Critical and Cultural Interactionism

Insights from Sociology and Criminology

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367671426
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351394055
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the longest standing traditions in sociology, interactionism is concerned with studying human interaction and showing how society to a large part is constituted by patterns of interaction. In spite of the work of figures such as Robert E. Park, Everett C. Hughes, Erving Goffman, Herbert Blumer, Norman K. Denzin and Gary Alan Fine, interactionism – perhaps owing to its association with the perspective of symbolic interactionism – remains something of an odd man out in mainstream sociology. This book seeks to rectify this apparent neglect by bringing together critical social theories and microsociological approaches to research, thus revealing the critical and cultural potentials in interactionism – the chapters arguing that far from being oriented towards the status quo, interactionism in fact contains a critical and cultural edge. Presenting the latest work from some of the leading figures in interactionist thought to show recent developments in the field and offer an overview of some of the most potent and prominent ideas within critical and cultural criminology, Critical and Cultural Interactionism will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in interactionism, social theory research methods and criminology.

1 Misgivings about Goffman

Social structure, power and politics in the work of Erving Goffman

Greg Smith and Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Introduction

Erving Goffman is generally regarded as one of the most prominent representatives of interactionism in sociology during the 20th century. Throughout his career, he wrote a number of seminal books and coined numerous important concepts now considered essential constituents of the working vocabulary of the interactionist community. Goffman primarily regarded his own analysis of what he termed the ‘interaction order’ as a contribution to microsociology, which was concerned with studying and understanding the realm of face-to-face interaction in everyday life settings (Goffman 1983). In this chapter, we discuss some of the criticisms raised against Goffman’s microsociological account for apparently neglecting many core concerns in much of sociology such as power, social stratification, social change, culture and social systems, and for providing a so-called ‘nice guy’ (Billig 2001) and consensual picture of the social world that overlooked issues of social conflict, contestation and dissonance. Often, the overall drift of these lines of criticism is to situate Goffman’s sociology as naïve or incomplete or as lacking an adequate sociological awareness. Misgivings about Goffman are those flaws or omissions or oversights that, state the critics, if rectified would provide a much more satisfactory basis for the sociology linked to his name.

We suggest that while Goffman may indeed deliberately have neglected some of these dimensions in his writings, part of that neglect was justifiable in light of his ambitions to establish the sociology of the interaction order. We contend that Goffman provided an important analytical platform that in combination with other theoretical perspectives spawned a multitude of useful and valuable ideas for addressing the lacunae identified by critics. Reading Goffman on the surface level as well as between the lines, we suggest that his sociology provides a key microsociological resource for many macrosociological concerns.

In this chapter, we thus aim to demonstrate that (1) many of the misgivings about Goffman’s sociology are in fact anticipated in various ways in Goffman’s own writings and do not have the fatal status that some critics often seem to assume; and (2) that attention to various comments scattered across the corpus of Goffman’s writings, together with some of Goffman’s own analyses of social life, offers a basis for claiming Goffman as a kind of critical theorist and public sociologist. We end the chapter by briefly noting some of the ways in which Goffman’s ideas are being taken forward in contemporary sociological work that indicate the often overlooked critical dimensions and possibilities of the sociology of the interaction order he proposed.

Gouldner’s misgivings about Goffman

It was particularly Alvin W. Gouldner’s (1970) critique that first gave significant expression to many of the reservations about Goffman’s sociology that up until that point had only circulated in seminar rooms and at academic conferences. Certainly, it was one of the earliest and most influential critical commentaries to express the ‘misgivings’ examined in this chapter. Gouldner’s brilliant examination of ‘Goffman’s dramaturgy’ saw it as a ‘symptom’ of an imminent ‘crisis of Western sociology’. In a forceful yet subtle examination, Gouldner’s 12-page essay offered a multitude of provocative interpretations of Goffman. Gouldner noted how dramaturgy refused to buy into conventional distinctions and valuations and thus exhibited ‘no metaphysics of hierarchy’, how Goffman presented a world whose social cement was ‘tact’, and which seem to articulate the experiences of middle-class workers in the new service occupations whose numbers had grown significantly since the end of World War II. Gouldner characterised the micro-world described by Goffman as a ‘new bourgeois world of “impression management” … inhabited by anxious other-directed men with sweaty palms, who live in constant fear of exposure by others and of inadvertent self-betrayal’ (Gouldner 1970:382).

More important for Gouldner, Goffman’s dramaturgy ‘has no metaphysics of hierarchy … the conventional cultural hierarchies are shattered’ – the behaviour of children illuminates that of adults, mental patients manipulate psychiatrists – ‘there is no higher and no lower’ (Gouldner 1970:379). But the absence of hierarchy is ambiguous: it can imply that Goffman’s dramaturgy is against existing hierarchies or it can imply an avoidance of or accommodation to the power differences implied by current stratification arrangements. Gouldner’s core objections are thus set out the following way:

Goffman’s is a sociology of ‘co-presence’ … it is a social theory that dwells on the episodic and sees life only as it is lived in a narrow interpersonal circumference, ahistorical and noninstitutional, an existence beyond history and society, and one which comes alive only in the fluid, transient ‘encounter’ … Goffman’s image of social life is not of firm, well-bounded social structures, but rather of a loosely stranded, criss-crossing, swaying catwalk along which men dart precariously … People are acrobatic actors and gamesmen who have, somehow, become disengaged from social structures and who are growing detached even from culturally standardized roles. They are … individuals ‘working the system’ for the enhancement of self. Although disengaged or partly alienated from the system, they are not, however rebels against it.

(Gouldner 1970:379)

To Gouldner, then, Goffman’s work oozed of a certain power-blind ‘status quoism’ since his ‘rejection of hierarchy often expresses itself as an avoidance of social stratification and of the importance of power differences, even for concerns that are central to him; thus, it entails an accommodation to existent power arrangements’ (Gouldner 1970:379). Some critics, for example T. R. Young (1971), considered this reading of Goffman too pessimistic and suggested that more radical and even liberatory messages could be gleaned from Goffman’s work. Others, like Charles Edgley and Ronny E. Turner (1984), considered such complaints about Goffman’s ‘status quoism’ to mistakenly malign an ally of progressive causes. Edgley and Turner thus regard much of Gouldner’s and post-Gouldnerian critical commentary to be based on a shoot the messenger fallacy in which Goffman is blamed for the features of society he describes and analyses. Edgley and Turner claim that Goffman’s sociology does not give political comfort to the status quo. On the contrary, Goffman’s analyses ‘simmer with politically astute criticism of the status quo’ (Edgley and Turner 1984:36). Structural questions about power and status are transformed into more ‘existentially accurate’ forms. Goffman (1959:75) early reminded us that ‘a status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well-articulated’. His sociology seeks to understand how such coherent, articulated conduct works in interaction. In that way, he can easily be read as transforming old questions about power and inequality ‘in a revolutionary way which places people, rather than institutions at the apex of social and political change’ (Edgley and Turner 1984:31). Goffman himself refused to address the issues directly, preferring an oblique and humorous response that acknowledged that his sociology ‘does not catch at the differences between the advantaged and disadvantaged classes and can be said to direct attention away from such matters … He who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people snore’ (Goffman 1974:14).

Much of the early debate on Goffman’s lack of critical edge was thus inspired by Gouldner’s analysis that is infused with a late 1960s political rhetoric that now has lost much of its previous force. More than any other leading sociologist of his generation, Gouldner forged an approach to sociology that saw it as a form of political activism (Chriss 2015). Apparently, Goffman and Gouldner were friends; Gouldner spent parts of the summer of 1964 living in Goffman’s house in Berkeley (Chriss 2015:16). In 1974, when Gouldner founded the journal Theory and Society (strapline: ‘Renewal and Critique in Social Theory’), Goffman served on its advisory board and a little later published his ‘institutional reflexivity’ theory of gender relations there (Goffman 1977). James J. Chriss (2015) suggests that political differences lay at the heart of Gouldner’s critique of Goffman and other interactionist sociologists. Certainly, Goffman found humour a useful device to distance himself from taking Gouldner’s criticisms too seriously. These misgivings first articulated by Gouldner have shaped many of the subsequent debates and provide the main themes for our chapter’s discussion of some of the major criticisms of Goffman’s enterprise.

Goffman’s ‘microsociology’: what about the macro social structure?

Unlike, say, some positions associated with ethnomethodology, Goffman never explicitly queries the existence or reality of conventional conceptions of culture and social structure. However, he does insist on the distinctiveness of his concerns with the interaction order and the ways in which these concerns differ from much of accepted sociology. Often the imagery Goffman uses is of the interaction order as a relatively closed system. Undoubtedly, some of his substantial stints of fieldwork – in the Shetland Islands, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC and in the casinos of Las Vegas – were research sites (‘social establishments’) with clear physical boundaries that marked off the social actions they contained from wider society. Especially in Goffman’s publications in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there is a tendency for him to write of society’s influence on interactional conduct in a strongly Durkheimian manner.

Sociology is conventionally and somewhat artificially divided between those who study large-scale social phenomena (such as the origins of capitalist society; the major economic, social and political institutions of entire societies; or the development of world systems), who are often called the ‘macrosociologists’, and then those who study social life as it is directly experienced by persons (such as the workings of small groups, the display and recognition of identities, or the structures of conversational interaction), who are often called the ‘microsociologists’. Scale seemingly distinguishes microsociology from macrosociology. A fleeting exchange between two persons is of interest to microsociology, whereas macrosociology, as Arthur Stinchcombe (1985:572) once memorably put it, ‘is sociology about millions of people’. The sociological tradition has tended to identify with the macrosociological. Microsociological concerns are often dismissed as ‘social psychology’. So it is perhaps no surprise that Goffman’s single-minded pursuit of a microsociology of the interaction order (Goffman 1953, 1983) could sometimes provoke exasperation from critics unable to see its point. For example, in a 1972 review in The Sunday Times, Goffman’s then-newest book was greeted as ‘a tome about “the realm of activity that is generated by face-to-face interaction and organized by norms of co-mingling” – such as what goes into saying “Excuse me!” to a stranger on the sidewalk – is a stupefying example of, while Rome’s burning, fiddling on one string, on one note’ (Cooper 1972). A topic, interactional minutiae, combined with a determination to concentrate on interaction’s social organisation and only that, was a focus that puzzled and sometimes infuriated critics.

Faced with complaints about such situational limitations of his sociology, Goffman acknowledged its marginal position. As he once provocatively stated about the nature of his own work: ‘I make no claim whatsoever to be talking about the core matters of sociology – social organization and social structure’ (Goffman 1974:14). Indeed, Goffman’s work – no matter how it is twisted and turned by either epigones or critics – is primarily microsociological. Although Norman K. Denzin has once claimed that ‘those who are preoccupied with turning [Goffman’s] theory into another micro-model perhaps do the discipline a disservice’ (Denzin 2002:111), Goffman’s ideas were indeed microsociological and have predominantly found use in microsociological contexts. This, however, does not mean that his ideas cannot be used for other analytical purposes, but their groundwork is microsociology. In fact, Goffman did have generalising ambitions, but he felt that theories and models of a general kind were still premature. Anthony Giddens thus rightly observed how Goffman ‘deliberately avoided any sort of engagement with issues concerning the large scale or the long term’ (Giddens 1988:251). In his more critical review, Gouldner stated that Goffman’s work is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Misgivings about Goffman: social structure, power and politics in the work of Erving Goffman
• 2 Upscaling Goffman: four principles of neostructural interactionism
• 3 A call to a critical interpretive interactionism
• 4 Dramaturgical interactionism: ideas of self-presentation, impression management and the staging of social life as a catapult for critique
• 5 Critical interactionism: a theoretical bridge for understanding complex human conditions
• 6 Pacifism, gender and symbolic interactionism
• 7 Towards a feminist symbolic interactionism
• 8 An invitation to ‘radical interactionism’: towards a reorientation of interactionist sociology?
• 9 Symbolic interactionism and the Frankfurt School: a critical appraisal
• 10 Situational analysis as a critical interactionist method
• 11 Cultural criminology and its incitement for symbolic interactionism: transgression, marginalisation, resistance and media in the wider context of power and culture of late modernity
• Index