Anne Warfield Rawls

THE INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS: GOFFMAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIAL THEORY

Goffinan is credited with enriching our understanding of the details of interaction, but not with challenging our theoretical understanding of social organization. While Goffmans position is not consistent, the outlines for a theory of an interaction order sui generis may be found in his work. It is not theoretically adequate to understand Goffinan as an interactionist within the dichotomy between agency and social structure. Goffman offers a way of resolving this dichotomy via the idea of an interaction order which is constitutive of self and at the same time places demands on social structure. This has significant implications for our understanding of social organization in general.

Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies

Known primarily as the author of a method for studying work, Harold Garfinkel — and ethnomethodological studies of work, or workplace studies — also offer an important alternative theory of work. First articulated in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theory of communication, organization, and information, it has been Garfinkels proposal that mutual understanding (orienting objects, meaning, and identities) in interactions, including technical situations of work, requires constant mutual orientation to situated constitutive expectancies — taken-for-granted methods of producing order that constitute sense — accompanied by displays of attention, competence, and trust. Based on this premise, researchers need to enter worksites to learn the order properties of work. Conventional theories, by contrast, treat social orders (including work) as resulting from individual interests, external constraint, and/or some conjunction between the two. For Garfinkel, however, individual motivation, power, and constraint must be managed by workers in and through the details of work. He insists that the need for participants to mutually orient ways of producing order on each next occasion adequately explains the details of order and sensemaking. Thus, any worksite exhibits the details required to produce, manage and understand local orders of work, including power and constraint — details that are local matters, lost to general formulation, requiring a research approach focused on the order properties of those details.

Race as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" Thesis Revisited*

This article reports on a study of interaction between Americans who self-identify as Black and White that reveals underlying expectations with regard to conversation that differ between the two groups. These differences seem not to have much to do with class or gender, but rather vary largely according to self-identification by “race.” The argument of this paper will be that the social phenomena of “race” are constructed at the level of interaction whenever Americans self-identified as Black and White speak to one another. This is because the Interaction Order expectations with regard to both self and community vary between the two groups. Because the “language games” and conversational “preferences” practiced by the two groups are responsive to different Interaction Orders, the “working consensus” is substantially different, and as a consequence, conversational “moves” are not recognizably the same. It will be argued that a great deal of institutional discrimination against African Americans can be traced to this source.

Durkheim's Treatment of Practice Concrete Practice vs Representations as the Foundation of Reason

It is generally thought that Durkheim based his theory of knowledge on a theory of representations. However, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]) he places great emphasis on concrete and witnessable aspects of practice such as sounds and movements and downplays the importance of beliefs and representations. He argues that ritual sounds and movements, when collectively enacted, can create sentiments that give rise to the essential concepts that he refers to as the categories of the understanding. Representations are, in his view, secondary phenomena that arise only after participation in social practices. This article demonstrates through an analysis of Durkheims text that he carefully referred to ritual practices in concrete and not representational terms at strategic points in the argument. Furthermore, it is argued that the collective experience of concrete sounds and movements was, on Durkheims view, a prerequisite for the subsequent development of representations.

Garfinkel’s Conception of Time

Garfinkel articulates a significant conception of time - as situated and sequential - that works in tandem with his rendering of social order in terms of situated practices. However, because his treatment of the actor, action, group and time in situated terms differs significantly from more conventional theoretical approaches, critics have often mistakenly interpreted Garfinkel as focused on the individual, and indifferent to the significance of social structures, and their relations through time. What Garfinkel focuses on are practices, not individuals, and he argues that practices constitute the essential foundations of social structure. Given this view, the time dimension of practice is the significant time dimension for any study of communication and/or social order, which are both constituted in and through situations defined by mutual orientation toward practice.

Conflict as a Foundation for Consensus: Contradictions of Industrial Capitalism in Book III of Durkheim's Division of Labor:

In The Division of Labor in Society (1893) Durkheim stresses the role of shared practice and spontaneous regulation in modern social forms, proposing that the modern division of labor is organized differently from traditional society, and thus that traditional solutions to problems of social justice and social disorganization are not appropriate in a modern context. He contrasts modern solidarities based on shared practice with the shared community of beliefs and strong external constraints characteristic of more traditional societies. It is Durkheims position that because modern social forms are organized differently they require a different type of moral foundation. Specifically, Durkheim argues that justice is necessary in an advanced division of labor and that any such society that does not achieve justice stands in a state of self-contradiction. While Durkheims reasons for arguing that modern industrial capitalism stands in a state of self-contradiction are somewhat different from those of Marx, the argument is in essential respects the same. Both argue that modern industrial capitalist society violates its own prerequisites and that if the fundamental needs of the human being for justice and reciprocity are not met that social form will destroy itself from within. The consequences of the argument that justice is a functional necessity in a modern division of labor context are fundamental and profound in an age of globalization.

Social Order as Moral Order

This chapter will argue that replacing the established focus on social institutions with a focus on constitutive orders of interaction has important implications for Ethics. Treating “social” facts as if they were “natural” facts has resulted in a focus on concepts in place of practices. Treating social facts as “instituted” has resulted in a conception of social order as contingent and of morality as relative to particular social institutional arrangements. However, social institutions are in almost all cases comprised of sets of rules for constructing and maintaining inequalities that are not moral in any general sense. A conception of constitutive order changes this. If the crucial social objects (including self) are understood as social and not natural objects, and their fragile character and dependence on constitutive orders for their existence (rather than on institutions) is accepted, then the whole question of morality and its relationship to society is changed. A relationship usually viewed as both relative and merely pragmatic (or functional) is recast in terms that transcend the particulars of institutionalized social arrangements, consummating a social contract position. There are implications not only for Ethics, but for a conception of democratic society in a context of modernity and diversity.

Listening to what is said--transcribing what is heard: the impact of speech recognition technology (SRT) on the practice of medical transcription (MT).

Medical records have become central to nearly all aspects of healthcare. However, little research exists on their creation. Using data from an ongoing ethnographic study of healthcare documentation production, this paper examines the process of medical record creation through the use of speech recognition technology (SRT) and subsequent editing by medical transcriptionists (MTs). Informed by ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), the results demonstrate the professional knowledge involved in the work of medical transcription, which includes a combination of skilled worksite practices and an orientation toward the social order properties of recorded dictation. Furthermore, we examine how the advantages and limitations of SRTs can impact the work of transcription. We conclude with strategic recommendations for using SRTs to support medical records production and recommend against total automation.

An Essay on Two Conceptions of Social Order: Constitutive Orders of Action, Objects and Identities vs Aggregated Orders of Individual Action

I argue that there is a deep parallel between problems that John Rawls (1955) argued had developed in moral philosophy as a result of not recognizing the difference between two conceptions of rules, and problems that have developed in sociology as a result of not recognizing that there are two conceptions of social order. That most philosophers and sociologists have not appreciated this problem does not weaken the importance of the argument. In fact, I think that the misunderstandings which have resulted from lack of attention to constitutive practices, with research and policy implications effecting social, legal and justice issues in modern society, strengthen the original argument considerably.

Durkheim’s theory of modernity: Self-regulating practices as constitutive orders of social and moral facts

An important and innovative conception of constitutive practices plays a key role in Durkheim’s theory of modernity as outlined in De la Division du Travail Sociale (1893), his first book. The idea of self-organizing constitutive practices presents a vision of a modern differentiated society that can be flexible, strong, and egalitarian; supporting individual freedom and equality between individuals; while at the same time facilitating coherence and social solidarity without exerting authority or constraint. In 1902 Durkheim added a second preface to underscore and clarify the essential role played by constitutive practices in differentiated modern contexts of work and occupations. In spite of the importance he placed on constitutive practices, however, and the foundational role he argued they would play in modernity, the point has been largely overlooked. Instead, Durkheim has been interpreted as a conservative thinker, lacking an adequate approach to modernity. The oversight has left sociology without an explanation for how social facts could be effectively shared in modern contexts. The consequences have been serious both for the appreciation of Durkheim and for the development of sociology. This paper offers a reassessment.