Informalization

The concept of informalization was coined in 1976 by the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters. It was developed primarily to understand and interpret the growing leniency in codes of conduct and feeling in Western societies of the 1960s and 1970s. In Amsterdam, discussions of this increasing “permissiveness” included the question of how to interpret these changes and, more specifically, whether they involved a change in the direction of what Norbert Elias had called the civilizing process. The framing of this question within Elias's theory of wide range and scope gave rise to the theory of informalization processes. It provides a perspective in which both the process of informalization and the spread of consumer culture turn out to have sprung from the same speedup of social interweaving processes and the same intensification of social competition.

In his 1939/2000 book The Civilizing Process, now a classic for being the first systematic study of the history of manners and emotion regulation, Elias shows how between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, European regimes of manners and emotions had expanded and become increasingly strict and detailed, giving rise to a particular type of self-regulation, a type of habitus and personality with a particular conscience formation. It was a long-term process toward the formalizing of manners and the disciplining of people and their emotions. By presenting a large number of excerpts from manners books in chronological order, focusing particularly on manners regarding basic human functions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, defecating, and blowing one's nose, as well as on those regulating sexual and aggressive impulses, Elias uncovered evidence of long-term changes in the codes of manners thus opening a window to developments in social structures and personality structures. The overall directional trend in codes of behavior and feeling provided an empirical basis for integrating historical sociology and psychology. The process of formalizing manners and disciplining of people continued in the nineteenth century, and although many a change had been perceived before the 1960s and 1970s—particularly in the 1920s—it was only during the “expressive revolution” (Parsons 1978, 300–324) that changes in manners and lifestyles became so impressive as to give rise to the question of whether the whole civilizing process had changed direction. With regard to the informalization of manners, the answer was that it obviously had, but regarding the disciplining of people and their emotions, developments had continued in the direction of increasing demands on emotion management or self-regulation.

Later studies showed the expressive revolution to have been a moment of rapid acceleration in a long-term process of informalization, involving much broader social layers than in earlier accelerations such as around the turn of the century and in the 1920s. Particularly, Wouters's monographs Sex and Manners and Informalization provide extensive evidence that from the last decades of the nineteenth century onward, the code of manners and lifestyles in four Western countries (Britain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands) came to allow for an increasing variety of behavioral and emotional alternatives: manners becoming more lenient, more differentiated, and varied for a wider and more differentiated public (see also Elias 1996; and Stearns 2007). Many modes of conduct that in the preceding long-term process of formalization had been curbed or forbidden came to be allowed, particularly in matters of sexuality. With one significant exception, all behaviors, manners, and arts, such as the written and spoken language, clothing, music, dancing, hairstyles, conduct, and emotions, became less formally restricted and regulated thus giving way to a widening range of acceptable behavioral and emotional options. People became more frank and more at ease in expressing and discussing their feelings.

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