Interaction Order

The concept of the interaction order refers to the complex system of entitlements and responsibilities that constitute the realm of face-to-face conduct, embracing both nonverbal and verbal channels of communication, and that are occasioned when humans enter into each other's physical copresence. Such face-to-face interaction is the foundation of human social life and plays a role in one's identity or self-image and how that image is presented to others.

Interaction order, however, has been largely ignored as a distinct topic of inquiry. Social scientists—with one or two notable exceptions—have had little to say about how interaction works as a phenomenon in its own right, treating it as a largely taken-for-granted matter. Its neglect as a distinctive area of investigation can partly be accounted for by its interdisciplinary character. Of relevance to sociologists, ethnologists, social psychologists, and linguists, interaction order appears to have been seen by each as the responsibility of the others. For sociology—arguably its core disciplinary home—the prevailing assumption of most postwar thinking was that such everyday interactional conduct was too fleeting or disorderly to permit systematic investigation. In linguistics, the Chomskian focus on the acquisition of competence with regard to the deep structure of communicative rules (Ferdinand de Saussure's langue ), as opposed to the performance of particular conversational utterances (parole ), has also served as an inhibitory factor in its scholarly pursuit.

The exploration of the interaction order was initially largely undertaken by the American sociologist Erving Goffman. In a series of books and articles, commencing with The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and culminating in his American Sociological Association presidential address in 1982 (posthumously published as “The Interaction Order”), Goffman sought to demonstrate that face-to-face interaction was a viable topic for sociological inquiry, an institution every bit as important as the more commonly recognized institutions such as the family, law, or polity. Conduct in interaction, for Goffman, differed from, and could not be reducible to, the behavior of a small group. For one thing, groups continue to exist when their members are apart, but face-to-face encounters are by definition predicated upon physical copresence. Moreover, the interaction order must be seen as an autonomous domain in the sense that its component behavioral features could not be understood as the effects of traditional sociological variables—gender, class, or urban-rural and public-private dichotomies. Nor could interaction be regarded as a matter for psychology: Its proper study was not the individual but “the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another,” as Goffman noted in Interaction Ritual (p. 2).

At the heart of Goffman's analysis of the interaction order was his concern to demonstrate its ritual or expressive character. Interaction can be seen as having both instrumental and expressive components, but Goffman's project can be understood as a sustained attempt to try to view it solely as a ritual endeavor. For Goffman, interaction can be analyzed as an intricate ritual of communicative [Page 397]control in which people are continually seeking to manage their appearances or their activities in such a way as to generally present a positive or favorable self-image. Equally, we also act so as to sustain the self-images that others are seeking to present to us. The expressive ends of interaction are closely linked to the concept of face, the immediate claims an individual makes about who he or she is at a given moment in interaction and the line he or she has taken toward this developing situation. Ultimately, the mutual honoring of selves and face claims presented in interaction sustains social order.

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