Social Interaction

Social interaction is the process through which two or more social actors reciprocally influence one another's actions. Although it may involve corporate actors of varying size, from pairs of individuals acting in concert to complex organizations, it commonly refers to processes of mutual influence among individuals. Individuals always influence one another's action in some form when in one another's immediate physical presence but may also do so through varied media of communication when spatially and temporally separated. However, until recently, the study of social interaction or what is commonly called microsociology has focused primarily on its face-to-face varieties.

Social interaction is the critical link between the individual and society. It is the medium through which culture and society directly influence individuals and through which individuals collectively produce and reproduce culture and social arrangements. However, social theories vary greatly in the relative emphasis they place on social interaction. Many suggest that patterns of social interaction directly reflect participants' psychological characteristics, internalized cultural values and social norms, or the influence of larger social entities and structures. Although these theories generally recognize that processes of social interaction constitute and uphold social arrangements and systems, they imply that the processes and outcomes of social interaction are largely predictable from anterior or other external factors. In contrast, other social theories argue that social interaction cannot be deduced from anterior or external factors and requires direct investigation.

Erving Goffman was the strongest advocate for treating social interaction as a subject in its own right. Goffman repeatedly argued that the orderliness of social interaction could not be reduced to the psychology of participants. Whatever is in individuals' minds, according to Goffman, they must make their behavior understandable to others. That requires an orientation to expressive conventions and consideration of the meanings one is likely to convey to others through either upholding or violating those conventions. For Goffman, social interaction involved not a meeting of minds but moves in an orderly game of collective definition.

Goffman also argued that what are commonly called social structures, such as diffuse social statuses or organizational positions, influence patterns of social interaction only indirectly. He maintained that social interaction consists of processes and structures specific to it. According to Goffman, there is only a “loose coupling” between interactional practices and encompassing social structures. The introduction of social structural factors into social interaction requires their translation and transformation into interactional terms. Hence, patterns of interaction cannot be directly deduced from social structural factors without consideration of the rules of their transformation into interaction specific processes and structures.

Goffman's own analyses of social interaction focused on the dramatic character of its definitional dynamics and its ritual order or structure. Goffman argued that social actors reach a working consensus about the definition of the situation that governs their interaction by mobilizing a variety of expressive resources, such as their appearance, voices and bodies, physical objects, and the fixed equipment of the setting. They thereby enact characters, stage scenes, and play through social narratives using techniques similar to those used by theatrical actors. Goffman also argued that an implicit but complex code of ritual conventions governed the interactional dramas of everyday social life. According to Goffman, much expressive conduct is ritual in both the ethological sense of being stylized and virtually automatic and, borrowing from Émile Durkheim, in the religious sense of expressing respect and regard for objects of ultimate [Page 745]value. Goffman argued that interactants ritually express respect and regard for each other's self or “face,” as if it were sacred. He demonstrated how social actors do so by avoiding intrusion on one another's various self-territories, such as personal space and private information, and by celebrating their past or anticipated relations with one another.

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