차이와 갈등의 의례 네트워크: 이방인의 수용 과정

Abstract

This study proposes a process model for accepting people who are not granted a social position within a group, namely, strangers, while taking into account the ritualistic properties of social interactions among group members, i.e., micro-rituals. A micro-ritual is an interaction order that regulates the initiation or termination of social interactions among individuals, particularly with respect to in-person proximate engagements in public places. It is informed by procedural knowledge rather than by content and as such it differs from organizational culture or work routines which regulate the content of interactions. In particular, this study examines the impact of the initiation of social interactions, regulated by micro-rituals, on the acceptance of strangers in the workplace. To this end, this study applies Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionist view of social acts as well as social network models. The authors suggest that a stranger will be accepted into a network of actors sharing common values when the stranger avoids civic inattention by engaging in micro-rituals with members of the network. One important practical implication of this study is that, in order to ensure that institutional changes will improve stranger acceptance, it is necessary for these institutional changes to take into account the micro-rituals that govern proximate interactions in public places.