Social Order and Practical Wisdom of Walking in a Crowd

Abstract

The article suggests returning to the “crowd” as an object of sociological analysis. Crowds have attracted early sociologists because crowds were visual embodiments of social forces that surpass individuals and also served as a symbol of the profound social transformations which were taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Analyzing crowds allowed for the first sociologists (G. Simmel, R. Park, M. Weber, E. Durkheim) to oppose the psychological interpretation of mass social phenomena with a purely sociological approach. However, in the second half of the 20th century sociologists had lost almost all interest in the crowd, as it did not meet the interests of researchers of “large” social structures, nor the interests of the proponents of interactionist approaches. This article shows that the crowd can again be made interesting for sociology if we were to consider it from the point of view of the everyday practices of the participants. In these everyday practices a specific form of phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom, technical skill coupled with moral judgment about which action is good and which is not, is implemented. It is shown here that the study of the practical wisdom of walking in a crowd requires special concepts and methods that can be found in phenomenology and ethnomethodology. The article suggests using three such concepts for the analysis of crowds: phenomenal field, oriented object, and figuration of details. With the help of these concepts, the methods of the crowd’s situated social order production are analyzed in relation to the management of speed and trajectories of movement, following one another, walkers’ stopping and slowing down, and joining the crowd. This analysis shows that the joint production of the crowd’s social order by its participants is a situated practice, i.e. it consists of making the local scenes of everyday life familiar and accountable, and of assessing the local adequacy of the actions performed.