Upscaling Goffman

Abstract

Mainstream sociology and conventional interactionism suffer from a tendency to take the metaphor of ‘social structure’ literally, thus falling into the trap of reification: misconceiving structure as an independent force that affects human affairs. Neostructural interactionism rejects this view, conceiving of structure as recurrent patterns of joint action. If there is no such action, no structure exists. Defining structure in this way makes the so-called macrostructures of the social world – organisations, economies, states, world systems – amenable to interactionist analysis. More specifically, neostructural interactionism upscales Erving Goffman’s method of analysing the orderliness of face-to-face interaction. This means treating macrostructures as large-scale interaction orders generated in the same way that micro-interaction orders are generated: by shared cognitive presuppositions, shared normative and procedural rules, and standard procedural forms. Neostructural interactionism thus offers a way to get at the roots of structures to see how they are generated, maintained and changed, and how they are related to constraint. The neostructural perspective is fleshed out by articulating four principles: (1) constraint is pragmatic, ideological and affective; (2) macrostructures are multi-sited interaction orders; (3) interaction orders are enmeshed ontologically, culturally and materially; and (4) nets of accountability link action across sites.