Interaction Ritual Theory Research Articles

Freud and Interaction Ritual: A Response to Manning

This is a nice review, but the editor has given me some pages to expand on a topic that Philip Manning only briefly mentions—the place of Freud in contemporary microsociology. Parsons and other sociologists used Freud chiefly as a theory of the superego, that is, to explain socialization and morality. On the other side, Dennis Wrong and others argued against the oversocialized conception by stressing the id. Some post-structuralist theorists (including many feminists) have used Freud for a theory of the self, especially gendered selves. I submit that interaction ritual (IR) chain theory covers the ground that Freud covers but does it in a more adequate fashion. We no longer need Freud’s model of superego for a theory of socialization or a theory of the self. In part, the Meadian tradition provides a mechanism of socialization—the generalized other (and its ancillary particularized others). The advantage of Freud was that he pointed to the emotional aspects of interaction, where Mead is more strictly cognitive. IR theory combines the two, showing that the generalized other emerges from microprocesses of mutual attention focus and emotional entrainment in infancy and early childhood. Moreover, the interactionist model has the advantage of showing how socialization or internalization is lifelong. Conversation experiences—whether religious, political, career, even friendship and erotic—happen whenever there is a highintensity interactual ritual. This is the kind of thing that Freud, as an early pioneer, pointed to long ago (in his model of trauma), but we now have a more generalized and flexible mechanism. Moreover, the neo-Durkheimian microtheory of rituals provides a theory of morality that is more open to historical and personal variations than Freud’s punitive superego. Another of Freud’s historical legacies was to emphasize unconscious mental processes. We have advanced on this front as well. Sociologists like Norbert Wiley and Margaret Archer have shown that we can study the inner self empirically, by studying interior dialogue. This is at least halfway to Freud’s unconscious, and it gives us some explicit criteria for describing the degree to which something is conscious: how articulate it is an interior dialogue. I have tried to show (in chapter 4 of Interaction Ritual Chains ) in reanalyzing some of Wiley’s data, and some of my REVIEW ESSAY

The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation

Can one explain both the resilience of the status quo and the possibility for resistance from a subordinate position? This paper aims to resolve these seemingly incompatible perspectives. By extending Randall Collins's interaction ritual theory, and synthesizing it with Norbert Wiley's model of the self, this paper suggests how the emotional dynamics between people and within the self can explain social inertia as well as the possibility for resistance and change. Diverging from literature on the sociology of emotions that has been concerned with individual emotional processes, this paper considers the collective level in order to explore how movement action is motivated. The emotional dynamics of subordinate positioning that limit women's options in face-to-face interactions are examined, as are the social processes of developing feminist consciousness and a willingness to participate in resistance work. Pointing toward empirical applications, I conclude by suggesting conditions where resistance is likely.

Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation

Bringing motivational dynamics back into the mainstream of sociological theory and research requires an examination of how the early theoretical legacy was incorporated in five of the most eclectic approaches in contemporary theorizing on social interaction. The paper analyzes (1) the incorporation of utilitarian and behaviorist theories into exchange theory, (2) the transformation of Mead's social behaviorism into interactionist theory, (3) the evolution of Schutz's phenomenology into ethnomethodological theory, (4) the blending of Freud's psychoanalytic approach with elements of interactionist and phenomenological theory in structuration theory, and (5) the combining of Durkheim's structuralism with ethnomethodology and interactionism in interaction-ritual theory. For each of these five theories, the underlying and largely implicit theory of motivation is schematically modeled. Then, a composite of all the models is constructed in an effort to present a provisional theory of interpersonal motivation.