Life in a total institution like a prison is cut off from the rest of society. In this case, even the guard is out of reach.
Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Interaction
In the first part of the chapter, we focused on the socialization of individuals. However, socialization generally involves interaction, or social engagement involving two or more individuals who perceive, and orient their actions to, one another. Interaction has generally been seen as involving face-to-face relationships between people, but in the twenty-first century, interaction is increasingly mediated by smartphones and social media. Interaction is an important topic of study in itself because of its ubiquity and its influence on individuals. It is also a key building block for more macroscopic social phenomena, such as networks and groups as well as larger organizations, societies, and the global domain, which is explored more deeply in the next chapter.
Personal interaction occurs throughout our lifetimes. Examples include interactions between parents and children, between children and their siblings, between teachers and students, between coworkers, and between medical personnel and patients. Interactions early in the life cycle, especially in the family and in schools, tend to be long-term and intense. Later in life, many interactions tend to be more fleeting (a quick hello on the street or a brief conversation at a cocktail party), although interactions with family members tend to remain intense.
Ask Yourself
What does it mean to say that interaction is increasingly mediated? Give some examples that illustrate your answer.
Superordinate–Subordinate Interactions
Georg Simmel saw society as being defined by interaction. Moreover, he differentiated between the forms interaction takes and the types of people who engage in interaction. For example, one “form” of interaction is the relationship between a superordinate and a subordinate (Simmel [1908] 1971). This type of relationship is found in many settings, for example, between teacher and student in the classroom, between judge and defendant in the courtroom, and between guard and prisoner in the jail. We tend to think of this relationship as eliminating the subordinate’s independence. However, a relationship between the two cannot exist unless the subordinate has at least some freedom to be an active party to the interaction. The relationship between employee and supervisor is a good example. If the employee cannot react to the supervisor’s direction, there is no interaction—only one-way communication from the supervisor to the employee. Furthermore, experimental research has demonstrated that the greater the equality in an employee–manager relationship, the greater the amount of two-way communication. In such a situation, the subordinate feels less resentment, anger, and worry when conflict arises with the manager (Johnson, Ford, and Kaufman 2000).
Reciprocity and Exchange
To sociologists who theorize about exchange, interaction is a rational process in which those involved seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs. Interaction is likely to persist as long as those involved find it rewarding, and it is likely to wind down or end when one or more of the parties no longer find it rewarding. An important idea in this context is the social norm of reciprocity, which means that those engaged in interaction expect to give and receive rewards of roughly equal value (Gouldner 1960; Mazelis 2015; Molm 2010). When one party feels that the other is no longer adhering to this norm—that is, not giving about as much as he or she is receiving—the relationship is likely to end.
Studies of exchange relationships, like much else in sociology, are now being challenged to find ways of dealing with new forms of virtual interaction: e-mail, social networking, and interaction on Skype and WhatsApp. One researcher who has explored the effects of virtual reality on interaction in the “real” world, and vice versa, concludes that “the constantly evolving avatar [or digital representation of oneself] influences the ‘real’ self, who now also orients toward virtual, yet all-too-real others” (Gottschalk 2010, 522). In other words, interactions in the digital realm and those in the physical realm both influence the self. Additional research questions come to mind readily. For example, are people compelled to cooperate to the same extent in the digital realm (such as when using e-mail communication) as they are in the material world (such as during in-person communication; Naquin, Kurtzberg, and Belkin 2008)? However, it is important to remember that the digital and material worlds are not separate from one another but, rather, interpenetrate. An important issue, then, is the connection between, for example, collaborative relationships online and offline (Ritzer 2013).
“Doing” Interaction
Another interactionist theory of great relevance here is ethnomethodology, which focuses on people’s everyday practices, especially those that involve interaction. The basic idea is that interaction is something that people actively “do,” something they accomplish daily. For example, the simple act of two people walking together can be considered a form of interaction. Engaging in certain practices makes it clear that you are walking with a particular someone and not with someone else (Pantzar and Shove 2010; Ryave and Schenkein 1974). You are likely to walk close to, or perhaps lean toward, a close friend. When you find yourself walking in step with a total stranger, you probably behave differently. You might separate yourself, lean away, and say, “Excuse me,” to make it clear that you are not walking with that stranger and are not engaged in interaction with her. More complex forms of interaction require much more sophisticated practices. In the process of interacting, people create durable forms of interaction, such as those that relate to gender (West and Zimmerman 1987) and the family.
Ethnomethodology also spawned conversation analysis, which is concerned with how people do, or accomplish, conversations (Heritage and Stivers 2012). For example, you must know and use certain practices to carry on a successful conversation: You must know when it is your turn to talk and when it is appropriate to laugh at a comment made by someone else (Jefferson 1979). Conversation analysts have taken the lead in studying conversations, and interaction more generally, in great depth. They typically record conversations using audio or video devices so that they can study them in detail. Later, they transcribe the conversations to create written records of them.
Interaction Order
While every instance of interaction may seem isolated and independent of others, each is part of what Erving Goffman (2000) called the interaction order (Rawls 2015). This is a social domain that is organized and orderly. The order is created informally and governed by those involved in the interaction rather than by some formal structure, such as a bureaucracy and its constraints (Fine 2012). One example of an interaction order is a group of students who form a clique and develop their own norms to govern their interaction. In this thinking, Goffman was following Simmel’s view that society is based, in a real sense, on interaction. In many ways, society is interaction.
The interaction order can be seen in many settings and contexts. One example is the 2016 shooting of police officers in Dallas by a lone sniper, which killed five officers. Before the shooting, an orderly demonstration against police brutality was taking place, but the shooting destroyed this interaction order and replaced it with fear and confusion. Some sociologists have suggested that human interaction with animals is another area in which we can observe the interaction order (Jerolmack 2009, 2013).
Status and Role
Status and role are key elements in the interaction order, as well as in the larger structures in which such interactions often exist. A status is a position within a social system occupied by people. Within the