Chapter Summary for Chapter 7
Small, everyday instances of social interaction shape the social world and are the way in which we actually ‘live’ and experience large-scale social systems and institutions. Much interaction is unfocused: individuals are aware of other people but do not directly interact with them.
Non-verbal communication exchanges information and meaning through looks, glances and body language. However, such non-verbal communication differs across the world’s cultures.
Gender is an example of an identity embodied through the different ways in which women and men communicate non-verbally, as demonstrated in Young’s famous study, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’. Butler has argued that gender identity is performative: it is not based on who we are but on what we do. Similarly, Goffman and others show that our selves and identities are inevitably ‘embodied’.
Ethnomethodology, developed by Garfinkel, is the study of the everyday ways in which people make sense of what others do and say. It emerged as a critique of Parsonian structural functionalism and mainstream sociology.
Interactional vandalism is a technique whereby the relatively powerless can disrupt the more powerful by breaking the taken-for-granted rules of social interaction. It is closely tied in to inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity.
Goffman calls periods of focused interaction ‘encounters’. Each encounter requires an opening and closing sequence. Using a dramaturgical approach, he divides social life into front regions where individuals act out formal roles and back regions where people prepare themselves for the role. Roles are the socially defined expectations of a person occupying a particular status (or social position).
Ascribed status is assigned on the basis of a biological factor; achieved status is earned through an individual’s own effort.
Cultures operate with different conceptions of personal space. Generally, intimates and friends can stand closer together than actors in a formal setting or strangers.
Social life is structured by both time and space: some activities take place at particular times of the day, week, month or year, and others in particular places. Time and space combine when a location has different functions at different times
Globalization has brought together people from different cultures, and hence with different rules of social interaction, in a number of different ways. Social constructivists argue that a shared and relatively stable social reality is the product of social interaction. The job of sociology, they say, is to analyse the ways in which this shared social reality is produced and maintained
In small-scale societies, most social interaction will be face-to-face and between people who know each other. In modern societies much social interaction is with acquaintances and strangers, but the development of ICT means that social interaction is often now carried out at a distance
Cyberspace presents the opportunity for people to play with adopting new identities and personas. Building trust in cyberspace, in the absence of non-verbal cues or pre-existing social networks, has lead to the development of systems such as the eBay feedback system.
Despite the spread of new technologies, most people still like to meet face-to-face: this is called the ‘compulsion of proximity’.
