The Everyday in Critical Interactionism
In developing a Critical Interactionist perspective, we must begin by interrogating the realm of the everyday. What do we mean by "everyday life"? Why is it sociologically significant, and how might it be transformed?
Everyday life comprises the routinized and taken-for-granted practices that structure our lived experience: waking in the morning, preparing meals, commuting to work, interacting with colleagues, participating in family rituals, and engaging in seemingly trivial exchanges at cafes, bus stops, and checkout lines. It is within these mundane contexts that society is reproduced—or challenged—through embodied, situated, and meaning-laden practices. As Henri Lefebvre (1987) argued, everyday life is the "residual" realm where structures of capitalism most fully embed themselves and where the contradictions of modernity are most acutely felt.
From a microsociological standpoint, the everyday world is composed of face-to-face encounters, conversational routines, and bodily comportments—the interaction order (Goffman, 1983). Erving Goffman’s work laid the foundation for analyzing everyday interaction as a meaningful domain in its own right, rather than as epiphenomenal to social structure. Goffman insisted that the micro-level forms of social interaction—greetings, apologies, turn-taking—are governed by an informal logic of propriety, deference, and face work. These norms, while fragile, are crucial to the maintenance of social order.
Yet everyday life is not merely a theater of ritual maintenance. As Critical Interactionists, we insist on historicizing the interaction order—situating it within broader structures of power, inequality, and ideology. Goffman was famously reticent about connecting his interactional analysis to macro-structures such as capitalism, colonialism, or patriarchy. Critical Interactionism extends Goffman’s insights by asking: how are the microstructures of everyday life permeated by domination, and how might they also be sites of resistance?
Ethnomethodology, as pioneered by Harold Garfinkel (1967), made a decisive contribution by showing that social order is not a set of pre-given structures but is instead accomplished through members’ methodical practices. Garfinkel’s experiments in breaching social norms revealed the unspoken background expectancies that organize our interactions. Garfinkel’s collaborator, Harvey Sacks (1992), along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, advanced the field through the development of conversation analysis—a powerful method for uncovering the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction.
However, classical ethnomethodology has often been criticized for its political neutrality and its lack of engagement with questions of power. Melvin Pollner and Don Zimmerman (1979) critiqued sociologists for treating everyday life as a mere resource for theorizing, rather than as a topic of analysis in its own right. In response, scholars such as Dorothy E. Smith (1987), Patricia Hill Collins (1990), and Carol A. Bailey (1999) have developed feminist and critical race extensions of ethnomethodology, calling attention to how the everyday is structured by ruling relations that remain invisible to those embedded within them.
Smith, in particular, emphasized that "the everyday world is problematic"—not in the colloquial sense of being dysfunctional, but in the sociological sense of being organized by translocal relations of ruling. Her standpoint epistemology insists that the everyday must be re-approached from the perspective of those whose experiences are marginalized within institutional discourse.
The methodological implications of this shift are profound. Critical Interactionists employ ethnographic observation, conversation analysis, autoethnography, and reflexive interviews to illuminate how class, race, gender, sexuality, and able-bodiedness shape not only access to resources but also the very categories through which experience is rendered intelligible. The goal is to produce what Michael Burawoy (1998) calls a "public ethnography"—a politically engaged, theoretically rigorous account of everyday practices that can inform struggles for social transformation.
Furthermore, Anthony Giddens (1991) reminds us of the psychological and existential dimensions of the everyday. His concept of "ontological security" refers to the basic sense of trust and continuity that individuals require to function in society. Routinized practices provide a buffer against existential anxiety, yet these same routines often anchor us within oppressive systems. The challenge, then, is to critically reflect on the comfort of routine without becoming paralyzed by insecurity or nostalgia.
In late modernity, the colonization of the everyday by global capitalism and digital media has intensified. As Jürgen Habermas (1984) argues, the lifeworld—the sphere of communicative action—is increasingly encroached upon by systems of money and power. Facebook "friends," algorithmically curated feeds, and performative self-branding have displaced older forms of sociality. And yet, as the Arab Spring and #MeToo movements show, the everyday can still erupt into resistance and collective reimagination.
For Critical Interactionists, then, everyday life is not a neutral backdrop, but a contested terrain. It is where ideology is reproduced, but also where counter-hegemonic practices can take root. As Paulo Freire (1970) taught us, praxis—reflection and action upon the world in order to change it—begins with the ordinary. We must take the ordinary seriously.
In sum, the study of everyday life through a Critical Interactionist lens invites us to:
Historicize micro-level interactions within broader systems of power;
Attend to the embodied, affective, and communicative dimensions of the interaction order;
Uncover the invisible relations that organize and constrain local activity;
Recognize the potential for resistance and transformation in mundane practices;
Employ reflexive, politically conscious methodologies to document lived experience.
The everyday is the crucible of human experience—where the personal and political collide. It is in the habitual, the banal, and the routine that we find both the mechanics of domination and the seeds of liberation.
References
Bailey, C. A. (1999). A Guide to Qualitative Field Research. Pine Forge Press.
Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33.
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought. Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford University Press.
Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1–17.
Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1. Beacon Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1987). Critique of Everyday Life. Verso.
Pollner, M., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1979). The everyday world as a phenomenon. In Psathas, G. (Ed.), Phenomenological Sociology. Wiley.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Blackwell.
Schutz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press.
Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic. Northeastern University Press.
Old Version
What do I mean by studying everyday life? What is everyday life?
The "everyday" world is the world we all live in and spend most of our time. Waking up in the morning and eating breakfast with a family member, running around the house getting ready for work, driving to work, chatting with colleagues at the copy machine, having lunch with a friend from high school, spending time with our child doing homework--this is the stuff of everyday life. It is often a world of home and family, of habit and familiarity.
It is also a realm of power struggles, of oppressive practices and resistance to those practices. Critical Interactionism insists on historicizing the everyday and recognizing both its continuity and discontinuity with the past. Capitalism has gone global in ways Marx's could never foresee. In our rapidly changing world the everyday world continues to be colonized and commodified by electronic media and other technological changes that have eroded and transformed our notion of the public sphere and of civil discourse.
The everyday world is the realm of our lived experiences. It's routine nature leads it to become habitualized and taken-for-granted. Our need for a sense of "ontological security" become satisfied through trusted habits. When we do what we have done so many times before we keep some of life's anxieties at bay.
But the everyday world is also a realm in which we question and resist the quotidian, normative and taken-for-granted. By ignoring our need for "ontological security", and breaking free from our past patterns of complicity with structures of dominance, and daring to do the right thing, we can transform the world. The everyday world is a site of radical transformation!
For "microsociologists", a term sometimes used to describe those who study the processes and structures that make up the everyday world, this is a realm of social activity and social interaction, including talk and other forms of situated and embodied actions.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described the realm of face-to-face interaction as the "interaction order". In a series of highly influential books he opened up for sociological analysis all the stuff that occurs in this realm. Often interactions occur when participants are "co-present", but increasingly in our mediated world co-presense is longer a requirement of communicative action.
Different types of interactions, including social occasions and gatherings, have different rules of "situational propriety". In situations of co-presense we typically monitor the "face work" and body idioms of those with whom we interact. We are very attuned to the information that is being presented and to the information that we present.
During the 1960s, several other American sociologists published work opening up this realm of everyday life for sociological analysis, including Harvey Sacks, Harold Garfinkel and Emanuel Schegloff. Their ethnomethodological approach greatly inspired my own thinking. Writing in this tradition, Melvin Pollner and Don Zimmerman famously critiqued sociologists for using everyday life as a "resource" for their studies, but failing to make it a "topic" in its own right. Employing the "attitude of everyday life" (Schutz), the constitution of the world is taken-for-granted, not only by ordinary people, but social scientists as well.
Ethnomethodolgists insist that the most banal of activities are done through methodic procedures. As Garfinkel states: "the objective reality of social facts is an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life."
Moving from classical ethnomethodology to Critical Interactionism moves us from a somewhat ahistorical account of the everyday world to an account that highlights everyday life under contemporary capitalism and in late modernity. When we critical reflect upon the interaction order we find a site of contestation, of subjugation and of potential liberation.
In our times the supposed triumph of neoliberalism has lead some to declare the "end of history" as if no other form of social order will ever emerge. Capitalism has become naturalized as "just the way the world works" and the way it was always meant to work.
We seem to be retreating to the realm of everyday life, perhaps as a way to escape the cynicism and despair we feel with the world. We substitute Facebook "friends" for traditional forms of sociality and build pseudo communities to assuage our alienation with the world. Perhaps our inward turns and abandonment of the traditional public sphere are not the whole story, as we see Facebook playing a major role in the Arab Spring of 2011.
One of my mentors, the great canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, has famously stated that "the everyday world is problematic" in that it is organized by social relations that are not observable within it. Her insightful research is a powerful reminder that the social organization which makes possible the daily scenes of our lives is not wholly contained within those local settings.
Clearly, "everyday life" is not merely a backdrop for more important activities and institutions, and needs to be studied in its own right. It is a site where consciousness is formed and transformed.
Everyday life is also a realm filled with cultural objects, including popular media forms, that are saturated with significance. It is a repository of the collective dreams of humanity for the realization of a better world.
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