Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch, "The Compulsion of Proximity"

                                             The Compulsion of Proximity

Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch 

(in NowHere: Space, Time, and Modernity, 1994)

1. The Paradox of Presence

In 2019, global business travel reached $1.4 trillion—the same year Zoom’s revenue doubled. If technology allows us to collaborate instantly across continents, why are airports still full? Why do executives, politicians, scientists, and activists still gather face-to-face, even at enormous expense and environmental cost?

This paradox is the starting point for Deirdre Boden and Harvey Molotch’s essay “The Compulsion of Proximity.” Written at the dawn of the digital age, their argument feels even more prescient today. They challenge the assumption that modern communication has transcended the need for physical presence. Far from making proximity obsolete, they show that the complexity of modern life actually depends on it.

Their central claim is simple yet radical: modernity runs on face-to-face interaction. The very institutions that stretch across time and space—corporations, governments, universities, and global media—require ongoing, embodied coordination among people who can see and respond to one another in real time.

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2. Why Presence Still Matters

Boden and Molotch advance a series of interlocking arguments about the necessity of co-presence—the state of being physically and perceptually available to one another.

1. People prefer co-presence for consequential activity.

Critical negotiations, delicate decisions, and creative collaborations occur primarily when participants can look one another in the eye. Trust and nuance are built in person.

2. Modernity produces more co-presence, not less.

The very technologies that permit remote contact—email, video calls, instant messaging—create new reasons to meet. They coordinate rather than replace physical interaction.

3. Mediated communication borrows its grammar from face-to-face talk.

Even when separated by screens, we draw upon norms learned in embodied conversation. When we write “lol” in a text, we mimic the laughter that would soften a remark in person. Digital discourse works because it translates the cues of physical interaction.

4. The most consequential decisions occur in proximity.

Courtrooms, surgical teams, and cabinet meetings rely on the interpretive work that only shared space allows.

5. Proximity constrains flexibility.

Organizations must continuously manage spatial arrangements—offices, summits, travel—because trust, repair, and understanding still require bodies in space.

At the heart of this analysis lies the ethnomethodological principle of indexicality: meaning depends on immediate context. Co-presence allows for real-time adjustment, repair, and mutual calibration. It is “thick with information”—every glance, pause, and bodily movement contributes to a shared field of understanding.

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3. Roots and Resonances

Boden and Molotch draw together multiple streams of sociology. Erving Goffman’s concept of the interaction order revealed the moral and ritual rules that govern face-to-face behavior. Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology showed that people sustain order through everyday interpretive methods. Anthony Giddens’s idea of time–space distanciation described how modern institutions coordinate action across distance.

Boden and Molotch integrate these insights to argue that the macro-order of modernity rests on the micro-order of co-present interaction. The global depends on the local. The paradox of modernity is that it expands across space by continually reproducing the conditions of local presence.

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4. Seeing the Theory in Action: The Executive Meeting

Imagine a multinational company preparing a major merger. Its executives communicate constantly through email and video conferences. Yet, before signing the final documents, they fly thousands of miles to meet in person.

Observe that meeting:

• Conversation flows turn by turn, with nods and overlaps signaling when to speak.

• A puzzled glance prompts instant clarification: “Wait—by Q3 do you mean fiscal or calendar?”

• Approval or skepticism is visible in posture and gaze before words are spoken.

• The very act of showing up signals seriousness and moral commitment.

In two days of conversation, the group accomplishes what months of asynchronous communication could not. Shared rhythm and embodied presence produce alignment, closure, and trust. This is not a vestige of the past; it is how modernity gets done.

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5. The Broader Significance

Urban Life: Cities endure because they maximize opportunities for interaction. The “meeting density” of metropolitan life fuels creativity and coordination.

Technological Myths: Each new medium—from the telegraph to Zoom—promises to abolish distance. Yet each creates new reasons to meet in person.

Trust and Morality: Co-presence allows us to judge sincerity and establish accountability. Much of modern work—diplomacy, therapy, education—depends on these embodied judgments.

Inequality: Access to proximity is a form of power. Those admitted into the rooms where decisions are made wield influence denied to those kept outside.

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6. Compulsion as Discipline

The word compulsion carries a double meaning. It describes both a preference and a pressure.

In modern organizations, proximity is often required. Executives demand “face time.” Service workers must appear in person even when remote options exist. The workplace turns the human desire for connection into an obligation to perform availability.

This is the disciplinary dimension of proximity:

• Workers are compelled to travel, attend, and emote on demand.

• Managers equate presence with productivity.

• Technology extends this demand into private life, keeping us perpetually reachable.

Thus, the compulsion of proximity is not only an interactional necessity but also a form of social control. People are bound by the requirement to be seen, to prove commitment through bodily presence. Critical Interactionism reveals this as a moral economy: who gets to choose proximity, and who must endure it.

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7. Critical Interactionism: The Politics of Presence

Critical Interactionism extends ethnomethodology and Goffman’s interaction order into moral and political terrain. It examines not only how social order is produced, but whose order it sustains.

From this perspective, Boden and Molotch’s essay is foundational. It shows how power operates through access to interactional space.

• Proximity as privilege: Decision-makers occupy proximate centers—boardrooms, chambers, campuses—while others remain at the periphery.

• Proximity as labor: Nurses, outreach workers, and service staff perform emotionally demanding face-to-face work yet lack control over the terms of their presence.

• Proximity as vulnerability: During COVID-19, essential workers were compelled into proximity while others worked remotely. Distance became privilege; presence became risk.

• Proximity as justice: Activist movements reclaim co-presence as democratic practice—assemblies, vigils, and marches that embody solidarity itself.

The interaction order, in this sense, is also a moral order of access. To study proximity is to study inclusion and exclusion, dignity and domination.

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8. A Living Example: Street-Level Work

Consider a Santa Barbara outreach worker meeting unhoused residents under a freeway. Policy discussions happen in distant offices, but real coordination—the fragile work of care—occurs face-to-face on the street.

Here, co-presence is not optional; it is the condition of trust. The worker’s tone, posture, and eye contact communicate safety more effectively than any form or email. Yet those performing this intimate labor rarely have access to the rooms where policy is made.

Boden and Molotch’s argument thus extends to the moral geography of the city: proximity is both the substance of connection and the terrain of inequality.

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9. Teaching the Text: Key Concepts

Co-presence — The state of being bodily and perceptually available to one another. Example: doctors coordinating surgery in real time.

Indexicality — Meaning depends on context. Words like “this” or “here” make sense only within a shared situation.

Interaction order — The moral and procedural organization of face-to-face behavior: turn-taking, politeness, repair, attention.

Compulsion of proximity — The persistent need for embodied interaction in modern society: meetings, conferences, service encounters.

Discussion questions:

• How do new technologies reorganize rather than replace proximity?

• Who benefits from access to co-presence? Who bears its burdens?

• What might a more just moral economy of presence look like?

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10. Conclusion: The Moral Economy of Being There

Even in the most virtual age, decisions that matter still happen in rooms—around tables, in eyes meeting across distances charged with trust and risk. Modernity has not escaped proximity; it has intensified it.

Boden and Molotch remind us that social order is not sustained by systems alone but by people showing up—perceiving one another, adjusting, and renewing the fragile fabric of understanding. Yet the privilege of being present is unevenly distributed.

The task for Critical Interactionism is to expose and transform that inequality:

Who gets to enter the room?

Who must remain outside?

And what might a just society of presence look like?

For now, we live by the paradox they named three decades ago:

we reach farther than ever—only to find we must still come close.