Beyond Asymmetries-in-Action: Critical Interactionism, Moral Economy, and the Unequal Distribution of Consequences

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Response to the Special Issue on "The (Re)Production, Negotiation, and Navigation of Social Asymmetries-in-Action" Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 48, Issue 4 (2025)

Abstract

The special issue edited by Catherine L. Tam and Robin James Smith represents one of the most sophisticated contemporary articulations of a critical interactionist sociology. Across analyses of policing, race, gender, disability, pedagogy, media, and institutional authority, the contributors demonstrate that asymmetry is not a background condition imposed upon interaction but an ongoing practical accomplishment. This response argues that these analytic advances open the door to a further extension—one that Critical Interactionism seeks to develop explicitly. That extension concerns three interrelated dimensions: the moral economy of interactional asymmetry, standpoint-sensitive analysis of resistance and risk, and the connection between interactional asymmetries and material consequences. Drawing on two decades of street outreach with people experiencing homelessness, I show how Critical Interactionism builds directly on this special issue’s foundations while pressing the question it necessarily brackets: What do we owe one another once we can see asymmetries being done?

Keywords: Critical Interactionism; ethnomethodology; conversation analysis; moral economy; asymmetry; homelessness; accountability; standpoint

I. Introduction: A Shared Achievement—and a Necessary Extension

The special issue The (Re)Production and Navigation of Social Asymmetries-in-Action marks a decisive moment in contemporary interactionist sociology. Across empirically rich analyses of policing, race, gender, disability, pedagogy, media discourse, and institutional authority, the contributors demonstrate—carefully and without analytic overreach—that asymmetry is not a background structure imposed upon interaction but an ongoing practical accomplishment. Inequality, power, and vulnerability are shown to be produced, resisted, stabilized, and sometimes undone through categorial work, entitlement claims, stance-taking, and accountability practices enacted in real time.

In this respect, the special issue stands firmly within the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic lineage associated with Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, and their successors. Institutional authority, moral order, and social hierarchy are treated not as external forces but as endogenous features of interactional life. The issue rejects both structural determinism and methodological individualism, offering instead a disciplined account of how asymmetries are done.

This response proceeds from deep alignment with that achievement. Reading these papers, I recognize intellectual neighbors I did not know I had. For nearly two decades, I have been developing what I call Critical Interactionism—a framework that synthesizes ethnomethodology and conversation analysis with sustained attention to power, inequality, and material consequence. This work has been shaped less by disciplinary debate than by weekly encounters on the streets of Santa Barbara: harm-reduction practice, street outreach, and the ordinary labor of accompanying people through bureaucratic abandonment. Yet the commitments that organize this special issue—asymmetry as accomplishment, power as procedural, inequality as locally moral, resistance as risky—are precisely the foundations on which Critical Interactionism builds.

At the same time, the analytic advances made here open the door to a further extension that remains largely implicit across the collected papers. That extension concerns three interrelated dimensions:

The moral economy of interactional asymmetry
Standpoint-sensitive analysis of resistance and risk
The connection between interactional asymmetries and material consequences

Taken together, these dimensions constitute what I describe as the sixth layer of Critical Interactionism: an analytic commitment to tracing not only how asymmetries are produced in action, but how their consequences are unevenly distributed across lives, bodies, and social locations.

II. What This Special Issue Accomplishes

Before extending the framework, it is essential to specify what the contributors have achieved. Four commitments unify the collection.

Asymmetry as accomplishment, not presupposition

Every article refuses to treat asymmetry as a given. Whether analyzing police–citizen encounters (Smith), investigative interviews (Richardson et al.), radio talk about child death (Rafaely), online music lessons (Gan, Tam, and Jadamba), or attempted degradation ceremonies (Tam and Rafaely; Henderson and Tennent), the contributors demonstrate how asymmetrical positions are produced through members’ methods rather than imported wholesale from social structure. As Tam and Smith note, the danger of glossing “power relations” lies in constructing stable relational categories—the powerful, the excluded—prior to examining their production and recognition in situ. The papers gathered here resist that temptation systematically.

Power as procedural, not metaphysical

Across the diverse settings examined, power appears not as a substance possessed by some and lacking in others, but as a set of procedural rights: rights to define situations, demand accounts, assign vulnerability, and give what Goffman famously called “official imprint” to versions of reality. Smith’s analysis of policing is exemplary. Authority resides not primarily in force, but in the capacity to assemble a policeable contexture through categorization—to redescribe actions, objects, and persons in ways that make escalation intelligible. Because power is accomplished procedurally, it is always, in principle, contestable—though never without cost.

Inequality as locally moral

A striking through-line is the treatment of asymmetries as moral orders. Participants orient not only to epistemic or deontic rights but to normative expectations regarding who owes what to whom, whose experience counts, and whose suffering warrants response. Rafaely’s analysis of radio talk about child death makes this explicit: speakers must manage entitlement to emotional experience while deferring to those with “primary” moral standing. Tam and Rafaely show how degradation ceremonies depend on shared moral uptake within a moral community—and how those ceremonies can fail when that community shifts.

Resistance as risky and fragile

Finally, the issue takes resistance seriously without romanticizing it. Participants refuse categorizations, assert counter-devices, film encounters, and reclaim entitlements. Yet resistance is always precarious. The student who resists police categorization risks arrest; the trans woman whose category membership is denied faces sustained delegitimation. Resistance is shown to be interactionally possible—but never guaranteed, often dangerous, and always shaped by the asymmetries it contests.

III. Asymmetry-in-Action and Its Moral Economy

One of the special issue’s most significant contributions is its sustained attention to the moral organization of asymmetry. Whether framed as moral communities, policeable contextures, entitlement hierarchies, or vulnerability as interactional status, asymmetries are shown to be intelligible only within locally organized normative orders. Participants do not merely exercise power; they orient to what ought to be the case, who should defer, who may speak, and whose account counts.

Critical Interactionism builds directly on this insight. Where it extends the framework is by insisting that these moral orders are also moral economies: systems in which costs, risks, protections, and harms are unevenly allocated. Moral economies are not abstract value systems; they are practical arrangements in which some actors repeatedly absorb the consequences of asymmetry while others are buffered from them.

Consider a routine encounter from my street outreach work. A man I call Anthony sits on a low stone wall outside a grocery store. When I approach, he greets me warmly: “Hey boss, how you doing?” Interactionally, the address term accomplishes differential positioning. “Boss” invokes relational categories—employer/employee, patron/client, housed/unhoused—that carry standardized rights and obligations. My response must manage this positioning: accept it, deflect it, or contest it.

A moral-economic analysis asks further questions. What debts does this encounter invoke? What obligations does my positioning create? What recognition has been denied, what suffering imposed, that produces this asymmetry in the first place? And what do I owe Anthony—not as charity, but as a matter of justice?

The special issue shows how categorial contests unfold. A moral-economic extension asks who bears the downstream cost when those contests fail. For whom does failed resistance mean embarrassment? For whom does it mean arrest, injury, or death?

This is not a turn away from interactional analysis. It is a demand that we follow its consequences.

IV. Standpoint, Resistance, and the Unequal Distribution of Risk

A second extension concerns standpoint sensitivity, specifically the question of who can safely resist. Across the special issue, resistance is shown to be interactionally real and procedurally organized. Yet resistance is never cost-free, and those costs are not evenly distributed.

Critical Interactionism foregrounds this asymmetry of risk as an analytic object in its own right. The question is not simply whether resistance is possible, but for whom, under what conditions, and at what price. The same interactional move—non-compliance, refusal, repair—can function as principled resistance for one participant and lethal escalation for another.

The student in Smith’s analysis is a university student with institutional backing and survivability of the encounter. What of those who lack such resources? What of the person experiencing psychosis whose resistance is read as “erratic behavior”? What of the undocumented immigrant whose filming may trigger deportation? What of the person so worn down by repeated degradation that resistance no longer feels possible?

My outreach work makes this painfully visible. Some people resist brilliantly—using humor, deference, strategic compliance to preserve dignity within impossible constraints. Others cannot. Interactional resources are unevenly available; consequences of failure are unevenly survivable.

Standpoint-sensitive analysis does not import external identity variables into interaction. It tracks how race, class, disability, housing status, and institutional precarity become consequential through participants’ own orientations and the accountability regimes that surround them.

V. From Interactional Order to Material Consequence

The third extension concerns what happens after interaction.

The special issue demonstrates how asymmetries are produced and stabilized in situ. Critical Interactionism insists that we also attend to how these achievements accumulate into material outcomes: homelessness, incarceration, psychiatric labeling, family separation, untreated addiction, premature death. These are not macro effects imposed from above; they are the sedimented consequences of thousands of ordinary interactions in which accountability, entitlement, and moral worth are unevenly allocated.

Homelessness is not merely a structural condition but an interactional career produced through repeated encounters with landlords, police, caseworkers, hospitals, and service agencies. A missed appointment becomes “non-compliance,” which becomes “service resistance,” which becomes abandonment.

One morning I accompanied a woman I call Maria to a county behavioral-health office. Each intake question was procedurally reasonable. Together, they transformed suffering into administrative categories. When Maria’s answers were “wrong”—too complex, too ambiguous—she was asked to simplify, clarify, choose. Her life was edited to fit available boxes.

The moral economy of this encounter extended far beyond the desk. Categories such as “chronically homeless” or “substance use disorder” carried differential entitlements and wait times. The stakes were material: where Maria would sleep, whether she would receive care, whether she would survive.

In thirteen years of organizing Santa Barbara’s Longest Night memorial, I have read hundreds of names. Each represents the accumulated weight of asymmetries: housing markets, healthcare access, police discretion, and the unequal distribution of moral recognition. These deaths are not natural. They are produced.

VI. Methodological Commitments of Critical Interactionism

Critical Interactionism is not a rejection of EM/CA but its extension. It maintains core commitments—attention to members’ methods, refusal of constructive analysis, empirical demonstration—while adding three methodological principles:

Standpoint sensitivity: centering those most at risk, without romanticization or projection
Longitudinal attention: tracing how asymmetries accumulate into moral exhaustion
Material connection: demonstrating, rather than assuming, how interaction mediates life chances

VII. Claiming the Terrain

The special issue represents one of the strongest contemporary articulations of a critical interactionist sociology. Critical Interactionism claims this terrain—and extends it.

Where the special issue shows how asymmetries are produced and navigated,
Critical Interactionism asks who pays for them.

Where it documents resistance,
Critical Interactionism interrogates its unequal risks.

Where it reveals moral orders in action,
Critical Interactionism traces their moral economies and material fallout.

This is not a repudiation of the work gathered here. It is its logical continuation. If interaction is, as Garfinkel taught, a site of accountability with no time out, then there is likewise no time out from consequence.

The question this special issue necessarily brackets is the question Critical Interactionism insists on asking:

What do we owe one another once we can see asymmetries being done?

To see my answer to this question, click here.

About the Author

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, sociologist, and certified substance abuse counselor based in Santa Barbara, California. He studied ethnomethodology at UC Santa Barbara under Don Zimmerman and has conducted street outreach with people experiencing homelessness for over two decades. He organizes the annual Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil and serves on the Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Commission and Continuum of Care. His theoretical work develops Critical Interactionism as a framework for analyzing how power, inequality, and moral order are accomplished through everyday interaction.

Search This Blog

Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism