Critical Interactionism The Micro-Sociology of Power, Morality, and Everyday Life

 

BOOK PROSPECTUS

Critical Interactionism

The Micro-Sociology of Power, Morality, and Everyday Life

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

University of California, Santa Barbara (1994)

The Central Argument

Domination happens not "out there" in abstractions, but in the pauses, glances, questions, form fields, and algorithmic prompts that structure everyday life.

This is the book's animating claim. Sociology has long examined power as a macro-level phenomenon—institutions, structures, historical forces that shape societies from above. But power is also enacted, maintained, and resisted in the smallest units of social interaction. How a nurse asks a question. How a journalist challenges a politician. How an outreach worker looks at a sleeping body on the sidewalk. How an intake form categorizes a human being. How an algorithm sorts a life into a queue. These are not reflections of power operating elsewhere. They 

For fifty years, a distinctive intellectual tradition developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara—scholars including Harold Garfinkel, Don Zimmerman, Candace West, Douglas Maynard, Steven Clayman, Deirdre Boden, and their students—who developed tools for making this visible. They learned to slow down interaction, to trace how categories get applied, to reveal how accountability is demanded or evaded in real time. They demonstrated that meaning, dignity, humiliation, legitimacy, belonging, exclusion, and justice are not abstract qualities but sequential achievements, organized turn by turn in the flow of talk and action.

Yet this tradition, despite its analytic power, remained hesitant about its political implications. It could show gender being done but stopped short of naming it patriarchy. It could reveal professional categorization but pulled back from calling it domination. It developed extraordinary tools and then contained their critical force.

This book completes that unfinished revolution. 

Why This Book Matters Now

We live in a moment when power has learned to hide in civility. Authoritarianism does not always announce itself with jackboots; it arrives through procedural reasonableness, algorithmic neutrality, bureaucratic necessity, and polite documentation. The world of polite documentation produces disposable populations. The world of algorithmic neutrality sorts human lives beneath the threshold of visibility. The world of bureaucratic reasonableness decides who receives shelter and who receives arrest, who counts as a patient and who counts as a problem.

Consider the phenomena we cannot adequately understand without interactional analysis: How do welfare offices manufacture the conditions they claim to remedy? How does a press conference evade accountability while appearing to submit to it? How does an outreach worker see a human being as both a person deserving compassion and a case requiring triage? How does an AI chatbot produce the effect of responsiveness while operating without the moral stakes of human encounter? How does a city make certain bodies disposable through the accumulated weight of glances, questions, and categorizations?

Macro-level analysis cannot answer these questions. It can tell us that inequality exists, that racism is structural, that bureaucracies sort populations. What it cannot do is show 

What Is Distinctive About This Approach

The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression

The original "doing difference" framework (West and Fenstermaker, 1995) demonstrated that race, class, and gender are interactionally accomplished. But it treated these axes as parallel operations—as if "doing race" and "doing gender" were isomorphic processes with equivalent structures. This book argues they are not. Race, class, and gender have different 

A Black man's encounter with police operates under stakes that are not equivalent to a white woman's navigation of hospital intake. Class structures the exits available—what one can refuse, what consequences one can absorb. Gender shapes accountability expectations—the performances demanded on pain of sanction. The moral economy of oppression is not flat; it is 

Professional Vision as Moral-Political Act

Charles Goodwin's concept of "professional vision" described how members of professions develop trained ways of seeing. This book extends the concept beyond its cognitive framing. When an outreach worker "sees" a person on the street, they are not merely perceiving—they are categorizing, positioning, making consequential decisions that affect whether that person receives shelter or arrest, compassion or triage. The trained gaze is simultaneously an act of care and an act of power.

Outreach workers see 

Completing the Unfinished Revolution

The Santa Barbara School never fully theorized race. It gestured toward class but rarely centered it. It developed remarkable tools but often hesitated at the threshold of explicit political analysis. This book finishes what they started—not by abandoning their methodological rigor, but by insisting that if we can see gender being done, we can see racism being done; if we can see professional categorization, we can see the production of disposability; and once we see these things, we have obligations. Visibility creates responsibility.

Autoethnography as Moral Witness

This book is not written from scholarly distance. The author is a certified substance abuse counselor who conducts street outreach with people experiencing homelessness. He serves on the County's Behavioral Wellness Commission. He organizes the annual Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil. This is not mere credentialing—it is 

Who This Book Is For

This book is not for everyone, and that is as it should be.

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Chapter Structure

Part I: The Stakes

The book opens with urgency rather than genealogy. Before any technical apparatus, readers must feel that the "small" scale is where the core crises of our moment unfold.

Chapter 1: The Return to Everyday Life

Opens with concrete scenes: a press conference where accountability evaporates; a welfare intake that produces rather than addresses need; an outreach encounter that must simultaneously recognize and categorize. Establishes that power now operates in talk, documentation, classification, and algorithmic prompts. Argues that without the tools this book provides, we cannot understand how domination works in the contemporary world. Positions the author within the Santa Barbara lineage and as a practitioner whose work grounds the theoretical argument.

Chapter 2: The Santa Barbara Inheritance

Presents the tradition not as intellectual history but as the emergence of a methodological sensibility—a way of seeing that makes power visible at the moment it is enacted. Garfinkel's insistence that social order is an achievement. Sacks's discovery that conversation has sequential machinery. West and Fenstermaker's demonstration that inequality is done, not just suffered. Maynard's revelation that institutions have moral architectures. Clayman's analysis of democratic accountability. These are chapters in a story about how sociology learned to see domination being enacted in real time. Identifies the tradition's hesitancies—its ambivalence about race, its containment of political implications—as unfinished business this book will address.

Part II: The Framework

The theoretical core of the book. Here the argument moves from inheritance to contribution.

Chapter 3: Laminated Worlds—The Moral Economy of Oppression

Develops the book's central theoretical contribution. Critiques and extends the "doing difference" framework. Introduces the concept of laminated oppression—the argument that different axes of inequality have different interactional signatures, temporal structures, and distributions of consequences. Provides concrete analyses of how these laminations become visible in sequential interaction: the traffic stop, the medical intake, the job interview, the welfare office. Establishes the theoretical architecture that subsequent chapters will apply.

Chapter 4: Seeing Power—Professional Vision and Moral Work

Extends Goodwin's professional vision into a framework for understanding how trained perception operates as moral-political action. Combines analysis of outreach work, medical encounters, and bureaucratic assessment. Shows how institutional categorization operates through embodied practice—the gaze, the form, the diagnostic pronouncement. Addresses the tension between compassion and triage that characterizes work with vulnerable populations. Integrates Robin James Smith's research on homeless outreach with the author's own experience.

Chapter 5: The Moral Architecture of Institutional Life

Positions Douglas Maynard's work as anchor for understanding institutions as sequential moral machines. Analyzes how institutions are moral orders enacted through accumulated categorizations, assessments, and decisions. Examines bad-news deliveries, diagnostic pronouncements, and bureaucratic classifications. Shows how repair, delay, refusal, and sanction operate within institutional frameworks. Extends to contemporary settings: HR protocols, AI-assisted triage, algorithmic sorting.

Part III: Where Power Lives

The empirical heart of the book. These chapters show, rather than merely tell, how Critical Interactionism reveals power in action.

Chapter 6: Democracy Under Threat—Accountability in Political Talk

Extends Steven Clayman's analysis of news interviews to the current crisis of democratic discourse. Shows how adversarial questioning, follow-ups, and challenges to evasion constitute the interactional infrastructure of democracy. Analyzes what happens when this infrastructure erodes—when politicians successfully evade, when journalists become deferential, when norms of challenge shift. Argues that authoritarianism is an interactional style, visible turn by turn in press conferences and public appearances. Uses contemporary examples alongside Clayman's archival analyses.

Chapter 7: Organizations Are Talking—Work, Workscapes, and Institutional Order

Synthesizes workplace studies within Critical Interactionism. Draws on the Whalens' "workscapes" concept, Deirdre Boden's analysis of organizational talk, and the Xerox PARC tradition of studying work as situated practice. Analyzes how bureaucracy now manifests as dashboards, metrics, and scripted interactions. Shows how organizations constitute themselves through accumulated interaction. Addresses distributed cognition and accountability in settings where work is increasingly mediated by technology.

Chapter 8: Street Life and City Trouble—Public Space and Moral Order

Develops Critical Interactionism for the study of public space. Analyzes Goffman's civil inattention and its disruption by race, class, and visible marginality. Examines "policing-light"—the informal regulation of public space through gaze, positioning, and challenge. Studies the moral geography of cities and the borderwork that maintains boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable presence. Shows how survival choreography operates for people whose existence in public is contested.

Chapter 9: Homelessness, Outreach, and the Edges of Order

The book's empirical centerpiece. Presents homelessness as the limit case where all themes converge. Analyzes how unhoused people are simultaneously maximally visible (always in public) and maximally invisible (looked through rather than at). Examines the professional vision of outreach workers—triage logic, compassion governance, the coexistence of administrative compassion and administrative cruelty. Shows how the interaction order has edges, and how people fall off them. Draws extensively on the author's fourteen years of street outreach and his organization of the Longest Night vigils.

Chapter 10: Bodies, Desire, and Sacred Trouble

Extends Critical Interactionism to embodiment, pleasure, and transgression. Analyzes party spaces, queer venues, and liminal social worlds where ordinary interaction rules suspend. Studies the ritual production of disinhibition, collective effervescence, and altered states. Argues against the implicit Protestantism of sociology—the assumption that serious analysis must exclude pleasure and ecstasy. Shows that these spaces are interaction orders too, with sequential organization, moral economies, and distributions of risk that reveal what more austere settings conceal.

Part IV: Method and Future

Chapter 11: How to See—Autoethnography, Micro-Ethnography, and Conversation Analysis

A methodological interlude showing readers how to do this work. Articulates how conversation analysis, micro-ethnography, and autoethnography complement each other—and is honest about what each can and cannot capture. Defends autoethnography as moral witness rather than self-indulgence. Provides practical guidance for graduate students wishing to marry rigor with moral seriousness. Demonstrates that it is possible to transcribe talk, engage with race and class, and write in a voice that reaches practitioners.

Chapter 12: Technology and the Hybrid Interaction Order

Extends Critical Interactionism to human-machine interaction. Draws on the Xerox PARC tradition and the author's own HCI research. Analyzes what happens when one participant in interaction is not human—chatbots, recommendation algorithms, AI-assisted decision systems. Studies accountability in hybrid encounters: when an AI "apologizes," what kind of repair is this? When an algorithm sorts a life, who bears responsibility? Addresses algorithmic governance as an emerging form of interactional power. Includes autoethnographic reflection on the practice of writing with AI.

Conclusion: Sociology as Vocation

Returns to the book's opening argument: that everyday life is where power operates, that the Santa Barbara tradition provides irreplaceable tools for seeing it, and that Critical Interactionism completes what that tradition began. Names the frontiers that remain: race-in-interaction as the most urgent unfinished work; policing beyond fragments; childhood socialization of inequality; algorithmic sorting; emotional withholding and the failure of repair; documents as domination. Argues that visibility creates responsibility—that once we can see domination being done, we have obligations to intervene. Positions Critical Interactionism as an ongoing project and invites others into it.

Market Positioning

This book occupies a distinctive position. It is not a textbook surveying symbolic interactionism (Charon; Sandstrom et al.). It is not a technical manual for conversation analysis (Sidnell and Stivers). It is not an introduction to ethnomethodology for beginners (Maynard and Clayman in the Handbook of Sociological Theory). It is not pure theory without empirical grounding, nor empirical work without theoretical contribution.

The closest comparisons are works that synthesize micro-sociological traditions with critical theory: West and Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" and its extensions; Patricia Hill Collins's intersectionality scholarship; Goffman's 

This book fills a gap: a sustained, book-length synthesis of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis with critical theory, written accessibly for an audience that includes but extends beyond specialists, grounded in concrete empirical work across multiple domains, and authored by someone who lives inside the phenomena studied.

Course adoption potential: 

About the Author

Wayne Martin Mellinger received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994, where he studied under Don Zimmerman and other founding figures of the Santa Barbara School. His dissertation applied conversation analysis to interaction in medical settings, examining paramedic-nurse handoffs and negotiated orders in emergency care.

Dr. Mellinger is an independent scholar who maintains two academic blogs: "Doing Modernity" (documenting the Santa Barbara School tradition) and "The Dionysian Naturalist" (exploring nature-based spirituality). He serves on the Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Commission and Continuum of Care, bringing academic expertise to policy deliberations about mental health and homelessness services.

Since 2011, Dr. Mellinger has worked as a certified substance abuse counselor conducting street outreach with people experiencing homelessness. He organizes the annual Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil, commemorating those who died while unhoused—an event that has become a significant community gathering drawing hundreds of participants. He writes on local issues for 

His intellectual work bridges rigorous microsociological analysis with social justice activism. His 2025 writings—the foundation for this book—include extended theoretical essays on professional vision in outreach work, democratic accountability in political discourse, the moral architecture of institutional life, the layered moral economy of oppression, and human-AI interaction. These essays totaled over 100,000 words and represent a sustained effort to develop Critical Interactionism as a coherent framework.

Dr. Mellinger is uniquely positioned to write this book: trained in the Santa Barbara tradition, committed to its methodological rigor, engaged with the populations whose lives hang in the balance of institutional categorization, and dedicated to extending the tradition's tools toward explicitly critical ends.

Specifications

Estimated length: 90,000–110,000 words (approximately 300–350 pages)

Estimated completion: 18 months from contract

Special features: Concrete empirical examples throughout; autoethnographic material grounding theoretical claims; accessible prose for graduate students and serious general readers; technical apparatus (transcripts, detailed methodological discussion) in appendices

Sample chapters: Introduction, Chapters 3 (Laminated Worlds), 4 (Seeing Power), and 9 (Homelessness) available upon request

A Final Word

Writing this book will be hard precisely because it attempts something rare: a genuine theoretical contribution that remains accessible to practitioners and readers outside the academy. That requires prose with the clarity and experiential resonance of vivid examples, grounded in scenes anyone can recognize and theorized in ways that give readers tools to see power at work in their own lives.

The Santa Barbara School taught that ordinary life deserves rigorous attention—that in the smallest interactions, we can observe how social order is accomplished and how inequality is reproduced. Critical Interactionism insists that this observation carries moral weight. Once we see domination being done, we cannot pretend we did not see it.

This book is written for everyone willing to look.