V. Abandonment in Real Time:

Recognition, Rupture, and the Moral Economy of Interaction

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

This chapter takes up the most difficult analytic task of the book: examining abandonment not as institutional structure, not as policy failure, not as cumulative trajectory, but as something accomplished in real time, within interaction, between people who care about one another. Earlier chapters have shown that abandonment can be understood as a social condition, a standpoint, and a trajectory shaped by institutional processes. Yet if abandonment is truly a social phenomenon, it must also be visible in the ordinary practices through which relationships are organized, sustained, and sometimes broken. This chapter therefore examines a single interaction in which care fails—not abstractly, not morally, but sequentially. The goal is not to assign blame, but to analyze how abandonment can emerge even within relationships structured by solidarity, compassion, and reflexive awareness.

This shift in analytic focus reflects the methodological commitments of critical interactionism and the ethnomethodological tradition. Rather than treating abandonment as the outcome of intentions, emotions, or institutional policies alone, the analysis turns to interactional sequences: how one action makes another relevant, how expectations are formed, and how failures of alignment emerge. In this approach, social order is not inferred from inner states, but from publicly accountable practices. What matters analytically is not what participants intended, but what their actions made relevant next. Abandonment, in this sense, is not merely suffered or imposed. It is accomplished.

The importance of this shift cannot be overstated. Much of the literature on homelessness and institutional care emphasizes structural conditions, resource shortages, or policy failures. These factors are crucial, but they do not fully explain how abandonment is reproduced in everyday life. If abandonment occurs only at the level of institutions, it remains distant and abstract. If, however, abandonment is visible within ordinary interaction, then it becomes clear that institutional abandonment is built upon interactional foundations. The argument of this chapter is therefore simple but consequential: abandonment is not only institutional; it is interactional. Institutions inherit, stabilize, and scale interactional processes that are already present in everyday life.

The Interactional Frame: Instruction Before Rupture

The interaction analyzed here took place in a private home shared temporarily by two long-term friends. One participant—myself—was housed and working in street outreach. The other, Brian, was unhoused and living with severe PTSD. The night before the interaction, Brian had been taken to the emergency room for treatment of an abscess. He was physically exhausted, emotionally depleted, and navigating ongoing instability.

In the period leading up to the rupture, the interaction was already structured by an evaluative and instructional frame. I had been coaching Brian on eye contact, posture, and engagement norms—interactional practices that shape how individuals are read by institutions, service providers, and potential employers. This coaching drew on a familiar recovery narrative: earlier success, fall from grace, bottoming out, and present-tense agency. The emphasis was on "living in the solution," a phrase drawn from recovery discourse that foregrounds agency, responsibility, and forward movement.

This matters analytically because it establishes that the interaction was already organized by assessment and correction before the moment of breakdown. The exchange does not occur in neutral conversational space. It occurs within an environment saturated with evaluation. One participant occupies a position of relative stability and authority; the other occupies a position of vulnerability and dependency. This asymmetry is not malicious or intentional. It is structural. Yet it shapes the interactional terrain within which the rupture occurs.

The Scene

The pivotal exchange unfolds as follows, reconstructed from immediate recall:

W: You're like family to me.
I don't want to hear that you're cold or hungry.
I'll always have food for you.

How do you feel about me?

Brian: (looks down, picks at face)

Do you have another pair of sneakers I could have?

This is not a misunderstanding. It is a re-specification of relevance. The first sequence projects affective reciprocity. The response initiates a different sequence entirely: a material request. The reply neither affiliates nor rejects. It sidesteps the projected action and substitutes a different footing for what counts as care.

The interactional tension here is subtle but decisive. A request for affective recognition is met with a request for material provision. Each action is intelligible. Each is reasonable. Yet they operate within different moral logics.

Two Moral Logics of Care

At this point, the interaction is organized by two distinct moral economies.

The first treats recognition as central. Within this logic, intimacy is sustained through verbal acknowledgment, reciprocal affective accounting, and explicit confirmation of relational standing. Asking "How do you feel about me?" is not casual. It projects an obligation to respond in kind. Recognition is treated as the foundation of relationship.

The second moral logic treats safety and survival as paramount. Within this logic, care is organized through concrete provision—food, shelter, clothing—and emotional exposure is minimized. Silence, gaze aversion, and material requests are not failures of engagement but competent practices for managing risk. In contexts of trauma, instability, and institutional surveillance, minimizing exposure can be an adaptive strategy.

Both moral logics are interactionally coherent. Both are morally accountable. The problem is not that one is correct and the other mistaken. The problem is that they are not interchangeable.

Format Mismatch

The interaction fails because these two moral logics rely on different formats for action. Recognition-through-disclosure and care-through-provision are not sequentially compatible in this moment. This is what I mean by format mismatch. The failure is not emotional or intentional, but organizational. The participants are operating within different moral economies of what counts as an appropriate next action.

The devastating quality of the exchange lies not in its content but in its structure. Each participant produces a competent action that the other cannot take up without abandoning their own interactional footing. To respond affectively would require Brian to shift from a survival-oriented footing to one of emotional disclosure. To respond materially would require me to abandon the projected expectation of affective reciprocity.

The mismatch is therefore structural, not personal.

Rupture

The response to this mismatch is immediate:

W: Fuck you.

Placed in third position, this utterance is analytically decisive. It functions as a sanctioning move that closes rather than repairs the sequence. The utterance publicly assesses the prior turn as inadequate. It transforms misalignment into rupture.

Brian responds:

I'm going to leave right now.

Exit becomes the interactional solution. Rather than escalating conflict, disengagement protects both participants. Yet exit also marks abandonment in real time.

Organizational Reasoning Without Organizations

What follows introduces a crucial analytic development:

W: You need to think about this.
If you can't tell me that you care about me,
that's a real injury to me.
When you come back,
I need you to tell me how you feel about me.

Here, organizational reasoning enters ordinary talk. We see assessment, naming of injury, and conditional re-entry. No formal institution is present, yet the interaction now contains a standard of adequacy, a requirement for compliance, and conditions for continued participation.

This is not cruelty. It is the migration of institutional logic into intimate care.

The Moral Economy of Oppression

To understand this dynamic, it is useful to distinguish three overlapping moral economies:

moral economy of interaction
moral economy of care
moral economy of oppression

Silence, gaze aversion, and material requests are rational survival practices in environments structured by surveillance and instability. What protects a person in one interactional ecology becomes a liability in another.

Bridge: From Interaction to Institution

What this interaction reveals is not simply the fragility of friendship under stress, but the basic sequential machinery through which abandonment is accomplished more broadly. The format mismatch visible here is not an anomaly. It is a recurrent organizational problem that emerges whenever asymmetrical care relationships are structured through incompatible moral economies. The collision between these moral logics anticipates the very processes that institutional settings formalize and scale.

In this sense, the exchange between myself and Brian is not fundamentally different from what occurs in shelter intakes, case conferences, discharge planning meetings, and eligibility assessments. Participants operate within competing moral economies of care: recognition, compliance, safety, and risk management. Format mismatches occur when one party treats recognition as central while another treats procedural adequacy as paramount. What appears in intimate interaction as rupture becomes, in institutional settings, routine procedure.

Institutions stabilize these interactional patterns, formalize them through documentation, and reproduce them across time. Where intimate interaction permits exit, institutional encounters often do not. Format mismatch becomes case file. Moral collision becomes eligibility determination. Organizational reasoning becomes policy.

The sequential machinery visible in this interaction is not exceptional. It is foundational.

What This Chapter Reveals

This chapter demonstrates that abandonment is not only structural or institutional. It is interactional. It emerges when suffering exceeds available interactional forms for holding it. Even care can reproduce abandonment.

That clarity is not consolation.

But it is analytically necessary.

Endnotes

The analytic approach adopted here draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, particularly the emphasis on sequential organization and participant orientation. See Harold Garfinkel (1967); Harvey Sacks (1992); Emanuel Schegloff (2007); and John Heritage (1984). This tradition re-specifies social psychology as publicly observable practices rather than inner states.
The concept of “interactional accomplishment” originates in ethnomethodology. See Harold Garfinkel (1967). For further elaboration on the sequential organization of action, see Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The analysis of asymmetry in care relationships draws on research in institutional interaction and professional-client relationships. See John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard (2006); Steven Clayman and John Heritage (2002).
The recovery narrative invoked in this interaction reflects widely documented narrative structures in addiction and recovery discourse. See Howard S. Becker (1963); Arthur Frank (1995).
The concept of “format mismatch” is developed here as an extension of conversation analytic work on preference organization and alignment. See Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The notion of competing moral logics draws on research in moral economy and interactional ethics. See E. P. Thompson (1971); Didier Fassin (2012).
The concept of rupture as third-position assessment builds on conversation analytic research into sequence organization. See Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The migration of institutional logic into intimate interaction draws on research in institutional ethnography and street-level bureaucracy. See Dorothy E. Smith (2005); Michael Lipsky (1980).
The concept of moral economies of survival draws on research in homelessness ethnography. See Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (2009); Michele Wakin (2010).
The distinction between interactional abandonment and institutional abandonment is developed throughout this book. The argument parallels David Sudnow’s demonstration that institutional outcomes are grounded in interactional processes (1967).
The argument that institutional processes scale interactional patterns draws on Douglas W. Maynard (2003), who demonstrates how conversational practices become institutionalized within medical settings.
The concept of bureaucratic amplification connects to broader sociological analyses of institutional rationality. See Max Weber (1978); Loïc Wacquant (2009).
The concept of abandonment as interactional failure connects to earlier discussions in this book of conditional recognition, burden of legibility, and temporal mismatch.

Bibliography

Howard S. Becker. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

Philippe Bourgois, and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Steven Clayman, and John Heritage. 2002. The News Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Didier Fassin. 2012. Humanitarian Reason. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Arthur Frank. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harold Garfinkel. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

John Heritage. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity.

Michael Lipsky. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Douglas W. Maynard. 2003. Bad News, Good News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Emanuel Schegloff. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

David Sudnow. 1967. Passing On. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Dorothy E. Smith. 2005. Institutional Ethnography. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Loïc Wacquant. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Durham: Duke University Press.

Max Weber. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 4 Endnotes

Abandonment in Real Time: Recognition, Rupture, and the Moral Economy of Interaction

The analytic approach adopted here draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, particularly the emphasis on sequential organization and participant orientation. See Harold Garfinkel (1967); Harvey Sacks (1992); Emanuel Schegloff (2007); and John Heritage (1984). This tradition re-specifies social psychology as publicly observable practices rather than inner states.
The concept of “interactional accomplishment” originates in ethnomethodology. See Harold Garfinkel (1967). For further elaboration on the sequential organization of action, see Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The analysis of asymmetry in care relationships draws on research in institutional interaction and professional-client relationships. See John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard (2006); Steven Clayman and John Heritage (2002).
The recovery narrative invoked in this interaction reflects widely documented narrative structures in addiction and recovery discourse. See Howard S. Becker (1963); Arthur Frank (1995).
The concept of “format mismatch” is developed here as an extension of conversation analytic work on preference organization and alignment. See Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The notion of competing moral logics draws on research in moral economy and interactional ethics. See E. P. Thompson (1971); Didier Fassin (2012).
The concept of rupture as third-position assessment builds on conversation analytic research into sequence organization. See Emanuel Schegloff (2007).
The migration of institutional logic into intimate interaction draws on research in institutional ethnography and street-level bureaucracy. See Dorothy E. Smith (2005); Michael Lipsky (1980).
The concept of moral economies of survival draws on research in homelessness ethnography. See Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (2009); Michele Wakin (2010).
The distinction between interactional abandonment and institutional abandonment is developed throughout this book. The argument parallels David Sudnow’s demonstration that institutional outcomes are grounded in interactional processes (1967).
The argument that institutional processes scale interactional patterns draws on Douglas W. Maynard (2003), who demonstrates how conversational practices become institutionalized within medical settings.
The concept of bureaucratic amplification connects to broader sociological analyses of institutional rationality. See Max Weber (1978); Loïc Wacquant (2009).
The concept of abandonment as interactional failure connects to earlier discussions in this book of conditional recognition, burden of legibility, and temporal mismatch.