Doing Modernity: The Interactional Accomplishment of Contemporary Social Order

Doing Modernity: 

The Interactional Accomplishment of Contemporary Social Order

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. · 

Revised Oct 6, 2026 1. Who Gets to Be a Stranger?

The steps of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse are a good place to watch a city keep its composure. People pass in every direction: shoppers carrying bags from the boutiques on State Street, lawyers and clerks moving between offices, tourists photographing the tilework, and people without housing who carry what they own in packs, bags, or carts. Most of these passages are uneventful, and that is what makes them interesting. A sidestep here, a glance that lands and then moves on, a slight adjustment of pace as two trajectories approach each other. Nobody announces any of it. Yet the scene is orderly, and its order is being produced, continuously, by the people in it.

I have spent a good deal of time on and around those steps, first as a street outreach worker and later as someone who could not stop looking at what outreach had taught me to see. What it taught me is that the courtesies of public life are not distributed evenly. The shopper and the lawyer pass each other with the small, practiced gesture Erving Goffman called civil inattention: a brief look that acknowledges the other person is there, followed by a withdrawal of attention that signals no intrusion is intended. The unhoused man sitting near the fountain often receives something else. Sometimes he receives a longer look, of the kind that inspects. Sometimes he receives a wide berth and a gaze held carefully elsewhere. Sometimes he is addressed by a security guard, or approached by someone offering a sandwich, or simply passed as though he were part of the architecture.

On occasion I have tried to interrupt that pattern with an ordinary greeting, a hello or a nod to someone who seemed to be receiving none. What follows such a greeting is not predictable. Sometimes there is a flicker of recognition, sometimes wariness, sometimes something closer to gratitude. Whatever it is, the greeting makes something visible: that the absence of a greeting had been an accomplishment too, produced by many people, none of whom would have described themselves as doing anything at all.

This essay starts from that observation. The courthouse steps display, in miniature, a problem that runs through contemporary social life. We are accustomed to thinking of modernity as something large: an epoch, a set of institutions, a culture of rationality and individualism that settled over the West and then the world. Those descriptions are not wrong. But they leave out the place where modernity actually happens, which is in the conduct of people who must make themselves and one another recognizable, moment by moment, as the kinds of persons modern settings expect. And they leave out the fact that this recognizability is unequally available. Some people are permitted to be ordinary strangers. Others are treated as problems to be managed, objects to be avoided, or cases to be processed.

What follows is a programmatic statement for a research program I call doing modernity, conducted within the broader framework of Critical Interactionism. Critical Interactionism asks how domination, inequality, recognition, and resistance are accomplished in the organization of ordinary encounters. Doing modernity is one of its central objects: the situated practices through which people make contemporary social order recognizable and hold one another accountable to it. The argument proceeds through two cases drawn from my own work in Santa Barbara, the public space of the courthouse and the documentary encounter of homeless services, with a comparative interlude drawn from Kenneth Liberman's ethnomethodological study of a street crossing in Eugene, Oregon. The cases are meant to generate the concepts, not to decorate them.

2. Doing Modernity: Accomplishment and Accountability

The phrase "doing modernity" borrows a grammatical move that ethnomethodology made famous. Harold Garfinkel (1967) proposed that the orderliness of social life, which sociology had usually explained by pointing to norms, structures, or shared values, could be studied as an ongoing practical accomplishment. Members of society produce the recognizable features of their settings through methods they use without reflection, and they produce those features as accountable: observable, reportable, and open to the question of whether they were done properly. A line at the post office, a medical consultation, or a conversation between friends exists as that kind of thing because participants keep making it so, and because departures from it can be noticed and called to account.

Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman (1987) carried this insight into the study of gender. Their argument was that gender is something people recurrently do rather than something they simply have. The crucial term in their account is accountability. Because people can be assessed as women or men in nearly any situation, they conduct themselves with an orientation to how their conduct will be read in light of sex category, whether they conform to the expectations or not. Doing gender, on this view, is not optional performance. It is the unavoidable condition of being held answerable to a category. West and Sarah Fenstermaker (1995) later extended the argument to race and class under the heading of doing difference.

I want to propose that modernity can be studied the same way. The question becomes: what are people held accountable for doing in order to appear as competent members of recognizably modern social worlds? A partial answer is easy to sketch. In many contemporary settings people are expected to arrive on time, wait their turn, carry identification, give an address, keep a schedule, manage a phone, present themselves as bounded individuals with private interiors, and grant others the same. They are expected to know how to deal with institutions they cannot see and experts they will never meet. They are expected to be legible.

The sketch is useful as a provocation and dangerous as a definition. If doing modernity simply means doing whatever contemporary people do, the concept explains nothing, because every observation confirms it in advance. The discipline the program requires is empirical: in a particular setting, which competencies, categories, rights, obligations, and expectations are participants demonstrably orienting to? The answer has to be found in what people do, including what they treat as noticeable, remarkable, or in need of an account. Modernity, in this program, is something to be discovered in practices, not assumed behind them.

This discipline matters for a second reason. Much critical writing about modernity, including earlier versions of my own, interprets ordinary conduct as evidence of a hidden worldview. The pedestrian waiting at a light is said to be reaffirming industrial rationality; the person filling out a form is said to be performing allegiance to bureaucracy. That kind of reading attributes to people a belief they may not hold and then treats their conduct as its expression. It gets the phenomenon wrong. A person standing in line at a county office is rarely pledging anything. A man calling a housing hotline for the fourth time in a week is not expressing faith in administrative reason. He is doing what the setting requires of anyone who wants something from it.

The point can be put as a proposition: modern orders do not ordinarily require belief. They require competent participation, or an account for its absence.

Several things follow from this. First, the relevant sociological object is accountability, not allegiance. People participate in orders they did not design, often do not endorse, and sometimes actively resent, and they are held to those orders anyway. Second, the order is most visible where competent participation fails or is refused, because that is where accounts are demanded: the person who cannot produce identification, who misses the appointment, who sleeps where sleeping is not done, or who speaks to strangers at length. Such moments are the natural breaching experiments of modern life. Third, because accountability is distributed through categories, the demand for an account does not fall on everyone equally. Some people's departures pass without remark. Others are called to explain themselves for doing nothing more than being present.

This is also where the program connects with work on action under conditions not of one's making. The question of agency here concerns neither free choice nor determination. It concerns what people can accomplish when the terms of competence have been set elsewhere and the costs of failing to meet them are unequally borne. Anthony Giddens (1984) described the reflexive monitoring of action as a routine feature of all human conduct; people keep track of what they are doing and of how it will be seen. What modern settings add is a particular density of things to monitor, many of them institutional, impersonal, and only partly visible to the people held to them.

3. Public Personhood: Attention, Category, and Who Counts as an Ordinary Stranger

Goffman's description of civil inattention is deceptively modest. One person gives another enough visual notice to show that the other's presence has been registered, then withdraws attention to show that the other is not a target of special curiosity or design (Goffman 1963: 84). He likened the moment of passing on a street to a dimming of lights. The gesture is so slight that it barely seems to deserve a name, and yet Goffman treated it as among the most basic rituals regulating the relations of individuals in public.

Two features of the practice are worth stressing, because earlier writing on the subject, including mine, has tended to lose them. The first is that civil inattention is thoroughly embodied. It is done with the eyes, the angle of the head, the pace of walking, the distance one keeps, and the timing of all these in relation to the approach of another body. To describe it as a disembodied civility gets it backward; it is civility carried almost entirely by the body. The second is that civil inattention is not the same as ignoring. It contains an act of recognition. Its message is roughly: I see that you are here, I treat your being here as legitimate, and I will not intrude on you. Among strangers who receive it from one another, it can be a small accomplishment of equal standing, a way of granting another person the same right to be left alone that one claims for oneself.

This is precisely why its distribution matters. The courthouse steps show that the same glance-and-withdrawal is not available to everyone, and that several other interactional forms can take its place. These forms should be kept analytically distinct, because they are not points along a single scale.

Avoidance manages proximity: the wider arc around a person, the crossing to the other side, the gaze held deliberately elsewhere. Avoidance can resemble civil inattention from a distance, but it lacks the initial acknowledgment, and its spatial signature is different.

Scrutiny is extended looking that treats the other as something to be assessed. Goffman noticed its harsher relative, the hate stare, in his discussion of how certain persons were looked at in public (1963: 83).

Surveillance is scrutiny organized for purposes of control, whether by a guard, a camera, a business owner, or a passerby who has appointed themselves to the task. It is intense attention, not its absence, which is one reason these forms cannot be ranked from more to less attention.

Nonperson treatment, in Goffman's sense, is conduct in the presence of someone as though they were not there in the way a person is there (1963: 83). People talk over them, move around them like furniture, and continue conversations they would otherwise lower their voices for.

Recognition, finally, is the ordinary acknowledgment of another as a party to the scene, including the right to be greeted, answered, or left alone.

A single encounter can involve several of these at once or in succession. An unhoused woman on a bench may be scrutinized by one passerby, avoided by a second, given civil inattention by a third, and approached by a security guard who addresses her about her presence while speaking about her, in her hearing, to someone else. The analytic task is to describe what is actually done, and to whom, rather than to sort people into the seen and the unseen.

What organizes this distribution? Part of the answer lies in membership categorization, the dimension of ordinary reasoning that Harvey Sacks made available for study. Sacks (1972b) showed that people hear descriptions and observe conduct through collections of categories, membership categorization devices, in which particular activities are bound to particular categories. To see someone as a shopper, a tourist, a lawyer, a police officer, or a homeless person is already to have expectations about what they are doing there and how they may be approached. In a related paper, Sacks (1972a) examined how police officers treat the appearances of persons and places as indicators of moral character, looking for what is incongruous in a setting. The courthouse is full of such incongruity work. A person whose belongings are visible, whose clothes suggest a night outside, or who sits too long in one place may be categorized quickly, and the categorization licenses responses that would be unthinkable toward someone categorized differently.

Categories do not determine conduct mechanically. People resist categorization, display other memberships, and sometimes succeed in being taken as something other than what they first appeared to be. A man with a cart who greets a passing lawyer by name, because they know each other, can briefly reorganize what the scene is. But categorization supplies the default inferences against which such work must be done, and those defaults are unequally burdensome. The person categorized as homeless must often do additional interactional labor to receive what others receive without effort: the benefit of the doubt, the right to stay, the courtesy of not being looked at too long.

The question this section poses, then, is simple to state and difficult to answer empirically: who receives the ordinary interactional courtesies of public personhood, and under what circumstances? The courthouse suggests that the answer is not settled by law or by explicit rules, which formally protect everyone's right to be there. It is settled, again and again, in glances, distances, and categorizations, by people who would deny that they are settling anything. That is what it means to say that public personhood is done.

4. A Crossing Without a Signal: Liberman on Local Order

It would be easy, at this point, to slide into a familiar story in which modern public order is something imposed on people by signals, rules, and enforcement, and in which ordinary conduct is mostly a matter of compliance. Kenneth Liberman's study of a street crossing near the University of Oregon offers a useful corrective. It is his material, gathered with his students in Eugene, and I use it here as a comparative case from the literature, not as part of my own fieldwork.

The opening chapter of More Studies in Ethnomethodology (Liberman 2013: 11–44) examines how pedestrians cross Kincaid Street where 13th Street dead-ends into it. The setting matters. At the place Liberman studied there is no conventional crosswalk organizing the crossing, the turning traffic has no stop sign obliging it to wait, and by city policy traffic regulations are not enforced there. Newcomers sometimes look at the scene and conclude that something should be done about the chaos. Liberman's finding is that there is no chaos. Pedestrians and drivers produce a highly orderly crossing through methods they display to one another: moving in ways that make their next movements predictable, attaching themselves to others already crossing, and showing through their bodies that they are, or are not, attending to the cars. Much of the order consists of making one's conduct readable as a particular kind of conduct, so that others can coordinate with it. Liberman's history of the site adds an irony: the city's attempts to manage the flow had to contend with how successful pedestrians had become at crossing on their own terms.

The case matters for doing modernity in three ways. First, it shows that the orderliness of a modern street need not be explained by mechanical authority. The traffic signal, where there is one, is a resource people orient to, not the cause of their coordination; where there is none, people still coordinate, and they do it through accountable displays. This is a strong reason to stop reading ordinary conduct as obedience to a script written elsewhere. Second, the case shows that competence in public is a skill, unevenly distributed but not in the way institutional categories might predict. Liberman remarks in passing on street people whose expertise at crossing exceeds that of others. It is a single observation and should not be inflated into a finding about homeless people in general. But it points toward a juxtaposition the rest of this essay will need: people whom institutions treat primarily through their deficits can display considerable practical competence in settings where competence is measured differently.

Third, Kincaid clarifies what the courthouse case is not. The courthouse is not a scene of disorder awaiting regulation, and the people who receive scrutiny there are rarely failing at the practical work of moving through public space. What they are often denied is not order but standing: the presumption that their presence is ordinary. The difference between a competent crossing and a recognized presence is the difference between doing public space and being granted public personhood. Doing modernity involves both, and the second is the one that is unequally distributed.

5. From Person to Case: The Documentary Encounter

The second case moves indoors, or at least into the institutional relation. For nearly two decades I worked in Santa Barbara's homeless services system, as an outreach worker, a case manager, a homelessness prevention manager, and shelter staff. Much of that work involved documentation: intake forms, assessments, case notes, eligibility checks, the matching of names against lists of people waiting for housing. I became fluent in that language. I could write "barriers to housing" without hesitation and summarize a life in the fields a database provided. The fluency troubled me even then, because I knew how much of what people told me had no place to go.

It would be easy to describe this experience as dehumanization, the reduction of persons to objects by an impersonal system. The description is not exactly false, but it skips over everything that sociology can actually observe. What happens in a documentary encounter is a sequence of practical activities, each done by someone, each accountable in its own terms.

A person tells a story, usually not in the order an intake form expects. The worker asks questions, and the questions are shaped by what the form, the program, and the funder will need. Some parts of the story become answers; others become context the worker remembers but cannot record; others simply disappear. Answers become information when they are entered into fields: a date of last stable housing, a count of episodes, a disability status, a score. The encounter becomes an intake, and the intake becomes a case record. The record then travels. It can be read by workers who never met the person, discussed in meetings the person never attends, matched against eligibility criteria, and used to rank the person against others. Later decisions are often made in the presence of the record and in the absence of the person. Earlier classifications become resources for later ones.

None of this is news to ethnomethodology. Don H. Zimmerman's (1969) study of intake in a public welfare agency showed how caseworkers produced documentary facts through practical work, and Garfinkel's (1967) analysis of clinic records argued that records which look deficient to researchers are often adequate for the organizational purposes that produced them. What Dorothy E. Smith (1987, 2005) added is a way of following the record beyond the encounter. Her institutional ethnography treats texts as the means through which local activities are coordinated with translocal relations of ruling: the forms, regulations, and reporting requirements that make what happens in one office answerable to people and purposes elsewhere. The intake form in a Santa Barbara shelter is written somewhere else, in the language of federal reporting and local funding, and it organizes what the worker in the room can hear.

Smith's approach and Garfinkel's are not the same, and the difference is productive. Garfinkel directs us to the local work through which the record's facts are made accountable. Smith directs us to the ruling relations those facts are made accountable to. Doing modernity needs both: the encounter is where the person is made into a case, and the textual chain is what makes the case actionable elsewhere.

My own work on abandonment in homeless services has developed several concepts for this transformation, and a few of them belong here. Conditional Recognition names the way institutions grant recognition to persons on the condition that they appear in the forms the institution can process. The Burden of Legibility names who carries the work of making oneself readable, which in homeless services falls overwhelmingly on the person seeking help. Documentary Sorting refers to the ways records distribute people into categories that determine what they will be offered, and Documentary Sedimentation to the way those classifications accumulate and harden as a record ages, so that an old notation can shape a new encounter. These concepts are developed elsewhere (Mellinger, forthcoming). In this essay they matter for one reason: they show that the documentary encounter is not the opposite of interaction. It is interaction organized so that its outcome can leave the room.

The documentary encounter also shows why modernity cannot be identified with domination. A record can reduce someone to a category. It can also establish a claim. People in homeless services routinely fight to get something written down: a disability, a date, a promise. The record that sorts people is also the record that makes institutions answerable when they fail them. Whether a document works as a cage or as a lever is not decided by the document. It is decided in how the record is made, read, and used, and by whom.

6. Infrastructure and Time: What Competence Presupposes

The documentary encounter rests on something it rarely mentions. Before a person can be made into a case, they have to reach the place where cases are made, at the right time, with the right things. Institutions that formally serve everyone often presuppose, in practice, a set of capacities that competent participants are expected to possess already. I have called this the Access Infrastructure Assumption.

What the assumption contains varies by setting, and it should not be turned into a universal checklist of modern personhood. A housing application may presuppose identification, a mailing address, and a working phone. A benefits portal may presuppose an email account, a password, a device that can receive a verification code, and the literacy to navigate a sequence of screens. A court date presupposes the ability to learn of it, remember it, and arrive. The empirical question in each case is which infrastructural capacities this institution presupposes here, and what happens to someone who lacks them.

For most people with stable housing these capacities are invisible. They sit in a drawer, a wallet, or a phone, and they are maintained by routines nobody thinks of as work. Homelessness makes them visible, because homelessness attacks exactly the conditions that keep them stable: a place to store documents, a place to charge a device, a safe place to sleep that is not swept away along with one's belongings. This is why the unhoused person is such a revealing case for doing modernity. The point is not that such a person stands outside modern life. They are held fully accountable to its requirements while being deprived of the infrastructure those requirements assume. Their situation exposes the membership conditions of modern institutions, which for everyone else disappear into the background.

The smartphone has become one of the densest of these infrastructures. For many people it now connects banking, transportation, maps, medical portals, benefits, two-factor authentication, appointment reminders, and the phone numbers of the people who help them. It is a portable access infrastructure. When a housed person's phone is lost, the result is an inconvenience. When an unhoused person's phone is stolen in a sweep or dies without a place to charge it, the result can be a partial institutional disappearance: missed calls from a housing worker, a lapsed benefit, an appointment that passes unknown. This should be described carefully. The phone does not determine anyone's fate, and people find ingenious ways around its absence. But its loss shows how much institutional recognition now travels through a device, and how unevenly the means to maintain that device are distributed.

Giddens (1990) described modern institutions as depending on disembedding mechanisms, among them abstract systems of expertise and symbolic tokens, which lift social relations out of local contexts and reorganize them across time and space. That account helps explain why these infrastructures have become consequential: access to a growing share of social life runs through systems that are not present in the encounter at all. Doing modernity adds the observation that these systems must still be activated locally, by someone with the right tools, at the right moment.

The right moment is itself part of the requirement. Modern institutions organize people through institutional time: appointments, deadlines, waiting lists, processing periods, application windows, expiration dates, bus schedules, court dates, and medication schedules. Competence includes the ability to synchronize oneself with these sequences, and much of it consists of waiting well, which means waiting without disappearing. A person who must be reachable during a waiting period, and who must arrive within a narrow window when called, is being asked to keep their life coordinated with a clock they do not control.

In my work on abandonment I have described the failure of this coordination as Temporal Mismatch: institutional time and biographical time do not move together. A housing match may arrive months after the phone number on file stopped working. An eligibility document may expire during the wait to use it. A crisis may unfold in hours while the system responds in weeks. In such cases nobody need act with ill will for a person to fall out of the process. The mismatch does the work.

The Kincaid crossing and the housing bureaucracy thus belong to the same sociology, though not in the way the earlier version of this essay claimed. Both are temporal coordinations. At Kincaid, people coordinate with one another through visible displays, and the coordination is local, reciprocal, and quick. In homeless services, people must coordinate with institutional sequences that are mostly invisible to them, and the costs of failure fall almost entirely on one side.

7. Making Power Observable

Critical Interactionism begins from a refusal and a commitment. The refusal is of the habit, common in critical sociology, of announcing that an interaction reflects power and then moving on. The commitment is to find domination where it is actually accomplished: in the organization of encounters, in who may do what to whom, and in whose version of events becomes consequential. Power, on this view, should be inspectable in the materials.

The two cases suggest a small set of questions that make it so. At the courthouse: who may look at whom, and for how long, without being called to account for it? Who must explain their presence, and who never has to? Who can end an encounter by walking away, and who is expected to stay put while it is concluded for them? In the documentary encounter: who asks the questions, and who must answer? Whose categories organize the exchange? Whose version enters the record, and whose remains as memory or complaint? Who waits for whom? These questions are modest. Each can be answered by looking at what people actually do, and each answer locates an asymmetry in a particular practice rather than in an abstraction.

This approach has a consequence that earlier versions of this essay did not face squarely: modernity and domination are not the same thing. Many of the practices that organize modern life carry contradictory possibilities. Civil inattention can protect a person's autonomy and grant strangers a rough equality of standing; it can also be withheld, or degraded into avoidance. A queue can discipline bodies, and it can also instantiate a simple equality of turns that does not depend on who you are. Formal procedures can constrain arbitrary authority. Documentation can establish rights and make institutions answerable. Professional norms can protect vulnerable people from the whims of those who serve them. Anonymity, the condition of being an ordinary stranger, can be liberating, which is part of why its unequal distribution matters so much.

The same institutional arrangements that exclude and abandon also supply some of the resources for contesting exclusion and abandonment. People in homeless services invoke the rules against the workers who apply them; they demand that something be written down; they ask for a supervisor, a grievance form, or a fair hearing. A critical sociology that treats modernity as simply oppressive cannot see any of this, and it ends up describing the people it cares about as passive. The task of Critical Interactionism is to investigate how each of these possibilities is accomplished in particular settings, and to say which one is being accomplished, for whom, and at whose cost.

8. Industrial Ontology Reconsidered

An earlier version of this essay organized its critique around a contrast between industrial ontology and relational ontology. Industrial ontology, I argued, segments the world into discrete parts, classifies them, and turns people into workers, time into units, and nature into resources; relational ontology sees the world as a web of interdependent beings. I presented the two side by side in a table and suggested that much of everyday modern conduct was industrial ontology at work.

The two cases above show why that framing has to change. Its first problem is logical. The essay opened by saying that modernity is accomplished in practice and then located a deeper ontology underneath the practices to explain them. That move puts back the very thing the program set out to remove: a hidden substance behind conduct that does the explanatory work in advance. In the documentary encounter, nothing is gained by saying that industrial ontology turned a person into a case. The transformation can be followed step by step, through questions, fields, records, and the ruling relations that give the record its uses. The concept added nothing the observation had not already supplied.

Its second problem is the binary itself. Industrial societies are intensely relational; bureaucracies are dense networks of dependence. Classification is not a peculiarly industrial activity; every human group classifies. And relational social orders can dominate as effectively as bureaucratic ones. A two-column table makes these complications disappear, and it assigns virtue to one column in advance.

Its third problem is what it did with other people's traditions. The earlier essay gestured toward Indigenous ontologies, relational cosmologies, and mad epistemologies as cracks in the concrete of industrial order. The gesture compressed many distinct traditions into a single category of alternatives whose main job in the argument was to offer modernity a way out of its own troubles. That is not engagement with those traditions, and I have removed it. The scholarship it cited deserves serious treatment on its own terms, which this essay cannot provide.

Something in the term is still worth keeping, in a much smaller role. "Industrial ontology" can serve as what Herbert Blumer (1954) called a sensitizing concept: a name for a family of practices that recur across modern institutions, including segmentation, standardization, calculability, abstraction, optimization, and extraction. Used this way, it points the analyst toward places to look. It does not explain what is found there. Whether a given practice segments or standardizes, and with what consequences, remains a question for observation. If the term cannot earn its keep under that discipline, it should be let go.

9. Remaking Interaction Orders

If modernity is done, it can be done differently. But the claim needs care, because "undoing" has often meant little more than adopting better values and hoping practice follows. What the cases suggest is that alternative orders are themselves accomplishments, with their own machinery, their own competencies, and their own capacities to exclude.

Autonomy is a good place to begin, because the earlier version of this essay listed it among the pathologies of modern urban life. That was a mistake born of running two different things together. One is liberal, individualized autonomy: the bounded, self-managing individual who owns their capacities and answers for them alone. Much of what the documentary encounter demands is of this kind. The person seeking help is required to present as a self-contained unit with a history, a set of barriers, and a plan. The other is autonomy as a collectively accomplished practice, in which people expand their capacities for self-direction through mutual support, shared knowledge, and forms of organization that do not route every decision through a hierarchy. This second kind is not the opposite of modernity. Many of its tools, including meetings with procedures, written agreements, and rights that can be invoked, are thoroughly modern. Neither kind should be romanticized. Individual autonomy protects people from domination by those close to them, and collective settings can reproduce domination in new forms.

Formal consensus decision-making shows both the promise and the limits. Groups using it try to engineer an interaction order that redistributes participation and authority: rounds in which everyone speaks, facilitation that manages the queue of speakers, hand signals that let people register agreement or concern without seizing the floor, and the formal options of standing aside or blocking a proposal. These are deliberate interactional technologies, designed to make a different kind of order happen. In my experience and in my work on doing equality, they can succeed in giving voice to people who would otherwise be talked over. They also generate new inequalities: procedural expertise becomes a resource, articulate members dominate the rounds, facilitators acquire informal authority, and people unfamiliar with the rules find themselves out of order in an order designed to include them. The lesson is not that formal consensus fails. There is no interactional technology that solves domination once and for all. Each has to be accomplished again, and watched.

At street level, alternatives can be much smaller. The greeting described at the opening of this essay is a counter-attentional practice: an attempt to supply recognition where the scene's default supplies none. It is modest, and its effects are uncertain. It changes nothing about who controls the record or who must wait. But it does make the default visible, to the person greeted and sometimes to bystanders, and it treats the person greeted as a party to the scene rather than a feature of it.

The Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil, which I founded in Santa Barbara, works at a larger scale. Each year it reads aloud the names of people who died while homeless in the county. Administrative life and public life often let those deaths pass without remark: a death without an address can disappear into a statistic or a short notice. The vigil reverses that. It takes the anonymity that public life imposed on these people while they lived and answers it with public naming, in a civic space, before witnesses. It is a ritual of recognition directed at people who were often denied the ordinary courtesies of public personhood.

A useful way to describe what such practices aim for is the sequence I have called recognition, voice, and traction. Unlike the forms of attention discussed earlier, these do form a sequence, because each presupposes the one before. Recognition is being acknowledged as a party to the scene. Voice is being heard within it. Traction is whether what one says becomes consequential: whether it enters the record, alters a decision, or changes what happens next. People can be recognized without being heard, and heard without gaining traction. The courthouse greeting reaches only the first step. The vigil reaches toward the second, by putting names into public speech. Traction is the hardest, because it is where interaction meets the ruling relations that decide what counts. A critical interactionist account of remaking modernity has to attend to all three, and to be honest about which one a given practice actually achieves.

10. Conclusion: Modernity as Contestable Accomplishment

The argument can now be stated directly. Modernity is a historically organized field of practical accomplishments through which people make persons, categories, times, places, records, rights, and relationships recognizable and accountable. It does not ordinarily require belief. It requires competent participation, or an account for its absence. Its organization is most visible in moments of trouble: when an expected document is missing, a schedule cannot be kept, a category is resisted, a device fails, an ordinary distance is violated, or some persons are denied the recognition routinely given to others. Critical Interactionism studies such moments, not only to expose domination but to see how domination, equality, autonomy, recognition, and resistance become observable features of situated social life.

This is why "micro" is the wrong word for the program, and why I have dropped it from the title of this essay. There is no small world of interaction sitting underneath a large world of institutions. A glance on the courthouse steps, a crossing at Kincaid, a housing intake, a two-factor code, and a case record are each places where much larger relations are locally activated and made consequential. Studying them is not a retreat from the big questions about modern society. It is a way of finding where those questions are actually being answered.

The courthouse steps, then, are where this essay ends as well as where it began. A glance can accomplish recognition. A greeting can interrupt a pattern of nonrecognition. A vigil can restore names to deaths that public life had allowed to pass unnamed. A consensus procedure can redistribute the chance to speak. A document can reduce someone to an administrative category, or establish a claim that an institution must answer. A queue can discipline bodies, or give everyone in it the same turn. None of these alternatives stands outside modernity. They are competing ways of producing social order from within it.

The question the earlier essay closed on, what kind of modernity are we doing, still stands. What has changed is that it can now be answered in particular places, by looking at particular practices, and by asking of each one who it recognizes, who it hears, and whose words it allows to matter.

References

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Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press.

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