The Wilson-Zimmerman Approach to Social Structure

The Wilson-Zimmerman Approach to Social Structure: 

Architects of the Santa Barbara School

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

The collaboration between Thomas P. Wilson and Don H. Zimmerman at UC Santa Barbara produced one of the most profound reconceptualizations of social structure in late 20th-century sociology—one that remains underappreciated outside ethnomethodology and conversation analysis circles. Their achievement, crystallized in the landmark 1991 volume Talk and Social Structure, was not merely to add interaction to existing structural theories, but to invert the entire relationship between structure and action. Where most sociological traditions treat interaction as either determined by structure (functionalism) or as separate from it (micro-sociology), Wilson and Zimmerman demonstrated that social structure exists nowhere else but in the sequential organization of members' practices.

This is not a metaphor. It is an empirical claim with methodological teeth.

ELLISON HALL AND THE MAKING OF A NEW THEORY

On the second floor of Ellison Hall at UC Santa Barbara—those narrow offices overlooking the sloping lawns and the coastal haze drifting in from Campus Point—Thomas P. Wilson and Don H. Zimmerman worked in adjacent offices, running joint data sessions, training students together, and forging what would become known as the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

Wilson, calm and philosophically precise, would arrive with carefully prepared arguments about what social structure actually is—not a sociologist's theoretical construct but what members themselves orient to in the course of their interactions. He spent years clarifying concepts, reading Giddens and Garfinkel with equal care, and insisting on conceptual precision that others found exasperating but which proved essential.

Zimmerman, earnest and disciplined, would return from his lunchtime run ready to plunge back into data. He listened to emergency calls again and again, discovering how institutional structures aren't external contexts but are built turn by turn through the systematic organization of talk. His desk was covered with transcripts marked up in multiple colors, each one a window into how social order gets done.

What distinguishes the Santa Barbara School is not only its analytic achievements but its ethos: empirical rigor combined with conceptual boldness, sequential analysis yoked to substantive sociological concerns, and a genuine commitment to cumulative science.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT: SANTA BARBARA, MARCH 1986

The foundational statement of the Wilson-Zimmerman position emerged from the 1986 conference on Talk and Social Structure at UC Santa Barbara—"one of those almost inevitably sunny Santa Barbara affairs that took place with the speakers standing against the backdrop of the sparkling Pacific." The conference was not merely an academic gathering but a deliberate articulation of what can justifiably be called the Santa Barbara School: a distinctive intellectual program forged through Wilson and Zimmerman's joint work.

As Zimmerman and Boden would later write in their introduction to the resulting volume, the conference and book were animated by a "guiding concern": the relationship between talk-in-interaction and social structure. But their framing of this concern was radical. They were not asking how social structure influences talk, or how talk reflects structure—questions that presume structure's analytical priority. Instead, they proposed what they called "structure-in-action": the principle that social structure "is accomplished in and through the moment-to-moment turn-taking procedures of everyday talk in both mundane and momentous settings of human intercourse."

WILSON: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AS MEMBERS' ORIENTATION

Thomas P. Wilson's central insight was deceptively simple, yet revolutionary: social structure exists nowhere except in the orientations displayed by participants in their sequential conduct. Wilson's contribution was primarily theoretical, though "theoretical" here means something specific: the systematic clarification of what participants demonstrably orient to in actual sequences of interaction.

Social Structure as a Members' Concept

This is the foundational move, stated with crystalline clarity in Wilson's chapter in Talk and Social Structure: "For ethnomethodological and conversation analytic purposes, social structure is a members' notion, something oriented to by the members of society. What matters for the sequential organization of interaction, then, is not some ostensibly scientific account of social structure but rather the participants' orientations to the social-structural context of their interaction."

Social structure is not a sociologist's abstraction—a variable to be operationalized, a force to be measured, a system to be modeled. It is what participants themselves orient to, make visible, and hold each other accountable to in the course of their interactions. Wilson is explicit: "Plainly the social-structural matters that are the objects of members' recognition and accounting are conventional. The categories of institutional identity, the activities associated with those categories, and the terms of biographical recounting are culturally variable, historically contingent, and negotiable at least in the long run."

When a doctor asks questions and a patient answers them, they are not merely "influenced by" medical institutional structure—they are producing that structure through the systematic organization of who speaks when, in what format, and to what end. The structure is their achievement, visible in the details of turn-taking, sequence organization, and the categories they invoke.

Wilson's chapter in Talk and Social Structure makes this point with surgical clarity. What sociologists call "macro-structure" is, for participants, a set of resources and constraints they orient to, invoke, and reproduce through their conduct. When emergency call-takers ask standardized questions, they are not "constrained by" bureaucratic structure—they are doing bureaucracy, constituting it through their systematic questioning practices.

The Primordial Status of Sequential Organization

Wilson clarified that sequential organization is the architecture of social order itself. This addresses the classical Hobbesian problem—how is social order possible?—but answers it without recourse to norms, values, shared meanings, or sanctioning systems. Order emerges because interaction has an inherent sequential structure: turns are constructed to be responded to in particular ways; actions create relevancies for next actions; participants display their understanding of prior turns in their subsequent turns.

As Zimmerman and Boden elaborate in their introduction, this creates what they call "the architecture of intersubjectivity": "conversational interaction is structured by an organization of action which is implemented on a turn-by-turn basis. By means of this organization, a context of publically displayed and continuously updated intersubjective understandings is systematically sustained."

The machinery of talk-in-interaction is what Schegloff called an "enabling institution"—but Wilson makes a crucial refinement. This machinery "is not subject to negotiation (unlike those social formations based on convention) and, strictly speaking, should not be referred to as an institution at all." The organization of talk-in-interaction is basic or primordial, assumed to underlie the construction of conventions of all sorts, and invariant to historical progression and cultural variation.

Mechanisms Versus Conventions

Wilson draws a fundamental distinction that clarifies much confusion in sociological theory: "In contrast, the fundamental mechanisms of interaction are the tools members of society use to construct their interaction. These mechanisms, while context sensitive, are context-free and so are not socially constructed in the same sense. Rather, they are universally available devices employed by members in that work of construction."

This distinction does the heavy theoretical lifting. Institutions, organizations, and social formations are conventional—culturally variable, historically contingent, negotiable. The machinery of conversation is not. This machinery "is not conventional but rather underlies the construction of social conventions of all sorts." Moreover, these mechanisms "are not themselves subject to negotiation or change while preserving the interaction as a situation of mundane conversation. For altering the fundamental mechanisms of interaction modifies the parameters of speech exchange and consequently transforms mundane conversation into some other type of conventionally established speech-exchange system."

This reframing dissolves one of sociology's most entrenched distinctions: the separation between "micro" and "macro." For Wilson there is no dualism—only different levels of abstraction describing the same phenomena. A 911 call is simultaneously a particular exchange between two people and the enactment of an institutional order. There is no gap to bridge because institutions exist only as patterns in the systematic organization of interaction.

Structure Reproduced Through Interaction

Wilson demonstrated how structure is reproduced through interaction—this is where Wilson's work intersects with and corrects Anthony Giddens's structuration theory. Giddens famously posited a "duality of structure," where structure is both medium and outcome of action. But Giddens's formulation remained abstract, unable to specify the actual mechanisms by which this duality operates.

Wilson, drawing on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic findings, showed the concrete machinery: participants reproduce institutional orders by orienting to institutional identities (doctor/patient, interviewer/interviewee, caller/call-taker), by adhering to institutional turn-taking systems, by using institutional categories to formulate their actions. The reproduction is not automatic or mechanical—it requires competent interactional work—but it is observable in recorded data.

In The Constitution of Society (1984), Giddens cites Wilson's unpublished manuscript as a key text clarifying the relationship between agency and structure. This is one of the discipline's hidden histories: a major social theorist acknowledging that the empirical specification of his central theoretical concept came from outside his tradition, from a scholar working in the Garfinkel-Sacks lineage.

Wilson's unpublished manuscript on agency—cited in Anthony Giddens's The Constitution of Society—offers another crucial insight. Agency, he argues, is not a metaphysical property but a members' orientation. Participants treat each other as autonomous agents responsible for their actions; this assumption is built into the sequential machinery of interaction. Agency is thus not explained but presumed—a practical necessity for coordinated social action.

Demolishing the Micro/Macro Distinction

Perhaps Wilson's most radical contribution was to demolish the micro/macro distinction. Conventional sociology treats interaction as "micro" (small-scale, fleeting, individual) and institutions as "macro" (large-scale, enduring, collective). Wilson showed this distinction to be analytically bankrupt.

When a 911 call-taker follows the "interrogative series" to extract caller information, they are simultaneously engaged in "micro" interaction (this particular exchange, these particular turns) and "macro" institutional work (emergency services dispatch, bureaucratic processing, governmental response systems). These are not different levels—they are the same phenomenon, described at different levels of abstraction. The institution exists in and only in the organized practices participants employ.

As Zimmerman and Boden put it in a crucial footnote: "It is essential to emphasize that we do not view talk-in-interaction that does 'institutional' work to be in some sense 'dependent on' institutional setting. Such imagery is natural in the received view of social structure discussed earlier, but it is seriously misleading for it wrongly supposes that institutional settings are some how constituted and can be recognized entirely independently of the actions occurring within them."

ZIMMERMAN: EMPIRICAL DEMONSTRATION AND INSTITUTIONAL IMAGINATION

If Wilson provided the conceptual grammar, Zimmerman demonstrated its empirical force. Don H. Zimmerman's genius lay in his ability to take naturally occurring interactional data and show, through meticulous sequential analysis, exactly how institutional structures emerge in and through talk.

The Emergency Call Studies: Canonical Demonstrations

The 911 and emergency dispatch studies remain canonical in conversation analysis. His work on emergency calls remains one of the clearest illustrations of structure-in-action. Using recordings of actual emergency calls, Zimmerman demonstrated how institutional identities (caller as complainant, call-taker as bureaucratic representative) are produced through systematic asymmetries in turn-taking rights, question-answer sequences, and information extraction procedures.

The "interrogative series"—where call-takers ask standardized questions regardless of what callers volunteer—shows institutional structure not as context but as accomplishment. The call-taker must work to maintain their institutional footing, the caller must work to be heard as having a legitimate emergency, and both must navigate the tension between conversational norms (where questions emerge from prior talk) and institutional requirements (where questions follow a predetermined script).

Zimmerman showed how a caller's opening utterance—"Somebody broke into my car"—is treated not simply as information but as an institutionally relevant request. The call-taker then initiates a series of questions that organize the interaction: "What's your address?" "Is this a house or apartment?" "Your last name?" This interrogative series is not optional; it constitutes the work of emergency dispatch. To fail to do it would be to fail to perform the institutional role.

Zimmerman and Boden detail how emergency calls are organized via "an adjacency-pair insertion/expansion sequence. A complaint or request for assistance (a first pair part) is followed by a series of question/answer pairs which elicit information relevant to servicing the request. When the insertion sequence is concluded, the delayed second pair part, the response to the request is provided."

What distinguishes emergency calls is not unique mechanisms but the configuration of conversational machinery: "not only, for example, what devices are routinely present and in what form, but which are routinely absent in environments in which they might ordinarily occur." The turns are "austere"—tightly focused, containing only question and answer, addressing standard issues (nature of problem, location, items relevant to police work). The calls are "monotopical"—single piece of business—and completion of that business provides the relevance of closing.

This is structure-in-action: visible, analyzable, consequential.

The 1986 Conference: Forcing the Field

The 1986 Talk and Social Structure conference, organized largely by Zimmerman with my assistance (I was the Conference Organizer), forced the conversation analysis community to confront social structure directly.  The resulting volume became a defining text, establishing the agenda for studying institutional talk and positioning the Santa Barbara School at the center of global EM/CA.

The conference brought together scholars studying courtrooms, medical encounters, news interviews, and workplace meetings, all demonstrating how institutional structures are enacted through systematic transformations of ordinary conversational machinery. As Tom P. Wilson notes in his acknowledgment: "Tom P. Wilson, friend, colleague, and co-conspirator, was in at the beginning, and went the distance with us - both with the conference and on the book."

Goffman and Symbolic Interactionism

Zimmerman's engagement with Goffman and symbolic interactionism distinguished him from more purist conversation analysts. Where some CA scholars rejected Goffman's concepts as insufficiently grounded in sequential analysis, Zimmerman and his studentys saw productive possibilities in integrating Goffman's attention to the interaction order, frames, and footing with EM/CA's rigorous methods.

This openness created a distinctive Santa Barbara sensibility: theoretically ambitious but empirically disciplined, willing to engage with categories like "identity" and "institution" while insisting they be demonstrated through participants' orientations in actual sequences.

The Double Mentorship and Building Community

Most importantly, Zimmerman trained students—and critically, his students were also Wilson's students. This double mentorship created a genuine intellectual lineage. Graduate students absorbed Wilson's theoretical clarity about what social structure is (a members' orientation made visible sequentially) and Zimmerman's empirical rigor in demonstrating it (through recordings, transcripts, and detailed sequential analysis). This combination produced scholars capable of both conceptual sophistication and analytic precision.

Zimmerman's empirical rigor made the theoretical claims testable. He trained students to listen closely, to avoid theoretical shortcuts, and to ground every claim in demonstrable participant orientation. His students learned not just a method but a discipline—a way of seeing social order that was at once radical in its implications and conservative in its evidentiary standards.

Zimmerman also built community. He invited students to his home to watch the Super Bowl and introduced them to visiting scholars. He maintained close relations with John Heritage and many other conversation analysts across the globe. He organized conferences and edited volumes. He created an intellectual atmosphere where rigorous analysis coexisted with genuine warmth.

THE SYNTHESIS: STRUCTURE-IN-ACTION

The Wilson-Zimmerman synthesis, as stated in the introduction to Talk and Social Structure, can be stated clearly:

"Social structure is not an external force acting on interaction. Social structure is a situated, accountable accomplishment—endogenously produced in sequences of action."

This is a radical correction to virtually all prior sociological theory. It rejects:

• Parsonian functionalism, which treats structure as normative patterns that determine behavior
• Marxist structuralism, which treats structure as relations of production that constrain action
• Durkheimian approaches, which treat structure as social facts external to individuals

Even Giddens, who despite his sophistication still treats structure as something partially separable from action.

Against all of these, Wilson and Zimmerman insist: structure exists only in what participants do, how they do it, and what they thereby accomplish. There is no structure "behind" interaction, no structure "constraining" interaction, no structure "influencing" interaction. There is only the structured character of interaction itself.

The heart of their contribution is the idea that social structure is accomplished in and through sequences of action. This synthesis redefines several classical problems:

1. The Micro/Macro Problem Dissolves

Institutions are not external contexts shaping talk; they are constituted through the interactional work by which participants produce recognizable actions. When Zimmerman analyzes emergency calls, he is simultaneously analyzing both "micro" conversational exchanges and "macro" institutional structures—because they are the same thing, described at different levels.

2. The Agency/Structure Problem Dissolves

Agency is neither free will nor structural constraint; it is the practical ability to design actions that are intelligible, respondable, and consequential within a sequential context. There is no need to reconcile how structure constrains agency or how agency reproduces structure, because these are not separate phenomena requiring reconciliation. Agency is visible in the competent production of recognizable actions; structure is visible in the organized practices through which those actions are produced. They are two descriptions of the same interactional work.

3. The Concept of Order Is Respecified

Social order is not a function of norms or collective values. It emerges from the sequential architecture of action: turn-taking, repair, adjacency pairs, preference organization. Order does not require shared values, internalized norms, or sanctioning systems. It requires only that participants have methods for producing and recognizing orderly action—methods that are themselves ordered and that create accountability for their deployment.

4. Social Change Becomes Empirically Tractable

Because structure exists only in practices, structural change occurs when interactional practices shift—when news interviews become adversarial, when medical consultations incorporate "patient-centered" question design, when courtroom examination adopts new interrogation techniques. If structure exists only in practice, then structural change occurs through changes in practice. This is not voluntaristic individualism—practices are deeply entrenched, massively redundant, and culturally specific—but neither is it deterministic structuralism. Change requires altering the organized methods through which recognizable actions are produced.

This synthesis answers the question "Where does social structure live?" with a clarity absent in all other sociological traditions: structure lives in the methods participants use to produce orderly, recognizable, accountable courses of action.

WILSON'S EMPIRICAL DEMONSTRATION: THE CONSTITUTION OF SEQUENTIAL OBJECTS

In his chapter, Wilson provides detailed analysis showing how participants' orientation to social-structural context constitutes the very objects to which sequential mechanisms apply. His demonstration deserves close attention, as it shows the deep interweaving of structure and sequence.

The "Social-Structural Short Circuit"

Wilson begins by warning against a common analytical trap—prematurely invoking social structure to explain patterns that arise from sequential organization itself. He analyzes a sentencing hearing where the judge controls turn allocation and restricts turn types (judge asks questions, attorneys answer them).

One might attribute this to the judge's "authority." But Wilson shows this explanation "is inadequate for our purposes because it fails to account for the details of the actual observed course of action." More importantly, "the phenomena in question result directly from the sequential organization of the interaction per se."

The structure is an adjacency pair with insertion sequence: the public defender makes a request (lines 1-2), the judge eventually grants it (lines 12-14), and between them an interrogative series gathers information warranting the response. The adjacency-pair structure itself constrains turn distribution such that the person to whom the initial request is directed (the judge) can introduce further questions, while other participants are limited to supplying answers. "Consequently, there is no need to invoke the special status and role of the judge in order to account for these features of the exchange. It reflects not 'broader' social factors but instead the sequential organization of an insertion sequence in an adjacency-pair structure."

Generality Across Contexts

Wilson then demonstrates that the same pattern occurs in emergency calls—where we would not attribute "authority" to complaint takers. The phenomenon "arises from the nature of the sequential organization of insertion sequences in general. Thus, by prematurely leaping to a social-structural account, one can miss a considerably deeper understanding of what is going across a range of interaction situations."

This is methodologically crucial: many apparent structural effects are actually sequential effects. Understanding this allows parsimony and generality.

But: The Deeper Role of Social Structure

Having demonstrated this, Wilson pulls back the curtain: the entire analysis depends on initially recognizing an action as a "request" that can establish the sequential relevance of an insertion sequence. And here social structure becomes essential.

Wilson analyzes a call where the caller says "Somebody jus' vandalized my=car." This utterance "cannot be construed as a request on the basis of lexical or grammatical considerations alone, nor does its sequential placement per se mark it as a request." Yet both parties treat it as a request, organizing their subsequent talk accordingly.

How? The preceding turn was the complaint taker's categorical self-identification: "Mid-City Emergency:" The caller acknowledges this, establishing that "the caller has reached the emergency dispatching service, and that this was what the caller had intended." This establishes "the potential relevance of a mutual categorization of each other as citizen complainant and complaint taker, where these categorical identities are specifically tied to the particular organization the caller has reached."

In Sacks's terms, "we have a membership categorization device and category-bound activities established by the institutional arrangements of the emergency dispatching service." The hearer's maxim operates: regard the utterance as an action bound to the category of caller to an emergency dispatching service. "This, then, provides the warrant for both parties to hear the utterance as a request."

Wilson's point is devastating: "Thus, to avoid inappropriate invocation of social-structural considerations at one level, we must attend to the interweaving of social structure and social interaction in a far deeper and more consequential way."

The Courtroom Reformulation

Wilson returns to the courtroom transcript to show how the public defender's reformulation of "burglary" as "shoplifting" is intelligible. The contrast works because "in the context of a request specifically for sentencing, they contrast sharply: the former is a misdemeanor, the latter a felony. However, the distinction between shoplifting and burglary is not a sequential matter, but rather has to do with the institutional structure of the criminal justice system."

Each turn displays understanding of both sequential context (what was said before, that a request is pending) and institutional context (the legal significance of misdemeanor versus felony for sentencing). "Thus, the work that the public defender does in his turn to construct a contrastive formulation is intelligible in terms of the co-orientation of the participants to both the sequential context of the turn itself and the institutional context of the criminal justice system."

METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The Wilson-Zimmerman approach requires specific methodological commitments, spelled out across both Wilson's chapter and the Zimmerman-Boden introduction:

Natural Observational Science

Only recordings of actual events count as data. No role-play, no simulations, no hypothetical examples. This follows Harvey Sacks's founding insight: if we want to understand how social order is actually produced, we must study actual instances of its production.

The Principle of Relevance

This is Wilson's most fundamental methodological principle: "the relevance of particular social-structural categories on a given occasion consists in the way the participants in the interaction display to one another their orientations to those categories in a manner that is consequential for their interaction."

The analyst cannot settle relevance "by invoking some theoretical scheme or interpretation of the situation." People have many identities; the physical setting doesn't determine which are salient. "Parties to a concrete interaction must address the questions of who they relevantly are and what it is they are about on any given occasion."

Moreover, "for participants the question of relevance is an ever-present concern, from which there is no 'time out.'" Once particular social-structural features are established as relevant, "these relevancies stand until further notice as the scheme under which speakers can warrantably expect each other to attempt, at least initially, to understand any next action."

Sequential Analysis

Structure is visible in how turns are designed, how they respond to prior turns, and how they project next turns. The sequence is the unit of analysis because the sequence is where structure happens. As Zimmerman and Boden emphasize: "each action is both 'context shaped' and 'context renewing' in the sense that it is oriented to the current sequential environment and then forms part of the sequential environment for the next action."

Members' Orientation Only

Analysts cannot invoke structural "forces" or "factors" unless participants themselves demonstrably orient to them. This is Schegloff's constraint, but it gains theoretical force from Wilson's clarification that structure is what members orient to.

Institutional Talk as Transformation of Conversation

The Santa Barbara approach studies how institutional settings systematically modify conversational machinery. As Zimmerman and Boden explain: "Courtrooms restrict turn-allocation, news interviews prohibit direct disagreement, emergency calls impose monotopicality, medical consultations organize perspective-display. Each modification is a structural feature—but one enacted turn by turn."

Ordinary conversation remains the "default" option. "The speech exchange system constituting mundane conversation is the base from which other systems depart."

Ethnographic Thickness

Unlike more minimalist CA approaches, the Santa Barbara School combines sequential analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, interviews about the work being done, organizational documents, and setting histories. This provides the institutional context needed to understand what participants are accomplishing—but always in service of sequential analysis, never as a substitute for it.

Attention to Power

The Wilson-Zimmerman tradition is explicitly concerned with asymmetry, inequality, and domination. This distinguishes it from both radical ethnomethodology (which often treats power as an analyst's gloss) and formal conversation analysis (which often brackets political concerns). For Wilson and Zimmerman, studying structure means studying how inequality gets done.

DISTRIBUTIONAL PHENOMENA AND STRUCTURAL REPRODUCTION

Wilson addresses a crucial analytical problem: how to account for regularities across interactions. In the emergency call corpus, the person answering the phone uniformly asks questions and the caller uniformly answers them. Within any single call, this pattern follows from sequential organization (the answerer receives the request, thus initiating the insertion sequence). But why is it uniform across calls that the answerer receives the request?

"The mechanisms themselves, however, are indifferent to the distributional particulars of the initial events." Sequential mechanisms "pass an antecedent distribution through to a final distribution." We can account for complaint takers asking questions given that citizen complainants make requests—but we must account for that antecedent distribution.

"Eventually, however, we reach the beginning of the interaction and so must face the issue directly. In the present case the initial distribution of requests, such that these are made by citizen complainants rather than complaint takers, arises from the institutional context that the participants establish as relevant."

This leads to Wilson's account of structural reproduction: "Insofar as participants establish this present interaction as a citizen calling the police for assistance in an emergency, they reproduce once again another instance of an emergency service call and thereby also reproduce the social-structural context by which that interaction is intelligible for them in the first place."

AGENCY BUILT INTO THE MACHINERY

The Wilson-Zimmerman approach has profound implications for the agency-structure problem. Sequential organization shapes conduct, but not deterministically. As Zimmerman and Boden argue, "The sequential organization of participants' talk-in-interaction does not, however, imply that members are judgmental dopes programmed to enact the requirements of sequential structure in lock-step fashion."

Questions project answers, but "questions can be evaded, ignored, challenged, or otherwise operated on and transformed by the recipient. Such moves may themselves initiate new sequences (for repairing, blaming, accusing, arguing, etc.) through which participants' motives, intentions, goodwill or its opposite, etc., are displayed and disputed through the orderly operation of the sequential machinery of talk."

Wilson argues that agency is built into the machinery: "From the viewpoint of Wilson (1989), what we have just described is human agency, understood to be intrinsic to the machinery that organizes social interaction. He suggests that there can be no social interaction without participants acting on the assumption that they as well as their co-participants are autonomous, morally responsible agents whose actions are neither determined nor random."

But Wilson treats agency as a members' notion: "From a scientific point of view, agency cannot be explained, since it cannot be reduced to either determinism (hard or soft) or randomness without destroying the essential quality of agency... By recognizing that agency is a members' notion, the reality of agency for the member is preserved. For the analyst, the reality of agency is bracketed, and it instead becomes a topic for non-ironic inquiry."

THEORETICAL POWER: DISSOLVING CLASSICAL PROBLEMS

The Wilson-Zimmerman theory of social structure resolves longstanding problems in social theory:

The agency-structure problem dissolves. There is no need to reconcile how structure constrains agency or how agency reproduces structure, because these are not separate phenomena requiring reconciliation. Agency is visible in the competent production of recognizable actions; structure is visible in the organized practices through which those actions are produced. They are two descriptions of the same interactional work.

The micro-macro problem dissolves. There is no gap to bridge between individual interactions and institutional patterns, because institutions exist only as patterns in interaction. When we analyze a single diagnostic consultation, we are analyzing both this particular encounter and the institution of medical diagnosis simultaneously.

The problem of social order is respecified. Order does not require shared values, internalized norms, or sanctioning systems. It requires only that participants have methods for producing and recognizing orderly action—methods that are themselves ordered and that create accountability for their deployment.

The problem of social change becomes tractable. If structure exists only in practice, then structural change occurs through changes in practice. This is not voluntaristic individualism—practices are deeply entrenched, massively redundant, and culturally specific—but neither is it deterministic structuralism. Change requires altering the organized methods through which recognizable actions are produced.

EMPIRICAL YIELD: THE SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL AND THE EXPANSION OF STRUCTURE-IN-ACTION

The Wilson-Zimmerman approach has produced some of the most compelling empirical work in contemporary sociology. The power of the Wilson-Zimmerman framework becomes most visible in the work of the scholars they trained.

• Gender is done in interaction (West & Zimmerman's canonical 1987 paper)—not expressed, not performed, but constituted through organized practices by which participants produce recognizably gendered actions. Candace West and Don Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" (1987) shows how gender is reproduced in interaction—not expressed, not caused by identity, but done through systematic practices by which people are held accountable to gender categories. This framework transformed gender studies by showing that gender is not something people have but something they accomplish. 

• Race is done in interaction (Whitehead, Turowetz, Kitzinger)—through category work, through what gets noticed and remains unmarked, through inferential practices making racial categories relevant or irrelevant. 

• Diagnosis is done in interaction (Maynard)—through perspective-display sequences, through asymmetric distribution of diagnostic authority, through sequential organization of delivering bad news. 

• Democracy is done in interaction (Clayman, Heritage)—through interactional architecture of news interviews, through accountability sequences in press conferences, through ways journalists maintain neutrality while asking adversarial questions. 

• Organizations are done in interaction (Boden, Whalen, Harper)—through meetings producing decisions, through troubleshooting sequences coordinating work, through inscription practices making organizational action visible and accountable.

More recently, scholars such as Kevin Whitehead, Geoffrey Raymond, and Jason Turowetz—the inheritors of the Santa Barbara lineage—extend structure-in-action to race, policing, autism, and neurodiversity. Their work shows that the framework remains productive across new domains.

These contributions were not accidental. They emerged from the atmosphere of analytic discipline, methodological innovation, and conceptual clarity cultivated by Wilson and Zimmerman in those narrow offices on the second floor of Ellison Hall.

MORAL ECONOMY: INTEGRATING GOFFMAN, RAWLS, AND CRITICAL INTERACTIONISM

If the Wilson-Zimmerman synthesis provided the machinery for analyzing structure, the integration of Goffman and Anne Rawls added the moral and political dimensions. Goffman showed that interaction is a moral order—participants are held accountable not just for saying intelligible things but for maintaining face, demonstrating deference, managing impressions. Rawls extended this by showing that interaction constitutes a moral economy in which participants trade recognition, dignity, and standing.

My own work—The Moral Economy of Interaction and The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression—(Found on this bklog) builds on this legacy by showing how oppression is enacted not through abstract structures but through the systematic degradation of interactional standing. Racism, sexism, and other forms of domination operate by denying people full participation in the moral economy of interaction—interrupting them, not ratifying their turns, treating their accounts as less credible, withholding the interactional resources necessary for dignity.

LEGACY AND LIMITATIONS

The Wilson-Zimmerman approach has made ethnomethodology and conversation analysis relevant to substantive sociological concerns while maintaining methodological rigor. Yet the approach has limitations.

The exclusive focus on what is demonstrably oriented to by participants can miss structural features that operate precisely by remaining unmarked. The requirement for recordings limits the study of historical structures and diffuse institutional patterns. The resistance to quantification (though less absolute at Santa Barbara than elsewhere) can make it difficult to establish the prevalence or distribution of practices. And the sheer labor required—transcribing, repeated listening, collective data sessions—makes large-scale comparative work nearly impossible.

But these are limits inherent to the approach's strengths. The Wilson-Zimmerman insistence on empirical demonstration, on not attributing to structures what participants don't orient to, on studying actual instances rather than idealized types—this is what gives the work its power and its credibility.

CONCLUSION: WHERE IS STRUCTURE?

The Wilson-Zimmerman theory of social structure is sociology's best answer to the question: where is structure?

Not in norms. Not in relations of production. Not in demographic patterns. Not in organizational charts.

Structure is in the systematic, organized, accountable practices through which participants produce recognizable social actions. It is in the turn-by-turn, sequence-by-sequence, occasioned work of social life.

As Wilson writes in his concluding statement: "parties to an interaction hold one another accountable for knowing who they relevantly are and what the current interaction is about over the course of the interaction itself. This creates certain interactional problems for the participants, notably those of arriving at, sustaining, and altering the footing of their interaction. It is in dealing with these matters that participants simultaneously construct their interaction as a meaningful, accountable occurrence and reproduce its social-structural context as something that is, for them, an external and constraining social fact."

This is structure-in-action: the signature contribution of the Santa Barbara School, the collaborative achievement of Thomas P. Wilson and Don H. Zimmerman, and one of the most important reconceptualizations of the social in contemporary sociology.

The 1991 Talk and Social Structure volume stands as the definitive statement of this position—a collective accomplishment forged in those sunny days in March 1986 at UC Santa Barbara, refined through years of collaborative work between adjacent offices on the second floor of Ellison Hall, and demonstrated through decades of rigorous empirical research by the generation of scholars they trained together.

Wilson provides the conceptual architecture that shows social structure is what members orient to. Zimmerman provides the empirical demonstrations showing how that orientation operates in the details of actual sequences. Together, they show that structure exists nowhere else but in the lived, turn-by-turn, sequence-by-sequence, locally accomplished, reflexively accountable work of social interaction.

This is not an alternative theory of social structure to place alongside functionalism, Marxism, or structuration theory. It is a respecification of what social structure is—a reconceptualization so fundamental that it dissolves the problems earlier theories were designed to solve.

Where most sociologists ask "how does structure constrain action?" Wilson and Zimmerman show the question is malformed. Structure doesn't constrain action because structure is action—specifically, it is the organized, systematic, recognizable character of action that participants produce and hold each other accountable for producing, turn by turn, through the competent deployment of the context-free but context-sensitive machinery of talk-in-interaction.

And that machinery—primordial, universal, not itself subject to negotiation—is what makes it possible for conventional social structures to be built, maintained, reproduced, and occasionally transformed through the endless, local, particular work of people talking to each other about the things that matter to them.

Thomas P. Wilson and Don H. Zimmerman did not write a grand theoretical treatise. They built something far more durable: a way of seeing. They taught us to look at the organized details of interaction and see in them not mere behavior but the constitution of social order itself. They showed us that structure is not something that exists apart from what people do—it is what people do, made systematic, made accountable, made reproducible through the competent use of interactional methods.

Their legacy is not simply a set of findings; it is an intellectual discipline, a methodological rigor, a conceptual clarity, and a community of scholars who continue to ask: How is this orderly? How do participants produce and recognize this as a coherent, accountable, structured course of action? And in asking these questions, they continue to reveal the deep organization of social life.

The Santa Barbara School stands as a testament to the power of empirical detail and theoretical imagination. And at its center stand two offices on a sunny campus overlooking the Pacific, where Wilson and Zimmerman worked side by side, building a new way to understand how society actually works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boden, Deirdre, and Don H. Zimmerman, eds. 1991. Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

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Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2004. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Wilson, Thomas P. 1991. "Social Structure and the Sequential Organization of Interaction." In Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, edited by Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, 22-43. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Zimmerman, Don H., and Deirdre Boden. 1991. "Structure-in-Action: An Introduction." In Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, edited by Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, 3-21. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zimmerman, Don H. "Talk and its occasion: the case of calling the police." Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications (1984): 210-228.

Zimmerman, Don H. "Acknowledgment tokens and speakership incipiency revisited." Research on language and social interaction 26, no. 2 (1993): 179-194.