Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

  Many Interaction Orders: Recognition, Inequality, and the Stratified Field of Interaction Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Abstract Symbolic interactionism has long treated the interaction order as a shared substrate of social life—the common ground on which selves are constituted, meanings negotiated, and situations defined. This paper argues that this singularity is a theoretical fiction. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s formulation of the interaction order as sui generis, Anne Warfield Rawls’ clarification of its moral and constitutive character, Robin James Smith’s ethnographic specification of its practical accomplishment, and the author’s fourteen years of street outreach work in the Ventura River Bottom, the paper argues that there is not one interaction order but many, and that this plurality is structured by inequality. Recognition—the mechanism through which selves are constituted in co-presence—is distributed unevenly across interaction orders that differ in their background e...