Doing Equality: The Interactional Accomplishment of Non-Hierarchical Social Organization

Doing Equality: The Interactional Accomplishment of Non-Hierarchical Social Organization

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. · Oct 4, 2026

I. How Do We “Do Equality”?

Nearly two decades ago, while teaching group dynamics at Antioch University Santa Barbara, I began asking a deceptively simple question: How do we “do equality”?

The question emerged partly from dissatisfaction with the way social psychology and organizational studies conventionally approached leadership, decision-making, and group behavior. Much of the literature I was teaching treated hierarchy as an ordinary feature of organizations. There were leaders and followers, managers and workers, experts and clients, teachers and students. The interesting questions concerned which leadership styles worked best, how authority could be exercised effectively, or how groups could make better decisions. Less attention was given to a more radical possibility: What happens when people deliberately attempt to organize themselves without hierarchy?

At the time, I was interested in progressive organizations experimenting with formal consensus, including anarchist and activist groups, Food Not Bombs chapters, infoshops, affinity groups, and other organizations attempting to embody egalitarian political commitments in their everyday practices. Their meetings suggested a microsociological problem that seemed to me insufficiently explored. It is relatively easy to proclaim equality as a political principle. It is much harder to sit around a table and actually produce it.

This distinction matters. A group can constitutionally declare its members equal while interactionally reproducing substantial inequalities among them. Everyone may possess one vote while some people determine what gets discussed. Everyone may formally have a right to speak while some people interrupt freely and others wait unsuccessfully for an opening. A meeting may have no designated leader while one or two experienced members nevertheless formulate the problems, summarize the discussion, evaluate proposals, and announce what the group appears to have decided.

Equality, in other words, cannot simply be inferred from organizational structure, ideological commitment, or formal rules. It has to be investigated in the details of social interaction.

That observation places equality squarely within the concerns of Critical Interactionism. If domination is accomplished through situated practices, equality must also depend upon situated practices. If people can do hierarchy, they must somehow be able to do non-hierarchy. And if inequality becomes visible through the unequal distribution of interactional rights—who may interrupt, question, define, evaluate, summarize, accuse, decide, or remain silent without consequence—then equality requires more than goodwill. It requires an interaction order capable of constraining some actions while making others possible.

The problem is therefore not simply whether people believe in equality. The problem is how equality becomes an observable feature of what people are doing together.

This essay develops that problem. I argue that equality is best understood not as a stable condition achieved once and for all but as a fragile and recurrent interactional accomplishment. Egalitarian groups must continually organize speaking rights, listening obligations, agenda control, epistemic authority, participation, disagreement, and decision-making in ways that prevent inequalities from hardening into domination. Formal consensus is particularly revealing because it represents an explicit attempt to construct procedures for accomplishing precisely this work. Yet consensus also demonstrates something more unsettling: procedures designed to suppress hierarchy can themselves become resources through which new hierarchies are produced.

The central question is therefore no longer merely Who has power? It is: Through what interactional practices do participants make themselves more nearly equal—and through what equally ordinary practices do inequalities return?

II. Equality Needs a Baseline

Studies of inequality frequently begin with the unequal case. Researchers examine domination, discrimination, exclusion, marginalization, status differences, racial inequality, gender inequality, class power, professional authority, or organizational hierarchy. There are compelling reasons for doing so. Inequality injures people, structures institutions, distributes resources, and organizes life chances.

But there is a methodological difficulty in beginning exclusively with inequality. To describe an interaction as asymmetrical, we need some conception of what a less asymmetrical interaction would look like.

This was the intuition behind my original question in 2008. To understand inequality interactionally, we need some kind of baseline—not an imaginary world in which everyone behaves identically, but empirical descriptions of situations in which participants successfully constrain domination and distribute interactional rights relatively equitably.

Equality cannot mean that everyone speaks exactly the same number of words. Mechanical symmetry would be an extraordinarily crude measure of social equality. A person possessing relevant knowledge may appropriately speak longer. Someone describing an injury may properly occupy the floor while others listen. A facilitator may speak frequently precisely because they are working to distribute opportunities to others. Silence can indicate exclusion, but it can also indicate attentive listening. Interruption can be dominating, but it can also be collaborative, affiliative, or necessary in an emergency.

The relevant question is therefore not simply how much people participate but what they are entitled to do through their participation.

Who gets to introduce topics? Who can decide that a topic has been adequately discussed? Who may challenge another person's account? Whose knowledge receives presumptive credibility? Who summarizes what “we” have decided? Who can interrupt without sanction? Who is expected to explain themselves? Who can remain silent? Who must answer questions? Who may evaluate the contributions of others? Whose anger is treated as legitimate? Whose anger becomes evidence that they are irrational? Who gets to define what the meeting is really about?

These are questions about the local organization of rights and obligations.

Conversation analysis and ethnomethodology are useful here because they direct attention away from abstract declarations toward the practical organization of action. Garfinkel's studies of ethnomethods demonstrated that recognizable social order is continuously produced through members' practical activities. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson showed how something as apparently spontaneous as conversation depends upon an extraordinarily organized system of turn-taking. Goffman's work on the interaction order similarly directs attention to the ceremonial and practical arrangements through which persons sustain encounters, identities, deference, demeanor, and social situations.

From this perspective, equality becomes an empirical problem. What practices make an encounter recognizable to its participants as one among equals?

III. The Micropolitics of Ordinary Interaction

Power does not enter interaction only when somebody issues an order.

Much of its operation is quieter.

Consider interruption. Persistent interruption can restrict another person's capacity to complete actions, elaborate claims, or establish the relevance of what they are saying. Zimmerman and West's (1975) early conversation-analytic study made the point concrete: in their small corpus of recorded cross-sex conversations, men interrupted women far more often than the reverse. But domination can occur without interruption. One participant may routinely determine the next topic. Another may possess disproportionate rights to evaluate proposals. Someone else may tell long stories whose relevance nobody feels entitled to challenge. A high-status participant may look at a phone while a low-status participant speaks, communicating something about whose words require attention.

In my early notes on “doing equality,” I identified interruption, topic changes, storytelling, evaluative statements, and failures of attention as possible sites of domination. That list was rudimentary, but the intuition remains useful. Interaction is filled with apparently minor actions that distribute consequential rights.

Topic control is particularly important. The ability to determine what a group will discuss is already a form of power because it establishes which realities can become organizationally actionable. A participant need not defeat an opponent's proposal if the proposal never becomes an agenda item.

Evaluation is similarly consequential. The person who repeatedly says “That's a good point,” “That isn't realistic,” or “We're getting off track” may be doing more than contributing another opinion. Depending upon the local organization of the encounter, such statements can claim a higher-order right to judge other participants' contributions. The evaluator positions others as producers of contributions and themselves as someone authorized to assess them.

Summarization can perform comparable work. “So what we're saying is…” sounds innocuous. Sometimes it is. But the right to formulate what the group has been saying is extraordinarily consequential. A summary selects some materials, omits others, establishes relationships among them, and offers a candidate version of collective reality. Whoever routinely formulates what “we” think may exercise considerable authority without ever issuing a command.

Even listening has a politics.

Attention is not merely an internal psychological state. Participants display attention through gaze, bodily orientation, response, acknowledgment, uptake, and subsequent action. To speak repeatedly without one's contributions receiving uptake is different from simply having fewer turns. A group can formally allow someone to speak while interactionally declining to recognize what that person has said.

Equality consequently involves more than access to the floor. It involves traction.

A contribution has traction when others demonstrably treat it as something that can affect the subsequent course of interaction. It may be answered, challenged, incorporated, remembered, entered into the record, or translated into organizational action. A person who is repeatedly permitted to speak but whose contributions disappear immediately afterward possesses voice in only the thinnest procedural sense.

This distinction is crucial for Critical Interactionism. Recognition without traction can produce the appearance of inclusion while preserving substantive inequality.

IV. Formal Consensus as an Interactional Technology

Formal consensus is sociologically interesting because it attempts to intervene directly in these processes.

Consensus is sometimes described simply as decision-making without majority voting. But this definition misses much of what makes formal consensus distinctive. In its more developed forms, consensus involves an ensemble of procedures intended to regulate participation: facilitation, agendas, speaking queues, rounds, hand signals, clarification questions, discussion phases, proposals, amendments, temperature checks, stand-asides, blocks, and explicit attempts to hear participants who have spoken less frequently.

The term itself has a history. C. T. Lawrence Butler and Amy Rothstein, both among the founders of Food Not Bombs, codified “Formal Consensus” in On Conflict and Consensus (1987; 2nd ed. 1991), drawing on their experience in Food Not Bombs, the Clamshell Alliance, and the Pledge of Resistance. Their handbook insists: “Above all, Formal Consensus must be taught.” The sentence is sociologically loaded. It concedes that equality in the meeting is not natural. It has to be learned, practiced, and enforced through shared procedure.

These procedures can be understood as interactional technologies of equality.

The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Egalitarian interaction is often imagined as spontaneous, authentic, and unregulated: remove coercive authority and free individuals will meet one another as equals. But actual egalitarian organizations frequently discover the opposite. Equality requires work. It may require more procedural organization rather than less.

Conversation analysis shows why. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) demonstrated that ordinary conversation allocates turns locally, one at a time, through an organized system that includes both current-speaker selection and self-selection at transition-relevance places. Their analysis establishes the machinery of turn allocation; subsequent interactional and feminist research gives us reason to ask how differently positioned speakers fare within that machinery. Formal consensus replaces much of that local allocation with mediated allocation. The right to speak next is no longer seized; it is assigned.

Goffman (1983) observed that a first-come, first-served queue is a moral order: it shuts out the statuses people bring with them, so that rank outside does not decide order inside. A speaking stack applies that logic to talk. A progressive stack goes a step further. Instead of shutting out outside statuses, it deliberately admits them in order to counter them, giving priority to people who have not yet spoken or whose voices are routinely discounted. Both are technologies of equality. They differ in their theory of how domination enters the room.

Read together, the procedures amount to a practical theory of domination written by activists:

Procedure	What it redistributes	Ordinary practice it displaces
Speaking stack	The right to the next turn	Self-selection; interruption
Progressive stack	Priority among those waiting	Habitual deference to dominant voices
Rounds	A guaranteed turn for everyone	Silence of those never invited
Facilitation	Control of agenda and topic	Unilateral topic changes
Hand signals	Feedback without taking the floor	Interjection; inattentive silence
Separate phases for questions, concerns, and resolution	Timing of evaluation	Premature evaluative statements
Temperature checks	Visibility of the room's position	Reading consent from the loudest
Block and stand-aside	Power to stop or abstain	Majority override; silent acquiescence

A speaking queue restricts the capacity of confident participants to seize the floor repeatedly. A facilitator can notice that several people have not spoken and explicitly invite their participation. A round can temporarily suspend competitive turn allocation by providing each participant an organized opportunity to speak. A clarification phase can distinguish questions from speeches masquerading as questions. A requirement that objections be articulated prevents private dissatisfaction from becoming invisible. A block can give a numerical minority protection against decisions it regards as fundamentally unacceptable.

Hand signals deserve special mention. They open a second channel alongside the floor, letting participants register agreement, disagreement, or a procedural concern without taking a turn. Edelsky's (1981) distinction between a singly developed floor and a collaborative floor is useful here; she showed that gender differences in participation depended on which kind of floor was in play. Formal consensus largely enforces the first kind while trying to recover some of the second through signals and rounds.

The architecture matters because ordinary conversation does not begin on a socially empty field. Participants arrive with unequal biographies, statuses, competencies, vocabularies, confidence, education, race, gender, age, professional standing, physical abilities, and familiarity with organizational norms. Telling everyone simply to “participate equally” does nothing to erase these differences.

Procedures can therefore function as counterweights.

They alter the opportunity structure of the encounter. They make some ordinarily easy actions more difficult and some ordinarily difficult actions easier. The person accustomed to dominating through rapid turn entry must wait. The hesitant speaker receives a recognized opening. The person who disagrees is provided an accountable procedure through which disagreement can be registered.

Formal consensus thus demonstrates an important principle: some forms of equality require structure.

V. The Tyranny of Structurelessness

But structure does not solve the problem once and for all.

Jo Freeman's classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” written out of the women's liberation movement, remains indispensable precisely because it attacks the assumption that eliminating formal hierarchy eliminates power. Groups that refuse explicit structures do not thereby become structureless. Informal networks, friendship circles, status distinctions, differential experience, charisma, and access to information can become the actual mechanisms through which decisions are made.

The absence of accountable authority may therefore protect unaccountable authority.

This insight can be pushed further interactionally. Even highly structured consensus procedures can generate distinctive forms of inequality.

Experienced activists know the procedures. Newcomers do not.

A veteran participant knows when to raise a procedural objection, how to formulate a block, when to request clarification, how to amend a proposal, what counts as a legitimate process concern, and which hand signal means “direct response.” The newcomer is simultaneously learning the issue under discussion and the machinery through which legitimate participation is accomplished.

Procedural competence becomes a resource.

Facilitators present another problem. Facilitation is designed partly to prevent domination, but facilitators necessarily acquire special interactional rights. They recognize speakers, formulate transitions, announce agenda items, summarize positions, identify apparent agreement, determine whether discussion is becoming repetitive, and sometimes decide whether an intervention is procedurally appropriate.

The facilitator can therefore become powerful precisely through practices designed to redistribute power.

Fluency is a third resource. An articulate speaker can dominate without breaking a single rule—by framing the question first, speaking in polished paragraphs, or being quotable. The stack controls when one speaks, not how much weight one's words carry once spoken.

The block presents a fourth. Formally, anyone may block. Socially, the cost of blocking is not equal. Mansbridge's Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), which studied a consensus-run crisis center alongside a New England town meeting, found that face-to-face democracy generates fears of conflict and real pressures toward conformity. Those pressures fall hardest on people who already have the least standing to absorb disapproval.

Polletta's Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (2002) adds a historical dimension. American activists repeatedly modeled their democracies on familiar relationships—friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship—and each model carried its own exclusions. A group run on the norms of friendship can be warm toward insiders and quietly closed to strangers. Freeman's informal elites, in other words, are not a failure peculiar to structureless groups. They can persist beneath formal procedure as well.

This does not demonstrate that facilitation, or consensus itself, is secretly authoritarian. It demonstrates something more sociologically interesting: there may be no position outside the interaction order from which equality can simply be administered.

Every mechanism for organizing equality itself enters the field of interaction and becomes available for consequential use.

VI. Equality Is Not Sameness

This also means that equality should not be confused with sameness.

An egalitarian group need not pretend that everyone knows the same things. Expertise exists. Experience matters. Some people have spent twenty years studying an issue that another participant encountered yesterday. Treating their knowledge as identical would not produce equality; it might produce epistemic absurdity.

The problem is not difference itself. The problem concerns how differences become organized into durable rights of command, dismissal, deference, or exclusion.

A physician and patient do not possess identical medical knowledge. A professor and first-year student do not possess identical disciplinary knowledge. A person who has lived on the streets for fifteen years and an administrator who has never been homeless possess different forms of knowledge. Critical analysis begins when we ask which differences become institutionally actionable and which are discounted.

Equality therefore requires a distinction between relevant asymmetry and generalized superiority.

Someone may possess greater knowledge regarding a particular matter without thereby acquiring the right to dominate every other dimension of the encounter. Expertise can warrant an extended explanation without warranting control of the agenda. Experience can establish epistemic authority concerning one's own life without making every interpretation unchallengeable.

The accomplishment of equality consequently involves keeping asymmetries bounded.

This is difficult because interaction has a tendency toward sedimentation. Repeated local advantages can become statuses. The person who knows the procedure becomes “the person who knows how things work.” The person who frequently summarizes becomes the unofficial interpreter of the group. The participant whose proposals are repeatedly accepted acquires anticipatory credibility. Others begin orienting toward these histories.

Yesterday's interaction becomes part of today's interactional environment.

Hierarchy can therefore emerge without anybody deciding to create it.

VII. Doing Equality Requires Repair

If equality is an interactional accomplishment rather than a permanent condition, failure is inevitable.

People interrupt. Facilitators become impatient. Confident speakers occupy too much time. Someone's contribution receives no uptake. A joke lands differently across status positions. A newcomer is confused by unexplained procedures. An expert dismisses a question that appears elementary. A marginalized participant becomes responsible for repeatedly educating everyone else about marginalization.

The important question is not whether an egalitarian group eliminates such moments. No group can.

The question is whether the group possesses repair practices capable of recognizing and responding to them.

“Could we hear from people who haven't spoken?”

“I think she was still talking.”

“Can we return to the point he raised earlier?”

“I've spoken several times; I'd like to step back.”

“Before we move on, I don't think we've addressed that objection.”

“What does that term mean for people who are new here?”

These are small utterances. Yet they can perform substantial political work.

They make inequality accountable as it is emerging.

This suggests that the deepest measure of an egalitarian interaction order may not be the absence of asymmetry but its capacity for reflexive correction. Equality resides partly in whether participants can notice emerging domination, name it without catastrophic consequences, and reorganize the encounter.

An organization committed to equality but incapable of receiving claims about inequality has transformed equality from a practice into an ideology.

VIII. Recognition, Traction, and the Right to Matter

There is another dimension of equality that speaking-time measures cannot capture.

People need not merely opportunities to speak. They need the possibility of mattering to what happens next.

This distinction between recognition and traction is particularly important in institutions that have become skilled at soliciting participation. Contemporary organizations routinely hold listening sessions, advisory committees, public comment periods, stakeholder meetings, community forums, lived-experience panels, surveys, and consultations.

Such arrangements can be meaningful.

They can also produce recognition without consequence.

A homeless person may be invited to describe sleeping outside while having no influence over shelter policy. A patient may recount failures of the mental-health system before professionals who sympathetically thank them and continue unchanged. Residents may receive two minutes each before a governmental body whose practical alternatives were established before public comment began.

The participants have spoken. The institution has listened. Procedurally, inclusion has occurred.

Yet nothing moved.

The gap here is between formal equality and interactional equality. Formal equality is a property of rules: one seat, one turn, one vote. Interactional equality is a property of what actually happens: who speaks, whose proposals are taken up, whose concerns are answered rather than acknowledged and set aside. Federal rules for homeless Continuums of Care offer a precise example. Each board must include at least one homeless or formerly homeless person (24 CFR 578.5(b)). That is formal inclusion written into regulation. Whether the person in that seat is heard, interrupted, consulted, or treated as a token is decided in interaction, meeting by meeting. No regulation reaches that far.

Interactional equality therefore cannot be reduced to voice. We must ask what happens to the contribution after it is produced. Does it enter deliberation? Does somebody become accountable for responding to it? Can it alter the proposal? Does it enter the organizational record? Does it survive beyond the encounter?

The distinction is between the right to speak and the right to matter.

The argument can be stated as three distinct levels of participation:

• Recognition: being admitted as a legitimate participant.
• Voice: a recognized, accountable opportunity to contribute.
• Traction: the demonstrable capacity of that contribution to alter subsequent interaction, deliberation, records, or organizational action.

The levels are separable, and inequality can persist at each. An institution can become progressively more inclusive while remaining unequal at every step: recognized but voiceless; voiced but without traction. The distinction travels well beyond consensus meetings—to lived-experience boards, public comment, classrooms, medical encounters, community advisory bodies, and institutional consultation generally. Wherever participation is solicited, the question is not only whether people may speak but whether anything they say can move.

That distinction connects the micropolitics of meetings to larger institutional structures. An interaction can appear beautifully egalitarian while existing inside an organization whose consequential decisions are made elsewhere. Conversely, a formally hierarchical encounter may sometimes contain substantial mechanisms through which subordinate participants can challenge decisions and produce institutional consequences.

Interactional practice can also run ahead of formal rights. Rawls and Duck's Tacit Racism (2020) argues that the interaction order among Black Americans developed as a way of guaranteeing equality to people who otherwise had little experience of it, and that it offers a template the wider society could learn from. Equality, on this account, can be a local accomplishment that no formal structure guaranteed.

Critical Interactionism must therefore resist romanticizing the local encounter. The micro is not politically innocent merely because everyone sits in a circle.

IX. The Paradox of Organized Equality

We can now state the central paradox.

Attempts to abolish hierarchy do not abolish the interactional production of hierarchy. They reorganize the practices through which hierarchy can be accomplished, resisted, concealed, recognized, and repaired.

This is why non-hierarchical organization should not be treated as a utopian endpoint.

It is better understood as an ongoing practical achievement.

Every egalitarian procedure produces possibilities and vulnerabilities. Speaking queues can redistribute participation but become bureaucratic. Facilitation can restrain dominant speakers while empowering facilitators. Consensus can protect minorities while allowing a single participant disproportionate leverage. Expertise can improve collective decisions while hardening into epistemic authority. Informality can produce warmth and flexibility while concealing networks of influence.

There is no procedural arrangement that permanently solves power.

That conclusion should not be confused with Robert Michels's. In Political Parties (1911), Michels argued that every organization, however democratic its ideals, drifts toward rule by a few: “who says organization, says oligarchy.” Subsequent research gives us little reason to treat this tendency as literally inexorable. Rothschild-Whitt (1979) documented collectivist organizations that sustained real alternatives to bureaucracy, under identifiable conditions and with identifiable strains. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) named one of those strains: collectives that must deal with hierarchical outside institutions come under pressure to designate someone who can act as a formal leader. Polletta (2002) showed participatory democracy working, and failing, for reasons that can be specified. Hierarchy is neither inevitable nor abolished. It is negotiated, encounter by encounter.

The difference from Michels is also one of question, not only of answer. This essay is not rediscovering the iron law at the microsociological level. Michels asked why organizations tend toward oligarchy. The question here is different: how participants locally organize interaction so that asymmetries are constrained, how those very arrangements become resources for new domination, and how emerging asymmetries are detected and repaired.

Nor need the conclusion lead to cynicism. Quite the opposite. It replaces the fantasy of a perfectly horizontal organization with the more demanding possibility of an organization capable of continually examining how inequality is being reproduced within it.

The relevant question becomes not “Are we non-hierarchical?” but:

What forms of hierarchy are we producing right now?

• Who has been speaking?
• Whose contributions have received uptake?
• Who formulated the problem?
• Who decided that discussion was finished?
• Whose expertise was recognized?
• Who performed the invisible labor?
• Who could object without social penalty?
• Who understood the procedure?
• Who was expected to adapt?

And perhaps most importantly:

What changed because the least powerful person in the room spoke?

X. From an Emergent Idea to a Research Program

When I first wrote about these questions in 2008, I ended one brief blog post with a sentence that now seems more revealing than I understood at the time:

“This is what blogs look like when they are just an emergent idea.”

The idea was indeed emergent.

What appeared then as a question about formal consensus now seems to me part of a considerably larger research program. Critical Interactionism asks how domination, inequality, recognition, exclusion, resistance, and moral accountability are produced through the situated organization of ordinary life. “Doing equality” is the necessary complement to that inquiry.

We cannot understand domination only by studying dramatic acts of domination. Nor can we understand equality only through constitutions, mission statements, organizational charts, or political ideals.

We have to watch what people actually do.

The 2008 post proposed participant observation of formal consensus in Santa Barbara groups. The systematic participant-observation project I imagined in 2008 was never carried out in the form proposed. The question, however, persisted. Over the following eighteen years I repeatedly encountered versions of it in activist organizations, nonprofit boards, classrooms, faith communities, homeless-services settings, advisory bodies, and social-justice coalitions. What began as a proposed study of formal consensus gradually became a broader inquiry into the interactional accomplishment of equality itself. The argument above now tells us what future fieldwork should look for:

• Distribution and organization of turns: who enters the floor, who is selected, who self-selects, and how these patterns shift across a meeting and across months; talk-time can be retained as one descriptive measure rather than treated as a measure of equality itself.
• Uptake and traction: whose proposals are taken up, built on, or attributed later; whose are acknowledged and dropped.
• Formulations: how the sense of the room is summarized, and whose words survive into the summary.
• Blocks and stand-asides: who uses them, how they are received, and what happens to the blocker afterward.
• Signals: who uses the second channel, and whose signals are acted on.
• Newcomer trajectories: how long it takes a new member to speak, propose, and be taken seriously, and who leaves.
• Repair: utterances that name an imbalance, and whether the group changes course in response.

Possible settings include any local group still deciding by formal consensus; the meetings of a homeless Continuum of Care, especially around its lived-experience seat; and faith-based coalitions where they use consensus-style procedures. In several of these I am a participant as well as an observer. That position should be stated openly in the research, as a source of both access and bias.

We have to examine turns at talk, interruptions, silences, formulations, questions, evaluations, repair, attention, agenda construction, records, decisions, and what happens to people's contributions after they have made them. We have to investigate the small practices through which some people acquire the right to define reality for others—and the equally small practices through which that right is restrained.

This also changes the political stakes of microsociology. The organization of a meeting is not trivial simply because the meeting itself is small. The mundane practices through which people recognize one another as consequential participants are among the places where democratic life either acquires substance or becomes ceremonial.

In 2008 I asked whether equality is done through “a special symmetry of interactional moves.” The answer this essay arrives at is analytic rather than hortatory:

Equality is not symmetry. It is an interactional order in which rights to speak, define, evaluate, challenge, decide, and receive consequential uptake are sufficiently distributed—and in which recurrent asymmetries can themselves be made visible, accountable, and repairable.

Equality is therefore neither a possession nor a declaration.

It is something people have to keep doing.

And because it is an accomplishment, it can always fail.

Perhaps that is precisely why studying its successful moments matters. When people manage, however provisionally, to distribute authority, restrain domination, hear those who would ordinarily be ignored, preserve disagreement without expulsion, and allow another person's contribution genuinely to alter what happens next, they provide us with something more valuable than an abstract theory of equality.

They show us what equality looks like in practice.

References

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• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Continuum of Care Program, 24 CFR § 578.5(b).
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