The Hinge

Idioculture and Commitment

A local sociology starts with affiliation and the commitments that public selves entail. In a world in which we recognize that we depend upon others, lasting ties are essential. Civil engagement stems from an interaction order that presumes the possibility of reciprocal sharing through common identities and common moralities (Greene 2013). As Fligstein (2001) writes, identities can be mobilized by those with the social skills to create local orders. We help those whom we consider situated within the boundaries of our community. This explains the presence of barn-raisings and comparable forms of agricultural cooperation (Galbraith 1964; Harper 2001; Vickers 1994), recognizing that those within local and committed communities hold an expectation of help, given and received. But even in smaller spaces, such as the household of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, help given and received can make all the difference. As Richard Sennett (2012) argues, cooperation is a force that has the potential to build society. “Favor banks,” in which personal services are traded, operate smoothly in circumstances in which micro-credit is exchanged. We are the kind of people who aid others in our social surroundings.

Definitions of the community, often informed by local institutions such as churches or schools, bolster this belief. We find similar aid in ethnic self-help organizations in which individuals or families contribute to a fund that is loaned as needed (Mitchell 1978; Nee and Nee 1973). This has been institutionalized in the form of micro-credit associations, transformed from communal-help agencies into banks making tiny loans. While the money lent through these banks comes from outside of the community through supportive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), banks may require gatherings of borrowers to provide mutual support (Sanyal 2009). Such a system operates through the charity of small numbers, tied to a belief in reciprocity both as a moral requirement, as an expectation of mutual exchange, and because of the power of conformity. Groups transform collective concern into a powerfully held and publically acknowledged value. These tiny publics become collaborative circles (Corte 2013; Farrell 2001). Perhaps the origin of reciprocity is based in self-interest, but commitment to group life quickly takes priority. Affiliation becomes a virtue and, when publicly enacted, leads to acceptance.

Even in moments of dispute, affiliation tempers conflict. Ellickson (1991) emphasizes the prevalence of order without law. By this he means that individuals settle disputes without resorting to external control, even when their interests differ. The negotiation of divergent interests of neighboring farmers and ranchers reveals this process. Despite incompatible desires, ongoing relationships hold sway and are treated as too valuable to breach. The commitment of the group to its continuation protects against rupture, leading to civil negotiations, a model for all politics. Current negotiations build upon past negotiations, creating a history of adjustments. Of course, negotiations can fail and lasting conflicts occur when individuals draw on different pieces of the past or on different models of negotiation. These may include unresolved grievances, unreciprocated benefits, or competing practices of dispute resolution. History is potentially unstable as actors are replaced and new cohorts replace old (Whittier 1997); in consequence, patterns of micro-relations that had once been established must occasionally be revised.

The memory of a group’s past and the commitment to it permit disagreements to be coordinated within a broader social organization. We need no single all-powerful Leviathan if we embrace a duty to maintain stability. With group affiliation as a guiding principle of collective life, affection can work as well as discipline. Soft communities operate as effectively as hard (Fine 2013). Societies are organized through group coordination at the level of the local and at levels with broader authority, establishing translocal order and responding to dissent and resistance. While coordination is essential for state governance, at each level interaction routines are to be found. We find groups all the way up.

In a different sense from Benedict Anderson (1991), I speak of imagined communities. Anderson examines state systems, focusing on the creation and the impact of national literatures and languages. However, micro-communities are imagined as well and this has greater interactional effects than for those communities that are built upon fixed texts. While Anderson properly addresses the role of the imagined community in linking individuals to systems of governance, it is potent because citizens see other citizens as being like them. Affiliation is most powerful when neighbors serve as stand-ins for all citizens. Ritual events such as ceremonies or parades (Lane 1981; Warner 1959) create idiocultures that are treated as national cultures, just as degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel 1956) use separation from a community to support a shared politics.

Tiny publics are the building blocks from which political order is possible through threads of emotional entrainment (Collins 2004). If, as Eliasoph (1998) argues, group cultures can create a commitment to apathy, that apathy exists because members believe, given their shared experiences, that their role as citizens makes no further demands. But inevitably group belongingness is a model for societal belongingness. The person without connections—the stranger, the hermit, or the detached—rejects meaningful participation in civil society. Participation depends on the existence of established social relations.

Further, categorizing one’s interaction partners into a named group creates the basis of belonging. The salience of group membership in identity work harkens back to Durkheim’s ([1912] 1965) emphasis on collective representations that bolster social participation. The Iowa symbolic interactionists (Kuhn and McPartland 1954) who developed the Twenty Statements test emphasize that individuals define themselves through action groups: families, clubs, or workplaces. We recognize ourselves not only through Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking-glass self” but through looking-glass communities. Identity work (Snow and Anderson 1987) emphasizes the salience of the group in which performances occur. One does not simply have an identity, but has an identity in light of a bounded public.

Idioculture and Social Capital

Affiliation becomes real through engagement, a skill that depends on social capital. By social capital, I refer to the ability of individuals to create a web of supportive friends and acquaintances. We see this in the early feminist movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also in engaged communities of all types. Following Portes (1998), social capital depends upon sociability.

Although the social capital approach has a lengthy history, its contemporary prominence developed from the insight of James Coleman (1990) who treated social capital as a strategy by which individuals maximized their interests, building community by creating dense networks. Less tied to rational choice arguments, but equally as influential in emphasizing a meso-level analysis, Robert Putnam (2000) has doggedly asserted that a robust civil sphere depends upon the prevalence of strong relations and supportive institutions. Putnam’s (1995:167) definition of civic engagement, “trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action,” emphasizes the connection between social capital and commitment to local domains. Putnam frets about the decline of this capital, but what he emphasizes throughout Bowling Alone is that established groups or small organizations are weakening, leading to declining interest in civic participation generally, a reality that has continued and is linked to class-linked social relations (Petev 2013). He points to the decline of organizations such as the Parent-Teacher Association to exemplify this decline. While other institutions may have replaced the PTA, Putnam’s point is that society depends on an ecology of groups and that idioculture supports forms of social capital that undergird successful societies. In their analysis of religion Putnam and Campbell (2010) argue for the essential place of churches. Following those who recognize the local cultures of congregations, Putnam suggests that the shared sense of belonging and the efficacy and networking that this creates makes religious gatherings powerful for social cohesion. While organized groups are surely important, this emphasis ignores the less formal, often nameless, groups that continue to flourish. An abundance of groups, even outside formal organizations, reveals a healthy civil society.

Through intersecting groups, social capital builds expansive networks, creating the possibility of organizational recruitment through who one knows and how one knows them. As is true in the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist movement, groups recruit through networks, building on established relations and differential association (Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson 1980). Only later does publicity bolster personal, direct recruitment. While not denying the importance of resources, movements thrive if they have close-knit supporters, even if these local chapters have only occasional linkages with groups of greater power and authority. Groups are motivated through the social capital of participants, potentially generating commitment to costly action (Della Porta 1988) and overcoming the collective action problem (Olson 1965). Sageman (2008) speaks of a leaderless jihad in the post–9/11 era, arguing that terrorism consists of “informal local groups . . . conceiving and executing from the bottom up.” Who needs Bin Laden in a world of Facebook and hookah bars? Any clique can be a violent cell. Of course, it is not only terrorist cells that are at issue. Many revolutions and insurrections are provoked by partisan bands no larger than a small group. These groups have the power of conviction, the ability to move swiftly, and, because of their tight boundaries, are resistant to state surveillance.

Through their social relations, small-scale networks build solidarity through grievance frames that larger units cannot easily generate, overcoming fears of retribution by state actors (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina 1982; Gould 1993; Pfaff 1996). Commitment may be so powerful that even failure does not produce disillusionment (Summers-Effler 2010).

The analysis of efficacy provides social capital with its most consequential empirical grounding. Central to this concept is the neighborhood effects literature in which researchers of urban poverty, otherwise at some remove from the examination of small group cultures, recognize that characteristics of local communities determine how social systems are organized through collective efficacy, linked to the presence of social capital. This approach emphasizes that the contextual features of an urban interaction order are crucial for analyzing the organization of inequality (Quillian and Pager 2001; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002). Sampson and his colleagues claim that broad structural forces are mediated through the lifeworlds of particular communities with their distinctive cultures, linked to local institutions that encourage or retard the development of collective action and meso-level social control. In other words, collective efficacy develops from local conditions (Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls 1999; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). This research tradition challenges the view that all poor neighborhoods are alike because of their structural similarities and recognizes that community feeling can buffer external threats (Fischer 1982).

As valuable as this model of urban life is, it demands attention to the specifics of how historical processes affect neighborhoods. Japonica Brown-Saracino (2009) demonstrates how gentrifiers depend on the backstory—real and imagined—of the neighborhood that they are in the process of transforming. While the micro-structural perspective on neighborhood effects is insightful in recognizing neighborhood diversity, this research tradition often downplays the processual how of local effects. The neighborhoods effects literature requires an urban ethnography to demonstrate how social capital operates not only in principle, but in practice. For instance, as Harding (2010) points out, the dynamics of collective efficacy can lead to within-group control, preserving social relations, or can create preemptive violence between groups, grounded on the defense of turf. Social capital is not merely an idea of social relations, but a force that aggregates skills made concrete within group contexts.

Idioculture and Place

As spaces are everywhere, communities can be as well. This explains the ethnographic trope of the corner as the setting for community (Anderson 1979; Liebow 1967; Whyte 1943). As Grannis (2009) argues, the ecological features of neighborhoods affect the social relations and local cultures that develop within them. Streets, cul-de-sacs, parks, and buildings make meetings or gatherings more or less likely. These material structures must not be dismissed. Their obdurate reality permits the arrangement of groups, scenes, and interaction patterns (Fine 1992).

Ultimately group cultures require spaces for shared action, providing dramaturgical moments that create a communal history. Places and scenes permit the public display of commitment and connection and, by generalization of the local, create commitment and connection to socially and geographically extended systems. Groups are constrained if they lack places in which interaction is possible. Politics, whether supportive of or resistant to the status quo, require locations in which people come together in common cause. In this I draw on Goldfarb’s (2006) analysis of the intimate spaces in which civil society is organized. The sociology of small things depends upon a sociology of small places. Here the kitchen table, whether that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Lech Walesa, is the center of political life. For Goldfarb it is the interaction order of places that creates shared perspectives and common purposes. Goldfarb (2006:15) places the hearth on a stage, asserting, “When friends and relatives met in their kitchens, they presented themselves to each other in such a way that they defined the situation in terms of an independent frame rather than that of officialdom.”

While the existence of these gathering points has been noticed in the creation of the modern public sphere, their position in an interaction regime must be emphasized. If, as Calhoun (2001) argues, civil society depends on the self-organization of social relations, then the ability of embedded small groups to gather is central, no matter whether they are explicitly politically self-conscious. Could a vibrant public sphere have existed without the coffeehouse (Back and Polisar 1983; Habermas 1989), the lodge (Koselleck 1988; Levtzion 2002), the club (Agulhon 1982; Amann 1975), the saloon (Bell 1983; LeMasters 1975; May 2001), or the salon (Giesen 2001)? Today urban daycare centers provide parents with information to obtain family resources that their own limited knowledge does not permit (Small 2009). These nodes of talk permit participants to recognize the larger structures that shape them. Spaces in which tiny publics challenge and debate provide the basis of a civil culture. Political discourse occurs in settings where argument is legitimate, even desired (Emirbayer and Sheller 1999; Ikegami 2000; Mische and White 1998). Ann Mische’s (2008) research on Brazilian youth politics demonstrates that it is not grievance or ideology as such that creates action, but the ability of a network of locally based groups to connect. Spaces in which individuals gather, either through a focused interaction ritual (e.g., an award ceremony) (Collins 1981) or through circulating discussions (e.g., the archetypal cocktail party) (Riesman, Potter, and Watson 1960) generate the recognition of community.

Calhoun (1982:149–50) analyzes the development of radicalism and revolt in nineteenth-century British artisan communities, which were facing the strains of the Industrial Revolution. This work demonstrates the value of recognizing the meso-level as the foundation of collective action. Calhoun argues that a close-knit community can generate a sense of injustice and awareness of techniques of resistance. As he writes, “These movements were largely based on the social foundations of local communities. The people they mobilized were knit together through personal bonds within these communities much more than they were unified by class. As such movements attempted to go beyond local communities in their mobilization or objects, they foundered.” In place of class consciousness, Calhoun asserts the centrality of group consciousness, tied to place. Radicalism depended on preserving traditional social relations.

Tilly (2006) makes a similar argument in recognizing the importance of transactions within a bounded public, rather than an approach that emphasized personal dispositions or structures of institutions (Gould 2003). These movements depend on the recognition of oppression in spaces in which collective action is possible, even as they make adjustments to the power of an authoritarian state (Chua 2012). Repertoires of action, of which the weapons of the weak described by James Scott (1985) form a part, are not merely abstract techniques of resistance but emerge from action spaces in which close-knit communities fight for their own preservation. Yet, while these theorists refer to groups, chains, relations, or clusters, they do not explore the microcultures that lead to the perception of common interests and, like Tilly, retreat from the interaction order to describe durable categories of actors, less grounded in local perspectives.

Civil society operates not just in domains that are explicitly political, but in ostensibly apolitical locations as well. These constitute “third places” as defined by Ray Oldenberg (1989). We are familiar with “Slim’s Table,” made famous by Mitchell Duneier (1992). At a table in Hyde Park’s Valois Cafeteria a group of black and white men talked about the issues of the day, overcoming racial boundaries. They relied on community and built that community in their talk. As Duneier (1992:159) reports, “In coming to a cafeteria in the integrated Hyde Park district, some of these men are expressing a desire to participate in the larger, more comprehensive society. . . . The wider society . . . is a vehicle for them to express their own civility.” Slim’s table provides a hinge that transforms these marginal actors into citizens. More explicitly political is Walsh’s (2003) observation of the daily discourse among a group of men in a small coffee shop. These men process the events of the day through their generally conservative world view; their continuing interaction emphasizes that political beliefs are shaped by and are responsive to the places that neighbors gather (Eliasoph 2012; Lichterman 2005).

As their methodology demands, ethnographers are place-based, depicting places linked to group life. This is true of the many observations of gang life (Venkatesh 2008), simultaneously aesthetic, normative, and political. Erickson (2009), describing a neighborhood restaurant, discovered that despite it being a place of business, a group of regulars care for each other and for the staff. The same happens in beauty salons (Furman 1997), baseball bleachers (Swyers 2010), and opera loges (Benzecry 2011), odd but real sites for revealing mutual care, becoming a public sphere of a sort. Beyond being places in which individuals debate, these third places permit the formation of communities of common purpose. They are Tocqueville’s “minute communities,” social orders that develop from spatial propinquity. Tocqueville ([1835] 1966:232) presents an example, perhaps apocryphal, from his travels, “If some obstacle blocks the public road, halting the circulation of traffic, the neighbors at once form a deliberative body; this improvised assembly produces an executive authority which remedies the trouble before anyone has thought of the possibility of some previously constituted authority beyond that of those concerned.” Our relations with those who surround us confirm that our own opinions are worthwhile and, if threatened, should be defended.

The more formal organization of public events such as community gatherings and town meetings creates spaces for dialogue (Baiocchi 2003; Bryan 2004). The town meeting is the archetypal form in which social relations are transformed into political involvement as a consequence of a shared environment. It is not that all agree on the appropriate action—often disagreements have lengthy afterlives and participants may be known for contrary views—but all are engaged in the same civic project (Deener 2012). While such spaces of action may create conflict and disagreement, by virtue of a shared presence participants assume that others share history, emotional concern, and a sense of belonging. Tiny publics provide the basis of civil society when settings are established in which politics is discussed and enacted (Fraser 1992). Commitment, linked to identity, provides part of the process by which meso-level identifications create shared action, but for action to be possible the interaction order must bring actors together in places that ratify the significance of their copresence (Campos-Castillo and Hitlin 2013; Zhao 2003). Of course, technology changes the rules of copresence. Postal systems and subsequent telegraphic and telephonic systems provide opportunities for a type of copresence that does not require the physical proximity of bodies. Computer-mediated communities, especially social media, are perhaps not so different from mail except by being more temporally insistent and more expansive in scope. Cyber culture permits coordinated action, recognizing that space need not be geographical, but can be communicative.

Idioculture and Performance

Once we gather, what to do? We act, mobilized in common cause. A meso-sociological theory of group culture is a theory that is not in the head, but on the stage. Returning to our opening example, it was not sufficient for Stanton and Anthony to gather in Stanton’s kitchen, but they had to arrange stage performances in which Anthony could move the crowd with her passionate speeches. This approach builds on the sociological tradition of seeing action as a basis of social organization, treating skilled performers as central to the reproduction of social relations (Fligstein 2001; Giddens 1984). While recognizing logics and affect, logics and affect gain meaning through action, and especially interaction (Hallett 2010; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). An interaction order is a domain of performance, a world of rituals and responses, not mere reflex.

Civil society depends on individuals sharing common perspectives or, alternatively, opposing each other in rivalrous dispute (or an ambivalent mix). As I describe in my research on high school debate teams (Fine 2000), political systems often depend on groups that perceive themselves in long-standing opposition. Structured contention is part of democratic decision making, and the breaking of conventions of group debate can potentially spark civil strife. It is not sufficient to feel that one belongs to a group through affiliation, the linkages that come with social capital, or sharing a space, but one must act so as to reaffirm this belongingness publicly. While mass rituals are set by states (or by groups that represent state systems), these mass events are comprised of groups that merge, creating a grid of groups. Singles may attend rallies, marches, protests, or events, but often do so with friends and acquaintances (Aveni 1977; McPhail 1991). What appears to be a mass is a collection of groups, forming an evanescent, “wispy community” (Fine and Van den Scott 2011). In times of disaster, moments that depend on immediate response (Shibutani 1966), such action platforms emerge as citizens search for common meaning and social support. As Xu (2009) describes in examining the aftermath of the massive Sichuan earthquake of 2008, groups quickly mobilized to aid the needy, and these nodes of action stood apart from the official state response. They created an intimate culture through the aid that they provided to devastated locales. Social relations healed society when the fabric was rent. At symbolic moments, people, acting together, reveal, forge, and refine allegiances.

The salience of performance as a political act is evident in the meso-analysis of social movements. At times a group can become, in effect, a stage troupe; actors gain confidence from their audiences. This is evident in instances in which emotional support bolsters high-risk activism, as Goodwin (1997) described in the case of the Huk rebellion in the Philippines. Consciousness-raising in women’s groups in the 1970s served a similar end, providing collective support for performances of gender that might otherwise be rejected (Cassell 1977). Staged high school drunk-driving tragedies, such as “Every 15 Minutes,” provide a performance context in which adolescents can feel those dangers of which adults believe they should be aware (Miller 2012). Shared communal emotions generate such moments of collective effervescence (Durkheim [1912] 1965). The challenge is to sustain this emotional attachment in the face of interactional routines and social control (Bartkowski 2000; Collins 2004).

The challenge of stoking emotion is especially evident in the constructed rituals of oppositional groups. Although much social movement scholarship examines the relationship between the movement and the state, between the movement and the individual, or the search for resources among organizations, movements depend on the willingness of actors to perform opposition. Movements are effective tools of revolt and reform if they can galvanize supporters to demonstrate that support to others through action (Freedman and Fraser 1966). Given their desire to shape public perceptions, social movement organizations, more than most groupings, depend upon the performance of passion to generate commitment. While movements can be extensive, often they are organized through interlocking groups, cells, or chapters (Lofland and Jamison 1984). This intimacy makes the behavioral demonstration of political desire more powerful in that the performance occurs in front of others with whom the performer has a salient relation.

To the extent that movements are comprised of local groupings (Gerlach and Hine 1970), they can have distinctive cultures, resources, and leadership, producing variable ideologies or outcomes (Andrews et al. 2010; Reger 2002). One group may look quite different from others that are ostensibly similar, a divergence that is evident in groups as diverse as cells of the Communist Party of America, Tea Party branches, or chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Depending on the ability of a central force to coordinate action or institute surveillance, the cultural or ideological relations among movement groups or service organizations may be tight or loosely coupled.

For a movement to grow, become institutionally stable, and cement allegiance, the public announcement of commitment by participants is essential. In this way individuals become part of a community and the community can rely on them to create public pressure. The performance of solidarity helps groups transcend the free rider problem (Olson 1965) by having the performance and reactions to it bolster the actor’s core identity.

From separate tight-knit groups an effective widespread organization creates a transcendent culture, creating performance points at rallies, conferences, or committees. These events establish cross-cutting connections where people can act together (Robnett 1996; Whyte 1974). McAdam (1988) writes of “Freedom High” as an integral component of the Civil Rights Movement. He refers to efforts by organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project to build cohesion through communal activities, such as classes, parties, and discussions. Political leftists sponsored camps and joint activities that fostered a congenial perspective, such as Unity House in the Catskills. The goal was to make Marxism a “way of life” and “a movement of families” (Mishler 1999:2). A similar sensibility was evident in the Ku Klux Klan, recognizing the fiery entertainment of witnessing cross burnings as building cohesion (Blee 1992:167). Camps for survivalists also promote sociable action amid guns and apocalyptic narratives (Mitchell 2002). Each movement reflects a commitment to performative democracy by sponsoring action and audience in pushing for social change.

Francesca Polletta (2002) suggests that focused meetings and the narratives that are embedded within them build organizations. Meetings are more effective vectors for action than are amorphous gatherings. They provide structures for discourse and for decisions (Schwartzman 1989). Gibson’s (2012) exemplary case study of committee discourse during the American government response to the Cuban missile crisis reveals just how powerful the performances around a table can be in setting a government on a path to war or peace (Janis 1972). Here was a moment in which group discussion reverberated beyond walls of the room. By performing locally, responding to each other’s concerns, the participants mattered globally as other committees in Havana and Moscow judged these outcomes through their own discussions.

Whether we examine powerful decision makers or those who counter those decisions, the performance of one’s belief and the practice of persuasion is a necessary path by which groups create or retard change. This local practice creates choices said to be those of “society” writ large.

Idioculture and Collective Memory

Central to the mediated relationship of citizens and the State is the role of shared memories. Olick (1999) describes two cultures of memory and in this he distinguishes between collected memories, commonly held memories of many individuals, and collective memories, which are memories that “belong” to institutions. He distinguishes between parallel micro-memories and macro-memories that operate as social facts, often backed by institutional support. Olick (1999:333) writes, “Two different concepts of collective memory compete—one refers to the aggregation of socially framed individual memories and one refers to collective phenomena sui generis.” In attempting to connect these two, he ignores meso-level spaces of memory. Olick is not alone in posing a choice between the micro and the macro in the creation of nationalism and state history (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Spillman 1997). In examining the establishment of German national memory and how that memory shifts, as Olick does, it is important to recall that power does not reside in an unpeopled state, but that certain state actors make moments of memory salient and that groups of citizens in their interactions judge whether the rhetorical claims are proper. Individuals connect to history through group discussions, supported by interaction orders. While individuals are the keepers of personal memory as recall is lodged in the brain, and while institutional systems provide for the material storage and ritual consecration of memory (Schudson 1989), memory becomes part of identity as embraced and used by communities of recall. Thus, it is the fact that groups attend and meet at political events, such as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, attended by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglas. This gathering gave rise to the organization of the “Ultras” in which Stanton and Mott participated, providing a structure for the subsequent involvement of Susan B. Anthony.

National holidays and the constructed memories that stand behind them become real in part because families or friends attend fireworks celebrations (Santino 1994). Successful holidays bring people together with a mandate to embrace family (Thanksgiving), faith (Easter, Passover, Ramadan), age (Halloween), or nation (Independence Day). These are not occasions that individuals celebrate nor are they occasions whose celebration is wholly collective (despite large gatherings, services, or broadcasts), but they gain power from an in-gathering of acquaintances. This is demonstrated powerfully in Bronner’s (2011) analysis of how local Jewish communities bond and express their commitment to religious practice and to each other by building Sukkot huts. These huts represent shelters in the wilderness, but, as Bronner emphasizes, their construction and their sharing for the weeklong holiday, including eating and sleeping in the huts, bolster micro-communities in a way that connects to the community’s past as well as to the larger Jewish past. Building these structures stems from social relations at the same time it historicizes these social relations and the religious beliefs that are treated as constituting them. Holidays that lack an interpersonal component (e.g., Columbus Day or President’s Day) are less effective in bolstering a social system. The challenge of Martin Luther King’s Birthday is to find strategies, perhaps through volunteering, that transform a day absent of work to a day that creates a shared public. Mutual presence and the emotional energy that this brings contribute to the political and moral socialization of the participants. The sharing of an event, and the recognition of common narratives, makes history collective (Tilly 2006). States can provide for social control and individuals can provide for personal recognition, but it is the group that permits communal memories to become integrated into the self.

Idioculture and Social Control

For a tiny public to be effective it must enforce standards and encourage predictability. This is the Hobbesian problem once again, creating a balance between extended and narrow boundaries on action. Ideally social control should be implicit—and welcome—given established social relations. Limits on action should not be based on external force, but on the desires of participants. Control should be internal, but collective. As Ellickson (1991) underlines, through the moral weight of a group, “order without law” emerges. In the words of Scott (2012:30), this creates a “vernacular order,” in contrast to the “official order.” In small-scale social systems, such as roommate dyads (Emerson 2008) or school meetings (Hallett, Harger, and Eder 2009), strategies of informal control arise, building on an overwhelming desire to maintain easy interaction, encouraging accommodation and local remediation (Morrill 1995). Formal control happens, but small groups are more effective when power is gloved, as through teasing or gossip.

When a need for a more powerful and extended social control is perceived, group boundaries are solidified, either through pronouncements by those who lead the group or through a consensus of members. A group can coalesce to erect barriers to participation by an individual or a subgroup that it finds disruptive, offensive, or resistant. This became clear in the nineteenth-century suffrage, women’s rights, and temperance movements. Farrell (2001:259) describes the splits in the National American Woman Suffrage Association that required Susan B. Anthony to use her considerable prestige to cement Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s acceptance as president of the organization.

Recognizing the attempt to limit action, Weiner (2013) speaks of a fundamental division between a constraining system of “clans” and a more open liberal individualism. Despite Weiner’s concern, groups can and often do accept conflict rather than suffer the costs that could flow from exclusion. Depending on those forces that bind the group (e.g., common resources), contending subgroups may either split or the conflict may continue. Mechanisms of social control are not invariably successful in tamping conflict and some level of dispute might be treated as legitimate or even desirable. An interaction order may include space for opposing interests or divergent claims.

How groups enforce control in such a way as to link with larger concerns is evident in the case of those who are seen as undermining the idea of a nation or people. Kim (2013) analyzes how Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese were treated by their fellow nationals. Kim, tracing the interactional routines in Japanese-controlled Korea, finds that Koreans had to make choices about their relations with the Japanese, taking into account the benefits that they could receive from participating in the Japanese-run state system, but at the same time recognizing the condemnation that they might receive from others within their interactional sphere. The dangers were not only from official shaming, limited because of Japanese presence, but from local disgrace. Only after the Japanese were overthrown could a more formal condemnation arise, but even here, the choices of who would be condemned were made by groups and small collectives—reputational entrepreneurs—that assumed responsibility for shaping the collective memory of this period in Korean history through the establishment of an encyclopedia that listed those collaborators whom the organizers considered traitors to the nation (Kim and Fine 2013). This is but one instance, although a powerful one, that reveals decisions about justice and control are organized on the level of the group that is given or takes the authority to evaluate the allegiances of others. While courts (and juries) are themselves small groups (Burnett 2001; Diamond and Rose 2005; Manzo 1993), often communal stability occurs through the recognition that law is not the most effective source of control. Groups provide immediate surveillance that combine institution and interaction to maintain what is considered to be morality and justice.