Between Situations: Anticipation,Rhythms,and the Theory of Interaction

Abstract

This article pushes interactionist sociology forward. It does so by drawing out the implications of a simple idea, that to understand the situation—the mise en scene of interactionist theory—we must understand it in relation not only to past-induced habits of thought and action but to future situations anticipated in interaction. Focusing especially on the rhythmic nature of situations, the paper then argues that such a recalibration both unsettles core tenets of interactionism and helps solve some problems in the sociology of culture. As an illustration, it focuses on two such puzzles—the place of disruption in interaction and the relationship between the notion of “boundaries” and of “distinctions” in the sociology of culture.

Keywords

interactionism theory of action sociology of culture temporality anticipation

Social action takes place in a specific situation, in the present-progressive unfolding of interaction. And yet, alongside the pressures that such a present produces, situations are saddled both by their history and by their anticipated futures. Actors do not simply hop from one situation to another but reside between them. And while sociologists have thought about how histories shape actors and interaction and have appreciated how agency requires us to think about futures, we have yet to develop a good way of understanding how the anticipations and rhythms of social life shape it.

To theorize interactionism in such a way, the paper begins from a core theoretical tension in the sociology of action—between present-located situational pressures and past-located dispositional accounts. As I then show, thinking carefully about the future, already present in the situation as a set of explicit and implicit anticipations, changes the way we think about “the situation.” Rather than thinking about situations as bounded, thinking about them in relation to the anticipations of a future they embody—and especially to the rhythms of social life—propels us to think “between situations.”

This is not simply an additional wrinkle in interactionist time, a matter of adding an arrow shot into the future. While true, this is somewhat obvious. It is rather that thinking “between situations” provides us with new questions as well as ways to think about “old” questions both in interactionist theory and other fields, such as the sociology of culture.

To exemplify the proposed utility of this theoretical move, I present two problems. The first, developed with Gary Fine, investigates the role of disruption in the interaction order—unsettling the emphasis on smoothness. The second, which I bumped against in my ethnographic work, is about the relationship between boundaries and distinctions in social life. In both cases, I argue that the solution to the problem—rooted in an appreciation of the futures, and especially rhythmic futures, of interaction—provides a blueprint for new empirical engagements. That is, that the solutions are not only theoretically aesthetic but empirically useful.

Between Disposition and Situation

The interactionist insight, still not blunted after half a century, is that there is a radical potential to interaction. It is in this sense that Blumer’s (1969) three tenets of interactionism with which he begins his Symbolic Interactionism are still provocative: that people act upon the meanings things have for them, that such meaning is made in interaction, and that meanings change (or stay the same) through interaction. The “situation”—the material setting action takes place in, the actors, and the way such actors make sense of their world in their ongoing interaction—is thus a key level of analysis.

This position locates interactionism in the midst of a key temporal tension in the theory of action, that between “dispositional” and “situational” approaches (see e.g., Lahire 2011; Thévenot 2006). That is, even if we accept that meaning is always made in a particular situation, it is not clear how important what happens in the situation is for shaping meaning. Do we need to primarily understand the actors’ pasts, when potentials to act were inculcated, habits formed and crystallized? Or, alternatively, is the present-progressive unfolding of interaction and its endogenous pressures “where the action is”?

Thinking through this tension seems especially important if we begin with ethnographic work, where the back and forth of interaction is so salient. How can we free interactionism from being locked in situational time without analytically sidelining what happens in it? In other words, how can we rediscover the aspects of the situation that temporally overflow it while staying attentive to the ways in which meanings, selves, and institutions are made, stabilized, and changed in action and interaction?

For some theorists, assuming any such temporal overflows is an ill-advised shortcut. Taking the interactional present-progressive to its logical ends, ethnomethodological work focuses on a bounded situational time. In Garfinkel’s (1967) work, this was done by intentionally bracketing preexisting order and meaning. As he argued, the challenge is always to show how—in a specific situation, with just the resources at hand—people make their world meaningful; dispositional notions like “order” or “norms” are constantly done in situ rather than providing a blueprint for action.

While increasingly loosening the radical avoidance of generalization (Tavory forthcoming), conversation analysis—ethnomethodology’s most direct progeny—has constructed a methodologico-theoretical agenda that continues to be highly suspicious of preexisting patterns. While Schegloff (1991:57) argued that researchers should be attentive to the “balance between the focus on social structure and the focus on conversational structure in studying talk-in-interaction” since “these two thematic focuses (we would like to think) are potentially complementary,” these are methodologically separated. The meaning of any utterance is always analyzed retrospectively, through the way it is responded to in the next turn. Rather than assuming meaning as preexisting, it is methodologically located “backward” in interactional time. Dispositions, in this view, are but a gloss on the local production of meaning. It is not only that we cannot assume that we can know what actors meant in their heart of hearts but that meaning is made retrospectively within the situation.

This theoretical suspicion, while provocative and generative, has received strong pushback from theorists of action. For many, it seems that it willfully ignores actors’ experience as they move through their lives and the modes of experiencing they carry with them. As Bourdieu (1977:81) noted, it thus risks becoming locked in what he called an “occasionalist illusion,” forgetting that “the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction.” To understand social life and its reproduction, he famously argued, the patterned dispositional structures of experience that actors carry with them need to be located at the center of analysis.

Yet while Bourdieu’s (1977) point may be a cogent critique of ethnomethodology, he overgeneralizes it, lumping together “social psychology and interactionism or ethnomethodology” (p. 81) in a way that is both ineffective and theoretically imprecise. For the purpose of the article, one aspect of this imprecision is crucial: Even while Blumer and other “Chicago school interactionists” stressed interaction as an important element of the situation, pragmatism-inspired interactionism was never as radically focused on the present-progressive of interaction. Interactionists never disavowed the pragmatist emphasis on the crucial importance of actors’ habits of thought and action in structuring interaction, even if they downplayed it in their writing (Camic 1982).

Thus, explicitly reclaiming the pragmatist emphasis on the importance of habits of thought and action provides sociologists with one way forward. For if habits of thought and action are crucial for both selfhood and meaning-making, then we are already on the golden middle road: Dispositional pasts are crucial but so is creativity in ongoing interaction. Indeed, as pragmatists remind us, there can be no creativity without habit (Joas 1996).

Such reclamation of habits, of course, does not solve the tension as much as it points in a general direction. From a dispositional point of view, it is not by chance that some of the most important figures in the current pragmatist revival in American sociology gravitate to Bourdieu once they have found their way to habits (e.g., Emirbayer and Desmond 2015; Gross 2009) or even that Bourdieu himself could be found to ally himself to pragmatist thought (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Once the situation’s pasts are evoked as these enter into actors’ habits, they tend to overwhelm the unfolding of interaction.

And on the other hand, those who focus on the unfolding of interaction do sometimes tend to underplay dispositions. Thus, when Becker (1982) wrote about interactionists’ view of culture, he likened it to the set of songs that jazz players come armed with when they perform a gig. Although such background knowledge and skills are necessary and even important in other moments of his work, they are often treated as a set of background expectancies and “side bets” (Becker 1960) upon which the crucial crafting of meaning operates situationally. If we want to understand jazz in the flesh, we need to attend primarily to what actually happens during the show.

This is not to say, of course, that there are no compelling accounts of interaction that focus on the ways in which these temporalities intersect. Thus, for Gary Fine (e.g., 1979, 2011), the way forward is through “small group culture”—or idiocultures. Doing so, Fine’s intellectual project melds “the past, which survives in the present” and the importance of situational emergence by empirically tracing the ways in which groups come to develop shared histories and ways of acting. Idiocultures give interaction the materials it draws on, with every new creative moment in interaction inscribed in group life for further reference. Like earlier work on the development of “group perspectives” through interaction (Becker et al. 1961), Fine shows that what we call culture is built through the sedimentation of small moments of interaction.

Using a different language and theoretical underpinnings, but with a similar temporal logic, Collins’s (2004) work on interaction-ritual-chains recruits Goffman and Durkheim to show how actors’ past is emotionally sedimented in a way that shapes subsequent interaction. Using the metaphor of “emotional energy,” Collins argues that each successful interaction ritual is sedimented in actors as a store of “energy,” which then shapes the next time they interact in relation to a particular symbol—all the while still attentive to the structure of the present interaction ritual itself, which may modify our proclivity to feel in certain ways in the situation.

Important for our purposes, for both Fine and Collins, actors’ past formation (in interaction and ritual) is analyzed chiefly as a layered set of pressures and resources for sensemaking in a present interaction. And while these approaches are important, they are also partial. They treat the formation of actors as the antecedent that present-interaction modifies, crystallizes, or amplifies. The situation, in temporal terms, spills far into the past and only slightly forward into the immediate future of action.

But thinking in these temporal terms shows another kind of situational shading—into the future. Habits of thought of action, though they emerge from our histories, are potentialities of action, imagination, and anticipation. That is, while we often think of habits as setting up tastes and modes of seeing the world, habits are no less about modes of anticipating trajectories and temporal landscapes—about our implicit and explicit orientation toward futures. Such habits of anticipation and imagination are crucial.

Pitching into the Future

That action is pitched into a future does not quite come as a shock. Any account of human action or “agency” requires us to think about our constant movement forward in time (see e.g., Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Giddens 1984; Hitlin and Elder 2007; Hitlin and Kirkpatrick Johnson 2015). A movement into the future is inherent in the structure of meaning-making, an important aspect of pragmatist semiotics (Peirce 1992–1999). The semiotic triad that Peirce (1992–1999) describes as constitutive of all meaning-making has temporal movement as one of its three “legs,” captured by his description of the interpretant, the effect of the sign-object that turns into the sign for the next iteration of meaning-making.

The way we are pitched into the future organizes our actions at any given moment and makes them legible. Think of our own work. At least as this article is written, professors often tell their graduate students not to publish in edited volumes because of how they anticipate their CVs will be read; assistant professors confess to be working on projects that bore them to tears while fantasizing about their “post-tenure project.” Understanding any situation requires a rudimentary understanding of both explicit imaginaries of the future and the implicit and well-grooved anticipations of what would happen next.

More theoretically, a number of the core accounts of experience in sociology have tried to parse out the implications of our future orientation and the analytic variation in what the term connotes. Thus, Bourdieu’s (1963, 1973) own work has shown the importance of the relation between poor Algerians’ disintegration of the immediate “sense of the game” and their long-term projects under colonialism; the very notion of a “sense of the game” includes the immediate way in which actors anticipate their future—what phenomenologists called their “protentions” (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, 2000). Alfred Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann 1973) was intensely interested in the way we structure our action in the future, how we imagine future scenarios in the future-past tense as actions we “will have done,” how these imaginations vary in the richness of their details and their concreteness according to how close or far they are from our lifeworld, as well as how our protentions are socially structured.¹

More recently, Ann Mische’s (2009, 2014) ongoing work on the dimensions of projectivity (e.g., clarity, contingency, or volition) provides a set of transposable considerations for the way future-imaginations structure our understanding of possible courses of action. And in another theoretical project, John Hall (e.g., 2016) has been developing a structural phenomenological account of time, examining the way in which different notions of time—diachronic, strategic, and pre- and post-apocalyptic—intersect.

While the above are all crucial contributions, they do not pay much attention to interaction. While there is action aplenty—after all, the Weberian “project” is a future-leaning term—there is less work on the way in which futures are analytically important for understanding the co-construction of meaning in the back and forth of interaction. And equally important, how taking interaction seriously changes the way we theorize the future.

One corrective is thus to pay careful attention not only to what occurs in interaction but to the expectations that may play out within it. A poignant and troubling exemplification of this point comes from a study of unwanted sex (Ford 2018). As the author shows through interview data with women who had unwanted sex, women sometimes went through such sexual encounters because they were afraid that if they try to put a stop to them, the situations will turn into violent rape. That was, significantly, even when there was no sign that the interaction would turn violent. Instead, in an important specification for what the moniker “rape culture” may interactionally mean, a constantly impending possibility of rape loomed over sexual encounters. Rape was constantly imagined “in the next turn” of interaction.

But there is also a sense in which taking interaction seriously allows us to theorize our relation to the future anew. Taking a step in that direction, in previous work (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013), Nina Eliasoph and I tried to specify this interactional relevance by laying out the modalities of future orientations that actors need to coordinate. We specified three such modalities. First, following classical phenomenology, actors are constantly engaged in protention: pitched to the immediate shading of the present into the future. This sense of the impending future is different than the trajectories actors implicitly or explicitly imagine. Some of these trajectories are explicit—the projects we construct; others are more naturalized: high school is a four-year affair, where every year “automatically” follows the others (we even have words like freshman or sophomore to follow this transition). Lastly, some trajectories are so general and naturalized that they feel like the neutral temporal landscape upon which trajectories and protentions take place—for example, the days of the week, or our location in relation to the impending apocalypse (or more optimistically, rapture) that some religious groups anticipate (see e.g., Adam 1990; Zerubavel 1989).

While these different modalities of the future are culled from others, taking interaction seriously allows us to see that these are not simply nested aspects of futurity. Thus, for example, David Gibson’s (2011) work on the deliberations surrounding the Cuban missile crisis shows that actors can coordinate their protentions perfectly while hurting their ability to coordinate a shared project (avoiding nuclear holocaust, in this case). When negotiators attended each other’s talk, following the endogenous pressures of interaction, they often precluded the deliberation of important scenarios—an oversight that could have had catastrophic effects. Thus, while trajectories are made through protentions, interactional pressures mean that they are not always aligned.

Similarly, as Eliasoph (2011) shows in her study of youth volunteers, the fact that some of these volunteers were middle-class kids on their way to college, while other were “high risk” youth, often mattered for interaction in unexpected ways. While youth volunteers could usually coordinate their action, at certain junctures, the imagination of how action was connected to futures—buffing up their CVs for college versus “staying out of trouble”—created moments of tension that needed to be smoothed over.

This, as we return to in more detail in the following, means that we have to incorporate potentiality, imagination, and anticipation into the analysis of “the situation.” Although there are, as Goffman and others showed, interactional pressures endogenous to the situation, these are importantly modulated by our imaginations and anticipations. To return to the example of Ford (2017), while there are Goffmanian pressures toward “interactional smoothness” in any situation and people often don’t stop a sexual encounter simply because it “would be weird,” such endogenous pressures become all the more pressing when coupled with the threat of swift change in the definition of the situation. Thus, a “situation” is never contained. It emerges from the past through our habits of thought and action and sends its tentacles into a future without which we cannot understand its shape.

Rhythms and Social Life

So far, we have talked about the future in a relatively linear way. Whether in terms of protentions, trajectories, or temporal landscapes, it seems as if we move forward in time, so that even in the tiny moments of protention things are propelled inextricably forward. This is, for some projects, a good enough account of the future. Most expectations of social life, however, are not so linear. People instead experience their life in a “wave form” (Bachelard 2000:145). While we move forward in time, we spiral through the familiar rather than take a beeline to our destination. Most domains of our life are rhythmic, a “patterned movement of presences and absences” (Snyder 2012:16). Both the calendars of religious and secular life are rhythmic (Eliade 2005; Leach 1961). The time for festivals and commemorations recur, rituals are reenacted.

To invoke the classics (itself a rhythm of sorts), for Durkheim ([1912] 1965) our very experience of time emerges out of the presences and absences of the sacred and the profane. As Susanne Langer (1953:127) put it, “one can sense a beginning, intent, and consummation, and see in the last stage of one the condition and indeed the rise of another. Rhythm is the setting-up of new tensions by the resolution of former ones.”

These rhythms are crucial for our coordination of action (Zerubavel 1985, 1989). This is true both for the way we imagine our temporal landscapes as it is for more mundane expectations of organizations, social worlds, and relationships. Thus, while the French revolutionaries made deep changes to French society, their attempt to change the week has been a dismal failure as it was deeply woven into the fabric of market days and other communal activities. Organizations, as he has shown earlier, can be understood precisely as a coordination of different rhythms that both patients and staff live through.

Such rhythms, as the work of Summers-Effler (2007, 2010) shows, are also important for the emotional involvement of organizational actors. Rhythms of organizational life (and especially for her, the life cycle of its emergence, stability, and collapse) are laid over the actors’ trajectories in them. Thus, beyond coordinating action and constructing future-anticipations, Summers-Effler argues that the emotional entrainment of actors cannot be understood without accounting for the moment in which they enter the organization and the kinds of “vortexes” of involvement that organizational rhythms give rise to.

This focus on organizations and their rhythms may be further widened. A “social world” can be defined precisely as a set of rhythms. As I tried to work through (Tavory 2016), the experiential “density” of the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood I studied came precisely through the overlapping of rhythms. The schools, synagogues, observances of the holidays, religious classes, and life course events all “colluded” so that actors were constantly summoned into being in a myriad of complementary ways. Coser’s (1974) evocative notion of a “greedy institution” pulling people in both in terms of identification and action can be specified precisely through looking at the relationship among these rhythms and the identifications they evoke. A “greedy social world” such as the one I described emerges through the thick overlaying of rhythms. And while these rhythms may clash at points (Should I go to one synagogue event or another? Where should I invest my tithe?), they evoke a similar identification.

This kind of analysis, mapping the way in which actors’ experience of social life is comprised of different rhythms coming together and drawing apart, is indebted to LeFebvre (2004). As he put it in his Rhythmanalysis, much of social life can be captured in terms of the relationships between different rhythms. Whether it is the inculcation of personal rhythms in what LeFebvre called the “dressage” of social life, or the wider intersection of rhythms (some of which are social, others natural) through which we live. This theorization of social life in turn defines new objects of analysis. There are rarely moments of “eurythmia,” when different rhythms seamlessly come together (on the level of identification, the example of my above work may be such a case). But there are also, much more commonly, situations in which multiple rhythms take place side by side, or situations of “arrhythmia,” when the rhythms we live through clash.

This clashing of rhythms structures Snyder’s (2016) work on the work of truck drivers. As Snyder shows, truck drivers are located between two kinds of temporal rhythms. On the one hand are the rhythms imposed on them by federal “hours of service” work regulations, which dictate periods in which they need to rest and work. They cannot work more than 14 hours straight and must rest for 10 hours after 11 hours of driving. On the other hand, however, are the rhythms of freight work—of loading and unloading, fluctuations in traffic, night and day. Snyder shows that these rhythms rarely align. Instead, the hours of service regulations that were supposed to get the drivers to rest more and drive safely come to mean that they often feel like they need to use all the allotted driving time even if they are tired; that they spend long times without driving when wait times make them “go over” their 14 hours. Thus, as Snyder shows, the clash of rhythms is translated to even longer hours of wakefulness and makes it harder to make ends meet. The drivers’ bodies and salaries end up bearing the cost of arrhythmia.

Between Situations

While the above shows that futures and rhythms are important, the question is still what, if anything, this rhythmic approach means for an interactionist project and sociological theory more generally.

As with the encroachment of the past through the pragmatist notion of habits, one poignant lesson is that interactionists cannot limit themselves to the present-progressive confines of the situation. While the “jazz” of social action occurs in interaction, the embodied memories that actors bring with them to the situation and how they anticipate the situation in relation to future situations (which is, again, a habit of sorts) are crucial. Playing a regular gig in a small dive bar will be different if the players know that a recording studio agent is sitting in the audience. And once we acknowledge that such anticipations are patterned, this necessarily takes us back to something like the notion of culture. While interactionists still need to show which pasts and futures are relevant in interaction, any accounting of the situation that ignores these shared patterns of meaning would be incomplete.

At this point, two intertwined critiques may be leveled against the project developed in this paper: the one culturalist, the other analytic. From the first point of view, one can read this work as a late interactionist mea culpa. We should have looked at culture more carefully to begin with. And now, in a long-winded way, we are finally rediscovering the wheel. The second critique, coming from a very different sensibility, would be something like the following: Despite their limitations, theories of interaction and the interaction order have gotten us traction precisely because they shaved away—methodologically and analytically—aspects of both pasts and futures. Now, in a kind of Borges-like dash to capture reality in all its complexity, we are adding layers. But with each addition, the analytic power of our description diminishes. And at the end, we may have a good description of what occurs within a particular interaction but very little analytic purchase on general patterns of social life.

Both these critiques are useful. If indeed we lose the dynamics of interaction in our effort to incorporate its future, we would be trading a temporal perspective for what made interactionism interesting to begin with. Nor is point to “complicate” interactionist analyses. Simply adding complexity for its own sake, as Healy (2017) notes in his understated critique, is analytically unhelpful.

Rather, my argument is that being more attentive to rhythms helps us approach some core theoretical questions in new ways, define new questions, and craft new solutions for old questions. First, within the confines of interactionist theory: What does it mean for the interaction order that we are pitched into the future? Do futures simply modify the pressures of the present progressive, or do they change them more radically? Second, thinking between situations should also change the way we think about culture. Locating actors between situations needs to add something to the way we understand meaning-making more generally.

In short, for the approach developed here to be more than a theorist’s version of inside baseball, it needs to make a difference. In the following, I map out two theoretical problems that this approach helps us think through. Following the above considerations, I have chosen puzzles that are embedded in two different sociological worlds—one relates to core aspects of interactionist theory, the other to tenets of cultural sociology.

Disruptions as Constitutive of the Interaction Order

The first problem, culled from ongoing work with Gary Fine, is that of importance of disruption to the interaction order. In interactionism—from the symbolic interaction of the Chicago school, through the work of Goffman, as well as in conversation analysis—the pressures of interaction are towards a “successful,” smooth exchange. For Chicago interactionists, negotiating and reaching a shared definition of the situation was paramount; in Goffman’s early work (e.g., 1959, 1967) “the veneer of consensus” is both a practical requirement of interaction and an aspect of what Rawls (1987) insightfully described as a “communicative morality” of interaction. Theoretically, the focus on smoothness both allowed interactionists to theorize how lines of action are brought together and coordinated as well as the mundane and artful ways in which we achieve intersubjectivity—the capacity (even if limited) to experience the other.

The problem with this image, however, is that both the coordination of action and intersubjectivity rarely arise through the smoothness of interaction alone. First is the problem of intersubjectivity. There is compelling work in conversation analysis about the ways in which people constantly calibrate their talk and thus repair disjunctures in interaction to achieve intersubjectivity (see Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 1992). The mechanics of turn-taking and especially “interactional repair,” as Schegloff poetically put it, are the “last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity.”

We note, however, that a completely smooth interaction may be quite unnerving precisely from the point of view of intersubjectivity. If the other party to interaction constantly agrees with us, we may slowly come to suspect that there is nothing behind the veneer of consensus and that we do not actually know with whom we are talking—what we call “the cocktail party dilemma.”² Smoothness can thus create problems of intersubjectivity much as it can solve them. Not simply a matter of theoretical speculation, these kinds of interactional problems routinely emerge in situations where smoothness is best achieved.

Rather than smoothness alone, we argue that intersubjectivity, especially in ongoing relationships, emerges from the back and forth between moments of smoothness and disruption, through the ways in which actors challenge each others’ definition of the situation and the definition of the actors populating it, recalibrating it over and again (see also Katz 1999). While interactional disruption is theorized as a disruption of the interaction, such disruptions are often productive disruptions for interaction.

But it is in the coordination of action where the importance of futures comes to the fore. The idea that a “veneer of consensus” coordinates action in the situation is powerful. But smoothness, in itself, coordinates action only within the situation. Indeed, in a fleeting situation, where parties will probably not see each other again, smoothness is the most important way to coordinate action (although interestingly, it is also where repercussions of disruption may be minimal). The focus on smoothness is intimately connected to the assumption that the interaction order needs to “stay within” the bounds of the situation. However, if we assume that actors live between situations—that they need not only coordinate their present situation but also anticipate their futures—the importance of interactional disruption comes to the fore.

In this sense, relationships appear as anticipatory structures. An interaction with a close family member—even if the interaction is fractious—is usually assumed to be one moment in a cadence of interactions. Whether or not we disrupt the interaction, even quite radically, we assume we will see each other again, come the holiday season or Thanksgiving. Indeed, keeping with a Goffmanian “morality of interaction” in such situations may itself seem to be an affront. As Tannen (2001) puts it, intimate relationships are often marked precisely by disruption. The adage “I am only saying this because I love you,” clichéd as it is, points toward the complex relationship between the interactional moment and broader relational expectations. Even if the interaction is disrupted, the relationship may not be. Actors, within the confines of the situation itself, will expect it to be stitched together later.

Thus, that people experience the interaction as part of a rhythm of interaction that forms a relationship is crucial for the theory of the interaction order. It means that the pressures of interaction toward smoothness are variable and that for most interactions, the question is how moments of smoothness and disruption alternate. In that, it opens up questions that interactionists have often been reluctant to take on—it assumes that cultural expectations necessarily invade the situation and opens up questions about the distribution of the ability to disrupt situations. It does so, importantly, from within interactionist theory. For it is not simply that smoothness is the domain of interaction and disruption where broader cultural and relational expectations come to the fore. It is, rather, that the alternation between smoothness and disruption is what the interaction order is made of.

Boundaries and Distinctions

While the issue of “disruption” allows us to see that relational anticipations and rhythms are a crucial aspect of the interaction order, the second problem I would like to raise here takes on a problem not in interactionist theory but in the sociology of culture: how to conceptualize the relationship between boundaries and distinctions, two ways in which sociologists think about the way in which actors construct social difference. As I argue, focusing on rhythms and anticipations takes us a good part of the way, but to get to interaction and its rhythmic anticipations, I first need to set the cultural-theoretical stage.

Both “boundaries” and “distinctions” are theorizations of difference that have their root in the de Saussureian semiotic tradition (see de Saussure [1916] 1986), that is, the powerful idea that stuff is defined by its relation to what it is not. The idea, however, was developed in two complementary ways: first, as binary boundaries between what is “in” and what is “out” of a category and second, as a field of differences where things are organized not in binary fashion but in a system of complex hierarchies and struggles. To put it in the language Marion Fourcade (2016) used in this forum two years ago, it is the difference between a nominal and an ordinal organization of differences—those referring to a difference in essence and those referring to a difference in relative position.

First, although already apparent in Durkheim’s work on classification (which influenced de Saussure to begin with), the notion of boundaries appeared in the form we know it later on. From political and historical sociology, it reemerged through Barth’s (1969) study of nationalism, where he shows that groups are defined by “others” across the border. And from the point of view of our categories more generally, this semiotic idea has been important to cognitive sociology, with its focus on what we lump together and what we split apart (Zerubavel 1996), and allowed to bring together substantively different topics based on their structural similarities (see e.g., Bowker and Star 1999; Lamont and Molnár 2002).

A second semiotic notion that has been crucial to sociologists is the Bourdieusian notion of “distinction.” This term in turn is intimately connected to that of “field” and connotes a relational structure of positions (Martin 2003). As with boundaries, positions are defined by where they are not. But a field is a much more complex space of hierarchically set positions—of distinction. A field implies multiple locations in relation to a center, defined as the position from which one can legitimately define the good. Rather than an idealized binary, a field is a space in which different actors vie to both move to the center of the field as well as redefine the field so that where they happen to be is retroactively defined as its center. And whereas some notions of field use it mainly as a category of analysis (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Fligstein and McAdam 2012), actors’ experience of the field as such is crucial for Bourdieu.

Thus, while the theorization of boundaries and fields are both important (and often to the same sociologists), the differences between them have not received as much attention (cf. Fourcade 2016). The Bourdieusian notion of distinction assumes a shared good and some sort of shared definition of what it means to be “at the center.” There is an “illusio” that gives a field its relative coherence. We can define the good in academia in different ways but not in endless ways. The importance of producing knowledge, of publishing, of teaching. The structures of consecration around them binds it as a field. Boundaries, on the other hand, which define the in-group and the out-group, make no such assumptions.

A field thus cannot be described as a complex set of boundaries set in space. Fields and boundaries do not connote levels of “granularity” of the same phenomena but different theoretical insights and existential relationships from the point of view of actors. In other words, although boundaries and distinctions are obviously sociological “categories of analysis,” they make certain assumptions about the experience of actors that go with them. Given that the “making of a difference” is central to symbolic boundaries, it assumes that when people make such boundaries, they experience the world—if only momentarily—in binary fashion. On the one hand, given that a shared illusio is central to Bourdieusian distinction, we assume actors make the distinctions while “sensing” (explicitly or implicitly) that they are tied together within the same field.

All of this, finally, leads to a problem that I encountered as I was doing my ethnographic work with Orthodox Jewish residents in a neighborhood in Los Angeles (Tavory 2016) and, importantly, ties it back to the question of anticipations and rhythms. In analyzing fieldnotes, in any specific ethnographic case, the difference between a “boundary” and a “distinction” seemed to lose its contours. What seemed like a sharp boundary sometimes “behaved” like a distinction, and most prominently, what seemed at times to be a distinction seemed like a boundary in many other situations. Thus, for example, although the distinction between “Jew” and “non-Jew” can be described as the key symbolic (and social) boundary for Orthodox Jews, I have been in conversations in which Orthodox Jews described conservative Evangelical Christians as, basically, “one of us”—especially when it came to gay marriage (which almost all the Orthodox Jews I talked to opposed). And then again, some of the most important axes of distinction in the neighborhood—between different strands of Orthodoxy, between newly religious and those born to Orthodox families, between Orthodox and Reform Jews—were often enacted as sharp boundaries.

What then, is the relationship between boundaries and distinctions? Is it, simply, that differences are “sometimes” enacted as boundaries and sometimes as distinctions? This would seem to fit the empirical evidence, but it completely ignores the way that actors understood their own lives. Thus, when actors reflected on their community, this form of blurring was often clarified (yes, it really is only for Orthodox Jews; and yes, although a newly religious member may be lower on the totem pole, he was “one of us”). And beyond these reflective moments, even while people enacted one kind of difference, they were aware of other situations in which these differences are made differently. Even as people told me that they felt like “outsiders,” they seldom doubted whether they were bona fide Orthodox members in most situations.

In other words, actors were aware of the rhythms of situations in which these differences were enacted and understood the situational formations of difference in this light. Whether a particular difference is understood as a boundary or a distinction is the outcome not only of the situational enactment—although it is surely important—but also of the way that actors understand this situational enactment in relation to the rhythm of other situations that they anticipate. Thus, to continue with the above, while a newly religious person would be of lesser status, they would count for the daily quorum, take part in classes offered, and be counted as dues-paying synagogue members. While a situational boundary was constructed between groups in some situations, it was transcended in many others, and it is impossible to understand the experience of difference without taking these rhythms into account.

If we are to understand the way differences are made and experienced, then, we need to take into account both the situational structure of difference making and how this situational enactment is related to other situations anticipated by actors. It is this interplay that makes this approach a theoretically and empirically generative one rather than only one that settles situational evidence and interview data. This is because this approach knits in historical instability and the possibility of change into the fabric of meaning-making. Since interactions have their creative potential and since the rhythms overlap, changes in one set of situations—either caused by external shocks or the creativity of interaction—can shift the experience of difference radically.

It is this sense that this rhythmic reorientation of the relationship between boundaries and distinctions may prove useful. We do not as yet have a good account of why it is that in some situations seemingly minor shifts produce what seem to be large-scale cultural changes (e.g., the acceptance of gay marriage in the United States). A rhythmic approach allows us to both understand the stability of cultural categories despite their situational breaching—understood against a backdrop of rhythmic anticipations—but also why changes can emerge from small situational changes. As the expectations about the rhythms of interaction shift, the entire experience of difference changes.

Anticipated Directions

The habits of anticipation and imagination we carry with us and the organizations and institutions we are enmeshed in lean into the future. In any particular case, the situation thus spills over into its anticipated futures of action, along with these futures’ patterned regularities. And if this is so, both aspects of interactionist theory and some core aspects of the sociology of culture need to be thought anew. In both cases, thinking in terms of actors’ anticipations and rhythms also opens up new empirical questions and research agendas.

In closing, I would like to offer some less structured thoughts about the directions that such a conception of interaction can take. I offer, tentatively, four such sketches.

First, as the work with Gary Fine previously described points toward, the notion of rhythm needs to be understood in relation to disruption. And more generally, rhythm needs to be understood in relation to the moments in which the regularities of social life are ruptured. This relationship takes a myriad of forms. It occurs as we attempt to domesticate the ruptures of historical events (Wagner-Pacifici 2017), as experiential careers are punctuated by moments of rupture and rapture (Surak 2017; Tavory and Winchester 2012), and as settled and unsettled times ebb and flow both historically and biographically (Swidler 1986). In all these cases, understanding how rhythms become disrupted and how these ruptures are reincorporated into new anticipations provides rich grounds for empirical studies.

Moving in this direction, however, sociologists would need to resist the urge to treat rhythm and rupture as opposing forces, the Eros and Thanatos of social life. First, in some situations, it is the moments of rupture that give rhythm its staying power. It is often the rare moment of rapture that gives meaning to the bodily discipline of religious life. But more interestingly, as different rhythms and worlds overlap, the cadence of one world may become the rupture of another. Thus, for example, as Caitlin Zaloom (2016) shows in her study of Evangelical finance, moving moments of divine presence emerge through the overlaying of Evangelical practices and the “regular” ways in which people order their finances. Things that happen regularly in the Evangelical world—such as giving small gifts of money to those who might be in need—never happen in the other. It is in the disruption of one rhythm by another that miracles are social produced.

Second, this paper has largely ignored the role of materiality. “The situation,” as I have described it, is populated solely by humans. This, however, is never the case. As actor network theorists (ANT) and others have emphasized, we are constantly enmeshed in assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. And while the interactionism I espouse here is quite far from ANT’s almost ethnomethodological suspicion of potentiality (see Ingold 2011; Latour 1993), interactionists have taken the place of objects seriously since Mead (1938) and through current interactionist syntheses (Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Knorr Cetina 2009).

How, however, are objects systematically enmeshed in setting up futures in interaction? It is almost a truism that objects set up future interactions (Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Latour 1990), and as Knorr Cetina (2002) has importantly argued, objects play an important role in setting up and coordinating interactions and anticipations—indeed, objects’ primary purpose is often the setting of such anticipations. Yet beyond its role in “setting up” interaction and the technological situation Knorr Cetina theorizes, much work remains to be done. Thus, for example, as McDonnell (2010, 2016) shows, the temporality of objects themselves matters: Colorful signs fade, plastics stay in the system long after we have finished using them, and so on. An important challenge of thinking about futures and rhythms in interaction is thus to both push Knorr Cetina’s insight forward as it is to incorporate nonhuman temporalities that interactionists usually ignore.

Then again, returning to the human actor, a third avenue opened up by such an approach brings it into closer connection to the theory of habit, selfhood, and identity. It is (mostly) through routines and rhythms that habits are inculcated. And since these rhythms, as we have shown, tend to be complex, overlapping, and seldom have a simple eurythmic structure, the landscape of habits needs to be thought through thoroughly.

Perhaps, as Bernard Lahire (2011) argued, such a rhythmic approach means that people are constantly switching between loosely connected habit-sets that are evoked by the situations they find themselves in. Such an approach does not necessarily assume a disjointed and completely situationally bound self, as some theorists were too quick to claim (e.g., Lifton 1993). Taking actors’ anticipations seriously means, precisely, that we must resist the urge to remain locked within a theory that posits a series of situationally emergent selves. It does, however, mean that sociologists should pay more attention to the moments that remain severed from each other and those in which actors connect to each other, fuse, or otherwise aggregate (see e.g., Cornelissen 2016; Tavory 2011).

Lastly, taking rhythms and anticipations seriously can provide new ways to think about the processes through which historical change occurs. Tracing how rhythms shift and how actors perceive and aggregate these shifts can help explain how local changes produce larger social “gestalt switches.” To take an example from the sociology of religion, much of the debate over “the secularization thesis” asks whether people are more or less religious or whether religious organizations are stronger or weaker than they were in earlier times (e.g., Berger 1967). Yet as a series of cogent critiques have shown, the assumptions underlying “secularization” are dubious—it is unclear how religious people used to be and how unreligious they currently are (Stark 1999), and religion appears to have become increasingly salient in the public sphere (Casanova 1994). More importantly, this kind of question glosses over a much more interesting puzzle: What happened to the place of religion so that sociologists and laypeople alike assumed secularization is taking place (Gorski and Altinordu 2008; Warner 1993)?

Approaching the question of “secularization” through anticipations and rhythms would, instead, ask in what situations do people anticipate religion to be important. The study of “secularization” then becomes a question of anticipated locations and rhythms. What we would look for in such a study is not a clean “secularization” story (for many of the reasons its critics bring up). But neither would we replace the question of religion with that of religious authority (Chaves 1994). Instead, we would look for shifts in the arenas and the moments in which people anticipate god to be invoked and evoked and the situations in which religious institutions make their appearance. And, much as with the questions of distinctions and boundaries previously, we would pay attention to the ways in which people make sense of these overlapping rhythms, aggregating the different anticipations to make sense of the place of religion in their lives.

These theoretical suggestions are, of course, but sketches. Yet I hope they are useful provocations for further theoretical development and empirical research. Thinking about anticipations and rhythms is one key to tie interactions and situations to the larger social stories we tell. It is not the key. No master key, I suspect, exists. It does not open all doors. Yet it does open certain doors, some of which we didn’t even realize existed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers of Sociological Theory for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Paul DiMaggio, Jeffrey Guhin, John Hall, Colin Jerolmack, Monika Krause, Eeva Luhtakallio, and Stefan Timmermans for talking things through.

Notes

Author Biography

Iddo Tavory is an associate professor of sociology at NYU, interested in the interactional patterns through which people come to construct and understand their lives across situations. His book Abductive Analysis (with Stefan Timmermans) provides a pragmatist account that allows researchers to make the most of the surprises that emerge in the process of research. His second book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identification, and social worlds. He is currently working on an ethnography of knowledge production in an advertising agency in New York and co-authoring a book on pro bono work and notions of worth in the advertising world. Iddo has received both the Clifford Geertz and the Susanne Langer awards for his work in the sociology of culture as well as the Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting in sociology.

References

Adam

Barbara

. 1990. Time and Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bachelard

Gaston

. 2000. The Dialectic of Duration. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press.

Barth

Fredrik

. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Beck

Ulrich

. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Becker

Howard S

. 1960. “Notes on the Concept of Commitment.” American Journal of Sociology 66(1):32–40.

Becker

Howard S

. 1982. “Culture: A Sociological View.” Yale Review 71(4):513–28.

Becker

Howard S.

Greer

Blanche

Hughes

Everett C.

Strauss

Anselm L

. 1961. Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beckert

Jens

. 2013. “Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in the Economy.” Theory and Society 42(3):219–40.

Berger

Peter L

. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

10.

Blumer

Herbert

. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

11.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1963. “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time.” Pp. 55–72 in Mediterranean Countrymen, edited by Pitt-Rivers

. Paris: Mutton.

12.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1973. “The Algerian Subproletariat.” Pp. 83–92 in Man, State and Society in the Contemporary Maghreb, edited by Zartman

I. William

. New York: Praeger.

13.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

15.

Bourdieu

Pierre

Wacquant

Loic

. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Bowker

Geoffrey C.

Star

Susan Leigh

. 1999. Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

17.

Camic

Charles

. 1982. “The Matter of Habit.” American Journal of Sociology 91(5):1039–87.

18.

Casanova

Jose

. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

19.

Chaves

Mark

. 1994. “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.” Social Forces 72(3):749–75.

20.

Collins

Randal

. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

21.

Cornelissen

Sharon J

. 2016. “Turning Distaste into Taste: Context-specific Habitus and the Practical Congruity of Culture.” Theory and Society 45(6):501–29.

22.

Coser

Lewis A

. 1974. Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment. New York: Free Press.

23.

de Saussure

Ferdinand

. [1916] 1986. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Open Court.

24.

DiMaggio

Paul

Powell

Walter W

. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48(2):147–60.

25.

Durkheim

Emile

. [1912] 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

26.

Eliade

Mircea

. 2005. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

27.

Eliasoph

Nina

. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

28.

Emirbayer

Mustafa

Desmond

Matthew

. 2015. The Racial Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

29.

Emirbayer

Mustafa

Mische

Ann

. 1998. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103(4):962–1023.

30.

Fine

Gary A

. 1979. “Small Groups and Culture Creation: The Idioculture of Little League Baseball Teams.” American Sociological Review 44(5):733–45.

31.

Fine

Gary A

. 2011. Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

32.

Fligstein

Neil

McAdam

Doug

. 2012. A Theory of Fields. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

33.

Ford

Jessie V

. 2017. “‘Going with the Flow’: How College Men’s Experiences of Unwanted Sex Are Produced by Gendered Interactional Pressures.” Social Forces 96(3):1303–24.

34.

Ford

Jessie V.

2018. “Sexual Danger: The Importance of Social Interaction and Gender Inequality in the Production of Unwanted Sex and Sexual Assault.” Unpublished Dissertation.

35.

Fourcade

Marion

. 2016. “Ordinalization.” Sociological Theory 34(3):175–95.

36.

Garfinkel

Harold

. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

37.

Gibson

David

. 2011. “Speaking of the Future: Contentious Narration During the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Qualitative Sociology 34(4):503–22.

38.

Giddens

Anthony

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

39.

Goffman

Erving

. 1959. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor.

40.

Goffman

Erving

. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. New York: Anchor.

41.

Gorski

Philip

Altinordu

Ates

. 2008. “After Secularization.” Annual Review of Sociology 34:55–85.

42.

Gross

Neil

. 2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74(3):358–79.

43.

Hall

John R

. 2016. “Social Futures of Global Climate Change: A Structural Phenomenology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4(1):1–45.

44.

Healy

Kieran

. 2017. “Fuck Nuance.” Sociological Theory 32(2):118–27.

45.

Hitlin

Steven

Elder

Glen H

Jr. . 2007. “Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency.” Sociological Theory 25(2):170–91.

46.

Hitlin

Steven

Johnson

Monica Kirkpatrick

. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429–72.

47.

Ingold

Tim

. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.

48.

Jerolmack

Colin

Tavory

Iddo

. 2014. “Molds and Totems: Nonhumans and the Constitution of the Social Self.” Sociological Theory 32(1):64–77.

49.

Joas

Hans

. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

50.

Katz

Jack

. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

51.

Knorr Cetina

Karin

. 2002. “Global Microstrucutres: The Virtual Structures of Financial Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 107(4):905–50.

52.

Knorr Cetina

Karin

. 2009. “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global Age.” Symbolic Interaction 32(1):61–87.

53.

Lahire

Bernard

. 2011. The Plural Actor. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

54.

Lamont

Michele

Molnár

Virag

. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28:167–95.

55.

Langer

Susanne K

. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner Sons.

56.

Latour

Bruno

. 1990. “Technology Is Society Made Durable.” Sociological Review 38(1):103–31.

57.

Latour

Bruno

. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

58.

Leach

Edmund R

. 1961. “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time.” Pp. 124–36 in Rethinking Anthropology, edited by Leach

E.R

. London: Athlone.

59.

LeFebvre

Henri

. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum.

60.

Lifton

Robert J

. 1993. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

61.

Martin

John L

. 2003. “What is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 109(1): 1–49.

62.

McDonnell

Terence E

. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Media in Accra, Ghana.” American Journal of Sociology 115(6):1800–52.

63.

McDonnell

Terence E

. 2016. Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

64.

Mead

George H

. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

65.

Mische

Ann

. 2009. “Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action.” Sociological Forum 24(3):694–704.

66.

Mische

Ann

. 2014. “Measuring Futures in Action: Projective Grammars in the Rio+20 Debates.” Theory and Society 43:437–464.

67.

Peirce

Charles S

. 1992–1999. The Essential Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

68.

Rawls

Ann W

. 1987. “The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 5(2):136–49.

69.

Sacks

Harvey

Schegloff

Emanuel A.

Jefferson

Gail

. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50(4):696–735.

70.

Schegloff

Emanuel A

. 1992. “Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation.” American Journal of Sociology 97(5):1295–345.

71.

Schiffrin

Deborah

. 1984. “Jewish Argument as Sociability.” Language and Society 13(3):311–35.

72.

Schutz

Alfred

Luckmann

Thomas

. 1973. The Structures of the Life-world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

73.

Snyder

Benjamin. H

. 2012. “Working with Time in Time: A Rhythmic Approach to the Problem of Time Pressure.” Presented at the Junior Theorists’ Symposium, August, Denver, CO.

74.

Snyder

Benjamin. H

. 2016. The Disrupted Workplace: Time and Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

75.

Stark

Rodney

. 1999. “Secularization R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion 60(3):249–73.

76.

Summers-Effler

Erika

. 2007. “Vortexes of Involvement: Social Systems as Turbulent Flow.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37(4):433–48.

77.

Summers-Effler

Erika

. 2010. Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

78.

Surak

Kristin

. 2017. “Rupture and Rhythm: A Phenomenology of National Experiences.” Sociological Theory 35(4):312–33.

79.

Swidler

Ann

. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 5(2):273–86.

80.

Tannen

Deborah

. 2001. I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You’re All Adults. New York: Ballantine.

81.

Tavory

Iddo

. 2011. “The Question of Moral Action: A Formalist Position.” Sociological Theory 29(4):272–93.

82.

Tavory

Iddo

. 2016. Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

83.

Tavory

Iddo

. Forthcoming “Occam’s Razor and the Challenges of Generalization in Ethnomethodology.” In Harold Garfinkel: Praxis, Social Order, and the Ethnomethodology Movement, edited by Heritage

Maynard

. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

84.

Tavory

Iddo

Eliasoph

Nina

. 2013. “Coordinating Futures: Towards a Theory of Anticipation.” American Journal of Sociology 118(4):908–42.

85.

Tavory

Iddo

Winchester

Daniel

. 2012. “Experiential Careers: The Routinization and De-routinization of Religious Life.” Theory and Society 41(4):351–73.

86.

Thévenot

Laurent

. 2006. L’Action au Pluriel. Paris: La Découverte

87.

Wagner-Pacifici

Robin

. 2017. What Is an Event? Chicago: Chicago University Press.

88.

Warner

Stephen

. 1993. “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 98(5):1044–93.

89.

Zaloom

Caitlin

. 2016. “The Evangelical Finance Ethic.” American Ethnologist 43(2):325–38.

90.

Zerubavel

Eviatar

. 1985. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

91.

Zerubavel

Eviatar

. 1989. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

92.

Zerubavel

Eviatar

.1996. “Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification.” Sociological Forum 11(3):421–33.