In this chapter I focus on the manner in which people engaged in social encounters contribute to the ongoing nature of society and how society in turn influences the daily activities of individuals. This raises questions about the extent to which people are free and creative in their social lives and the degree to which they are hedged in by social constraints and the obligations of social arrangements and circumstances. In more formal terms I shall be dealing with various aspects of the problem of social production and reproduction. My argument will be that it is necessary to examine these terms in some detail and to unpack the issues associated with them in order to develop a multidimensional view of these social processes.
Particularly important in this respect is the idea that from the individual’s point of view, we can distinguish between psychological reality and social reality although the two are intrinsically interrelated. Furthermore, our understanding of this social reality requires us to distinguish between internal and external aspects of social constraint and enablement. It is necessary to rescue this feature of social analysis from those approaches that would abandon the idea of an external social reality (and the notion of external constraint), by collapsing it into the notion of an intersubjective world. The view that all reality is a social construction effectively denies the distinct characteristics of psychological phenomena and situated activity both of which have their own partly independent features.
Next I move to a discussion of the nature of social interaction and discourses. In this respect the notion of discourse connects with the analysis of social reproduction and production in ways not envisaged in Foucault’s own work (and subsequent poststructuralist analyses in general). I also examine some of Habermas’s ideas on the nature of communicative action and suggest that there is a connection between his work on validity claims and the push towards shared understanding, with the analysis of discourse and subjectivity. Having made these connections I develop some of Goffman’s ideas on the “interaction order”. Goffman is a key figure in sociological analysis but the linkage between his work and that of the classical sociologists (particularly Durkheim) have been overlooked. In this respect he has closer affinities with various forms of objectivism than others have assumed. For my purposes Goffman’s notion of an interaction order that is loosely coupled in various ways with other social orders is an essential ingredient of the theory of social domains.
This discussion feeds directly into an examination of the processes of social production and reproduction as they manifest themselves in face-to-face conduct.
Lifeworld and system have to be treated as parallel social domains in which different aspects of creativity and constraint are worked out in the context of very different social conditions and circumstances. Many theorists have neglected this distinction and tended to treat production and reproduction as rather uniform and mechanical processes that
operate within a similarly uniform social landscape. Despite the vast differences in their starting points and the implications of their approaches, writers as divergent as Foucault, Giddens, Blumer and Garfinkel are at one on this. For very different reasons these writers overlook the mediating influence of situated activity (as it is shaped by the partly independent effects of the interaction order) and as it articulates with social system elements. Also, as I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2, day-to-day conduct is an inherently emotional enterprise in which elements of unique psycho-biographies are impressed upon, and become constitutive of, the emergent nature of encounters. The role of psychological and emotional factors in the processes of production and reproduction must therefore be registered in our theories.
The nature of social constraints
Constraints have to do with the manner in which social behaviour is both facilitated and limited by social circumstances and arrangements. In this respect they may be treated in a similar fashion to the analysis of resources since indeed they can be understood as types of resources (such as cultural, discursive phenomena) that shape activity. My fundamental argument is that social constraints exist in three dimensions—they possess an internal (subjective or psychological) existence, an external one as an aspect of social systems (including both the domains of settings and contextual resources) and an intermediate one as the lived experience of situated activity. Certain dominant trends in social theory seek to abandon the idea of external constraints explicitly (as in the case of Giddens and various ethnomethodologists and symbolic interactionists) and adopt a position in which social forces are understood as entirely internal to an ongoing intersubjective process. These approaches fail to appreciate that interaction is but one social domain among others that are equally important in the analysis of creativity, constraint and the reproduction of social life. Other forms of social constructivism that reject a phenomenological starting point (as found in Foucault or Elias) and opt for some synthetic unifying principle (such as discourse/power or “figurations” or “process analysis”) conversely fail to recognize the importance of both the interaction order and the realm of psychobiography in the constitution of social life.
Unless the three different but related aspects of constraint are acknowledged then social analyses will deploy a faulty and very limited notion of constraint. Although it is easier for sociologists to acknowledge that the social world is a source of constraint that is, in principle, external to individuals it is harder for certain of them to acknowledge that social constraints may be distinguished in terms of their existential status in the social world. Thus constraints as they are experienced and enacted in face-to-face encounters have a status that corresponds with the thereness of the participants, the motives and reasons they have for their behaviour, and the situated or bounded character of the interaction. The virtuality of these constraints is to do with the fact that they exist in time and space only in so far as they are in the process of being employed by people in their behaviour and activities. They appear to exist only for the practical purposes of the activities of participants since when the encounter terminates they seem to “disappear” as the activity and the people themselves disperse. In the sense that specific constraints are mobilized and involved in the scene of activity then they can be said to be evanescent.
For example individuals may feel constrained to display “involvement” in some talk about which they have little enthusiasm (so as not to let colleagues or family members down). Once the encounter is over then this particular constraint ceases to have any hold over the proceedings and for all intents and purposes “ceases to exist” for those taking part in the encounter. However, although it ceases to exist as a factor in this situation, the general nature of “involvement obligations” continues to exist as a wider cultural constraint in the sense of being something that people need to attend to in all encounters.
In this sense it has an existence external to particular situations and represents the preconditions under which particular instances or displays of involvement are enacted.
The two are different but related. The general constraint of involvement demands that people exhibit attention to what others are saying and doing in any face-to-face encounter. In specific encounters, however, the extent to which that demand is pressing and how it manifests itself in the unfolding situation varies according to the circumstances of the encounter such as the type of relationship that the participants have with each other (family, friends, strangers), the state of the relationship (good, bad, “so-so”), the emotional tone of the proceedings (whether they getting on well with each other, whether they have had a recent argument), and so on.
So although we can understand the operation of specific constraints as internal to situated activity—a function of the emergent and ongoing nature of the encounter—how should we understand the more general cultural constraints from which they derive? In this respect we have to borrow from several traditions of thought that underline the objective character of certain social phenomena. In particular, Popper’s notion of a “third world” of objective knowledge—or knowledge without a knowing subject—is again pivotal here in understanding the “externality” of these constraints (as it was in the discussion in Chapter 3 on the nature and analysis of discourse). Such a conception of cultural knowledge and ideas as they are exemplified in art, science, language and so forth, is absolutely central to understanding the distinction between situated activity and the broader settings and contextual resources that feed into such activity.
Although these aspects of lifeworld and system are intrinsically related to each other as I have tried to make clear throughout, it is of paramount importance to view them as quite different orders of social reality with some similar—but also, crucially with some very different—characteristics. Popper’s idea of third world phenomena is a useful way of conceptualizing these features as relatively autonomous from the situated activities that make up the day-to-day substance of social life. At the same time such phenomena are not divorced from human agency or social life in any way In fact they enter into the constitution of daily life in four principal ways. First, they are themselves human products (institutions, cultural resources) that represent established ongoing social processes and conditions that influence people and help shape their activities. Secondly, they enter directly into social life as resources that people draw upon to help in the formulation and construction of their behaviour. Thirdly, as a by-product of this process these phenomena are an important ingredient of, and provide a focus for, processes of social production and reproduction. Fourthly, as Popper argues, the very fact that they have an objective existence allows them to be examined, criticized, extended, revised or completely changed. That is, their very external form makes them amenable to transformation through human activity
This particular aspect of Popper’s work is in line with a tradition of social thought that emphasizes the importance of a dualism between an internal world of subjective experience and an external world of social structures, institutions and culture (“system elements” as a generic term). This is reflected not only in the work of Habermas with his lifeworld—system distinction but also in the work of Durkheim, Marx and Parsons.
However, unlike this tradition of thought the theory of social domains accords due weight of influence to the situated character of social activity and to individual psychobiography, both of which are either muted or missing in the work of the above authors. As long as these latter amendments are brought into the equation then I feel it is possible to tap into, and borrow from, this tradition since it provides us with means by which the objective features of social life are acknowledged and given adequate weight in social analysis.
Several strands of modern social theory have tended to erode, obscure or simply reject the distinction between social practices and system elements. This includes a diversity of authors and approaches who have very different reasons for denying or obscuring the distinction. Whatever the reason, I believe that it is a mistake to take this step and that it is important to retain a notion of constraint that underscores the multidimensional nature of social reality.
What is at stake is an understanding of the independent, though related, effects of different domains on the form and functioning of social constraints and thus on social activity itself. There are a number of positions in social theory that fail to recognize the multiplicity of effects or appreciate their importance for various reasons. The work of Foucault (and poststructuralists who take their lead from him) analytically suppresses the notion of an interaction order and the importance of individual psychobiography by couching everything at a general impersonal level of discourses and practices. Now certainly this position can be brought into the service of a more embracing notion of constraint by underlining some of its important objective features. However, on its own such a one-dimensional view of social life lacks subtlety and leads to a rather mechanical view of subjectivity. Others such as symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists simply reject the idea of objective constraints because they believe that there is nothing
“external” to, or partly independent from, social activity itself.
Although expressed in a sophisticated and subtle manner, Giddens takes a very similar line on the question of what he terms structural constraint and thus his remarks provide a useful focal point for mounting a challenge to this view. The fear expressed in Giddens’
work (as it is in symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology) is that the idea of a social world which contains external properties is the product of a falsely scientific and objective line of thought in social theory as exemplified in functionalism and structuralism. On this view it is thought that sociologists have adopted a version of scientific inquiry from the natural sciences that is wholly inappropriate to the analysis of the social world. For example, in criticizing Durkheim for adopting the idea of externality in his famous discussion of “social facts”, Giddens says that “he wanted to find support for the idea that there are discernible aspects of social life governed by forces akin to those operative in the material world”. He goes on to say that “of course ‘society’ is manifestly not external to individual actors in exactly the same sense as the surrounding environment is external to them” (1984:172).
Taking their cue from Durkheim subsequent authors have adopted this false line of thinking and “have tended to see in structural constraint a source of causation more or
less equivalent to the operation of impersonal causal forces in nature” (1984:174).
Importantly Giddens suggests a corrective to this view:
Structural constraints do not operate independently of the motives and reasons that agents have for what they do. They cannot be compared with the effect of, say, an earthquake which destroys a town and its inhabitants without their in any way being able to do anything about it. The only moving objects in human social relations are individual agents who employ resources to make things happen, intentionally or otherwise. The structural properties of social systems do not act, or “act on”, anyone like forces of nature to compel him or her to behave in any particular way.
(Giddens 1984:181)
I would want to agree with Giddens that it is quite inappropriate to suggest that society is like the natural world and that it is a serious mistake to understand constraints as operating as if they were natural forces that are independent of social life in general.
However, this is not my view when I suggest that social constraints possess an external dimension. Here, I am suggesting that social constraints are multi-dimensional and that they exist in different but related forms. Thus as I have already intimated, as an ingredient of situated activity constraints are linked directly to people’s reasons and motivations in two ways. First, constraints are tied in with the emergent and variable activities and behaviours of the specific people involved in particular encounters. In this sense constraints have to do with the way in which people creatively deal with the demands produced by specific situations. Questions of how to deal with other people in situations that are always unique in some respects requires imagination, skill and knowledgeability. Thus these constraints are directly implicated in the means through which social life is accomplished by individuals and has to do with their being able to successfully manage, sustain or terminate encounters. Constraints in this sense are what interactants have to take into account about the behaviour and reputations of others included within the membrane that defines the boundaries of the encounter.
Secondly, constraints are also directly linked to people’s reasons and motivations in the sense that they form part of their behavioural predispositions that are the resultants of psychobiographical influences. Again, however, although there is a direct link with the motives and reasons of individuals, this should not lead us to assume that these subjective controls on behaviour are of the same type as those concerned with the interaction order.
Further, although it is true that a merging and melding of these two sources and types of constraints takes place in the arena of face-to-face conduct we cannot assume that this somehow “neutralizes” the effects of their different characteristics. Both of these assumptions are implicit in the view that constraints can be identified with agents”
reasons and motives (in Giddens’s scenario) or in the ethnomethodological assumption that the investigation of local practices defines the limits of social analysis (see Hilbert 1990).
To leave the analysis of constraints at the level of interpersonal processes would indeed be to reduce and limit our understanding of social phenomena to the realm of intersubjective processes—a point with which Durkheim and Marx (as well as subsequent functionalists, neo-functionalists, systems theorists as well as structuralists
and poststructuralists) all concur. While we do not have to adopt in toto the ideas and implications of any of these authors or schools of thought, we certainly have to take seriously the point that social analysis is predicated on a collectivist assumption (Alexander 1985) and that to account for social order we must begin with the premise that there is a collective or institutional level of social life in parallel with (and not reducible to) an interpersonal domain. Expressed in rather different terms we have to conceive of macro or system elements as a parallel reality that provides the society-wide context in which situated activities take place in order to conceive of society as an ordered whole in the first place. To start with interpersonal relations and to deny a macro reality leads to an image of society and social processes as random and formless (Alexander 1985).
In order to understand the importance and necessity of conceiving of social constraints in an external sense as an aspect of a wider macro reality we simply have to pose the question “how do cultural and institutional elements of social life influence people’s behaviour?” Functionalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches attempt to answer this question while many other positions in social theory cannot even pose it since they do not recognize the reality of an external macro-order. Now while functional and structural schools of thought are deficient in their analysis of human agency and subjectivity, those who wish to restrict the notion of social constraints to actor’s motives and reasons as a purely internal feature of interpersonal processes are likewise inadequate in two ways. First, they have a partial account of subjectivity because their internal account of constraint severs its connection with reproduced system elements and thus
In order to understand the importance and necessity of conceiving of social constraints in an external sense as an aspect of a wider macro reality we simply have to pose the question “how do cultural and institutional elements of social life influence people’s behaviour?” Functionalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches attempt to answer this question while many other positions in social theory cannot even pose it since they do not recognize the reality of an external macro-order. Now while functional and structural schools of thought are deficient in their analysis of human agency and subjectivity, those who wish to restrict the notion of social constraints to actor’s motives and reasons as a purely internal feature of interpersonal processes are likewise inadequate in two ways. First, they have a partial account of subjectivity because their internal account of constraint severs its connection with reproduced system elements and thus