The Interaction Order

Norman K. Denzin, Norman K. Denzin

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787695474
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together leading scholars in the area of symbolic interactionism to offer a broad discussion of issues including identity, dialogue and legitimacy. Authors move the concept of interaction order into new interpretive spaces, marking the unique contributions of symbolic interactionism to the contractions that define the postmodern social order.

PART I
FOUNDATIONS

GREGORY P. STONE (1921–1981): AN INTERPRETIVE ANALYSIS OF HIS WORK

Harvey A. Farberman

ABSTRACT

Gregory P. Stone (1921–1981) made original contributions to the fields of urban sociology, social psychology, sociology of sport, and sociological theory. His work gave rise to a set of empirically grounded concepts including nonranked status aggregates, personalization, universes of appearance, and personal and collective identity. These concepts developed over time, were based on quantitative research, and provide continuity to Stone’s work. This essay will elaborate on these concepts in order to consolidate and interpret Stone’s contribution to sociology.

Keywords: Urban sociology; social psychology; nonranked status aggregates; personalization; universe of appearance; identity

Gregory P. Stone’s (1921–1981) enduring contribution to sociology rests on the fact that, in his lifetime, American, European, and Asian sociologists recognized his original contributions to the fields of urban sociology, social psychology, and social theory as well as his pioneering work in the sociology of sport. In fact, his path-breaking work in the sociology of sport helped to establish this area as a legitimate domain of social scientific investigation.

In addition, his contributions to sociologically oriented social psychology both as coeditor of the landmark anthology Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction (1970, revised ed. 1981) which redirected the field of symbolic interaction and as a cofounder and first president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction ranks him alongside such towering figures as Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), Herbert Blumer (1900–1987), Erving Goffman (1922–1982), Anselm Strauss (1916–1996), and Howard Becker (1928–). His legacy and relevance continue to inspire contemporary inquiry and is reflected in the ongoing Couch-Stone Annual Symposium hosted by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

Stone began his academic career as an undergraduate at Hobart College, located in the Finger Lake Region of Geneva, New York. Hobart is a private, liberal arts institution with a historical affiliation to the Episcopal Church. There, he came under the influence of sociologist Leo Srole (1908–1993) and worked with him on a community survey that assessed the impact on small-town life of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Srole was called into military service in World War II before the project was completed and replaced by the political scientist Ithiel de Sola Poole (1917–1984). Stone remained with the project until he was graduated from Hobart in 1942.

In April 1943, Stone also was called into military service and was placed in a Turkish language certification program at Princeton University in 1944. This preparation was in anticipation for some sort of intelligence work. Instead, after achieving certification, Stone’s unit was posted to the European Theatre of Operations and integrated into a mortar company. For 180 consecutive days, Stone saw intensive combat in the Battle of the Bulge. His two closest combat friends, a poet and a mathematician, were killed: one during an enemy artillery barrage and the other when American bombers missed their coordinates and unloaded ordinance on frontline American positions. Stone survived these events and on April 12, 1945, as part of the 104th US Infantry Division, participated in the liberation of Nordhausen concentration camp. Stone’s (n.d.a.) prewar ambition to become an Episcopal priest did not survive his military experience.

Throughout his wartime service, Stone carried along – and studied – three books. The first was The Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing. Fearing (1902–1961) was a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, a cofounder of the Partisan Review, and a novelist who wrote about the plight and alienation of the lower and middle working classes. The second was an excursus on Marxist political economy by Harvard trained economist and cofounder of the left-leaning Monthly Review, Paul Swezey (1910–2004), entitled Theories of Capitalistic Development. And the third was a treatise on the sociology of knowledge by Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), the Hungarian-born social philosopher and sociologist, entitled Ideology and Utopia. Stone described these books respectively as easy, logical, and incomprehensible. In a handwritten, unpublished, and autobiographical fragment, he reports, “what attracted me to Chicago [University] was the brute fact that I did not understand the ‘orgiastic chiliasm of the Anabaptists’ discussed in Karl Mannheim’s book.”

Stone was in residence at the University of Chicago in the sociology department from January 1946 to September 1949 and was awarded a masters degree in 1952 and a PhD in 1959. In the sociology department, he encountered established scholars such as William Ogburn (1886–1959), Ernest Burgess (1886–1966), Louis Wirth (1897–1952), Everett Hughes (1897–1983), and Herbert Blumer; young instructors including Herbert Goldhamer (1907–1977) and Nelson Foote (1916–2012); and fellow students including Erving Goffman, Anselm L. Strauss, Howard S. Becker, and Robert W. Habenstein (1915–2011), among many others. He also was influenced by the work of other Chicago faculty outside of the sociology department including Lloyd Warner (1898–1970), from the Committee on Human Development, Robert Redfield (1897–1958), in anthropology, and Frank Knight (1885–1972), in economics. (Lloyd Warner and Everett Hughes were co-chairmen of Stone’s doctoral committee.)

Stone held teaching positions at the University of Illinois, Michigan State College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Minnesota, MN, where he spent the bulk of his academic career. At Minnesota, he held a joint appointment in the American Studies Program (where, from time to time, he lectured on the history of city planning) and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Home Economics (where, on occasion, he lectured on the social psychological importance of clothing in everyday life).

In the summer of 1977 (while I was teaching a summer session course at the University of Minnesota and living at the Stone residence), I asked Stone to identify the major conceptual contributions that he had made to the field of sociology. In short order, he came up with the following list:

• nonranked status aggregates;
• personalization;
• universe of appearance; and
• identity.

These concepts embody four distinguishing features of Stone’s work; they mark (1) the chronological development of his thought, (2) emerge out of a series of quantitative empirical studies, (3) reflect a continuity of interest in the intersection of social organization and social psychology, and (4) lay down markers that help to identify the larger intellectual problems that he was dealing with and to which these master concepts respond.

Although Stone did not mention it (and thus will not be included in this essay) he regularly gave lectures in undergraduate social psychology classes and in graduate seminars on other ideas and concepts that he did not write about or publish. Most notable, perhaps, is his development of a full-blown theory of motives that built on the earlier contributions of John Dewey (1922), Kenneth Burke (1936), and C.W. Mills (1940).

Although Stone’s work extends over many subfields within sociology, my aim here is twofold: (1) to locate each of Stone’s concepts in the problem-oriented scholarly dialogue from which it arose and (2) to discern the continuity and inner coherence of his work.

NONRANKED STATUS AGGREGATES

Upon arrival at the University of Chicago, Stone came under the wing of Lloyd Warner who, Stone surmised, had been contacted by Stone’s Hobart mentor, Leo Srole. Although Warner had an ambiguous (and contested relationship to the department of sociology), he had been conducting a decade-long empirical study of stratification systems in Newburyport, MA, a small, New England community. (The so-called Yankee City Series.) There, Warner had adopted a Weberian (as opposed to a Marxian) approach to the study of societal organization. Whereas Marx (1818–1883) had argued for the precedence of economics (and for the analysis of economic class struggle) over politics and sociability, Weber (1946), in his penetrating examination of class, status, and party, had argued for the relative autonomy of social, political, and economic institutional orders (and for the analysis of status politics). Following Weber (1864–1920), but ignoring the political and economic side, Warner focused exclusively on status groups and their usurpation and distribution of status and honor as a way of understanding how communities were organized. Based on extensive empirical research, Warner developed a rank-ordered model of social stratification. While he did not pursue an analysis of the structure of political power and economic class in the grand European sense, he did incorporate a hierarchical approach to the development of a model of the social order.

C. Wright Mills (1942) leveled a critique against Warner’s work given its neglect of political and economic matters and provoked a dialogue that ensnared Marxists and Weberians alike in a debate over which network of elites (social, political, or economic) controlled the country. Stone and Form (1953) came to the conclusion that the debate was fruitless and that attention should focus on whether Weber’s original conception of status group itself was adequate for an analysis of social order and whether it should be tied into an exclusively hierarchical model of that order. Stone’s answer was no, on both counts. In general, he believed that a vertical model of any sort, whether of the social, political, or economic, orders was unable to capture the richness, flexibility, and nuance of sociocultural reality and, in fact, had hobbled the development of sociological theory. In particular, he believed that the notion of hierarchically ordered status groups should be replaced by that of nonranked status aggregates.

Stone came to this view after having conducted considerable quantitative empirical research. For example, Stone had used Warner’s Index of Status Characteristics in an ongoing six-year study of clothing that began in 1950 and was sponsored by the (then) Michigan State College Agricultural Experiment Station and carried out by members of the sociology and anthropology departments. The research team had used Warner’s instrument for describing and discriminating status in a community survey of Vansburg, Michigan, and came up with a very different picture of the social organization of that small, south-central, county seat of 10,000 than that anticipated by Warner’s model.

Stone, (Stone, Form, & Strahan, 1954) and his collaborators, did not find a system of vertically ranked status groups, or a community ecology that reflected such a system; rather, they found that the broad middle range of the community had no discernible status reputation at all and that there actually was an ongoing status war at the very top of the community between an old line local elite and an invading horde of newcomers who recently had descended upon the community when the national-level corporations that they worked for located some divisions in a nearby area in order to take advantage of Vansburg’s supply of cheap labor. Indeed, the new cosmopolitan elite identified with national-level culture and fashion and began to set trends for the rest of the community. The status war that broke out between the old and new elites reverberated down through the community and made a shamble of what, at an earlier time, may well have been a settled status order (Stone, 1952). Instead of a vertical order, what Stone found was a configuration that looked like a “Y” that is a community bisected at the top with reverberations reaching down towards the bottom.

To interpret this situation, Stone introduced the concept “status aggregate” and distinguished it from “status groups.” He thought it more useful for analysis because, for the large middle range of the population, it did not presuppose either frequency of contact or communality among members but rather occasional, episodic, encounters characteristic of middle-mass, urban society. Nevertheless, status aggregates still refer to agglomerations of individuals who enjoy the same amount and kind of honor in a community and who tend toward a limited degree of social closure or exclusiveness. This distinctiveness, however, comes to them more by default than design; subordinate groups emulate them. Unlike status groups, status aggregates maintain only a loose monopoly over their symbols of distinctiveness so that individuals who are not objectively in the aggregate may appropriate its symbols and thus render them unreliable as indicators of actual social position. People may learn and copy the lifestyle of a status aggregate without being part of it.

In consequence, in the anonymous situations that are typical of an urbanized lifestyle, and now infiltrating small towns and small cities not to mention large ones, the dignity and honor of a status aggregate might be borrowed by those who are not objectively entitled to it. Indeed, individuals may misrepresent themselves and pass without disclosure. This may be taken to the extreme in larger urban communities, where bars, department stores, and other consumer situations provide anonymous stages upon which individuals may assume identities and play roles that are outside their normal, everyday life. (Stone refers to these situations as “status platforms” or “status transformers.”)

Stone’s (1984) research led him to believe that there was more instability than stability in the status arrangements of the average community. He was impressed enough with the phenomenon of status instability that he theorized about three of its possible modes: horizontal competition among groups, vertical polarization between groups, and totally unranked groups. The evidence from his own empirical work led him to elaborate more fully on the last of these where he pointed out that unranked groups usually voluntarily withdraw to a marginal position on the outskirts of a community and hold themselves independent of the appraisals of mainstream groups. They adopt and display esoteric symbols of expressive and intrinsic value, cultivate taste, maintain internal solidarity, and rebuff the intrusion of outsiders. They typically place a higher value on status sentiment than on economic interest and often wind up setting trends and displaying symbols that other groups eventually appropriate. At the extreme, these groups often are the bohemian artists and intellectuals that other groups first revile and then imitate.

Stone’s identification of at least three status configurations that either reflect or may precipitate community instability was a self-conscious attempt to counter the conservative image associated with studies of social status as compared to the radical image associated with studies of economic class. He asserted that there are powerful dynamics for change inherent in status conflicts and discrepancies. For example, groups that are unable to achieve an esteemed position in the overall social organization of a community, nevertheless, as Mannheim had suggested, may continue to regard themselves with dignity and solidarity by looking toward a futu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Part I Foundations
• Part II The Interaction Order
• Part III New Interpretive Studies
• Index