The constant threat of annihilation hangs over both the in- teraction and the social selves in and through whose commitments and performances it is created and sustained: "When an incident occurs and spontaneous involvement is threatened, then reality is threatened"

For Goffman, not only is strategic interaction only one form of action, but it is quite clear that he believes an injunction against strategic interaction is embedded in the "working consen- sus."11 "When an individual senses that others are insincere or af- fected (in their assumed role), he tends to feel that they have taken unfair advantage of their communication position to pro- mote their own interests: He feels they have broken the ground rules of interaction"

"Regardless of the person's relative so- cial position, in one sense he has power over the other participants and they must rely on his considerations.

What has interactional significance, however, is my attitude toward the other members of the line and toward the order of the line itself. What tells me something, what constitutes my commitment, is not the personal end but the respect of the collective accomplishment.

If a social performance can reaffirm the moral values of the community, then its acceptability will be assessed ac- cording to the degree to which it accomplishes that affirmation.

In contrast, Goffman presents a picture of constraints on interaction that are internal to interactional scenes. He paints a picture of the emergence of social order, wherein social order and meaning require a particular interactional relation between individ- ual and group. Meaning is, according to this view, a constitutive production in and through group performance. Actions do not ac- quire their meaning primarily through a direct relation to external ends. As a consequence, Goffman states, where there is "order," there must be a "working consensus."6

Meaning is an in situ creation, not conferred by a relation to institutional givens. It is for this reason that the management of impressions is a delicate and moral affair (Goffman, 1969a:84,94, 1961a:76). Inter- actions that Sartre would call simple seriality are not devoid of hu- manity and meaning for Goffman. They are, in fact, the source of the order, meaning, and morality that we bestow on the rest of the social order

Rather, the performance has meaning, in particular a moral meaning, through its relation to the interaction within which it is played out

The working consensus orients toward a particular definition of the situation, which includes status and roles. But for different settings there will be different definitions of the situation, some of which include status and some not. In my classroom, for instance, I can effectively maintain my social superiority by successfully performing as a teacher. Goffman is careful to point out, however, that I can do so only through the cooperation of others. When I go home on the trolley, however, the definition of the situation does not include any particular sta

Goffman (1959:30) stresses the need for the performance in order for meaning to be achieved. It is not that I must play out a certain performance because I am a tailor or a grocer but that in order to claim to be a tailor or a grocer I must perform the part:

The dramaturgical qualities of action are in a certain way parasitic;

One thus forgets that the truth of any interaction is never entirely to be found within the interaction as it avails itself for observation.

I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructiv- ism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Levi-Straus- sian tradition. By structuralism or struc- turalist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations. By con- structivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notably those we ordinarily call social classes

convention contract in general (whatever it happens to be), nor personal belief in the ulti- mate value of the particular norms that are involved. Individuals go along with current in- teraction arrangements for a wide variety of reason

Roger Barker reminded us with his notion of "behavioral setting," the regulations and expectations that apply to a particular social situation are hardly likely to be generated at the moment there. His phrase, "standing be- havior pattern," speaks to the fact, reasonably enough, that quite similar understandings will apply to a whole class of widely dispersed set- tings, as well as to particular locations across inactive phases. Further, although a particular behavioral setting may extend no further than any social situation which two or more partici- pants generate in its precincts-as in the case of a local bar, a small shop floor, or a domestic kitchen-other arrangements are frequent. Factories, airports, hospitals, and public thor- oughfares are behavioral settings that sustain an interaction order characteristically extend- ing in space and time beyond any single social situation occurring in them

bodily displays are enacted and in which all bodily displays are read. Thus the warrant for employing the social situation as the basic working unit in the study of the interaction order

The characterization that one individual can make of another by virtue of being able directly to observe and hear that other is organized around two fundamental forms of identification: the categoric kind in- volving placing that other in one or more social categories, and the individual kind, whereby the subject under observation is locked to a uniquely distinguishing identity through ap- pearance, tone of voice, mention of name or other person-differentiating device

conceptualize these effects, great or small, so that what they share can be extracted and an- alyzed, and so that the forms of social life they derive from can be pieced out and catalogued sociologically, allowing what is intrinsic to in- teractional life to be exposed thereby. In this way one can move from the merely situated to the situational, that is, from what is inci- dentally located in social situations (and could without great change be located outside them), to what could only occur in face-to-face as- semblies

Always of course the fact of social situatedness can be expected to have some consequence, albeit sometimes appar- ently very minor. These consequences have traditionally been treated as "effects," that is, as indicators, expressions or symptoms of so- cial structures such as relationships, informal groups, age grades, gender, ethnic minorities, social classes and the like, with no great con- cern to treat these effects as data in their own terms.

socially situated

that the contained elements fit to- gether more closely than with elements beyond the order; that exploring relations between orders is critical, a subject matter in its own right, and that such an inquiry presupposes a delineation of the several social orders in the first place; that isolating the interaction order provides a means and a reason to examine di- verse societies comparatively, and our own historicall