The Sociology of Disruption, Disaster and Social Change : Punctuated Cooperation 9781107348325, 9781107032149

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The Sociology of Disruption, Disaster and Social Change

In the wake of disruption and disaster, cooperation among members of a collective is refocused on matters of status, membership and the formation of coalitions. In an important contribution to sociological theory, Hendrik Vollmer emphasizes the processes through which disruptions not only affect, but also transform social order. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s understanding of framing and the interaction order, as well as from a range of insights from contemporary sociological theory and ethnographic, historical and organizational research, Vollmer addresses the dynamics of disaster and disaster response within the framework of a general theory of disruption and social order. It is proposed that the adjustment of cooperation in favour of coalitionforming strategies is robust in both informal and organized social settings and transcends the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ approaches currently favoured by theorists. Offering a systematic sociological analysis of the impact of disruptiveness, this book investigates how punctuated cooperation precipitates social change. h e n d r i k vo l l m e r is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bielefeld University. He is Managing Editor of Zeitschrift f¨ur Soziologie, one of Europe’s leading sociological journals, and the author of numerous articles on sociological and organizational theory.

The Sociology of Disruption, Disaster and Social Change Punctuated Cooperation Hendrik Vollmer

c a m b r i d g e u n i ve r s i t y p r e s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107032149  C Hendrik Vollmer 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Vollmer, Hendrik, 1972– The sociology of disruption, disaster and social change : punctuated cooperation / Hendrik Vollmer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03214-9 (hardback) 1. Social change. 2. Disasters – Social aspects. I. Title. HM831.V65 2013 303.4 – dc23 2012050473 ISBN 978-1-107-03214-9 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures and tables Preface and acknowledgments 1 Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9

Events and experts Social scientists facing disruptions Crises and catastrophes Punctuated equilibrium Rules and exceptions Tracing trauma The nexus of social situations Framing disruptions Conclusion

2 Framing situations, responding to disruptions 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

page vii ix 1 4 7 9 12 15 18 21 24 26

28

The framing concept Participants Disruptions Responses Keys Signs Symbols Resources 2.6 Practical sense and punctuated cooperation 2.7 Framing, strategies and fields 2.8 Conclusion

29 33 38 43 47 50 51 52 56 62 67

3 The social order of punctuated cooperation

69

3.1 Containing participants 3.2 Involvement in punctuated cooperation Engrossment Rekeying Practical sense and private deliberations Emergent context Transcendence 3.3 Endogeneity and selectivity 3.4 Normalizing disruptions 3.5 Towards change in strategies and fields 3.6 Conclusion

71 77 78 79 82 85 87 90 95 102 106

v

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Contents

4 Organizational stress, failure and succession 4.1 Formally organized cooperation Formal expectations Keys Upkeying and downkeying 4.2 Upkeying and downkeying organizational stress Organizational stress and emergent order Threat-rigidity effects Rekeying punctuated cooperation 4.3 ‘Nothing succeeds like succession’ Socializing newcomers Enter: the successor Elementary contingencies Keys and coalitions The struggle for social capital 4.4 Framing organizational failure 4.5 The high-reliability challenge 4.6 Conspicuous associations 4.7 Implications for organizational theory 4.8 Conclusion

5 Violence and warfare 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

Violent engagements The cohesion and disintegration of military units Hitler’s army The multiple normalizations of warfare Redistribution, domination and contention Totalizing warfare Resistance and revolution Contingent dynamics of centralization 5.6 Associating and stratifying across situations 5.7 Conclusion

6 Elaborating the theory 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

Tracing disruptiveness Theorizing change in strategies Successful strategies Punctuated equilibrium and the successes of succession Assembling empirical records Framing the relational Conclusion

References Index

107 108 109 113 118 120 123 125 126 129 130 132 134 136 138 139 145 151 155 159

161 163 169 174 179 186 187 190 192 195 202

204 206 213 217 224 227 233 235

238 269

Figures and tables

Figures 6.1 Varieties of disruptiveness 6.2 Tracing disruptiveness 6.3 Disruptiveness and beyond

page 207 209 210

Tables 2.1 Expectations and keys 4.1 Formal laminations 6.1 Expectations, keys and focus of strategies

55 115 216

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Preface and acknowledgments

My engagement with the topic of this investigation began with an intuition which, at that time, appeared to be simple enough: in responding to disruptive events, people award special attention to what other people do. When you do not know what you are facing, when you are uncertain about what to do and what to expect to happen next, following the lead given by others appears to be an almost natural and also somewhat reasonable response. I began to look for sociological intelligence supporting, specifying or, possibly, refuting this intuition. In an initial collection of empirical material, I was primarily looking at organizations in critical situations, and, more particularly, at military organizations on battlefields, thinking that my general interest in the impact of disruptiveness could most effectively be pursued through an investigation of collectives at war. I was struck early on by how personal relationships among members of the organizations I was studying unequivocally appeared to win precedence over more formal aspects of organizational structures and processes. There appeared to be something structural about this kind of change, as organizations confronting disruptions became aggregations of primary groups, coalitions and networks, working much less like bureaucracies governed through formal rules and regulations. Members seemed to effectively redistribute their attention under disruptive circumstances, withdrawing attention from formal regulations, norms or roles and reinvesting attention into one another. This pattern promised to account for a good amount of the empirical findings. Accordingly, I was hopeful to translate, on this basis, my initial intuition about people’s responses to disruptiveness into a more systematic sociological treatise. The present work is the result of a sustained effort to bring about this translation and to accommodate a good deal of empirical intelligence available in prior sociological research about how collectives respond to disruptiveness. I found a wealth of interesting case studies and a multitude of conceptual leads, but ultimately no prior account would have allowed me to trace the effects of disruptiveness from people’s ix

x

Preface and acknowledgments

temporary responses and adjustments to mid- to long-term collective outcomes without an extensive use of theoretical extrapolation. As a consequence, what started out as an attempt to utilize an apparent convergence of observations in order to develop some seemingly obvious conceptual and empirical extensions quickly turned into a wrestling match with various theoretical concepts and approaches, none of which seemed by its own devices to do justice to the topic, to my initial intuition or to the empirical data which I confronted. Most importantly, I seemed utterly unable to systematically relate the individual and structural aspects of how collectives respond to disruptions and to articulate both kinds of aspects within a single sociological framework. As I was struggling with tentative solutions and with various packagings of theoretical and empirical narrative, trying to stick as much as possible to the exploratory style of discussing empirical cases which I had originally envisaged for the project, the result was more and more turning into an exposition of theory. Through all my efforts to address ‘bigger’ collective outcomes, this theory remained surprisingly ‘micro’, whether I was exploring single social situations, organizations or collectives in a state of war. Despite an academic training to the contrary, I became stuck with a sociology of disruption, disaster and social change that addresses both the small and big collective outcomes of exposure to disruptiveness in largely microsociological terms. I had not anticipated this and it took me a while to accept it. Finalizing this text for publication, I have gained some confidence that the kind of sociology which the study has to offer improves on what, to me, has remained a very suggestive but disconcertingly dispersed set of sociological evidence, a scattering of diverse ideas and findings. The run of the project has played havoc with a good share of my academic socialization but it has, somewhat ironically, left my initial intuition intact. Any progress I now feel confident to claim depends on whether the study more robustly spells out the implications of the initial sociological intuition, whether it appropriately qualifies the convergence of empirical indications and, ultimately, on whether it renders the sociological intuition and the systematic issues associated with it more researchable. Many people have commented on the project over the years and have provided valuable comments and directions. First and foremost, I would ¨ Bergmann, Bettina Heintz and Alex Preda for seeing like to thank Jorg this through as a post-doctoral thesis, my ‘Habilitation’. Andrew Abbott, Ruth Ayaß, Klaus Dammann, Wolf Dombrowsky, Jens Greve, Thomas ¨ Hoebel, Sven Kette, Andr´e Kieserling, Volker Kruse, Stefan Kuhl, John ¨ Levi Martin, Christian Meyer, Sven Oliver Muller, Klaus Nathaus, Ole ¨ ¨ Putz, Rainer Schutzeichel, Annette Schnabel, Ulrike Schulz, Veronika

Preface and acknowledgments

xi

Tacke, Hartmann Tyrell, Harrison C. White and Hendrik Wortmann all provided helpful inputs at various points. I greatly benefited from interaction and engaging discussions among colleagues within the interdisciplinary research group Communicating Disaster located at the ZiF Centre for interdisciplinary research, Bielefeld University, for over twelve ¨ months in 2010 and 2011. This research group was organized by Jorg Bergmann, Heike Egner and Volker Wulf. Sarah Hitzler and Mar´en Schorch contributed immensely to making the group work on a dayto-day basis. Christof Wehrsig read and discussed with me all parts of the manuscript through various stages of the project, and to him I am particularly thankful. I would like to dedicate this work to Mars, who was born around the time that I started the project and who died two years before I was able to finish it. I miss him.

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

Disasters can provide an exceptional opportunity for the comparative analysis of social systems. Disaster events are particularly useful for comparative purposes since they activate a variety of structures and processes with which the social system attempts to cope . . . Disaster events are also useful for comparative purposes not only in understanding the immediate adjustment of social systems but also because they are significant in understanding long-term social change. These possibilities, of course, have not been achieved. Russell Dynes (1975:21) As sociology splintered and specialized, the idea that catastrophe could inspire broad insights seems to have been lost, though some disaster researchers always knew it was there. Still, it is generally true that disasters and perceived disasters have come to be seen as special and exotic. That is a mistake. Disasters and failure are not special and exotic. They are prosaic and ordinary . . . Lee Clarke (2004: 137) Human life is one mistake after another. We make mistakes, repair them, then go on to make more mistakes. Charles Tilly (2003: xi)

Disruptions are ubiquitous in social life. The fact that things occasionally go wrong, that events frustrate expectations, that situations turn awkward and sometimes horribly awry, is congenial to the experience of everyday interaction. Many disruptions happen and attract little further notice beyond the situation in which people confront them. Only certain types of disruptions are treated as special and extraordinary and are regarded with a peculiar fascination, even by those who are not immediately concerned. It is to only some of the disruptiveness inherent in social life, notably to those disruptions impressing themselves as somewhat more drastic and consequential, that special attention is awarded, while many disruptions are more or less shrugged off as temporary irritations. It is only beyond a certain but hardly exactly certifiable limit that disruptions turn into stickier irritations, maybe into outright anger, possibly into interim confusion, and sometimes into longer collective preoccupations with what it was that turned out so remarkably, disastrously wrong. 1

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

With increasizng magnitude and relevance of a disruption, there is an intuitive sense that something is different after a disruption has taken place. In attempts to localize this difference, the impact on individuals, their biographies, their sense of order or psychological well-being tends to come into focus. Even when talking about the impact on larger sets of participants, groups and aggregate collectives, the effects of disruptiveness are often addressed in terms that originally characterized individual experience and conduct: shock, stress, frustration or trauma. In exploring disruptions, disasters and the run of punctuated cooperation within a collective, the present investigation will be concerned with developing an alternative characterization of disruptiveness and its effects – one focusing not on the life of individuals but on the state of a collective of participants who are involved in the run of social situations and, more particularly in terms of the perspective offered here, in the coordination of activities and expectations in the face of disruptiveness. Disruptions and their various kinds of effects do of course affect each participant of the activities run at a collective level in an individual fashion, but participation itself, and thus the experience of disruptions to begin with, is a result of individuals being exposed to the run of social situations. Disruptive events, like normal ones, like individual experience, individual or collective action, emerge from social situations as nexus of actual occasions in which activities and expectations are coordinated. This will be the sociological premise of exploring disruptiveness in the present study. The study will attempt to draw together the resources currently available to the sociology of disruption, disaster and social change. Its foundation is a microsociological approach that focuses attention on how events and activities coalesce as actual occasions in social situations, each of which constitutes a microcosm of which individual experience is one, but not the most essential, and surely not the most micro, aspect. In 1969, Irving L. Janis published a prominent psychological treatise about stress and frustration. Paraphrasing the opening sentences of Janis’ book and replacing ‘personal’ with ‘social’, ‘personality changes’ with ‘social change’ and ‘person’ with ‘collective of participants’, the resulting statement does come out as somewhat compatible with the direction in which the present investigation will be headed, that is, towards a major area of human behavior: [social change] provoked by stressful and frustrating events. The discussion is wide-ranging – from everyday frustrations that upset a [collective of participants] for a few hours to [social] or community disasters that may produce basic and enduring [changes in the coordination of activities and expectations]. The common theme is disruptive . . . events and the reactions they typically provoke. (Janis 1969: ix)

Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

3

That ‘personal changes’ are not merely replaced by ‘social changes’ – an expression which in contemporary sociology could just about mean anything – but by ‘changes in the coordination of activities and expectation’ represents the particular microfocus of the sociological approach to disruptions and disasters developed in this study. Certain central terms in Janis’ mission statement did not need to be replaced in order to switch from a psychological towards this sociological focus: ‘stressful and frustrating events’, ‘everyday frustrations’, ‘upset’, ‘disasters’, ‘disruptive’. The limit of the psychological analogy is represented by one conspicuous omission. The single word which I have deleted from Janis’ opening paragraph without offering a substitute in terms of the perspective offered by the present study is indicated by the ellipsis in the last sentence of the quote. This missing word is ‘external’ in ‘disruptive external events’, and this omission indicates a grave source of trouble for all sociologists, including the more macro-minded colleagues, analysing the impact of disruptions – a trouble with respect to which the present study does not and cannot present an exception. This study will – and indeed has to – address disruptions occurring strictly among participants of social situations and which in absolutely no sense take place outside of such a collective. Rather than being more specific or picky than a psychological account of disruptiveness, a sociological account of disruptiveness has to be more inclusive than a psychological one. This implies that we cannot consistently externalize psychological processes from sociological accounts of disruptions either – the sociologist has a hard time externalizing anything (Abbott 2001a: 5–6). This sociological account of disruptiveness will accordingly be hard-pressed to distribute and focus analytical attention economically; this is why it calls for a certain amount of theorizing. If the statement by Dynes (1975), at the start of this chapter, about the unrealized possibilities of a comparative sociology of disaster still stands today, despite the common intuition that disastrous disruptions have indeed often been a catalyst for social change (e.g. Kreps et al. 1994: 168–74), then the lack of an adequate sociological theory of disruptiveness clearly has something to do with it (Stallings 2002: 282–4). As the opening quotations indicate, the topic of this investigation bears upon sociological questions and ideas with a lengthy academic lineage and, many times, analytical promises attributed to social analyses of disruptions and their impact upon collectives have remained unfulfilled. For reasons the consideration of which would require a separate study, sustained sociological investigations of disruptiveness and its impact on the collective have remained marginal within the discipline. At the same time, sociologists have produced a substantial, yet discontinuous, body

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

of theoretical concepts and empirical evidence with which disruptions and their fallout can be analysed with some empirical scope and consistency – if only these resources could be employed systematically. Articulating the present approach by starting with social situations and their participants is supported by contemporary sociological theorizing and by a wide variety of empirical studies; it can draw some support from the wider academic field of the social and behavioural sciences, from psychology, economics and evolutionary anthropology. A considerable share of the ensuing arguments and observations will be directed at mobilizing a share of these disconnected resources. My aim in this introductory chapter is to demonstrate that the microsociological focus on social situations followed subsequently presents an adequate foundation for doing so. I will start by briefly taking a very general look at collective expertise about disruptions (1.1), then turn to expertise offered by social scientists (1.2). Various concepts have been utilized in order to explore the impact of disruptions: crises and catastrophes (1.3), punctuated equilibrium (1.4), rules and exceptions (1.5), trauma (1.6). This very cursory tour of concepts and potential approaches serves to corroborate and contextualize the focus on social situations as an elementary analytical footing for addressing disruptions and their collective effects (1.7). More specifically, how disruptions are framed in the run of social situations will be established as a suitable point of departure for the following chapters (1.8). The aim here is not to provide a comprehensive overview or a representative sample of everything that has been written about these topics, but to locate the current effort in the broader field of expertise about disruptiveness and to modestly claim a couple of reasons to continue in a somewhat more particularistic manner. 1.1

Events and experts

Mobilizing and categorizing theoretical concepts from a variety of sources is clearly not an innocuous enterprise. Aspects of intellectual competition are inevitably involved, and this competition tends to become particularly fierce once academic expertise for interpreting disruptions is being claimed. Accumulating the expertise which the present investigation would like to offer cannot well be separated from strategic questions of finding allies as well as audiences, of selectively making friends and enemies among experts, clients and bystanders. The question of the comparative standing and reputation of academic intelligence about disruptiveness and its collective effects leads back to the peculiar segregation of disruptions into extraordinary specimen and more or less normal specimen that was noted at the outset.

Events and experts

5

Disruptions are, to repeat, often prosaic and ordinary, matters of everyday life and, if at all matters of further concern, subject to more or less routine repair activities within social situations. In most situations, disruptions are handled by participants in ways that do not command longer-lasting attention. Buses fail to arrive or drive off early, people fail to show up or show up surprisingly, shares fail to perform or perform ‘unreasonably’ well, expectations collapse and are rearranged. All of this only occasionally requires more than a modicum of cognitive and behavioural effort from that particular section of the collective taking notice in the first place. When people begin, on the other hand, to talk about ‘disasters’ and ‘catastrophes’, they are alluding to events that are members of a narrower set of disruptions that are considered as extraordinary and severe. Concerns, for example, among couples about potential outside sexual engagements, suspicions about conspiracies or impending revolt among members of political elites, fears about drastic price movements in shares, mortgages, currencies or whole economies direct attention to events that are considered disastrous to a degree which makes their actual occurrence somewhat less than ordinary and worthy of particular vigilance. It usually is the collective interest in this special set of disastrous disruptions that provides much of the market for respective expertise and most of the drive for intellectual competition. Various experts claim to be in authoritative control of specialized knowledge about disruptiveness, struggling to receive or defend collective recognition for their particular kind of expertise. Whilst many disruptions of everyday life are being managed more or less casually, the narrower set of disastrous disruptions appears to monopolize the collective interest in disruptions, even if events within this set are generally less likely to take place, if they ever actually occur. Collective interest in the collective set of disastrous disruptions tends to correlate with the presence of some form of dramatizing discourse through which the threatening and potentially destructive character of disruptions is articulated. Some share of the drama may be made up for the sole purpose of entertainment (as in movies about earthquakes, alien invasions or illicit sexual engagements) or other forms of general education, and clearly the articulation of disruptions is subject to a wide range of motivations, with epistemic ones overall probably being somewhat marginal, possibly even among experts. In very general historical terms, the discursive resources which participants of social situations, irrespective of their motivations, are able to draw upon in articulating actual or potential forms of disruptiveness have become diversified. Arrays of discourses, disciplines and professions nowadays direct a great deal of collective effort into the marking and characterization of disruptions. Religious

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

forms of apocalyptic thinking have been supplemented by discursively supplied notions for crises, revolutions and other kinds of disastrous disruption, for example economic or ecological kinds (Kermode 1967: 93–124). Within the gamut of conceptualizations, experts compete for collective attention awarded to ‘their’ respective disasters and the particular events exemplifying or signifying them, if only potentially. Scientists have gradually managed to dispossess priests, soothsayers and, to a lesser extent, journalists and politicians. Competition among communities of experts tends to escalate once disastrous disruptions are concerned which have yet to occur and once the possibility of their occurrence cannot be assessed by laypersons and politicians. Since the latter are just the ones to be mobilized in generating and maintaining collective attention, successful experts have learned to not only to safeguard their respective bases of expert knowledge about disruptiveness but also to discursively defend the boundaries of their collectively ratified jurisdictions against contenders (Abbott 1988: 59–85). Maintaining and possibly extending expert jurisdictions about the likelihood, observation or prevention of disastrous disruptions often implies investing considerable energy into taking part in public discourse. Whilst many social scientists have been participating in disaster discourse, exponents of the experimental and laboratory sciences have generally been somewhat more adept in binding the attention of the general public to their expertise about disastrous events in a way that leaves them with unilateral command of more academic interests within the confines of their research institutions. Within these confines, they manufacture expertise with which they are able to surprise the larger collective beyond its common knowledge in fearing, expecting and confronting disastrous disruptions. Scientific resources for producing and regenerating expertise, access to which is meticulously controlled and embedded in networks of academic laboratories, methods, technologies, engineers, scientists, institutions and careers, afford organizational bases for manufacturing knowledge about disastrous disruptions. Climate change, extinction level events, global epidemics and other potential yet invisible or never to be seen disruptions thus are transformed into facts, and are able to withstand efforts at deconstruction waged against them by laypersons or by experts from competing fact-building networks. Considering the success with which scientists and engineers have been spanning technoscientific networks (Latour 1987) from theoretical concepts to measures and instruments, from fieldwork and laboratories to centres of calculation, and back to theoretical concepts, in support of claiming and forecasting disastrous disruptions, the social sciences, and most notably sociology, appear to have mostly been content with

Social scientists facing disruptions

7

serving as suppliers of terminological gloss. Among social scientists, experts at discursively rearticulating disruptions appear to outnumber those researching them by a large margin, and social-scientific expertise generally tends to remain vulnerable to challenges by other groups of experts. Numerous disaster myths prevail despite sociological evidence against their validity (Fischer 2008). The present study cannot set out to design or simulate a social-scientific fact-building network that would be able to manufacture facts about disruptions matching the resilience afforded by the facts of contemporary technoscience. Furthermore, facing competition for collective resources, the need for intellectual adversity in this respect is easily overstated. What the present study would instead like to achieve is an improvement in the conditions for forming and extending networks of expertise in which sociologists can claim a role of their own. Where are the intellectual allies for this endeavour? 1.2

Social scientists facing disruptions

Regrettably, much of the blame for sociologists’ competitive disadvantages in addressing disruptiveness needs to be laid at the doorstep of sociological theory. The work of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the advocator of sociological theory with the most permissive understanding of its purpose and potential public relevance, is a perfect representative of how theorists have been confronting the phenomenon of disruptive events by claiming significance of the general subject while practising neglect with respect to systematically accumulating conceptual and empirical intelligence about disruptiveness. On the one hand, the potential conceptual and empirical significance of disruptions surfaces in Giddens’ discussion of ‘critical situations’ at a central point in his main theoretical essay. The notion of critical situations serves Giddens well enough to illustrate some of his dearest analytical concerns, like the routinization of social life and the quest of participants for ontological security (Giddens 1984: 60–4). At the same time, he cuts the analysis of critical situations short by contending he has tackled the issue ‘in a certain amount of detail elsewhere’ (Giddens 1984: 61). Tracking down Giddens’ reference to himself, the reader is directed to his Central Problems in Sociological Theory, only to find this treatment ‘in a certain amount of detail’ to make for another five pages (Giddens 1979: 123–8). The fact that this amount of detail may be considered as appropriate for investigating disruptiveness is symptomatic of a discourse in sociological theory that acknowledges the methodological significance of disruptions for analysing social order but has achieved very little in elaborating it. Do such tendencies represent a conservative interest of sociological theory

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

in how social order prevails (Whyte 1956: 28–9)? At the same time sociologists generally do cherish unusual phenomena more than common and ordinary ones (Brekhus 1998), and many instances of empirically focused explorations can be found in the literature. There is, for example, a rich tradition of disaster research (e.g. Kreps 1984; Quarantelli 1994; Clausen et al. 2003; Rodr´ıguez and Barnshaw 2006). There is also ample sociological intelligence about the systemic risks of disaster inherent in the development of contemporary society (e.g. Turner 1978; Pedahzur et al. 2003; Henderson 2004). There is a great wealth of case studies of solid quality, and, of course, these studies involve the use of sophisticated theoretical concepts, some of which will lend themselves to the present investigation quite easily during the next couple of chapters. Particularly within the more specialized genre of disaster research, however, there has always been the ‘seductive lure of “policy-oriented research”’ (Quarantelli and Dynes 1977: 44), and theoretically ambitious sociologists have done little to involve disaster researchers in their discourse (Quarantelli 1994: 41–2). The trend of ‘increased separation between basic and applied research and between theory and empirical research’ (Dynes and Drabek 1994: 20) has been set to continue – and what could possibly stop it? There is not a single theoretical paradigm offering a systematic sociological vocabulary for making sense of disruptiveness across its different manifestations, and no analytical meta-framework would lend itself easily to aligning the diverse forms of empirical data and conceptual offerings. It is one particular aspect of the failure by sociological theory to welcome and further develop expertise for disasters and disruptions at the heart of the academic discipline that sociologists have not produced an understanding about how disastrous disruptions relate to the ordinary troubles which researchers like Erving Goffman have been investigating. The difference between such types of disruptiveness may be less categorical than is superficially apparent. Ordinary troubles in everyday interaction annoy or embarrass some participants while remaining tangential to a majority of others (e.g. Goffman 1974: 350–8) – but is this not the case with any kind of disastrous disruption? If the house in which you live burns down, this may be catastrophic for you, for your house-mates or your family – but is it a collective disaster? There is no sociological framework able to analyse the incidence of disruptions within a continuum ranging from the trite to the cataclysmal, and little understanding of the social forces driving apart the opposite ends of the continuum. There is, however, also no a priori reason why such a framework could not be constructed by utilizing some combination of concepts which sociologists and their colleagues in neighbouring academic disciplines have

Crises and catastrophes

9

been putting to work in exploring disruptions from minor to disastrous ones. Whilst the following list is far from comprehensive, disruptions have been analysed using notions such as crisis and catastrophe, punctuated equilibrium, the state of the exception, or trauma. A brief and very cursory review of such efforts needs to suffice here to make initially plausible the special promise of reconstructing the field from an analysis of social situations congenial to the sociology of disruption, disaster and social change. The convergence of certain developments within sociological theory that allow this reconstruction to take place will be more extensively explored in the next chapter. 1.3

Crises and catastrophes

Analyses of disruptions are often accommodated in broader historical narratives as distinct episodes within the general trajectory of a collective. A more specific way of providing analyses of a particular class of collectively highly disastrous disruptions is to investigate them as transitory events between specific historical manifestations of social order. Perhaps the most common rubric under which social scientists have discussed such in-between episodes is the notion of crisis. Treating disruptions in this manner not as discrete events but as elements of more extended episodes within a collective history is associated with a couple of analytical advantages and disadvantages. Reporting the imminence of some crisis has been a major asset of sociological expertise with respect to disruptiveness and it has often been intrinsic to attempts at getting this expertise collectively recognized. Crisis discourse has been congenial to the discourse of progress since at least the nineteenth century (Sztompka 2004: 156). By engaging in crisis discourse, social scientists have been catering to an apparent collective demand (to some extent generated by themselves) for interpreting disruptions, contradictions or paradoxes confronting collectives through various episodes of social change. Notions of crisis have been attuned to reinterpreting discontinuities within various aspects of social life, whether in economic development (Schumpeter 1934; Mandel 1978: 438–73), the history of ‘enlightenment’ (Koselleck 1988; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), in ‘industrial society’ (Birnbaum 1969), its legitimacy (Habermas 1988) or growth (Meadows et al. 1972), or by combining a selection of such aspects in broader models of crisis systems (e.g. Farazmand 2004: 349–51; Marshall and Goldstein 2006). More than occasionally, it seems that sociology is ‘dominated by crisis talk’ (Holton 1987: 502). Whilst failing to produce a general theory which would account for how

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

different manifestations of social order turn critical, crisis discourse within sociology has intimately been associated with a cycle of crisis fashions correlated to fluctuations in public discourse. This has resulted in crisis discourse in which ‘fashionable semantic predispositions look out for supporting theories . . . The glitterings of success, of being mentioned, of gaining reputation may have seduced sociologists to deliver the formulations’ (Luhmann 1984: 68). More analytically speaking, crisis discourse is congenial to sociological theories which try to make empirical predictions about the course of history. Investigating disruptions in terms of crisis turns analysts’ attention from the specifics of particular disruptions to imbalances and discontinuities inherent within manifestations of social order as explored by the respective sociological theory. This theory allows analysts to award disruptions a meaning that transcends the set of historical occasions immediately associated with their impact. Crisis theories investigate disruptions as predicated by longer historical processes and structures, and often the collectives and elements of social order in question are regarded as having been on the brink of a critical transformation to start with. Disruptions are thus seen as endogenous to social order since their actual occurrence can be determined by structural analyses that identify the relevant disequilibria (e.g. Milburn et al. 1983: 1143–8; Fligstein and McAdam 2012: 176–8). This implies that the historical specificity of the events bringing disruptions about is gradually marginalized, and the understanding of historical discontinuities is primarily determined by a theoretical estimate of alleged continuities inherent in social structures or processes.1 The contradictions which are deemed critical are considered as temporary correlates of larger continuities, and without assuming some robustness of the structures and processes associated with them, a respective developmental theory incorporating crises episodes would not be possible (cf. Hopkins and Wallerstein 1996b). Crisis theories, with historical materialism the prime exhibit, accordingly run the risk of appealing to deterministic assumptions about historical processes (Popper 1950: 274–81). They turn disruptions into dependent variables within conceptual architectures that tend to be incompatible with one another. Despite the fact that disruptions as discrete historical events are methodologically marginalized in this line of analysis, it would be too rash to altogether discount the possibility that valuable conceptual leads 1

Space does not allow here to discuss more comprehensively the general issues of theory construction in historical sociology, e.g. with respect to whether a marginalization of historical specificity inherent to theorizing disruptions in terms of crises is generally defensible or avoidable (cf. Calhoun 1998; Mahoney 2004).

Crises and catastrophes

11

may be gained from crisis discourse. Most particularly, the mathematical theory of catastrophes (Thom 1975; Zeeman 1976) may help to distil knowledge about potential dynamics of endogenous social disequilibria from crisis theories. This theory is trying to describe in formal terms how the interaction of continuous variables might produce highly discontinuous effects (Jiobu and Lundgren 1978: 30; Turner 1978: 153–8). The impact of this theory on social science, however, has so far been scant and largely limited to an initial experimental adoption of concepts towards the end of the 1970s (Jiobu and Lundgren 1978; Fararo 1978). Its lack of impact cannot be attributed to any intrinsic logical weakness of catastrophe theory. It results from a lack of ideas of how sociological data could be systematically related to the dynamic models of catastrophe theory. Areas of research in which such ideas have at least partially been forthcoming provide indications that applications are feasible (e.g. Scapens et al. 1981; Kauffman and Oliva 1994). Catastrophe theory and other mathematical approaches towards modelling extreme events may turn out to be of great value to the understanding of how drastic disequilibria emerge from superficially stable conditions, despite the fact that actual applications have been rare (Albeverio et al. 2006). However, neither can the mathematical understanding of catastrophes provide a substitute for an elementary sociological understanding of what constitutes a disruption to begin with, nor is it any help in selecting the respective indicators and empirical data. Rather than an adequate mathematical understanding of the catastrophic behaviour of systems, a suitable sociological theory able to inform it is left wanting.2 Analyses of crises and of catastrophes converge in addressing disruptions as temporal discontinuities between historical episodes of relative stability. Disruptions are defined by events challenging or intercepting the continuation of structures and processes by which a given configuration of social order has previously been specified by analysts. Even if the unilaterally theory-driven character of such a strategy of observation is accepted, the resulting understanding of disruptions will be confined to exploring disastrous disruptions. Both concepts, crisis and catastrophe alike, are explicitly not meant to address ordinary troubles. Nor are they applicable to Giddens’ limited set of cases with which he illustrates his concept of critical situations. Neither the concentration camps of the study by Bruno Bettelheim (1943), which is Giddens’ primary case of 2

cf. the general comments by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (2004 [1944]: 4) on the very limited success of mathematics in economics until the 1940s – a statement which, as far as crises and catastrophes are concerned, can be applied to contemporary sociology with little qualification.

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

reference, nor the organizations investigated in the fourth and fifth chapter of the present study present unambiguous instances of social order experiencing a crisis or a catastrophic collapse. 1.4

Punctuated equilibrium

On a very general level, the bifurcation of ordinary and disastrous disruptions can analytically be overcome by the assumption that certain processes endemic to the maintenance of order within a collective serve to normalize disruptions (cf. Holton 1987: 516–17). The idea that the impact of disruptions is mediated by ‘structures and processes with which the social system attempts to cope’ (Dynes 1975: 21) allows us to account for gradualization in the severity of disruptiveness. It might be seen as an initial encouragement to investigate the possibility of a unified sociological framework for investigating disruptiveness – from ordinary troubles, lapses and mere annoyances, through accidents, towards full-scale breakdowns of order. Analytical frameworks which accommodate analyses of both minor and major disruptions, as well as of both minor and massive effects associated with disruptiveness, can be found across the disciplines, and perhaps the most notable examples can be found in the realm of evolutionary theorizing. Evolutionary theorizing, following the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1862) and the naturalist Charles Darwin (1859), has long been dominated by the idea that evolution is a gradual process taking place in small incremental steps (Hodgson 1993: 89–96; Gould 2002: 146–55). The notion of punctuated equilibrium (Eldredge and Gould 1972) emerged from the attempt to establish evolutionary theory within the subfield of palaeontology (Gould 1992: 55–7). Eldredge and Gould refused to attribute the lack of fossil evidence for the gradual evolution of species to an incomplete fossil record. Instead they began treating fossil records showing uniformities, breaks and leaps, but rarely gradual developments of evolutionary forms, as accurate representations of evolutionary processes. They hypothesized a pattern of evolution in which relatively stable equilibria of evolutionary forces are repeatedly and abruptly interrupted – ‘rapid evolutionary events punctuating a history of stasis’ (Eldredge and Gould 1972: 308; italics original). In their perspective, fossil records show authentic evidence of an historical prevalence of equilibrium, and of evolutionary change not occurring gradually but rather in abrupt alterations between periods of relative stability. Social scientists have been trying to mobilize the notion of punctuated equilibrium as an expression for revolutionary change, placing it alongside Thomas Kuhn’s (1996) understanding of scientific revolutions

Punctuated equilibrium

13

in which one paradigm abruptly replaces another (cf. Collins 1988: 3–34; Gersick 1991; Romanelli and Tushman 1994). Sometimes punctuated equilibrium episodes have been introduced as complements to episodes of gradual evolution within models of social or organizational change (Gersick 1991; Sabherwal et al. 2001); sometimes the term has been used to more generally characterize tipping-point dynamics (Young 1998: 20). The distinctive promise of the punctuated equilibrium concept in overcoming the categorical (and often stereotypically imposed) difference between evolutionary (gradual) and revolutionary (abrupt) change, though, possibly has yet to be fully realized in sociology. The theory of punctuated equilibrium tries to explain both gradual and abrupt change in the context of a single theory (Gould 1982: 103–4; Tushman and Romanelli 1985: 172–3). Its proponents therefore aim to extend a research tradition predicated on ideas of gradual historical development towards recognizing empirically dominant discontinuities (Eldredge and Gould 1972: 97–8; cf. Eldredge 1992: 107–9).3 Once placed in the geological context of fossil records, the very processes accounting for the relative stability of species also account for abrupt evolutionary discontinuities (Gould 2002: 778–9). The occurrence of disruptive mutations drowned out by tendencies towards intra- and interspecies equilibria and the occasional collapse of these equilibria are analysed within a single framework, demonstrating that an appropriate recognition of equilibrating forces indeed disposes of the need for employing separate approaches for analysing disruptions of a minor character on the one hand, and major disasters on the other. The opposition of evolutionary theorizing and a ‘discontinuist interpretation of history’ claimed, again among many others, by Anthony Giddens (1987a: 31), thus has become a chimera. There is another sense in which the idea of punctuated equilibrium in palaeobiology encourages a broader sociological exploration of disruptions of different scales and impacts. Whilst mainstream evolutionary biology has largely remained committed to a view of evolutionary processes as operating exclusively via the selection of individual organisms (Mayr 2001: 124–34), the punctuated equilibrium approach sees evolutionary change as resulting from the interaction of structures and processes situated on different levels of order (Eldredge and Gould 1972: 308–14; Gould 1992: 67–8). In analogy, if one is interested in a sociological gradualization from ordinary to disastrous troubles, then it is analytically appealing to consider how different manifestations of social order within a collective might be involved. One might, for example, 3

An upgrade of the academic status of palaeontology is, of course, implied (Ruse 1992: 150).

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

suppose that the severity of disruptions is to some degree related to differences between situations coping with disruptions effectively and situations confronting disruptions in which participants are unable to manage. The latter might transmit disruptions to further runs of situations, other groups of participants, other settings, thus possibly breaching various manifestations of order beyond a situation at hand: families, groups, organizations, enterprises or governments. As in evolutionary theory (Hodgson 1993: 186–94), whether and which different manifestations of order are involved, whether they are adequately modelled as appearing on different levels, whether such levels imply separate sets of constitutive elements, and whether levels are vertically or horizontally ordered with respect to one another, calls for qualification (see below, Chapter 6, section 5). The punctuated equilibrium approach in evolutionary theory encourages us to incorporate analyses of how disruptions initially take place as well as investigations of how they subsequently spread, escalate or die down (as exemplified, for example, by sociological analyses of crises and catastrophes), and how different manifestations of order are possibly involved in this, within a single analytical perspective on the longitudinal development of order. The punctuated equilibrium on which the present investigation focuses is inherent to the microcosm of social situations. This equilibrium can be explored sociologically as a situated equilibrium of cooperation, and its punctuation turns out to potentially affect cooperation in further runs of collective activity. Thinking about disruptions in such terms, punctuated cooperation eventually became the slogan within the present study for exploring the distinct level of collective activity on which disruptions take place and reverberate. There is another strand of evolutionary theorizing concerned with analysing the manifestation and drift of respectively situated equilibria that turned out to effectively support this focus: the field of evolutionary game theory (Maynard Smith 1982; Fudenberg and Levine 1998). In one of the landmark works within this field, economist Peyton Young (1998: 12–20, 146–8) has predicted distinct circumstances under which punctuated equilibrium dynamics will occur at the level of strategies within a collective of players.4 Very generally speaking, it is on the level of participants’ strategies that initially are in some equilibrium that the 4

Young also addresses processes of learning among players in terms of equilibrium selection and develops a model of adaptive play during which strategies are constantly accommodated. This focus is very much congenial to the analytical interests of the present investigation as they will subsequently be specified. The formal understanding of learning among participants that is employed by Young, however, is based upon the adoption of best responses rather than on reinforcement learning (Young 1998: 27–9, 89–90). The latter is the principal learning mechanism assumed subsequently.

Rules and exceptions

15

particular microdynamics of disruption investigated subsequently take place – dynamics that will increasingly emerge as potential predictors of social changes traditionally considered as occurring on other, more ‘macro’, levels of social order. As with catastrophe theory, the challenge in mobilizing evolutionary game theory effectively to explore these issues is to bring a formal theory into conversation with diverse forms of sociological and historical intelligence. With evolutionary game theory, and especially with recent works by economists and philosophers such as Sugden (2004), Binmore (1994, 1998), Gintis (2009), Skyrms (1996, 2004) and Young (1998) who have opened up the field more widely for the pursuit of more conventionally sociological interests, the signs that such a conversation may hold up with some productivity have currently become much more favourable than in the case of the former.

1.5

Rules and exceptions

As these sources of analytical support are, as it were, waiting in the wings, coming up with an appropriate understanding of what characterizes a disruption to begin with remains the most immediate need of the present endeavour. Attempts to set up respective characterizations of events and activities by differentiating rules and exceptions, both terms general enough to be applied to experiences, activities, strategies or more generally to structures and processes within a collective, are instructive with respect to the elementary difficulties involved in characterizing disruptiveness. If the difference between rules and exceptions is used as a basis for differentiating the disruptive and the normal, then the identification of disruptions essentially becomes an analogy of detecting the violation of a law. Indeed, there seem to be empirical correlations between the two: if disruptive events turn out to be the result of deliberate acts, then we will often think of this as calling for legal persecution. Furthermore, the difference between rules and exceptions may also alert us to the fact that there are certain instances in which disruptiveness results within a collective from the fact that certain rules are temporarily suspended. The particular type of disruptiveness associated with such instances has often been addressed by the notion of the ‘state of the exception’ (Schmitt 2005). This also plays on a legal analogy of actions being beyond or above the law, but it emphasizes the endogenous character of disruptiveness within a politico-legal system, and thus the paradoxically regular character of the exceptional, even in its extreme form (Agamben 1998, 2005). Both aspects of exceptionality as a deviation from a set of rules with legal or quasi-legal character concur well with an everyday understanding of disruptiveness.

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

The analytical troubles, however, begin when we recognize that in many collectives various manifestations of order, various sets of rules and various notions of exceptionality coexist. Even if a general legal mechanism for dealing with disruptiveness of various sorts were to rule a collective, be universally recognized across its segments, it could not be equated with a compulsive process that would automatically identify and adjudicate normal or disruptive events in distinct historical instances (Wieder 1974: 36–42; Bourdieu 1977: 17). Disruptions are identified before they are brought to court, and participants do not identify them on the basis of some legal knowledge. Rather, participants usually feel quite intuitively what is inappropriate given a certain situation and given certain co-participants. In a similar manner, if we gradually step back from a purely legal understanding, it becomes difficult to empirically hunt down a Schmittean sovereign that would be able to deliberately declare a state of the exception. If we leave the legal analogy behind and start to look at the constitution of rules and exceptions within the smaller confines of social situations with limited sets of co-present participants, then we see that rather than rules allowing for the identification of exceptions, it is often the very incidence of disruptions that makes participants retrospectively construct rules which none of them would have ever needed to consider had the disruption not taken place. Assumptions about the characteristics of actual occasions associated with a ‘normal’ run of everyday life usually remain diffuse and implicit until some form of frustration has taken place; accordingly, rules are to some extent constituted by exceptions, rather than the other way around. This generally undermines the idea that disruptiveness could be characterized deductively from a given set of rules or regulations. Rather than a set of rules for bringing about and regulating events or activities which could be explicitly stated and turned into texts, laws, handbooks, or could simply be read off participants’ accounts, what is disrupted by exceptional events in distinct social situations is an interlocking of participants’ attentions and activities that transcends cognitive, material and emotional aspects of what is going on at the time of impact. This interlocking will be addressed in this study in terms of the coordination of activities and expectations. It substantially complicates any empirically appropriate understanding of participants’ strategies in dealing with disruptiveness. If one were to describe this kind of coordination as based on an internalization of a general set of rules across participants, then one would have to face the paradoxical fact that these rules can usually be spelled out only after they have been frustrated by disruptions. More generally speaking, in attending to events, participants of social situations make up and accommodate rules as well as exceptions as they go

Rules and exceptions

17

along. Dealing with actual occasions in a regular manner, making them observable, reportable and accountable, is not based on some mechanics of rule-following in everyday life, but on participants’ practical sense, their mastery of coming to terms with events and one another (Bourdieu 1977: 113–14; Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 162–4). Rather than being based on mastering a set of rules, recognizing, reporting and coming to terms with disruptiveness involves a ‘sense of limits and of the legitimate transgression of limits’ (Bourdieu 1977: 124), a sense that is not easily spelled out or transmitted. A believer in the ability of rules to guide experience and activity, or, for that matter, to define social order within a collective of participants, may respond that any paradoxical implication of rule use such as the retrospectiveness of their definition must result from an inadequate or incomplete empirical understanding of the substance of the particular rule in question. Even if, however, certain rules for events and activities were comprehensively implicit in institutions, practices or strategies, and even if, by an ingenious act of translation, these rules were accessible to a sociological observer, this observer could not reliably predict if any future event will be treated within the collective in question as either disruptive or normal. The future application of any rule cannot be regulated by the rule itself – a problem that cannot be solved by rules about rules (Kripke 1982). Attempts to increase the regulatory effectiveness of a rule by augmenting its substance or scope would run against the idea of rules being applicable to future cases which are yet unknown; anticipating all possible future applications in spelling out a rule would drive into an infinite specification of rules for the applications of rules which specify rule applications for rule specifications and so on. Participants’ competence in rule use inevitably consists in discretionary application (Zimmerman 1970: 230–7). Wittgenstein demonstrated the fundamental variability in applying any kind of rule in his discussion of mathematical practice (Wittgenstein 1967), and David Bloor (1997: 9–26), among others, systematically explored some of the implications in terms of a more general ‘meaning finitism’.5 Practical sense in using rules implies fitting rules to actual occasions at hand, or, alternatively marking certain discrepancies. In everyday conversation, for example, just about anything may come to be treated as a statement requiring resolution and what needs to be ‘corrected’ is thus in essence defined by the incidence of repair 5

A radicalized interpretation of the Wittgensteinian argument has recently claimed the impossibility of granting structures of meaning any reality sui generis (Levin 2007). Neither this implication nor the more subtle differences between Bloor’s and ethnomethodologists’ interpretations of Wittgenstein can be discussed here in an adequate level of detail (Lynch 1992a, 1992b; Bloor 1992; Sharrock and Button 1999).

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

(Schegloff et al. 1977: 363). On a certain level, such observations appear to resonate well with the Schmittean idea of how a state of exception is brought about: what cannot be decided by a rule has to be decided by the sovereign, and conversely the sovereign is he or she ‘who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 2005: 5; Ortmann 2003). Exactly which participant or set of participants, though, will come to act as ‘the’ sovereign? Schmitt seems to suggest that it will be a participant who is able to force her will upon others, but this merely reiterates the problem of meaning finitism: how an exception is brought about will be a question of a specific situation in which participants come to treat actual occasions as either ordinary or exceptional. Whether and when a disruption is faced, how it is brought about, experienced and enacted, is as much an outcome of situated practices and strategies as who – if anybody – would be able to decide such an outcome for others, or who, in the extreme, could simply declare the exceptionality of events within a collective and define a level of response.6 Rules cannot adjudicate on events, activities, disruptions or normalities. Instead, regularities and exceptions are co-constituted within social situation as nexus of actual occasions (Whitehead 1929: 30, 50; Abbott 2001b: 232–7). This poses a variety of problems for sociologically investigating disruptiveness and it defines the interlocking of participants’ attentions and activities as the central analytical issue the present investigation has to face. Like the notion of rules, the state of the exception as a politico-legal metaphor cannot deal with such issues. However, the metaphor highlights the fact that the very substance of a disruption ultimately requires determination within a collective of participants. This collective is sustained by participation in social situations as nexus of actual occasions, the constitution of which is always ‘a process of transition from indetermination toward terminal determination’ (Whitehead 1929: 72) – of activities as much as of events. As a result, the question of regularities and exceptions, of order and disruptiveness, effectively becomes a question of social situations and trajectories of participants (cf. Sharrock and Button 1999: 204–6).

1.6

Tracing trauma

Against this composite character of disruptiveness as an outcome of social situations as nexus of actual occasions, the observation could be offered 6

The Schmittean framework may indeed be analytically suggestive primarily in situations in which an asymmetry of power can be enforced by certain participants, e.g. when the legal institution of a codified state of the exception can in some way be exploited by those who are, by the terms of a legal constitution, entitled to do so.

Tracing trauma

19

that participants of social situations in fact often recognize and experience disruptions in an immediate manner. The fact that participants of social situations experience their involvement in an immediate and spontaneous manner does not, however, imply that participants’ awareness of what is going on in any given situation would be an immediate representation of discrete events. Rather, experience of discrete events itself is an outgrowth of involvement in social situations,7 and it refers to a type of behaviour and awareness that has to be learned in order to be brought about more or less instantaneously in situated activities (Tomasello 1999: 62–70). The next chapter will describe in some detail how disruptions substantially emerge from participants’ responses; still, there are important differences between the initial impacts of actual occasions on participants’ perceptions, on the one hand, and irritations resulting from further processing experiences and activities, on the other. In appreciating these differences, sociological analyses will do well to consider psychological investigations of disruptiveness. Psychological research into trauma and traumatization, first of all, sets up some important epistemological warning signs. Despite the swamping force with which many traumatizing situations are initially experienced, this force does not correlate with the existence of a distinct set of discrete events which could unequivocally be identified as traumatic sui generis (Smelser 2004: 32–5). Psychological as well as sociological utilizations of the notion of trauma have been careful to deny what has often been called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (Alexander 2004: 8) of assuming certain events to just be genuinely traumatic. Onward from ‘Freud’s preliminary formulations, the idea of trauma is not be conceived so much as a discrete casual event as a part of a process-in-system’ (Smelser 2004: 35; cf. Erikson 1976: 254–6). More recently, psychologists have taken this scepticism towards the discreteness of traumatic events one step further by doubting that traumatic experiences can be associated with distinct mechanisms of processing experiences and memories at all (e.g. Geraerts et al. 2007). In any case, trauma as an object of psychological interest needs to be considered as an aspect, function or aggregate result of psychological processes, whether distinct to trauma or not, and not as an aspect of external events. Accordingly, the study of trauma is a study of the processes and effects of traumatization rather than of specific events causing a trauma. Freud 7

Whitehead’s criticism of the philosophies of Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant and his own understanding of symbolic reference can be read as a cosmological articulation of this derivative, relational and thus immediate character of experience (Whitehead 1929: 173–274); cf. Gallagher (2008), Van Riel (2008) and De Jaegher (2009) for recent discussions of the relationship between participants’ direct perception, social cognition and the run of social situations.

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

(1950: 45–7) saw the implications clearly when he likened the work of the psychoanalyst to that of an archaeologist. In a similar fashion, any sociological study of disruptiveness needs to be a study of effects and symptoms, since disruptions are the effects of participants confronting actual occasions in social situations, and emerge somewhat retrospectively. As noted in the beginning, sociologists generally find it even more difficult than psychologists to externalize the incidence of disruptiveness from what it is that is being disrupted. From a sociological perspective, ‘participants confronting actual occasions’ already refers to a manifestation of social order within a collective. With respect to the jurisdiction of sociological expertise, however, such endogeneity may be a blessing rather than a curse: an observer attending to the microdynamics of social situations may be in a better position to track down disruptiveness than a trauma researcher who would deliberately choose to confine the investigation to psychological phenomena, structures or processes.8 This makes the relative scarcity of respective sociological expertise all the more notable. A challenge shared by psychologists and sociologists investigating disruptiveness in this manner is the great significance of emotional affect (Smelser 2004: 39–41). Social situations commit participants’ attention not only cognitively but also affectively (Turner 2002: 67–97). Situations generating disruptions of traumatic quality appear to be particularly successful in binding participants’ attention in the long term. Freud famously assumed that adults’ traumata point back to long past social situations during infancy (e.g. Freud 1952: 433–9). Processes of traumatization demonstrate that emotional and cognitive aspects of experience are inextricably intertwined, as both are shot through with more evidently social aspects. Shame and guilt are emotions that are particularly prominent within the incidence of trauma (Lewis 1971: 503–13), and these emotions very clearly point to the social context of experience within an ongoing situation in order to be meaningful (Scheff 2006: 54–60). Since the run of every social situation engages participants not only on a behavioural level but also on emotional and biographical levels,9 a sociological observer interested in the impact of disruptiveness across social situations would be ill advised to altogether disregard psychological 8

9

Which is not to claim that trauma researchers are generally inclined to confine their attention in this way – or that psychologists would generally be more restrictive than sociologists in this respect. Notably, sociological studies mobilizing the trauma concept appear to be particularly devoid of analyses of social situations. The reader by Alexander et al. (2004), for example, provides about three hundred pages on the topic without a single mention of either Goffman or Garfinkel. Biographies appear to be particularly powerful sources of ‘negative experience’ in social situations (Bouissac 2000: 113–15; Goffman 1974: 378–438).

The nexus of social situations

21

processes. Positively speaking, psychological traumatization of participants may well be one particular mechanism of transmission by which disruptiveness transcends local situations and goes on to affect the collective as a whole. I will address this possibility to some extent in the third chapter (section 3.4). This kind of psychological transcendence of disruptiveness refers to actual occasions of the kind which participants retrospectively characterize as ‘unforgettable and unreal’, and to an area of social psychological research for which the present investigation attempts to rearticulate the relevance of sociological analysis. Across the academic disciplines engaged in investigating trauma, traumatization illustrates what a veritable mess of processes and structures the incidence and trajectory of disruptiveness is associated with. Cognitive and affective, social and psychological as well as physiological irritations and irritabilities appear intricately entangled in generating and transmitting disruptiveness across social and psychological as well as neurological-organic systems (e.g. Ganzel and Casey 2007). The situated activity in which disruptions take place does not refer to an orderly arrayed set of participants bringing in various psychological and behavioural resources one after the other in responding to events, but rather to something like a ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering 1995) – to social situations as nexus of actual occasions involving ‘an inevitable psychobiological element’ (Goffman 1983a: 3). Some sociologists investigating disruptiveness have responded to this mess of situated practice by categorically segregating social disorganization from individual disorganization (Kramer 1943: 473). Psychological research in trauma investigates disruptions in terms of psychological process, and the very processes and structures associated with the production of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder have so far remained a subject of dispute (J. Mills 2008; Verhaeghe and Vanheule 2008). In any case, differentiating sociological and psychological approaches to trauma according to the system of social, psychological or neurological order to which disruptions as ‘processesin-systems’ respectively refer runs the risk not only of ignoring the extent to which social situations mobilize participants comprehensively (cognitively, affectively, socially), but the risk of needlessly giving up a lot of the specific explanatory power by reiterating scholastic divisions of academic turf. Sociologists, like economists (Ross 2005), surely have much to learn from psychological and neurophysiological research. 1.7

The nexus of social situations

This very brief review of a couple of concepts and approaches which sociologists and their colleagues from neighbouring disciplines have been utilizing in investigating disruptiveness has highlighted a variety of

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

theoretical and empirical issues. Getting a sense of the inherent complexities in exploring disruptiveness leaves this investigation all the more desperate for a theoretical footing. Some circumstantial intelligence for locking in the necessary analytical bearing has been acquired up to this point: a comprehensive understanding of the incidence and transmission of disruptiveness presupposes an understanding of order in social situations. These situations need to be considered as nexus of actual occasions from which distinct events emerge among participants, whether in terms of normality and order, or as disruptive, critical or traumatic. An extended understanding of social situations is required in order to comprehend how disruptions are initially constituted and how disruptiveness, possibly, resurfaces in further situations, affecting, like trauma, further accommodations or more general forms of change. The notion of disruptions as discrete events with intrinsic abilities to irritate therefore needs to be replaced by a more sophisticated investigation that starts with social situations and then moves on in tracing disruptiveness: any collective impressed by a disruption is first and foremost impressed within a social situation – within a situation in which a disruption is initially recognized and enacted, and within further situations impacted by this enactment through some yet to be ascertained form of re-enactment – or, perhaps, by a more ‘structural’ form of connection, as approaches to crisis and catastrophes, traumata and traumatizations have, each in their own terms, been suggesting. That further situations will indeed be affected by a disruption that has initially been registered at a local site of activity, will, of course, empirically not be a given, irrespective of the type of disruptiveness concerned. To think of disastrous disruptions as by their mere incidence not only eroding landscapes and soils but also communities or societies, or of terrorist attacks as not only costing human lives but as immediately threatening the moral integrity of a collective, has motivated much intellectually stimulating discourse. However, generalizing from distinct disruptive events to effects often derives from a biased perspective on social order within a collective whose tolerance for and capacity to accommodate contradictions, conflicts and potential disruptiveness is underestimated.10 Social situations elapse naturally and continuities between and across situations have to be addressed as distinct social achievements. Across situations, and more generally within a collective, the prime ‘vehicles of structural immortality’ (Katz 1999: 37) are participants’ bodies – and not the mysterious workings of some alleged collective or structural 10

cf. Schatzki (2002: 11–17) for a brief discussion of conceptualizations of social order as regularity and stability associated with such a perspective.

The nexus of social situations

23

‘logic’. Participants’ abilities to learn and relearn their past experiences, their competence in using rules, norms, knowledge or associations, including the ‘inevitable psychobiological element’, can in no sense whatsoever be discounted by sociological explorations of disruptiveness. If participants of social situations could simply act off their records, all disruptions would remain confined within the bounds of current situations, and pass away with them (cf. Whitehead 1929: 126). The sociology of disruption, disaster and social change needs to understand social existence as a ‘structure of involvement’ (Goffman 1963: 193) that is to some extent transcendent, an involvement participants of social situations are drawn into by entering (cf. Ostrow 2000): So there are enablements and risks inherent in co-bodily presence . . . I remind you that it is in social situations that these enablements and risks are faced and will have their initial effect . . . Thus the warrant for employing the social situation as the basic working unit in the study of the interaction order. And thus, incidentally, a warrant for claiming that our experience of the world has a confrontational character. (Goffman 1983a: 4)

The confrontational character of social existence per se, and of social situations in particular, by bearing upon the biographies of participants, their trajectories, ideas and plans, inevitably involves a continuous adjustment of strategies (Bourdieu 1977: 6–15), and it is on this level that evolutionary stability or its disruption need to be investigated. Suspicions about the strategic use of disruptiveness by privileged participants have motivated much discourse about the state of the exception (e.g. Klein 2007), but these suspicions have mostly been articulated in the context of macrosociological observations and criticisms. Microanalytically oriented researchers in sociology, on the other hand, have taken good care, and perhaps too good a care, in separating themselves from the strong tradition of micro-oriented research threatening to invade sociology from neighbouring disciplines, most notably perhaps from economics.11 Yet 11

The works of Pierre Bourdieu, a major source of sociological intelligence on strategic aspects of situated practice, offer a good example of how sociologists may be drawn to partisan positions in defending their expertise against microeconomic challenges. In the tidied-up version of his theory of practice, the vehement generalization of the economics of practice called for in the earlier exposition of his approach (Bourdieu 1977: 177–8) has almost completely been deleted from the discussion of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1990: 112–21). Conspicuously, another paragraph has been inserted in which Bourdieu discusses Sartre, whose voluntarism is claimed to have been ‘outdone by the voluntarism of the anthropological fiction to which the “rational actor” theorists have to resort’ (Bourdieu 1990: 46–7). Subsequently, Bourdieu turns against Elster (1979) and attacks ‘the idea of an economic subject who is economically unconditioned’ (Bourdieu 1990: 47). Ironically, Bourdieu’s concept of economic capital has since then, arguably, been

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Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

the sociological understanding of social situations as nexus of actual occasions may benefit just as much as from an extended understanding of the economies and the evolutionary dynamics of strategies exercised in situated behaviour as it would from underlying psychological and neurophysiological dynamics. If Bourdieu’s idea to ‘extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic’ (Bourdieu 1977: 178) was realized, then sociological theory would need to more actively engage with microeconomic approaches. As with respect to psychological and neurophysiological expertise, it is beyond the scope of the present investigation to present an instantaneous realization. Participants’ strategies of coping with actual occasions in social situations, though, will become a major analytical concern for exploring correlations between disruptions and social change, and an occasion to tentatively reach out to approaches such as evolutionary game theory in the concluding chapter (sections 6.3 and 6.4), if only, at this point, on a conceptual level.

1.8

Framing disruptions

Overall, sociologists may have been rash to focus their understanding of disruptiveness on spectacular disaster-type instances and on the dynamics of crises allegedly associated with these events. In concentrating on specimens that are either of a disastrous kind in, supposedly, their own terms (which ultimately means relying on a commonsensical understanding of which events or activities are legitimate instances) or which acquire a disastrous character by some theoretical specification of the needs or functions of manifestations of social order, sociologists have to a large extent been bypassing the more fundamental question of how disruptiveness is produced within social situations to begin with. The present investigation starts with reconstructing this elementary production and emergence of disruptiveness and will then attempt to track down how disruptions are recognized, responded to, and, possibly, passed on to other situations. It would be rather bold to claim that the requisite sociological theory is there for the taking, just waiting to be applied with appropriate diligence. Most importantly, combining the ‘sociological miniaturism’ (Stolte et al. 2001) called for in analysing situated activity with a concern for social order transcending single situations remains a particular challenge for avoiding both the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ sociologically deconstructed by another ‘“rational actor” theorist’ (Coleman 1990: 53– 64), and, despite Bourdieu’s care in emphasizing (and, possibly, somewhat overstating) respective differences, his work has often been criticized for being implicitly economistic; cf. Lebaron (2003) for helpful clarification.

Framing disruptions

25

(Whitehead 1929: 11) and the ‘fallacy of misplaced abstraction’ (Rawls 2004: 324). Respective diligence is badly needed if both the incidence of disruptions within and the transmission of disruptiveness across any nexus of initial exposure are to become elements within an analytically coherent narrative. In order to accomplish this, the present investigation will mobilize and to a considerable degree rearticulate Erving Goffman’s (1974) concept of frame analysis. Although the position and status of Frame Analysis among Goffman’s works is subject to various ambiguities (Turner 1988: 108; Scheff 2005: 370), Goffman’s elementary understanding of framing appears singularly suited to explore how aspects of participants’ experiences and activities which are specific to situated social orders interrelate with aspects of order transcending single situations. Frame Analysis tries to describe how participants come to experience and enact situations ‘in accordance with principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them’ (Goffman 1974: 10–11). Framing in this sense is a process in which participants actively relate what is going within a situation to more general aspects of order within a collective, to ‘principles of organizations’ transcending single runs of activity. When Thomas Scheff (2005: 374) reasons that Frame Analysis ‘would have been better understood if it had the subtitle “Defining Context”’, ‘context’ should not be read as referring to a given setting of activity, just waiting for participants and researchers to be adequately recognized and reported. The concept of framing tries to address the fact that any kind of context, any manifestation of social order around ongoing events, in order to have any bearing at all on situated activity, has to be made present within the run of a social situation as a nexus of actual occasions: ‘Sociocultural context is active, not passive; it gets negotiated rather than uncovered or invoked’ (White 2008: xxi). The next chapter will invest a good deal of effort in investigating how participants achieve productions of context in this sense – and how disruptiveness may temporarily upset these productions. In framing actual occasions, and more particularly, I will claim, in keying activities by drawing on distinct sets of signals, participants of social situations sustain distinct levels of cooperation, and these levels of ‘cooperation in maintaining expectations’ (Goffman 1983a: 5) are essentially what is threatened and, sometimes, punctuated by disruptiveness. The second chapter will provide an elementary account of the effectiveness and vulnerability of framing and will introduce the theoretical core of this investigation. In the third chapter I will more specifically address how participants interact in punctuated cooperation. Analysing subsequently the transmission of disruptiveness across situations calls

26

Confronting disruptions: the nexus of social situations

for a somewhat riskier analytical endeavour, since it depends on an initial understanding of the effects of disruptiveness, and on an estimate of the form and extent in which these effects are reproduced by participants later on as they enter other situations. In gradually extending the analytical perspective respectively, the study will present its material ‘Goffman style’ by developing general observations on the basis of various empirical examples. Each chapter will elaborate a set of initial and very preliminary findings about how disruptiveness affects the run of social situations within a collective of participants. Whilst these findings begin to be formulated at the end of the third chapter, the fourth and fifth chapters will try to accumulate empirical intelligence across increasingly extended runs and larger sets of social situations. The sixth chapter will conclude the study by a preliminary elaboration of the theory that is needed in order to put the sociology of disruption and social change on a sustainable basis and to gradually extend its scope and viability. 1.9

Conclusion

At this point of the investigation, social situations have been singled out as those manifestations of social order from which a sociological understanding of the incidence and impact of disruptiveness will need to proceed. In confronting and investigating disruptiveness, social scientists have been reproducing a bifurcation of disastrous and therefore interesting disruptions on the one hand, and ordinary troubles on the other. As a result, the former have tended to be contextualized within larger social structures by analysing disruptiveness in terms of crises and catastrophes, and this has not been congenial to an analysis of actual social situations and to how participants come to confront disruptiveness. The present investigation sets out to overcome this lack of mutual resonance. However, the differentiation of disruptions into sets of minor lapses on the one hand, and disastrous disruptions on the other, will not be entirely displaced by the sociology of disruption, disaster and social change that is subsequently developed here. Rather, the differentiation will be accommodated in a broader understanding of how distinct events are constituted by drawing together actual occasions in the run of social situations. An alternative sociological rationale for differentiating different kinds of disruptiveness will ultimately become apparent: events acquire a distinct character as participants cope with actual occasions, and while most disruptions, beyond being recognized and realized as such, are tackled effectively by participants on a given level of cooperation, sometimes this level of cooperation is disrupted, and this may bring about processes of social change which are broader and more consequential. This

Conclusion

27

differentiation need not necessarily correlate with disruptions being initially more or less disastrous: disruptions generally are of an emergent quality within the run of social situations, and they are not defined by an initial, allegedly external, impact. Rather than leading to a distinct class of disruptive events, this line of analysis will lead to a fuller appreciation of different varieties of disruptiveness (see below, section 6.1). Whilst being a source of trouble for attempts to keep a clean and well-defined jurisdiction, the endogeneity of disruptiveness to the order of social situations essentially is good news for sociologists seeking expertise about disruptiveness: with neither the licence nor the need to externalize any kind of disruption from sociological jurisdiction, there is a certain reliability associated with the fact ‘that there is order at all points’ (Sacks 1984a: 22) – a naturally occurring order vulnerable to disruptiveness and amenable to sociological analysis from within to beyond punctuated cooperation.

2

Framing situations, responding to disruptions

Given their understanding of what it is that is going on, individuals fit their actions to this understanding and ordinarily find that the ongoing world supports this fitting. These organizational premises – sustained both in the mind and in activity – I call the frame of the activity. Erving Goffman (1974: 247)

As far as people experience and enact social order, social structures and processes, they do so within social situations. The existential involvement of participants in situated activities can be sociologically specified and discussed in many different ways – moving from general patterns to particular cases, from collective to Robinsonesque involvements, from involving human to non-human participants, from positions in pecking orders to cultural values and norms, status, roles, fields, societies and so on. The current discussion will begin by bracketing most of these specifications in favour of focusing on how participants frame actual occasions in social situations. To investigate framing in social situations means to explore how order is produced within a nexus of actual occasions (cf. Whitehead 1929: 30, 50) and, more specifically, it will require an analysis of participants’ ‘effective cooperation in maintaining expectations’ (Goffman 1983b: 5). That this kind of elementary cooperation precedes and supports more complex forms of cooperation is the central assumption guiding the subsequent exposition of the theory required by the sociological exploration of disruptiveness. In framing actual occasions, in producing order and context for what it is that participants are dealing with, participants employ, defend and accommodate expectations, signs, symbols and resources. Not frames as ready-made products or contexts for actual occasions but processes of framing as producing social order within a collective of participants through producing contexts for activities and experience are at stake. By specifying processes of framing in terms of cooperation in maintaining expectations, this chapter provides the sociological foundation for the following exploration of the incidence, impact and transmission of disruptiveness. Before continuing this exposition, some comments on 28

The framing concept

29

how this approach relates to other adoptions of the framing concept and particularly to the original work by Erving Goffman (1974) are called for (2.1). An understanding of social situations will then gradually be assembled from participants (2.2) to disruptions (2.3), responses (2.4) and keys (2.5). Punctuated cooperation as that run of activity the understanding of which is particularly crucial for the sociological investigation of disruptiveness is explored with respect to the challenges it poses to participants’ practical sense of framing and keying (2.6), and social changes brought about by these challenges will be visible in terms of strategies and redistributions within the collective respectively exposed (2.7).

2.1

The framing concept

Utilizations of the concept of framing have often focused on how frames direct participants’ experience, their consciousness and cognition of what is going on in social situations.1 The fact that Erving Goffman has placed his approach in a line of works ranging from William James to Alfred Schutz and Gregory Bateson (Goffman 1974: 3–8) appears to resonate well with such a focus on perception and recognition. In his own introduction of the framing concept, however, Goffman from the outset offers it as addressing order among events and activities, cognition and behaviour: I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. (Goffman 1974: 10–11)

Goffman reiterates this point several times during his book Frame Analysis, relating cognition to behaviour and vice versa. His understanding of framing as a generic process irreducible to either consciousness or overt behaviour therefore transcends the earlier, and more psychologically oriented, use of the frame concept by Gregory Bateson (1972: 177–93). Goffman explicitly acknowledges this: ‘need my drawing on Bateson preclude disagreement? Bateson identified framing as a psychological process; I see it as inhering in the organization of events and cognition’ (Goffman 2000: 84). 1

Rarely do authors in references to Goffman’s concept of framing acknowledge that an emphasis on cognition is not Goffman’s own. Baptista (2003: 199–200) provides an exception: ‘So, it would appear that the cognitive sciences, and cognitive psychology in particular, wouldn’t have a place in a research study based on Goffman’s work. But here we can turn Goffman against himself . . . To put it bluntly, if a cognitive (and psychological) approach to Goffman’s work turns up to be feasible, who cares?’

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Framing situations, responding to disruptions

The lack of analytical attention which those aspects of framing referring to the organization of events and activities rather than to cognition, perception, experience or knowledge have been receiving since the publication of Goffman’s original work is remarkable. In an investigation of disruptiveness, it would be particularly ironic to uphold this neglect: the impact of disruptiveness on social life is, after all, not a mere matter of contemplating what is going on, but refers to participants’ bodily involvement in situated activities and to social life as existential confrontation and exposure to potentially disturbing events and activities. The existential involvement of participants in social situations claims cognitive as much as behavioural and emotional participation, challenging participants’ minds as well as their bodies, and the framing concept was set up by Goffman to take the full scope of such involvement and exposure into account. As in earlier works, his favourite examples continue to be activities staged within the ‘theatrical frame’ (Goffman 1974: 124–55), but no frame is precluded as beyond Frame Analysis. As experience acquires distinct modifications once participants attend to ongoing events as elements of a staged drama, so do their own activities – whether on stage or anywhere else.2 Framing requires participants to learn to accommodate events and activities within an ongoing production of context in a nexus of actual occasions (cf. Ostrow 2000: 325–8). This production is a result of meaning enacted, claimed, symbolized and articulated among participants; it may be a routine, a somewhat more temperamental and sometimes an overtly political process (Benford and Snow 2000). In framing events and activities, context emerges from processes of interlocking and coordination that are prone to accidental perturbations (cf. White 2008: 337). Any regularity of framing within and across situations ultimately has to be the outcome of a practical training of participants and a result of their mastery of a natural language that is, to some extent, shared among them (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 163). Each participant of situated activity, 2

There is no space here to discuss more extensively utilizations of the framing concept that concentrate on cognition. Much of the relevant work takes its lead from the classical paper by Tversky and Kahneman (1981), and respective contributions to sociological theory have been offered, for example, by Lindenberg (1993) and Esser (2009). In game theory, the late Michael Bacharach (2006: 14–24, 53–7) explored framing processes with regard to choices based on salience. Rather than discussing framing as a psychological process, the present approach will focus on framing as a process of signalling and correlated equilibrium selection (cf. below, section 2.5). The understanding of framing as brought about by the mobilization of distinct correlation devices, however, does not in any way deny the existence of distinct psychological correlates of framing, e.g. in terms of cognitive schemata, and may, on a more general level, in many ways be complementary to respective explorations.

The framing concept

31

by virtue of prior training, socialization and individual trajectory, brings into social situations a ‘socially informed body’ equipped with a practical sense for producing order (Bourdieu 1977: 124; cf. Schutz 1962: 9–10), for example in with the ability to calculate prices or balances when you are about to make a financial transaction (Lave 1988; Guyer 2004). Erving Goffman evidently realized that processes of learning and socialization needed to be taken into account more comprehensively than he saw himself to be in a position to do when explaining the regularized character of framing in everyday life. This is apparent in a remark made some years after the publication of Frame Analysis on the regularities of what Goffman (1983b: 3) then called the interaction order: ‘character of these observations is itself facilitated and complicated by a central process yet to be systematically studied – social ritualization – that is the standardization of bodily and vocal behavior through socialization’. In Goffman’s Frame Analysis, the organization of behaviour on the one hand, and the organization of awareness and cognition on the other, are continuously juxtaposed. Standardization of behaviour and standardization of experience are both treated as accomplishments of producing context. With regard to outlining how framing is rooted in broader social structures and processes affording relatively stable forms of socializing participants, though, the late Goffman (1983b: 5), in the same presidential address to the American Sociological Association, which due to his illness he could not hold in person, acknowledges surrender: How a given set of such understandings comes into being historically, spreads and contracts in geographical distribution over time, and how at any one place and time particular individuals acquire these understandings are good questions, but not ones I can address.

Rarely as outspoken in this respect, microanalyses of social situations have to a great extent been avoiding these issues.3 The present investigation requires some elementary orientation with respect to how participants can be trained in a regular fashion to produce certain contexts repeatedly – and in order to understand how these broader regularities may be challenged or shaken up by disruptions that initiate social changes beyond events and activities which, after all, perish by themselves. The 3

One reason for this might be the way in which the battle lines of theoretical dispute have historically been drawn. Microsociological research has tended to ‘set contingent action against social structure in the name of creativity and individual freedom . . . Thus, as Goffman, Homans, and Garfinkel gained increasing authority, interest in socialization and personality structure correspondingly declined’ (Alexander and Colomy 1998: 56). The works of Pierre Bourdieu, although somewhat frugal in their analyses of actual social situations, are a gradual exception.

32

Framing situations, responding to disruptions

transmission of disruptiveness across situations needs to be related to the socialization and possible resocialization of participants, to learning and changes in strategies; moreover, the conceptual framework needs to include a respective area of contingency and variation. In order to track down disruptiveness, recognizing how participants learn and relearn how to cope with actual occasions in runs of social situations and how they adjust their strategies of response is essential. If learning was left unaccounted for, framing would remain a sterile process of reproducing routines, the origins and transformations of which remaining black-boxed. Whilst, for example, summing up prices in order to find out whether you can financially afford the contents of your shopping basket will always be the same routine, there will always be scope for changing the financial reckoning when shopping. Such scope does not tend to be enacted accidentally, and it is clearly vulnerable to disruptiveness, financial or otherwise. The present approach needs to explore the framing of social situations and the production of context across cognition and behaviour, and from participants reproducing habitual routines to participants learning, accommodating and relearning to produce order within nexus of actual occasions. Though the corresponding need to explore situated practice has been well articulated by authors such as Bourdieu (e.g. 1977: 114–24), and, of course, Garfinkel (e.g. 1967: 9–11), substantial attention to problems of situated learning has been scarce and mostly limited to various conceptual attempts within the sociology of deviance (Sykes and Matza 1957; Akers 1998: 338–9), and to ethnographic studies of apprenticeship and teaching (e.g. Greenfield 1984; Lave and Wenger 1991). Interrelating framing and learning diverges from applications of the framing concept which emphasize the categorical unity and coherence of specific frames, applications which in the context of the present investigation would end up suggesting an artificial contrast between social situations as vulnerable and prone to disruption on the one hand, and frames the substance of which would be conceptually displaced from any nexus of actual occasions on the other (cf. Gonos 2000: 36–8). The situated relearning and accommodation of strategies of framing, however, is not a freakish aberrance from a set of structurally pre-established frames as blueprints for activities – it is, rather, a pervasive aspect of everyday life in which framing is practised as a form of ‘regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu 1977: 78; cf. Benford and Snow 2000: 618–22). If framing is used as a general expression for the production of context, then Blumer’s general statement that people ‘do not act toward culture, social structure or the like; they act toward situations’ (Blumer 1969: 88), may be qualified by the observation that people act towards

Participants

33

one another – and thus towards culture, social structure or the like (cf. Schegloff 1987). Any categorical contrast between social situations as particular manifestations of social order among participants and transsituational aspects of social order within a collective is inevitably an abstraction (Goffman 1983b: 8–9; Gonos 2000: 33–6), though not necessarily a futile one. Participants face culture, social structure, institutions, organizations, theatre and drama, financial needs and implications because they become involved in social situations (cf. Cicourel 1981: 52–3). And conversely, this is exactly why culture and social structures, as well as those broader or more specific instances of social order within a collective discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 below, are indeed vulnerable to the vagaries of single social situations and the disruptions they incur: because you attend the action on the stage as a scripted drama you will be disturbed if a member of the audience enters the action, just as you are likely to be disturbed when you see people rushing a bank (even if it isn’t your bank). You will feel the implications and likely modify your behaviour, and this is how disruptions occur and are reproduced not despite the framing of events of activities but, quite definitely, by virtue of framing. 2.2

Participants

Social situations take place once participants enter into relations of mutual monitoring (Goffman 1963: 18). In the run of everyday life, participants enter and leave most situations without taking much notice of the contingencies inherent in accommodating behaviour and experience to the variety of settings and participants they respectively encounter: you leave your house and drive to the supermarket, you meet a neighbour at the dairy aisle, you pay, you answer your cell phone, you again meet your neighbour at the parking lot and so on. The smooth running, coupling and continuation of everyday activities demonstrates how effectively human participants master settling on common levels of involvement and grounds of activity (Clark 1996: 92–121; Tomasello 2008: 330–7). In analyses of everyday life and its regular run of social situations, ‘frame’ is sometimes used as just another term for any sanctioned ‘definition of the situation’ to which participants come to adhere (Turner 2002: 156). On the first page of Frame Analysis, though, Goffman denies the very existence of distinctive definitions of situations: in social situations, despite regularities which often appear to follow a collective script, there usually is no single way of experiencing and behaving towards actual occasions, and therefore no coherent definition of what ‘really’ is going on (Goffman 1974: 1). If for one member of the audience watching a play is a stimulating pastime, for another it may simply be an obligation

34

Framing situations, responding to disruptions

to endure during a date, just like figuring out the financial implications of a transaction may mean very different things to different participants. Participants’ competence in framing actual occasions is not based on memorizing definitions of situations, but is predicated by their ability to feel what is going on diffusely and affectively. Such feeling precedes any more intellectual and specific exploration of that context (Collins 1981a: 991; Bourdieu 1990: 66–7). It is informed by a ‘shared intentionality’ (Tomasello 2008: 72–3) which participants suppose, on average pretty comfortably, to be in line with actual occasions and with one another – despite potential, and often mutually recognized, differences in the exact understanding and evaluation of what is respectively meant to be going on. Participants’ mastery of framing social situations and cooperating in producing context tends to keep daily activities along highly regular patterns. The existence of such patterns correlates with participants’ abilities not only to follow but also to some extent to reflexively adjust and exploit them. Observing that there is a ‘moral character’ in maintaining a certain level of involvement in situated activity, Goffman (1959: 24) implies that participants tend to be so well versed in striking distinct levels of cooperation that they will often use their mastery for partisan purposes (cf. Tomasello 2008: 216–17). Expecting a specific manner of cooperation with respect to some generally trained framing pattern not only allows participants to modify their behaviour accordingly but also puts them in positions to, for example, hide private intentions and secret schemes behind appearances deliberately fabricated as normal, for example, when acting inconspicuously in shoplifting (Katz 1988: 58–64) or in making too good a deal. Conversely, coherent conformity with some mutually understood level of appropriateness may not be altogether innocent, for example when participants seek to put themselves in the right (Bourdieu 1977: 22), for whatever ulterior motive. That the production of context among participants is not based on some blind kind of belief in some regularity and that, rather often, the production of context is manipulated by some, only to in turn become deliberately exploited by others, is one of Goffman’s most elementary observations about framing (Goffman 1974: 156–200). Instead of blind belief, framing requires an effective direction of participants’ attention to the extent that they can start and continue treating each other’s activities as putting forth some common level of involvement, whether participants might enact this emerging context with antagonistic (cynical, ironic, didactic, etc.) intentions or with some collectively ratified righteousness. Of course, there are many aspects to framing situations and the interlocking of participants’ attention that are not subject to control by

Participants

35

co-present participants. Physical spaces and material architectures, for example, direct and arrest participants’ attention in their own ways (Goffman 1971: 52–67; Lofland 1973: 66–91; Turner 2002: 222–4). Good examples of the impact of material layouts on framing activities are spaces in which everyday economic transactions take place, with their arrangements of checkpoints, limited walking lanes and counters directing possibilities of conduct and awareness. Also, as far as technological devices take part in situated activity, they contribute to how framing is brought about by producing distinct behavioural opportunities while restricting others (see Callon 1999: 190–2). Still, physical environments of situated activity are not orders of activity sui generis, and what a physical architecture, a technology of interaction or a medium of communication tries to prescribe is not easily separated from how participants deliberately respond to spatial (or technological) arrangements or how they actually employ what is materially made available. A shop will look differently to owners, thieves, employees or to sales and marketing consultants; standing in the dairy aisle, they will all have different ideas about, for example, the placement of merchandise. Buildings, like roads and bridges, aisles, tables and seating arrangements, may stabilize situations to some extent but are always ‘vulnerable to wrecking balls or discourse’ (Gieryn 2002: 35), to new paint, new owners or consultants – or to participants’ well-situated ignorance in framing events and activities as when, for example, financial consideration associated with a price tag drowns out other aspects of a current frame or a carefully fabricated ‘shopping experience’. Participants of situated activity often appear predisposed to accept physical boundaries (walls, fences, etc.) as legitimate limits of attention, but this does not unambiguously relate to their abilities (or lack of abilities) to accept, enact or transcend these barriers.4 Social situations taking place in public as opposed to private spaces can be observed to evoke distinct levels of sanctioned involvements of participants’ bodies (Goffman 1963: 22–3; Collins 2004: 231–2), but the layout of spaces associated with private or public activities does not by itself account for the specific structure of these involvements: one may have a public meeting in a private room, and a very private engagement in a public place. Whilst there are, of course, material bases and resources of framing (Collins 1981b: 250), other, more conventionally social aspects of framing – the fact that participants know a shop is a place where goods are traded and might 4

Participants might, for example, be able to look through windows, but will still see this as trespassing into situations in which they have no licence to participate (cf. Goffman 1963: 151–3).

36

Framing situations, responding to disruptions

be stolen, or that they may legitimately treat an intimate interaction as taking place in a private room while getting a kick from being watched from outside a window, or in a public place being watched by a camera, by watching other participants on camera and so on – turn spaces and technological devices into meaningful features of context by virtue of becoming subject to participants’ productions of context, whether in terms of drama or in terms of costs and allowances, rather than affecting such production from without (Schatzki 2002: 117–22). The increasing spatial and technological embedding of present-day everyday life heavily affects how cooperation in maintaining expectations is achieved from situation to situation by drawing on a variety of objects, some of which are of an impressive technological sophistication (e.g. Latour 2005: 87–120); yet, other participants’ activities, even if they are technologically mediated, generally have remained the most potent attractors of participants’ attention (Blau 1964: 14–19; Blumer 1969: 88; Preda 2009: 688–91). The effectiveness of spatial arrangements and technological devices in guiding situated activity continues to derive primarily from the extent to which they determine how participants come to meet, interact and separate (Collins 1981a: 995–6) as we find our way around by using other participants as indices and indications (Scollon and Scollon 2003: 45–81). The ‘ecological huddle’ (Goffman 1963: 95) of situated activity is constituted by mutual monitoring, usually by initially signalling awareness by eye contact (e.g. Clark 1996: 276). This constitution of mutual monitoring manifests the problem of social order in the most elementary manner, whether interpreted as a problem of interdependence (Coleman 1990: 29–31) or one of ‘double contingency’ (Luhmann 1995: 107–23). Sociological interpretations tend to generalize from physical surroundings in a way that sometimes renders the material conditions of social encounters utterly invisible, but they have been making considerable inroads in understanding elementary problems of n-person coordination in running social situations and producing context. If learning and socialization, as suggested above, appear for social theory to define a potential space of solutions to problems of n-person coordination, from the perspective of participants involved in social situations learning refers to a range of practical problems. Learning and relearning may be costly in terms of producing appropriate displays, of forgoing immediate gratifications, of paying attention, of being nice, trustworthy and so on. A comprehensive account of framing needs to offer a basic understanding of why participants expose themselves to a mutual monitoring that potentially incurs certain costs, how they socialize one another in situated activity, how they direct one another’s attention effectively to

Participants

37

certain ‘focal points’ in solving coordination problems (Schelling 1960: 57; Lewis 1969: 14–24), and how participants distribute the costs generated by adjusting their activities to the presence of others – always at the risk of being set up individually or collectively. Social scientists have been addressing these elementary problems of involvement and coordination in many ways. The analysis of social exchange presents one of the historically most successful conceptual lenses through which solutions to problems of learning and coordination have been explored.5 Attending to patterns of social exchange provides one way of looking at how mutually agreeable tendencies of behaviour are coordinated among participants, and offers a direction in which to look for initial motivations to participate. Participation may, for example, be motivated by participants’ quest for distinct rewards, and various levels of cooperation, from mutually rewarding exchange to forms of peaceful competition or outright conflict, can be analysed as a result of participants’ trading sanctions or reinforcements. One of the reinforcements generally available to participants that enter into mutual monitoring is social approval, access to which motivates participation in social situations and requires exposure to other participants. The exchange of social approval among participants pushes activities towards certain levels of cooperation since every participant remains able to provide or deny approval (Homans 1961: 34; Kuhn 1963: 84–6) but has little approval to gain from frustrating a level of coordination that has once been selected (Lewis 1969: 14–15). In mobilizing reinforcements selectively, participants may thus socialize one another to attend specific forms of coordination. Reiterated cooperation correlates with reiterated access to reinforcements, from social approval to other kinds of incentives, most of which participants come to gradually appreciate by having been reinforced to do so. In this sense the exchange of social approval certainly constitutes a very elementary process through which participants frame activity and experience in distinct productions of context, many of which come to incorporate distinct sets of more complex reinforcements.6 The disciplinary r´esum´e of behavioural sociology and the diverse theories of exchange associated with it is mixed, though not devoid of lasting 5

6

Homans (1961: 10–14) claimed that the effective operation of this elementary behavioural process is implicitly presupposed by all serious attempts at formulating general sociological theories. Social exchange in this general sense of coordinating participants is therefore a more fundamental phenomenon of cooperation than the incidence of communication in the narrower sense of mobilizing language (cf. Goffman 1969: ix–x). Rather, it is congenial to communication in the broader sense of coordination through signalling (cf. Sugden 2004: 190–5).

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Framing situations, responding to disruptions

promise (cf. Emerson 1976; Skyrms 2010: 83–92). The basic idea that co-present participants train and socialize one another through forms of alternating stimulation can hardly be sociologically villainized, since there is just no other proven elementary process for producing regularities across social situations and for equipping participants with the kind of mastery required for such productions. If explorations of framing are to recognize the elementary character of this reflexive behavioural socialization of participants for the production of context, then sociologists will have to relate behavioural and cognitive regularities more closely than in traditionally cognition-sceptical accounts of social exchange (Binmore 1994: 151–2) and also much more closely than is common in phenomenological, cognition-enthusiastic, analyses (Maynard 2003: 10). Thinking about situated activity in terms of exchange is compatible with a broad-based understanding of existential involvement in social situations. The sociological literature offers observations of successful exchange generating positive affect (Lawler and Yoon 1996), of disapproval producing feelings of shame (Scheff 1990: 74–5) or of exchanges of gestures implying exchanges of emotion (Hochschild 1979: 568). The effects of social exchange appear to transcend behavioural, affective, as well as cognitive aspects of coordinating participation as participants travel through social situations. Once the understanding of social exchange is more comprehensively recontextualized within a microsociological account of situated activity, a more continuous form of sociological inquiry becomes available (Mitchell 1978). Within such an inquiry, the incidence of disruptiveness, rather than an irritation to be sidelined, becomes an analytical resource that helps to reveal distinct ways of producing context and coordinating participants’ cognitive, behavioural and affective involvements. 2.3

Disruptions

Even the most trivial and unproblematic encounters are embedded in a lavish exchange of various kinds of signal (body, head and facial movements, and verbal and non-verbal utterances) with which participants constantly reassure one another, among other things, that indeed a somewhat consensual run of events and activities is taking place (Scheff 1990: 98–102). If social situations are recognized as constituting elementary problems of coordination by an observer, then he or she will see ‘no such thing as idle conversation’ (Lewis 1969: 160). In many situations of everyday life the reception of reassuring stimuli from co-present participants is rewarding to an extent that effectively marginalizes more instrumental, and less immediately rewarding, aspects of participation (Molm 2003: 12; Collins 2004: 168–70). One way of identifying disruptiveness in the

Disruptions

39

run of social situations against this background is through noticing distinct changes in the kind of reinforcements which participants present one another with. One basic form in which respective shifts occur is marked by the provision of signals with which participants indicate that something untoward has happened. Such signals may take the form of subtle gestures of tension or irritation, like avoiding the gaze of the other or other minor forms of body language (Binmore 1998: 269–70), or of descriptive communication, of accounts by which participants offer another a verbal interpretation of what is wrong (Scott and Lyman 1968).7 Once participants mutually ratify such accounts, a common level of involvement is usually quickly re-established (Scott and Lyman 1968: 52–3). The repertoire of non-syntactic forms of expression in responding to difficulties in maintaining unobtrusive involvement in ongoing activities, however, is particularly broad. It reaches from the subtle to the blatant as well as from the general to the more specific in attributing disruptions. Often very short signals suffice to provide satisfactory identification of distinct types of disruptiveness: ‘Oops!’, ‘Eek!’, ‘Ouch!’ (Goffman 1981: 99–110; Miller and Leary 1992: 211–15). Various conventional tools are utilized by participants in dealing with disruptiveness in a more or less routine manner (Clark 1996: 259–74): using suspension devices such as pausing in mid sentence (or mid expression), using fillers (‘uh’, ‘uhm’, ‘hold on’), and employing certain editing expressions in order to provide retrospective interpretations of disruptiveness (‘that was in error’). It is evidently unpleasant to interrupt an ongoing run of activity and deal with a disruption; participants appear to prefer brief signalling of disruptions over both verbal accounts and lengthier forms of perusal, and the mere possibility of the latter tends to be a source of embarrassment. Just what, however, establishes the particular level of involvement that participants appear to prefer? One might say in answer that it is the context which participants have previously been assuming in coordinating their activities, for example, the indifferent chatter, the ‘minding one’s business’, the ‘doing being ordinary’ (Sacks 1984b). Participants, just like sociological observers of their involvement, will generally tend to refer to any order associated with a frame of activity prior to a disruption as having been normal. The problem is, however, that the presence of such normality in a particular situation is usually rather diffuse and, as long as no disruption is marked, that it will tend to remain utterly unspecified. Goffman uses various terms 7

An instance of this is the provision of accounts by offenders with which they acknowledge their offences, at the same time justifying their behaviour and thus ‘neutralizing’ its deviant character (Sykes and Matza 1957; cf. Athens 1977).

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to address the suppositional and implicit aspects of framing, and he does not settle on a theoretical concept for analysing the respective social accomplishments, writing about ‘cognitive relations with others’, ‘shared presuppositions’, and the previously mentioned ‘effective cooperation in maintaining expectations’ (Goffman 1983b: 5). Harold Garfinkel somewhat more systematically speaks of ‘background expectancies’ within the run of social situations (Garfinkel 1967: 36). For Garfinkel, the effectiveness of background expectancies is evidenced by the expressive and often highly affective behaviour that is triggered by disappointments (Garfinkel 1967: 49–53). On the level of social exchange among participants, Garfinkel’s data shows how this is marked by a shift in the provision of signals from approval to disapproval, from trading rewards to presenting or threatening retributions (Garfinkel 1967: 51–3). The late Erving Goffman handed down harsh judgement on sociologists’ lack of ability to address the underlying issues of coordination and learning, complaining that there would be ‘no framework’ and ‘not even a simple-minded classification’ (Goffman 1983a: 48). Some sociological intelligence, though, becomes available in response to this judgement if the distribution of expectations among participants and the different ways of maintaining these expectations are explored more systematically. Expectations are propositions, or theories, the logical subjects of which are actual occasions (cf. Whitehead 1929: 280–316, 392–5). If there are defensive aspects to the way in which participants feel and relate to these propositions, then there clearly are also highly affirmative aspects of confronting actual occasions in social situations – how else could Garfinkel’s background expectancies usually remain in the ‘background’? There is an evident empirical preference among participants to accept just about everything that transpires in a situation as normal as long as nobody complains (Goffman 1959: 21–2). Randall Collins (2004: 144–5) calls this the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle8 of assuming normalcy. This principle defines a level of generally affirmative involvement that is able to accept almost anything that is taking place – not only as an expression of actual occasions, but as an expression of a more general regularity and legitimate order. Just like Goffman and Garfinkel, Herbert Simon has regarded the collective maintenance of expectations as the elementary accomplishment of the continuation of social order through a run of social situations (Simon 8

It might be more appropriate to speak of the ‘Schutz and Simon’ principle, since Garfinkel’s argument is in this respect a restatement of Schutz’ paper on multiple realities (Schutz 1962: 228–9). I will stick with Collins’ original designation in order to preserve the pun.

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1997: 110–11, 359). In Simon’s more behaviourally minded terminology, maintaining expectations is a question of participants attending to common sets of generalized stimuli (Simon 1997: 110) as they socialize one another in following similar stimulus patterns in responding to actual occasions (Simon 1997: 117). Simon’s behavioural account of situated activity implies a largely affirmative character of maintaining expectations cooperatively: once participants respond to actual occasions, this establishes specific actual occasions to be attended to, and respectively directed responses in turn stimulate responses by other participants with responses consecutively ratifying one another as valid stimuli (March and Simon 1993: 162–70). This includes the possibility that cooperation in maintaining expectations occasionally does not motivate an outright rejection of disruptive events. Such events may, rather, often be initially affirmed as actual occasions participants are actively attending before they are being marked as disruptive; if nobody watches the play, nobody will be disturbed by an inappropriate performance or by a noisy audience. Maintaining different sets of expectations at the same time – some, for example, serving primarily purposes of recognition, others serving as a basis of evaluation – allows for the maintaining of coordination through runs of activity during which some, but hardly all, expectations are frustrated at any given time. The insight that not all expectations which are maintained cooperatively can be considered as norms, and that there are considerable differences in how expectations are being maintained, is essential for an appropriately complex understanding of how participants come to deal with actual occasions which are always substantially unforeseen.9 Since the difference between normal and abnormal events is constituted not by actual occasions but by how participants respond to them, there is always more than one avenue of response open to participants, and not all participants will tend to respond in the same or even just a similar fashion. Divergences across participants as to what is considered immediately irritating are common, and for a large majority of everyday actual occasions, such considerations do not tend to be regulated by social conventions as long as they do not impose problems of coordination (Lewis 1969: 42). Maintaining expectations across participants requires accommodating differences of response and different ways of responding to 9

This distinguishes the working of the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle from the principle of cooperation identified by Robert Sugden (2004: 177), which emphasizes normative aspects inherent in the stabilization of strategies within a collective of participants. The implication of the putting the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle first is to emphasize that the stability of strategies in the face of potential or actual disruption may benefit from accommodation as much as from resentment.

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responses. Singling out certain types of behaviour as normatively desirable and others as deviant, then, is merely one particularly rigid form of conserving expectations as propositions about actual occasions. The ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle implies that it is not the dominating but, rather often, the dominated among participants who will appreciate the immediate benefits of ignoring apparent embarrassments. Furthermore, treating a differentiation of compliant and defiant forms of behaviour as the general solution to maintaining order within and across situations would run contrary to the empirical complexities of framing situated activity among participants with different biographies, intentions and beliefs. Such complexity is not a special attribute of everyday life in an age of globalization. Even in locally more contained and comparatively homogenous communities, participants usually see fit not only to differentiate between appropriate and offensive demeanour but also between regrettable and somewhat tolerated, if not indeed desirable, forms of delinquency: Between the responsible man, whom the excellence of a practice immediately in line with the official rule . . . predisposes to fulfil the functions of delegate and spokesman, and the irresponsible man who, not content with breaking the rules, does nothing to extenuate his infractions, groups make room for the well-meaning rule-breaker who by conceding the appearances or intent of conformity . . . contributes to the – entirely official – survival of the rule. (Bourdieu 1977: 40; italics original)

Such observations, again (see above, section 1.5), imply that a definition of disruptions as events deviating from a discrete set of rules or standards would miss the fact that there is always an element of coordination among participants in identifying deviations. There are many ways of coming to terms with disruptions, and participants may take advantage of a variety of options. A working definition of disruptions should therefore take care not to be overly restrictive in relating to empirical incidences, and it makes sense to include even those actual occasions which in a run of situations will possibly come to constitute disruptions of an ultimately minor and elusive sort. Accordingly, a disruption can be defined as any actual occasion which at least one participant marks as being disruptive. This may be one participant ‘flooding out’ (Goffman 1961b: 50–5), a group of participants reservedly inspecting a interestingly different occurrence, one person’s ‘tsk’, or many persons’ ‘aargh’. How disastrous or ordinary a disruption will subsequently become is a question of further responses, and of maintaining sets of expectations among participants beyond present disruptions and responses. In this respect, the very content of an

Responses

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original stimulus is an emergent quality subject to continuous reconstruction (Mead 1964: 56–8).10

2.4

Responses

At this point there is a clear sense that articulating and maintaining expectations in responding to disruptiveness may take place in a variety of ways. The recovery of previously held background expectations is that particular process which has tended to draw most of the attention from sociological microanalysts.11 The pervasiveness of repair in everyday interaction illustrates the impressive discipline with which participants of social situations cooperate in maintaining expectations, but it also raises the following points: whether there are different kinds of repair motivated by different sets of expectations; whether and when participants may be able to avoid repair altogether by simply coordinating in favour of ignorance; and whether and in which way participants may be selective in adjusting responses accordingly. In confronting actual occasions, participants draw on sets of expectations which accommodate varieties of response. If sociological analysis is to make further progress in understanding the apparent variety in participants’ strategies of response, then it needs to find a way of addressing this variety systematically. Attending to how participants maintain expectations is one particular way of doing so. The differentiation of normative expectations and cognitive expectations offered by Johan Galtung (1959) and elaborated by Niklas Luhmann (1995: 319– 25) provides a useful starting point. Normative expectations are defined by Galtung (1959: 216–17) as motivating that particularly rigid and categorical way of response that is traditionally associated with upholding norms. If disruptions as actual occasions are dealt with through reaffirming normative expectations, then a rejection of events which have been marked as disruptive is supported 10

11

Mead’s discussion of situations in which experience is in need of reconstruction, which is set up to demonstrate the emergent character of the subject matter of experience, heavily draws on Dewey’s (1896) criticism of treating distinctions between stimuli and responses as categorically given by either experience or its logical subject (Mead 1964: 36–42, 59 [note 17]). The work by Schegloff and his colleagues (1977) is the canonical example. A comprehensive assessment of the rich literature about repair in conversation analysis is desirable but cannot be offered in the context of the present investigation. Although speaking of repair suggests a focus of associated engagements on reducing the social fallout of disruptions, I would suspect that potential effects of repair on subsequent social changes within a collective of participants may be identified in transcripts of conversations analysed in this line of research.

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and legitimized. After an actual occasion has initially been marked by a participant, other participants (if they are willing to normatively coordinate in this manner) will join in and confirm that events rather than expectations have failed them. In the long line of sociological theorizing about these issues, Emile Durkheim has perhaps most famously emphasized the affective character of the collective response associated with maintaining normative expectations as an ‘act of vengeance’ (Durkheim 1964: 85–90); Harold Garfinkel (1967: 35–75) has provided excellent microsociological evidence of the kind of emotional arousal involved (see Chapter 3), and recent evolutionary game theory has demonstrated how the stabilization of strategies within a collective breeds a morality that surrounds normative expectations with resentment against their breach (Sugden 2004: 151–65; 214–23). Mobilizing sanctions is an expression of participants’ readiness to defend normative expectations against deviance. Maintaining normative expectations, therefore, is ultimately a question of social support (Mead 1964: 170; Luhmann 1981: 243–4; Sugden 2004: 177). If participants are to uphold normative expectations against disruptive events, then they will reject these events as well as the potential rewards offered by accepting them (or by deliberately bringing them about). If this willingness and the mobilization of respective ‘excess pressure’ (Luhmann 1995: 333; cf. Boehm 1982; Binmore 1998: 277–82) can be reckoned with, then small signs (e.g. a stare) may suffice to keep participants from frustrating normative expectations, which are at risk12 (cf. Goffman 1963: 88): ‘the subliminal withdrawals of polite courtesies, the half-turned shoulders, the irritating remarks passed off as badinage, the pursed lips, the awkward silences, the eyes that wander in search of a more socially acceptable partner’ (Binmore 1998: 307–8). Alternatively, disruptions may be responded to by adjusting expectations and responses affirmatively (Galtung 1959: 217; Luhmann 1995: 320–1). Whilst disruptions mobilize participants against events or activities once normative expectations are being frustrated by them, disruptions will constitute occasions to contemplate events more or less appreciatively when cognitive expectations are being maintained. In the latter case, participants (again, given their willingness to coordinate in this manner) will take actual occasions that have been marked as disruptive by one or more participants as potential premises for reformulating 12

Conversely, it can often be observed that deliberate offenders avoid the gaze of other participants in committing an offence, negating mutual monitoring and thus the existence of a common social situation (e.g. pedestrians rushing over a red light and avoiding eye contact with pedestrians waiting on the other side).

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expectations. Cognitive expectations are not, however, fleeting assumptions readily given up at the slightest notice. Maintenance of cognitive expectations often draws on quite elaborate and stable bodies of knowledge – scientific theories amenable to falsification are obviously a case in point – and presupposes some mastery among participants in bringing such knowledge to bear on actual occasions. Cognitive expectations do not fully surrender to the dynamics of unfolding situations (otherwise it would make no sense to maintain them) – they direct participants’ attention to particular aspects of a present situation which will inform their responses (Luhmann 1995: 332–3). In frustrating cognitive expectations, disruptions become sources of information and occasions for participants to find out what exactly has just been happening. Sometimes the result may be to give up a set of expectations, but often, cognitive expectations are upheld in ways which allow participants to more gradually adjust them. Good examples are relations in scientific practice between theories and empirical evidence, and the seduction of treating disruptive observations as occasions to extend rather than revise theoretical assumptions (Duhem 1954: 180– 218). Or consider the working of the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle in cases in which participants hold on to cognitive expectations in cases in which they could just as much, or, indeed, should register the normative discrepancy of actual occasions: The plane is now in the midst of being hijacked, and the guy reports, ‘I thought to myself, we just had a Polish hijacking a month ago and they’re already making a movie of it.’ (Sacks 1984b: 419)

The respective dispositions of attending to actual occasions have to be acquired by participants through socialization in the case of cognitive expectations just as much as in the case of normative expectations (cf. Ryan 2006: 243–4): whilst the basic rules of calculation are learned normatively in the sense that two plus two must always equal four, the various ways in which numbers make sense and refer to apples, oranges, friendship or money are generally learned in a manner that remains amenable to further modification (Vollmer 2007). These two alternative ways of maintaining expectations and associating them with the production of context present participants with two options of responding to disruptions: One stumbles into a situation without giving it much thought. Then disappointment strikes. The Chancellor started smoking again! One must now be clear whether one could have expected the opposite cognitively or normatively. (Luhmann 1995: 321)

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Facing disruptions, participants need not settle explicitly on an interpretation of events in coordinating their responses. Agreeing to disagree may be one particular solution to the problem of coordination, and participants may occasionally come to legitimately expect just that. At least one further way of maintaining expectations, though, has to be brought into the picture in order to account for the variety of expectations drawn on by participants. Since, on a very fundamental level, maintaining expectations requires participants to attend to one another’s responses in a present ecological huddle, prior contacts between participants will often bring about a form of attention that is peculiar to co-presence among specific participants. In situated activity, defending the standing of a norm is, for example, a question of whether to actually support somebody in his or her resentment against deviant events or activities, but there may also be a sense in which such giving of support is not general (Mead 1964: 170). Who has been frustrated by disruptiveness may, in other words, to some extent determine participants’ responses. Fundamentally, then, a third way of cultivating expectations within a collective of participants is to align one’s expectations to those of others selectively, which might take the form of a hostile alignment, an open dissociation and various ‘personalizations’ of expectations (Lindemann 2009: 197–8). In such instances, participants’ responses to disruptions are being defined in relation to other participants’ attributes and responses. Respective expectations might be called relational, and their maintenance contributes to establishing and reiterating specific relationships among participants (cf. White 2008: 24–8; Martin 2009: 21–3). Relational expectations can be based on affinity or antagonism, on knowing each other in person, or by virtue of a more impersonal or formal relationship, but they always refer to and are activated by some taking or shifting of positions among participants with respect to one another (Gibson 2005: 1564–7). There are, then, three different ways of maintaining expectations in responding to disruptions to be considered here: defending the standing of expectations (normative); adjusting their substance (cognitive); or making any response depend on other participants (relational). How will effective cooperation in maintaining expectations in one way or another of ‘undoing disappointment’ (Luhmann 1995: 332) be achieved in actual runs of activity in which disruptions are being marked and expectations are called into question? Referring to an alleged social context specific to the situation and disruption in question cannot provide a satisfactory answer, since context is just what is being produced by framing actual occasions through responses. Responding to disruptions not merely indicates but more fundamentally establishes among participants how the fundamental demarcations of order and social context will come to rest

Keys

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for those concerned by it (cf. White 2008: 67–8). In frame-analytical terminology, the requisite aspects of framing need to be keyed in order to direct participants’ activities and awareness accordingly (Goffman 1974: 43–5). In employing distinct keys, participants provide one another with signals about types of responses, the maintenance of expectations, and the context to put forth. 2.5

Keys

Goffman introduces his notion of keying as a musical metaphor for analysing transformations of situations that are already in some sense meaningful, as when, for example, serious activity is transformed into play. The notion of keying is not elaborated much by Goffman, who utilizes it more as a suggestive metaphor than as an instrument of systematic theory-building.13 In responding to disruptiveness, the problem of keying becomes a problem of rearticulating expectations in the face of disappointments and, therefore, of establishing some level of response on which the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle can gradually be reasserted. The problem of keying cooperation has been characterized in a more general fashion, and with respect to problems of coordination, by Thomas Schelling, also by adopting a metaphor of keys, though with non-musical, door-opening connotations: People can often concert their intentions or expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same. Most situations . . . provide some clue for coordinating behavior, some focal point for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do. Finding the key, or rather finding a key – any key that is mutually recognized as the key becomes the key – may depend on imagination more than on logic; it may depend on analogy, precedent, accidental arrangement, symmetry, aesthetic or geometric configuration, casuistic reasoning, and who the parties are and what they know about each other. (Schelling 1960: 57; italics original)

In drawing on imageries of keys, Goffman and Schelling both grapple with the problem of how cooperation in maintaining expectations is accomplished among participants of social situations. With respect to the problem of cooperation, every social situation may be called a ‘Schelling game’ (Clark 1996: 62–7) or, rather, a ‘Schelling–Lewis game’ (Lewis 13

Jameson’s (2000: 50) critical remark on Goffman’s use of metaphor is perhaps a bit severe but not entirely off the mark: ‘the notion of musical keys, of modulation and the like, is a familiar enough source of occasional figures of speech, but to transform the noun into a verb is to terrorize the reader into a conviction that the operation is something he and all the rest of us do all the time, and that there is no point pretending we don’t know what the term means’.

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1969; Skyrms 2010), in which participants struggle in order to reach a common solution to a problem of coordination, a level on which coordination can persist, and thus, to use David Lewis’ (1969: 14–24) words, a coordination equilibrium. The saturation of sociological discourse with similar images is striking. With respect to the present topic, studies of collective behaviour have employed a concept of keynoting in investigating how participants respond ‘when an unusual, difficult-to-assimilate event occurs’ (Turner and Killian 1972: 47). Students of collective behaviour have been focusing on episodes in which order among a collective of participants is suspended, reset and redirected (Lofland 1981: 413). In the perspective offered by Turner and Killian (1972: 47), a keynote is ‘a gesture or symbolic gesture’ which among an ‘ambivalent audience’, if it is supported by subsequent responses, may ‘shift the balance in support of a keynoted image’ (47), establishing a temporary coordination of collective behaviour. The elementary social process implied by all three imageries of keys is very general and can gradually be given a more formal characterization, starting along the lines of Clark’s (1996: 64–5) notion of a coordination device. The framing of situated activity as a process of coordinating expectations requires some signalling among participants with respect to how they relate to actual occasions in order to gradually establish some common ground. Keying can be used as a generic term for this process of signalling, and any signal employed by participants in introducing ‘a shared basis for the piece of common ground to be added’ (Clark 1996: 132) can be called a key. In such a perspective, a continuum of keys can be investigated – from asymmetries in ongoing activities that are recognized by participants as cues about what is going on, to keys more deliberately employed by them (Goffman 1959: 14–16; Sugden 2004: 44–55). Metaphorically speaking, any key within this continuum is door-opening with respect to providing participants a glimpse of one another’s expectations, and it is musical with respect to tuning their level of response, providing a note to start with and a tonality to attend to. More formally speaking, keys as means of coordination are correlation devices that help participants to settle on distinct equilibrium points at which expectations can successfully be maintained, that is, correlated among participants (Skyrms 1996: 69–73; Fudenberg and Levine 1998: 21–4; Gintis 2009: 135–9). Keying as an accomplishment in correlation is a coming to terms among participants, a temporary settlement on one of (usually) many potential coordination equilibria. Such a settlement need not imply that participants will produce an explicit consensus on some subject matter of experience and action – it simply means that participants will be able

Keys

49

to continue their involvements in the present situation in a manner that allows them to suppose to be in agreement about what is going on for the time being (cf. Garfinkel 2006: 184; Lewis 1969: 39–42). Keying cooperation in responding to actual occasions thus merely requires that participants’ attention and conduct is directed in a way which allows them to find a temporary equilibrium of coordination on some level of selective attention and ignorance, behaviour and forbearance. Across normative, cognitive and relational expectations, keys which selectively direct and arrest participants’ attention take on sociologically specifiable formats.14 Furthermore, across types of expectations, keys can be further differentiated into signs, symbols or resources – a differentiation that allows for the identification of distinct types of keys and generally recognizable examples. In identifying signs, symbols and resources as specific manifestations of keys articulating normative, cognitive and relational expectations respectively, sets of keys that are collectively habitualized can systematically be explored. All keys are generalized stimuli that are able to correlate the selection of expectations within a collective of co-present participants (cf. Foss 1996: 83–4). The differentiation of expectations and responses this generalization is associated with allows us to investigate regular patterns in the ways keys are employed by participants, and thus to identify distinct sets of elementary and more generalized keys.15 The complexity in these sets of keys is great, and is a result of both the substance and variety of coordination problems occupying participants utilizing keys as correlation devices and of the differentiation and generalization of expectations attended to. Such complexity is mastered by participants in adhering to 14

15

There are a couple of theoretical syntheses operating with similar differentiations of how social order is produced and maintained. Luhmann’s differentiation of three dimensions of meaning (Luhmann 1990: 21–79, 1995: 74–82), Bourdieu’s differentiation of forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986) and Lindemann’s (2009: 194–200) recent extension of differentiation of expectations offered by Galtung and Luhmann are, to my knowledge, the ones most closely related to the present investigation, while both Scott’s ‘pillars of institutionalization’ (e.g. Scott 1995: 33) and Giddens’ dimensions of structuration (Giddens 1984: 28–34) present more limited similarities. The analogies cannot be systematically discussed here. In an important sense, such correlation is prior to effective signalling, since the ability to settle on certain signals to begin with is already a result of equilibrium selection. As Peter Vanderschraaf (2001: 53–97) argues convincingly, correlated equilibrium solutions to coordination problems do not generally require signalling by participants. This argument generally supports the present understanding of keys as emerging within a collective of participants from the successive generalization of responses towards signs, symbols and resources. Whilst the existence of signs is generally taken as a given in this investigation, a more thoroughgoing microfoundational account of the genesis of keys therefore does appear possible if game-theoretical analyses are taken into account more comprehensively than is possible here (cf. Skyrms 2010: 130–5).

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certain typical forms of signalling which afford finite sets of regular types of keys, typical keys which participants and sociologists alike are able to recognize across situations. Signs Attending to a key brings about certain ‘attentional modifications’ (Schutz 1972: 71–4), and this is perhaps most evident in the case of specific cognitive expectations the perpetuation of which requires an alertness towards ‘interpretative relevance’ (Schutz 1970: 35–45). To coordinate cognitive expectations with respect to actual occasions, participants need to draw each other’s attention to specific aspects of what is going on, pointing out sources of information, that is, as those ‘differences making a difference’ for how expectations are to be accommodated (Bateson 1972: 315; Skyrms 2010: 34–8). If an aspect of what is going on is marked as a piece of information, then participants following a respective signal will attend to ongoing events in an affirmative manner, taking the actuality of an occasion (i.e. the fact that it has happened) as a premise for coordinating expectations (Garfinkel 2008: 158). In upholding expectations normatively, on the other hand, participants need to ascertain each other’s willingness to defend expectations against actual occasions, which requires an exchange of signs indicating sanctions or participants’ intent to administer them. And finally, if expectations are sustained relationally, then this is neither a question of picking up information nor of communicating a willingness to punish, but of attending to signs that provide clues about how to relate to other participants. Keying responses to relational expectations, then, is contingent on the signalling of positions in claiming the attention of others, as when friendship, apprenticeship, hostility or intimacy, dominance or subordination are being signalled through respective ‘participation shifts’ (Gibson 2005: 1564–7). In this manner, distinct types of signs can be associated with cognitive, normative and relational expectations in respectively signalling information, sanctions or positions. Keys may be given off involuntarily, as when one participant identifies another as signifying hostility or sexual interest. If a selection of expectations has been affected, then signs have, by virtue of successful correlation, been operating as keys even if they were expression given off rather than provided deliberately (Goffman 1959: 14–16). In the latter case, participants may still try to rekey coordination deliberately, and it may take several turns before a selection of expectations acquires, for the time being, some stability and robustness. Often coordination is rekeyed repeatedly in sequences superimposing, specifying, generalizing,

Keys

51

stacking and stirring keys in more complex linguistic expressions, repeatedly readjusting temporary coordination equilibria: activities on stage convey a sense of drama or comedy, but the story unfolds gradually towards an ending, just like meeting with your accountant is keyed from a friendly chatter towards financial issues, then towards bills and accounts, target figures, balances, legal issues, and back to chatter. The effectiveness of keying responses and correlating activities and expectation through selective signalling of information, sanctions or positions depends on the habitualization of participants, that is, on their habitus and socialization in scanning and responding to ongoing activities selectively (Bourdieu 1990: 53). The choice of keys through which activities are coordinated, as well as the general extent to which reiterated keying will be necessary in stabilizing a common level of response, will generally refer to certain similarities or differences between participants in their socialization and their respective mastery of responding to the signs sent off by others, whether between friends or neighbours, performers and audiences, or professionals and laypersons. Symbols If participants are socialized towards entertaining similar sets of expectations, then keys will gradually become more conventional. Keys as correlation devices become the subject of stimulus generalization beyond the level of generality at which they will reliably be recognized as specific signs towards being recognized as signs of further signs. Such further generalization of keys and signalling conventions (Lewis 1969: 135–52) supports participants in dealing very robustly with dissimilarities across situations by generalizing, and thus in a sense cutting through, complexities and contingencies: one cannot survey at a glance the complex situation of who expects what – especially if one takes into consideration more than two participants and possibilities of changing expectations . . . But the fact that one cannot take this complexity in at a glance entails, not that expecting expectations is irrelevant, but that symbolic abbreviations representing highly complex expectational situations are necessary for ongoing orientation. (Luhmann 1995: 306)

As generalizations of signs towards signs representing sets of other signs (and so on), symbols presuppose the existence of broader social conventions and more thorough habitualizations of how sets of expectations are selected and coordinated within a collective (cf. Gomez and Jones 2000: 699–700). Therefore symbols which are employed as keys take on very distinctive sociological forms with respect to normative, cognitive or

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relational expectations. The possibility of expressing expectations as propositions about actual occasions in symbols which reliably represent their relevance within a situation is associated with the possibility that expectations can in turn be expected (Luhmann 1995: 306). Such a congealing of expectations may be the outcome of reiterated exchange through interaction rituals (Collins 2004: 95–9), of balancing uncertainties afforded by routinely re-enacting associations of institutions and rhetoric (White 2008: 180–2), or, more generally, of the reiterated run of distinct types of coordination games. In any case, if expectations are symbolized by specific keys, then invoking the symbol will select expectations depending on whether participants refer to norms, customs or morality (normative expectations), to knowledge, competence, taste (cognitive expectations), or to membership, status or reputation (relational expectations). Symbolization can take various forms and is not subject to an intrinsically coherent logic of expression. Accordingly, the list of potential symbols will be open-ended for any expectation that is being mobilized; normative expectations may be symbolized by sets of collective values rather than by legal code, or status may be signalled by sexual stamina rather than by indicators of wealth. The generalization of keys from signs towards signs of signs (of signs and so on) also implies that differentiating between types of expectations to be selected may be difficult for certain symbols, for example, when deciding whether a norm is truly general or whether it demands a qualification in terms of membership. Such problems are the result of the stacking and layering of keys and expectations in social situations which are repeatedly rekeyed and of homologies brought about by the habitualization of collective conditions of existence, in which social practices tend to economize on the varieties of logic employed by collective schemes of classification (Bourdieu 1977: 109–14), breeding problems of interpretation in correlating activities and expectations effectively in particular cases. Resources Sophistication in reading, providing, responding to and exploiting the symbolization of expectations is associated with behavioural regularities which participants gradually come to expect and rely on, but also with their abilities to experiment and gamble with such regularities. Participants’ inclinations to play with expectations, a playfulness that is pervasive across human collectives (Huizinga 1949: 22–32), is associated, among other things, with learning to key (Goffman 1974: 40–3) and, more generally, with learning to manipulate the run of social situations

Keys

53

(Goffman 1969: 47–58). As social exchange, every situation involves and reproduces inequalities across participants who influence the distribution of behavioural opportunities through keying cooperation selectively, gradually redirecting coordination turn by turn. Reliability in manipulating one another’s expectations, activities and awareness through mobilizing distinct correlation devices increases with the extent to which keys are generalized and, as generalized stimuli, acquire characteristics of deployable resources in bringing about certain responses (cf. Sugden 2004: 54–7). Individual participants who utilize keys as resources therefore in a sense exploit an infrastructure of socialization and habitualization maintained collectively in bringing about a reliable generalization of keys. Generalized signals which are in this manner employed as social resources can, again, be associated with distinct types of keys, depending on whether normative, cognitive or relational expectations are being mobilized by participants. Normative expectations are associated with a distribution of rights (Coleman 1990: 53–64; Binmore 1998: 273–93), cognitive expectations generate a distribution of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986: 243–8; Collins 1998: 28–30), and relational expectations allocate social capital across participants (Lin 2001: 19–20; Coleman 1990: 302). Rights, cultural and social capital become resources for participants trying to establish, maintain or redistribute behavioural opportunities by effecting the keying of respective activities. Accumulating rights, cultural and social capital requires some reliability in keying cooperation, and this reliability is potentially undermined by the fact that the resulting distribution of keys will put certain participants at a disadvantage, possibly motivating inattention, deliberate ignorance or sabotage. In situations in which such risks are evident, mutually supportive forms of signalling and symbolizing in bulk are common, as when signs warning that offenders will be prosecuted are put up or when participants employ techniques for reminding one another about associations, membership conditions or status. Furthermore, keys deployable as resources allow making the selection of expectations itself contingent on more explicit forms of social exchange and generate opportunities for explicit bargaining about coordination, for example by trading rights in terms of money and paying off participants otherwise suffering disadvantages deemed illegitimate. Aggregate mobilizations of keys in bulk illustrate the fact that, from signs to symbols and resources, the effectiveness of keying increasingly presupposes the existence of expectations and of expectations of expectations (Lewis 1969: 25–42). In this sense, symbols and resources are ‘more structural’ expressions of probabilities with which expectations can be reproduced across situations. The effectiveness of signifying and

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correlating expectations (sanctions, pieces of information, positions) is elementary to symbolizing these in norms, knowledge or status, and to exploiting them by invoking rights or cultural or social capital. Conversely, neither will participants be able to mobilize any such forms of capital, nor will they be able to invoke any other kind of ‘structure’, if signs failed to articulate and, if required, to reiterate the standing of respective expectations. Authors such as Schelling, Lewis and Luhmann have been leaning towards a reflexive understanding of expectations as being based on expectations of expectations of expectations (and so on) in explaining increasingly unlikely forms of coordination.16 Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural capital is similar in that it emphasizes the effective socialization of participants in relatively homogenous conditions of existence as the primary prerequisite for the associated reproduction of expectations (and of expectations of expectations) and, more particularly, the continuous reproduction of inequalities (Bourdieu 1977: 186–8; 1984: 99–156). And, finally, evolutionary game theory considers the settling of populations on evolutionarily stable strategies as a form of convention in which expectations become the subject of expectations and thus become gradually self-enforcing within a collective (Sugden 2004: 149–65). Sociological analyses of the generalization of keys may, of course, be driven further. Keys as resources often become the object of further signification, symbolization and so on. Cases in point are the symbolization of rights in terms of money, of cultural capital in terms of truth or ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu 1991: 72–6), or of social capital in terms of trust, sexual intimacy or violence. At higher levels of generalization, it makes sense to speak not simply of generalized stimuli but of generalized reinforcements (Kuhn 1963: 83–4), or, possibly, of symbolically generalized media of exchange (Parsons 1963a, 1963b; Luhmann 1979, 1995: 376–7). In order to not overtax the theoretical argument beyond what is serviceable to discussing the effects of disruptiveness on the coordination of activities and expectations, the discussion stops here at the level of generalization represented in Table 2.1. This table presents a collective repository of keys across normative, cognitive and relational expectations, 16

The theoretical apparatus offered by Harrison White (2008) is another case in point. In White’s terminology, the maintenance of expectations results from efforts at control that generate identities (of events, activities, participants, persons, etc.), gradually amalgamating social structures. The parallelism of approaches with respect to the reflexive generalization of structural patterns is particularly clear in those passages of Identity and Control in which White relates his approach to Luhmann’s: ‘If we assume with Luhmann that all events are fugitive and that they are the elements of social systems, then control becomes the attempt to constrain the possible events’ (White 2008: 7, note 9). Reiterated attempts at control may be conceived as processes of establishing sets of expectations, and expectations of expectations and so on.

Keys

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Table 2.1 Expectations and keys Types of key Expectations

Signs

Symbols

Resources

normative cognitive relational

sanctions information positions

norms, customs, morality knowledge, competence, taste membership, status, reputation

rights cultural capital social capital

each with typical expressions in signs, symbols and resources. In making participants, from signs to symbols and resources, increasingly depend on expecting expectations of expectations, the utilization of keys as effective correlation devices increasingly presupposes further generalization of conventional patterns of signalling within a collective. Whilst in everyday interaction there is often a stacking of keys, of signs and symbols supporting the coordination of expectations, there is also a frequent cross-layering of expectations of participants mobilizing keys referring to and complementing one another across normative, cognitive and relational expectations.17 Upholding norms, for example, 17

This also means it becomes very difficult to distinguish normative, cognitive and relational expectations if one thinks of expectations as verbal statements like, for example, ‘We will meet tomorrow at seven.’ ‘Language, as usual, is always ambiguous as to the exact proposition which it indicates’, as Whitehead (1929: 403) writes. ‘Like it or not, we have plenty of knowledge we cannot put into words’ (Lewis 1969: 64), and as combinations of signs, symbols, and, possibly, resources, verbal statements activate a variety of keys all at once. They can therefore rarely be taken as expressions of one particular expectation, or even a finite set of expectations (Clark 1996: 156–70). Verbal signalling in keying activities is generally not to be equated with expressing expectations in verbal statements (Lewis 1969: 141–3). A statement like ‘We will meet tomorrow at seven’ accommodates relational (‘we will meet’), cognitive (‘tomorrow at seven’) and, if more implicitly, normative expectations (‘I expect you to be there and will not be prepared to give up that expectation at five past seven, and it will not sit easily with me if I have to wait for you much longer.’). The tendency to think about expectations in terms of verbal statements, of narrative or, more generally, of language, and not in terms of patterns of actual occasions like, for example, generalized patterns of response (e.g., making an appointment, setting a time, keeping an appointment, etc.), may be one reason why the sociological investigation of expectations has made such limited progress (cf. Whitehead 1929: 297–9). In everyday life, habits of representing expectations in narrative reflect participants’ practical sense of compounding keys and expectations economically in ‘series of squeaks’ (Whitehead 1929: 403–4; cf. Bourdieu 1977a: 109–14). Such practical sense is as pervasive to everyday life as it is to punctuated cooperation (see Chapter 3), but its workings can only be comprehensively understood once its intricate and shorthand ways of keying cooperation among participants are analytically disassembled. To this end, the Parsonian idea that expectations ultimately refer to ‘shared’ values is hardly helpful (Martin 2009: 5–7). Expectations are, ontologically speaking, propositions, and they may be represented more adequately by combining conceptual abstractions (of

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may be bolstered by mobilizing reason or social capital; claiming status may be supported by signifying a willingness to sanction status threats or by showing competence (Kuhn 1963: 86). Displaying uncertainty in order to induce other participants to provide (and take responsibility for) information may provide an alternative interactive resource in generating and defending status (Goodwin 1987). The signalling of information is mediated by ‘notification norms’ (Ryan 2006: 229), cultural capital mediates membership opportunities, and ‘taste is a match maker’ (Bourdieu 1984: 243). Participants frequently infer from differences in status to the prevalence of norms (Cook 1975: 386–7), and setting up associations is safeguarded by a taboo against denying the recognition of participants one has once encountered (Goffman 1963: 114–16). There are also symbolizations of aggregated expectations as propositions about actual occasions which compound normative, cognitive and relational aspects, for example institutionalized roles associated with specified status, competence and rights (like teacher, doctor or judge). Such symbolizations are typical for sites of activity in which some degree of professionalization or formalization can be levelled, awarding subsets of participants some status alongside certain resources affording its reinforcement (Coleman 1990: 167–72, 425–9); they are also prominent in scripted forms of activity, such as staged performances and storytelling (Clark 1996: 354–83). Additional layers of keys and conventions for using them may be generalized within any given collective, and this may result in isomorphic structures of higher order.18 2.6

Practical sense and punctuated cooperation

The empirical reason why even this somewhat schematic exposition easily gains complexity is that participants typically produce contexts which

18

which values may be little more than higher-order generalizations), their logical subjects (actual occasions) and probabilities of key-response connections (cf. Whitehead 1929: 312–16). In the final analysis, all such representations will have to remain rough approximations – and they do not unambiguously represent the effectiveness of correlation in solving actual coordination problems. Participants’ practical mastery of language illustrates the limits of putting expectations into verbal statements: articulating expectations verbally is generally an instance of what Garfinkel and Sacks (1986: 164–5, 183–9) have termed ‘glossing practices’. As an instance of glossing, articulating expectations always involves a certain legitimate and collectively recognized discount on the definiteness of what it is that is being articulated and clarified ‘in so many words’. Even if there is among participants some mastery of language, there is, in other words, always so much more to effective correlation in solving coordination problems, and, thankfully, the initial salience of any key needed for participants to coordinate their activities and expectations accordingly in no sense presupposes language (Sugden 2004: 190–5). Perhaps the p-homomorphism of narratives described by Abell (1987: 62–86) could be investigated in this respect.

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they subsequently defend against disruption by keying coordination in dense layers of expectations, exercising a particular mastery in ‘filling the blanks’: ‘For example, one may realistically expect (knowing oneself and one’s neighbor’s parties) to feel bored at a large New Year’s Eve party and at the same time acknowledge that it would be more fitting to feel exuberant’ (Hochschild 1979: 564). Cognitive and normative expectations, although accommodated by contradictory principles of accommodation – expecting ‘realistically’ or fitting realities to match propositions – are often cultivated simultaneously with respect to the same set of actual occasions (in this case, a party), and relational expectations (me and my neighbour) are more or less spontaneously fitted in. Through the differentiation and agglomeration of expectations achievable by selective keying of activities, a veritable battery of defences is at participants’ command. It allows them to deal with disruptiveness through categorizing and responding to actual occasions selectively: Is it me, or is it the party; is it my neighbour, or is it my mood? Will it help to have more drinks? At the same time, bearing, accommodating and being confronted with expectations is usually the very reason why there is sensitivity to disruptiveness in the first place. Given the standing of the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle, one is tempted to ask why participants should be motivated to defend a particular form of context to begin with. Why not simply go along with the run of actual occasions (and just party)? Obviously participants following certain strategies of response do have something to lose by giving them up: collectively, they lose a basis of coordination; individually, they lose a well-trained response set. At the same time, participants’ willingness to muster defences against disruptions does not appear to be comprehensively accountable to voluntaristic interests. Much defensive behaviour does not appear to be motivated by a reckoning of potential adjustments, and commitments to keeping up habitual levels of existential involvement are rarely explicitly contracted or renegotiated, even in situations in which respective bargaining would be possible.19 Framing situated activities in everyday life is a process in which different expectations and keys are mixed up, embroiled and reiterated, with signs, symbols and resources interrelated and compounded across normative, cognitive and relational expectations. The associated framing might be reproduced and distributed in the form of narrative, stories or ‘styles’ (White 2008: 112–17). Mix-ups of signs, symbols and resources allow for a great deal of 19

Think, for example, of the ironic fact that making explicit deals in order not to be invited to future social events you have found to be unpleasant in the past will be less of an option among your friends than it would be in striking a deal with people you do not know as well.

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complexity in bringing about and maintaining quite improbable forms of cooperation. Regular forms of dealing with disruptions provide for escalation (e.g., taking a case to court) as well as pacification (apologizing, accepting demotions or invitations), while demanding from participants differentiated forms of attention, challenging their abilities to selectively adjust experiences and actions in passing different social situations. Participants will seldom consciously be aware of all the aspects of framing activated within a present situation (Collins 1981a: 991), attention to which may possibly be distributed very unevenly among participants even if the correlation of expectations and activities is highly effective. Relational expectations, for example, tend to move to the background of attention in everyday conversations, which in most contemporary settings denigrate the mobilization of status in chatting and discussing (Scheff 1990: 185–9). Relegation of expectations to the background of awareness, however, does not render these propositions completely ineffective, as Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘generous’ gift exchange demonstrates (Bourdieu 1977: 191–6). Participants feel the sense of certain situations as well as the expectations associated with their regular run (as in the party case), and such feelings leave a lot of detail and complexity implicit. As propositions, expectations are a ‘lure for feeling’ (Whitehead 1929: 281, 395–6). Prior socialization influences participants’ predispositions in getting involved in situated activity not just by channelling cognitions but also through producing and retaining emotions associated with actual occasions and through a mastery of calling upon them (feel exuberant at parties!). Very generally speaking, an affirmation of expectations tends to be associated with positive affect while disappointments involve emotional discomfort (Turner 2002: 87–8; Weick et al. 2005: 418–19). On the one hand, the experience of affect may be taken as an individualized reflection of turns in social exchange and the balance of reinforcements thus brought about. A signifying function of emotion appears to be put to work by participants articulating where they stand with respect to what is going on (Hochschild 1983: 28–31). Perhaps there are ways to analytically associate distinct forms of emotional experience with specific expectations, for example in the case of relational expectations directing participants’ attribution of affect to others and themselves (cf. Lawler 2001: 329–43). On the other hand, since the existential involvement of participants is one of full bodily participation in framing cognitions, behaviour, as well as emotional experience, affection or dislike underscore just about every aspect of situated activity and awareness, which makes it hard to imagine emotions as reflecting discrete aspects of a situation. There is possibly no emotional balance sheet of situated conduct that could be, if only analytically, dissociated from the more cognitive

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or calculative aspects and implications of what participants confront (cf. Frank 1988; Binmore 1998: 338–43). Affective aspects of framing tend to be pushed to the background of sociological analyses once situated activity is treated as either a primarily cognitive process based on ascertaining interpretations and pieces of information or as a result of reckoning with options, preferences and utilities. Yet affective forms of experience and action not only complement cognitive and behavioural predispositions, they are utterly inseparable from them, since participants always have to bear out their interpretations and strategies in existential involvements in social situations which are affectively experienced and acted upon. If cognition is always to some extent emotional, then emotions are always to some extent determined by cognition and their reinforcement in solving coordination problems (Cosmides and Tooby 1994). Employing keys in reaching out towards a mutual level of involvement is also a question of producing and controlling emotions and their expression (Katz 1999: 339–43), and many contemporary forms of producing and enacting social context require a form of ‘deep acting’ in this sense (Hochschild 1979: 558). This implies that the experience of affect is framed just as much as any other form of experience is (cf. Whitehead 1929: 248), without necessarily being diminished in emotional depth, a fact effectively illustrated by patently social emotions like shame, guilt or embarrassment. The existential involvement of participants in social situations does not only bring about a certain affective conditioning towards certain aspects of framing, but is also embodied in participants’ practical sense, their individual mastery in generally being able to come to terms with what they confront. The fact that in everyday life diverse aspects of framing appear to reinforce one another in the run of social situations is not the result of some intrinsic gravitation of meaning or signalling towards clustering in norms or facts, ideas, or relationships. Instead, it results from relatively homogeneous conditions of existence within a collective of participants engaged in correlating expectations in order to solve problems of coordination. These social conditions, resulting from the run of social situations within the collective, bring about distinctive amalgamations of practical sense in employing, opening up and narrowing down specific sets of expectations (Schutz 1962: 15–19). Bourdieu pinpoints empirical tendencies in human populations towards producing homologies in his early ethnographic work on the Kabyle as well as in his later ethnographies of France (Bourdieu 1984: 175–225; 1990: 135–41). Homologies across instances of framing as single productions of context, reflected in the practical sense with which participants are able to recognize and reproduce order across situations, do not come about because participants

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cultivate a more or less accurate idea of the world which they inhabit. Homologies come about because participants intuitively feel what is right and appropriate as well as the scope for collective learning and accommodation and, perhaps, for social change (Fligstein 2001). Homologies across frames and keys derive from a collective regularization of participants’ practical sense acquired by having been in similar situations (Bourdieu 1984: 109–14). By virtue of their practical sense of correlation, participants are usually able entertain the general idea that the social world actually is a wellordered place to live in: status or membership affords certain rights, competence supports status, and cultural capital enables distinct types of friendship. The observation that participants find occasions to complain about a lack of homologies – when individual status fails the norm, or a superior turns out to just be incompetent – indicates the robustness of participants’ practical sense in producing context, whether by zeroing in, reinterpreting or striking out at occasional irregularities. It also illustrates yet again the scope of emotional affect mobilized by participants’ practical sense. However, it furthermore introduces a vulnerability of experience and activity that cannot be overcome by any battery of social defences. Participants may be well versed in deploying a large variety of complex sets of responses and correlation devices; they may know that there are different ways of getting things done, different and possibly contradictory customs and conventions, and they may feel, still, that every situation has a level of involvement utterly appropriate for it. As participants cooperate in maintaining expectations according to their practical sense, this makes them vulnerable to disruptions frustrating their feeling about what is right and called for. Respective frustrations are associated with shifts of involvement indicating the distinct phenomenon that will subsequently be discussed as punctuated cooperation. Punctuated cooperation is an engagement in which participants lose a previously established level of cooperation in maintaining expectations, or, more formally speaking, a run of cooperation in which a coordination equilibrium is temporarily lost. Not every marking of an event as disruptive leads to a run of punctuated cooperation,20 as many disruptions can be handled within levels of involvement that are subject to participants’ routine mastery: ‘That’s next door . . . ’; ‘No, I was meaning to say something else . . . ’; ‘Call the IT people . . . ’ Disequilibrium 20

This does not imply that episodes of punctuated cooperation constitute a proper subset of all situations in which disruption is being marked (see below, Chapter 6, section 1). Punctuated cooperation may also take place in situations in which no event has been marked as disruptive, for example in episodes of organizational stress (see Chapter 4, section 2).

Practical sense and punctuated cooperation

61

associated with punctuated cooperation is always gradual, even when a level of coordination is lost abruptly.21 The incidence of punctuated cooperation within a situation is invariably a matter of degree: when somebody who witnesses an accident and then calls an ambulance or the police, he or she establishes a normalization of the disruption as requiring outside assistance and draws on a tight script in articulating the emergency (Raymond and Zimmerman 2007). Yet in one respect, even very gradual losses of coordination bring about a clearly identifiable change of involvement: punctuated cooperation is always marked by participants becoming somewhat more if not ‘fully occupied with the case at hand’ (Coleman 1990: 199), if not ‘unreservedly engrossed’ (Goffman 1974: 378), and by some level of resentment (Sugden 2004: 151–65, 218–23). The cultural differentiation between events from the collective set of disastrous disruptions and ‘ordinary troubles’ therefore in a sense comes down to an emotional arousal: many disruptions that are marked end up as mere annoyances, while others unsettle participants’ practical sense by displacing their involvements and challenging their practical sense about what is going on in an existentially engrossing manner. Roughly speaking, as participants lose their grip on coordination equilibria which they feel should have been struck, they tend to lose their temper, and both deviations are a question of degree but as such visible in participants’ actual involvement. When disruptions are handled effectively without participants’ practical sense being substantially challenged this rarely results in further disruptions being marked within a collective. Punctuated cooperation, on the other hand, is likely to provoke accommodations that unsettle coordination in further runs of activity. The set of actual occasions possibly associated with punctuated cooperation is very diverse – from social to technological accidents to more deliberate or formally motivated engagements like the delivery of bad (or good) news (Maynard 2003: 4). The distinctness of these events is defined exclusively by their effect on participants’ responses as they ‘inevitably provoke emotional reactions of one kind or another just as they necessitate a realignment to and realization of a transfigured social world’ (4). Disruptiveness does not lead to punctuated cooperation because discrete events would generally be incompatible with particular keys like, for example, some collectively habitualized norm, knowledge or status. Rather, punctuated cooperation is itself a source of disruptiveness by actual occasions being, in some 21

Coordination equilibria, of course, do not represent static distributions of activities to begin with, but rather, define ranges of appropriateness and ‘zones of indifference’ (Barnard 1968: 168–9).

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way or another, at odds with participants’ practical sense of keying and correlation. Punctuated cooperation is, in other words, not a result of a collective repertoire of keys generally available to solve coordination problems being challenged from without, but a result of participants’ strategies being frustrated in attempting to solve problems of coordination. In punctuated cooperation, disruptiveness is, again, fundamentally endogenous to the run of social situations. 2.7

Framing, strategies and fields

In providing a general idea how order is produced by participants in navigating social situations, the discussion has, up to this point, identified a battery of elementary defences, and, at the same time, elementary conditions for the incidence of disruptiveness. Framing and keying are intrinsic to participants’ bodily, behavioural, cognitive and affective involvement in social situations and their practical sense habitually associates present situations with past and future ones. In this way, events and activities, by the very fact of becoming embedded in local productions of context, in social situations as nexus of actual occasions, also become embedded in transsituational trajectories of participants, biographies, signs, symbols and resources (cf. Kaplan 2008: 738–40). This establishes the elementary possibility for disruptions initially incurred in well-contained situations and articulated by a limited number of participants to bring about social changes across situations and diverse kinds of contexts produced within a collective. Punctuated cooperation takes place in situations in which this possibility is particularly evident as previous levels of involvement and coordination are lost. Two concepts which are potentially serviceable for tracking down disruptiveness beyond the run of single social situations need be introduced before a more sustained analysis of punctuated cooperation and its effect upon a collective of participants can be started. These are the concepts of strategies and fields. Furthermore, one concept can at this point be relegated to a rearward position in subsequent explorations, and this is, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the notion of frames. In order to track down how disruptiveness may reverberate across situations, framing in a specific situation needs to be related to instances of framing in other situations. There clearly are cases in which it makes sense to use the notion of frames to not only describe the order of a specific social situation but also to classify situations according to the frames activated by participants. One example from Goffman’s discussion is the theatrical frame (Goffman 1974: 124–55); another instance

Framing, strategies and fields

63

may be the arithmetic frame used by participants employing numbers in calculations (Vollmer 2007: 584–8). There is also the impressive body of research about social movements and the framing of political issues (Benford and Snow 2000). However, even if in certain classes of situations like staged performances, calculations or political decision-making, specific frames achieve a particular dominance, these situations simultaneously activate other frames, for example, kinds of drama (tragedy, comedy) for staged performances, political or economic discourse in terms of which specific numbers are meant to make sense, or mobilization schemes catering to specific constituencies. To classify situations according to which ‘primary frameworks’ are active is defensible in terms of the empirical question at stake, but it trades on considerable discretion in deciding just what type of frame is taken as the dominant one (Goffman 1974: 25). More generally still, speaking of certain frames sui generis is not easily reconciled with the fact that framing is a process rather than a product. The preceding considerations have illustrated that framing as a social process is quite flexible, that any would-be frame is malleable and, once in place, will likely be accommodated to further contingencies, keys and responses. Disruptiveness therefore does not produce an impact on social order by lashing out at some alleged set of pre-given frames. It does so by affecting local and, possibly, further productions of context by challenging participants’ practical sense, thus affecting their future tendencies of keying signs, symbols and resources. In order to relate these tendencies to problems of coordination within and across social situations, and, ultimately, to types of social change conventionally considered as ‘structural’ or ‘macro’, focusing on the use of keys which are general enough to travel across situations and segments of a collective is immediately intuitive. Generalized keys with some intrinsic collective stability to be recognized in different settings by different participants may become subject to redistribution across situations and participants. This is particularly apparent with respect to generalized resources which participants stand to gain or lose in the run of social situations, whether in terms of money and property as specific bundles or symbolizations of rights (Coleman 1990: 59–63), in terms of cultural competence (Bourdieu 1984: 65–8), or, most basically perhaps, in terms of social capital epitomized by acquaintances or friendships. Tracking down the impact of disruptiveness may accordingly focus on respective balances within and across situations. The use and reuse of signs and symbols may possibly be addressed and analysed in a similar fashion, for example, when discourses are investigated as reiterating inequalities across participants in their ability to draw on certain keys, such as in

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academic or political discourse (Foucault 1972: 40–70; Bourdieu 1991: 57–65). As punctuated cooperation unsettles coordination equilibria, it may lead to redistributions both in the selective availability and the actual deployment of keys within the collective as a whole and within distinct subsets of participants. Respective changes can be addressed in terms of fields and strategies. Whilst context is always produced within situations, the notion of fields addresses the relationship of broader (transsituational) structures and distributions to the run of social situations (Martin 2003: 34–5). In the context of the present approach, social fields may be conceptualized as distributions of keys across participants involved in interconnected runs of social situations. The concept of fields articulates the analytical intuition that participants within a given collective strike coordination equilibria which are relatively stable across situations and which involve asymmetries in how solutions of coordination problems pay off for those involved. The concept of fields – sometimes the notion of social space is used as an equivalent expression – addresses distributions which can, at least in principle, be quantified (cf. Black 1998: 159–62), and, interestingly, it has also been applied in analysing cooperation beyond human collectives (Tomasello and Call 1997: 193–205). Bourdieu emphasizes the existence of a multitude of social fields, an idea he introduces in his criticism of narrower concepts of the economy of practice, insisting that the economy described by economic theory is a particular case of a whole universe of economies, that is, of fields of struggle differing both in the stakes and scarcities generated within them and in the form of capital deployed in them. (Bourdieu 1990: 51)

With respect to framing and keying in different fields, different sets and distributions of keys along with their respective ‘stakes and scarcities’ establish conditions for the run of social situations that are associated with remarkable differences in the way in which coordination equilibria are struck (cf. Bourdieu 1993: 72–7), which is particularly evident once the availability of keys, like rights or, more particularly, money, is socially selective. The fact that certain practices of framing and keying are reproduced across situations with little or no bargaining even among participants engaged in highly asymmetrical exchanges who have never met before or are unlikely to ever meet again illustrates the relative stability of certain field-specific distributions, for example, of an economic field in which property and money are mobilized in a highly regular manner and kept in individualized accounts, all backed up by more general distributions of status, membership and rights (see below, section 5.5).

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The empirical distributions constituting any given field may, however, not be as easily amenable to sociological analysis as previous employments of the concept have been suggesting (see below, section 6.5). In the following chapters participants’ strategies will become a much more immediate focus of attention. To begin with, this focus emphasizes that participants do not unilaterally suffer from but actively contribute to transsituational effects of situated activities into which they are being drawn. Participants tend to defend expectations cultivated by their practical sense, even if this reproduces or brings about drastic inequalities, more work and less play, even if they are very likely to personally suffer. In a very real sense, participants’ strategies are the sources of any distribution of resources in fields. Focusing on the exercise of strategies by participants therefore does not need to deny that field-specific or more generally homological distributions are at stake – it rather provides the unique availability of these distributions to sociological analysis. In a minimal formal definition in the vein of game-theoretical reasoning, any set of responses specific to a participant engaging with actual occasions (like, most particularly, other participants’ responses) can be called a strategy. With respect to the empirical and analytical complexity encountered in the framing of activities, such a minimal definition may appear as quite an empty concept for what participants do in actual situations. The challenge for the present investigation, however, is not to refine the conceptual understanding of strategies by specifying their potential exercise in an a priori manner. It is, rather, to explore how change in strategies can be tracked down systematically. The aim is not to more extensively theorize the concept of strategy, but to adequately theorize change in strategies within collectives of participants exposed to disruptions (see below, section 6.2). This is why the understanding of strategies followed here is deliberately minimal and why the variety of keys available to inform participants’ strategies indicates, at this point, a continuum of potential empirical qualifications. If the latter will, after all, suggest potential regularities in the way strategies are exercised in the wake of disruptiveness, then these regularities will be the result rather than the cause of participants’ exercise of strategies. A certain degree of improvisation in reproducing and defending order and context in situated activities is apparent in almost every social situation, and the notion of strategies has to be comfortable with this just as much as with the fact that improvisation may become subject to various types of social influence, regulation or idiosyncratic tempering. In the exercise of strategies, a ‘durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation’ is at work which Bourdieu (1977: 78) has famously called the habitus. Habitus is seen by Bourdieu as ‘the strategy-generating

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principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’ (72). In adjusting to the demands of specific fields, participants acquire a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990: 66–7) which allows them to mobilize signs, symbols and resources selectively. This ‘feel for the game’ does not point to rules or strategies of games that could never be changed, but, on a more elementary level, to the fact of interdependence that exists with respect to actual occasions within a present ecological huddle. These actual occasions may be, game-theoretically speaking, moves by nature or they may be moves which are elements of other participants’ strategies. Some correspondence with actual occasions is essential for any number of moves to constitute a strategy, since there needs to be a sense of selectivity with respect to what task, game or problem a distinct set of moves exercised by a participant responds to. For there to be a set of responses with distinct boundaries there needs to be, in other words, some membership criterion, and this is provided by a corresponding set of actual occasions as moves by another party to the engagement, whether by nature or by any number of other participants. There is no strategy, in other words, without an engagement with actual occasions to which moves could be correlated. This focus on strategies and, to a lesser extent, on social fields, is congenial to the sociological approach towards disruptiveness postulated in the introduction. A disruption incurred in one situation may affect further situations by unsettling a distribution of keys, but first and foremost it will need to somehow redefine participants’ strategies in mobilizing them in an actual situation – which later may or may not result in field-shaking redistributions. Whilst the structure of fields addresses net effects of runs of social situations on a collective level, the structure and distribution of strategies represents their fallout with respect to individual participants, their dispositions and ‘ethnomethods’ exercised in distinct situations (Garfinkel 1974; Sacks 1984a: 21). In observing how participants draw on signs, symbols and resources in responding to disruptiveness, empirical intelligence about the exercise of strategies can be collected and, potentially, utilized in longitudinal observations of social change across situations. Transsituational regularities within a collective are visible in distinct characteristics and distributions of strategies, in fields, and, on an even more general level, in homologies across fields. The effectiveness of participants’ strategies in mobilizing keys will depend on the interdependence of strategies within situations as much as on the structure of fields (Bourdieu 1984: 95–6), and the structure of fields will in turn depend on

Conclusion

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the continuous recycling of keys in strategies (cf. White 2008: 164–5). Disruptions might in principle reverberate across such interdependencies. Up to this point, the impact of disruptiveness has been explored as a distinct challenge for producing and maintaining cooperation in maintaining expectations among participants within a single situation. A disruption was defined as any actual occasion that is marked as disruptive by at least one participant, thus challenging other participants’ responses. Punctuated cooperation has been defined as a run of activity in which a coordination equilibrium is disrupted, frustrating participants’ strategies. The ensuing dynamics of response have so far not been addressed. These dynamics of re-coordination are the topic of the more extended analysis of punctuated cooperation that will begin in the next chapter. 2.8

Conclusion

The present chapter has established an elementary understanding of social situations accounting for the incidence of disruptiveness, and punctuated cooperation has been characterized by a distinct disruption of coordination equilibria and participants’ practical sense in striking them. Framing is the process during which participants come to terms with actual occasions through producing context for events and activities. Disruptions initially take place in such situated productions of context and, by affecting further productions of context, punctuated cooperation may transcend local situations, bringing about changes in strategies and fields. The regular reproduction of involvements, the very articulation and accommodation of expectations in framing cooperation and producing context, makes participants vulnerable to experiencing disruptions which they could otherwise let pass. There is a mutual reinforcement of learning to frame actual occasions on the one hand, and becoming sensitive and vulnerable to disruptions on the other; of gaining practical sense and of occasionally losing it. That this mutual reinforcement is rarely explicitly recognized may be regarded as testimony to the impressive mastery of practical sense among participants who maintain their commitments to ‘cooperation in maintaining expectations’ despite the disappointments it incurs. This practical sense draws on specific means of coping with actual occasions inherent to the production of context: signs, symbols and resources available to participants in coordinating activities and expectations, bringing disruptions under the auspices of norms, knowledge or social status respectively. There is more than one way of responding to

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disruptions which participants transform into occasions to learn, punish, congregate, prevent, contemplate, assemble or annihilate. In the light of the contingency and, possibly, arbitrariness suggested by this variety in productions of context and potential responses to disruptiveness, the empirical regularities explored in the following chapters gain their particular sociological significance.

3

The social order of punctuated cooperation

In times of stability it is difficult to imagine wild and uncontrolled social behavior, and there is a comfortable feeling that such things ‘will never happen’. Yet they do occur, however sporadically or infrequently. When they do, attention is fully occupied with the case at hand; when that manifestation is over, the relief that order is restored often leads to a turning away from such upsetting events – until the next time. Social scientists are not immune from these tendencies, with the result that less attention is given by them to periods of disequilibrium than is warranted by the importance of such events, both for sociological theory and for social practice. James S. Coleman (1990: 199) [T]rauma is generally viewed as an effect, the result of a blow from the outside . . . Suppose, however, that we were to reverse the logic of that sequence . . . Instead of classifying a condition as trauma because it was induced by a disaster, we would classify an event as disaster if it had the property of bringing about traumatic reactions . . . We would be required to include events that have the capacity to induce trauma but that do not have the quality of suddenness or explosiveness normally associated with the term. Kai T. Erikson (1976: 254–5; italics original)

Now that the tables have been turned, as in Erikson’s redefinition of trauma in the conclusion of his study of the Buffalo Creek flood, disruptions have been identified as endogenous to the production of context among participants of social situations rather than as a distinct class of events sui generis. Tracing incidences of punctuated cooperation and the potential effects that result from the loss of coordination equilibrium will now extend the subject area of sociological explorations of disruptiveness beyond the incidence of discrete disruptions. It will include disruptiveness that is not ‘sudden’ or ‘explosive’ but still endogenous to social situations defining disruptiveness as they are taking place. Just as there are no disruptions sui generis, punctuated cooperation is not characterized by one discrete type or logic of disequilibration; the empirical characteristics of punctuated cooperation are as ontologically arbitrary and contentious 69

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as what participants may find embarrassing in terms of their practical sense, their feelings of proper context and order.1 Being ontologically arbitrary, however, does not imply being devoid of empirical regularity. This chapter will look more closely at the arbitrary and, yet, empirically regular characteristics of punctuated cooperation, and will explore how these characteristics may be associated with the repercussions of punctuated cooperation across social situations. For the latter case, it will turn out that both elementary sociological understanding and systematic empirical intelligence are lacking, despite the availability of conceptual leads such as those discussed at the end of the preceding chapter. In the course of this chapter, the marking of disruptions and the incidence of punctuated cooperation will be discussed with respect to a couple of empirical examples. Garfinkel’s breaching experiments (Garfinkel 1967: 35–75) have been mentioned earlier and will be widely referred to during the course of this chapter. Among the other material engaged with repeatedly, Bruno Bettelheim’s study of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp (Bettelheim 1943) and Haruki Murakami’s interviews with survivors of the Tokyo gas attacks (Murakami 2000) stand out. The social order of punctuated cooperation will be traced from the containment of participants (3.1) and the particular level of involvement it commands (3.2) to a preliminary assessment of its emergent characteristics as a manifestation of social order (3.3). Punctuated cooperation as a particular episode of social life expires once disruptions are made subject to normalization (3.4), and this outcome has to be categorically distinguished from other changes affected in strategies and fields on which punctuated cooperation exerts some leverage that remains to be explored (3.5). The choice of empirical examples serves the purpose of discussing the concepts introduced in the preceding chapters, and of exploring implications with respect to actual cases. This chapter, like the subsequent ones, does not represent an ideal set of empirical data with which the present theory could be tested. The aim throughout is to provide sociologists with preliminary empirical and conceptual intelligence in order to improve the conditions of making informed choices with respect to further investigating the association of disruptiveness and social change.

1

Many of the conventions identified by Erving Goffman, for example, are valid mostly for encounters among participants from the middle and upper classes of ‘western’ culture in the first half of the twentieth century (Collins 1975: 162–4): standard forms of attire, proper role discipline and role distance, adequate courtesies and so on, most of which have been vanishing since the 1960s (Collins 2004: 370–2).

Containing participants

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Containing participants

The sociological significance of the fact that participants of social situations mark certain occasions as disruptive transcends the investigation of single social situations. Marking actual occasions as disruptive, for example, to some extent expresses what involvements, actions and experiences a collective is unwilling to tolerate (e.g. Ben-Yehuda 1990: 10–13). The marking of a disruption from without a situation in which it has occurred, for example by journalists covering a natural disaster, by judges adjudicating a crime or by sociologists writing about disruptions, however, needs to be carefully distinguished from disruptions established by responses among co-present participants who face disruptiveness from within a nexus of actual occasions. The importance of this categorical distinction is indicated, first and foremost, by the fundamental differences in the behavioural and perceptual opportunities between participants within a situation in which a disruption is originally faced and participants of later situations which, in some form or another, refer back to this disruption (cf. Schutz 1962: 26–7; Rawls 2008: 724). Above all, the latter command an opportunity that participants of situations with imminent disruptiveness, situations of the type which Giddens (1984: 60–4), in referring to Bettelheim’s concentration camp study, calls ‘critical situations’, fundamentally lack: the opportunity to reject the situation as a whole. These elementary differences between possibilities of response are perhaps most unambiguously indicated by participants’ respective abilities to become uninvolved, of leaving the situation and avoiding the nexus of exposure. Punctuated cooperation usually takes place in situations which participants would rather leave or altogether avoid, if only they could. Situations in which responding to disruptiveness is being forced upon participants are often situations in which taking flight would be the evidently reasonable choice to make. Contemporary social life is almost universally arranged for participants to command exit options (Hirschman 1970: 106–19), and perhaps one could argue that the loss of exit options under such conditions suffices to disequilibrate coordination and necessitates rekeying: the door is shut, so what do we do now? Still, participants in punctuated cooperation are often contained in co-attendance without the use of brute force, prison walls or blocked routes of escape. Respective enclosure is often enacted as a boundary of attention among participants. This boundary is maintained, on the one hand, by outsiders to the run of punctuated cooperation, who prefer not to get involved:

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[T]here were people foaming at the mouth where we were, in front of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual. I’d be tending to someone and look up to see passers-by glance my way with a ‘what-on-earth’s-happened-here?’ expression, but not one came over. It was as if we were a world apart. Nobody stopped. They all thought: ‘Nothing to do with me.’ Some guards were standing right before our eyes at the Ministry gate. Here we had three people laid out on the ground, waiting desperately for an ambulance that didn’t arrive for a long, long time. Yet nobody at the Ministry called for help. They didn’t even call us a taxi. (Murakami 2000: 16)2

In this excerpt, Murakami’s interviewee, witness to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, retrospectively articulates the expectation that somebody should have come to attend to those exposed to the gas who were just leaving the subway station. Reasons are provided why such an intervention indeed should, in all decency, have occurred. The interviewee establishes this expectation by pointing to the suffering that should have been apparent to outsiders, some of whom were officials. An interesting aspect of this is the implicit assumption that particular reasons are indeed needed for additional participants to legitimately become involved. These additional participants are also regarded as outsiders by those within the situation. A kind of a priori containment within an active ecological huddle differentiates insiders and outsiders and this is considered as an initially legitimate form of enclosure, both from within and without. This legitimacy is apparent in the fact that accounts such as the above point to some form of emergency that calls for the breach of such containment. A mutual understanding among participants that some principle of subsidiarity is at work in separating and containing participation – of participants being obliged to contain their respective situations by exploiting all options of helping themselves first – is visible even in cases in which participants explicitly call for outside assistance, for example in emergency phone calls (Bergmann 1993: 319). The standing of this subsidiarity principle of containment and social enclosure, however, does not always prevail. There are circumstances under which participants try to extend the ecological huddle of an ongoing situation and to draw in outsiders more actively, as above. If participants succeed in drawing others into potentially precarious involvements, then these situations are sometimes called ‘scenes’ (Goffman 1963: 185–7): 2

Murakami edited the interviews stylistically (Murakami 2000: 4–7).

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A woman in a lower-class street who is struck by her male companion may . . . make a direct appeal to others for help, thereby forcibly embroiling them. The disturbed feelings created by such bursting of the bounds of the engagement give us a clear picture of exactly what the rules of public conduct operate to prevent. In the extreme, a scene can break down all conventional closure separating the various engagements and unengaged individuals in the situation providing an instance of an exhaustive engagement where none had been expected or desired. (Goffman 1963: 186)

The breaking of containment in running a scene tends to be marked as a disruption. Outsiders may often reject the scene as a whole, demanding the activists of a scene to be quiet or to leave them alone. Outright scenes in public places in which many mutually exclusive encounters take place simultaneously frustrate a norm of civil inattention that allows people to mind their respective businesses (Goffman 1963: 84–8). In public places, normative expectations appear to not only establish rights to treat one’s own involvements as private affairs but also the entitlement to ignore the involvements of others. One can easily see how this arrangement restricts the potential exposure to events and activities by narrowing down the set of actual occasions participants of social situations are expected to respond to. It supports participants in maintaining situated involvements which are local in the sense of selectively engaging and disengaging activities and participants that are being treated as either inside or outside of an ecological huddle, including individual assertions of rights of way and claims to segments of space. Preferences to stay out of potentially precarious involvements may be treated as expressions of participants’ practical sense of ‘once you’re in, you’re in’. Accordingly, civil inattention ceases to be expected (and granted) once participants have undeniably entered an involvement; it then becomes uncivil to simply leave. Situations in which disruptions have been marked will produce a distinct order of experience and activity within a nexus of actual occasions and an ecological huddle set apart from the remainder of involvements, which are run separately, possibly in the same area of public space. Punctuated cooperation is a manifestation of social order with collective boundaries enacted from within – by participants attending and failing to leave – and without – by participants not attending and preferring not to enter. Even participants with some vested interest in scouting disruptions (journalists, politicians, social scientists, etc.) will usually take great care not to be fully drawn into a nexus of exposure by establishing their engagement as a highly selective one, announcing themselves upon entering by claiming the role of a visitor, supervisor, reporter and so forth.

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Whilst some distance to personally engaging with disruptiveness is often helpful for analysts in order to gather intelligence systematically without incurring full exposure to the contingencies of the engagement, it is impossible to understand how participants respond to disruptions by taking the view of an outsider labelling the whole situation as somehow deviant, immoral, outrageous or impossible in principle. Such assessments are appropriate, for example, for evaluating situations with respect to their conformity to certain moral or cultural standards, but they are ultimately not congenial to the analytical interest in punctuated cooperation as an actual run of activity. The differences become very much evident in investigating situations in which local orders of punctuated cooperation are apparently unintelligible when viewed from a distance. In his famous study of imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, Bruno Bettelheim (1943) reports how prisoners responded to the sustained abuse and violence by prison guards and Gestapo officers in a typical pattern which, regarded at a distance, involved an apparent paradox: the more severely prisoners were attacked and the more drastically they personally suffered from abuse, the less they attributed the exercise of violence to individual perpetrators and, indeed, the less anger they felt to them as persons. Instead, the Gestapo as an impersonal organization was being blamed – despite the apparent discretion exercised by its members. Less severe forms of abuse by Gestapo officers accordingly brought about severer forms of aversion. Prisoners came to hate less aggressive officers much more than those aggressors prone to carry out violent assaults of the more brutal sort (Bettelheim 1943: 435). This differentiation of responses within the extended containment of punctuated cooperation does not merely contradict an impulse to adequately reciprocate; it also appears to represent a generally ineffective orientation to social exchange by making prisoners withdraw from those officers who might be likely to treat them in a more lenient manner. Prisoners, in other words, were framing aggression in a way that was superficially at odds with keeping out of harm’s way. This production of context, however, is incomprehensible only if aggression is indeed treated as an expression of personal dislike. In everyday life, such an interpretation of aggressive behaviour as resulting from antipathy is common, and it tends to key activities towards establishing relational expectations with respect to future engagements, separating friends from foes. If, however, violence is exerted disproportionately and irrespective of any personal relation to the perpetrator, then attributing violent behaviour to the individual motivation of an aggressor and personalizing one’s own responses and expectations respectively will be less suitable. Among

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prisoners, the experience of grave violence was not accountable to personal antipathies and the attribution of violence to the Gestapo organization as an impersonal entity therefore was indeed quite appropriate. Prisoners attributed violence to a source which they could not make subject to retribution, which they were in no position either to punish or gratify. Aggressive behaviour of minor graveness, on the other hand, could indeed be treated as deriving from officers’ personal inclination. Whilst the latter type of behaviour could be framed in terms of a social exchange between persons, the former could not, since the officer was taken to act not as an individual person but as a member of the Gestapo organization acting towards members of the group of prisoners. Recognizing the specific order of experience and action within the containment requires a reconstruction of the challenges of actual occasions faced by participants and of the sequence of responses thus brought about. With respect to such cases, punctuated cooperation can well be used as a summary term for serial productions of order and context as long as they involve some form of sustained containment inducing endogenous forms of coordination. The analyst’s task is to reconstruct this coordination from the interdependence of moves within the ecological huddle and not by an external evaluation of the situation as a whole. Bettelheim’s study is the reference case for the notion of critical situations offered by Anthony Giddens (1984: 61–4; 1979: 125–6). Giddens characterizes critical situations as situations ‘where the established modes of daily life are drastically undermined or shattered’ (Giddens 1984: 60). In his definition, ‘established modes of daily life’ are the reference points for assessing disruptiveness. Since, in the concentration camp case, the prisoners’ ‘modes of daily life’ are being frustrated, this definition might lead us to assume that framing disruptions may be more a function of prisoners’ than of officers’ responses: for Gestapo officers, a concentration camp might define a site of ordinary work, defined by formal expectations of the Gestapo organization, in which, for example, an insurgence of prisoners might define a disruption but forceful containment and abuse of prisoners will represent normal duty. Such an interpretation would, however, misconceive the fact that officers and prisoners were enclosed in common ecological huddles, common nexus of actual occasions, both in terms of physical (camp site) and social (mutually recognized co-presence) boundaries, dealing with the same set of coordination problems. In Giddens’ perspective, prisoners and prison guards may not be in the same type of critical situation at all. In the perspective offered here, punctuated cooperation is sustained by the different groups of participants coordinating their responses with respect to one another, and it is an engagement drawn out across a distinct sequence

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of situations with coordination equilibria which, viewed at a distance, will appear as strange, if not utterly inappropriate settlements.3 The possibility of strange coordination equilibria emerging from punctuated cooperation emphasizes the effectiveness of participants’ containment in situations with distinct socioecological boundaries, whether kept by force or by a respective differentiation of ignorance and attention. The containment of participants within these boundaries implies that the run of punctuated cooperation gradually extends beyond the experience of disruptiveness. As actual occasions, disruptions go away all by themselves as one participant may mark a disruption while others may ignore it and all of them may subsequently just forget there ever was anything to report. The conventional order of everyday life and conduct in public places, through providing participants with genuine rights of ignorance, in a sense minimizes the social inclusiveness of punctuated cooperation with respect to both participants and time. Within the ecological huddle of punctuated cooperation among co-present participants, however, disruptions are transformed into distinct episodes of social life (cf. Abbott 2001b: 250–7). In some cases, as in the slowly unfolding Tokyo gas attacks or in extended concentration camp imprisonment, exposure to such episodes is sustained through longer series of situations. In other cases, as, for example, the death of a relative or the 9/11 attacks, the run of punctuated cooperation may be temporally much more confined while the experience of disruptiveness may reflexively extend far beyond an initial exposure towards situations such as having breakfast in the family home or stepping on a plane. The task of tracing down such extensions of disruptiveness is complex and it clearly affects the accuracy with which social change in the wake of disruptiveness can sociologically be assessed (see below, Chapter 6, section 1). The investigation of the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation generally deserves much more attention by sociologists than has generally been forthcoming. The coordination equilibrium struck after ‘cooperation in maintaining expectations’ (Goffman 1983b: 5) has temporarily failed to be the ultimate source of all accommodations. Understanding the selectivity of re-coordination is the prerequisite of an appropriate assessment of the further impact of punctuated cooperation on the collective into which participants trail off after an initial containment has run its course. 3

Another superficially strange aspect of prisoners’ strategies reported by Bettelheim (1943: 447–51) is that prisoners tried to imitate just those orientations and attitudes they recognized in officers’ behaviour as representing the specific (Nazi) values of the Gestapo. This behaviour may be interpreted as a particularly desperate attempt at reframing the context of imprisonment in order to gain a measure of psychological control.

Involvement in punctuated cooperation

3.2

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Involvement in punctuated cooperation

Giddens’ idea of critical situations explicitly focuses on psychological impact (Giddens 1984: 61), but such impact does not offer an easy proxy of participants’ strategies in punctuated cooperation. Understanding participants’ involvement in punctuated cooperation needs to transcend the understanding of disruptiveness in terms of psychological frustration: the social dynamics of involvement need to be examined across cognitive and behavioural, emotional and fully existential ‘engrossing’ aspects of involvement. Involvement in punctuated cooperation often brings out the intricate entanglement of these aspects in particularly vivid colours, even in cases in which participants are thrown into predicaments which are nowhere near as desperate as in the concentration camp case. The ‘breaching experiments’ conducted by Harold Garfinkel and his students provide a particularly useful set of empirical observations. These experiments were based on a very simple method of manipulating the run of social situations in which the modification would consist of subjecting a person to a breach of the background expectancies of daily life while . . . making it difficult for the person to interpret his situation as a game, an experiment, a deception, a play . . . making it necessary that he reconstruct the ‘natural facts’ but giving him insufficient time to manage the reconstruction with respect to required mastery of practical circumstances . . . and . . . requiring that he manage the reconstruction . . . without consensual validation . . . Events should lose their perceivedly normal character. The member should be unable to recognize any event’s status as typical . . . Stable and ‘realistic’ matchings of intentions and objects should dissolve . . . (Garfinkel 1967: 54)

Garfinkel reports observations from a series of experiments based on this general instruction. The experiments were mostly run in social situations involving just two participants, one of whom was the experimenter. The results provide evidence about the social constitution of punctuated cooperation in very runs that are well contained, but then again, not always so well contained. To start with, Garfinkel’s observations emphasize the affective character of subjects’ responses to the modification of social situations brought about by experimenters. Whilst experimenters were to provoke subjects to mark events as disruptive, subjects’ responses gained in affective strength in relation with the degree to which they were judged to be committed to the expectations that were being frustrated. Garfinkel (1967: 65) reports this relationship with a strong disclaimer, but his observation is congenial to a couple of other findings, for example, from studies of affects associated with breaches in social networks (Turner 2002: 208), or with psychological data about the experience of

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‘cosmology episodes’ (Schimel et al. 2007). In the perspective offered here, Garfinkel’s findings illustrate, among other things, the extent to which participants’ embodied practical sense was challenged. Engrossment Garfinkel lists a whole repertoire of emotional responses observed during the run of breaching experiments: ‘Reports were filled with accounts of astonishment, bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger’ (Garfinkel 1967: 47). In everyday life, participants regularly pass through different levels of experience and action, each associated with distinct productions of context and manifestations of social reality. Among participants using their practical sense in coping with respective complications in accommodating experiences and actions, such transitions are routinely marked by rekeying cooperation in a more or less routine manner – from playful to serious, from public to private, from mutual to solitary confinements. In many transitions, despite a temporary loss of coordination equilibrium, usually only a minute, if any, degree of punctuated cooperation and respectively engrossed participants is observed: coordination is quickly rekeyed and resettles on another level. Being set up to not only frustrate participants’ expectations but, also, and probably much more crucially, to frustrate subsequent rekeying (cf. the middle section of the instruction quoted above), Garfinkel’s experiments amplified the degree of punctuated cooperation. Beyond frustrating participants’ routines of coping with a present situation, Garfinkel’s instruction means to challenge subjects’ very sense of the reality they confronted. The sociological lineage of Garfinkel’s reasoning upon providing the instruction leads back to Alfred Schutz’ (1962: 231) description of the experience of shock in everyday life. And indeed Garfinkel’s experimental reiteration of frustration – giving ‘insufficient time’ and withholding ‘consensual validation’ (Garfinkel 1967: 54) – brought about affective involvements which appear to indicate a degree of shock. These findings are very much in line with Erving Goffman’s (later) characterization of ‘negative experience’: When, for whatever reason, the individual breaks frame and perceives he has done so, the nature of his engrossment and belief suddenly changes. Such reservations as he had about the ongoing activity are suddenly disrupted, and, momentarily at least, he is likely to become intensively involved with his predicament; he becomes unreservedly engrossed with his predicament . . . Whatever distance and reserve he had in regard to prior events he loses . . . along with some of whatever conscious control he had over what was occurring. He is thrust immediately into his predicament without his usual defenses. Expecting to take up a position in a

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well-framed realm, he finds that no particular frame is immediately applicable, or the frame that he thought was applicable no longer seems to be, or he cannot bind himself within the frame that does apparently apply. He loses command over the formulation of viable response. Experience . . . meant to settle into a form even while it is beginning, finds no form and is therefore no experience. Reality anomically flutters. (Goffman 1974: 378–9)

Douglas Maynard (2003: 12–15) has analysed this pairing of cognitive disorientation and emotional arousal as the first stage of a noetic crisis. Bettelheim (1943: 431–2) reports a similar shock experience upon initially confronting the concentration camp. The drastic case of the concentration camp, like Maynard’s notion of a noetic crisis, and the more ordinary examples which Schutz, Garfinkel and Goffman focus on, illustrates fairly well the extent to which the experience of shock is associated with an abruptly expanding involvement in coming to terms with actual occasions. As in the resolution of a noetic crisis (in Maynard’s case, by receiving and retrospectively elaborating life-changing good or bad news or, in the concentration camp case, in the form of strange coordination equilibria), some respecification will ultimately emerge from this involvement, and some form of context will become elaborated (Maynard 2003: 15–19). In the meantime, involvement in punctuated cooperation is associated with an engrossing activation of attention which shakes up participants’ experience to the point at which reality itself ‘anomically flutters’. It motivates a specific preoccupation in which participants become ‘unreservedly engrossed’ and eventually regain reservation.4 Rekeying In punctuated cooperation, unreserved engrossment gradually gains direction and focus beyond the expression of affect. This will not involve an immediate scaling down of being engrossed since ‘it is under these circumstances that identities and differences come with thrills and shocks’ (Mead 1964: 43). The signalling of keys among participants of punctuated cooperation reflects their efforts to re-coordinate, and Garfinkel’s breaching experiments provide ample illustrations of such efforts. Garfinkel and his students tried to frustrate a variety of expectations; in some experiments, expectations regarding appropriate impression management were frustrated (Garfinkel 1967: 58–64), in other experiments norms of casual conversation were being crossed (Garfinkel 4

Psychological data point to a similar refocusing of attention during the experience of fear in a redistribution of attention from goals to present stimulation (Eysenck et al. 2007: 342–6).

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1967: 41–4). Generally, experimenters were required to pick one of their regular social contacts among friends and family in order to then frustrate subjects’ expectations regarding their normal level of involvement with experimenters. The status or relationship exploited by experimenters could be that of a regular partner in conversation, or that of a family member, frustrated by acting, for example, against the ‘sanctioned properties of common discourse’ (Garfinkel 1967: 41), or by imitating the behaviour of a boarder while at home (Garfinkel 1967: 47–8). In effect, these efforts at manufacturing frustration targeted a stack of regular everyday normative and relational expectations and prior settlements of coordination problems among participants. The experiments could therefore in an important sense only be conducted by virtue of previous runs of cooperation among experimenters and subjects, and by virtue of the fact that cooperation had become associated with certain expectations and salient equilibria. The experimental run of situations was generally very unpleasant for the subjects but, mostly, they were contained at least for some time, crucial for cooperation to be punctuated beyond an initial disruption. The option of leaving the situation could, however, not be systematically controlled by experimenters, and in some cases subjects rejected ongoing involvement in the experimental situation early on. In many of the cases, the prior association of experimenters and subjects was explicitly addressed by subjects: The father responded in a high rage: ‘I don’t want any more of that out of you and if you can’t treat your mother decently you’d better move out!’ (Garfinkel 1967: 48; italics original)

Such responses illustrate how associations between subjects and experimenters might have gradually suppressed behavioural tendencies towards ‘exit’ in favour of ‘voice’ (Hirschman 1970: 30–43), but in marking disruptions, something more to ‘voice’ than venting frustration was apparent: subjects tried to bring about a rekeying of actual occasions through marking the disruption in a particular manner and by pressing experimenters to in turn respond to these markings. In the example above, this took the route of keying cooperation towards relational expectations by identifying the experimenter as the deliberate source of frustration, threatening a loss of social capital. Signalling a willingness to sanction was also a very prominent aspect of subjects’ responses throughout, thus keying cooperation with respect to normative expectations, communicating the understanding that the experimenters rather than the subjects were the deviants, and that it was the experimenters’ turn, if not obligation, to adjust:

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You know what I mean. Drop dead! (Garfinkel 1967: 43)

Some attempts by subjects to key responses towards cognitive expectations are also reported by Garfinkel. In such cases, somewhat more benign reinterpretations of what was going on were offered by subjects who were apparently trying to identify and articulate information relevant to producing appropriate context for what they were being confronted with. In family settings, this focused on finding out what could possibly have happened to make the experimenter act in such an unusual manner: Family members demanded explanations: What’s the matter? What’s gotten into you? Did you get fired? Are you sick? What are you being so superior about? Why are you mad? Are you out of your mind or are you just stupid? (Garfinkel 1967: 47)

Such examples, though, clearly show that, even when cognitive keys were being mobilized, these keys appear to be wound up with normative and relational implications. Besides reporting a gradualization of keys with increasing provocations to respond (which may well have been the result of a retrospective packaging of responses in the experimenter’s report), the example above shows how cognitive keys can be effectively coupled with relational (being ‘superior’ or ‘stupid’) and normative ones (‘Are you out of your mind?’). More generally, instead of carefully dissecting the ongoing situation into relational, cognitive and normative aspects, participants tended to throw several kinds of keys in simultaneously. In some of Garfinkel’s examples, subjects and experimenters entered into lengthier exchanges during which they tried to re-coordinate the level of cooperation in a kind of trial and error process (Garfinkel 1967: 60–4). Throughout the reports, subjects and experimenters are characterized as engrossed in coordinating their responses while on the ‘hunt for a hypothesis’ (Mead 1964: 51), out to find the keys that might indicate workable expectations – a search deliberately extended by experimenters’ intention to reject any key that was being offered. These aspects of punctuated cooperation can be associated with well-known dynamics of collective behaviour, especially those types of behaviour that are often referred to as milling and keynoting (Turner and Killian 1972: 37–9, 47–8). Milling refers to the restless, emotional and verbally active behaviour within assemblages of participants in search of a common focus during situations of high uncertainty. The basic concept of milling is found as early as 1921, in Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (1921: 788–91, 866–70). In their understanding of milling, Park and Burgess closely stick to the

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analogy of cattle moving in circles until at some point the animals set off on a collective trajectory: Historical crises are invariably created by processes which, looked at abstractly, are very much like milling in a herd . . . The effect of this circular form of interaction is to increase the tensions in the group and, by creating a state of expectancy, to mobilize its members for collective action. (Park and Burgess 1921: 789) .

The crowd does not discuss and does not reflect. It simply ‘mills.’ Out of this milling process a collective impulse is formed which dominates all members of the crowd. (Park and Burgess 1921: 869)

Turner and Killian later reutilized the concept of milling in a textbook chapter about rumour, emphasizing sensitization rather than irresponsiveness to collective cues (Turner and Killian 1972: 38–9). Milling in this way is considered as paving the way from unrest towards social contagion, as providing ‘the basis for the coordination of crowd behavior’ (Turner and Killian 1972: 41).5 Whilst claiming ‘increasing suggestibility and declining critical facility’ (41) among participants, Turner and Killian regard milling as setting up the emergence of a distinct structure, direction and focus of collective behaviour. Looking at Garfinkel’s reports from this particular angle, the reports appear to indicate something like a transposition of milling towards a discursive level at which participants – contrary to the understanding offered by Park and Burgess – indeed discuss and reflect: participants mill about responses as if looking for keys and expectations to hold on to. Like slowly moving about in circles and testing out directions in which to collectively run off, Garfinkel’s subjects appear to be discursively treading a circle of potential keyings.

Practical sense and private deliberations Whilst Garfinkel’s experiments allow for the identifying of a variety of participants’ interactive attempts at framing disruptions and producing context, they also illustrate that respective social dynamics are not easily disentangled from individual psychological processes associated with punctuated cooperation. At the juncture between a situation in search of a focus and participants trying to cope with cognitive dissonance, Turner and Killian employ the notion of keynoting that was already mentioned in the preceding chapter: 5

One might read this as gradually displacing the ‘madding crowd’ image of collective behaviour in which ‘the crowd does not discuss and does not reflect’ (McPhail 1991: 70–103).

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When an unusual, difficult-to-assimilate event occurs, an undecided, ambivalent audience is created. Individuals entertain a variety of interpretations of the event. They may engage in a brief period of covert restructuring activity, turning over in their minds various possible explanations of what the situation is and what action may be appropriate. A gesture of symbolic utterance made to such an audience may be characterized as keynote. (Turner and Killian 1972: 47; italics original)

In Garfinkel’s experimental situations, the process during which participants tested possible keys corresponded with a particular experience of the situation which reportedly involved a good degree of ‘covert restructuring activity’. Subjects appeared to intellectually play through different possible framings of the situation, submitting versions of actual occasions to mental test runs. Garfinkel documents respective self-reports for one particular experiment in which a game of tick-tack-toe was being sabotaged: Subjects were convinced that the experimenter was ‘after something’ that he was not saying and whatever he ‘really’ was doing had nothing to do with ticktacktoe. He was making a sexual pass; he was commenting on the subject’s stupidity; he was making a slurring or an impudent gesture. (Garfinkel 1967: 72)

These are retrospective accounts reconstructing psychological dynamics after the fact. Nevertheless, certain psychological implications – and possibly individual psychological functions – of framing actual occasions in punctuated cooperation are evident. Keys were apparently employed by participants as a kind of psychological resource, even if they were not explicitly offered within the situation to direct the production of context and coordinate towards equilibrium. A similar observation is provided by Bettelheim (1943: 424–8) in the context of classifying prisoners’ strategies by differentiating prisoners in terms of socioeconomic class and political education. For political prisoners, their prior understanding of the Nazi regime was confirmed by their imprisonment; these prisoners could reproduce a previously habitualized production of context within the concentration camp. Their practical sense was validated and reinforced, and their self-esteem generally remained high. Non-political middle-class prisoners, in contrast, were those who showed the least resilience to what to them was an utterly incomprehensible experience (Bettelheim 1943: 427). It is in this sense that Bettelheim also accounts for his own practical sense as a prisoner: On the basis of introspection it seems that the writer gained emotional strength from the following facts: that things happened according to expectation; that, therefore, his future in the camp was at least partly predictable from what he already was experiencing and from what he had read; and that the Gestapo was more stupid than he had expected, which eventually provided small satisfaction.

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Moreover, he felt pleased with himself that the tortures did not change his ability to think or his general point of view. (Bettelheim 1943: 431)

Even if participants are unable to collectively ratify a present frame of activity and establish coordination equilibrium, the excerpt shows how the individual ability to draw on keys, and to rehearse strategies privately, may become a source of psychological security in punctuated cooperation. Of course, the reverse might also be the case, as Erikson describes with respect to the community hit by the Buffalo Creek flood. In Erikson’s (1976: 132) words, ‘the people of Buffalo Creek had to face the effects of the flood with reflexes that had already been dulled by a more chronic catastrophe’, a collective habitus unsettled and eroded by a more general period of social change in the Appalachian community. Going back to Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, they also illustrate that the psychological basis of individual security in facing disruptions may by no means be self-sufficient: Three more subjects were convinced that there was a deception and acted on the conviction through the interview. They showed no disruption. Two of them showed acute suffering as it appeared that the interview was finished, and they were being dismissed with no acknowledgement of a deception. (Garfinkel 1967: 63)

How strong is participants’ relative commitment to resolve actual occasions collectively by striking coordination equilibria collectively rather than withdrawing into private deliberation? In any case, such an estimate of relative strength would be difficult to provide, and it would probably need to be based on a whole range of measures correlating private and, with respect to the ecological huddle, public manifestations of strategies. Researchers of collective behaviour, such as Turner and Killian, have been pointing to keynoting as a collective resolution to milling, but the recognition that framing disruptions in punctuated cooperation involves participants in both individual and social engagements with actual occasions may be more fundamental. Whilst on the individual level, this apparently correlates to participants’ practical sense and thus their biographical trajectories across social situations, one distinctly social aspect of punctuated cooperation may be the redistribution of ‘social cost’ (Coase 1988: 95–156). Clearly, participants’ strategies associated with manipulating the distribution of social costs cannot be modelled as entirely voluntaristic, since some of participants’ individual costs are also sunk (i.e. incorporated) in habitus, and emotional affect appears to intervene heavily in how participants come to respond to events and one another (Collins 2004: 174–5). Some strategizing among

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participants aiming to reproduce specific keys in punctuated cooperation is, however, to be expected, for example by gaining a measure of recognition or leadership in being the one to provide the keynote (Turner and Killian 1972: 89–90). Both individual (‘covert restructuring’) and unambiguously social (e.g. keynoting) manifestations of strategies should in some sense be visible in participants’ individual trajectories through episodes of punctuated cooperation. Sometimes participants may appear to hang on to prior trajectories rather desperately: Most people, although they were in a bad way physically, still tried to get to work somehow, to go somewhere. That just seemed so strange to me. They could hardly walk – in fact, one guy near me was crawling! – it was so obvious they were in no condition to go to work. (Murakami 2000: 133)

It bears noticing how the speaker in this excerpt retrospectively dissociates himself from the behaviour of others. In the interview, being safely displaced from the original exposure to the sarin attack incident, the speaker could very well interpret the behaviour of others which he observed at the time as what retrospectively has to appear rational given the circumstances: to exit the situation and avoid further exposure to the poisonous agent. Instead, he interprets it in terms of what he thinks the situation still should have been about: getting to work.6 He thus pieces together a not altogether impossible but clearly not readily obvious interpretation of what other participants were trying to do. Orientation towards punctuated cooperation in this case does not appear to be based on a reflection of costs associated individually with specific behavioural strategies, nor with an assumption that (at least?) others will behave rationally. And still, some clearly selective assumptions about one another’s strategies appear to inform the observer with regard to how to make sense of responses. More specifically, it is the Schelling–Lewis– Luhmann dynamic of expecting expectations (see above, section 2.4) which in this recollection gives actual occasions a characterization which subsequently appears to be intrinsic to what objectively must have been happening: that people were indeed trying to get to work. Emergent context Substantially, expectations attended to by participants as in the excerpt above – if we take it to be more than a retrospective rearrangement 6

At this point in his personal recollection, the man interviewed by Murakami has sat down on a subway platform ‘thinking, “No, I’d better stay put”’ (Murakami 2000: 133), then observing the scene around himself.

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of observations – indicate background expectations as postulated by Garfinkel (this is a place passed by people on their way to work, this is a casual family dinner, etc.). There may, however, also be a reflexive precipitation of expectations during framing actual occasions in punctuated cooperation and a collective production of context. Participants respond to each other’s responses and thus reiterate a certain level of involvement, testing keys to expectations which gradually congeal. They attribute certain expectations to one another and act on these assumptions in responding to responses, treating expectations as if they were given and intrinsic to ‘the’ situation as such. As participants reflexively key activities in responding to one another’s responses, it appears to them as if an inevitable run of events is taking place. Garfinkel’s experimenters in some instances even redefined their role in the experimental situations, forward to regarding themselves as victims of events which they supposedly were in control of: She acknowledged the experiment. He stalked off obviously unhappy and for the remainder of the evening was sullen and suspicious. She, in the meanwhile, remained at the table piqued and unsettled about the remarks that her statements had drawn forth about his not being bored at work ‘with all the insinuations it might or could mean,’ particularly the insinuation that he was not bored at work but he was bored with her and at home. She wrote ‘I was actually bothered by his remarks . . . I felt more upset and worried than he did throughout the experiment . . . ’ Neither one attempted nor wanted to discuss the matter further. (Garfinkel 1967: 53)

Apart from the contagious character that negative affect here appears to assume (cf. Gregory 1982: 50–1), punctuated cooperation can in this instance be seen to produce a distinct level of social reality that was not easily shaken off by experimenters, despite their being aware of the contrived character of what was taking place. Experimenters manufactured disruptiveness deliberately, but the actual run of punctuated cooperation was ultimately beyond their control: involvement in punctuated cooperation mobilized keys and expectations which could not be fully controlled, producing contexts that sometimes proved painful, awkward and difficult to keep in check. In one particular experiment, students were instructed to approach subjects during casual conversations ‘until their noses were almost touching’ (Garfinkel 1967: 72). Family members were excluded as subjects in these experiments in which a violation of bodily distance that would normally be considered as appropriate was performed. Regardless of gender and of previously established associations between subjects and experimenters, these experiments resulted in a reflexive attribution of sexual motives by participants to one another and to themselves, including the

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experimenters. All participants felt they were in a situation in which a decision was required of them to either accept or decline the apparent ‘invitation’. The explanation that the situation was manipulated as part of a sociology course was not sufficient to resolve it as an experiment which at that point by definition should have been over: ‘Characteristically, subject and experimenter wanted some further resolution than the explanation furnished but were uncertain about what it could or should consist of’ (Garfinkel 1967: 73). With participants responding to responses and expecting each other’s expectations, punctuated cooperation produced an emergent level of order and a production of context that was not generally compatible with treating actual occasions as part of a ‘mere’ sociological experiment.7 Involvement in punctuated cooperation produced an endogenous social order which could not be comprehensively anticipated or controlled (cf. Gregory 1982: 59–60). Participants – subjects and experimenters alike – found themselves in a situation in which actual occasions amalgamated into a context calling for recognition, understanding and further enactment. Rather than individual strategies determining expectations or individual expectations selecting appropriate strategies, both gradually emerged as participants deliberately or unwittingly rekeyed cooperation. Through mobilizing keys, punctuated cooperation and the context coming to be associated with it were actively being brought about and enacted, but simultaneously context was treated by participants as confronting them from without. Transcendence Before the emergent context and endogenous social order brought about through involvement in punctuated cooperation is further characterized, another qualification is required. The process of producing order through 7

Although Garfinkel in most reported cases implies and in some cases explicitly emphasizes that no further distress was produced in resolving the experimental situation (Garfinkel 1967: 52), one might more specifically ask for the conditions under which a resolution, i.e. a redefinition of events and activities as ‘merely’ experimental, may be successful. In experimental research involving human subjects, it is common to frame all events and activities as experimental to begin with (despite misguiding subjects about what the experiment actually consists of), despite the understanding that the experimental frame might key unwanted expectations among participants (e.g. the notorious experimenter effect). One might interpret this strategy of framing activities as experimental, i.e. as deliberately contrived, throughout experiments as reflecting an accurate implementation of scientific ethics, or, more pragmatically, as reflecting the practical necessity of terminating and resolving the experiment at some point, making the required reframing a matter of gradual instead of fundamental rekeying, and keeping down the degree of punctuated cooperation involved in the resolution.

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punctuated cooperation is gradual and open-ended, and this observation implies that any production of context may not be confined to the run of a single social situation. As implied in the first section of this chapter, this qualification does not contradict the characterization of punctuated cooperation as contained within a distinct ecological huddle that constitutes an original nexus of exposure. The gradual and open-ended character of the emergence of order within punctuated cooperation is reported quite clearly by Murakami’s interviewees in recollecting their experiences of the Tokyo gas attacks. Framing and the production of context in these cases, partly because of the initially diffuse character of the events,8 appear to have evolved in a rather slow fashion: Not long after we were underway, the smell came fuming up . . . If it had smelled really bad everyone would have been in a panic . . . Of course, I’m coughing too. Everyone has a handkerchief out over his mouth or nose . . . As I recall, passengers started getting off at Korakuen. As if on cue, everybody was opening the windows . . . I didn’t know what was wrong with me, it was all so strange, but anyway I went on reading my newspaper like always . . . When the train stopped at Hongo-sanchome, . . . station attendants came on board . . . By now the floor was soaked with sarin, but all they did was remove the parcel and maybe give the floor a quick wipe . . . At Ochanomizu another five or six station attendants got on and gave the floor a once-over with rags. From here on I’m really coughing, so bad that I can scarcely read the newspaper . . . Somehow I just about hold it together by shutting my eyes . . . It was about the time we reached Ginza that I noticed the carriage interior was pitch black when I opened my eyes, as if I was sitting in a cinema. I felt dizzy when I got off at Ginza, but somehow I managed to totter up the stairs, clinging to the handrail, aware that I might fall over any second. Ordinarily I would have transferred . . . but I heard an announcement . . . ‘It’s happened there, too,’ I thought. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not just me’ . . . The train kept going, even after I got off . . . The passengers were so panic-stricken, how could they not have known something was desperately wrong? (Murakami 2000: 94–5)

This recollection describes an individual effort of hanging on to normalcy, of adhering to the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle, of holding on to the sense of nothing unusual happening (Maynard 2003: 53; Sacks 1984b: 419). At the same time, the interviewee recalls a desperate attempt at relating to what the other participants were doing. Despite the interviewee’s understanding that the other participants must have known what was going on, and despite the fact that this is a retrospective account 8

The gas was invisible, its source and dissemination were undefined, and the physiological impact on participants was initially quite unspecific. Participants hung on to their daily train ride routines for an extended period of time as the physiological effects of the gas attack slowly became apparent.

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from a position at which both interviewer and interviewee share a common understanding about the episode, the initially uncertain production of context is recollected very vividly. Furthermore, the excerpt shows that the endogenous character of this original context does not imply that the definition of what was going on would have closed down at some point, either within the situation or in its immediate aftermath. Framing disruptions in punctuated cooperation is an open-ended process that is not predicated by arriving at definite results, and coordination may for an extended period fail to strike any coordination equilibrium. There also is the possibility that participants may enter or leave the ecological huddle, and that they may infect other situations with tendencies acquired through an initial exposure to disruptiveness. The passenger interviewed by Murakami in the above excerpt keeps on going after leaving the platform at Ginza: I crawled up the stairs. I knew I had to get myself out of there or I was dead . . . I finally managed to get above ground and I knew I had to get myself to a hospital quick . . . If I had gone by the main avenue I might have just fallen flat on my face, so I took the backstreets: slowly, slowly, weaving like a drunk . . . I went to the office and asked one of my co-workers to accompany me to the hospital . . . I told the nurse at the reception desk ‘I can’t see,’ but all she said was, ‘Well, this isn’t an eye clinic’ . . . But others came in the same condition and soon enough the television’s blaring out details on the victims’ symptoms. Slowly but surely the hospital realized it had a crisis on its hands. (Murakami 2000: 95)

In keying experience and activity towards a specific level of involvement, the run of punctuated cooperation may embed single situations in extended episodes. This is apparent for the passenger in the excerpt above, for his fellow victims and for the hospital staff: riding the subway train, exposure to the gas, getting off the train, getting to the hospital, being diagnosed, being treated; all these activities are gradually framed with respect to one another as context is produced and converges across situations. In this way, involvement in punctuated cooperation may transcend situations by the transfer of participants, keys and pieces of context, and different sets of participants may be drawn into punctuated cooperation consecutively. Certain aspects of context may be collectively accumulated in gradually stabilizing the meaning of events. Rekeying, however, is always a possibility, as is remarking disruptions as still virulent and present within an active nexus. Associated forms of ‘behavioural spillover’ (e.g. Edwards and Rothbard 2000) may take the form of treating certain participants as ‘sources’ of disruptiveness or of treating the experience of disruptiveness as the result of somehow inaccurate prior expectations. Broader productions of context may in such cases be

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reappraised, even if the initial sources of disruptiveness are, as in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, somewhat trivial: The following day the husband confessed that he had been considerably disturbed and the following reactions in this order: determination to remain calm; shock at his wife’s ‘suspicious nature’; surprise to find that cheating on her was liable to be hard; a determination to make her figure out her own answers to her questions without any denial or help from him; extreme relief when the encounter was revealed to have been experimentally contrived; but finally a residue of uneasy feelings which he characterized as ‘his shaken idea of my (the wife’s) nature which remained for the rest of the evening’. (Garfinkel 1967: 53)

The transcendence of punctuated cooperation may thus supersede socioecological containment once the possibility of transsituational changes initiated by participants’ involvements is comprehensively taken into account. If, for example, participants’ beliefs in each other’s character are shaken by confronting an unprecedented level of response, then processes of re-evaluation may set in, producing, potentially, some disruptiveness of their own (cf. Mead 1964: 50–4). Reconstruction may accommodate punctuated cooperation in more embracing productions of context. Whilst involvement in punctuated cooperation is always local in facing a presently active nexus of actual occasions, it may induce processes of generalization and rekey cooperation across situations. In this respect, punctuated cooperation does not appear to be any different from other runs of activity during which participants gradually learn and relearn strategies of response. The potential for contagion, though, appears to be one of the more particular effects of disruptiveness.

3.3

Endogeneity and selectivity

To summarize the rough sketch of involvement in punctuated cooperation up to this point, it is associated with a level of experience and activity that is highly affective, with compounded processes of keying in which participants try to accommodate what is going on and attempt to re-coordinate their expectations and activities, drawing on their practical sense both privately and publicly, producing context some of which is likely to transcend the ecological huddle of an ongoing situation. Despite its association with some degree of contagion across situations, the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation thus brought about bears a couple of distinct characteristics nearly perfectly suited to socially enclose, specify and marginalize disruptions. It is associated with a distinct selectivity in keying coordination through which responses to

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disruptiveness are ordered in a manner that delimits further impact.9 Such fitness of punctuated cooperation to delimit disruptiveness is not afforded by the structural needs or precautions of a social system, but by participants’ practical sense, their incorporated habitus expressed in selective strategies (Bourdieu 1990: 64–9). The milling analogy suggests a characterization of keying activities during the run of punctuated cooperation as somewhat unfocused and erratic. In fact, in mobilizing keys as, for example, in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, participants appear to test as many options of framing with as few signalling moves as possible. Subjects’ verbal complaints about experimenters’ behaviour reported by Garfinkel illustrate the point: What’s the matter with you? You know what I mean. (Garfinkel 1967: 43) Why are you asking me such silly questions? Surely I don’t have to explain such a statement. Why should I have to stop to analyse such a statement? Everybody understands my statements and you should be no exception. (Garfinkel 1967: 44) What came over you? We never talk this way, do we? (Garfinkel 1967: 44)

Signalling a willingness to sanction, marking pieces of information and social status takes place simultaneously, within single sentences, if not within single phrases and signals (‘do we?’). Questions of interpreting behaviour are associated with questions of rights, competence or membership. Experimenters’ behaviour is marked as frustrating a legitimately expected standard, as calling for interpretation and as putting at risk the relationships of experimenters and subjects. However, although various expectations tended to be signalled simultaneously through mobilizing keys in bulk, normative and relational aspects stand out in Garfinkel’s report. Normative and relational keys constituted something like an ad hoc jurisdiction subjects brought to bear on experimenters’ behaviour. Whilst subjects could have articulated background expectations in all types of forms by referring, for example, to general norms or etiquette, they almost always appear to have addressed normative expectations in terms of associations between experimenters and themselves, and of the moral obligations they deemed these particular relationships to impose. Subjects mobilized keys embroiling normative and relational aspects in pointing out the frustration of legitimate expectations, in blaming experimenters as the patent sources of the frustration (which they were), and 9

The preference for self-correction in conversational repair noted by Schegloff and his colleagues (1977: 375–7) is another illustration of this regularity.

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in appealing to social ties that should under ‘normal’ circumstances have kept experimenters in line with subjects’ comfort levels of involvement. Whilst subjects’ references to norms were provoked deliberately by the setup of the experiments in correspondence to Garfinkel’s understanding of background expectancies, the persistence of relational keying was not, as far as we can tell from Garfinkel’s reports, among the anticipated effects. Relational keys are particularly salient in the reports of unintended fallout, and in response accommodations that almost unilaterally appear to focus on relationships between subjects and experimenters (Garfinkel 1967: 53). Similar selectivities of rekeying can be found in sociological studies of larger-scale disasters. These studies generally tend to emphasize relational keys in exploring emergency responses. The following excerpt is a summary of participants’ accounts assembled in the aftermath of the 1988 earthquake in Armenia: All the men started digging in the rubble and moving pieces of buildings to try to get to people who were buried. They worked in groups. They all helped one another to move rubble and get people out. They formed lines and would pass pieces of rubble from one to another to get it out of the way. It seemed as one of the men would act as the leader of his work group and get things going and keep it coordinated . . . The women would go and get water for the men who were working, and sometimes they’d bring them milk. The women did their part, but they didn’t help dig. That’s men’s work. When the men who were digging got close to someone who was buried they would talk to them. They’d find out their name. The women would then find out the name of the survivor that they were trying to save and go and tell the people who were looking for the name . . . That’s how things went. The people who were there did most of the work themselves. It was total ‘chaos.’ (Mileti 1989: 64–5)

This description is rife with relational keys (emergent groups, stratification within and across groups, division of labour), pointing to instances of order somewhat at variance with the simultaneous assessment that this was actually ‘chaos’. In accounting for this contrast, the last sentence can be read as little else than a reference to the chaos participants were responding to, as an attempt by the writer to emphasize the spontaneity of the emergent order at the scene. The obvious difference to the relational keying reported by Garfinkel is the apparently consensual character – despite not exclusively involving commonality of status but also aspects of stratification and inequality (e.g. leadership, gendering). These findings are representative of the well-established finding in disaster research of the spontaneous generation of mutual membership in ad hoc communities. Erikson (1976: 200–1) summarizes the results of a sample of earlier studies of disastrous disruptions in these words:

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S. H. Prince, studying a ship explosion in Halifax, talked about a ‘city of comrades.’ R. I. Kutak, studying a flood in Louisville, talked about a ‘democracy of distress.’ Charles E. Fritz, studying a tornado in Arkansas, referred to a ‘community of sufferers.’ Martha Wolfenstein, reviewing the literature on disasters in general, called the phenomenon a ‘post-disater utopia,’ while Allen H. Barton, having surveyed much the same literature, spoke of an ‘altruistic community.’10

Erikson’s own study of the Buffalo Creek flood also documents a couple of more antagonistic manifestations of keying cooperation relationally – resentment and blame (Erikson 1976: 172–3, 180–3) – much in line with some of the pushier tendencies of response reported by Garfinkel. Murakami’s compilation of recollections of the Tokyo gas attack also contains elements of blame: The train kept going even after I got off. They should have stopped it at Hongosanchume or Ochanomizu. The passengers were so panic-stricken, how could they not have known something was desperately wrong? After all, half an hour before I caught that train, Kasumigaseki Station was already in complete chaos. They knew they had a crisis, they should have just stopped the train and taken off all the passengers. They could have reduced the injuries. It was a serious oversight. Complete communication breakdown. (Murakami 2000: 95)

Through blaming outsiders for their predicament, ad hoc communities of participants set themselves apart from the rest of the collective and emphasize mutual membership in a common coalition. As a particular kind of response, blaming is not confined to disruptions that are unambiguously man-made or ‘non-natural’, and such categorizations are themselves outcomes of framing events and of victims’ or alleged perpetrators’ prior and subsequent activities (Blocker and Sherkat 1992; Gephart 1993: 1482). More generally speaking, in blaming outsiders, participants turn their containment in punctuated cooperation into a resource in the production of context. This is similar to witch-hunting and scapegoating in that participants typically blame bystanders, who can easily be isolated from the rest of the collective standing by. The apparent correlation between the frequency of witch-hunt type of phenomena within a collective and the extent of social change experienced by members (Schoeneman 1975) is a nice illustration of the prominence of this tendency, and it supports a functional interpretation of the containment of punctuated cooperation as preserving social order by externalizing disruptions in one way (e.g. marginalizing the community of participants) or another (marginalizing another section of the collective as ultimate perpetrators). 10

The respective studies are Prince (1920), Kutak (1938), Fritz (1961), Wolfenstein (1957) and Barton (1969); cf. also Clarke (2003b: 131–2).

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Everyday conversation represents many more instances of relational keying in punctuated cooperation, for example, when failure of repair leads participants to challenge their respective positions (Schegloff 1992: 1334–7). Some caution against deducing a general dominance of relational keying within the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation, though, is still required at this point. In Garfinkel’s experiments, situated ‘naming-and-shaming’ is an immediate response to experimenters’ provocations, and it accurately reflects the fact that experimenters were indeed the source of subjects’ frustration. In the Buffalo Creek and Tokyo cases, documented resentment is to some extent retrospective. In the latter cases, respective relational keying (e.g. us victims against the authorities) may be associated with normalized forms of framing disruptions discussed in the following section. There is also at least one example in Garfinkel’s reports in which cognitive keying is more prominent: the case in which the breaching experiment turned to experimenters being queried by family members about what was possibly wrong with them. With keying taking place in a compounded manner, the apparent selectivity and economy of participants’ strategies generally bears emphasizing. Resentment and blame point towards ways of focusing responses, of combining normative expectations of a ‘this should not have happened’ type with relational keys (e.g. perpetrators vs. victims) by not only identifying disruptions but also their alleged sources. The effect of rumour on collective behaviour may be another case of tightly wrapped keys making their way towards a makeshift interlocking of expectations (Turner and Killian 1972: 41–3). Garfinkel’s family interrogation case also shows how cognitive keys that direct attention to the gathering of information can be incorporated into series of response moves. Whilst the impression of a relative dominance of relational keying conveyed by the accounts of disruptiveness responses mentioned so far may be biased both in terms of the reported data and with respect to the type of disruptions being responded to, it strongly suggests it will make sense to further inquire into the selective character of the endogenous social order brought about by punctuated cooperation: if participants are selective in combining keys economically, this may induce specific regularities in the type of social context that is gradually being produced, which respective change possibly affected across situations. The remainder of this study concentrates on tracing down this empirical intuition and, in the end it will provide the sketch of a more robust analytical argument accounting for the relative prominence of relational keys in punctuated cooperation that is suggested, though in no way verified, by these initial observations (6.3). Any selectivity in combining keys is an expression of participants’ practical sense in exercising strategies of response (Bourdieu 1990: 101–7).

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In terms of preserving social order, the combination of normative and relational keying generates an almost functionalistic appearance of punctuated cooperation managing disruptions while minimizing requisite changes in expectations, allowing both the identification and the marginalization of disruptiveness. Nevertheless, participants’ practical sense may also lead them to further challenge rather than preserve a manifestation of emergent context (see below, section 5.5). In punctuated cooperation, participants struggle with the complexities of finding shortcuts to coordination equilibrium – and this is one reason why experimenters’ reluctance to withhold the ratification of keys is a particularly tedious aspect in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. Participants need to select specific combinations of keys and this is an altogether practical task of dealing with uncertainty, calling for an exercise of discretion.11 Participants need to figure out and select a delineation of potential context as a temporary settlement in the coordination of responses and expectations. Misfiring does happen and is associated with embarrassment, the most evidently social of all emotions (Goffman 1967: 110–12; Miller and Leary 1992; Scheff 1990: 18). If the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation is functional in any sense, it achieves such functionality by imposing the respective challenges of social experience and activity on participants: Social structure gains elasticity; the individual merely loses composure. (Goffman 1967: 112)

3.4

Normalizing disruptions

Despite participants’ discretion in mobilizing keys, combinations of keys which end up being mobilized in responding to disruptiveness are rarely invented on the spot. Discretion in keying is exercised by participants in drawing keys from collective repertoires that provide building blocks for the contextualization of disruptiveness, for example in terms of accidents, criminal misdemeanour, deliberate provocation, harmless banter or stupid play. Collective repertoires are rife with respective concepts and conventions, providing a pool of keys opening up distinct avenues of dealing with both minor troubles and major disasters (Douglas 1987: 111–28; Berger and Luckmann 1966: 175–6). The conventions of framing disruptions associated with well-habitualized keyings support participants in the more or less immediate switching of their attention and activities by 11

Alfred Schutz (1972) investigates how responding to events and activities mobilizes different forms of relevance, emphasizing that such relevance is ordered with respect to participants’ individual biographies and trajectories.

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decoupling them from a previous context, re-embedding them in a novel one by initiating a kind of override: this is an emergency, run for help, do not just stand about, or, nothing to worry about, this is Mardi Gras (White 2008: 13–14, 109–11). Collectively specified symbols are available for accomplishing respective attentional modifications, for example, klaxons going off, police forces breaking in, wearing uniforms or costumes, carrying flags or bottles. Forms of rescue and repair, just like surprise and getting in the spirit (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006), may be deliberately prepared and brought about through such conventional, or normalized, keying of expectations in punctuated cooperation.12 Clearly, conventional forms of framing disruptions may help to avoid or at least simplify coordination problems such as those faced by the involuntary subjects of Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. In a sense, conventional patterns of framing disruptions are ready-made collective recipes for coordinating responses to disruptiveness, with respective activities gradually bypassing the intrinsic problems of punctuated cooperation. The problem, though, is that conventional forms of framing disruptions are not easily separated from other aspects of punctuated cooperation. Conventional forms of framing disruptions do not define responses in a way that would relieve participants from actively contextualizing what is taking place. Making an emergency call, for example, imposes the challenge of framing actual occasions for rapid communication (Whalen and Zimmerman 1987; Whalen and Zimmerman 1998), which generates a gap to be appropriately managed between the context produced in making an emergency phone call and the situation at the site of the emergency. Framing disruptions overcomes differences between uncertain and makeshift interpretations, on the one hand, and routine and conventional productions of context, on the other, in a very gradual and makeshift manner when participants settle on keys and specifications of events, activities and context step by step. This may involve ‘extraordinary discourse . . . capable of giving systematic expression to the gamut of extra-ordinary experiences’ (Bourdieu 1977: 170). The framing given to a disruption in such discourse will gradually normalize and accommodate it within broader productions of context, producing conventional definitions of disruptiveness within conventional definitions of contexts, embedding events like 9/11, Pearl Harbor, or the terror of Nazi Germany in political, historical, legal or moral discourse. Therefore, rather than affording a clear distinction between ad hoc and conventional forms of

12

More generally speaking, just like ritual enactments of social structure, there may be ritual enactments of anti-structure (V. Turner 1969).

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framing, different degrees of normalization are collectively accomplished with respect to disruptions, responses, contexts and keys. In Garfinkel’s reports, it appears as if subjects were indeed aiming for at least partly conventional forms of context that were verbalized, for example, in the patently correct observation that they were deliberately being set up. However, subjects apparently were typically not satisfied with this degree of normalization, but tried to further resolve events: by asking what was wrong, whether the joke could please be done with, by leaving the situation, or by revisiting it later on. In these cases, some of the motivation for resolving disruptions in more detail may have been based on subjects’ prior associations with experimenters. Motivations to resolve disruptions beyond categorizing them as ‘a case of X’, however, are not confined to disruptiveness putting social relationships at stake. Contemporary conventions of event accounting generally incorporate a differentiation between events that are unexplained and events which are inexplicable (Goffman 1974: 28–30). Irrespective of the extent to which actual occasions may be surprising or mysterious, participants will tend to treat them as generally resolvable. Even ‘cosmology episodes’ (Weick 1993: 633–4), which challenge participants’ practical sense of reality on a more fundamental level, are usually treated as only temporary lapses of understanding, as events just waiting to be reasonably accounted for, with causes and effects, signs and significances to be eventually spelled out for good. Possibly, the implicit expectation that all events can ultimately be accounted for backs up present-day tolerance for temporary delays in the resolution of uncertainties to the extent that respective suspense can even become a source of entertainment. At the same time, tolerance for actual occasions which cannot be explained at all nowadays is reduced to the point at which the very existence of such events is all but denied. Although this general observation does not tell us much about participants’ individual levels of comfort with respect to the explicability of disruptions, it does indicate that some degree of accommodation of disruptiveness within the terms of participants’ everyday life, their individual trajectories through situations and fields and their strategies of coping with actual occasions will ultimately be accomplished. It is in this sense that Goffman writes about ‘clearing the frame’ (Goffman 1974: 338–43). The process of clearing may extend beyond a present run of actual occasions, and as the immediate noetic crisis is resolved so one set of problems is replaced by another (Maynard 2003: 18). In the cases reported by Garfinkel, this amounted to subjects and experimenters wondering about the possible impact of the experiment on future contacts, the keeping of relationships and friendships. Normalizing disruptions may in this manner turn from clearing the frame towards clearing strategies for

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passing further runs of activity. Further context tends to be produced that allows us to bracket distinct biographical episodes: I probably went a little funny in the head, too. Seriously. I went around telling people, ‘Something’s out there. You’ll see, something strange is going to happen.’ I was buying survival gear at camping shops (laughs). After I came back to normal, I thought what a fool I’d been . . . but at the time I was deadly serious. Now, what am I going to do with a survival knife? (Murakami 2000: 51)

The extent to which participants may experience such transitional biographical episodes, or to which they make their individual strategies subject to disposition in the first place; their level of comfort with normalizing disruptions or with treating them as events never to be revisited, whether in little or extra need of accommodation – all of this appears to vary across participants. Regardless of the empirical scope of such variations, the mere possibility that normalized disruptions may transcend the endogenous social order brought about by punctuated cooperation constitutes a very significant point. It implies that the normalization of disruptiveness may neither be identical to the overall effect of punctuated cooperation on the collective nor be in any sense a dominant outcome. Participants will at some point become uninvolved in punctuated cooperation and contextualize the episode within a broader run of situations; participants who initially were outsiders to a disruptive situation may become extensively involved in normalizing disruptiveness, whether as academic analysts or as ‘troubleshooters’ (Emerson and Messinger 1977: 130–1). Sets of expectations and strategies may be affected by a disruption long after the situation of an initial exposure and marking has expired, and this may take place in a manner that is largely indifferent to the constitution of the endogenous social order of the original involvement. Normalizing disruptions transcends the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation towards levels of activity no longer calling for survival knives, but for assessments and evaluations, stories and histories, journalists, politicians and scientists. The distinctness of shifts in framing associated with normalizing disruptions appears to correlate with the initial difference between punctuated cooperation and its endogenous order on the one hand, and situations which by the standards of individual and collective trajectories (biographies, interaction ritual chains, everyday routines, etc.) are considered as normal on the other. At the beginning of this chapter, this difference was illustrated by the apparent irrationality of prisoners’ behaviour in concentration camps. In Bettelheim’s report, the incompatibility of the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation with what from

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the outside might have been expected as reasonable behaviour culminates in prisoners imitating Gestapo values (Bettelheim 1943: 446–50). Some prisoners began to regard the world outside of the camp as unreal, which was in some cases accompanied by an outright fear of possibly having to leave the camp at some point in the future (Bettelheim 1943: 437– 8). Ultimately, and more generally among prisoners, after leaving the camp and somehow finding their way back into routine runs of everyday involvements, former imprisonment typically appeared as ‘unforgettable but unreal’ (Bettelheim 1943: 433). In his essay on homecoming soldiers, Schutz makes a similar observation: When the soldier returns home and starts to speak – if he starts to speak at all – he is bewildered to see that his listeners, even the sympathetic ones, do not understand the uniqueness of these individual experiences which have rendered him another man. (Schutz 1964: 114)

When soldiers return home after a war, their homecoming may to some extent be supported by collective normalizations of war or front-line experiences. However, whilst such normalizations accommodate participants’ trajectories by providing terminological, historical and biographical brackets, they support the communication of individual experience only very selectively. Participants on both sides of the nexus of exposure tend to take the discrepancy into account: Bobby used to tell me stories about his days in Vietnam and I didn’t understand. He was a paratrooper and saw a lot of the war from the air. I knew it was hard for him to tell me about the killing. All he told me was that he hated guns and didn’t ever want one in the house. Bobby never looked at me when he told me these things. He became stiff and stared off into who knows where. I learned not to ask many questions because he seemed to hate himself for telling me. (P. Coleman 2006: 61)

Retrospective unreality of prior involvement may be taken as a measure of discrepancy between runs of punctuated cooperation and activities which collective repertoires of keys and contexts are suited to account for on a daily basis. The excerpt above indicates the care that is often taken by both insiders and outsiders to punctuated cooperation to maintain rather than dissolve the discrepancy and to keep, from the perspective of the larger collective, the involvement retrospectively unreal. With soldiers, their families, politicians, journalists, historians and social scientists framing and reframing disruptiveness, more and more is learned about the episode, but such learning does not reflect the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation. Instead, it is retrospectively accommodated as

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an episode in terms of later individual or collective significance (Mead 1932: 48; Gregory 1982: 61). This point bears repeating, since it is just where previous sociological engagements have tended to adopt the position of the accommodating collective rather than a more sceptically analytical attitude. Whilst social scientists have invested much effort in interpreting disruptions in terms of crises, catastrophes and so on, this has almost always been an investment in normalizations. Little has been done to track down the possible effects of punctuated cooperation that are not intrinsic to normalizations, and which may indeed often appear to be marginalized and concealed by them. Murakami makes a similar point with respect to the public response to the Tokyo gas attack and the media’s focus on the perpetrators: For many months thereafter, the media overflowed with ‘news’ of all kinds about the cult. From morning till night Japanese TV was virtually non-stop Aum. The papers, tabloids, magazines all devoted thousands of pages to the gas attack. None of which told me what I wanted to know. No, mine was a very simple question: what actually happened in the Tokyo subway the morning of 20 March, 1995? Or more concretely: What were the people in the subway carriages doing at the time? What did they see? What did they feel? What did they think? . . . The question was, what would happen to any ordinary Japanese citizen – such as me or any of my readers – if they were suddenly caught up in an attack of this kind? (Murakami 2000: 195–6; italics original)

Some disruptions develop into almost universal concerns within collectives, repeatedly framing and reframing them in multiple productions of context (Saito 2006; Muschert 2009). This is often driven by participants, who, at some point, have become involved in or deeply concerned by the disruption, and it may undeniably generate insights from which both those originally exposed and the collective as a whole can substantially benefit. However, aiming to comprehensively understand and accommodate disruptive events is mostly a discursive activity that is at some distance from the actual occasions brought under retrospective scrutiny. The persistence of panic myths despite the rarity of actual panic behaviour, the term often applied even to situations clearly devoid of collective panic, is a case in point (Tierney 2003: 37–8; McPhail 1991): outsiders as well as originally exposed participants reframe behaviour as panic (as in the above excerpt from Murakami’s interviews), accommodating the episode, emphasizing its contained and deviant character. Punctuated cooperation is retrospectively rekeyed in order to make sense for the collective as a whole (Altheide 2004; Law and Mol 2002: 85–8). The type of systematic bias this involves is well known from studies of deviance: exploring possible motives and opportunities, biographies and

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capacities takes precedence over investigating the endogenous order of criminal conduct,13 and engagements in reframing are compounded with efforts to claim expertise over the future management of similar events, symptoms or participants (Tierney 2003: 44–8). In normalizing disruptions retrospectively, the selectivity of keys in producing context is no longer subject to the practical sense of participants responding to actual occasions within the original nexus of exposure: it is subject to the practical sense of participants with ample time to collect evidence and ideas about a situation which has long expired. Normalizing disruptions may surely also to some extent be directed towards the future and articulate a form of ‘mobile utopianism’ with respect to preventing further disruptiveness (Law and Mol 2002: 88). In contrast to what could be gleaned from Garfinkel’s reports, the selectivity put to work in normalizing disruptions patently favours keys signalling cognitive expectations, interpretations, knowledge and cultural capital. It is selectivity congenial to academics’ practical sense in confronting disruptiveness, normalizing events and activities more or less analytically, often becoming involved in the support of distinct collective memories. Normalizing disruptions may become associated with theory, with feelings of horror and disgust, with feelings of nostalgia (Davis 1979: 49) or with various forms of political mobilization (e.g. Luke 1989: 181–204; Saito 2006: 368–73). Much like psychological neurosis (Freud 1940: 292–3), it always goes along with selective omissions – and quite appropriately so, since the disruptive situation is inevitably (and gladly) over, and involvement in it shall not be reproduced. At the same time, the recollection by original participants of situations that remain ‘unforgettable but unreal’ (Bettelheim 1943: 433) points to the inability of effectively communicating the experience of punctuated cooperation within the collective, despite all the effort put into normalizing it. However, whilst the incidence of punctuated cooperation may gradually come to appear as unreal, participants sometimes very visibly hang on to what they have learned. Some systematic bias may be involved in this, for example, a retrospective misjudgement of initial surprise (Fischhoff and Beyth 1975) and also a cultivation of ‘flashbulb memories’ which, having been the subject of excessive rehearsal, become highly accessible (Maynard 2003: 2–3; Hirst et al. 2009). Furthermore, 13

Take, for example, the various reinterpretations of the case of Pierre Rivi`ere by himself, his contemporaries and by Foucault and his colleagues (Foucault 1975). The situation of the crime is almost completely marginalized in favour of factors located in a ‘background’ or ‘social context’ (family structures, social class, biographies, discourse, relations of production, etc.). For respective commentary, cf. Katz (1988: 310–12) as well as Birkbeck and LaFree (1993) for an attempt by sociologists to catch up.

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participants may acquire some talent for recognizing the signs and portents of disruptiveness: I can tell you if it’s ‘them’ or ‘us’. I can tell you how far away it is. I can tell you if it’s a pistol or machine-gun, tank or armored vehicle, Apache or Chinook . . . I can determine the distance and maybe even the target. That’s my new talent. It’s something I’ve gotten so good at, I frighten myself. What’s worse is that almost everyone seems to have acquired this new talent . . . young and old. And it’s not something that anyone will appreciate on a r´esum´e . . . I keep wondering . . . will an airplane ever sound the same again? (Riverbend 2005: 11–12)

Such effects of participants picking up more durable dispositions may of course be particularly common to disruptions which take place somewhat regularly in similar form, affording a continuous remobilization of keys (cf. Drabek 1986: 142). In such cases, some participants – or ‘almost everyone’ originally exposed, as in the above account by a blogger in the war-torn city of Baghdad – may draw on experiences, activities and levels of response originally keyed within punctuated cooperation in later runs of activity. Certain types of response originally associated with the endogenous social order of punctuated cooperation are, in such instances, likely to resurface later, frightening, as in the above excerpt, just those participants remobilizing them. The respective expectations, keys and strategies, in other words, need not disappear from the collective repertoire. They may be selectively absorbed by a larger collective in the form of specific signs, symbols or resources and be recycled in later runs of activity. Alternatively, participants hanging on to a repertoire of responses acquired in punctuated cooperation may reassemble as more permanent collectives or ‘disaster subcultures’ (Wenger and Weller 1973) at odds with levels of experience more common in the larger collective: I felt for a moment as though I were in the company of people so wounded in spirit that they almost constituted a different culture, as though the language we shared in common was simply not sufficient to overcome the enormous gap in experience that separated us. (Erikson 1976: 11)

What is significant in both cases is that as original exposure to disruptiveness is dissolved so effects of punctuated cooperation may spread across the collective which are neither identical nor immediately related to the retrospective normalization of disruptions. 3.5

Towards change in strategies and fields

No matter how drastic or chronic the effects of punctuated cooperation may turn out to be, treating them merely in terms of psychological fallout would needlessly sterilize the sociological exploration of

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disruptiveness. In punctuated cooperation, framing actual occasions produces an endogenous context of response that affects participants’ expectations and strategies, their ability and likelihood to recycle keys genuine to punctuated cooperation in other situations. This broader kind of fallout is narrowed down significantly if sociological investigations are restricted to how disruptions are collectively normalized and discursively accommodated. Tracing disruptiveness beyond instances of punctuated cooperation and its normalization, however, presents a daunting task. The sociologist at this point is left in a position very much like that of the participants of Garfinkel’s experiments, a position which ‘“turned serious” and left a residue of disruption . . . that offered explanation did not resolve’ (Garfinkel 1967: 52). For the sociologist investigating disruptiveness, the ‘offered explanation’ is the public set of normalized disruptions, a set to which sociological research has indeed contributed generously. The ‘residue of disruption’, on the other hand, emanates from what social scientists have tended to treat – with only a few notable exceptions14 – as individual fallout, mostly leaving it for psychologists to explore: changes in participants’ strategies of coming to terms with actual occasions. At this point, two arguments can be made in favour of overcoming this delegation of competence, and both reiterate the demand for exploring punctuated cooperation across social situations within distinct social fields associated with distinct sets of strategies mobilized by participants. Firstly, in punctuated cooperation, just as in other social situations, participants’ expectations are reflexively calibrated, a process that can vividly be observed in Garfinkel’s reports, and of which the ‘residue of disruption’ is a case in point. The changes thus affected need not and are, indeed, unlikely to be private or ‘merely’ psychological. They are based on responding to responses and once participants meet again, respective adjustments in expectations and strategies are prone to resurface – as in Garfinkel’s case of the disturbed couple. Furthermore, various situations with only a minority of participants or maybe just a single participant previously exposed to punctuated cooperation may be affected significantly by such prior exposure – as when a traumatized soldier returns home. Participants’ expectations and strategies may come to infect one another across situations. Respective changes in signs, symbols and resources 14

The most notable exception may be the work by William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki about the Polish peasant; Thomas and Znaniecki (1996) provide a convenient sample from the five original volumes. The investigation of immigrant communities may indeed provide suitable data to further work out the perspective offered here. Dealing with such data appropriately, however, presupposes elaborations of theory of method that can only be discussed here in preliminary terms (see Chapter 6, section 5).

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mobilized by participants should thus gradually become visible across situations as the effects of punctuated cooperation diffuse within a collective. Punctuated cooperation will in this way leave recognizable traces that remain to be more systematically documented. Many of these traces may be occluded to some degree by normalizations which are highly selective in recycling the significance of certain disruptions and which will rarely be entirely congenial to changes in participants’ strategies brought about by an original exposure. Secondly, the extent to which the diffusion of expectations and strategies from punctuated cooperation towards other situations is likely to take place will be affected by the empirical interconnections within series of social situations. One may think of such connections as trajectories of participants continuously adjusting their strategies as they travel from one situation to the next, but this is only one way in which single situations are embedded in broader productions of context. After all, expectations and keys provide ways of ordering situations with respect to other situations, for example in manufacturing distinct sets of runs: if indeed membership, friendship or social capital is salient in keying cooperation, then participants are more likely to meet again; if rights are traded once, then exchange may subsequently take longer turns; ‘taste is a match maker’ (Bourdieu 1984: 243) and so is victimization (Heeren 1999: 171–6). There may therefore be not only a trajectory of participants involved in punctuated cooperation, but also a trajectory of keys, of signs, symbols and resources collectively associated with solving future coordination problems. Observing strategies as mobilizations of keys by participants across a distinct run of interconnected situations affords opportunities to trace trajectories of both distinct sets of participants and distinct sets of keys outwards from instances of punctuated cooperation. Participants are selective in framing actual occasions in terms of their practical sense, and the ability to recycle keys and expectations later on is a central aspect of how strategies are continuously being adjusted. The recycling of keys and expectations originally mobilized in punctuated cooperation in later situations, just as much as any original strategy, is the result of participants’ practical sense. This practical sense may only very partially be affected by involvements in punctuated cooperation which have been normalized. Instead, it may well be a vehicle for reproducing strategies below the level of public discourse, similar to the way in which former soldiers may still hate former enemies long after peace has been declared. As projected at the end of the preceding chapter, respective changes need to be tracked down not only within but also across situations in which participants repeatedly mobilize keys and adjust their strategies, possibly transforming social fields.

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If the focus for exploring structural effects must be laid on strategies and fields rather than on single episodes of punctuated cooperation, how can an empirical focus suitable for this kind of investigation be maintained? Since the effects hypothesized so far relate to phenomena of unknown scope, a selection of empirical examples economizing on the probability with which these phenomena will actually be observable is a critical step in elaborating the approach. One factor that we may, at this point, generally anticipate to increase the probability that strategies once adjusted will be reiterated later on is the regathering of participants. That participants expect one another to adhere to levels of involvement they have previously been maintaining is illustrated very effectively by subjects’ responses in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. This makes, alongside families and friends, groups and organizations defined by distinct forms of membership suitable candidates for respective empirical observations. Organized social settings may even be more particularly suited, since additional to repeatedly bringing together specific sets of participants, organizations, rather than informal gatherings motivated by convergent interests, do so by virtue of explicit coordination, therefore bringing about a relative continuity of both participants and distinct coordination problems. In organized social settings, participants deliberately coordinate trajectories of themselves and others, and they also coordinate trajectories of keys such as, for example, distinct tasks and obligations. Furthermore, the fact that members, signs, symbols and resources are subject to continuous decision-making and formal coordination should make any kind of social change particularly noticeable: the organization of activities needs to take notice of change in members’ strategies and tends to be explicitly concerned by it (Brown 1978: 365–7). The following chapter explores the social order and impact of punctuated cooperation under these special conditions. The other elementary factor to consider in identifying social fields that are particularly amenable to the further study of social change in the wake of disruptiveness is the probability that punctuated cooperation will actually take place. Some social settings are prone to experiencing more and more drastic instances of disruptiveness than others. Collectives of participants engaged in violence and warfare and, most particularly, military organizations at times of war with a majority of their soldiers drawn from other occupations, conscripted regardless of their inclination to participate, constitute such settings. Violent situations are generally instances of punctuated cooperation (Collins 2008: 79–82), and barely prepared participants are exposed to these situations through membership, often involuntary, in conscript armies. As military historian John Keegan flatly states, ‘all battles, are, in some degree, and to a greater or lesser number

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of the combatants, disasters’ (Keegan 1978: 199). Even that degree of order which military organizations attempt to fashion for their members is likely to suffer from disastrous disruptions, and, short of imprisonment, there are few other social settings in which exit options are collectively withheld as thoroughly as by membership in military organizations. The fifth chapter investigates violent situations as manifestations of punctuated cooperation, exploring the impact on military organizations and on the larger collective that accommodates violent engagements and the exigencies of organizing them. 3.6

Conclusion

Responding to disruption generates a specific level of involvement among participants of social situations. This emergent context produced in punctuated cooperation agitates participants’ practical sense in rekeying coordination. Punctuated cooperation is existentially engrossing, focusing participants on what they presently confront; it is also transcendent and potentially infectious with respect to further runs of activity, retrospective constructions of the past, accommodations of expectations and strategies. In responding to disruptiveness, relational and normative aspects of coordination appear to be particularly salient. The endogenous order of punctuated cooperation thus sustained tends to be superseded, and often collectively marginalized, once disruptions are made subject to normalization. The social order and context endogenous to punctuated cooperation and the order and context of disruptiveness normalized in distinct biographical or historical episodes are not identical, and the two may come to be at odds to an extent that leaves participants of punctuated cooperation with recollections which are ‘unforgettable but unreal’. Since the transcendent and contagious aspects of punctuated cooperation tend to overlap with collective normalizations only very partially, the latter cannot present an adequate sociological focus for investigating social change in the wake of disruptiveness. Aggregate effects of disruptiveness on strategies and fields are likely to differ substantially from what is conveyed about them by collectively ratified accounts of disruptive episodes. Social fields with some degree of organization have been identified as a suitable empirical focus for improving the level of respective sociological intelligence.

4

Organizational stress, failure and succession

I was in no shape to go and help. I was shaking too much . . . I felt so bad it seemed doubtful I would make work the next day, so I started to check over my paperwork and things . . . By then my nose was running, my eyes were sore. I was in a terrible state, though I was completely unaware of this. I only learned that later . . . ‘Okay for now,’ I thought, ‘I’ve done my job’ . . . I went to wash my face . . . Just then I started to tremble really badly . . . I felt like throwing up, couldn’t breathe . . . I didn’t think I was going to die. I’ll bet even Takahashi didn’t think he was going to die . . . I was more worried about my work, what I needed to do. Toshiaki Toyoda (Murakami 2000: 31–3)

The focus in tracing and investigating disruptiveness will now shift from single situations to activities sustained across a longer series of situations. In the course of the present chapter, more specifically, the genesis and impact of disruptiveness within cooperation that is formally organized will be explored. People routinely recognize a variety of organizational claims on situations, events and activities: that taking a bus ride requires a ticket, that seminars are attended by students and lecturers, that journal editors will decide in what form your paper will get printed, that in some restaurants you are required to serve yourself and in others you are forbidden to do so (Goffman 1961a: 159–71). The conventional character of respective recognitions, for example of ‘my job’ and ‘my work’ in the above quote, and the keying of cooperation going along with respective signalling are in a very elementary sense prerequisites for the transcendence of disruptiveness, and of punctuated cooperation, in organized social settings: fields of organized cooperation, and not just single instances of organized activities, are vulnerable to the deflation or inflation of resources, to changes in signs and symbols in their environments, to the fact that some merchandise does not sell as it used to or that students do not attend seminars like they used to, all of which affects organization both within and across situations by virtue of participants’ recognition of some specifically organizational relevance and 107

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coherence of activities across multiple productions of context (Fligstein and McAdam 2012: 64–7). Any recognition organizations are able to call on in claiming events, activities, expectations, keys and participants as being under their jurisdiction as personnel to be moved, property to be sold, space to be provided or withheld and so on, as well as all the vulnerabilities deriving from such claims and recognitions, ultimately derives from participants’ dispositions to realize organizational domains, authorities or posts within an active nexus of actual occasions. A practical sense of formal organization these days is ubiquitous, but it is, in its contemporary meaning, not universal across human collectives. Considering the power of organizations over much that is taking place collectively these days (Coleman 1982), legitimate disputes over organizational claims on actual occasions are impressively rare; the improbability of such a state of affairs must not be glossed over (Godwin and Markham 1996: 660–1). The present chapter therefore initially needs to clarify and appropriately characterize formally organized cooperation and what is special about it within and across situations (4.1). Subsequently, a couple of empirical scenarios and cases in which disruptiveness strikes formally organized cooperation will be discussed: organizational stress and the upkeying and downkeying of punctuated cooperation (4.2), managerial succession (4.3), the framing of organizational failure (4.4) and attempts at preventing failure through investing organized cooperation with reliability (4.5). In two further sections, these findings are drawn together (4.6) and implications for organizational theory are discussed (4.7). The empirical intelligence is mobilized from a variety of organizational research and disaster studies. Scholars’ efforts to explore not only disruptiveness but also workable solutions in making organizations respond and adjust more effectively to its impact will be referred to throughout, though only the concept of high-reliability organizations will receive a lengthier treatment. In keeping with the general approach of this investigation – and with the earlier disclaimer about the exploitability of available data – data will be mobilized and discussed to the extent that initial findings about the incidence and impact of disruptiveness can be elaborated conceptually while keeping these efforts in a sustained dialogue with empirical observations. 4.1

Formally organized cooperation

References to ‘my job’ and ‘my work’ as they appear in the quote that opens this chapter are examples of people’s recognition that the coordination of activities is subject to formal organization calling for specific

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contributions (cf. Goffman 1961a: 162). Understanding the distinctive character of such recognition and the kind of organized cooperation supported by respective contributions requires a discussion of how such cooperation is achieved and an understanding of the sense in which the means to achieve it, and, more particularly, the keys that orient participants towards achieving it, are specifically organizational. Organized social settings are not altogether different from other manifestations of local order (Friedberg 1997), but they are characterized by distinct processes in the generalization of expectations, keys and strategies. These processes ‘make abstractions and govern by them’, and they ‘go on in the same times and places as people live in details’ (Stinchcombe 2001: 193). To use a long-standing term in organization theory, the outcome of these processes may be called the formalization of cooperation (Luhmann 1964).1 Formal expectations Associating actual occasions, activities, events or participants with specific organizations is nowadays a mostly unproblematic accomplishment in everyday life. It is supported by collective layouts of spaces (buildings, offices, vehicles, etc.) and by individual and collective schedules (of operating, office, opening or working hours). By referring to sections of space or time as legitimately organizational, a kind of organizational ownership of social situations and specific instances of cooperation is routinely assumed and enacted by participants. Sets of situations are differentiated according to home or office, work, show time, leisure time. This works well enough for most purposes of everyday life, and organizations do their best in leading participants on respectively (Giddens 1987b: 140–65). Among specialized members of organizations, the design of spaces organization members are expected to engage in has become an explicit issue of ‘culture management’ (Fleming and Spicer 2004: 88–9), while the timing and spacing of activities motivated by membership has recently lost some of its conventional character for many members. Formally organized cooperation increasingly depends on members’ activities outside of factories and offices; times of work are often defined singlehandedly by members called on to perform a task. The fact that this does not appear to impose unbearable uncertainty on the formal organization 1

Luhmann’s (1964) understanding of formalized expectations that informs this chapter is subsequently elaborated in terms of keying and a specifically organizational set of correlation devices. His understanding is compatible with the later recovery of the term by Stinchcombe (2001), who considers formalization as a more general process beyond its specifically organizational sense.

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of cooperation, but rather problems of ‘work–life balance’ (Hochschild 1997) for individual organization members, is a clear indication that the extension of fields of organized cooperation and their claims on actual occasions are not confined to sections of space and time through which specifically organizational situations would be run. In organizing cooperation, sets of signs, symbols and resources are put to work which are very mobile, widely distributed across the collective and ready to infect all kinds of situations and activities. Fields of organized cooperation, distributions of expectations and keys across participants, rather than sites and buildings, extend across ‘multiply spaced environments’ (Ford and Harding 2004: 826–8). Participants often become attached to material aspects of these environments – with expectations becoming geared to physical layouts like counters, chairs, screens, tables, windows, doors, lights, etc. – and organization members may suffer greatly from respective changes (Milligan 2003). Such attachments result from participants’ prior involvements in organized cooperation, from continuously reiterated processes of organizational socialization in which senior members and newcomers, organization members, customers or clients train one another and in which they continuously reinterpret the material set-ups they are confronted with (cf. Gieryn 2002: 62–5). As a result, organizational spaces, like all material settings of collective activity, look, feel and ultimately are different for different participants (Ford and Harding 2004: 828). The look, feel and being of any such setting results from distinct expectations, more particularly from expectations which organization members have made commitments to continuously attend to and enact (e.g. Suchman 1998). Respective differences in commitment correlate with different degrees of exposure to runs of formally organized activities, the net effect of which is a specifically organizational socialization of members. The specific level of involvement brought about by processes of organizational socialization is, like any regular level of involvement, an achievement of reiterating situated activities, of striking distinct coordination equilibria and inducing a certain habitus among participants (cf. Gomez and Jones 2000). It is, once again, the result of participants’ ‘effective cooperation in maintaining expectations’ (Goffman 1983b: 5). The critical difference with respect to other fields and other types of involvement is constituted by the fact that organization members as participants are addressed by an exclusive set of formally specified expectations. The sociological significance of participants’ membership in organizations is that it opens up regular forms of reiterated participation in which more improbable forms of ‘cooperation in maintaining expectations’ can be brought about through sustaining specified sets of expectations for finite

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sets of participants, coupling them with certain incentives committing members to striking distinct coordination equilibria. Participants who aspire to and keep up membership status become exposed to organizational socialization against this background and thus acquire field-specific dispositions (Hilbert 1987: 76). Since ‘members of an organization generally come to it equipped with the mores of the society in which it operates’ (Simon 1952: 1135), the crucial question of organizational socialization with respect to the distinctiveness of field-specific dispositions and the mastery among members it brings about is the extent to which there is a capacity of organizational socialization ‘to develop and inculcate mores that are distinct from the mores of society’ (Simon 1952: 1135). Formally specified expectations associated with membership status cannot be utterly incompatible with other expectations that are being cultivated within the collective from which an organization draws its members (cf. Friedberg 1997: 51–64). More generally, compatibility of field-specific distributions with distributions of participants and expectations in broader fields allows organizations (or rather, certain members endowed with the responsibility or motivation to associate themselves with some alleged interest of ‘their’ organization) to reckon with participants’ inclinations to seek out and sustain membership status and get access to the incentives it provides. Organizations mobilize members’ inclination to participate in runs of situations ‘under their control’ (Thompson 1967: 102–5) and to accept, for example, ‘reasonable’ amounts of money as adequate compensation. Compatibility of fields of organized cooperation with broader distributions of expectations and keys within a collective is a prerequisite for participants’ understanding of whatever an organization may want to offer its members, clients, customers or stakeholders as incentives of involvement.2 In addressing organization members exclusively and authoritatively, the specific process of generalizing expectations and keys called formalization takes place. Since formal expectations do not address outsiders but exclusively address organization members, the adjustment of participants to membership status usually contains a degree of surprise (Louis 1980: 237–9), 2

In this respect, formalization in the organizational sense discussed here is similar to formalization in the legal sense (Stinchcombe 2001): just like formal expectations which address organization members cannot be completely at odds with the broader distribution of expectations and keys within the collective, so formal rules of law which address everybody cannot effectively be implemented against the conventions governing spontaneous order (Sugden 2004: 5–6). It would be interesting to explore this line of argument further by extending what Stinchcombe (2001: 76–99) has to say about legal certainty as ‘piecewise equilibrium’ (Llewellyn 1960) into game-theoretical territory.

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if not shock (Schein 1968; Van Maanen 1975) and ‘acculturative stress’ (Mejia and McCarthy 2010; Nelson 1987). New members confront an unfamiliar, if not utterly alien, level of involvement, of ‘what it means to “take initiative” or “put in a hard day’s work”’ in terms of the organization they have entered (Louis 1980: 243). Entering an organization therefore tends to be associated with forms of experience similar to those of an immigrant (Schutz 1964: 91). Non-members, for example customers or clients, of course often become additional targets for organizational attempts at socializing participants in some form or another, but attempts at socializing outsiders confront a higher degree of uncertainty; the regularity to which the latter can be exposed to respective expectations is generally limited (Larsson and Bowen 1989). With membership status committing a finite set of participants to reiterated runs of specified sets of situations, socialization becomes more pronounced, less episodic and less impressionistic. Various socialization tactics are put to work in training new members accordingly (Van Maanen and Schein 1979; Ashforth and Saks 1996) and organizational socialization is the aggregate outcome of the interaction of these socialization tactics with newcomers’ strategies in entering the field (Miller and Jablin 1991; B. Eldredge 1995; Bauer et al. 2007). During organizational socialization, expectations and strategies of newcomers and insiders clash and gradually become readjusted across both junior and senior members, but formalization ensures that being addressed by organizational expectations cannot be denied by members, even if actual compliance is still a matter of modest or massive discretion, creativity and, notoriously, ‘agency costs’ (Jensen and Meckling 1976). High rates of turnover among newcomers may partially be attributed to the frustration involved in participants realizing the costs of adjusting strategies in changing from being outsiders to being members (Louis 1980: 226–9). Organizational socialization, though, is always a two-way process in which all members are continuously resocialized as the influx of newcomers temporarily unbalances field-specific distributions (Denhardt 1968; Wanous et al. 1984). Whilst formalization pins down certain expectations, not all expectations mobilized by participants in runs of organized cooperation are subject to formalization. Cooperation among participants, members, customers and clients often occurs spontaneously, as in getting on and off subway trains or queuing for tickets.3 Managing organized cooperation usually relies heavily on such spontaneous cooperation; 3

Spontaneous cooperation is, in this respect, a resource which organization members draw and rely on and which they try to manipulate, for example, by making use of material settings in designing work spaces, queuing lanes, counters, etc.

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participants’ tendencies to stick to the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle will often keep expectations of doing something ‘formally correct’ at bay. It is the bringing about of cooperation that would spontaneously not take place which sets apart fields of formally organized cooperation. Formalization, however, never brings about comprehensively formalized distributions of expectations among members of any organization (Friedberg 1997: 108). ‘Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences and information, interests and knowledge differ’, March and Simon (1993: 2) famously observe (italics are mine). This implies formalization is a process that takes place within fields across which participants and expectations – ‘individuals and groups’, ‘preferences and information, interests and knowledge’ – are already distributed in some way or another. Through any run of organized cooperation, continuous adjustments of strategies take place among participants, sometimes by virtue of formalization, sometimes through other framings and keyings. In the formalization of expectations, ‘the scheme of social interaction becomes itself partly a resultant of the rational contriving of means and the conscious construction and acting out of “artificial” roles’ (Simon 1952: 1139; italics mine). Membership contracts only very partially represent how members actually coordinate (Tirole 1988); organized cooperation always remains subject to local productions of context (Friedberg 1997: 119–31). Formalization goes on ‘as people live in details’ (Stinchcombe 2001: 193), adjusting strategies as they see fit. Keys Formalized expectations, like all expectations, are generalizations of response patterns in terms of propositions about actual occasions. In progressive processes of socialization, participants spontaneously acquire and recall expectations and keys they associate with actual occasions. Mastery of formal expectations among organization members is no exception. Formality, therefore, can never be the opposite of some ‘informal substance’ which it would replace; ideally, it may be a somewhat ‘refined version’ of this informal substance (Stinchcombe 2001: 3).4 4

There is some affinity between speaking of ‘formal’ in these terms and the discussion of ‘formal properties’ of participants’ activities by Garfinkel and Sacks (1986). Garfinkel and Sacks, however, do not investigate formalization but rather a practice they call ‘formulation’: a process of glossing through which participants make activities, particularly verbal ones, intelligible and accountable to one another. If formalization is brought about verbally or even in writing – and the historical evidence associating the emergence and growth of formal organization with the keeping of written documents is unambiguous

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Formalization relies on and mobilizes participants’ practical sense of coming to terms with actual occasions and only very gradually redirects this practical sense. Formal expectations are made explicit by addressing organization members instructively with respect to what is demanded from them and with respect to future runs of activity in which members are expected to maintain a certain level of coordination. This generalization can only be achieved through mobilizing expectations and keys, signs, symbols and resources which are already familiar, that is, to some extent habitualized and mastered among members. Regular patterns of expectations and keys – that norms symbolize willingness to sanction, that pointing out pieces of information shows a certain competence, that reputation begets social capital – are expressions of participants’ practical sense in making use of a collective repertoire of signals. Formalization establishes regular patterns across or, if you will, on top of these patterns by addressing organization members and drawing on their practical sense of keying. Within a collective accustomed to formally organized cooperation, participants can be expected to have a practical understanding of and a general feeling for what it means to organize activities in this manner. In other words, participants’ practical sense of cooperation will accommodate a sense of formalization. Through centuries of collective experience with formalizing expectations and with participants nowadays joining and leaving a multitude of organizations during their lifetime, formal keyings and the expectations thus mobilized have very much settled into similar patterns across organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Fogarty and Dirsmith 2001). In drawing on Goffman’s terminology of frame analysis, we may say that a distinct ‘lamination’ (Goffman 1974: 564–5) is applied to the collective repertoire of keys discussed earlier (Table 4.1). Across organizations, participants formalize relational expectations by referring to varieties of organizational posts. These posts as specifically organizational keys to relational expectations define positions which are held by participants through virtue of their membership, which awards formalized positions and status in relation to other members. If participants formalize normative expectations, that is, expectations to be reiterated in the face of potential and actual disappointments, then this generally takes the form of a reference to or assertion of formal authority: expectations are what they are because they have been formally defined and because formalized rights and customs for evaluating, demanding or (cf. Goody 1986: 87–126; Robson 1992: 692–7) – then formalization may be analysed as a special case of formulation and ‘organizational arrangements’ may be treated as accomplishments of ‘gloss enterprises’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 173).

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Table 4.1 Formal laminations Expectations

Relational

Cognitive

Normative

⎧ signs ⎪ ⎪ ⎨ symbols Types of key ⎪ ⎪ ⎩ resources

positions membership, status, reputation social capital

information knowledge, competence, taste cultural capital

sanctions norms, customs, morals rights

Formalizations

posts

domains

authorities

rejecting actual occasions are available. Finally, in mobilizing specifically organizational cognitive expectations, participants refer to domains as deliberately delineated regions of relevance to be attended to by organization members, calling formally on participants’ competence and knowledge. As keys to formally organized cooperation, posts, domains and authorities mobilize relational, cognitive and normative expectations respectively by addressing participants as organization members. This is what makes for the artificial appearance of expectations mobilized in this manner: the information within the domain is relevant because the domain just happens to be defined that way; the relation exists because the post has been appointed; the boss can do this because she is the boss.5 In addressing participants as organizations members, formal expectations need to be made explicit, and thus they become a matter of evident contingency. Keying cooperation formally provokes deliberation and decision-making and tends to reproduce its occasion by the need to 5

In formulating theories of formal organizations, social scientists have been drawing extensively on their practical sense as participants and members, and these theories offer many analogies to the present reconstruction of formality with respect to framing and keying. James Coleman (1990: 450), for example, distinguishes organizations from other corporate actors by defining them as systems of action ‘composed of positions (not persons)’, using ‘position’ in much the same sense as ‘post’ is used here (cf. also Luhmann 1976: 99–101). Thompson generalizes the concept of organizational domain introduced by Levine and White (1961), arguing that consensus about domains ‘defines a set of expectations both for members of an organization and for others with whom they interact, about what the organization will and will not do’ (Thompson 1967: 29). The concept of ‘domain’ in the present discussion brings such an understanding of organizationally defined zones of concern and relevance to bear on distributions of cognitive expectation within individual organizational fields. There are also many differentiations of dimensions of formality similar to the one offered here, for example in the discussion of diverse ‘functions of bureaucratic rules’ by Gouldner (1954a: 162–74). Among other examples there is, in disaster studies, the structural model of organizational activities, resources, domains and tasks offered by Kreps (1978: 67–73; 1985: 51–7, 1994). Perhaps closest to the differentiation put forward here is the distinction of positional, task and normative structure used by Forrest (1978: 107–10), although Forrest investigates groups rather than organizations and does not discuss formalization.

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adjudicate on participants’ responsibilities, for example, on which element of a domain it exactly was that they were meant to attend to. In articulating formal expectations, participants build and maintain organization ‘through the medium of communication’ (Weick 1990: 582; Stinchcombe 2001: 30–5), framing actual occasions as specifically organizational in a primarily verbal manner. As with other forms of framing and keying, the coupling of numerous formal keys in single acts of communication dominates the articulation of formal expectations. The coupling of posts and authorities, for example, is common among participants discussing membership obligations in terms of who can tell whom what to do, and it is common among sociologists discussing authority structures (cf. Coleman 1990: 170–2). Sociologists confronted with formal organization draw on much the same set of keys as organization members when, for example, defining a ‘simple formal structure . . . as a hierarchical structure consisting of a set of positions linked in authority (legitimately coercive) relations (command chains) over the control and use of certain values resources’ (Lin 2001: 35), thus embroiling different keys in analysing formally organized cooperation. Formalization puts a distinctly organizational twist on processes of stimulus generalization within a collective. Besides pushing expectations towards verbal explicitness and overt contingency in being articulated, formalization has a similar effect with respect to the acceptance of expectations: upholding membership status means not only being addressed by formal expectations; it also requires members to respond affirmatively to a respective keying of cooperation. Formalization calls for explicit articulation of expectations, making contingencies visible while at the same time demanding that expectations be routinely ratified. This is why the formula of formalization as ‘abstraction plus government’ (Stinchcombe 2001: 41–3) is a good approximation of participants’ actual experience of how formal organization is achieved and maintained through a distinct set of correlation devices: posts, domains and authorities will often be articulated and recognized implicitly by participants, but if the respective expectations are to have any formal licence, then there have to be ways of backing them up by making them explicit through communicating expectations tied to membership status, by motivating members to respond affirmatively and, should they decline, by excluding them. One implication is that membership status needs to be attractive enough to compensate for any costs (of time, effort, status, etc.) members incur in subscribing to formal cooperation and in accepting to surrender to formal demands (March and Simon 1993: 103–31). Sometimes, as in the case of military organizations discussed in the next chapter, this

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attractiveness is primarily a result of the high cost of losing membership. Another implication is the reinforcement of members’ tendencies to couple keys economically in keeping down the costs of recognizing, deliberating about, surrendering to or compensating for formal claims by formalizing as little as possible and by tuning down the amount of respective communication in relying on spontaneous cooperation to fill in the blanks. Formal rules, guidelines and standards superficially abound as written contracts defining membership status are full of fine print. Rarely if ever, though, is fine print used to key formal cooperation; members safely leave contracts and guidelines in their respective drawers. Instead, participants embroil combinations of posts, domains and authorities into compact and often highly complex verbal constructs of roles, duties, professional ethics and so on – drawing on their practical sense in responding to what has, somehow and in so many words (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 170–4), been communicated as an organizational demand, allowing others to do likewise and develop a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990: 66–7; Law 1994: 147–9). On this basis, governing the indeterminacy of contractual relations in organizations becomes an art and, perhaps, now increasingly a science (cf. Townley 1993: 524–6; Bolton and Dewatripont 2005). Participants’ proficiency in coupling keys has led scholars to describe distributions of expectations and keys within fields of organized cooperation in terms of organizational goals, means–ends relations and rationality. Such manifestations of participants’ practical sense, however, are by no means confined or genuinely specific to fields of organized cooperation (cf. Bourdieu 1996: 375–6). These fields are the object of deliberate calibration; of cooperation being constantly, formally and informally, renegotiated among participants, just like other instances of social order (Fine 1984; Hallett 2003). Organizational theorists trying to define the specific orderly properties of organized cooperation, if only for the purposes of contextualizing what it is they are investigating, have a hard time dealing with a mess of equilibrating and disequilibrating forces (Orton and Weick 1990: 204–5; Friedberg 1997: 179). ‘The’ organization, whatever combination of signs, symbols and members may claim to represent it, is always a generalization of formalizations, an abstraction of abstractions, performed by either members, stakeholders or researchers trying to bracket certain aspects of organized cooperation (Bittner 1965: 253– 4). Many such abstractions, like organizational goals, have proven to be either misleading or empty (Simon 1964). The rationality of formalization is always a symbolic product which at best economizes more or less efficiently on the costs of articulating and ratifying formal expectations for one purpose or another (Brown 1978: 369–70). Formalization

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can never comprehensively rationalize organizational strategies or fields because it cannot even comprehensively formalize single runs of cooperation (Friedberg 1997: 102–3).6 Upkeying and downkeying It is tempting to regard such observations as defining a general vulnerability of organized cooperation to disruptiveness, but the potential vulnerability associated with the coexistence of disparate forms of coordination is usually well controlled by members’ mastery of rekeying cooperation in avoiding disruptions. Since the classic work by Roethlisberger and Dickson (1968; originally 1939), the problems of coexisting formal and informal cooperation have been widely publicized. In utilizing signs, symbols and resources, formalization mobilizes participants’ practical sense in order to come up with workable generalizations, and in this sense formalization effectively presupposes informal distributions: ‘The informal system is the semantics of the formal system, which is why the formal system works’ (Stinchcombe 2001: 61). Alongside formal expectations there are other expectations, signs, symbols and resources which ‘may conflict with, distract from, or reinforce the formally established ones’ (Coleman 1994: 173; cf. Turner 2000: 294–5). How formalization relates to these other expectations and their associated frames of activity, though, is, to repeat, gravely misunderstood if one contrasts ‘formal’ with ‘substantive’ as if formalization would override substance by form (Stinchcombe 2001: 3–4). Formalization cannot simultaneously draw on given (informal) keys and delete their significance (Stinchcombe 2001: 181–5). Formalization cannot and does not strip activity down to some impoverished or empty form of conduct, but rather adds another layer to the framing of activities. Expressed in frame-analytical terminology, formalization involves an upkeying of cooperation. Goffman discusses the processes of upkeying and downkeying exclusively with respect to distinctions between serious and playful, theatrical and unscripted conduct as cases in which the outer (or upper) layer is easily distinguished from the inner (or lower) one: keying playfulness from within serious activities performs an upkeying while keying serious activities from play performs a downkeying (Goffman 1974: 359– 68). However, Goffman’s idea of stratified laminations is more general than his own illustrations may suggest (Goffman 1974: 82, 156–65). In 6

As a glossing practice or ‘formulation’ in the sense of Garfinkel and Sacks, formalization can by itself not solve elementary problems of cooperation since ‘there is no room in the world for formulations as serious solutions to the problem of social order’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 180).

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principle, it can be applied to any successive framing of activity (cf. Clark 1996: 354–84; Vollmer 2007: 586–8). The idea of laminations is helpful in understanding formalization because it emphasizes that references to authority, posts or domains do not produce an impoverished or ‘merely’ formal frame. Just as playfulness does not delete a world in which injuries may seriously hurt, so formalization does not put participants in a frame of activity in which they would only react to authority, only attend to their formally designated domains or only relate to people through the specific social angle of their formally assigned posts (cf. Clark 1996: 354–5). In fields of organized cooperation, formal and informal frames of activity are always co-present in the sense that participants are able to rekey cooperation to either formal or informal levels of engagement with formalization fundamentally remaining a ‘glossing practice’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 164–5, 183–7). Even if things appear to be done exclusively ‘by the book’, a more basic level of practical involvement is always present in which participants continue to ‘live in details’ (Stinchcombe 2001: 193) and in which doing things ‘by the book’ is a deliberate choice which can be reiterated, jettisoned or accommodated by successive upkeying, downkeying, upkeying and so on. Conversely, if things appear not to be done by the book at all, then something of a shadow of formality is usually recognized by members, as guidelines may be retrieved from the drawer or somebody may call the boss. In mastering upkeying and downkeying as a routine accomplishment of formally organized cooperation, organization members are able to avoid much of the disruptiveness that would otherwise result from coordinating cooperation in the light of incoherent sets of mutually incompatible formal and informal expectations. An overt antagonism of formal and informal expectations, of cooperation keyed either up or down, is rare in fields of organized cooperation. Members usually demonstrate great prudence in responding to contradictory demands across instances of formal and informal cooperation without bringing about or provoking the marking of disruptions. A regular differentiation of situations within organized fields of activity with respect to how much formality is demanded is common, corresponding, for example, to an understanding of formality or informality as referring to ‘tight’ or ‘loose’ modes of conduct (Morand 1995: 832–8). As there are keys for articulating formal expectations (signs, symbols and resources referring to posts, domains or authorities), so there are also correlation devices signalling informality like, for example, phonological slurring, use of colloquial expressions, joking or postural relaxation (Morand 1995: 834–40; Goffman 1974: 363). Just like upkeying, downkeying is a matter of conventional forms of signalling. By, for example, loosening their

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ties or rolling up their sleeves, members signal willingness to start involvements which transcend formal demands and, conversely, by referring to their duty, office or career, they may upkey cooperation towards a more formal level in order to withdraw from engagements which have turned out to be irresponsibly deep. By virtue of the availability of distinct correlation devices for downkeying and upkeying cooperation, participants may switch between frame laminations without the need to deconstruct or delegitimize the layer respectively left behind. Structural tensions between formal and informal status, formal or informal authorities, domain and so on, though, often do exist, since formal expectations are just what has been deliberately generalized in upkeying cooperation and are thus usually not accurate reflections of any member’s status, competence or authority. Also, there may be a lack of tact exercised by particular members in switching between layers, and still others may deliberately try to exploit opportunities offered by the incoherent ordering of activities across layers (Clark 1996: 355–8). Organization members are generally well aware of the potential tensions between formal and informal layers of cooperation; usually they prefer to spare one another the revelation of respective mismatches, whether for the sake of avoiding trouble, for more partisan reasons or for the simple fact that coordination would otherwise fail miserably. If members fail to avoid the pitfalls, disruptions may be marked and other participants may feel pushed to respond. The will of organization members to retaliate against whistle blowers (Parmerlee et al. 1982: 19–20) is a clear indication that tolerance for the deliberate generation of trouble does not appear to be greater in fields of organized cooperation than anywhere else. Investigating how participants respond to disruptions and engage in punctuated cooperation again simply has to seek out those peculiar situations in which disruptions are hard to be denied, marginalized or simply ignored, and in which punctuated cooperation is evident. 4.2

Upkeying and downkeying organizational stress

There are two major concepts through which the coexistence of inconsistent structures, processes and activities within fields of organized cooperation tends to be addressed: organizational strain and organizational stress. Haas and Drabek (1973: 239) define organizational strain as ‘inconsistencies or discrepancies among structural elements of an organization’ and organizational stress as ‘the organizational state or condition indicated by the degree of discrepancy between organizational demands

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and organizational capacity’ (251). Using these concepts with respect to organized cooperation is largely analogous to how they are being employed in descriptions of individual conduct and experience. Very generally, the stress concept is used to describe the experience and enactment of inconsistencies in a specific situation (‘state or condition’) while the strain concept attempts to provide a more structural expression of inconsistencies. Strain, thus, is sometimes referred to as one specific result of exposure to stress (Hall and Mansfield 1971: 533) and, with respect to participants, strain tends to be seen as an expression of psychological deterioration (Hobfoll 1985: 266) or of a chronic lack of integrity in an individuals’ dealing with his or her immediate environment (Schabracq and Cooper 1998: 634). With respect to fields of organized cooperation, strain may be taken to refer to inconsistencies in field-specific distributions that negatively affect participants’ abilities to sustain coordination equilibria, likely introducing some degree of punctuated cooperation into the run of organized activities. At the same time, the concept of strain does not indicate how participants will respond to inconsistencies. The concept of organizational stress, on the other hand, is usually employed to characterize a specific level of involvement at which possibly disruptive inconsistencies are enacted in organized cooperation and are, indeed, often handled with some success: The concept of ‘stress’ is a wonderful overarching rubric for the domain concerned with how individuals and organizations adjust to their environments; achieve high levels of performance and health; and become distressed in various physiological, medical, behavioral, or psychological ways. (Quick et al. 1997b: 2–3)

Using the concept of stress in the context of the present investigation is appealing because it emphasizes the emotional and affective aspects of participants’ involvements in organized cooperation.7 As the preceding chapters have already discussed, affect is intrinsic to any instance of marking and framing disruptions. More particularly, though, in the incidence of stress, the significance of affect in responding to actual occasions transcends the marking and keying of actual occasions as disruptive. In situations of stress, participants cope with expectations that exhaust or gradually overextend their capacities of response, and they often do so without actually marking any disruption. In times of organizational stress, participants of organized cooperation, to some extent and 7

There is no space here to discuss either the various concepts of stress employed in the literature or their respective merits across the different disciplines and discourses involved; cf. Abbott (2001a: 34–59) for a broader discussion.

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in some number (which may well be one), intuitively sense and feel the likelihood of disruptions, even if they do not mark, specify or fully recognize the disruptive character of ongoing events. As with an ‘unforgettable but unreal’ experience of disruptiveness which may inform participants’ further strategies of coping with actual occasion without becoming manifest collectively, there is an element in the experience of stress that is not easily made explicit but which may be less than circumstantial to the adjustment of participants’ strategies and to the further coordination of responses. As Torrance (1960: 101) observes, ‘the distinctive element in stress is to be found in the lack of structure or loss of anchor in reality experienced by the individual or group as a result of the condition labeled “stressful”’. It is this ‘loss of anchor’ which may induce adjustments across participants’ strategies even if disruptiveness remains ambiguous, since disruptions are perceived as merely probable and, accordingly, as somewhat less than real. In this peculiar manner, organizational stress may gradually unbalance coordination equilibria, possibly leading to punctuated cooperation even in situations in which no disruption is being marked. Stressful situations are situations in which disruptions may or may not be marked but in which disruptiveness is sensed by some or all participants. Fields of organized cooperation, with their always gradually inconsistent distributions of expectations, appear to be particularly likely to induce these stressful situations. The literature on organizational and occupational stress, bulky and disparate as it is, may be interpreted as specifying, and to some degree unpacking, older humanistic diagnoses of alienation in terms of members’ situated engagements (Hall and Mansfield 1971: 545). Lists of ‘organizational stressors’ usually include role ambiguity and role conflict (Ashforth and Saks 1996), membership fluctuation (Shaw and Barrett-Power 1997) and organizational socialization in general (Nelson 1987). Talking about stress has become part of everyday discourse, with the perception of stress referring to a wide variety of experiences (e.g. Ng et al. 2009). Negative affect generally tends to be emphasized while, within a longitudinal perspective, the intermediate experience of stress may, conversely, also to some extent be celebrated as mobilizing previously latent capabilities of response in coping with a temporary engrossment (e.g. Quick and Quick 1984). Both aspects – negative affect as experienced by participants who are ‘stressing out’ and a (possible) accommodation of cooperation through this very process – are covered by the more formal definition of stress provided by Rudolph and Repenning (2002: 12), who characterize stress as a mismatch between a desired resolution rate of contingencies confronted by participants and a normal, that is, habitualized, resolution rate.

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Organizational stress and emergent order During the 1960s students of disaster and collective behaviour began turning their attention towards organized social settings. Diagnoses of spontaneous collective action like the ones referred to briefly in the preceding chapters in terms of milling processes and keynoting (Turner and Killian 1972) were extended to collectives with some degree of formal organization. This extension gave rise to a new wave of disaster research. The idea that disastrous disruptions bring about emergent groups was already well established in the disaster research community; it can be found, for example, in the paper by Tiryakian (1959: 293–4) about the possible aftermath of a nuclear attack on the USA. Since early on, disaster researchers have been emphasizing that the ‘incidence of panic behavior is vanishingly rare in actual crisis situations’ (Tierney 2003: 36; cf. Drabek 1986: 133–6), that many alleged situations of panic turn out to be media fabrications (Rosengren et al. 1975: 314–18), and that, when panic behaviour actually occurs, it proves to be more orderly and controlled than expected (Drabek 1986: 139; Clarke 2003b: 131). Under the persistent influence of Chicago School sociology (Nigg 1994), the interest in emergent groups gradually turned into a more general interest in emergent structures, which was subsequently extended to organized social settings. Bringing about a convergence of organizational and collective behaviour perspectives turned into an explicit mission (Dynes and Quarantelli 1968),8 and in this context the exploration of organizational stress became a particular asset, since it allowed demonstrating similar dynamics of emergence to be at work both in collective disaster situations and in more confined organizational settings. In a laboratory simulation of a police communication room, Drabek and Haas (1969) explored the extent to which changes in organized cooperation can be induced through the experimental manipulation of stress-typical mismatches. To this end, and in keeping with the authors’ concept of ‘realistic simulation’ (Drabek and Haas 1967), the experimental communication room replicating the natural habitat of the experimental subjects, a group of police officers, was flooded with an increasing load of incoming emergency calls. Drabek and Haas observe that the interaction patterns of participants showed distinct changes with an increasing load of calls: the time taken to respond to individual calls was reduced; callers were more and more being encouraged to help 8

A couple of instant classics in organizational theory may be seen as simultaneously paving the way, such as, for example, the study by Thompson and Hawkes (1962) on ‘synthetic organization’ (cf. Thompson 1967: 52–4).

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themselves as ‘officers “expanded” their organization by calling upon external resources available in the community’ (Drabek and Haas 1969: 233). In a follow-up work, these findings were generalized towards a set of distinct hypotheses about organizational stress and organizational change (Haas and Drabek 1973: 254–9). The general observation that an increasing weight of actual occasions may induce a change of strategies has subsequently found further empirical support (Griffin and Griffin 1980: 172, 174). Brouillette and Quarantelli (1971) offer a general model of organizational stress and structural change, proposing a typical sequence of adjustments. Drawing on field data about disaster response within a metropolitan engineering department as empirical intelligence, the generation of organizational structures which are genuinely novel is emphasized (Brouillette and Quarantelli 1971: 39–43). In this study, the accommodation of tasks and structures escalates from old tasks and structures to new tasks within old structures and then to new tasks and new structures as prior strategies are successively overtaxed, with a comprehensive extension of both tasks and structures as a last resort (43). ‘Bureaucratic adjustments’ are seen as direct consequences of the incidence of organizational stress, with clear correlations between intensities of stress and scopes of adjustments from type 1 (‘ongoing structure and regular tasks’) to type 4 (‘new structures and tasks’). More than forty years after these pioneering studies, the focus among disaster researchers appears to have shifted, just gradually, from adjustments within groups and organizations to adjustments within, between and across organizations, groups and participants (see below, section 4.7), while the idea of emergent processes and structures as spontaneous responses to stress and disaster has become almost a truism of disaster research: ‘It should be remembered that disasters, by their very nature, lead to emergence’ (Drabek and McEntire 2002: 214).9 As we have seen in the previous chapter, the observation of instantaneous cooperation in the wake of accidents is commonplace; it is Chester Barnard’s example for illustrating that organization may spontaneously emerge among participants which have never met (Barnard 1968 [1938]: 102). The rich tradition of disaster research suggests, beyond the omnipresence of emergent structures and processes, a functional adequacy of emergent order with respect to sustaining organization in times of stress. The claim is that ‘the ad hoc, organic, emergent, emergent organization . . . may actually be the optimal organizational form for the response to a complex event in a turbulent and hostile environment’ 9

In a related paper, Drabek and McEntire (2003) provide a comprehensive review of the literature with respect to this theme.

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(Harrald et al. 1992: 211). Such fitness of response must not be confused with the assumption that respective adjustments of participants’ strategies will work as antidotes to organizational stress. These adjustments may not necessarily bring about ‘prediction, understanding, and control’ (Sutton and Kahn 1987); one participant’s adjustment may be another participant’s stressor, and there is a wide variety of mediating factors (Schmidt 2007). In any case, the evidence that organizational stress brings about punctuated cooperation is ample. Disagreements prevail with respect to the characterization of adjustments across participants’ strategies. Threat-rigidity effects Staw, Sandelands and Dutton (1981) integrate an alternative set of observations by analysing patterns of stress response in terms of threat-rigidity effects. They show that a regression of responses to well-established patterns under conditions of threat is well documented in psychological research on stress and anxiety. Such regression is often associated with successful efforts to cope with stress, with the qualification that the trained response in order for coping to be effective needs to match the actual challenges of coordination (Staw et al. 1981: 507). Temporary mismatches of actual occasions and participants’ strategies are, again, the issue. The adjustments observed are, however, not understood as the invention or learning of new strategies but as restrictions within members’ responses to narrower sets of activities which have been particularly well learned and habitualized. The underlying loss of response variety can be usefully illustrated by the well-documented phenomenon of groupthink (Janis 1982: 174–97): under threat, pressures on group members towards uniformity of expression tend to increase and the effects of groupthink become more pronounced (Staw et al. 1981: 507–11). With respect to organizations, Staw and colleagues (1981: 515) describe a distinct effect towards reduced complexity of communication, towards a centralization of authority and an increased prominence of formalized expectations at the expense of other considerations. Restrictions of information processing and constrictions of control are portrayed as general effects across participants, groups and organizations (Staw et al. 1981: 516–17; cf. Hermann 1963: 68–71). The authors’ definition of threat is very general and roughly refers to actual occasions, either actual or imminent, which are valued negatively (Staw et al. 1981: 502–3).10 This is congenial to the 10

Staw and colleagues claim the work by Lazarus (1966) as the primary reference for this definition.

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understanding of disruptiveness followed here, while extending it towards situations of stress in which disruptions are not actual but impending events, and thus are possibly left unmarked. Instances of stress and threat therefore constitute somewhat equivalent challenges for organization members. The finding of threat-rigidity effects, however, is evidently inconsistent with the finding of emergent structures by authors such as Drabek, Haas, Brouillette and Quarantelli, since threat-rigidity effects appear to shift and narrow down rather than remake members’ sets of responses. Weick’s (1990) study of the Tenerife air disaster provides an illustration of the depletion of response variety involved in threat-rigidity dynamics. In this case of a runway collision of two passenger aircrafts, the co-pilot and the flight engineer of the KLM jet that crashed into another 747 at take-off from Tenerife failed to stop the pilot from opening the throttle despite their apparent understanding that the plane which they would hit in seconds was possibly still on the runway occluded by fog. There was cockpit communication indicating the unusual character of the situation, with both co-pilot and flight engineer inquiring whether take-off clearance had actually been given by airport traffic control. Just before take-off, however, the framing of cockpit communication was keyed towards authority, the pilot’s status overriding other concerns, and the framing of the situation was not further contested or resolved (Weick 1990: 574). The disruption which the co-pilot and the flight engineer may have been meaning to mark – the fact that there was no clearance for take-off – effectively remained unmarked; the intuition that the co-pilot and flight engineer actually did mean to mark a disruption by asking whether the plane was in fact clear to start is a matter of retrospective interpretation. Cockpit communication yielded to the authority of the pilot and thus to a thoroughly habitualized keying, while unprecedented moves may have been required in order to stop the plane and prevent the collision. The level of involvement endogenous to this instance of punctuated cooperation displaced the usual equilibrium of cockpit coordination in getting ready to start. A decision which should have followed a protocol of cross-checks according to participants’ domains was arrived at by attending to formal authority. Rekeying punctuated cooperation We are thus faced with two sets of findings about how participants’ feeling of imminent disruptiveness induces punctuated cooperation in distinct forms: one predicting emergent structures and spontaneously accommodated strategies, the other predicting a depletion of response sets (cf. Christianson et al. 2009: 857–8). Similar restrictions on strategies in

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situated threat-rigidity dynamics like the Tenerife case may be brought about by participants keying responses towards domains and posts. Studies of crisis decision-making, for example, point towards a frequent formalization in terms of narrowing down domains which are being attended to (Smart and Vertinsky 1977: 642–7; Wallace et al. 1993). Processes of downsizing demonstrate how participants’ responses may come to focus narrowly on posts, which may in turn amplify threat perceptions within the field (Shaw and Barrett-Power 1997: 115–17). One way of reconciling such observations with the alternative prediction of emergent order may be to more closely investigate the actual coordination problems in empirical cases. One may, for example, assume that once available resources prove insufficient in responding to disruptiveness, threat-rigidity symptoms may be transcended towards milling processes and trying out novel responses. This, apparently, was the early intuition of Kilpatrick (1957: 21): ‘Under stress there is a tendency to isolate oneself from immediate on-going events, and hold on to a familiar stable perceptual organization . . . In the absence of reliable guides from past experience for perceiving or acting, suggestibility is high.’ However, the line between novel strategies and strategies which are well learned and habitualized cannot be drawn in an entirely categorical manner. Both adjustments are associated with the rekeying of activity in punctuated cooperation and, therefore, with participants’ practical sense of correlation. The Tenerife case points to a fateful attentional modification that in terms of participants’ strategies and practical sense was both novel and habitualized. For the pilot, giving himself clearance for take-off was a familiar routine since it was standard procedure in simulated flights when he was Head of the Flight Training Department at KLM (Weick 1990: 576). For the co-pilot and the flight engineer, giving clearance to oneself was a strategy by the pilot to which they yielded within a situation in which it was (allegedly) untested. Collectively, activity shifted to somebody’s (not everybody’s) habitualized strategy as, at the same time, the application of this strategy was extended to a new type of situation. Centralization of take-off clearance in the cockpit, so to speak, was an innovation and, at the same time, a constriction of control (Staw et al. 1981: 514). Rather than by determining the relative novelty or learnedness of participants’ strategies, which is slightly spurious since novel strategies will always to some extent derive from practical sense, threat-rigidity effects may be differentiated from cases of emergent order by whether an upkeying or downkeying of punctuated cooperation is being brought about. The Tenerife case is a good illustration of upkeying as ‘a shift from a given distance from literal activity to a greater distance’ (Goffman

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1974: 365) is taking place. Downkeying is clearly evident, on the other hand, in instances of emergent order in which layers of formalizations are removed. Both upkeying and downkeying as well as which kind of rekeying is brought to bear on punctuated cooperation in a given situation is subject to the exercise of practical sense with respect to the coordination problems faced by participants. If participants are faced with actual occasions which are stressful not by virtue of some novel quality but by the mere quantity in which they are being confronted (even if they are, qualitatively, made up of ‘normal’ assignments), then there may be little time to reframe actual occasions and ‘unquestioned adherence to pre-existing routines may be the best way to prevent the overaccumulation of pending interruptions’ (Rudolph and Repenning 2002: 26). Participants’ abilities to upkey cooperation effectively may allow them to transcend their feelings of impending disruptiveness and to concentrate on getting activities off their schedules. This probably works well enough during involvements in which no apparent damage is being done by speeding things up for a while, or in which respective damage does not need to be addressed. Downkeying, on the other hand, may be called for in situations in which a substantial reframing of activities is essential. The effectiveness with which participants rekey punctuated cooperation in one way or another is also associated with distinct types of organizational failure, which will be discussed in some detail below (4.4). The very effectiveness of rekeying, especially if no disruption is being marked in shifting coordination equilibria, may, however, lead to a perpetuation of organizational stress (cf. Menzies 1960). Disruptiveness which is not marked will continue to be felt and is likely to prevail as a stressor. In learning to respond to stress on a regular basis, organization members may acquire routines of selectively ignoring actual occasions by upkeying and downkeying activities respectively. The vulnerability through inattention which upkeying may foster is sadly evident in the Tenerife case. Inattention through downkeying may be as detrimental as it is deadly, as Snook’s (2000: 192–7) discussion of ‘practical drift’ as a key factor in explaining the shooting down of US Black Hawks by friendly fire or Baccus’ (1986: 48–51) analysis of multipiece truck wheel accidents indicates. Downkeying, by allowing emergent processes and structures to unfold, requires participants to gradually disattend formalizations of authority, domain or posts. This may lead to adjustments which are decoupled from formal coordination, potentially frustrating its continuation at some point. In both cases, the very effectiveness of rekeying punctuated cooperation in times of organizational stress may turn out to be an adjustment that is ultimately detrimental. As noticed earlier, the effectiveness of rekeying is typical for organized cooperation; the

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vulnerability it introduces is particularly visible in cases in which routine rekeyings produce aggregate effects of inattention. An instance of this is the Challenger disaster, which was precipitated by a ‘normalization of deviance’ at NASA, with members disattending recurring signs of what in the Challenger explosion turned out to be a fatal design flaw (Vaughan 1996: 148–52, 232–7; cf. Starbuck and Milliken 1988). Normalization was associated with an increasingly routine ‘accept risk and fly’ strategy to which decision-making yielded on the eve of the launch, marking a final fateful inattention to warning signs (Vaughan 1996: 385–6). Organizational stress, whether induced by threat or otherwise, and members’ mastery of rekeying organized cooperation in response, put a distinctly organizational twist on the incidence of disruptiveness. There is a distinct possibility, if not an overall likelihood, that many disruptions which are intuitively registered by participants will fail to be collectively marked, framed and responded to, even if a degree of punctuated cooperation, some breakdown of coordination, is apparent. These tendencies may be amplified by the fact that participants learn to routinely rekey punctuated cooperation by upkeying or downkeying activities selectively. Through upkeying and downkeying, the disruptiveness of punctuated cooperation as it shifts equilibrium may be minimized, fostering routine forms of negligence which are switched to once things get rough or just ‘busy’. 4.3

‘Nothing succeeds like succession’

The skill with which participants accomplish upkeying and downkeying of punctuated cooperation demonstrates the extent to which organization members are attuned to fields of organized cooperation and to using a repertoire of formal and informal signs, symbols and resources to deal with contingencies (cf. Brown 1978: 372). Despite the fact that speaking of threat suggests the existence of an external source of disruptiveness, the endogeneity of threat is apparent once it is treated as a particular instance of organizational stress: disruptiveness is felt to be imminent by participants drawing on their practical sense of organized cooperation. The endogenous character of disruptiveness is even more immediately salient in cases in which disruptions can be traced to exigencies thrown at members deliberately by organizational decision-making. Among such cases, some very disastrous disruptions of organized cooperation indeed can be found. Major organizational transitions, reforms and recalibrations are often recognized as requiring forms of ‘workplace recovery’, which ought to be scheduled ideally before changes even begin to be implemented

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(e.g. Marks 2006). Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that formal expectations are usually changed only very gradually, with members generally restricting themselves to respecifying expectations that in some form or another already existed. The scope beyond which changes in formal expectations will provide a source of disruptiveness that is considered threatening or stressful among members is difficult to ascertain, and it may vary widely across organizations, members and membership sections. In addressing organization members, any change in formal expectations presses specific adjustments upon them, and thus any change may be a source of disruptiveness, may provoke the marking of disruptions, subsequent responses, and various kinds of punctuated cooperation. Conversely, any change initially considered as grave and momentous may turn out to trigger only mild and incremental adjustments, little hassle among members that have learned to patiently improvise through one organizational reform after another by rekeying activities towards pragmatic forms of ignorance. Certain types of situations, though, stand out by virtue of the disruptiveness with which they are associated empirically. Episodes of membership fluctuation are cases in point. Socializing newcomers The case of newcomers’ surprise or shock upon entering an organization may be considered as paradigmatic for investigating participants’ adjustments to the demands of the field. That newcomers are not and probably cannot be unproblematically provided with all the information they would need in order to adjust immediately upon entering an organization is an irremediable fact given by the incomplete formalization of expectations distributed among members. Much membership knowledge is tacit and never becomes subject to formalization (Trowler and Knight 1999: 188–90). Marking disruptions in order to make senior members respond to them, or provoking senior members to mark disruptions by themselves, may then in fact be one particular tactic of newcomers seeking to ‘learn the ropes’, especially those invisible to outsiders. As a deliberate use of breaching in order to make tacit knowledge explicit, Miller and Jablin (1991: 107) call this strategy Garfinkeling. Forming viable relationships with other members is, however, fundamental to successful organizational socialization (Morrison 2002) and, in this respect, as we may infer from the earlier discussion of breaching experiments, obtrusive Garfinkeling may not altogether be too helpful. More generally, and this is a point much writing about organizational socialization takes for granted (e.g. Reichers 1987: 280–1; Saks and Ashworth 1997), organizational socialization which is considered successful usually takes place in

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situations in which newcomers are marginalized in order to make them adjust to senior members’ strategies – rather than the other way around. New participants take special positions as junior members to be gradually manoeuvred into adjustments by the formal authority of supervisors and by dominant coalitions of senior members. Speaking of the importance of social support in organizational socialization (e.g. Nelson and Quick 1991) may in this sense be a euphemism for the exercise of social pressure and control in training newcomers to adequately respond to the requirements of organized cooperation (Settoon and Adkins 1997: 514–15), which, more accurately speaking, are the requirements of dominant coalitions preserving coordination equilibrium to their advantage. Even in statements such as ‘newcomers are proactive during socialization rather than passive recipients of practices initiated by organizations’ (Saks and Ashworth 1997: 255), proactive behaviour is taken to exclusively mean proactive adjustment (246–8). In cases in which organizational socialization is successful in terms of such asymmetric newcomer adjustment to a given level of organized cooperation, the experience of disruptiveness is likely to become a private psychological affair, and the marking of disruptions – if newcomers actually dare to be so bold – can be routinely rejected by members of dominant coalitions. Some degree of organizational stress is likely, but senior members will usually be in positions to enforce previous levels of involvement. This, however, is not always the case. As argued above, organizational socialization is generally a two-way process of adding new members to the distributions of the field, a process accommodating strategies gradually or more dramatically across junior and senior members.11 A scenario of socialization processes in which newcomers are not unilaterally pressed into existing distributions by a dominant coalition of senior members but, rather, heavily unbalance coordination equilibria to the disadvantage of senior members can, in fact, very easily be characterized: these cases occur when newcomers are granted posts providing them with domains and formal authorities on the basis of which they can disenfranchise existing levels of coordination. Most particularly, administrative succession provides a likely scenario in which existing distributions within the 11

Establishing who is yielding and who is asserting expectations in any given newcomer situation may not be as easy as it appears, particularly since some compatibility of formal expectations with those cultivated among non-members has to be assumed. This is noted by Goffman (1961b: 172) when he introduces his understanding of primary adjustment to organizational demands: ‘In short, he finds that he is officially asked to be no more and no less than he is prepared to be, and is obliged to dwell in a world that is in fact congenial to him. I shall speak in these circumstances of the individual having a primary adjustment to the organization and overlook the fact that it would be just as reasonable to speak of the organization having a primary adjustment to him’ (italics original).

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field are prone to suffer shake-ups. ‘Nothing succeeds like succession’ (Giambatista et al. 2005) – in punctuating organized cooperation. Enter: the successor One may suppose that the potential for organization members to become irritated by the arrival of newcomers increases with each measure of authority tied to a newcomer’s post. This potential may be further amplified by the fact that formal domains of posts endowed with a greater degree of authority are often defined in a quite general and diffuse manner, rendering executive-level jobs ‘idiosyncratic, nonroutine, and unstructured’ (Kesner and Seborah 1994: 329). With rising formal authority, newcomers’ strategies are therefore likely to become both increasingly significant and increasingly unpredictable. Whilst shaking up a given level of organized cooperation is often the explicit motivation for reassigning posts at the top of a hierarchy – and some researchers appear to affirm this intuition by associating CEO succession with revolutionary changes in the wake of punctuated equilibrium (Romanelli and Tushman 1994: 1145, 1158) – the relative unpredictability of the mutual socialization of organization members that is therefore reinitiated is usually not given much consideration. In any case, a successor’s assignment often starts by him or her being given some definite mission upon entering the field, putting a successor deliberately in opposition to prior distributions and settlements. The classical case of such a scenario is reported by Alvin Gouldner (1954a, 1954b). In this particular case, the new plant manager of a gypsum mine was appointed with the mission of improving the performance of the mine after the death of a predecessor who was considered by the company’s main office as having been too lenient (Gouldner 1954a: 71–3): Even before setting foot in the plant . . . Peele had an intimation that there would be things which needed ‘correction.’ He began to define the plant as one needing some ‘changes,’ changes oriented to the efficiency-maximizing values of top management, and he tentatively began shaping policies to bring about the requisite changes. (Gouldner 1954a: 73)

Peele entered the field with the intention to crack down on the ‘indulgency pattern’, the informal structure in which organized cooperation had previously been embedded and which, during the days of ‘Old Doug’, assured a stable but highly informal level of cooperation among management and workers (Gouldner 1954a: 45–56). This is the structure deliberately attacked and subsequently disenfranchised by Peele, who begins to gradually establish a regime placing greater emphasis on formalization

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and control: ‘Formal rules that had been ignored were being revived, while new ones were established to supplement and implement the old. Emphasis upon hierarchy and status were rupturing the older informal ties . . . A cold, impersonal “atmosphere” was slowly settling on the plant’ (Gouldner 1954a: 69). Rather than a steady upkeying of cooperation across the field, Peele’s formal attempts to realize his mission brought about an increasing degree of tension and conflict (Gouldner 1954a: 100–1) and, in the end, they resulted in a ‘wildcat strike’ by the workers (Gouldner 1954b). Despite being backed up unambiguously by his superiors and despite being equipped with comprehensive formal authority over the plant, Peele ran up against a collective of members that was not prepared to simply surrender to the demands of his mission. The general level of cooperation within the plant quickly eroded and, in Gouldner’s terminology, the industrial bureaucracy was transformed from a ‘representative type’, in which both workers and management were actively involved in collective rule-making and regulating coordination, to a ‘punishmentcentered type’ in which participants drifted apart into separate coalitions (Gouldner 1954a: 24). As Hallett and Ventresca (2006: 219) summarize in their rereading of Gouldner’s study, Peele entered the mine as an outsider unable to tap existing informal network ties, but with a mandate to change productivity. As a result, the informal authority created by the indulgency pattern was closed to Peele, and the formal authority provided by bureaucracy was the option that remained.

Grusky (1960: 109), taking up Gouldner’s lead, observes that, in succession situations, ‘The isolation and neutrality of the outside man encourage a tendency toward formalization.’ Formal keys provide the general type of resources within the field drawn on by ‘the successor’s defenses’ (Gouldner 1954a: 86–99), while access to informally distributed keys within the field is denied by an opposing coalition of veteran members. Upon completing his studies, Gouldner’s impression was that the conflict between workers and management in the wake of managerial succession was about to lock the organization into a continuous reiteration of conflict (Gouldner 1954b: 178–9). Grusky accordingly assumes a vicious circle of succession and organizational decline to be the general rule for succession situations (Grusky 1963: 30): While successors are unable dissolve strategies within the field which are blocking fulfilment of their mission by consistently upkeying cooperation to what they would see fit to formally ratify, such strategies are likely to cause potentially endless trouble for all organization members. At the same

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time, upkeying towards formal forms of cooperation is indeed problemsolving from a successor’s point of view (Gouldner 1954a: 98–9). At the gypsum mine, it is also a means of rallying members to the management coalition. Upkeying was instrumental for forming a coalition loyal to the successor, ultimately giving the successor access to informal rather than just formal keys (Gouldner 1954a: 92–3). However, the use of formal authority also generalized the industrial conflict by associating members in two opposing coalitions, which came to be in conflict not merely on a formal level but also on a personal level. The general argument about the disruptiveness of the succession situation is sometimes referred to as the ‘Gouldner–Grusky line of thinking that when disruption is maximized . . . , performance decline will occur, and when disruptiveness is minimal . . . , there is no sign of a decline’ (Brown 1982: 3). Disruptiveness, though, in fact may also bring about or refer to changes which are desired by stakeholders (e.g. Tushman and Romanelli 1992). Despite the richness of research dedicated to assessing the effect of managerial succession on the performance of organizations or, for that matter, their mortality (Haveman 1993), with respect to the investigation of punctuated cooperation, the Gouldner study may be significant not so much for its implications regarding the relationship between disruptiveness and organizational performance but for its observations with respect to how the disruptiveness of the succession was being marked and subsequently framed among members. Whilst succession has generally been a much studied phenomenon, Gouldner’s original focus on post-succession conduct among organization members did not draw much interest from students of organizational behaviour (Kesner and Seborah 1994: 357; Giambatista et al. 2005: 973–80).The study by Robert Gephart (1978) is one of the few exceptions in which a microsociological perspective is brought to bear on field-specific dynamics of succession. Gephart’s study focuses on pre-succession dynamics and on the process of bringing succession about rather than on its impact.12 Nevertheless, it provides an instructive contrast to the gypsum mine case. Elementary contingencies To begin with, formalization does not sterilize punctuated cooperation in the field towards some framing of disruptiveness which would by definition be able to commit organization members to a particular production 12

Gephart (1978) analyses a case of achieving administrative succession through the degradation of the participant formerly in charge. It was actually Gephart himself who was the victim of this degradation.

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of context. Instead, in the succession situation described by Gouldner, formalization appears to increase the contingency of context: it is not despite but because of the formal character of Peele’s authority that this authority is regarded as disruptive by workers; accordingly, workers do not cooperate in upkeying cooperation in responding to Peele’s authority. Since formal authority derives from deliberate decision-making, its contingency is apparent. Any formalization of activities, irrespective of how substantially appropriate or ‘refined’ it may actually be, is in the same sense a manufactured correlation device that can easily be recognized as such. Further formalization can only reinforce the perceived contingency of these devices by requiring a rearticulation of decisions about what expectations should be entertained, emphasizing the artificial character of the demand to those addressed by it, particularly if other types of support are not forthcoming. The post of the predecessor is formally assigned to Peele but the predecessor’s position within the field, defined by the formal and informal resources of ‘Old Doug’, cannot be formally transferred to him. The ‘crucial distinction between organizational posts, with their formally decreed powers, and the specific volume and form of capital actually held by the occupants of different positions in the organizationas-field’ (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 23) therefore accounts for the artificial character of Peele’s authority – which to workers appears hollow and in need of constant formal support – and his domain, which lacks the air of ‘good sense’, as senior members would feel it (Gouldner 1954a: 100–1). Such differences between formal and actual distributions of keys among organizational members inevitably derive from the simple fact that members taking over a post may bring a wide variety of strategies to bear on organized cooperation (cf. Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 23). Knowing whether an organization member, after taking up his or her post, will actually learn to mobilize all the endogenous resources required to fulfil the position is like guessing whether or not he or she will actually be smart enough to muster the competence exacted by attending the domain, or congenial enough to accumulate social capital on a day-to-day basis. Gephart’s study of pre-succession dynamics, in contrast, shows how redistributions of keys among participants congenial to succession may be brought about before a succession takes place. Such a process of preadjustments may be typical for fields of organized cooperation with low levels of formalization in which decisions about posts do not fall within the domains of finite subsets of organization members (in Gephart’s case, the organization is a student council). The pre-adjustment to succession described by Gephart is achieved by marginalizing and degrading

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the member in charge who would subsequently be replaced. Gephart emphasizes that formalizations are gradually manufactured in the run up to the succession, to then be gradually enforced, making the conduct of the member to be replaced increasingly appear as discrepant (Gephart 1978: 577–8). Gephart’s organization initially lacks formalization through which succession could just unproblematically be decided and immediately enforced, but members gradually gather readiness to advocate and accept a succession at the point at which the decision can finally be brought about. In this process of ‘frame alignment’ (Snow et al. 1989), succession is informally and formally normalized before it takes place, accommodating members’ strategies in advance. Whilst in Gouldner’s case formalization increases the contingency of framing disruptions, in Gephart’s case the lack of formalization requires participants to achieve a framing of disruptiveness (which establishes that the predecessor – Gephart – is a failure) before the disruption is formally framed as a succession. In this case some of the elementary contingencies of producing context for the succession situation have successfully been dealt with beforehand, resulting in a completed transfer of power rather than a vicious circle of conflict. Keys and coalitions What in single situations looks like a trial and error process among participants, rekeying punctuated cooperation takes on the character of a battle over the validity of expectations and over the value of keys in Gouldner’s succession case. Punctuated cooperation takes place as a kind of ‘framing contest’ (Kaplan 2008) among coalitions of organization members. A conflict develops at the gypsum mine in which two alternative ways of framing the disruption are put in place and sustained among competing subsets of participants: in the framing supported by managers, Peele is a man with a legitimate mission to set things straight in a plant in which ‘things have been slipping’ (Gouldner 1954a: 71); in the production of context among workers, Peele is a man poisoning a climate of cooperation and mutual respect (Gouldner 1954a: 79–83). Management draws on formal expectations and keys in order to reinforce its framing (Gouldner 1954a: 93–6); workers draw on informal resources, on social capital generated in years of cooperation, on cultural capital with respect to how accounts, rules, regulations and technologies are put to work and how they are to be bent, and on rights informally granted among themselves (e.g. on rights to smoke when supervisors are absent; Gouldner 1954a: 182–7), reproducing solidarity and collective identity adverse to formal intrusion, supervision and control (Morrill et al. 2003: 392).

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Among workers, the largely informal production of context for the succession situation is valid and management’s framing is rejected. Whilst management’s framing cannot redefine workers’ framing, workers’ framing remains informal, unable to affect the formal frame. For members of one coalition, informal keying is invalid; for members of the other subset, formal keying is illegitimate. Within the coalitions different sets of expectations and keys are cultivated, much like different currencies for keying cooperation and producing context (cf. Rawls 2008: 715). The struggle among the coalitions over the framing of succession can be interpreted as a struggle over the respective value of expectations and keys in framing disruptions, and thus over the value of social resources available to members (cf. Feldman 2004: 306–7). One may consider the ultimate prize of this struggle to be the structure of the field in terms of members’ positions with respect to one another, with intermediate results being visible to participants in the respective prominence and power of each coalition’s production of context. The structure of the field, its distribution of participants and expectations ‘as the more or less durable outcome of struggles over the conservation or devalorization of what counts (at a given moment) as the legitimate form(s) of capital obtaining therein’ (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 24), is reflected in the prominence and legitimacy of distinct ways of framing and keying. Punctuated cooperation thus takes on the character of a dispute over the value of expectations, signs, symbols and resources, and thus, ultimately, over the social order prevailing among members. Fields of organized cooperation may always be described in this way as sites of struggle among members commanding various types of correlation devices (cf. Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 25–8; Fligstein and McAdam 2012: 64–7). Bourdieu (1984: 309–10), for example, writes about classification struggles that are waged within organizations in which symbolic restructurings and changes in positions tightly correlate. ‘Symbolic power’ may be used as a shorthand expression of participants’ abilities to mobilize keys distributed across the field to their advantage (Hallett 2003). The ability to establish what constitutes a failure may be a prime indicator of such symbolic power (Hughes 1951: 322–5). The prevalence of a specific framing in marking disruption among members can be interpreted as a sign of the power of coalitions being able to maintain, and, if facing further disruptiveness, to enforce a specific level of cooperation. Perhaps the fact that an outsider is selected as a successor is in many cases an early empirical indicator of the relative weakness of a still dominant but struggling coalition of members (Cannella and Lubatkin 1993).

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The struggle for social capital As associating in coalitions gains relevance for the rekeying of punctuated cooperation in succession situations, so the relative prominence of relational keying in responding to disruptiveness which was observed in the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation earlier is reflected in the struggle for social capital among members and respective forms of attention. In Gouldner’s succession situation, ‘taking sides’ draws participants’ attention, as it does in Gephart’s case of bringing succession about (cf. Burns 1961: 269–70). Participants’ social skill in getting other participants ‘on board’ turns into a prime factor in deciding which production of context becomes dominant under such conditions of organizational conflict and change (cf. Fligstein 2001). The success of a successor may be strongly influenced by his or her prior experience with similar situations (Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1986). A successor’s disposition and practical sense in recognizing the dynamics associated with succession is associated with prior training, habitus, mastery and social skill, and so are the dispositions and strategies of other members. Senior members’ perceptions of newcomers’ conduct tend to be informed by prior experiences of membership fluctuation; newcomers’ prior experiences with entering organizations will tend to make them aware of the respective sensitivities. These sensitivities appear to be particularly salient with respect to the positions taken or claimed by newcomers: From a prospective employee’s first contact with an organization – indeed from the very fact of submitting an application for this rather than that kind of job and at this rather than that organization – a person is constantly engaged in the act of position-taking. Once officially admitted to the organization, the employee who chooses Monet rather than family photos to decorate the office – or, who, in the name of professionalism, chooses not to decorate at all – is engaged in positiontakings, as is the female employee who chooses to wear ‘fun’ short skirts rather than ‘drab’ pantsuits to work. It should be noted . . . that position-takings at every level are governed by the formal rules dictated by the organization . . . therefore position-takings must be analysed, additionally, for their compliance with or opposition to these rules. But in any case, these position-takings serve to provide other organizational members . . . with the information they use . . . to classify the position-taker. (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 27)

Members of formal organizations appear to spend a great deal of time judging newcomers with respect to how they will relate to other members. Social conflicts which are likely when positions and position-takings are incompatible, when coalitions form and rally for members, may be considered to provide a particular social mechanism for striking, sooner or later, new coordination equilibria; conflict will ultimately clear the field

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of certain expectations incoherent with new levels of coordination, either by clearing the field of particular members or by associating members in segregated coalitions in which distinct strategies can be sustained. In this sense, the disruptiveness of the succession situation may be considered an asset rather than a liability in shaking up a prior distribution of strategies (e.g. Staw 1980; Dalton and Todor 1979). Whilst ‘strategic replacements’ may reproduce post-succession dynamics on a smaller scale (Gouldner 1954b: 156–9), dissatisfied members are likely to leave the organization sooner or later by themselves, and this may clear the field from dispositions which have gradually been rendered incompatible with field-specific distributions (Krackhardt and Porter 1985: 259). If participants do not leave voluntarily but are expelled by management, then normative expectations (about justice, recognition of effort, status and so on) potentially mediate the impact of lay-offs on ‘survivors’ (Brockner et al. 1987), and coming up with legitimate formalizations gives management some leverage to affect such mediations. Replacing members en masse is not only management’s most powerful weapon in working on field-specific distributions, but also possibly the only means by which formally organized activities can be disrupted in a manner maintaining some semblance of a planned process. In this respect, however, the wholesale replacement of top managers rather than middle-ranking staff and lowranking workers is possibly the most effective measure (Starbuck 1983: 100; cf. Hedberg 1981). It is also the least likely to be implemented. 4.4

Framing organizational failure

It is in framing organizational failure, in determining, once accidents, disasters or bankruptcies have taken place, who did or knew what at which point in time and who may or may not have prevented the failure to begin with, that structural questions of organizing tend to become explicit concerns both for organization members and for outside stakeholders. The perhaps most prominent characterization of organizational failure in structural terms has been offered by Charles Perrow (1984) in his account of ‘normal accidents’. Perrow observes that in organizations, minor mishaps escalate into disastrous accidents through the embedding of activities in larger systems of interdependent components (activities, technologies, members, etc.), the coupling of which multiplies the effects of small deviations. In Perrow’s view, if the coupling between elements of organized cooperation is tight, then disastrous failures become both more likely and more severe (Perrow 1984: 89–90). In his Tenerife study, Weick criticizes the structural bias implied in this perspective (Weick 1990: 585–7). Weick’s point is that participants make

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organizations more or less susceptible to failure by loosening or tightening coupling in social situations. Tight coupling thus is more adequately addressed as an interactive process rather than as the structural attribute of a given field: The point . . . is that ‘normal accidents’ may not be confined to obvious sites of technical complexity such as nuclear power plants. Instead, they may occur in any system that is capable of changing from loose to tight and from linear to complex. As we have suggested, any system, no matter how loose and linear it may seem, can become tighter and more complex when it is subjected to overload, misperception, regression, and individualized response. (Weick 1990: 587)

Organizational failure results from how members have enacted expectations and strategies in confronting actual occasions. It is an effect of unique runs of situations, of the extent to which participants have upkeyed or downkeyed cooperation, of whether disruptions have or have not been marked and framed, of how they have been framed and so on. Since longer series of situations rather than isolated runs of activity are concerned, the challenge of framing disruptions that have already taken place and of estimating what or who went wrong cannot, however, be effectively responded to without invoking some idea of patterns across situations, even if Weick’s ‘anti-structural’ remarks are accepted. The forensic challenge of reconstructing such patterns, which are able to trace failure from a present in which its results are evident to a past in which it was imminent and could have been avoided, is shared by organization members, stakeholders and researchers alike, and it is not surprising that ‘bad structure’ identified in patterns of failure always turns out to be some derivative of ‘good structure’ associated with the organization in question (cf. O’Keefe 2005: xviii). In her review of literature on the ‘dark side of organizations’, Diane Vaughan’s overall assessment is that the very aspects of organizing which assure organizational performance also bring about various forms of organizational deviance in the form of mistake, misconduct and disaster (Vaughan 1999: 297–8). That organizations have a ‘dark side’ (Griffin and O’Leary-Kelly 2004) is an apt metaphor for associating failure with certain patterns of organized cooperation, but it still somewhat understates the general problem: actually there is no ‘side’, no system, section or subfield to which the ‘darkness’ could be traced and unilaterally attributed. Researchers are left with the understanding that processes producing crises and those bringing about sustainability and success are not only on the same ‘side’, but may be substantially identical (Starbuck et al. 1978: 114). If failure is framed in terms of what allegedly constituted an organization at its historical moment of failure, and if this understanding is in turn informed

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by what this organization was allegedly made of to begin with, then this cannot be an altogether surprising outcome. The considerations of the preceding sections allow establishing some qualifications, however. In situations of threat and stress, participants may avoid the marking of disruptions by upkeying cooperation: in the Tenerife case, there is no clearance, but there is the pilot’s authority and the attention of participants is rekeyed accordingly. If activities are, on the other hand, downkeyed, then the marking of disruptions may become somewhat more likely, since participants turn to more direct involvements with actual occasions (Goffman 1974: 360–6). This increase in the probability of marking disruptions may, however, be very slight and its assessment is irretrievably to some extent confounded with retrospective information about what participants should have attended to. Whilst there is never a situation in which disruptions could, due to some sociological or metaphysical principle, generally not be marked and framed, selective upkeying and downkeying of cooperation allows participants to disengage from confronting disruptions they feel to be likely, or it may keep them from consciously registering disruptiveness, whether actual or merely probable, altogether. In terms of organizational fitness, the windows of inattention thus opening up may be detrimental, as in the Tenerife case, or they may be functional, as when emergent cooperation disregards a standard operating procedure in order to prevent a disastrous failure. Staw and colleagues discuss the overall class of threat-rigidity effects as amplifying ‘both the survival and extinction potentials of organizations’, depending on the kind of environmental challenges faced by them (Staw et al. 1981: 520). In order to make respective assessments, Rudolph and Repenning (2002: 27–8) suggest that organization members would need to decide whether they face a ‘novelty-induced crisis’ calling for new strategies (and thus for a downkeying of cooperation) or confront a ‘quantity-induced crisis’ during which threat-rigidity behaviour will effectively resolve charges by speeding things up through an upkeying that brackets sources of distraction. The possibility that stress is reinforced by disruptions the status of which remains ambiguous, though, blurs the distinction between quantity-induced and novelty-induced crisis: in quantity-induced crises, sooner or later a ‘tipping point’ may be reached at which participants become unable to cope with previous response strategies and thus, by definition, will face a novelty-induced crisis. Beyond such a point, members may be urged and willing to downkey cooperation but it may be too late to reframe actual occasions in a way that avoids disorganized and possibly detrimental forms of becoming ‘unreservedly engrossed’ (Goffman 1974: 360, 378–9). Organization members may find themselves in situations of punctuated cooperation

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in which little time is left to re-establish coordination before failure turns into disaster (cf. Rudolph and Repenning 2002: 25–6). A particularly tragic historical example of such a situation is the Mann Gulch fire disaster in which thirteen firemen were killed in 1949. In a reinterpretation of the monumental study of this disaster by Norman Maclean (1992), Karl Weick describes a complete collapse of cooperation among the firemen sent to combat the wildfire (Weick 1993: 632–8). For the firemen, the situation turned into a ‘cosmology episode’ (633– 4) in which they were unable to reassemble some degree of organized cooperation once they got rid off their tools and began to run away from the fire after their leader, Wagner Dodge, realized the urgency of escape. Retrospectively, the downkeying involved in tool-dropping was a necessary move and it emphasized to the firemen that their task could no longer be to approach and combat the wildfire. Wagner Dodge gave his team all the right directions: he turned the group around when he sensed the impending danger and the firemen followed; he told them to drop their tools and they did so; but when he finally told them to face the rapidly approaching firewall by lying down in the ashes of an escape fire, he had no organization and no team left to save. Whilst the firemen dashed off to their deaths,13 Wagner Dodge could only save himself. In hindsight, the firemen would have needed to not only downkey cooperation, but to more actively reframe actual occasions and produce context early on in order to realize that they confronted a situation demanding accommodations by them as members of a team of firemen (Weick 1993: 638–9). Instead, downkeying disassembled their sense of being firemen and being in a team altogether, and they fled as individuals. Had an alternative context of escape been produced in time, team members might have acted out on the assumption that they were still firemen despite running away from the fire and that, despite deliberately dropping their tools, they still had a leader whose judgement they could trust. Framing disruptions and rekeying cooperation at an earlier point in time – that this was an unusual fire which called for unorthodox solutions and a shift from fighting the fire to escaping the gulch – might have provided an opportunity to reorient participants adequately (cf. Kaplan 2008: 748). This kind of re-coordination was no longer possible when Wagner Dodge set the escape fire. The Mann Gulch case therefore demonstrates how opportunities for marking and framing disruptions may be irretrievably missed within punctuated cooperation and how missing these opportunities for producing appropriate contexts of response may set up dynamics 13

Only two other members of the crew were able to save themselves (Weick 1993: 647); cf. below, section 6.

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ending in organizational failures which, beyond a certain point in time, become hard if not impossible to avert. Responses to organizational failures often appear to be unaware of such issues of timing in framing organized cooperation. Once organizational failures have occurred, organization members and outsiders alike tend to focus on what and who went wrong. Yet the wisdom to be gained from focusing on the substance of a failure that has already taken place is in a very important sense quite limited, especially if the need for timely intelligence is taken seriously, as Barry Turner (1976, 1978) has argued so convincingly. Turner takes his lead from Wilensky (1967) and regards failures of intelligence as more important determinants of disastrous disruptions than failures of control, concentrating on ‘disasters that are potentially foreseeable and potentially avoidable’ (B. Turner 1976: 380). In Turner’s view, the scope of organizational failure is critically precipitated by an ‘incubation period’ (393–5). This understanding resonates well with the collective character of situated inattention hinted at earlier and it decisively emphasizes its collectively regularized character. During incubation periods, problems that are well defined tend to systematically draw participants’ attention away from problems that are ill defined (387–8); the latter subsequently turn out to do the damage. Once organizational failures are apparent, investigators set out to explore the reasons, and recommendations are given to avoid respective negligence in the future. Unfortunately, though, ‘recommendations . . . treat the wellstructured problem defined and revealed by the disaster’ rather than the ‘ill-structured problems’ precipitating it (393) – which basically means that the clock is reset to start another incubation period during which members increasingly underestimate the probability of ‘inconceivable occurrences’ (cf. Lanir 1989: 491–2; Farjoun 2005). In other words, picking up the observations in the preceding chapter (see section 3.4), framing organizational failure often brings about a normalization of disruptiveness. Such normalization may reaffirm wellentrenched tendencies of inattention. Post-disaster tribunals produce stylized representations of actual occasions – and sometimes of the field as a whole – for the purpose of normalizing the disruption (Gephart 1993: 1506–8). This establishes and stabilizes the sense in which the organization has failed; it need not, however, in any way affect the mechanisms which have brought the failure about in the first place. It draws people’s attention to ‘well-structured’ rather than ‘ill-structured’ problems, to disruptiveness that is marked and framed rather than just felt, and to a past which is irretrievably gone. Such normalizations of failure may well be associated with a ‘normalization of deviance’, a process analysed at length by Vaughan (1996, 2005) as one of the main causes of

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NASA’s space shuttle disasters. In fact, the embedding of any given field of organized cooperation in larger fields, distributions and trajectories of participants and expectation within a collective may provoke multiple normalizations of failure; NASA, with its embedding in assemblages of various political, economic and professional concerns, is clearly a case in point. In the case of the Challenger disaster, the disposition to fly with an essentially flawed rocket booster design was reinforced by the professional logics of engineering, by the structures of the aerospace industry and by a stream of policy decisions (Vaughan 2008: 74–5; 1997: 1–23). The associated gravities of normalization are one of the key links between the Challenger disaster and the Columbia disaster (Vaughan 2005) in which various warning signs with respect to the thermal protection system were subject to the normalization of deviance. Once a disastrous failure has taken place, post-disaster convergence sets in, drawing insiders and outsiders alike into framing disruptions, normalizing what has taken place not only for the organization but also for its environment. Normalizing organizational failures in this way is often motivated by the assumption that members’ strategies need to be changed reflexively in order to prevent mistakes from being repeated. Some lack of correlation between framing disruptions and previous strategies of coping with actual occasions – which may favour ‘unforgettable but unreal’ recollections –may be deliberately intended, therefore. Furthermore, transforming failures into ‘better-defined’ problems may be seen as quite legitimately drawing participants’ attention away from problems which have not yet been proven fatal and towards those that have. There is, however, another problem, the solution of which requires something more than an officially ratified framing of organizational failure – and something more than a set of formalizations manufactured in order to keep members’ future attentiveness in check: ‘Executives can control the rules of relevance – the official paradigm; but the rules of irrelevance – the paradigm as it is tacitly used – are not so amenable to managerial control’ (Brown 1978: 376). The discussion of succession cases has illustrated severe limitations to the managerial power of committing organization members to specific productions of context in framing disruptiveness and rekeying punctuated cooperation. The normalization of organizational failures, as expressed by some ‘official paradigm’, may be challenged and disattended both tacitly and explicitly. As a consequence, somewhat pessimistic conclusions about the capability to effectively cope with disruptiveness in organized cooperation suggest themselves: disruptions that in hindsight would have needed to be marked may be ignored by participants coping with stress and threat; disruptions which are marked and framed are likely

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to draw participants into reiterated and possibly antagonistic engagements in normalization, the effect of which on the prevention of future organizational failures is, at best, uncertain. The reframing associated with inquiring into disruptiveness retrospectively, trying to reconstruct failures as carefully as possible, will account for the tacit and implicit strategies of the past in explicit and formally instructive terms of the present, disembedding the dynamics of failure from original productions of context (cf. Law and Mol 2002: 98–9). Fatal coincidences, for example, that members’ strategies are refocused in such a way that further organizational failures in the process of incubation are not attended to, are likely results of normalization and the kind of self-confident ignorance of organizing thus encouraged (Farjoun 2005: 62–5). As a consequence, how members’ strategies can be adjusted in order to make the marking of disruptions as well as the bringing about and rekeying of punctuated cooperation more appropriate and more timely presents a difficult question for stakeholders of organized cooperation, especially if the stakes are high. 4.5

The high-reliability challenge

The marking of organizational failure is not an exclusive prerogative of organization members. Disruptions are often pointed out to organization members by outsiders calling on them to respond. Organizational domains are often attributed to members or to organizations as a whole by outsiders (Thompson 1967: 26–9). Furthermore, these domains may include responsibilities of responding to disruptiveness which is neither brought about nor originally registered by members, as, for example, in the case of disaster relief organizations or public agencies in charge of collective responses to disruption or failure. If disastrous disruptions take place, then numerous organizations are expected to quickly respond, and these ‘organizations are expected to respond to disasters by minimizing their impact’ and to achieve a ‘failure-free response’ (Carley and Harrald 1997: 310). In order to provide an adequate level of readiness, organizations are expected to learn as comprehensively as possible from disastrous disruptions which are, by definition, rare events. Effective organizational learning in this respect requires lengthier sequences of reiterated marking, framing and coping with disruptiveness, productions of context which empirically turn out to be problematic achievements (Carley and Harrald 1997: 326–9). Planning responses is based on the assumption that the lessons of the past will generally be instructive (e.g. Sylves 1998: 15– 16), but to some extent this may run up against efforts to also utilize

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emergent processes and structures.14 The question of organizing how to effectively and reliably cope with future disruptiveness therefore becomes a question of how to ‘structure and train for predictable tasks while creating organizations capable of solving unanticipated problems’ (Harrald et al. 1992: 214). This challenge is shared by organizations coping with sources of disruptiveness which are patently their own and those facing the disruptiveness of others. Overall, the problems of organizing in order to reliably respond to future disruptiveness appear to resemble those of framing organizational failure: such framing is unlikely to match participants’ strategies to the demands of future contingencies and especially those related to ‘illstructured’ problems; it cannot overcome the problems of rekeying cooperation which are elements of a yet unknown series of situations involving participants’ future dispositions in a timely manner. Members’ attentiveness and responsiveness are unlikely to be unequivocally increased by investments in producing context for specific incidents or scenarios of organizational failure, regardless of whether framing takes place after the fact or production of context is practised in advance. Considering everything that may fatefully go wrong in formally organized activities these days, maybe certain solutions to this problem of producing context to deal with yet unknown sources of disruptiveness are already inherent in members’ practical sense of organizing. Some researchers following this intuition have been turning their attention to organizations that confront enormous risks of incurring disastrous disruptions and statistically appear to be good at preventing them. These ‘high-reliability organizations’ have allegedly turned the marking of actual and potential disruptiveness in order to deal with it in an appropriate and timely fashion into a ubiquitous rather than an episodic concern of their members (Schulman 1993: 36; Weick and Sutcliffe 2007: 9–10). Studies by Gene Rochlin (1989) and Karlene Roberts (1990) have established military aircraft carriers as prime examples of high-reliability organizations. Roberts describes how aircraft carriers cope with high levels of intrinsic vulnerability and environmental uncertainty, emphasizing the thorough socialization of participants, the redundancy of processes and involvements, the high accountability of members and the 14

There is also the further question as to what extent ‘lessons from the past’ can be translated into systematic managerial concepts with which problems of organizing for future contingencies could be adequately addressed. Disaster research appears to indicate that effective preparedness cannot refer to a single managerial concept but will always need to refer to a discontinuous set of variables to be managed separately by various subsets of organization members (Kirschenbaum 2002).

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hierarchical differentiation of posts, combining a close grouping of members continuously cooperating with one another with accountability across levels (Roberts 1990: 170–5). In a more general discussion of the concept of reliability, drawing on the US invasion of Grenada as another military example, Weick (1989) more directly addresses the question of appropriate strategies for coping with complex forms of organized cooperation. In Weick’s cognition-focused terminology, reliability requires members’ mental models of organizing to be combined in a specific way with the kind of cooperation which these models refer to (Weick 1989: 128). Since mental models can never fully match the complexity of cooperation, members are advised to keep cooperation as simple as possible and their models as complex as is tolerable in order to reduce complexity gaps that cannot altogether be avoided. Members should constantly remind one another that models are abstractions and as such are to be modified on a regular basis (Weick 1989: 140–1). High reliability is achieved, in this perspective, by organizations that manage to keep their members attentive both to the ongoing run of activities and to the potential shortcomings of their own strategies and orientations (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007: 10–14; Weick 2005). The theory of high reliability has perhaps most convincingly been articulated in a joint paper by Weick and Roberts (1993), who start by distinguishing organizations concerned with reliability from those concerned primarily with efficiency: instead of economizing on attention, high-reliability organizations are determined to generalize ‘mindful attention’ and ‘heedful action’ (Weick and Roberts 1993: 357). Rather than treating members’ attentiveness to actual occasions ‘one brain at a time’ (Weick and Roberts 1993: 358), appreciating high reliability requires taking the ‘collective mind’ into account. For understanding how the collective mind works, the concept of heedful interrelating is introduced (Weick and Roberts 1993: 364–8). Heedful interrelating is a generalization of the kind of practical sense that needs to prevail among members in order to organize cooperation in a highly reliable manner. The collective mind is an outcome of how members relate to one another, of how they pay attention to what others are doing and to how they are doing it, and of how members’ activities relate one to another. A vivid collective mind needs to be continuously renewed through participants resocializing one another across situation and engagements. Newcomers entering high-reliability organizations, rather than being rewired to match what is expected of them, are allowed and even encouraged to irritate senior members. Heedful interrelating is enhanced as newcomers are able to resocialize insiders as much as they are exposed to be socialized by them:

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If insiders are taciturn, indifferent, preoccupied, available only in stylized performances, less than candid, or simply not available at all, newcomers are in danger of acting without heed because they have only banal conversations to internalize. They have learned little about heedful interdependence. When these newcomers act and try to anticipate the contributions of others, their actions will be stupid, and mistakes will happen. These mistakes may represent small failures that produce learning . . . More ominous is the possibility that these mistakes may also represent a weakening of system capacity for heedful responding. When there is a loss of particulars about how heed can be expressed in representation and subordination, reliable performance suffers. As seasoned people become more peripheral to socialization, there should be a higher incidence of serious accidents. (Weick and Roberts 1993: 368)

Capacities for heedful interrelating therefore ultimately boil down to questions of fashioning appropriate forms of co-presence. Supporting heedful interrelating means supporting forms of co-presence in which there is adequate provision of time and resources. Accordingly, structural redundancy is valued highly in the high-reliability literature. This appreciation of redundancy contrasts sharply with the perspective of authors in the normal accidents tradition following Charles Perrow, who take redundancy to increase overall system complexity and thus the vulnerability of organizations to disaster dynamics. In the high-reliability approach, the role of system complexity is re-evaluated and seen in a more positive light, as complexity may, for example in more complex sets of participants’ strategies, contribute to heedfulness by increasing ‘collective requisite variety’ (Weick 1988: 305–17). The contrast to the normal accidents tradition is deliberate, as when Roberts (1990: 170) juxtaposes the dysfunctionalities identified by Perrow in his investigation of high-risk technologies and by Shrivastava (1986) in his study of the Bhopal disaster with intelligence about organizational responses which she collected on aircraft carriers (cf. Weick and Roberts 1993: 377–8). The debate about the respective functions and dysfunctions of redundancy and complexity is at the heart of the ‘great divide’ between highreliability theory and the normal accidents school (Vaughan 1999: 296– 7). The underlying issues are particularly evident in a review essay in which Lee Clarke (1993) discusses the then recent publications by Roberts (1993) – a collection of high-reliability studies – and by Sagan (1993), a representative of normal accidents theory in the tradition of Perrow. Clarke decidedly sides with Sagan and Perrow. He criticizes the empirical evidence garnered for high-reliability theory, particularly the claim that these organizations are in fact good at preventing disaster (Clarke 1993: 681–2), and he emphasizes, with Sagan, the ubiquity of

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near misses (Clarke 1993: 676–7). Clarke also indicates that high reliability may often be a matter of appearances by referring to control and command systems for nuclear weapons as an example and the lack of learning amid self-deception and cover-ups in this case (Clarke 1993: 683–5). The unambiguously positive valuation of redundancy in highreliability theory is queried by arguing that redundant elements may escalate minor into disastrous failures (Clarke 1993: 685–6; cf. Sagan 1993: 273–4). The theory is criticized for missing the crucial fact of ‘evidence contamination’ by organizations (Clarke 1993: 687), a fact that may be particularly problematic in the case of high-reliability organizations since many of them are very much self-contained and intransparent to outside inspection. Roberts (1990: 173–5) discusses the human costs of high reliability herself, illustrating these costs by the fact that organizations like aircraft carriers are basically total institutions. However, even if such human costs among members are disregarded, the total character of high reliability brought about through their ‘extreme discipline and intense socialization’ (Sagan 1993: 253) may counteract heedfulness by encouraging ‘excessive loyalty and secrecy, disdain for outside expertise, and in some cases even cover-ups of safety problems, in order to protect the reputation of the institution’ (Sagan 1993: 254). It may also facilitate feelings of shame among members coping with disruptiveness, which they privatize and, possibly, hide from collectives to whom commitments to ‘safety culture’ are top priorities (Edwards and Jabs 2009: 716–17). Such feelings of shame may restrict members’ willingness to mark disruptions and motivate them to put up smokescreens. Whilst high-reliability theory focuses on participants and the endogenous order of activities situated within organizations, normal accidents theory calls on the openness of organizations to outside evaluation and intervention, considering exogenous control as critical for keeping risky systems honest (Perrow 1999; Sagan 1993: 268–9). But then again, bringing in outsiders with rights to intervene as they see fit bears other risks, as Barry Turner (1976: 390) observes: ‘when those not directly under the control of or socialized by the organizations concerned can put themselves in a position where they can activate the hazards if they behave improperly from the organizations’ point of view, the risks are vastly increased.’ Organization members find it difficult to adequately communicate with outsiders, since the latter are unaccustomed to the day-to-day demands of organized cooperation and are difficult to integrate in their respective competences and habitus (B. Turner 1976: 390); whether outsiders may become effectively involved in ‘heedful interrelating’ has to be, at the very least, uncertain. On the other hand, whilst it cannot be altogether wrong to suggest more ‘mindfulness’ might have helped

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NASA prevent the Challenger disaster (Mason 2004: 136–9), the point of Vaughan’s careful reconstruction is that engineers had been pretty mindful – mindful in terms of their own engineering culture, their experience and practical sense.15 Careful consideration was given to marking and framing disruptions as ‘the word “anomaly” was part of everyday talk’ (Vaughan 1996: 223). The problem with the normalization of deviance was not that members did not care about discrepancies, but that ‘committed individuals and organizations can turn the experience of failure into the memory of success’ (Sagan 1993: 258), accommodating, in the Challenger case, the careful accounting of discrepancies with a ‘correctand-fly belief’ (Vaughan 1996: 223). Members may come to believe that a kind of ‘hyper-resilience’ was attained by having mastered some critical or near-critical situation (Clair and Dufresne 2007), while they simultaneously failed to respond to actual occasions beyond their zone of attention. Generalizing concerns in terms of a ‘safety culture’ thus may, in the medium term, lead to ‘complacency through self-congratulations’ (Edwards and Jabs 2009: 717). These considerations will suffice to illustrate that there is a lot of legitimate debate about the challenge of high reliability. The impression that outsiders may ultimately be in better positions to control organized cooperation than members is supported by the retrospective transparency of failure and thus by productions of context that are not congenial to the day-to-day management of risk by organization members. Complex organizations, in the meantime, are run by expert insiders and by activities that are to some extent incomprehensible to outsiders, and this partially intransparent level of activity may, under conditions which organization sometimes fail to establish (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007: 75–80), indeed be associated with some reliability. Accepting a certain measure of intransparency, though, need not mean surrendering measures of outside supervision altogether. The quest for high reliability calls for generalized scepticism with respect to remedial prescriptions within and beyond the organization in question and, if any of these prescriptions do sound appealing after all, to be ready to attend contradictory ones in keeping perceptions sharp with respect to the actual problems of coordination members and stakeholders are facing (Starbuck et al. 1978: 123). If coordination tends to drift towards ‘conventions that are crude and robust, and that leave no room for fine judgements’ (Sugden 2004: 106), then there clearly is a role for formal, and to some extent externally 15

Cf. Davidson (2010) for a general idea of conceptualizations of mindfulness in recent psychological research.

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motivated, keying and supervision of activities – and for social scientists keeping track of blind spots and ambiguities across formal and informal layers of coordination (cf. Vaughan 2005: 57). 4.6

Conspicuous associations

If and when specific strategies of coping with disruptiveness will be individually or collectively adopted is subject to a wide variety of conditions. The enduring appeal of high-reliability theory may derive from its sustained effort to search for clues about which strategies are empirically associated with the marking, framing and coping with disruptiveness in a timely and effective manner. Being developed in close conjunction with organizational practitioners – a fact that has not escaped its critics (Clarke 1993: 686–7) – the high-reliability approach has not been short of suggestions for improving organizational reliability, up to providing guidebooks with checklists for high-reliability-minded managers (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007: 83–107). Whilst the pragmatic value of such guidelines is vulnerable to the kind of scepticism articulated in the preceding paragraph, some of the conceptual leads are clearly worth pursuing further with respect to the effectiveness of dealing with disruptions in organized cooperation. Some of the early high-reliability literature generally emphasizes the need to provide members with opportunities for cognition and learning – for example when Weick (1987: 133) states that the basic idea would be ‘that a system which values stories, storytellers, and storytelling will be more reliable than a system that derogates these substitutes for trial and error’ – but attention has gradually turned to investigating the structure of groups and associations among members. In the Mann Gulch study, for example, Karl Weick describes an ‘inverse relation between meaning and structure’ (Weick 1993: 646) as the possible antidote to organizational collapse, understanding ‘structure’ in terms of associations among members. The rationale ‘less meaning, more structure, and vice versa’ (646) is seen as a potential basis for rekeying organized cooperation from scratch: When meaning becomes problematic, this is a signal for people to pay more attention to their formal and informal social ties and to reaffirm and/or reconstruct them. These actions produce more structure, which then increases meaning, which then decreases the attention directed at structure. Puzzlement intensifies attentiveness to the social, which reduces puzzlement. (Weick 1993: 646)

If one expresses this idea within the terminology of the present investigation, then the rekeying of punctuated cooperation towards relational

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expectations is favoured.16 In introducing their concept of heedful interrelating, Weick and Roberts (1993: 358–68) draw on the idea that collective mind among organization members emerges from a practical sense of interrelating that is enacted, primarily, within groups (362–4). The ability of groups to sustain heedful interrelating varies; their ‘smartest’ aggregate states tend to be manifest at early stages in their development (376) while fully developed groups become more reminiscent of groupthink phenomena (375). Mildly unstable associations are taken to be particularly conducive to heedfulness, and this assumption is generalized towards associations beyond groups of organization members, for example, to flexible forms of interorganizational coordination as incorporated in the idea of network organizations (377). The idea is that associations which are flexible and nascent rather than stable and settled provide the best foundations for improving heedfulness, for attentiveness of participants to each other’s activities, for the recognition of vulnerabilities and the circulation and reception of respective information in ‘lateral formations and experiential epistemic networks’ (Rochlin 1989: 169; cf. Roberts et al. 2005: 82–3). This preoccupation with associations among members as a basis of high reliability – and Weick is clearly not an author to be accused of neglecting problems of cognition per se – dovetails with the focus on emergent structures and processes in disaster research. The common denominator of these two lines of research is that associations among members are seen to provide the foundations for the keying of cooperation in marking and responding to disruptions. In disaster research, the interest in emergent structure emerged from investigating emergent groups (Barton 1962: 246–57; Dynes and Quarantelli 1968: 424–8). More recently, the focus has shifted to exploring emergent structures in disaster settings in manifestations of networks, particularly in the interorganizational networks of disaster response. As Topper and Carley (1999) demonstrate in a study of organizational responses to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, organizations converge on the disaster site as their members coalesce into coordinating groups both within and across organizations, forming crisis response networks which do not easily yield to centralized coordination (Topper and Carley 1999: 69–70). As the planning of disaster response is pressed to take emergent groups into account (Neal and Phillips 1995: 334–5), it also needs to do so with interorganizational networks (Drabek and McEntire 2002). And in fact emergency 16

Weick (1993: 646) then goes on to make the same claim for a reconstruction of structure through meaning, but, somewhat surprisingly considering his own track record as a theorist of ‘sensemaking’, does not give much consideration to this dynamic.

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management networks increasingly appear to be offered as organizational solutions not only to problems of disasters response but also for dealing with issues of public safety and security in confronting, for example, terrorist threats (Waugh 2003: 384). Organizational improvisation in response to the 9/11 attacks at Manhattan Island clearly provides a good case for the effectiveness of semi-spontaneous, semi-regulated coordination achievable in emergency response networks (Wachtendorf 2004). Whilst earlier command-and-control approaches to emergency management represented the civil defence origins of emergency management, the ‘bureaucratic model’ focused on thorough formalization and planning now appears to be on the retreat (Drabek and McEntire 2002: 202–3). The belief in planning, though, has not been replaced by a belief in emergent networks (cf. Siegel 1985: 111), and nowadays the idea that emergent phenomena ‘are inevitable, natural, neither necessarily dysfunctional nor conflictive and cannot be eliminated by planning’ (Stallings and Quarantelli 1985: 98; cf. Forrest 1986: 63) happens to resonate well with the contemporary spread of interorganizational networks as highly regarded forms of coordination (cf. Sydow and Windeler 1998: 266–8). Emergency management personnel are advised by disaster researchers to allow for emergent qualities of response networks to unfold and to avoid excessive central planning (Schneider 1992: 90–1). The kind of planning that is deemed desirable ‘ought to take into account the inevitability and pervasiveness of emergent groups and behavior’ (Stallings and Quarantelli 1985: 99), and should try to ‘link emergent citizen groups into the network of emergency management organizations’ (99). If it is accepted that the relational keying of cooperation provides a good foundation both for marking disruptiveness before it develops into disastrous failures and for keying punctuated cooperation in dealing with organizational stress and failure, then one may still want to question the effectiveness and appropriateness with which disruptions are marked and responded to in this manner. The differentiation of developed and undeveloped groups by Weick and Roberts (1993: 375–6) is an attempt to qualify the conditions for heedful interrelating beyond the assumption that the existence of associations generally supports reliability. Keying cooperation towards relational expectations may introduce particular vulnerabilities (cf. Miles and Snow 1992: 62–8), for example, that access to information increasingly comes to depend on social capital that resists central coordination. As ‘each network that forms is nominally an authority system’ (Rochlin 1989: 170), the informal distribution of rights and obligations may come to be at odds with the demands of formalization,

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and thus, for example, with legitimate forms of control exercised by stakeholders. On a group level, possibly some ‘pressures on group members to conform to majority opinions can be avoided through the use of subgroups that meet separately under different leaders and report back to the decision unit’ (Smart and Vertinsky 1977: 652). The question of how the effectiveness of emergent networks across members, groups and organizations can be deliberately regulated, though, is just beginning to be explored. Whilst emergent associations may respond well to the immediate exigencies of actual occasions, reiterated rekeying of relational activities may bring about different degrees of efficiency and effectiveness. Not only may the respective effectiveness of networks or hierarchies vary with the kinds of tasks members are presented with (Waugh 1993: 21), but also emergent networks may themselves turn out to be more or less centralized, dense, open or closed. Disaster researchers have noted that cohesiveness differs significantly within and across organizations in emergency situations (Sorensen et al. 1985). The emphasis of high-reliability theory on the relative looseness and flexibility of associations does not appear to resonate well with some findings of disaster research that emphasize the importance of close associations in bringing about collective behaviour (e.g. Aguirre et al. 1998). Karl Weick, though, appears to see no contradiction at that point, attributing, for example, the survival of the two firemen who at Mann Gulch were able to save themselves to ‘the power of close ties to moderate panic’ (Weick 1993: 647). Measuring and managing the effectiveness of response remains a particular problem of applied disaster research. It involves problems of evaluation which are inevitably confounded with the question of who is to provide, control and accommodate standards of effectiveness. Post-disaster convergence draws in a variety of outsiders with diverse expectations (e.g. Kendra and Wachtendorf 2003; Perry and Pugh 1978: 132–7), and so do pre-disaster planning and efforts at prevention. Researchers assessing measures of effectiveness are one party among many drawn into framing responses and producing contexts for actual or potential forms of disruptiveness. Emergent structures resulting from such ‘informal mass assault’ (Barton 1962: 226–6) tend to cut across organizations, transcending fields of organized cooperation and embedding them in broader trajectories of participants, expectations and strategies. The effectiveness of organizational response thus inevitably refers to larger embeddings of organized cooperation, for example to the relative value of the capital accumulated within the field and to distinct forms of domination (cf. Sydow and Windeler 1998: 275–7). The respective evaluations may heavily influence participants’ strategies of response, of assuming or avoiding

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responsibilities, and suggest quite specific forms of attention, whether for good or for worse. Effective levels of response can clearly be missed by insiders, and ‘during a crisis it seems that there are particularly strong motives to pursue inappropriate social structures’ (Loosemore and Hughes 2001: 85). The observation that ‘competing coalitions and interest groups will attempt to exercise both legitimate and illegitimate power in the pursuit of relational control’ (86) again points to the pervasiveness of relational keying. Both high-reliability discourse and disaster research point to the ubiquity of relational keying in bringing about and successively ordering participants’ responses to disruptions, and this is not delimited but rather reaffirmed and amplified by the fact that participants are likely to attribute a somewhat political character to any level of response, as is most apparent in succession cases. If associating in coalitions mobilizes not only members involved in punctuated cooperation (succession) but also those engrossed in responding to disruptiveness (disaster research, organizational stress), and if, furthermore, membership in intraorganizational coalitions might also encourage participants to mark and frame disruptions to start with (high-reliability theory), then one is led to regard the association of organization members in distinct coalitions as a social process the prominence of which is to a certain extent more generally characteristic of how punctuated cooperation tends to be run and keyed (cf. Kaplan 2008). 4.7

Implications for organizational theory

Since at least the 1980s, research on organizational change has become increasingly interested in how organizations accumulate and update knowledge and information. Various concepts of organizational learning have been introduced (e.g. Huber 1990), and the focus of earlier literature on organizational learning in the production and accommoda¨ 1978) has gradually tion of organizational action (e.g. Argyris and Schon been displaced in favour of latching on to ‘information age’ themes within the broader discourse of industrial organization (Drucker 1993; Castells 1996). Against this background, it is interesting to note that the cognitive turn, at least for researchers such as Karl Weick, whose studies of organizational behaviour turned cognitive at least a quarter century earlier, has taken a decidedly relational direction. For the high-reliability approach, cognitive constructs (mindfulness, heedfulness) are important, as is members’ expertise in attending to particular domains. High reliability, however, is not brought about by maximizing participants’ sense of information and competence but by drawing on their sense of association:

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We prefer the concept of ‘expertise’ to the concept of the ‘expert’ because we want to preserve the crucial point that expertise is relational. Expertise is an assemblage of knowledge, experience, learning, and intuitions that is seldom embodied in a single individual. And even if expertise appears to be confined to a single individual, that expertise is evoked and becomes meaningful only when a second person requests it, defers to it, modifies it, or rejects it. To defer to expertise is to act the way people on aircraft carriers do when they practice heedful interrelating. (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007: 78)

Normal accidents theory and high-reliability theory concur in the general emphasis on issues of association: tight and loose coupling as well as heedful interrelating focus on modes of association and not on what is being associated (Emirbayer 1997: 282–91). In discussing coupling, normal accidents theory is actually somewhat indifferent to whether human and non-human components of technological systems are concerned (cf. Law 1994: 144). If matters of pragmatic valuation – whether relational structures and processes are good or bad for purposes of organizing – contentious as they are, are left aside, then the two disparate and in many respects antagonistic approaches agree on the prominent role of the relational in understanding how disruptiveness is dealt with in formally organized cooperation. On the one hand, the implications for organizational theory are pretty much the same as the implications for the sociology of disruptions and social change more generally, since formally organized cooperation differs from other forms of cooperation just gradually, by lamination. Implications amount to paying close attention to the shift in strategies towards a focus on forming coalitions in the wake of disruptiveness. One more specific result of this chapter is the surprising decoupling of instances of punctuated cooperation from the marking and framing of disruptiveness on the other. Crucial to this dissociation is the observation that the probability of attending to disruptions appears to be significantly decreased by organization members’ mastery of upkeying and downkeying punctuated cooperation selectively towards workable coordination equilibria. Upkeying is likely to withdraw attention from, for example, anything formally unrelated to a post, domain or authority in question, and downkeying allows participants to disattend respective formalizations. Both rekeyings may be brought about in a routine manner that quickly resettles cooperation after it has been punctuated. The universality of organizational stress indicates reluctance among organizational members to mark and respond to disruptiveness in cases in which cooperation can quickly be adjusted to dealing with exigencies that would otherwise disrupt coordination on either a formal or informal level. If a disruption is not marked and framed, it will remain

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ambiguous, uncertain, not quite real, even if punctuated cooperation is evident. This is what happened in the Tenerife case when co-pilot and engineer were asking whether there actually was clearance for take-off. In other cases, ambiguous indications of disruptiveness during punctuated cooperation may simply take the mundane form of members indicating that they are rather busy or ‘not open’ for business. Furthermore, with respect to marking disruptions in punctuated cooperation, time is of the essence: if disruptions are not recognized in time, certain opportunities of response will inevitably be lost (as in the Mann Gulch case). There are also cases in which disruptiveness becomes manifest too early, as is apparent when comparing Gouldner’s succession case with Gephart’s: in Gouldner’s case, a longer conflict unfolds; in Gephart’s case, subsequent (post-succession) cooperation among the remaining members could leave behind a disruption the meaning of which had already been resolved collectively. By virtue of bringing about adjustments in members’ strategies, responding to disruptions may be an important source of organizational routines, regardless of whether disruptions are ambiguous or clearly marked, and whether they have been dealt with informally or formally (Felin and Foss 2009: 164–5). A great share of the literature concerned with organizational failure struggles with the question of how respective adjustments can be brought about while motivating as little further disruption as possible (cf. Downer 2011: 755–8). Obviously it is hard to find appropriate prescriptions, as safety failures sometimes turn out to have taken place in organizations that had invested heavily in extending some variety of ‘safety culture’ (Edwards and Jabs 2009: 708). To identify organizations which are successful in their adjustments is also not a trivial task, as the inclusion of international banking among Karlene Roberts’ original examples of high-reliability organizations involuntarily illustrates for contemporary readers (Roberts 1990: 160). This high uncertainty and ambiguity with respect to the appropriate object, form and focus of a theory of organizational failure and resilience makes the unequivocal salience of members’ association in coalitions found in the various cases of imminent or actual, ambiguous or disastrous, effectively dealt with or fatefully unrealized kinds of disruptiveness particularly striking. One question that has not been discussed up to this point is how this salience of members’ associations in marking, coping with and framing disruptions relates to what is still often treated as the dominant principle in organizing activities in formalized social settings: the rationalization of cooperation. Richard Hilbert provides a suggestive shortcut to considering the issue of rationalization at least briefly before drawing this chapter to a close. Hilbert (1987: 78) explores rationalization as a process driven

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by participants’ strategies of rekeying organized cooperation, and as a result of the bureaucratic membership working to maintain the appearances of a smoothly functioning organization, all the time ‘knowing’ that specific cases they are privy to are handled in ways that fall far short of fantasized bureaucratic rationality . . . Thus the bureaucratic mentality is not fully ‘believed’ even as it is fully respected as ultimately preferred to what passes as rational in specific cases. In this light, it is not uncommon to hear bureaucratic insiders speaking ironically about the sloppiness of ‘what goes on around here’ and how shocked certain outsiders might be ‘if they only knew’; yet it remains axiomatic that within these ironies, general belief in the bureaucratic order, a faith that somewhere beyond the local scene – if not here, then there; if not there then somewhere else – bureaucracy either is or could be running as it dutifully should, serves as a standard according to which it is possible to feel embarrassed, chagrined, amused, in the know, and so forth about how things are actually handled in the immediate setting.

Bureaucratization, in Hilbert’s view, is best discussed as an outcome of participants’ repair activities, that is, their rekeying of cooperation in responding to disruptions which would never be marked as disruptive were it not for prior formalizations, a process continuously refuelled by efforts to provide more adequate formalizations. Gouldner’s description of management’s escalating commitment to punishment-centred bureaucracy provides an illustration of the suggested principle, but it also begs the question whether the conspicuousness of associations in rekeying cooperation may not bring about quite a specific type of rationalization. In Gouldner’s case, the drift towards punishment-centred bureaucracy correlates with a drift of organized cooperation towards a conflict between two opposing coalitions of members. In contrast, discourses of rationalization tend to downplay relational aspects of organizing cooperation in favour of cognitive aspects in the mobilization of pieces of information and of certain norms with respect to evaluating them. This bias in favour of the cognitive is apparent in the preference for well-defined problems in the normalization of organizational failure. The irony of attempts to understand and possibly avert organizational failure through rationalizing forms of repair is that formalizing consistently relegates relational strategies of coping with actual occasions to a secondary status in discourse about organizing: questions of authority and status are treated as if they derive from well-informed decisions about how to organize appropriately. Even the patently relational enterprise of marginalizing those identified to be perpetrators of failure tends to be staged as an exercise in ‘interpreting the facts’ and ‘talking to the topic’ (Gephart 1978: 572). Problems of marking, responding to and framing disruptions tend to be treated as if they referred to primarily cognitive rather than relational

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challenges, as if strategies of information seeking would in reality (or some desired version of it) dominate the formation of coalitions, while empirically the reverse appears to be the case. A comparative analysis of participants’ strategies geared to either relational, cognitive or normative expectations will be a prerequisite to better understanding the dynamics of organizing associated with this discrepancy. Judging from the intelligence available at this point, it is likely that organizational attempts at rationalizing members’ strategies will contribute to keep the actual experience of disruptiveness by anybody accidentally exposed to it as ‘unforgettable and unreal’, and also, on a fundamental level, as to some extent inaccessible to outside stakeholders and the collective as a whole – despite all the emphasis given to organizational learning, knowledge and competence. 4.8

Conclusion

In analysing formally organized cooperation, the present chapter has extended the analysis of how participants respond to disruptiveness from observing single situations towards regularities across sets of situations. Upkeying cooperation by referring to posts, domains and authorities has been identified as a unique feature of organized cooperation that affects organization members’ strategies of dealing with disruptions in a particular manner. The stacking of expectations resulting from formalization affords opportunities to selectively attend and ignore disruptiveness by upkeying and downkeying punctuated cooperation respectively. Adjustments of strategies in which these opportunities are exploited interact with the probability with which disruptions are marked and responded to; tendencies of inattention appear to be associated with the reproduction of organizational stress. Once participants are drawn into responding to disruptiveness more explicitly, a competition among multiple framings and productions of contexts is likely to develop. Associating in coalitions appears to dominate the keying of cooperation among members responding to disruptiveness that is felt to be imminent, among those who are involved in framing disruptions which undeniably have been taking place and among those trying to keep up heedfulness in order to avert disruptions to begin with. Gouldner’s famous succession case documents a particular trajectory of keys and participants in the wake of punctuated cooperation: the salience of associations and coalitions transcends the framing of the succession and heavily affects how organized cooperation is keyed subsequently; social change is brought about by successively transforming the organization into a site of industrial conflict by continuously recycling

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the keying of punctuated cooperation. This diffusion of expectations and strategies from the succession situation to extended runs of activities ends up with distinctive redistributions of expectations, strategies, keys and resources among organization members, refocusing organized cooperation on a struggle for social capital. The following chapter will gather further intelligence on such a recycling of keys, and of respective changes in social fields. Punctuated cooperation at this point reveals itself as possibly a much more widespread phenomenon than the marking of disruptions would suggest, indicated by the ubiquity of organizational stress the disruptiveness of which remains ambiguous. This implies that the emotional arousal characterizing punctuated cooperation may often not find a release in articulating disruptions and will subsequently be rerouted to various forms of stressing out more or less quietly, leading, perhaps, to adjustments that remain private. Routine rekeying of punctuated cooperation which avoids the marking of disruptions may be motivated by the prior experience of organizational stress, and, by virtue of its very effectiveness, perpetuate such stress – up to the point of redefining it as normal, if not an intrinsic and positive aspect of everyday work: This is MIT. We will always be stressed. Just try to stop us. (Williams 2002: 192)

It may be that the evolutionary success of organizing cooperation formally has partly been due to its impressive ability to motivate inattention to a good deal of disruptiveness and to defer the expression of emotional affect otherwise associated with marking disruptions to later situations, to other settings or to an eventual instance of undeniable disaster (Menzies 1960: 120). Regarding the restructuring of organizational domains, authorities and positions as a last resort of responding to disruptions is a common phenomenon (Wagenaar 2004: 647). This, if nothing else, indicates that some degree of monitoring formally organized cooperation by outsiders probably is collectively indispensable.

5

Violence and warfare

Who would assert that war is not a disaster, or a hazard, or an extreme environmental event? Gary A. Kreps (1984: 326) Action is essentially destructive of all institutional studies; just as it compromises the purity of doctrines, it damages the integrity of structures, upsets the balance of relationships, interrupts the network of communication which the institutional historian struggles to identify and, having identified, to crystallize. War, the good quartermaster’s opportunity, the bad quartermaster’s bane, is the institutional military historian’s irritant. John Keegan (1978: 28)

Warfare is an extended run of violent engagements which are deliberately planned, brought about and sustained. Despite the fact that warfare is collectively regularized and made subject to various rules of engagement and disengagement, the actual experience and enactment of violence always retains an element of exceptionality and disruptiveness. Whilst warfare is an institution, an accomplished accommodation of violent engagements within a wider range of regular collective activities, violent engagements always involve a measure of disruptiveness, some loss of coordination, some degree of punctuated cooperation. This is the central insight of Collins’ (2008) microsociology of violence, which provides the starting point of the present chapter. Violent situations will thus be considered as instances of punctuated cooperation. If warfare is, nevertheless, to some extent a collective project that is deliberately planned and sustained, then this regular character of warfare refers to the question how collectives accommodate violent situations as instances of punctuated cooperation by drawing on a regular repertoire of keys in preparing for, organizing and sustaining warfare. Ultimately, warfare is not a disaster – it is many disasters; it brings about extended series of violent engagements involving disasters and disruptiveness of all kinds. Many elements of contemporary warfare, for example the mass conscription of civilians, the availability of mass transport to and from the front lines, attacks against civilian targets and the proliferation 161

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of highly destructive weapons, have significantly expanded the scope of collective exposure to violence (McNeill 1982: 223–4; Giddens 1987a: 224–35; Van Creveld 2000). In this respect, the contemporary ‘art of war’ has escalated incidences of punctuated cooperation as effects of the collective exercise of warfare beyond participants who are specifically trained for violent engagements. With an increasing collective scope of and exposure to violence and warfare, with more frequent and extended runs of violent situations, and with an increasing share of poorly prepared participants exposed, drafted or otherwise drawn into these situations, the collective in a state of war has to cope with an increasing degree of punctuated cooperation. The accommodation of violent engagements is an accommodation of punctuated cooperation. Whilst the normalization of violent engagements is one aspect of accomplishing this accommodation (see below, section 5.4), the character of violent engagements as instances of punctuated cooperation is generally not overcome by it: violent engagements do not generally become routine accomplishments; they are simultaneously normalized and marginalized as they turn into the occupation of a special subset of participants within the collective while for a majority of others warfare becomes an exogenous source of disaster and disruptiveness. In exploring the accommodation of punctuated cooperation in the context of violence and warfare, the analytical objective of this chapter is to explore connections between instances of punctuated cooperation and more enduring aspects of order within a collective: at first in terms of organized cooperation, exemplified by military organizations, then in terms of more general changes within social fields. There is an abundance of historical and sociological literature about how, why and to what extent collectives and individual participants engage in violence and warfare, about how and to what extent violence can be effectively organized and about how, in the course of warfare, resources are redistributed in social fields. It cannot be the aim of this chapter to review this very broad and rich literature comprehensively. As in the preceding chapters, samples from a much greater reservoir of research across the social sciences will be mobilized quite selectively, this time with the ulterior motive of demonstrating how the sociology of disruption, disaster and social change can be elaborated from microsociological foundations to the analysis of social phenomena which social and political scientists tend to consider as ‘macro’ events such as, in this chapter, the constitution and growth of nation-states and their bureaucracies. I will begin this discussion by briefly establishing violent situations as instances of punctuated cooperation (5.1). Subsequently, a first set of problematic accommodations is discussed: problems faced by military

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organizations trying to sustain members’ engagements in violent situations, starting with the problem of primary group cohesion (5.2). I will explore the example of ‘Hitler’s army’ (Bartov 1991) at some length in order to explore how the dynamics of primary group cohesion and indoctrination interact in organizational accommodations of punctuated cooperation (5.3). The accommodation of violent engagements within collective activities will then be investigated more broadly in terms of the multiple normalizations of warfare (5.4) and in terms of the dynamics of redistribution, domination and contention evident in times of war (5.5). As in the preceding chapter, particular aspects of order appear to be conspicuously present within episodes of punctuated cooperation: in the accommodation of violent engagements, associating in coalitions is again highly conspicuous, though, in the case of violence and warfare, this appears to be almost universally accompanied by processes of stratification (5.6). 5.1

Violent engagements

Characterizing the exceptionality of exposure to violent situations refers back to some of the general observations discussed in the second chapter of this book. In entering social situations, and in responding to events, activities and one another, participants draw on their practical sense in maintaining expectations. Participants’ practical sense of cooperation in everyday life is often congenial to the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle of generally accepting as normal what is going on, and of striking coordination equilibria accordingly (see above, 2.3). Cooperation is sustained in the face of unpredictable actual occasions by keeping a common focus inside the ecological huddle of the engagement in a particular production of context. In his theory of interaction ritual, Randall Collins (2004: 47–78) has called this process the entrainment of participants. In applying his theory of interaction ritual to the analysis of violent situations, Collins identifies the frustration of participants’ entrainment as the distinctive aspect of these situations: ‘Face-to-face conflict is difficult above all because it violates this shared consciousness and bodily emotional entrainment. Violent interaction is all the more difficult because winning a fight depends on upsetting the enemy’s rhythms, breaking through his mode of entrainment and imposing one’s own action’ (79–80). Engaging in violent activities, therefore, is difficult because it frustrates participants’ involvement in ongoing activities by disrupting a common level of engagement. Violence as an immediate exchange of frustrations among co-present participants brings about a particular experience of

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uncertainty.1 Collins calls the level of experience and activity characterized by this uncertainty confrontational tension. Participants of violent situations are generally tense and fearful, even if they are deliberately involved in a violent engagement (Collins 2008: 8). The experience of confrontational tension is visible even in situations in which participants are engaged in actions ‘which might be called courageous’ (42). In violent situations, participants are generally tense and strained, and they tend to act somewhat stiff and incompetently; the unreserved engrossment generally characterizing punctuated cooperation is coupled with an experience of incompetence and a momentary lapse of practical sense (Blake 1970: 332–5). Violent situations are characterized by an ‘emotional field of tension and fear’ (Collins 2008: 19); incompetence of engaging in violent acts is a general attribute of participants’ conduct in these situations, regardless of whether civilians or soldiers, experts or novices are engaged in or exposed to violence. Collins illustrates this general character of confrontational tension in violent engagements by discussing at some length the classical study by S. L. A. Marshall (2000 [originally 1949]), who has famously claimed that in World War II at best a quarter of US soldiers involved in frontline action actually fired their guns. Collins (2008: 43–55) discusses this as, among other historical cases, an example of fighting incompetence among soldiers. Generally, there does not appear to be a great difference in fighting incompetence between veteran soldiers and ‘green’ troops (Collins 2008: 49). Against the diverse remedial actions and historical solutions implemented by military organizations struggling to keep their soldiers engaged in violence, the general fact of low fighting competence appears to prevail. The present sophistication in the technology of killing has primarily increased the ratio of friendly fire and bystander hits (Collins 2008: 57–66; Weick 1985). According to Collins (2008: 29), the general inaptness is irremediable as it is the biological hard-wiring of human beings to have so much emotional difficulty at face-to-face violence that has set the problem which the development of social techniques has tended to solve. Fortunately for human welfare, the problem to a large degree still resists solution.

Violent situations can therefore be characterized as situations in which some degree of punctuated cooperation is general as participants’ practical sense is severely challenged, and no regular level of involvement could unambiguously provide stability to coordinating the involvement, 1

In keeping with Collins’ (2008: 24–5) understanding of violence, symbolic or structural violence will not be included in this discussion.

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let alone turn violent engagements into routine accomplishments (cf. Grossman 1995: 5–66). In direct exposure to physical violence, the immediacy of frustration presented by an attack generally suffices to undeniably mark a disruption nullifying any previous level of coordination, rendering equilibration highly dubious. However, once a previous level of involvement has been shaken up, an endogenous order of punctuated cooperation for which Collins coins the paradoxical expression ‘non-solidarity entrainment’ (Collins 2008: 29) does emerge during violent engagements. As in any instance of punctuated cooperation, this is not a level of involvement which would be triggered from without the present situation, for example, by some scheme of collective aggression, or by a collective standard of warfare.2 Instead, the order of violent situation is an endogenous order of punctuated cooperation dealing with the exigencies of response and an unstable state of tension, fear and apprehension among participants. Exit once again is a very salient solution to difficulties of response. The continuation of violent engagements, therefore, usually depends on the effective containment of participants. Conscript armies provide a host of material for studying punctuated cooperation, because they subject involuntary members who are poorly prepared for exposure to violent engagements and who generally hold pronounced preferences to avoid such exposure to increasingly perfected collective technologies for making exit unavailable or unattractive (Collins 2008: 28–9).3 The common perception that situations of violence would be trials of strength among participants with vested interests in aggression against one another, or that aggression would in general prevail just until that particular point at which one of the parties to the fight has clearly ‘lost’, are myths supported primarily by stylized accounts and dramatizations of violence. In empirical runs of violent situations, the exchange of violence is usually very brief (Collins 2008: 14–15). Exceptions to this rule are situations in which participants’ general tendencies to avoid further participation are counteracted by strong and firmly socialized predispositions of specialized participants or by the presence of regulating agents in the run of violent engagements (Collins 2008: 14–19), for example, by an audience watching a fight, by military police or the presence of ‘comrades’ within 2

3

This level of involvement is also not to be equated with a definition of violent situations in a symbolic interactionist sense; cf. Athens (1977, 2005) for investigations of violence in such terms. Athens’ research is one among the few microsociological explorations of violence and would generally deserve a much more detailed discussion than is possible here, given the focus of the chapter. The acculturative stress of organizational socialization briefly discussed above (sections 4.1 and 4.2) therefore tends to be particularly pronounced (cf. Hollingshead 1946).

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military units, by the acquisition of automatic habits in military drills or by the combined effect of such measures cultivated in the conscript armies of nation-states. The rise of the syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder is evidence that even under the highly regularized conditions of contemporary warfare the capacities of human participants for sustaining violent engagements and their experience are clearly limited and, for a considerable share of members of military organizations, likely to be exceeded (e.g. Coleman 2006). The endogenous order of punctuated cooperation, therefore, again has to be categorically differentiated from its normalization. Since violent situations tend to be subject to excessive reruns in times of war, one may ask whether their normalized framing may, nevertheless, if only to some extent, successfully prepare participants for exposure to violence and warfare. Respective learning can hardly be denied and is, in fact, an elementary prerequisite for the collective accommodation of violence and warfare. For Marshall, one consequence of the low firing ratio in World War II was the call for a more realistic form of battle training that would allow soldiers to form adequate expectations and associate them with habitualized sets of adequate responses (Marshall 2000: 36–7, 45–9). Clearly, there are large collective repertoires for keying situations with some degree of violence, from boxing matches to pillow fights and full-scale military battles among ‘nations’; these repertoires are drawn upon in scheduling violent engagements in advance and in developing collective technologies for keeping participants involved. These repertoires support participants in developing strategies for dealing with violent situations, even if training for battle may never completely close the gap with the actual experience of combat (Marshall 2000: 108; Lang 1965: 857). Learned competence in violent engagements may also be based on successfully achieving and maintaining some degree of distanciation, as, for example, in sniping or other ‘confrontation-minimizing terrorist tactics’ (Collins 2008: 381–7, 440–9). Engaging in violence at a distance, attackers may try to avoid engagement in an endogenous order of violent situations to begin with, most effectively perhaps by the use of remote-controlled weapons. If, on the other hand, attackers have to more immediately face their opponents, then it is by mastering ‘cool techniques’ that social rather than physical distance is generated and maintained, allowing participants to exert and sustain face-to-face dominance. Empirically, only a small number of participants are, however, able to successfully achieve such dominance reliably (Collins 2008: 461–2). With respect to the endogenous order of violent engagements, Collins points to certain ‘pathways to violence’ which ‘fit a small number of

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patterns for circumventing the barrier of tension and fear’ (Collins 2008: 8). These pathways can be explored as instances of punctuated cooperation in which the endogenous order of violent situations supports an effective continuation of violent activities and temporarily stable coordination equilibria. One of these pathways to violence is finding a weak victim to attack. The exercise of violence by a clearly dominant coalition of participants may be considered as the chief form in which violence is extended beyond a brief exchange of frustrations (9). Another pathway is provided by an audience supporting the continuation of a violent engagement (9–10). Whilst in the former case confrontational tension is reduced by the inability of select participants to become sources of frustration, in the latter, confrontational tension is alleviated by the presence of a supporting cast of participants. Both cases point to highly unbalanced distributions of violent activities within endogenous orders of violent situations. This aspect is even more evident in the third ‘pathway to violence’ mentioned by Collins, a pathway which, in Collins’ (2008: 82) words, constitutes ‘the most dangerous of all social situations’: the situation of forward panic. In cases of forward panic, a situation of tension and fear is transformed into a frenzied attack. This transformation is experienced by those involved as entering a ‘tunnel’, as a ‘hot rush’ of violence that often leads to more or less indiscriminate forms of aggression and killing (89–94). Collins discusses this particular order of violent engagements with respect to situations in which regular soldiers indiscriminately kill combatants willing to surrender as well as non-combatants (87–9, 94–9), and with respect to a couple of historical battles with one-sided distributions of casualties of combatants (104–12). An endogenous order of punctuated cooperation is particularly visible in these cases as their specific level of confrontation remains very much confined within the actual run of forward panic, and those involved ‘in the aftermath treat their own behavior as if it were a separate reality’ (88). Across these ‘pathways to violence’, two distinct social processes appear to be at work in supporting coordination in violent engagements: the formation of coalitions of participants engaged in violent activities and a process of stratification among participants and coalitions. Those who overcome the uncertainties of confrontational tension and successfully engage in violence invariably take a dominant position with respect to other participants. Collins points to the complementarity of weak and strong participation, for example in cases of domestic abuse (Collins 2008: 137–41) or in cases of war atrocities or genocide (102–4). Cases of progressive stratification in which dominated participants increasingly lose and dominating participants consistently gain leverage are not

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uncommon: participants ending up on the receiving end often give up remaining opportunities of resistance, down to passively accepting being killed (103). In such cases, both subsets of participants contribute to the process of ‘non-solidarity entrainment’, most strikingly perhaps in cases in which weak participants are the majority. Opportunities for collective action are often forgone by coalitions of participants with more collective resources at their disposal than they actually employ in violent confrontations. The more striking observation offered by Collins, however, is that, within the endogenous order of violent activities, the initiative of collective action almost always ends up as the possession of a single dominant coalition. The evenly matched exchange of violence is a rare exception, empirically confined to highly normalized situations, for example, to staged contests like boxing matches, or to front-line military situations when soldiers fight each other at a distance in regular formations controlled by the disciplinary power of a military organization. With respect to endogenous orders of violent situations, an even distribution of activities is simply one of the most prominent ‘fight myths’ (Collins 2008: 10–19). Stratification available by the keying of formalizations, especially of rank and authority, may of course sometimes not support, but interfere with processes of stratification endogenous to situations of violence: the commanding officers of a military unit are often not identical to its most aggressive members or to its most effective killers (Collins 2008: 370– 412). It is nevertheless interesting to note how the collective mechanism which is empirically the most successful (or, rather, the least unsuccessful) in preparing participants for violent engagements, the military drill, incorporates both general aspects of Collins’ ‘pathways to violence’: associating participants within coalitions in advance of violent engagements and stratifying participants by making the initiation of violence a prerogative of those in command. Military drill can be analysed as a form of interaction ritual in which the endogenous order of activities is congenial to the endogenous order of violent engagements and its keying of punctuated cooperation (Collins 2008: 54–7). In a sense then, by anticipating the order of violent engagements, military drill transforms violence into a form of cooperation within coalitions of aggressors trained to minimize contact with potential coalitions of victims. Military drill may thus be analysed as a form of interaction ritual among future aggressors: For when a group of men move their arm and leg muscles in unison for prolonged periods of time, a primitive and very powerful social bond wells up among them. Perhaps even before our prehuman ancestors could talk, they danced around camp fires, rehearsing what they had done in the hunt and what they were going to do next time. Such rhythmic movements created an intense fellow feeling that

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allowed even poorly armed protohumans to attack and kill big game, outstripping far more formidable rivals through efficient cooperation. By virtue of the dance, supplemented and eventually controlled by voice signals and commands, our ancestors elevated themselves to the pinnacle of the food chain, becoming the most formidable of predators. (McNeill 1982: 131)

Can drill overcome everyday tendencies of cooperation in favour of ‘non-solidarity entrainment’? The extent to which violence becomes a well-rehearsed engagement if it is exercised by dominant coalitions of participants trained accordingly in separation from the larger collective (McNeill 1982: 132–3) is evidently open to some empirical variation. Violent engagements among, for example, police forces and demonstrators, however, generally appear to follow the pattern of associating and stratifying participants, including the possibility of reversals of dominance (Collins 2008: 112–18). The question of establishing associating and stratifying participants within a collective in accommodating warfare on a broader and more permanent level will be discussed in a later section of this chapter (5.5). At this point, it suffices to note that situations of violence are situations characterized by punctuated cooperation with an endogenous order of activity, and that this order of activity is likely to involve associating and stratifying participants with respect to dominance, particularly once violence is extended beyond a brief exchange of frustrations. These aspects of the endogenous order of violent engagements only very marginally correspond to the na¨ıve assumption that fights always have to be ‘won’ by one of the parties which, by virtue of such an outcome, becomes the dominant one. Violence is most excessive, and most persistent, in cases in which one of the parties dominates early on, has already won and goes on to further humiliate, maim and kill increasingly passive opponents. 5.2

The cohesion and disintegration of military units

Military organizations and collective efforts to produce violence in a reliable formally organized manner are an obvious focus for investigating the accommodation of violent engagements within collective repertoires of activities and productions of context. In exploring military organizations in the further course of this chapter, the reconstruction of specific historical battles, though, will be neglected, as will be, by and large, the discussion of particular historical trajectories of participants and military units. In the latter respect, the discussion will mostly be confined to the case of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.4 4

For a mild taste of the complexities involved, cf. Ginzberg et al. (1959: 126–36).

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Once engaged in a campaign, military organizations expose their members to the scattering of disastrous disruptions associated with formally organized warfare. Much of members’ work gets to be ‘of an emergency nature’, as Homans (1962: 60) wrote about life on ‘the small warship’. Organizers of collective violence generally appear to expect and accept the loss of life among participants at their command; how to sustain the effectiveness of military units despite ongoing decomposition in battle has been an enduring military concern. Contemporary warfare has extended the scope of this concern towards the acceptance of mass casualties, but it appears to have only very gradually changed the way in which the reliability of military organizations is construed. The preoccupation, for example, with instilling ‘battle morale’ into military units able to withstand the adversities of combat, a preoccupation backed up by, among others, social scientists, can be traced back to, at least, World War I (Travers 1993: 45–8). After World War II, one particular concept has dominated the discussion about why certain military units prove to be able to withstand great adversity, loss of provisioning, technology, life and livelihood without losing much of their ‘battle morale’, while other military units lose it under (somewhat) less severe conditions: the concept of primary group cohesion. The study by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz of the ‘extraordinary tenacity of the German Army’ (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 281) in World War II has remained the paradigmatic articulation of the concept: In the final phase, the German armies were broken into unconnected segments, and the remnants were overrun as the major lines of communication and command were broken. Nevertheless, resistance which was more than token resistance on the part of most divisions continued until they were overpowered or overrun in a way which, by breaking communication lines, prevented individual battalions and companies from operating in a coherent fashion. Disintegration through desertion was insignificant, while active surrender, individually or in groups, remained extremely limited throughout the entire Western campaign. (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 280–1)

Shils and Janowitz then go on to claim that this ‘battle morale’ was not the result of faith in the Nazi ideology among soldiers but rather the outcome of effective ‘primary groups’ sustaining order within military units. Only once ‘disruption of primary group life resulted through separation, breaks in communication, loss of leadership, depletion of personnel, or major and prolonged breaks in supply of food and medical care, such an ascendancy of preoccupation with physical survival developed that there was very little “last-ditch” resistance’ (281). This is, in brief, the primary group thesis of military cohesion: as long as a primary group provides participants with a ‘steady satisfaction of

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primary personality demands’ (281; italics original), military units will be able to sustain their fighting effectiveness, participants are unlikely to desert fellow members and each individual member of the primary group is ‘bound by the expectations and demands of its other members’ (284). The study by Shils and Janowitz enthroned the concept of primary group cohesion as the alleged primary determinant of military effectiveness (Beaumont and Snyder 1980: 26). Use of the concept has since been gradually decoupled from its roots in the analysis of primary groups. ‘Cohesion’ now is sometimes employed as a general measure of military effectiveness and further decomposed and differentiated into measures other than primary group coherence (e.g. Siebold 2007; Kier 1998: 17–18). The title of the original paper by Shils and Janowitz to a certain extent encourages this more general use of the notion of cohesion by speaking of ‘cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht’ rather than of the cohesion and disintegration of primary groups in the Wehrmacht. However, when it comes to reconstructing the empirical argument of Shils and Janowitz and the influence of military organization on primary groups, the central observations by the authors are most suitably represented by discussing cohesion as an expression of actual relationships among members and by treating military effectiveness as a more complex phenomenon. Military effectiveness is a measure on which primary group cohesion may have some leverage but one that is hardly exclusive (MacCoun et al. 2006). Primary group cohesion is investigated by Shils and Janowitz as a result of the collective coping of participants with actual occasions and with one another in a ‘community of experience’ (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 287). The strength of this community of experience is seen by them to correlate, initially, with the commonality of members’ social backgrounds and then, increasingly, with sustained common exposure to military engagements (287–8; cf. George 1971: 303–5). Primary group cohesion emerges from reiterated cooperation that is keyed towards an emergent set of expectations, some of which may be exogenously given by the initial homogeneity of participants, most of which, however, will be endogenously produced and sustained within military units. In this respect, the observations of Shils and Janowitz are congenial to the soldierly notion of comradeship (Marshall 2000: 42–3) and, on a sociological level, to Homans’ notion of cohesiveness resulting from reiterated exchange of social approval among group members (Homans 1961: 88–9). Shils and Janowitz also point to the stratification of primary groups with non-commissioned and junior officers in high-status positions, generally regarded by their men as ‘brave, efficient and considerate’ (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 298). These officers were members of the same community of experience and were in a special

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position to provide other members with gratifications, not least through access to other sections of the military organization and thus to food, decorations or letters from home (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 297; Little 1964: 218–19; Blau 1964: 47). In their analysis of primary group cohesion, Shils and Janowitz employ very elementary sociological intelligence about the formation and endogenous order of social groups and about the ‘communion’ of members as a source of social resources and incentives (cf. Barnard 1968: 148; Homans 1951: 365–8). In the terminology of the present investigation, the concept of cohesion emphasizes relational expectations and the associated set of keys in membership and status, positions and social capital. Instead of ‘non-solidarity entrainment’ in violent situations, Shils and Janowitz focus on solidarity entrainment within particular coalitions of participants. These particular coalitions, as primary groups within military organizations, are taken to produce and sustain social capital in the run of social situations. Social capital is considered to be the major resource and incentive keeping soldiers engaged in violent engagements (cf. Marshall 2000: 43). At the same time, the argument about cohesion and military effectiveness offered by Shils and Janowitz basically remains correlational and a couple of factors moderating the relationship between primary group cohesion and military effectiveness are mentioned. That primary group cohesion and military effectiveness correlate to some extent can be argued with respect to a great variety of historical cases (Janowitz and Little 1974: 110; Beaumont and Snyder 1980), but the significance of the correlation with respect to the influence of other factors has remained a matter of dispute (MacCoun et al. 2006). The impact of moderating variables is most clearly visible in cases in which the correlation between primary group cohesion and military effectiveness is evidently low. An instructive contrast to the Nazi Wehrmacht is the US Army in Vietnam, which underwent no catastrophic reverses and suffered few losses in comparison to the German Army or, indeed, the American Army in World War II. Still, by 1969 the American Army began to disintegrate under comparatively minimal stress. (Savage and Gabriel 1976: 344)

Prominent among the moderating factors mentioned both by Shils and Janowitz and in investigations of the US campaign in Vietnam are distinct aspects of formal military organization. One aspect of this formal organization is the replacement system used by the armies: the German Wehrmacht withdrew complete military units from the front and later redeployed them with replacements which joined the unit away

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from front-line action; time was available to assimilate replacements in primary groups (Shils and Janowitz, 1948: 287–8). The American replacement system, in contrast, did not preserve primary group integrity in a similar manner (Van Creveld 1983: 74–9). The US forces in Vietnam also suffered from ‘rapid rotation in and out of combat units for the sake of “ticket punching”’ (Savage and Gabriel 1976: 371), clearly a bad idea in terms of preserving a community of experience (cf. Moskos, 1970: 141–4). Whilst in the Wehrmacht the non-commissioned and junior officers effectively concatenated primary groups and military bureaucracy (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 297–300), the ‘fragging’ of officers by American soldiers in Vietnam, the killing of superiors by members of primary groups to which officers had little access, documents how military effectiveness may fail to benefit from and even be undermined by primary group cohesion (Savage and Gabriel 1976: 346–50; Lewy 1980: 96; Faris 1977: 459–61). The correlation between primary group cohesion and military effectiveness is therefore moderated, among other factors (Kier 1998: 8–15), by the ability of military organizations to influence primary groups as distinct coalitions among members (Janowitz and Little 1974: 194). Primary group cohesion may correlate with organizational disintegration once influence over these coalitions is lost (Wesbrook 1980; Little 1964: 213). A respective disintegration took place in the German Wehrmacht towards the end of World War II: desertion no longer required an individual effort against primary group pressures and controls, but was often the result of collective choice and action taken by primary groups or even by larger military units (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 286). Primary group cohesion may support military effectiveness and, at the same time, it may fundamentally undermine the command approach to battle (Keegan 1978: 50). Primary group cohesion may become a basis of opposition to military leadership as counter-ideologies are cultivated and collective defences against interventions by the larger organizational environment are put in place (Wesbrook 1980: 257–8; Kier 1998: 15–17). This may start with the negative standing of the officially decorated ‘hero’ among other soldiers (Little 1964: 203) and escalate towards cooperation across primary groups, even across opposing armies, in frustrating the ends of leadership in military bureaucracies. Life in the trenches of World War I is particularly rife with examples of informal group-based structures protecting members from exposure to violent engagements. Anthony Ashworth (1968: 411–15) described various ways in which opponents ritualized offensive activities in order to render them innocuous for everybody across the lines exposed to

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them – and formally inconspicuous for outside observers: aiming, for example, repeatedly at spots away from the ‘enemy’ in order to communicate the intent to maintain a token level of aggression while concealing from superiors the lack of ‘truly’ offensive activities. Across the opposing armies, a ‘live and let live system’ was sustained in response to the bureaucratization of trench warfare (Ashworth 1980: 76–98). The isomorphism of military bureaucracies across nation-states in their ideas of ‘battle morale’, of military initiative and effectiveness, met an opposing isomorphism of counter-organizational coordination within and across primary groups over the front lines (also cf. Axelrod 1984: 73–87). At the end of their famous Hawthorne study, Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson (1968 [originally 1939]: 559) felt the need to emphasize that informal organization is not universally bad. The career of the concept of primary group cohesion in analyses of military organization requires it to be stressed that informal coordination is not universally good either, at least not in terms of military effectiveness. Whilst there is no warrant against the argument by Shils and Janowitz in the latter respect – their argument is frankly correlational and they acknowledge the influence of moderating variables – it is with the relative impact of cohesion on effectiveness and thus with respect to the strength and significance of the correlation that further qualifications are required, even with respect to the paradigm case of high correlation between primary group cohesion and military effectiveness which the Nazi army of World War II appears to offer. 5.3

Hitler’s army

On one level, the debate over group cohesion among historians and social scientists is about the primacy of factors potentially explaining military effectiveness. On another level, the debate is about explaining a broader range of military behaviour which is not altogether well represented by the notion of military effectiveness. In the Wehrmacht case, one such aspect is what Omer Bartov (1985) has called the barbarization of warfare: excessive aggression and brutality levelled against enemy soldiers, prisoners of war and all kind of non-combatants. In his analysis of ‘Hitler’s army’, Bartov offers an account that is deliberately at odds with what he perceives as the ‘widely accepted sociological theory of Shils and Janowitz’, which he deems ‘largely irrelevant to conditions particularly on the Eastern front’ (Bartov 1991: 5). Like Shils and Janowitz, he acknowledges the ‘remarkable cohesion and battle performance’ of the Nazi troops (5) but

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during the first six months of fighting in the Soviet Union most of the preconditions presented by Shils and Janowitz as bound to lead not only to the disintegration of the ‘primary group,’ but by extension also to the breakup of the army as a whole, already existed. Yet while the ‘primary groups’ did more or less disappear, the army fought with far greater determination and against far greater odds than at any other time in the past. (Bartov 1991: 33)

In focusing on the role of Nazi ideology and thus on what for Shils and Janowitz (1948: 281) are ‘secondary symbols’, Bartov aims to provide an alternative explanation for the military effectiveness of the German army and an account of its effectiveness at the Eastern Front, despite the lack of primary groups. The argument differentiates military units within the Wehrmacht with respect to the existence and viability of primary groups and to military effectiveness at different front lines. Shils and Janowitz claim to discuss the army as a whole – although they leave room for interpretation with respect to their sample, in which troops deployed at the Western Front are probably overrepresented.5 Bartov notes that primary groups survived in greater numbers at the Western Front and that there, very little ‘last-ditch’ resistance occurred, indicating ‘precisely the opposite of what Shils and Janowitz have tried to demonstrate’ (Bartov 1991: 34). Troops at the Eastern Front, despite the apparent lack of primary group cohesion, ‘fought till the bitter end’ (34) and, according to Bartov, they did so because they were indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. This ideology had soldiers reasoning that a Russian victory would spell the end not only of their military units and armies but also of their homes, families, if not of civilization as a whole, something which ‘indeed could only be understood in terms of a universal apocalypse’ (35). For Bartov, the indoctrination of the common Wehrmacht soldier, his officers and generals by Nazi ideology provides the crucial lead to understanding why military units at the Eastern Front fought the way they did (Bartov 1985: 68–105). The indoctrination of Wehrmacht soldiers was the outcome of a progressive diffusion of Nazi ideology throughout the Wehrmacht organization. Exposition and commitment to Nazi ideology for the common soldier was not at all a mere matter of faith or political conviction. Nazi ideology was communicated by propaganda but also and, perhaps most crucially, by disciplinary practices reflecting the alleged ideological mission of the Wehrmacht at the Eastern Front once ‘the Wehrmacht’s 5

Shils and Janowitz (1948: 282) refer to unspecified research in Great Britain and North Africa and to subsequent surveys among prisoners of war conducted by the intelligence section of the Psychological Warfare Division. In the course of their paper, though, the argument nevertheless shifts towards discussing the Eastern Front (292, 301), while no sources of additional data are given.

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legal system adapted itself to the so-called Nazi Weltanschauung, with all its social-Darwinist, nihilist, expansionist, anti-Bolshevik, and racist attributes. This it applied to its real and perceived enemies, and to its own men’ (Bartov 1991: 70). Whilst in the West, irregular behaviour by soldiers towards civilians was met with unrelentless punishment and the most severe disciplinary measures, Hitler’s Barbarossa decree of May 1941 made any prosecution of soldiers depend on evidence ‘that by committing these offenses a soldier had simultaneously breached military discipline’ (Bartov 1991: 70). If this was indeed the case, then the punishment was severe. If the soldier though had not breached military discipline, then he had much discretion in acting against civilians and was generally free to rape, pillage and kill (Bartov 1985: 119–41). This barbarization (Verwilderung) of military conduct levelled against real, perceived and would-be enemies was combined with strict internal discipline of the troops, a marriage of two superficially contrarian tendencies of regulation that in practice did not contradict but effectively complemented one another since ‘contrary to the expectations of some generals, it was precisely because, rather than in spite of what they called the Verwilderung of the troops, that it became possible to enforce such brutal combat discipline on them without stirring any visible spirit of rebellion, let alone actual mutiny’ (Bartov 1991: 72; italics original). In this way, Hitler’s army at the Eastern Front was, in Bartov’s words (Bartov 1991: 72), ‘held together by a combination of harsh combat discipline and a general license to barbarism toward the enemy’. The ‘logic’ of Nazi ideology and its understanding of warfare in the East were, of course, transmitted to the soldier also by way of political propaganda; propaganda narratives were reproduced widely in front-line sense-making and the framing of activities by common soldiers (Fritz 1996). The constructions of the enemy offered by Nazi propaganda can clearly be identified in soldiers’ accounts of regular military action and, for example, in their perceptions of genocidal engagements. In the perception of the ordinary soldier, the ‘distorted features of the tortured and butchered served as evidence of their own, rather than of their murderers’ inhumanity’ (Bartov 1991: 107). Nazi ideology proved particularly effective in absorbing potentially dissonant information, for example in receiving the news of the failed assassination attempt after which ‘Hitler’s “salvation” even further enhanced his divine aura’ (170). Bartov’s analysis of letters written by soldiers indicates how, even when confronting their own annihilation, for example during the reverse at Stalingrad, soldiers generally accepted ‘the propagandistic line that the military disaster whose victims they had become was a necessary step toward the Endsieg’

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(167). Not only are soldiers’ letters devoid of criticism of how the military campaign was conducted and of the Nazi regime as a whole (both of which could be an effect of censorship), but also Nazi ideology was expressed and utilized deliberately in the production of front-line context. For those officers and generals who translated Nazi ideology into formal military policies and organizational doctrines, this ideology substantially helped to frame military events and activities on a more aggregate level, most particularly after the initial strategy of overpowering the Soviet Union with a Blitzkrieg type of campaign could no longer serve as a guideline for military action. Although ‘ever since the collapse of the Kaiserheer the German officer corps had been searching for a new set of ideas which would form the crucial link between effective action and spiritual commitment’ (Bartov 1991: 127), the conversion of the Wehrmacht’s military elite from technocratic to fascist concepts of military goals and strategies, of racial supremacy and of nations competing for Lebensraum took place at precisely the point when the Eastern campaign was stalling ¨ (cf. Berghahn 1969; Forster 1997: 270–2): Confronted with a battle ideology which no longer corresponded to their previous image of war, and with an enemy who could not be overcome by employing familiar military methods, German soldiers now accepted the Nazi vision of war as the only one applicable to their situation. It was at this point that the Wehrmacht finally became Hitler’s army. (Bartov 1991: 28)

Of course, this was possible also because ‘a large proportion of the Wehrmacht’s officers and men shared some key elements of the National Socialist world-view’ (28), especially younger members who had been brought up in the Nazi era and had been socialized to some extent in political organizations like the Hitlerjugend (108–18). It is indeed hard to imagine that to anybody socialized in Nazi youth organizations, faith in its ideological framework and the leadership of Hitler could have been secondary concerns, dominated by inclusion in primary groups and disintegrating with these groups. Yet this is just what Shils and Janowitz (1948: 305–6) claim when pointing to the early strength and late weakening of the ‘Hitler symbol’. With respect to the question of whether ideology or group cohesion is the decisive factor in explaining military conduct and effectiveness, the claims by Shils and Janowitz on the one hand, and by Bartov on the other, therefore are evidently at odds. One weakness shared by both accounts is that problems of engaging in violence in the actual run of social situations are not systematically considered; both accounts are vulnerable to the charge by Collins (2008: 20) that theories of violence

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would be focusing too much on alleged motivations of engaging in violent activities and in this way implicitly assume that violence would be easy once the motivation to engage in it is assured. More importantly, though, once considerations of Collins’ pathways to violence are brought into the mix of correlates of military conduct and effectiveness, the differences between emphasizing ideological indoctrination and group cohesion gradually dissolve. Both ultimately refer to the exchange of social resources among members of military units as distinct coalitions: the idea of group cohesion refers mostly to the exchange of social approval among members; the idea of ideological indoctrination refers to a wider circulation of cultural capital within military units, armies and nationstates. Nazi ideology as cultural capital rested on a particular competence among soldiers, from common soldiers to officers and generals, in taking up and utilizing information in productions of front-line context in terms of associations and coalitions (cf. Mann 2004: 140–7). Indoctrination, like the ecology of primary group life, was congenial with the association of members in stratified coalitions striving for dominance in violent engagements – in the Shils–Janowitz argument, with leadership of primary groups by NCOs, and, in Bartov’s argument, with the ideology ¨ of the ‘Fuhrerprinzip’ building a tight line of command across hierarchies of soldiers, officers and generals, turning a military bureaucracy into ‘Hitler’s army’. Both the primary group cohesion and the ideological indoctrination accounts of military effectiveness are therefore consistent on a broader level with the two general social processes – association and stratification of participants – characterizing Collins’ ‘pathways to violence’, although the effects of ideological indoctrination are more clearly ridden with certain collective prerequisites transcending the run of violent engagements: participants need to be socialized somewhat homogenously (cf. Blake 1970: 336–41) if the keying of activities is to produce the kind of counterfactual framing visible in the Wehrmacht case and if ‘competence’ in producing context consonant with Nazi ideology is not to be deconstructed or simply disattended by participants. One may then ask whether ideological indoctrination can retain its effectiveness in the long term and, especially, under devastating circumstances, if ideological compliance is not continuously translated into an exchange of social approval among members attuned to a particular form of cultural (symbolic, ideological) capital to start with. In this respect, the case of Hitler’s army may be historically special in that its members were indeed a sample of participants drawn from a population particularly predisposed towards associating in stable and stratified coalitions, towards sustaining

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an ideologically supported framing of actual occasions compatible with maximizing the resilience of groups (cf. Kohut 2012). In looking at Hitler’s army as the result of a particular trajectory of military and social development, the historical perspective on the transformation of Germany’s military forces can be extended. The Wehrmacht drew participants from a collective that was arguably historically already somewhat attuned to its particular style of leadership, emerging from collective experiences with compulsory military service leading back to the Prussian army of the nineteenth century. The complementary character of primary group cohesion and ideological indoctrination characterizing Hitler’s army and its deeper historical roots makes the Prusso-German case an almost ideal exhibit for considering the implications of a longitudinal understanding of how repeated runs of violent situations may change a collective towards accommodating violent engagements in a particular manner – not by making the enactment and experience of violence entirely normal among participants, most of which were, after all, conscript civilians and, to use Browning’s (1992) famous expression, ‘ordinary men’, but by collectively generating and sustaining social resources making soldiers and the military organization into which they ¨ were drafted amenable to the exigencies of Nazi warfare (Forster 1988). The peculiar sociohistorical character of Hitler’s army therefore draws attention to the fact that precarious engagements in violent situations may be supported by a larger collective that is providing somewhat predisposed participants, equipping them with biographies, strategies and practical sense congenial to forming coalitions and enacting stratification. It shows that the production of order within violent situations is embedded not only in multiple runs of activity among specific groups of participants and, via the association in coalitions, in military organizations that may support or frustrate primary group cohesion among members, but also, via military organizations, via states and political organizations, in a larger historical collective. Furthermore, the case illustrates how specific participants and coalitions may utilize the respective trajectories of participants and keys in order to pursue partisan goals. 5.4

The multiple normalizations of warfare

Hallett and Ventresca (2006: 226–8), in their reconstruction of Gouldner’s succession study discussed in the previous chapter (see 4.3), point to the ‘double embedding’ of organized cooperation in both local runs of situations and broader ‘extra-local’ forms of social order. Military organizations engaged in warfare exemplify such double embedding: the

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ability to sustain military action is a product of bringing about, running and connecting situated activities on the one hand, and of controlling and manipulating transsituational trajectories of participants and keys which transcend specific military engagements and the reach of military bureaucracies on the other (cf. Rosen 1995; Vollmer 2010). These trajectories across situations and social fields, as well as the run of activities in each violent engagement, are made subject to organized efforts at keying activities that are congenial to collective understandings of how violence should be exercised. The run of violent situations will punctuate cooperation and result in some degree of ‘practical drift’ (Snook 2000: 192–7); the productions of context thus brought about may or may not be compatible with military efforts to maintain appropriately keyed engagements. Participants confronted with respective matches and mismatches will adjust their understanding of violence and warfare, its exigencies and problems, accordingly, all of this leading to further accommodations – and to multiple normalizations of capacities to engage in violence cultivated within the collective. The multiple embedding of runs of collective violence in various sets of situations, in military manoeuvres, campaigns, strategies, political projects, careers and so on, produces irritations beyond a situation at hand, which may, as in succession cases, challenge the social order maintained within a broader field of distributed participants and keys. By producing frustration, stress or threat, or by motivating further investments into collective violence, warfare tends to punctuate cooperation within a larger collective, even among people that have themselves seen little or no violence at all and are unlikely to experience any. The spread of punctuated cooperation across a social field involves reiterated reframing of collective violence and its appropriate organization and keying, as well as accommodation across expectations and strategies that may, possibly, be more implicit and less easily recognized. As in most cases of punctuated cooperation, discursive normalizations of events and activities are easy to see, but they are still often hard to characterize as normalizations that are partial and selective rather than somewhat natural and given. To effectively realize the scale of multiple normalizations which generations of participants within and beyond the military forces of a collective have put in place in coping with the disruptiveness of violence and warfare would require an effort in historical sociology which the present investigation is unable to deliver. The general fact that accommodating violent engagements in larger sets of collective engagements motivates normalizations and accommodations, though, can be established quite sufficiently by exploring a couple of empirical examples – the scope of

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which is sure to offer a dire underestimate of the overall extent of normalization and accommodation which the exercise of violence of warfare has been subject to during the history of the species. In very general terms, the exercise of violence by a specialized coalition always means that this coalition needs to be supported by the larger collective. The current pattern of paid specialists as members of military bureaucracies can be traced back to the Italian city-state of the fourteenth century (McNeill 1982: 74–9). The development of armed forces varies across human collectives, but historical dynamics have tended to bring about some degree of isomorphism, especially across collectives that are geographically close to one another. The pattern of organizing collective violence at work, for example, in Hitler’s army, can be traced to a specifically Prussian, then German trajectory, but one that is of course not altogether disconnected from developments in other armed forces, especially European ones. Michael Mann (1993: 433) considers the German army of World War I to have been ‘the best army in the world’, with the ‘best NCO cadre to segmentally instill its values below’ (434); McNeill (1982: 154–5) praises the ‘superior rigor’ of Prussia’s organization for war as the outcome of persistent military reforms (215– 16). Some of the Wehrmacht’s resilience and viciousness clearly originated in a tradition of military organization pioneering the devolution of decision-making down towards the level of the non-commissioned officer (Martin 2009: 280) and in a collective idealization of universal military obligations and of ‘people in arms’ (McNeill 1982: 218– 19), favouring primary group formation and the adoption of militaristic ideologies across soldiers, afforded by the collective from which they were drafted and which was to reabsorb them. Many Prussian innovations in warfare, particularly with respect to the mass mobilization of citizens – which can in turn be traced back to military innovations of the French Revolution (McNeill 1982: 200) – were adopted by other armed forces (McNeill 1982: 253; Giddens 1987a: 229–30). As in the Prusso-German case,6 the historical organization of collective violence within distinct social fields can be reconstructed as a correlate of both the historical growth of formally organizing warfare within the collective and, for example, in nation-states, and the competition among collectives in which ‘the most powerful rulers in any particular region set the terms of war for all’ (Tilly 1992: 15). Preparing for and engaging in warfare in each case is articulated in activities of ‘routine institutionalized 6

For an alternative example, see Travers’ (1993: 38–43) description of the Edwardian army.

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provisioning’ (Goffman 1974: 250) for the specialized coalition acting as the armed force within the collective. One aspect of the normalization of collective violence that is often associated with the formal organization of armed forces these days is the expectation that military campaigns are occasions for collective learning. As Marshall (2000: 109) has put it somewhat loftily: ‘The ground itself is the teacher; one must be ready to apply its lessons with a fresh mind.’ A broad and popular literature about military failures addresses the layman as well as the specialist. The outcome of public discourse about military performances is very much an exemplification of the dynamics of post-disaster tribunals discussed earlier (see above, 4.4): ill-structured problems are turned into well-structured problems which in the final analysis again often turn out to have been structured just as ill (Turner 1976). That military failure is generally a failure to learn is one among many normalizations imposed on military engagements retrospectively. Of course, it does find plenty of empirical evidence to work with. Cohen and Gooch, in their broad-based review, point, for example, to the failure of US leaders to fully understand the Korean situation prior to the North Korean debacle of their forces in the aftermath of World War II, illustrating a proclivity of military organizations to see all wars as pretty much the same (Cohen and Gooch 1991: 192–5). The failure of the French army in Word War II to respond adequately to the German Blitzkrieg strategy is another obvious case of inappropriate learning (Cohen and Gooch 1991: 210–30). There are also clear cases of isomorphism in failures to learn: the armies of Word War I struggled miserably to understand the implications of industrialized warfare (Travers 1993: 85); slow, if not unable, to see how unprecedented fire-power challenged the traditional image of the human battlefield in which the demoralization of the enemy was the ultimate objective (Travers 1993: 70–1). Military professionals across all the major European armies at that particular time shared a fascination with the offensive (Travers 1993: 38; Snyder 1984: 10), an attachment associated by Snyder (1984: 26–30), as by Cohen and Gooch (1991: 12–13), with an organizational need for simplicity and stable structure which Travers (1987: 363; 1993: 97) traces, for the British Army, to a staff college paradigm of normal war. Travers portrays the working of this paradigm as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which catastrophic failures of the ‘offensive spirit’, ill suited to the situation of trench warfare, led military leaders to push and control their troops harder, to send them out of their trenches even more emphatically, to certain annihilation (Travers 1993: 51–3). The ideology of the offensive is one of the clearest and most devastating historical cases of a particular organizational doctrine in the sense

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of Selznick (1966: 48–76), a doctrine governing military thought and decision-making across European armies. One might see the doctrine as the outcome of a prior learning process and as an example of militarists having learned and normalized too thoroughly (Marshall 2000: 24–5). Historically, the doctrine combined with a tendency of military organizations to plan future engagements in a very comprehensive manner (e.g. Davis 1948: 149; Lang 1965: 857), resulting in the almost mechanistic processes of mobilization across European armed forces at the beginning of World War I (Mann 1993: 762–3; McNeill 1982: 305–6; cf. Sagan 1991). In both respects, the behaviour of military organizations in World War I arguably epitomizes an upkeying of organizational stress (see above, 4.2). For most observers and evaluators of military action, military failures of this nature have been leading to criticism of military preparation and training. Keegan (1978: 18–20), for example, generally criticizes the ‘procedural approach to war’ visible in military training, and Marshall (2000: 10), in his post-World War II assessment, sees training systems and standards of battle as still rooted in eighteenth-century concepts. One also, however, needs to take into account the general limits on rehearsing in advance engagements the disruptive character of which can only be simulated very partially (cf. Goffman 1974: 62–5). For military organizations, as for other organizations, training can generally do little else than expose members to expectations valid at the time of training (cf. Simon 1997: 220–2) – and not to the actual occasions to which the individual soldier will be exposed on the battlefield (Simon 1997: 308–9). Recognition of such gaps redirects collective investigations into the appropriate coordination of warfare from the training of soldiers and military professionals to the demands of leadership in the field of military action. The overall image of how military authority is to be exercised among combatants has changed across the major armed forces around the globe throughout the twentieth century, from concepts of hierarchical domination of indiscriminate masses of soldiers towards an understanding of leadership as the animation and manipulation of initiative among a diversity of members (cf. Janowitz 1960: 38–51). High-status members of military and civilian organizations have been cultivating overlapping interests in ‘human relations’ (Bendix 1963: 319–40) and consultants have jumped at the chance of exploiting apparent analogies of military and civilian leadership (e.g. Wills 1994). The management of ideology and organizational doctrine in times of crises is an instance of such analogies (Starbuck et al. 1978: 132–3), but the idea of charismatic leadership has generally received most of the attention, maybe because it resonates so well with the problem of manipulating co-present participants

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(Janowitz and Little 1974: 102–3). Despite significant experimental studies of charismatic leadership and small-group behaviour (e.g. Howell and Frost 1989), reliable data about the actual impact of charismatic leadership on military units in battle is lacking (Keithly and Tritten 1997: 132). One of the problems inherent in the very idea of charismatic leadership is that it is perhaps not easily reconciled with the information-processing demands of command (Martin 2009: 248–9; cf. Weick 1989: 141). Being an emergent product of associations reiterated in multiple runs of activity (Martin 2009: 191–5), charisma is also hard to be awarded to participants formally, and tensions between informal and formal status are prone to interfere with leadership claims. Maybe the primary sociological significance of leadership discourse is that it expresses a collective quest to develop a normal understanding of processes of stratification genuine to violent situations and, possibly, to other forms of punctuated cooperation, whether in business organizations or other settings (cf. Binmore 1998: 335–6). The idea of leadership marks one aspect of coordination – the stratification of participants – as particularly worthy of collective attention; whether military professionals and their consultants have indeed developed concepts of leadership that are effectively able to support a respective normalization is, however, not quite clear. The focus on communication dominating Marshall’s influential treatment (Marshall 2000: 86–101, 118–20, 132–48) has remained one of the more promising leads (Janowitz and Little 1974: 107; Beaumont and Snyder 1980: 34–5; Wesbrook 1980: 267–8). Academic experts, numerous professionals and consultants have been involved in the normalization and collective accommodation of violence and warfare. Setting up the run of violent engagements incorporates numerous conventions about the use of force which are often challenged by and renegotiated among expert members of a collective. If conventional normalizations are contested, then they can turn into issues of contractual arrangement and collective jurisdiction, from the institutionalization of compulsory conscription to the Geneva Convention and the International Court of Justice. These legal normalizations redistribute rights of bringing about, sustaining and being involved in violence and warfare. Across nation-states, legal professions have gradually taken control of the respective redistributions as feudal obligations to participate in collective violence have gradually been replaced with ‘blanket legal ones’ (Martin 2009: 277). Medicine is another profession involved in normalizing violence and warfare, a good example of which is the diagnosis and treatment of ‘combat neuroses’ among soldiers in World War I (Eckart 2000). These ‘neuroses’ are a direct result of violent engagements and their confrontational tension (Weinberg 1946: 471). Beginning in World

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War I, soldiers suffering psychologically and somatically from the battlefield experience have been placed under medical supervision, to be either pathologized (as sick and requiring extensive therapy, the means of which were often brutal) or criminalized as malingerers (Eckart 2000: 143–8; ¨ Brockling 1997: 207–30). Medical professionals have been cultivating fictions of soldiers’ normal functioning by pathologizing deviation, levelling professional treatment of war neuroses at sick participants rather than at sick engagements. Psychiatric expertise has been forthcoming, complementing and, to some extent, displacing the medicalization of the ‘combat neuroses’ and taking control of associated assessments of combat motivation (Wessely 2006). During the last couple of decades psychiatrists have successfully been extending their jurisdiction on the handling of battlefield experiences to include potentially all soldiers and combatants (cf. Greenbaum et al. 1977: 21): After our deployment we’ll go to a hotel in Germany, with psychologists an’ stuff, and then we’ll talk about that. (Chauvistr´e 2010: 13)7

The accommodation of violent engagements, the formal organization, embedding and keying of runs of violence and warfare in larger sets of situations and collective engagements correlates with a wide variety of normalizations – of how violence is to be brought about, how it is to be sustained and regulated and how it is, eventually, to be stopped.8 The failure or effectiveness of military organizations in managing the respective demands is just one, and a very general, form of normalizing runs of violence that have taken place in terms of aggregate assessments. Historians such as Keegan (1978: 44–5) have been warning against the ‘outcome approach’ to military history. Normalizations of organized violence and its outcomes primarily reveal how collectives evaluate complex and extended runs of warfare and how the task of committing participants to ‘non-solidarity entrainment’ is resolved in a more or less ramshackle manner. Extrapolating from the discussions in the preceding chapters of this investigation, neither the actual experience nor the actual effects of entrainment in collective violence are likely to be represented adequately by such (or other) normalizations. The continuous discourse about military training recognizes this difference, calling for military organizations ‘to inculcate in their members a relentless empiricism, a disdain for a priori theorizing if they are to succeed’ (Cohen and Gooch 1991: 236). 7

8

Statement by a German soldier in Afghanistan upon being asked whether he wondered about the military strategy and ultimate goals of the German mission (newspaper article; my translation). The latter is a notoriously tricky problem (Ikl´e 2005).

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The inequalities involved in producing violence and warfare need, to some extent, to be collectively ratified and backed up, especially if a major share of the collective stand to suffer from such engagements. Accommodations of violence and warfare are not collective adjustments that would be legitimate by default; after all, they imply maintaining and regulating participation in engagements which members of the collective would by and large rather want to avoid. It is beyond the scope of this investigation to discuss, or merely to list, the various social processes and technologies involved in attempts to govern members’ trajectories accordingly. Accommodation need neither be fair nor, evolutionarily speaking, need it in any way be particularly intelligent. The case of Hitler’s army suffices to show that success in the sense of sustained ‘fighting power’ need not necessarily correlate with ‘relentless empiricism’ with respect to the realities of the field (cf. Van Creveld 1983: 173–4) or to the realities of warfare more generally. The Nazi accommodation of collective violence as a particular normalization of warfare surely did not provide a particularly bright understanding of military action, even though it was able to temporarily sustain the effectiveness of the German forces. The transformation of the Wehrmacht into Hitler’s army was not a result of accommodating warfare unilaterally to the exigencies of violent engagements, but of accommodating it with respect to both military action and (fateful) collective activities and trajectories on a larger historical scale. It is to the broader scale of redistributions within collectives accommodating violence and warfare that the next section will now turn. Such redistributions involve possibilities of collective action which may be at odds with prior normalizations of violence and warfare and which may, sometimes, redirect collective violence against that particular coalition within the collective which had expected to control its exercise. 5.5

Redistribution, domination and contention

Collective violence is a particular form of collective action (see e.g. Tilly 2003: 3–4). As such, it is hard to bring about and sustain in a planned and coordinated manner as the situational ‘pathways’ to violence have continued to resist normalization (Collins 2008: 29). Nazi ideology may in some respects have been a close miss, but engaging in warfare generally places a more than merely ideological burden on a collective that has to invest a good share of its overall resources in order to commit its members to violent engagements and maintain adequate levels of institutional provisioning. Historically, some of these investments appear to have paid off beyond military campaigns originally motivating them by pushing collectives to experiment with extensive forms of organized cooperation

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deemed successful enough to be perpetuated in times of peace and in various fields of organized cooperation. Many times have the requirements of military power induced a certain ‘reorganizing spirit’ (Mann 1986: 20), bringing about redistributions within collectives, which subsequently turned out to be of a more permanent nature. These redistributions have generally tended to result in a centralization of resources and means of coordination. Two historical patterns are evident in dynamics of centralization: processes of domination on the one hand, and of contention on the other. Whilst it is surely tempting to look at these processes in terms of conceptual oppositions, such as repression versus revolution or power versus resistance, both turn out to originate in quite similar conditions and lead to somewhat similar results. Historically, they appear to effectively complement one another. Totalizing warfare The harrowing episodes of ‘total war’ in the twentieth century define an apparent extreme. Historians have been emphasizing that total warfare ¨ was not invented in 1914 (e.g. Forster 2000: 2–3; Strachan 2000). What did emerge in the Great War was in fact the contemporary concept of ¨ total war (Forster 2000: 6): the idea to commit a highly differentiated collective comprehensively to the single mission of defeating another collective by attacking it in all of its potential abilities to resist (Chickering 2000: 35–6). As a normalization of collective violence, the concept is simple enough. The requirements of institutional provisioning in actually implementing such a total commitment, however, are complex and had to be hastily improvised across the nations involved in World War I, all of which initially expected the war to be short and were unprepared for the long struggle that it eventually became (Chickering 2000: 52–3). As more and more resources were drawn into the war efforts, ‘[time-]tested customs and institutions became soft and malleable in the hands of rival technological elites who made millions into soldiers and other millions into war workers’ (McNeill 1982: 317). The second phase of World War I, especially – from 1916 to 1918, which started with a further intensification of German mobilization – brought about fundamental changes across the nations. These redistributions pioneered, as McNeill (1982: 330–46) argues, ‘planned economies’, which, fundamentally, stayed intact after the war and were refined in World War II (350–60), and which became normal afterwards in all industrially advanced countries (364). One may, of course, question the extent to which these command economies in each case continued to marginalize other mechanisms of

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distribution and coordination within the collectives that had set them up in their respective war efforts. The historically unprecedented character of the increase in scope and complexity of formally organized cooperation gained as a result of such efforts, though, can hardly be denied. Giddens (1987a: 237–41) rehearses McNeill’s general evaluation with respect to the integration of technological research and development in industrial organizations coordinated within networks of public and private bureaucracies. Giddens sees a ‘fateful conjunction’ of science and technology as the ‘principal medium of industrial advancement’ that the ‘Great War’ brought about (Giddens 1987a: 237) and which later, during World War II, was completed in a systematic fashion (241). Among the numerous examples of organizational innovations, the diffusion of standard models of personnel management and employment relationships may be a central, yet often underestimated factor embedding industrial relations in nation-wide networks of coordination (Baron et al. 1986). Whilst the advancement of personnel psychology has attracted some interest from sociologists (cf. Janowitz 1960: 45–6), the role of the various nonengineering professions in the coordination of organized cooperation from episodes of total war towards episodes of relative peace has yet to be comprehensively examined. As illustrated by the rise of cost accounting in Great Britain, a development that received a major push during the British munitions crisis (Armstrong 1987: 423–5; cf. Grieves 2000), the role of financial experts may merit particular attention.9 Collective mobilizations for war have been the chief occasions of state expansion ‘from ad 990 onward’ (Tilly 1992: 70). Episodes of collective violence may indicate a possibly more general role of punctuated cooperation in the formation of states and, particularly, in the case of nation-states (see next section). The emergent potential for coordinated collective action is most visible in the growth of state bureaucracies (see e.g. Porter 1980), but the emergent coordination of formally organized cooperation across organizations is not restricted to organizations holding some form of military power or a political mandate to govern. Participants across historical collectives have been recognizing war as a window of opportunity to advance projects of coordination within and beyond 9

Following Peter Armstrong (1987: 432), at least in Great Britain, accountants managed to put themselves in positions in which they were able to interpret crises and ‘sponsor their own characteristic solutions’. The German command economy of World War I was clearly rooted in the feudal Prussian heritage (McNeill 1982: 339); the terrifying ‘accounting logic’ behind the Nazi economy and its association with the economies of genocide is well documented (e.g. Gerlach 1999; Tooze 2006). A systematic appraisal of the trajectories of German accounting professionals and their networks through World War II and, more particularly, beyond the war has, to my knowledge, yet to be pursued.

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bureaucracies of which they were members (cf. Noble 1977: 152–4, 206– 23). Sociologists have been analysing these projects somewhat selectively, with Lasswell’s (1941) garrison state hypothesis offering something of a paradigm for later explorations of the ‘military-industrial complex’ (e.g. Melman 1970, 1997). Without a doubt, the industrialization of warfare from technology to personnel has been playing a leading role in the historical transition to managed economies (McNeill 1982: 224) and military-industrial complexes have spread swiftly from late nineteenth-century Great Britain to other industrialized countries (McNeill 1982: 269–99). However, one may also ask whether the industrialization of warfare and the preparation for future wars may not be a typical case of a ‘rhetoric of organization’ obfuscating a form of social change that is only very partially directed by discrete interests that could be isolated within a network of coordinated cooperation (White 2008: 215–16). It may be more appropriate to investigate redistributions of resources in collective war efforts, even if they are empirically associated with the more total forms of contemporary warfare, as a gradual process of amplifying forms of dominance within networks and associations of participants among which the formal keying of cooperation by authority, domain or post is already well established (Kruse 2009). Against this backdrop, the rhetoric of total war may of course have a significance of its own. Although the extent to which appeals like Goebbels’ ‘total war’ speech in 1943 probably had little practical significance with respect to processes of organizing for total war that were well underway since (at least) the second half of the 1930s (e.g. Overy 1988: 613), such appeals may be analysed as attempts at keynoting. Public speeches may represent the more visible cases of keynoting coordination and, as such, represent only a small sample of collective keynoting activities, much of which may be constrained to elite circles of decision-makers. The public keynote may certainly tip balances of coordination within a collective by making certain coordination equilibria more salient to participants, not least by marginalizing other options, as Turner and Killian (1972: 89) note: ‘Acclaim received from even a small portion of the crowd may create fear in those who disagree that they hold an unpopular, minority viewpoint.’ However, Turner and Killian are thinking of situations characterized by some degree of ‘milling’ which are less clearly structured than situations like the one in which Goebbels’ speech took place. Perhaps public keynotes like the ‘total war’ speech are also significant indicators of the recognition by high-status participants that their position in a centralizing network of collective action is not secure and that they need to actively generate support and marginalize resistance in order not to

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be overrun by competing projects of coordinating collective action. But the ability of public keynotes to introduce keys, metaphors and analogies which are later reused in finding salient solutions to coordination problems should not be underestimated. Resistance and revolution The risks faced and recognized by high-status participants involved in coordinating collective violence are historically very much evident. As Tilly (1992: 186) notes, ‘all of Europe’s great revolutions, and many of its lesser ones, began with the strains imposed by war’. One source of resistance may originate from the need to centralize resources in order to maintain a level of military action ‘required’ by competing powers. This assumption is central to the famous work by Behrens (1967) on the French Revolution and Skocpol’s (1979) study of France, Russia and China, both branded by Mann (1993: 168) as ‘fiscal-military revisionism’: in the cases analysed by Behrens and, comparatively, by Skocpol, pressures on collective resources imposed by military competitors lead to dynamics of contention which ultimately turn out to displace prior stratifications of participants and coalitions, changing comprehensively the distribution of participants and resources. Military requirements drain the fiscal resources of states and increasingly come to affect the trajectory of participants by requiring more and more manpower and resources – redistributions which people faced with these extractions of livelihood in fact often choose to resist. According to Mann (1993: 224–5), all western revolutions have indeed been triggered in this way. The revolutions in France, Russia and China illustrate that, whilst an actual run of collective violence may not be needed to initiate a dynamic of contention that turns into a revolution, violent engagements and the requirements of accommodation play a crucial role in escalating revolutionary dynamics: in the case of France, first through the fiscal pressures imposed by military engagement prior to the revolution (Skocpol 1979: 60–4), then through extended violent engagements of revolutionary France with other European forces and the years of Montagnard terror (Skocpol 1979: 185–90); in China, through a mix of foreign intrusions and domestic rebellions (Skocpol 1979: 73–7); in Russia, again, through the military engagements of the old regime and then, of course, its breakdown during World War I (Skocpol 1979: 94–9). The interesting thing to notice about dynamics of redistribution such as these is that domination and contention are in many respects equivalent patterns of cooperation: both types of process involve participants in making claims on other participants’ claims and capacities (cf. Tilly 2008: 5–7); both

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are subject to deliberate, outspoken and reflexive attempts to redistribute social resources; both presuppose a relative centralization of resources to begin with (cf. Lindenberg 1989). Opposing supposedly liberating revolutionary dynamics and patently repressive forms of domination, therefore, would assume a false dichotomy. The observation by Hertzler (1940: 157–8) of ‘the fact that dictatorships, regardless of their constitutional or unorthodox nature, are a pattern of control which the logic of circumstances often tends to thrust upon people when certain crisis situations prevail’ sounds somewhat apologetic but also very much on point and based on a broader assessment of historical data. In studying thirty-five dictatorships, Hertzler (1940: 160) finds that ‘practically every dictatorship examined has been preceded by a period of confusion and emergency which terminated in crisis’ (also cf. Binmore 1998: 335–6). The French Revolution, like the Russian and the Chinese cases, certainly fits the pattern: in France, the liberal phase of the revolution was terminated by the engagement with the other European powers (Skocpol 1979: 185–96) as a ‘dictatorial and arbitrary system of government’ was emerging to ‘meet the crisis of defending the revolution from its armed enemies at home and abroad’ (Skocpol 1979: 188); in China, the ‘unique synthesis between the military needs of the Chinese Communists and the social-revolutionary potential of the Chinese peasantry’ (Skocpol 1979: 262) led to the communist one-party state surpassing the old regime capacity for bureaucratic domination (Skocpol 1979: 263–5); in Russia, the outcome was ‘a totally collectivist and authoritarian system in which the mass energies of all of the Russian people were finally turned – through coercion and terror if voluntary enthusiasm was not forthcoming – from the anarchic rebellions of 1917 toward active participation in centrally determined and directed efforts’ (Skocpol 1979: 233; cf. Weber 1994: 302–3). In all these cases, revolutionary dynamics of contention, war efforts and the challenge at organizing their continuation ripple the fabric of the collective, provoking punctuated cooperation across episodes of stress and strain likely to reinforce one another.10 Domination and contention 10

The aggregation of stressors within a collective appears to be a crucial factor in the generalization of punctuated cooperation across situations, and violent engagements are probably particularly effective in bringing such an aggregation about. There is, for example, no intrinsic tendency for collective gatherings to turn into violent riots under ‘normal’ circumstances, even given some motivation of participants to engage in violent acts. This may be one reason why researchers cannot reliably predict violence in collective gatherings (McPhail and Wohlstein 1983: 595). Revolutionary dynamics across collective gatherings and riots historically appear to arise in conditions in which

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emerge as equivalent and often complementary processes through which redistributions brought about by people’s responses to reiterated runs of violent engagements and an increased degree of punctuated cooperation gradually settle into redistributions of keys and participants (cf. Barbera 1998: 311–12). Contingent dynamics of centralization There is no space here to review the wealth of sociological and political theories of revolution; a quick glance at the assessment by Skocpol (1979: 6–33) of the state of the art in the 1970s would suffice to get an impression of the complexities which have to be overcome in order to appropriately discuss the different approaches and insights. In the present context, revolutions are interesting primarily as empirical instances of punctuated cooperation which undermine rather than amplify prior stratifications. Revolutionary dynamics illustrate a continuum of contingencies from processes of domination to contention associated with accommodating violent engagements. One aspect of how these contingencies turn out to produce eventually somewhat stable redistributions is participants’ ability to induce cooperation in others. In avoiding more conventional notions of leadership, Fligstein (2001) calls this aspect of practical sense ‘social skill’. The concept of social skill emphasizes the role of participants’ practical sense in the emergence and change of social fields (Fligstein 2001: 116–17). Goffman (1967: 217), speaking about participants’ ‘capacities (or lack of them) for standing correct and steady in the face of sudden pressures’, introduces a notion of ‘character’ somewhat similar to that of social skill, arguing that under conditions of fatefulness, participants tend to differentiate between strong or weak characters (217–18). Goffman expects ‘that the capacity to maintain support of the social occasion under difficult circumstances will be universally approved’ (229), pointing to participants’ tendencies to gravitate to those of ‘strong’ character who are able to exercise command when engagements become precarious. In any case, participants’ practical sense and the distribution of such sense within a collective appear to be critical factors in settling the contingencies of domination, contention and redistribution. Distinct organizational forms assumed by the mobilization of participants and coalitions for projects of contention and domination are another factor worth considering. Armies, political parties and social some degree of collective violence has already been exercised deliberately by one party or the other – after which things gradually get out of hand, as in the cases analysed by Skocpol.

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movements are equivalent attempts to mobilize participants, with armies and political parties being more traditional forms of mobilization which correlate, as of today, more significantly than social movements with the exercise of collective violence (Martin 2009: 282–96). One aspect that is distinctive for contemporary social movements may be their particular repertoire of staging contentious performances (Tilly 2008: 118–44). Staging contentious performances in challenging ruling elites effectively needs to displace normalizations of collective violence – of who legitimately monopolizes the means of violence and is authorized to exercise it against resistance – in order to mobilize participants with any hope of sustainable success. Armies and political parties usually strive for closer associations with ruling elites in order to extend their scope of mobilization, counting on normalizations of collective violence to work in their favour. This is a point at which, considering the recent spread of social movements not rooted in traditional forms of political organizations, Skocpol’s analysis of social revolutions may possibly focus too much on redistributions of resources ultimately settling into structures of nation-state bureaucracies. According to Skocpol (1979: 165), ‘claiming and struggling to maintain state power’ is ‘what political leaderships in revolutionary crises are above all doing’ (italics original). In France, Russia and China, the revolutionary elites were drafted from the ‘ranks of highly educated groups oriented to state activities or employments’ (165) and ‘oriented to the need and possibility for changes in and through the state’ (168). Orientation towards the state was clearly an element of revolutionaries’ practical sense, but may also have worked as a ‘rhetoric of organization’ obfuscating a more chaotic form of muddling through and struggling with redistributions of signs, symbols, resources and participants (White 2008: 215–16). Mann (1993: 466–7), en route to a careful evaluation of what he calls the ‘Kafka–Skocpol–Tilly’ claim that revolutions would generally lead to an increase of state power, points out that at least the French Revolution promised more bureaucracy than it was able to deliver (463). Clearly, the translation of redistributions emerging from multiple instances of punctuated cooperation and revolutionary dislocations into more permanent institutional arrangements is a matter of contingency, just like the ultimate stability of such arrangements. The ‘garrison state’ paradigm, with its assumption of reigning militaryindustrial complexes, offers the analytical advantage of locating dynamics of domination and contention within a network of participants and coalitions in which capacities for mobilization may be more or less centralized to begin with, as local forms of domination coexist with a global decentralization of resources and regular episodes of contention. In his

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discussion of the validity of ‘garrison state’ accounts, Giddens (1987a: 245–51) concludes that military-industrial complexes are ‘not in the ascendancy in the economies of the industrialized societies’ (248) since the ‘very nature of industrialized war’ would presuppose ‘in a certain sense a diversity of interests and concerns’ (248). Giddens goes on to claim that the structural basis for the existence of military governments in the Third World, the apparent counter-case, would have to be found in the ‘relative lack of development of internal administrative coordination’ (251) in these states (cf. Tilly 1992: 200–5). Towards the end of his much cited book, however, Giddens (1987a: 327–8) observes: The potentiality for military rule is relatively limited, if ‘government’ here means assuming overall responsibility for rule. It is a different matter if we consider the capability of the military to maintain diffuse sanctions holding governments to certain styles of policy, or confining what they do within definite limits . . . ‘Militarism’ today means more than anything else a proclivity on the part of those in the higher echelons of the armed forces and in other leading circles outside to look first of all for military solutions to issues which could be solved by other means; and the readiness of lower ranks to accept such solutions unquestioningly.

Centralization of resources is a gradual phenomenon, and dominant coalitions may only occasionally choose to mobilize others explicitly while often trusting implicit forms of coordination to work in their favour. Central participants and coalitions may sometimes even draw on repertoires of contention – warning, for example, against imminent threats to the collective – in order to further increase their centrality during an episode of mobilization, before sliding back into a less prominent, but also less exposed, position. If the ‘garrison state’ hypothesis is made subject to less state-centred interpretations, then the concept of a military-industrial complex embedded in an incompletely and incoherently stratified distribution of participants and keys may indicate a more elementary intuition – that patterns of domination continue to find support from participants who are (to say the least) unlikely to benefit from them, to the degree that dominant coalitions successfully implement what Mann (1986: 100) has called ‘the gigantic protection racket of political history’: Accept my power, for I will protect you from worse violence – of which I can give you a sample, if you don’t believe me.

Charles Tilly’s theory of state formation discussed in the next section may be seen as a more general ‘description of the contemporary state as a kind of protection racket’ (Porter 1994: 114–15). Historically, the Montagnard terror of the French Revolution reinvented the ‘domestic’

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form of the protection racket that was quickly adopted by other European powers (Tilly 1992: 107–15). With respect to state-orchestrated repression, contention and domination are not only equivalent responses to – and enactments of – the collective centralization of resources, they become altogether identical as bureaucratic elites contend against their ‘own’ citizens. 5.6

Associating and stratifying across situations

At the beginning of this chapter, in exploring the run of violent engagements, it was suggested that violent situations, no matter how well planned and rehearsed they are, generally constitute instances of punctuated cooperation. In a highly selective review of the sociological and historical literature, efforts by military organizations and by collectives affording these organizations to accommodate extended runs of violence and warfare have subsequently been explored. From the cohesion of military units to the embedding of military action in larger social fields and the normalizations and redistributions brought about by collective investments in warfare, a multitude of accommodations has become apparent. They present accommodations to somewhat extreme cases of punctuated cooperation: to interconnected sets of situations which are likely to expose ill-equipped participants drafted from a collective in great numbers to varieties of disruptiveness, exposure to which is reiterated in an intermittent but enduring fashion. The general pattern emerging from these instances of exposure and accommodation is a persistent salience of dynamics of association and stratification among participants coping with violent engagements, whether they are directly exposed to these engagements or are involved in less immediate forms of accommodation or provisioning. Beginning with Collins’ pathways to violence, tendencies to associate and stratify have been predominant in just about every setting addressed by the investigation. Participants of violence and warfare tend to associate and stratify regardless of whether they are members of military units at the front line of military action or decision makers trying to make sense of front-line activities, regardless of positions in military organizations and networks of military-industrial complexes. Participants of violence and warfare tend to associate and stratify irrespective of whether single situations, organizations or structures and distributions permeating the collective as a whole are at stake. The salience of associating and stratifying is also apparent in collective normalizations of violence and warfare: imagining a stratified subset of participants in a privileged

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position to mobilize and, mostly,11 monopolize the resources of violence and destruction available within the collective would have been a dystopian nightmare for most historical collectives, but it is the normal accommodation of violence and warfare in contemporary collectives organized in nation-states (Tilly 1992: 68–70; Giddens 1987a: 113). To many readers, it will surely appear almost natural that this should be the case. Associating and stratifying dominates the production of context for violence and warfare in a taken-for-granted manner, framing violence and warfare ‘both in the mind and in activity’ (Goffman 1974: 247) with impressive universality, at least today. The salience of associating and stratifying can, of course, not altogether be disaggregated from the fact that contemporary social life is generally rife with situations in which participants attend to membership in coalitions and to differences in status, authority or access to resources. When Homans, for example, analyses social life on the ‘small warship’, he draws on the notion of ‘class structure’ quite unproblematically (Homans 1962: 52–3), deliberately using a category not specific to battle conditions. Although stratification and the association of participants in coalitions are indeed very common social processes which arrest people’s attention under a wide variety of circumstances in which cooperation is not necessarily punctuated, the particular significance of both processes to the collective accommodation of violence and, perhaps, to the accommodation of disruptiveness and punctuated cooperation more generally, is supported by two interrelated arguments: one is historical and concerns the emergence of state-type structures (cf. Maleˇsevi´c 2010: 252–64); the other is systematic and concerns the fact that it is hard to consider the observable isomorphism across a large variety of situations associated with the accommodation of violence and warfare as being entirely accidental and at the same time altogether not very difficult to account for sociologically. It is a social regularity that can be expressed quite prosaically by the observation that people confronted with violence and warfare, regardless of the angle from which they are facing it, always tend to be concerned with two simple questions simultaneously: one about strength, the other about alliances. Historically, the significant causal role of warfare in the formation and development of states bears repeating. War has been the driving force of the formation and transformation of states; as a general rule, when states have not been busy engaging in warfare, they have been busy preparing for it (e.g. Tilly 1992: 29). The European nation-state emerged from a 11

The USA, by allowing a higher level of civil armament than that of other developed countries, is an evident, though gradual, exception (Tilly 1992: 69).

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competition of states into which the powerful ones locked the others (Tilly 1992: 15, 57) and with ‘only moderate exaggeration we can say that the nation-state . . . was originally little else than a life support system for an army’ (Martin 2009: 322). The emergence of non-military governmental organizations has generally supplemented and paralleled the emergence of military ones (Martin 2009: 326). Both types of bureaucracy expanded as states struggling to survive had to increase their extractive capacities on collectives caged within their boundaries (Mann 1986: 490), gradually drawing industrial organizations into dynamics of mobilization (McNeill 1982: 223–61). Nation-states thus emerged from networks of political and industrial organization in which military bureaucracies were central but at the same dependent on populations of participants and organizations to which their ‘power networks’ connected them (cf. Mann 1993: 55–87). In this respect, the ‘coalitional path to state formation’ (Porter 1994: 94–8) is not a special case but a general rule: no state emerges without a network of organizations supporting its claim to statehood, which, rather than the claim of any particular organization, is usually the claim of a coalition among central members of organizations making up ‘the’ state.12 The fact that military organizations occupy central positions within ‘power networks’ mobilized in particular territories, that they belong to special coalitions of state organizations within such networks, and that these coalitions are again highly stratified are conditions characterizing all nation-states. The similarities between the endogenous order of such power networks and the endogenous order of violent situations are striking: in both cases, coalitions form, one of which gradually monopolizes the exercise of violence; in both cases, stratification across and within coalitions is taking place as a majority of members support the few actively engaged in the exercise of violence; in both cases, stratification is much less apparent among participants (or, respectively, organizations as coalitions of participants) which are bystanders or belong to dominated coalitions. Together with the historical evidence linking warfare to the isomorphism of ‘power networks’ across countries which otherwise differ greatly in many areas of collective life, this isomorphism of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ configurations paving pathways to violence cannot appear accidental. Attending analytically to stratification and the formation of coalitions therefore allows us to address from a more continuous perspective phenomena that are sometimes placed on distinct levels of sociological 12

cf. Martin (2005) for a resounding criticism of competing accounts of war and state formation which emphasize discipline and rationalization.

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analysis (also cf. Fligstein and McAdam 2012: 170–8). The difference between participants responding to the exigencies of physical confrontation on the battlefield, decision-makers at the rear moving tin soldiers or symbols on a monitor and civilians working in some business branch of power networks is not that some participants are involved in ‘micro’ situations, others in ‘meso’ organizations and still others in ‘macro’ economies or cultures. The observable differences, for example that we might expect accommodations of violence and warfare to acquire an increasingly normalized character the further participants are removed from physical exposure, may appropriately be addressed as resulting from the embedding of specific social situations in larger sets of situations putting participants in positions of, for example, planners or perpetrators respectively – but these situations are not more ‘macro’ than others (Kusch 2011: 490– 2). Participants of any situation may surely try to affect regularities within a broader set of situations by acting in their respective ‘here and now’ and by practically accomplishing overlap of activities across engagement, for example when they decide in one situation to send reinforcements to another. That the same patterns of ordering experience and activities, similar kinds of salience in attending and responding to actual occasions, similar framings and keyings are recycled in the production of context both within and across situations is hardly surprising; it is a matter of participants’ practical sense to not entirely rethink what they think whether they have to coordinate activities within or across situations. The salience of coalitions and forms of dominance, the consideration of strength and ability to associate, is a matter of practical sense and using analogies in striking coordination equilibria across ‘levels’ of coordination – analogies that we tend to find ‘natural’ to the extent that we would not argue against their sanity, which is why these analogies – of associating and stratifying – work so well as a correlation device in violent engagements and their accommodation (Schelling 1960: 89–108; Sugden 2004: 49–57). The discussion of stress and threat dynamics in the course of the preceding chapter has already demonstrated that participants’ practical sense of anticipation beyond actual occasions is active within a present situation. With respect to violence and warfare, the experience of stress and threat may be a crucial contagious mechanism contributing to the fact that the dynamics of keying military actions that are allegedly ‘macro’ generally tends to follow a pattern evident in micro-pathways to violence: anticipation of violence across situations may be highly affected by participants’ prior experiences of direct physical assault, which may to some degree prime the keying of later accommodations, even if participants turn from soldiers into politicians. It may, in other words, make the

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salience of perceived analogies across violent engagements as coordination problems more effective. Whilst this may suggest a kind of collective simple-mindedness in accommodating violence and warfare – something along those lines certainly is visible in the case of Nazi Germany – it is important to notice the fact that, although the salience of coalitions and stratifications demands an apparently straightforward mastery of attention by analogy and subsumtion, participants may be able to build large and complex frames of activity by repeatedly using this mastery in keying and rekeying activities. Andrew Abbott has shown how complex structures can be gained from reiterating ‘fractal distinctions’ which, taken on their own, are rather simple. Complexity will escalate once distinctions are reapplied to the results produced by their application (Abbott 2001a: 7–29), a generation of complexity that can easily be accomplished with respect to coalitions (by producing coalitions within coalitions), stratifications (by further stratifying the strata) and their combinations (e.g. by stratifying coalitions, clustering strata, differentiating coalitions across strata and so on). How complexity may be processed, blown up and reduced by reflexive rekeying may be worth exploring further in order to discuss, for example, why processes of centralization characterizing the emergence of nation-states result in coherent stratifications of coalitions and networks, even in single states. The rekeying of membership in coalitions and of stratification across participants and coalitions allows us to differentiate, stack up and diversify stratification, separating, for example, stratification within military hierarchies from stratification of state organizations in general, or differentiating, within military organizations, formal and informal authorities, leaving room for ‘situational stratification’ in the endogenous order of violent engagements without letting it affect formal rank or the chain of command (Collins 2000). Reflexive rekeying may help us to understand how nation-state structures can be both compatible with the institutionalization of democracy and open access to rights universal within the larger collective (North et al. 2009), with an often comparatively low social status of military professionals or sometimes with fateful devolutions to highly divisive forms of violent internal conflict such as fascism and genocide (Maleˇsevi´c 2010: 269–73). The reflexive keying towards associating and stratifying, the persistent salience of coalitions and strength, generate complexity but may also nourish sectarian tendencies (cf. Abbott 2001a: 17–25), some of which will allow for pacifying differentiations while others may open up pathways to violence (cf. Mann 2005). The persistent salience of associating and stratifying points to homologies across productions of contexts (Bourdieu 1984, 1990; see above,

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2.6) and thus to interrelations between levels of sociological analysis that are often obscured by separating research at the ‘micro’ from research at the ‘macro’ level (Cicourel 1981: 62–5). This self-similarity of order across such foci of sociological analysis – from soldiers to generals and politicians, to nation-states and a state system shifting ‘to the rhythm of major wars’ (Tilly 1992: 165) – does not imply the existence of a collective principle of keying that would impose itself across situations by the power of some superior principle or given context (Kusch 2011: 490–2). It simply points, to repeat, to the power of analogy in collectives solving coordination problems (Schelling 1960: 89–108; Sugden 2004: 49–57). Self-similarity across instances of social order and productions of context is accomplished collectively by participants attending to similar types of keys repeatedly within and across situations (cf. Abbott 2001a: 165–73). The persistent salience of associating and stratifying is a result of framing violence and warfare ‘both in the mind and in activity’ within and across a diversity of situations. It is an instance of self-similarity emerging from rekeyings being recycled across runs of punctuated cooperation. This may be one instance of fractal, or ‘multi-level’, recycling of keys and strategies among others: the morality of subsidiarity – of participants being expected to explore all avenues of helping themselves before reaching out to somebody originally uninvolved – provides another, more philanthropic, example, enacted in emergency phone calls as well as in the formulation of social policy (Bergmann 1993, 1998). Other instances of accommodating disruptiveness and punctuated cooperation, for example in disaster response units, may be screened for similar patterns. Self-similarity of structures and processes emerges through keying cooperation repeatedly in a selective manner and need not necessarily displace other forms of keying, allowing for great complexity generated and processed in striking coordination equilibria. This presents sociological analyses with the tasks of adequately specifying the selectivity at work in the mobilization of keys and strategies and of exploring how typical mobilizations relate to, accommodate, draw in or dominate alternatives of producing context within and across situations. According to Tilly (2003: 5), observers of violence tend to form coalitions of their own, clustering into ‘idea people, behavior people, and relation people’. The salience of associating and stratifying refers to relational keys, to membership, status and positions. Therefore, with respect to types of keys, it is clearly selective, as ‘idea people’ would place more emphasis on cultural capital and behaviour people would emphasize sanctions (Tilly 2003: 5–8). The persistent salience of coalitions and stratifications suggests that there is a general sense in which the ‘relation people’ may be right. Even the specific type of cultural capital that

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was found to be in play in the accommodation of violence and warfare has tended to direct participants’ attention to relational keys, whether in normalizing warfare as the legitimate prerogative of the violent few, in providing ideologies of ‘people in arms’, or in picturing collectives as ‘nations’ or ‘races’ fighting for supremacy. Such normalizations imply an understanding of violent engagements which to the extent of using similar keys may represent recurrent aspects of actual runs of violence – bringing about a partial correspondence, some extent of homology between the keying of punctuated cooperation and the normalization of disruptiveness, and thus something which the previous chapters were genuinely sceptical about. However, this correspondence should not be exaggerated, as the normal understanding of warfare as resulting from deliberate decisionmaking and the mobilization of armed forces primed by requirements of organizational (not to mention political) learning is clearly not congenial to the endogenous context of violent situations (cf. Grossman 1995: 262–80). Although the accommodation of violence and warfare implies the use of analogy and thus some correspondence between contexts of punctuated cooperation and their retrospective normalization, soldiers, for example, will not find it less difficult to express to their families experiences which ultimately remain ‘unforgettable but unreal’ in the sense discussed earlier (3.4). The aggregate historical effect of the accommodation of violence of warfare – that warfare becomes the occupation of a specialized coalition of members within the collective – is prone to stabilize this incompatibility of action and experience: ‘One of the things I miss most is the brotherhood – the trust in the soldiers . . . I have this big perception that a lot of America is ignorant about what actually goes on in Iraq,’ he says. ‘They’re sitting in the safety of their own houses.’ At one point, his comrade was reading a newspaper article about a wounded Marine in Afghanistan. Uninvited, another patient flipped the pages to a crime story. [His comrade’s] breathing became shallow, and his adrenaline surged, he recalls. [He] noticed [his comrade’s] distress and pulled him aside . . . [He] calmed him down. ‘He just doesn’t know,’ was one of [his] frequent refrains to [his comrade]. ‘He’s ignorant.’ (Phillips 2012)

Such ignorance is not the exclusive perception of those members of the collective that were physically exposed to the exigencies of violent engagements – it is a general collective effect of accommodations of violence and warfare built on associating and stratifying within and across situations, from violent to civilian engagements. Can the larger collective indeed understand the predicament of soldiers struggling to find their way back into the ‘normal’ surroundings of everyday work and family life after a tour of duty? Numerous normalizations of warfare within the

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collective, by mobilizing schematic, technological or psychological representations of violent engagements – from weapons research and development to coping with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder – involve a predominantly cognitive keying of activities towards information, knowledge, technical, medical or psychological competence. The ‘smarter’ it thus becomes, the less likely it is to produce a homology of collective normalizations and accommodations of violence and warfare. A comparative analysis of different forms of keying in collective accommodations of violence and warfare cannot be provided at this point. The preceding discussion may suggest, however, that the cognitive keying of violence and warfare tends to become more salient with increasing remoteness of situations from actual runs of violent engagements. Furthermore, it may be noted that the mobilization of normative keys appears marginal to the accommodation of violence and warfare to an extent that, historically, it has yet to become more than an afterthought. In the accommodation of violence and warfare, there is relatively little change in customs or morals, little calibration of norms, and still a very low level of actual jurisdiction with respect to the exercise of violence, especially when this level of jurisdiction is compared with other kinds of post-disaster litigation. If there is morality in warfare, then it is primed by membership and status (cf. Boehm 1982: 420). 5.7

Conclusion

It was the aim of the present chapter to explore collective responses to a particular form of disruptiveness and collective accommodations of a specific type of punctuated cooperation from a more longitudinal perspective. Some of the accommodations of violence and warfare that have been investigated refer to deliberate accomplishments by participants and coalitions, for example by social scientists, military professionals and politicians involved in planning, carrying out or deliberating about violent engagements. Other accommodations have been of a more contextually contained nature, like the ‘live-and-live-system’ of trench warfare, or of a seemingly more chaotic type, like cases of forward panic. Such accommodations within distinct productions of context are generally hard to differentiate according to their degree of intentionality: we may treat the centralization of resources in collectives in a state of war as a spontaneous response to exigencies of warfare which initially take participants by surprise; at the same time, we would not assume that resources would be redirected to specific positions within the collective quite by accident. In deciding whether collective accommodations of violence and warfare have been intended or incurred, the practical sense of correlating

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plausible motives with observed outcomes invariably interferes (Mills 1940): we may treat primary group cohesion among Wehrmacht units in World War II as the effect of smart military planning that makes effective use of replacement systems, propaganda and ideological indoctrination, but we are unlikely to consider primary group cohesion among US troops in Vietnam as intended in quite the same degree. Moreover, the assumption that politicians, soldiers and generals would generally be loyal to the nations and states which they allegedly represent may perhaps to some extent mislead our practical sense of participants’ actual dispositions to respond to violence and warfare in a particular manner: membership may be very salient but it may, as in the trenches of World War I (Ashworth 1968), also cut across states and nations. The salience of coalitions and stratifications in accommodating violence and warfare is congenial to the everyday understanding of violent engagements – as requiring knowledge of your friends, your foes and their respective strengths. Thinking about punctuated cooperation in terms of ‘Schelling–Lewis’ games suggests that this kind of congeniality, and the power of analogy it illustrates (Sugden 2004: 49–57), may be representative of collective accommodations of disruptiveness more generally, but this is as far as an exploratory study like the present one will take the argument. A recycling of keys from single situations to participants embedding situations in longer runs and series of engagements, working out more broadly institutional, organizational and ideological solutions to the problems of violence and warfare by using analogies as correlation devices has been evident; further qualifications have to await the elaboration of a more rigorous framework of analysis allowing a more systematic assessment of empirical intelligence. In the final chapter of this investigation, I will try to establish a couple of benchmarks for bringing about respective elaborations of theory and method. Historical accommodations of violence and warfare in human collectives have been made much more researchable by individual commitments of historians and sociologists to interdisciplinary cooperation, commitments that need to be sustained and intensified (Barkey 2009; Nathaus and Vollmer 2010). Such commitments may benefit considerably from the broader reassociation of forces from across different academic disciplines which the present effort, in conclusion, would like to encourage.

6

Elaborating the theory

Each state of the social world is thus no more than a temporary equilibrium, a moment in the dynamics through which the adjustment between distributions and incorporated or institutionalized classifications is constantly broken and restored. Pierre Bourdieu (1990: 141)

According to Homans (1961: 378), ‘a last chapter should resemble a primitive orgy after harvest’. In trying to strike a balance between, on the one hand, assessing the interim results of the previous chapters and letting go, on the other hand, of some of the discipline involved in getting here, this last chapter will ultimately not quite meet Homans’ standard. Whether sociological expertise about disruptiveness will ever be in a position to unambiguously celebrate its findings is another matter; securing the harvest, rather than the orgy, will in the foreseeable future have to remain its primary concern. Still, in concluding the present study and in projecting a trajectory for further developing its analytical concerns, the discussion will, while far from orgiastic, assert a little more elbow space. Elaborating the present theory requires certain leaps to be taken and a clearing of space is necessary in order to gain respective momentum. Findings up to this point allow us to muster some confidence. In the wake of disruptiveness, participants of social situations predominantly attend to one another’s positions, status, membership, reputation and social capital. In responding to disruptiveness, people coordinate activities and expectations in a largely relational manner. This implies a relative neglect of, and comparative inattention to, cognitive and normative expectations and respective forms of coordination, and therefore to information, competence and cultural capital, as well as a relative neglect of norms, customs and morality. Neither does this observation imply that participants facing disruptions would not recognize pieces of information and competence in coping with disruptiveness, nor does it imply that people would altogether ignore the signalling of sanctions and rights in such situations. Rather, the observation indicates that there is a systematic bias introduced into participants’ strategies through exposure to disruptiveness. 204

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This concluding chapter will try to indicate how a more robust sociological understanding of this bias in participants’ strategies and its broader impact on social order within a collective can be gained. It is also worth taking note that certain results were not forthcoming throughout the preceding chapters. Frustration and anger among participants marking and responding to disruptiveness notwithstanding, there has been little evidence of actual chaos and disarray, and nothing like a ‘madding crowd’ has been encountered (McPhail 1991). The configuration closest to the image of the madding crowd was perhaps found in the phenomenon of forward panic as a distinct pathway to violence described by Randall Collins, and this pathway turned out to refer to highly stratified social situations. On the most general level, then, collectives do not respond to disruptions by dissolving into confusion. Participants of social situations respond to disruptions by producing order and context, by re-coordinating activities and expectations – particularly when they are mad, as is patently visible in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. As a matter of fact, this tendency to bring about, maintain or repair some form of coordination and social order in the wake of disruptiveness has fascinated sociologists to the extent that this fascination has crowded out a more general, and potentially much broader, interest in how disruptiveness may produce change rather than reiteration of order within the collective. This preliminary conclusion tries to more systematically recover strategies among participants of social situations as the ultimate subject matter of the sociology of disruption and social change, a sociology that aspires to analyse the effects of both small and large disruptions on social order within collectives of participants. The general problems involved in tracking down disruptiveness will initially be reiterated (6.1). An understanding of strategies that is able to overcome these problems needs to address the selectivity inherent in participants’ responses to disruptiveness (6.2). It also has to account for the respective success of distinct strategies (6.3). On this basis, a refocused discussion of punctuated equilibrium is possible and analytically appealing (6.4). Further progress in addressing disruptiveness and its effect on social change, however, will depend on the ability of analysts to more systematically assemble data from various sources and with a variety of methodologies (6.5). The relational aspects of participants’ strategies stand out throughout this discussion as they did throughout the preceding chapters. This is why certain qualifications to the statement, nowadays quite common in social theory, that social order is fundamentally relational, bear emphasizing (6.6) prior to the conclusion (6.7).

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6.1

Tracing disruptiveness

At the beginning of this study it was noted that disastrous disruptions get a lot of attention from social scientists – attention which has tended to be dissociated from analyses of minor troubles. The subsequently explored subject matter of the sociology of disaster, disruption and social change has turned out to be broader and more general than prior investigations of disruptiveness would suggest. Disruptiveness which is felt to be imminent but which may not be explicitly marked or recognized – and which may refer to disruptive events that in fact will never take place – may still bring about a significant degree of punctuated cooperation and thus, potentially, a significant degree of social change. During the course of this investigation, this has become particularly apparent in episodes of organizational stress and the occasionally fateful accommodations stress may bring about. Whilst disasters are clearly a distinct subset of events within a continuum of disruptiveness from minor to disastrous disruptions, the phenomenon of stress indicates that incidences of punctuated cooperation ultimately do not constitute a subset of either disasters or disruptions more generally, since both always involve an element of marking; many but by no means all incidences of punctuated cooperation are characterized by the marking of disruptions. Accordingly, if we think of actual occasions which are faced by participants of punctuated cooperation as constituting a distinct set of events, and of events which are collectively marked as disruptive as another, then these two sets will only to some extent overlap. This disparate existence of disruptions, disaster and runs of punctuated cooperation interferes with sociologists’ ability to build a coherent theory of disruptiveness. The elementary relationships between these varieties of disruptiveness can be expressed by a Venn diagram (Figure 6.1). In such a diagram, the space in which distinct sets of events are drawn as closed curves can be thought of as an infinite set (or plane) of actual occasions encountered by a given collective. Whilst disasters are a distinct subset of disruptions, punctuated cooperation refers to a set of actual occasions which only to some extent are at the same time discrete disruptions or disasters. Figure 6.1 also introduces a tentative specification of sets of events with respect to their fuzziness, represented by different lines of closed curves. All three sets of events are ‘fuzzy’ sets the members of which are members by degree (Ragin 2000: 6–7): all actual occasions across the plane are distinct events only with respect to productions of context among participants; membership of an actual occasion in any of the three sets is therefore the result of a certain

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disruptions

disasters

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punctuated cooperation

Figure 6.1 Varieties of disruptiveness

framing. Since frames tend to vary, the status of an actual occasion as a distinct event is always somewhat precarious – an object of gradual redefinition. The closed curve drawn with a full line indicates an average degree of membership of close to one, characterizing events within the sets as quite well defined and their membership in the sets as close to unambiguous; dotted and dashed lines of closed curves respectively indicate low and medium average levels of membership and ‘fuzzier’ definitions of events among participants. The set of disasters is the fuzzy set with the most clearly defined membership of events. The more disastrous a disruption becomes, the less ambiguous its membership in the respective set of disruptions will be. The average membership degree of actual occasions in the collective set of disastrous disruptions is close to one since there will usually be very little dispute whether, for example, earthquakes, broken glasses or bankruptcies belong to this set or not. However, even this set of actual occasions is a somewhat fuzzy set, since the disruptive character of an actual occasion is always defined by how particular participants respond to it. Very generally, ‘what will . . . be one man’s alarm will be another’s opportunity to show experience’ (Goffman 1971: 288). The superset of disruptions, on the other hand, includes all the disruptions which are marked as such within a collective, including minor disruptions which many participants will choose to ignore, and intermediate disruptions which usually combine elements of damage or embarrassment incurred by some respondents, and some degree of vicarious experience, if not entertainment, enjoyed by others. The average membership degree of actual occasions within the superset will therefore be considerably lower than in the set of disastrous disruptions. However, as some marking of

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disruptiveness is required in order for actual occasions to become members of this set, the average membership degree is not as low as in the third set of actual occasions depicted in Figure 6.1. This third set of actual occasions defines instances of punctuated cooperation, and it is that set in the diagram with the least clearly delineated membership. Establishing actual occasions to be members of this set calls for a more careful appraisal of the situation the nexus of which these actual occasions are drawn into, and an assessment of whether a previous level of involvement has indeed been lost within its run of events and activities. This criterion is hard to employ as a binary category, and it refers to a question of degree in the deviation of activities from previous coordination equilibria (see above, 2.6). That the set of disruptions, including its subset of disasters, intersects with the set of actual occasiondefining instances of punctuated cooperation was implied by the understanding that participants in these instances lose common ground in dealing with disruptions. Many instances of punctuated cooperation, as in episodes of organizational stress, however, may not involve the marking of disruptions at all, and thus take place beyond the intersection of the sets. In this area, we are not supported in placing events in the punctuated cooperation set by some correlation with marked disruptiveness. Such ‘fuzziness’ in the definition of events constituting a run of punctuated cooperation, particularly if these events are not simultaneously included in the set of disruptions, makes these actual occasions more difficult to trace down than events belonging to the other sets. It essentially demands us to track down distinct productions of context in terms of coordination equilibria participants were sustaining prior to the run of punctuated cooperation. Unfortunately, the unequal distribution of sociological attention, correlating with this disparate traceability of varieties of disruptiveness, tends to be aggravated by attention to particular sequences of events at the expense of other, less easily recognized, sequences. In keeping with the above mode of graphical representation, actual runs of social situations within a collective can be imagined as drawing elements from the plane of actual occasions, and sequences of events may be plotted by connecting points in distinct timelines on the plane. Since the timing of actual occasions is not a function of positions within the diagram, tracking a passage of time through a series of actual occasions may involve moving within the plane in any direction. Sequences of events can in this way be represented by vectors within a plane of actual occasions (Figure 6.2). An escalating dynamic of disruptiveness as, for example, envisaged by theorists of crises and catastrophes, could be represented by a graph plotting a set of actual occasions starting within the subset of disastrous

Tracing disruptiveness

A disruptions

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B disasters

D

punctuated cooperation

C

Figure 6.2 Tracing disruptiveness

disruptions at point A and moving towards point B in the set of punctuated cooperation. An alternative story would run in the opposite direction, with a timeline of actual occasions starting with some instance of punctuated cooperation at C, with events initially not marked as disruptive, but then reaching a point D at which a disaster is evident. This kind of initially ‘quiet’ escalation would correspond to Barry Turner’s (1976: 393–5) understanding of incubation, running towards the lefthand side of the diagram until reaching an easily identified event D in the intersection of punctuated cooperation and disaster. In such cases, there is an accommodation of activities early on as participants adjust their levels of response starting at C, but, since this accommodation does not yet correspond to either a disruption or disaster mark, punctuated cooperation may not be explicitly noticed at all. Since respective accommodations will thus probably pass as unproblematic, if they will not go altogether unnoticed, it may precipitate the disaster that is recognized at D. This disaster is likely to make participants realize accommodations that had tacitly been put to work as problematic, as in the ‘normalization of deviance’ at NASA in the run up to the Challenger disaster reconstructed by Vaughan (1996: 119–95). Retrospective analysis in such cases tends to proceed against the arrow of time until a point like C in Figure 6.2 can be identified as the initially unnoticed cause of later trouble. Both kinds of case reconstruction and historical narrative will usually find some support in events that have collectively been marked as disruptive. Additional sociological expertise is needed, particularly in areas of analysis in which actual occasions in ‘fuzzier’ sets of events need to be reconstructed. With respect to point B, we may recall the ‘residue of disruption’ in the rundown of Garfinkel’s breaching experiments as

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F

normalizations

‘unforgettable but unreal’

H

E disruptions

B

A disasters D

C

punctuated cooperation

Figure 6.3 Disruptiveness and beyond

the point at which sociologists tend to lose track of disruptiveness (see above, section 3.5). In reconstructing events at point C, Turner’s and Vaughan’s respective forensic expertise in the identification of sources of organizational failure is particularly evident as they point to ill-recognized incubation phases. Sociological interest in episodes of social change in the wake of disruptiveness, however, encourages the tracing of sequences beyond the points indicated by the arrows in Figure 6.2. For example, we may consider tracing a timeline starting from C and continuing beyond the incubation of the disaster to its post-disaster tribunals and, finally, to some point at which some normal run of events has been re-established within the collective, in order to trace and identify specific accommodations at point E (Figure 6.3). Similarly, we may think that a sequence beginning with a disastrous disruption and initiating a run of punctuated cooperation will lead us to explore, as in the third chapter of this investigation, the endogenous order of punctuated cooperation, to then further trace activities and participants until they engage in a somewhat more regular production of context at point F. Tracing the social changes potentially set off by disruptions, therefore, tends to always lead beyond the three sets of actual occasions already mentioned and towards a fourth set, and another one that is particularly well defined: to a set of normalizations that establish regularized understanding of disruptions, particularly disastrous ones, as well as of responses to disruptiveness that eventually lead, after the police and ambulance have arrived, everybody has been taken to hospital and the street has been cleared, to adjacent normalizations (repair

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activities, counselling sessions, etc.). But what if the timeline takes us to situations that are neither normalizations of disruptiveness nor normalizations of further responses to disruptiveness but are entirely normal – which means, as the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle suggests (see above, 2.3), that they are unremarkably, or ‘unmarkedly’, normal – and to runs of activity during which the disruptiveness will retrospectively appear as ‘unforgettable but unreal’ (Figure 6.3)? The collective repository which participants draw on in categorizing, evaluating and reordering actual occasions is impressive and allows for the normalizing of even the most disruptive events. The mere marking of a disruption already requires that events are identified with distinct characterizations in order to make out what is discrepant, whether more or less disruptive. The run of punctuated cooperation also tends to be characterized by many, more or less routine, markings of events and activities, as is evident in the ‘I was more worried about my work’ quote at the beginning of the fourth chapter (Murakami 2000: 33). The set of normalizations should thus be considered as generally somewhat larger than the three sets of events previously discussed. Represented as a timeline of events in Figure 6.3, the reconstruction of a case like, for example, the Challenger disaster would begin at point C with an instance of punctuated cooperation in which coordination is unsettled after which some normalization of deviance takes places, before disruption is marked more explicitly just before the start of the shuttle, the disaster takes place, there is a collective aftermath of blame, and finally NASA finds a normal level of response at point E. Alternatively, a sequence of events may start at point A and take the general route of the third chapter from disasters to punctuated cooperation, and to normalizations at point F (see above, 3.4). Certain biases were discussed earlier with respect to the kind of story one is likely to get when a reconstruction of events in this manner starts with a normalized event and then works its way back against the arrow of time: normalization rekeys punctuated cooperation retrospectively, manufacturing distinct episodes with an historical meaning within individual and collective biographies. As a result, if we trace a sequence from A to F, then our understanding is likely to be primed by normalizations and we will be struggling to recover an initial nexus of actual occasions that will never be as unambiguously qualified as the ensuing normalization. In fact, our effort to follow the most carefully corroborated and ratified pieces of data will likely keep us from ever leaving a trail of normalized events. Events within the set of normalized disruptions and responses are as unambiguously normalized as those in the disaster set are unambiguously disruptive; by virtue of such clarity, both become attractive anchors for analysis.

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At the end of the third chapter, the dissatisfaction with letting the concern with disruptions rest with normalizations that come with their respective inability to provide us with intelligence on how participants actually respond to disruptions led to a call for exploring changes in strategies and field (3.5). Of course, respective explorations also tend to take their lead from empirical data that are well ratified to begin with or which can be normalized to some extent by analysts. This may lead to the reconstruction of a sequence such as from D to F in Figure 6.3. The general problem facing such explorations is the difficulty of identifying accommodations in strategies and fields beyond the set of normalizations that can in fact be associated with disruptiveness as, for example, in the fifth chapter, the multiple normalizations of violence and warfare that were associated with actual runs of punctuated cooperation (5.5). Whilst establishing such connections is comparatively easy in dealing with normalized responses (whether calling the police or calling violence warfare), much more work is required in order to trace down accommodations in runs of activity that are not well connected to an initial source of disruptiveness; to discuss the collective recycling of strategies of association and stratification in the fifth chapter in fact already demanded a good degree of analytical extrapolation (5.7). Traceability is thus a very general problem in reconstructing sequences that begin with events that are not well defined (B and C in Figure 6.3) and those which lead to accommodations that cannot be directly associated with disruptiveness by means of some normalized understanding or by responses active in the respective nexus of actual occasions (at G and H in Figure 6.3). Actually, the sketchy array of indications mustered in the fifth chapter was supported by an understanding of typical sequences that could still, through the general issues of warfare, armies and states, at least somehow be associated with actual disruptions, following timelines along routes like those beginning at A or, to a lesser extent, at D in Figure 6.3. The worst trouble in this respect is encountered by an analysis that would need to establish a convincing trail of evidence that begins in punctuated cooperation, for example in an episode of stress at B, a timeline that takes a sequence of actual occasions to a point like H without ever being associated with either the marking of a disruption or some normalized form of engaging with a disruption that could easily be recognized in terms of a collective repertoire, going from fuzzy cases of disruptiveness to fuzzy cases of disruptiveness that are ‘unforgettable but unreal’ – if they are unforgettable to begin with, which need not be the case.1 1

Indeed, if a disruption is never marked as in the case of the timeline from B to H, participants may rationally prefer to forget about an episode the disruptiveness of which was

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It is this area of the unreal and possibly still not quite forgettable, an area the connection of which to an initial source of disruptiveness is not easily traced, that sociologists have tended to leave for psychologists to explore. It is difficult enough to establish instances of punctuated cooperation if there is no clear disruption associated with them (as people stressing out, for example, do their best to perform inconspicuously), but if the accommodations within the collective (say, an organization) are also, if you will, lost within a generally endless plane of actual occasions across time, they are unlikely to attract analysts’ attention ‘until something breaks’ (Starbuck and Milliken 1988). The area around points G and H in Figure 6.3 is where a more elaborate theory of disruptiveness and social change needs to establish a more robust understanding of what to look for if social changes induced by disruptiveness but not easily associated with it in terms of a collective repertoire of disruptions and responses are to more effectively be addressed. What conceptual lead can the present perspective offer to sociologists interested in investigating accommodations forward into collectively unmarked areas (cf. Brekhus 1998)? 6.2

Theorizing change in strategies

‘If we truly want to get back to “the things themselves” according to the Husserlian slogan taken up by the ethnomethodologists, we must focus on strategies’, writes Bourdieu (1996: 121), adding qualifications about fields and positions. In what way, however, would an analysis of strategies give us access to the ‘things themselves’ in the wake of disruptiveness if strategies of response are themselves obviously so clearly biased in favour of normalizations which draw attention away from a potentially considerable share of ‘the things themselves’? To normalize means producing common ground on which the relevance of a disruption and responses can collectively be addressed. As Schutz (1970) and many others have argued, a respective ordering of common ground and relevance is ‘built up stratum by stratum’ (Clark 1996: 120). Normalization provides such a layering by embedding events and activities in broader productions of context, clearly recognizable sequences and stories (see above, section 3.4). This allows participants to recover some ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1984: 63–4) in productions of context that are conventional to the extent that they are ‘backed fuzzy to begin with, which is not easily reconstructed for outsiders who are, furthermore, unlikely to ever inquire about it. The ‘unforgettable but’ in Figure 6.3 may thus be put in brackets, but the figure probably looks wild enough as it is.

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by a hierarchy of appropriate interacting expectations’ (Skyrms 2004: 51). If normalization is recognized as the result of participants’ strategies locking on to ‘appropriate interacting expectations’ or strata of conventionally ordered common ground, then we can still look for patterns of adjustment in such ordering that are, perhaps, generalizable beyond the production of normalized responses to disruptiveness. Such patterns could be traced in timelines leading from punctuated cooperation to less disrupted engagements, for example from nation-state bureaucracies engaging with the economic and political problems of warfare to attacking the economic and political problems of peacetime (5.7). The motive behind tracing respective accommodations would be to generalize from how participants bring about normalizations of disruptiveness to how they will engage subsequent productions of context in, possibly, a similar manner. Accomplishing such an understanding in terms of participants’ strategies of engagement provides additional analytical leverage for tracing the impact of disruptiveness by tracing participants and strategies rather than tracing sequences of events. The task, therefore, in being able to address, beyond normalizations, all types of accommodations in the wake of disruptiveness is to explore more persistently the particular selectivity inherent in participants’ strategies of response that is manifest in normalizations but also, possibly, in moves in situations which are not related to disruptiveness in a more obvious manner (represented, for example, by points G and H in Figure 6.3). From the third chapter onwards, starting with the signalling of keys in responding to disruptiveness, indications have been accumulated that contexts of responding to disruptions and runs of punctuated cooperation are produced somewhat selectively. Going back to the ‘Schelling– Lewis’ game understanding of keying introduced in the second chapter (2.5), participants’ strategies can be considered in terms of the mobilization of distinct correlation devices which, in frame-analytical terms, can be characterized as keys. As sets of particular responses, strategies are expressions of participants’ practical sense in engaging with actual occasions and in solving coordination problems. Strategies employed by participants consist of series of moves, some of which are keys. The selectivity of any strategy is the result of the selectivity of moves; the signalling of keys as distinct moves, however, is particularly informative with respect to the selectivity of strategies in play within a given ecological huddle. The mobilization of a key constitutes a single move but it also signals specific expectations. In doing so, it provides participants with indications of future moves and allows them to adjust their strategies accordingly. The mobilization of a key is a particularly salient move because it correlates moves within and across strategies. Essentially, this employment of signals

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is what qualifies them as keys. As correlation devices, keys are associated with regularities within any participant’s strategy and across participants’ strategies. Both types of correlation should be particularly pronounced once keys are associated with distinct coordination equilibria backed up by ‘appropriate interacting expectations’ in the Schelling–Lewis sense (Skyrms 2004: 51). This section will initially discuss the correlation of moves within strategies in order to address the question of selectivity of particular strategies in terms of keys within strategies. Section 6.3 will broaden the discussion to the correlation of moves across strategies. The differentiation of expectations introduced in the second chapter puts us in a good position to address selectivity within strategies. Discussing the selectivity of strategies in terms of keys mobilized in distinct sets of moves refers back to the understanding of different sets of expectations associated with and activated by keys. Any strategy may mobilize keys of different generalization – signs, symbols, resources – and refer to different types of normative, cognitive or relational expectations. Therefore changes in sets of keys mobilized by a strategy may involve, on the one hand, changes in generalization, moving, for example, from a signalling of sanctions to appealing to a norm or custom and to claiming certain rights. On the other hand, there can also be change with respect to the types of expectations activated by the keys mobilized in a strategy, for example, by participants shifting types of key from signalling cognitive to signalling relational expectations. Strategies may include keys of different type and generalization, and changes in keying can be characterized as shifts in the focus of a strategy as a ratio of mobilizing different keys. Change in the type of expectation signalled, however, is generally much more salient than change in the generalization of keys thus mobilized: whether a participant signals willingness to sanction, appeals to a norm or tries to claim a right, participants will throughout such instances tend to consider this as expressing a somewhat continuous strategy of engagement, for example, in arguing about the finer points of gardening with a neighbour or in discussing a bad grade given to a term paper. If, on the other hand, the mobilization of keys in discussing a term paper or the obligation to mow your lawn shifts from addressing questions of competence and taste to moral matters or to questions of status, then participants are much less likely to miss the difference. Since such matters of salience are key with respect to the choice of strategies by co-present participants, differences in the focus of strategies are for purposes of sociological analysis most usefully itemized by inserting an additional column into Table 2.1 (see above, 2.5). Differences in the focus of a strategy are thus associated with differences in the type of expectations rather than with different generalizations of key; specific

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Table 6.1 Expectations, keys and focus of strategies Types of key Expectations Signs normative cognitive relational

Symbols

sanctions norms, customs, morality information knowledge, competence, taste positions membership, status, reputation

Resources

Focus of strategies

rights asserting rights cultural capital gathering information social capital forming coalitions

foci in participants’ strategies will result from the relative prominence of keys according to types of expectations (Table 6.1). Strategies mobilizing sanctions, norms, customs, morality or rights indicate that participants primarily attend to normative expectations in the run of activities. Whatever their rationale, hope or ultimate pay-off may be in doing so, we may characterize participants’ focus in trying to get through situations as an overall effort based on the assertion of rights. Strategies focusing on cognitive keys may be characterized as concentrating on the gathering of information, and those relying on relational keys, as focusing on forming coalitions. Characterizing sets of moves by participants as employing a rightsasserting, information-gathering or coalition-forming strategy offers shorthand terms which simplify the complexity of any given strategy. It addresses a prominence of distinct keys within a larger set of moves that possibly includes the mobilization of other keys. Focus in this sense is, therefore, always a question of degree. Furthermore, the characterization of strategies in terms of focus highlights different types of keys, emphasizing resources with respect to a normative focus, signs with respect to cognitively focused strategies, and aggregate outcomes with respect to relationally focused strategies. Conventional salience with respect to the signalling of expectations, therefore, is not distributed symmetrically across types of expectations; it is basically a result of practical sense in assessing moves and strategies in terms of salient aspects. As discussed earlier (2.6), such practical sense is trained within historical collectives of participants (and analysts) and its regularity is therefore empirically accidental. Despite the gradual unevenness in assessing the focus of strategies according to conventional salience, an understanding of strategies in terms of differences in focus is a reasonable supplement to an understanding of strategies as aggregate sets of discrete moves since it allows combining different sorts of data and analytical approaches in investigating strategies.

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In exploring actual runs of activity, strategies need to be established with reference to a broad variety and, possibly, a large sample of moves made by many participants. Investigating the focus of a strategy as either rights-asserting, information-gathering or coalition-forming allows combining and compiling data about moves on various levels of aggregation – and, most particularly, it allows combining narrative with more formal explorations. In order to elaborate the present theory, it is desirable to combine discrete forms of microevidence, more diffuse aggregate assessments as provided by historians and sociologists using documentary methods and narrative and formal analyses of interdependent strategies (cf. Vaughan 2009). The present study basically stuck with the first two kinds of intelligence, circumstantially supported by game-theoretical concepts. In fact, retrospectively speaking, the findings discussed here were informed primarily by recognizing distinct foci of strategies and not by a systematic aggregation of empirical data about the mobilization of keys in distinct strategies. The latter kind of work remains to be done, and alliances between disparate microanalytical approaches need to be struck in order to accomplish it. The main obstacle for a respective effort is the present incompatibility of formal and qualitative intelligence about strategies. Investigating the focus of strategies is one way of overcoming it by allowing for qualitative assessments of what strategies look like in the field, in the laboratory or in the normal form of a game-theoretical representation, while remaining sensitive to the fact that strategies are not determined by their look or, for that matter, their motivation, intentionality, ideology and so on, but by interdependent moves across participants. The understanding of strategies in terms of their focus, by generalizing from distinct moves to patterns of moves expressed in the relative prominence of keys, allows mediating between qualitative assessments of what players are doing in actual situations, types of correlation they are bringing about, and formal analyses of the type of coordination equilibria or disequilibria participants are respectively striking, accommodating or overcoming. If we are investigating an area like the one around G and H in Figure 6.3 for traces of disruptiveness, we can therefore realistically do so by exploring the focus of participants’ strategies, by trying to account for its origins, potentially leading back to certain sources of disruptiveness. 6.3

Successful strategies

In this manner, the success and diffusion of strategies within a collective becomes the central issue in understanding social change in the wake of disruptiveness. Keying as accomplished correlation is associated with regularities not only within but also across strategies and this

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across-strategy correlation qualifies keys as correlation devices in the game-theoretical sense introduced in the second chapter (Gintis 2009: 135–9; Skyrms 2010: 157–60). By looking at correlation across strategies, the exercise of strategies by participants can be associated with the success or failure of coordination both empirically and at a more analytical level in trying to relate different strategies more generally to the problem of correlating moves and expectations across participants in different scenarios. In keeping with the understanding of social situations as Schelling–Lewis coordination games, a strategy can be deemed successful if it contributes to and is accommodated within particular coordination equilibria among participants exercising their strategies. Coordination equilibria are islands of stability in the exercise of strategies since in terms of interdependent moves, they indicate ‘a combination in which no one would have been better off had any one agent alone acted otherwise’ (Lewis 1969: 14; italics original). The success of a strategy in striking a coordination equilibrium is therefore evident, in the first place, by its relative stability in an ecological huddle and, perhaps, across different runs of activities and situations. The simplest way to get an idea about the respective failure or success of a single strategy, therefore, is to look at which keys are being mobilized repeatedly over time and to establish respective continuities, if there are indeed any. By itself, however, sequences of moves and keys will generally provide little intelligence about why distinct regularities are discontinued or perpetuated. Redundancies in single strategies give an indication that some coordination equilibrium will probably exist, but they will tell us little about the distinct characteristics of this coordination equilibrium and, more particularly, about the forces sustaining it during the run of activities. In order to gain intelligence about the associated forms of interdependence, data about the distribution of strategies across participants is required. The success of any strategy in social situations as coordination games, after all, depends on other participants’ strategies, as Lewis’ reference (above) to ‘any one agent’ illustrates. In order to understand the stabilization of strategies in coordination equilibria, we require intelligence about the way in which participants’ ‘contingency plans’ correlate (Lewis 1969: 130–3). Keying provides participants and external analysts alike with signals about the way in which correlation across strategies is accomplished and it is in this particular respect that important differences resurface between the types of expectations thus brought into play. Once data about strategies exercised by co-present participants is forthcoming, the extent to which these strategies are compatible or incompatible in the sense of allowing mutual continuation without anybody having

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to ‘act otherwise’ can be investigated. The question whether certain keyings contradict each other and thus, employed strategically, would lead participants into disequilibrium appears straightforward enough. The standing of the ‘Simon and Garfinkel’ principle in everyday interaction (2.3), however, ensures that it is difficult to establish degrees of compatibility: participants tend to initially affirm any keying they are presented with. They will usually rekey gradually rather than object if they feel some incompatibility, and such rekeying will tend to stack keys and thus essentially establish compatibilities across keys. Among other things, this implies that the interim success of a strategy that is continuously readjusted slightly without attracting any complaints may mislead participants and observers, who cannot easily discern the relative strain it may impose on co-present participants, until the strategy is eventually frustrated by some participant’s failure to keep bearing it. In order to anticipate such failures, Miller and Jablin (1991: 107) suggest deliberate ‘Garfinkeling’ as a method of gaining a more robust understanding of participants’ actual strategies. An interesting aspect of this method is that it takes correlation within and across strategies for granted and tries to establish which strategies particular participants are committed to. Garfinkeling in this manner personalizes strategies by correlating them with specific participants in order to establish certain limits of compatibility. In doing so, it trades on the correlation of moves within participants’ strategies (by extrapolating from present runs of activity to future ones), and it also relies on participants’ ability to re-establish cooperation after it has, possibly, been frustrated, that is, on the general availability of recorrelating moves across strategies. Whether punctuated cooperation is the result of deliberate Garfinkeling or of a more accidental frustration of strategies, the mobilization of keys as correlation devices calls on participants’ practical sense of recoordination. Keying provides participants with intelligence about what moves to expect from one another, and this may to different degrees be intelligence ad personam, intelligence about specific participants. The opportunity to exercise this particular intelligence is determined by the continuation of co-presence. This renders strategies focused on associating in coalitions particularly successful in running punctuated cooperation and makes the reaccomplishment of some coordination equilibrium more likely as long as participants stay within the ecological huddle. In attending to positions, in generalizing signals of membership, status or reputation, or by regulating activities by selectively mobilizing cooperation through social capital, the efficiency of relational keys as correlation devices within and across strategies is, in other words, contingent on the co-presence of particular participants. Neither cognitive nor normative

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expectations face a similar contingency: cognitive expectations draw attention to the information contained in actual occasions and to what is signalled rather than to who is doing the signalling; appeals to norms, customs, morality or rights, like normative expectations in general, assert licences to respond irrespective of both accidental events and idiosyncratic swings of personality. Maintaining relational expectations requires participants to attend to signs, symbols and resources which are contingent on the recognition and categorization of particular co-present others. Cognitive and normative expectations generalize in more universal terms: one in the name of what generally is, the other in the name of what generally ought to be. In cases of accomplished cognitive and normative keying, moves are correlated within and across strategies but both types of correlation need not be personalized: if respective expectations become conventional within a collective, then participants may exercise the respective strategies across situations while being ignorant about whom it is they are facing. In law as in science as symbolic manifestations of normative and cognitive generalizations, participants’ activities are assessed according to roles anybody could, in principle, adopt, and the personalization of resources, whether in terms of personal ownership of truth or exemption from law, is disallowed. Employing relational keys, on the other hand, requires an identification of participants in terms of status, position or membership. The power of relational keys as correlation devices crucially depends on participants’ ability to categorize one another because correlation within and across strategies will vary with the type of participants engaging with one another. Rather than indicating the risks involved in respective categorizations of co-participants as a particular weakness associated with strategies focused on forming coalitions, the preceding chapters have illustrated the prominence of these strategies in responding to disruptiveness. Findings from disaster research have been pointing to emergent structures in communities struck by disastrous disruptions which are based on the spontaneous association of participants in groups and networks; high-reliability theorists have been claiming that the marking and ratification of disruptions is made more probable if participants are involved in ‘heedful interrelating’; succession succeeds in inducing the association of organization members in coalitions. Dynamics of associating were also very much evident during the run of violent engagements. The salience of stratifying in a sense presupposed such dynamics, generalizing from associations towards differences in status and power among the associated. The list of examples may be extended to include, for example, breakdown theories of collective action which have recently been enjoying a revival (Useem

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1998: 226–8; Snow et al. 1998); this would reiterate the connection between contention and domination discussed in the preceding chapter as ‘it seems that authoritarian leaders have a particular appreciation of the equilibrium acting to maintain their power in the high stress, highly structured goal situation’ (Korten 1962: 233). What may initially look like a ‘madding crowd’ will again turn out to be an ordered array of participants keying activities in a highly systematic fashion, which, due to its endogenous order, appears exotic, if not utterly irrational, from outside its nexus of activities (Coleman 1990: 198–240). It probably is the very fact that disruptions often bring about ‘an extreme form of decoupling thus offering a fresh social start’ (White 2008: 280–1) which shifts participants’ attention towards pursuing coalition-forming strategies. In such situations, just as in situations when you need to interact with unknown co-participants who may pose an immediate danger, classifying participants becomes a primary concern (cf. Gambetta and Hamill 2005). Relational keying effectively forces participants to face this concern by calling for responses that tend to be interpreted as acts of self-categorization in terms of status, position, membership and so on. A respective shift of attention exacted by participants marking disruptions is clearly visible in the evidence reported by Harold Garfinkel as in the previously cited What came over you? We never talk this way, do we? (Garfinkel 1967: 44)

In the case of violence and warfare, a similar dynamic appears to be at work with participants picking sides and memberships with groups, nations and states assembling, to states organizing citizens into armies and bureaucracies, and, again, picking alliances and memberships. John Levi Martin (2009: 16) claims that the analytic priority of relational structures ‘translates to a temporal priority’ in situations in which ‘institutional structures or fields are radically disrupted’. Martin then goes on to assert that ‘larger structures can only be quickly assembled using strong pre-existing components with certain structural properties’ (16), discussing this idea with respect to European patronage structures in the Middle Ages, which developed from the degeneration of command structures during the fall of the Roman Empire (268–70). In strategies focused on forming coalitions, participants attend to the risks imposed on coordination by other participants’ types: friend or foe, partner or cheater, comrade or squeaking wheel. Participants’ ability to employ and stabilize correlation appropriately will determine the success and durability of re-coordination. Over half a century ago, Charles Fritz (1961: 689) observed:

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The capacity of human societies under severe stress to contract from a highly elaborated set of secondary group organizations to a kind of universal primary group existence is probably their central built-in protective mechanism. This mechanism seems to account for the resiliency of groups and society in the face of disaster and their ability to regenerate a more complex social life. The reversion to the primary group mode of existence might be likened to the antidotes which are formed in the human body to attack disease and to return the body mechanism to a state of homeostasis.

Potential evolutionary mechanisms and historical dynamics shifting strategies towards a coalition-forming focus become apparent once the particular suitability of this focus in the coordination of activities in the wake of disruptiveness is taken into consideration. If collectives of participants following this tendency are likely to be quicker, more effective and more efficient in dealing with disruptions, then they will tend to either out-perform other collectives or to induce them to adopt similar tendencies of response (cf. Skyrms 2010: 120–35); in both cases, collectives prone to shift strategies towards a coalition-forming focus in coping with disruptions will result. The efficiency particular to coalition-forming strategies that may be able to support a respective assertion derives from the fact that participants, by signalling relational expectations, encourage and reinforce moves that allow them to categorize one another, establishing correlation within strategies by referring to generalized signals and correlation across strategies by virtue of reinforcing and reckoning with one another’s references. The contingency on type of participants essentially adds another correlation: a correlation of strategies with particular instances of co-presence. Strategies that focus on gathering information or asserting rights provide a more universal orientation for interacting with a variety of different participants. Such universalism is less likely to provide sufficient correlation in situations in which settling participants on a common course of action is uncertain, indicated, for example, by the very fact of prior punctuation. Whilst normative and relational keys correlate moves within and across strategies, the signalling of relational keys additionally correlates types of participants, either by relating them in terms of particular attributes, positions or associations, or by pushing them apart into separate ecological huddles. Of course, whilst relational expectations direct participants towards attending a more restrictive type of correlation device, a focus on building coalitions bears risks of its own, such as, for example, vulnerability to membership fluctuation or exposure to adversity generated by mismatches. The individual risks incurred by correlating strategies through relational keying are, however, very likely to be offset by the collective benefits if a general tendency to rekey relationally once coordination has

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been disrupted is prevalent within a population: whilst some participants may be estranged by the pressure to associate in one way or another, or intimidated to the extent that they exit a common huddle and go in search of another, the resulting segregation is likely to cluster participants within the population who are able to associate with one another; participants who are unable to effectively correlate their strategies in a local huddle are likely to leave it earlier rather than later. Relational keying, therefore, is a match-maker in a much more fundamental sense than in the case of other keyings: if membership, status or position keys are not congenial to your type, the intended correlation will be lost on you. In this manner, moves that respond to relational keys will give participants useful indications about whom they are likely to strike coordination equilibria with and they will seek out ecological huddles within the larger collective accordingly. More generally speaking, whilst the focus on relational keying is not congenial to committing the collective as a whole to a common standard of involvement (to this end, the universalism inherent in cognitive and normative expectations will appear much more effective), it is likely to break the collective down into sub-units the members of which are able to coordinate with some resilience, possibly bringing about a ‘reversion to primary group life’ serving the overall collective in much the same manner as suggested by Fritz (1961: 689). The relational keying of activities in the wake of disruptiveness will also, by segregating participants, increase the tendency of punctuated cooperation to seal off its ecological huddle and thus contain disruptiveness. In both respects, increasing the risk of frustrating, if not temporarily losing, participants by imposing unbearable demands of membership or status upon them will tend to strengthen the overall adaptive capacity of collective responses to disruptiveness by regulating membership in coalitions with respect to efficient coordination.2 If the focus on forming coalitions is general within the overall collective, then it will orient defectors along with outcasts to find realignment among their own types. There are therefore two arguments to be made about the success of coalition-forming strategies among participants coping with disruptions and coordination disequilibria: one with respect to the success of forming coalitions within ecological huddles and distinct runs of activity, the other with respect to the general tendency within the collective to exercise the strategy in various runs of punctuated cooperation; one with respect 2

There are, of course, other means of regulating participation in facing risky engagements, for example, in terms of demanding costly signals (Gambetta 2009). Space does not allow me to discuss the various generally available mechanisms, however.

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to successful reiteration of strategies in single situations, the other with respect to the successful retention of strategies within the collective and its fitness as a whole to deal with disruptiveness. Working out more robustly the dynamics involved in the respective success of strategies, in conjunction with gathering further empirical intelligence about the retention of strategies in the field, should improve the accuracy with which social changes in the wake of disruptiveness can be accounted for. 6.4

Punctuated equilibrium and the successes of succession

After coordination equilibria have been punctuated, they appear to quickly re-emerge. The enclosure of participants responding to disruptiveness seals off and contains instances of punctuated cooperation. We have also seen that the supplementation of relational keying with the mobilization of norms and sanctions personalizes and at the same time marginalizes disruptive engagements (3.3). The dissociation of participants’ experiences of disruptiveness from normalizations retrospectively imposed on the episode primarily in terms of cognitive accommodations and narratives fit for universal consumption within the collective may be seen to provide further impact containment by marginalizing discrepant recollections as ‘unforgettable but unreal’ (3.4). The consultancy of ‘heedful interrelating’ is trying to encourage associations which turn the marking and containment of disruptiveness into a kind of communal project among organization members (4.5), and we have seen that the accommodations of violence and warfare can be associated with a steady growth of state bureaucracies, disrupted only by an occasional changeover of elites in associating and stratifying. Against the backdrop of the steadily rising industrial and organizational development of the contemporary state system over the last couple of centuries, even the disruptive impact of any historical revolution appears to be very well contained in an overall dynamic of increasing order (5.5, 5.6). Then again, the term ‘revolution’ itself illustrates that in the language common to these – our own – historical collectives, hardly anything could be more disruptive than a displacement of ruling elites. All estimates of disruptiveness and containment will ultimately depend on where the analytical cuts are being made and, to a certain extent, this is of course a matter of convention. We have seen some contained instances of escalation as Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, for example, instigated disruptiveness which remained beyond its ‘resolution’ by experimenters, and we have seen organizations struggle with conflicts emerging from administrative succession. If the containment demanded were a reconstitution of a given status quo prior to a disruption, containment in fact

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may never be successful. ‘Does a disaster-hit community ever return to “normal”? Probably not, if in “normal” we include every detail of the way of life prevailing before the disaster’ (Cisin and Clark 1962: 33), and in the allegedly minor cases of Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, we have no idea of the extent to which, for example, the ‘shaken idea of my (the wife’s) nature which remained for the rest of the evening’ (Garfinkel 1967: 53) turned out to linger on until, perhaps, an eventual divorce. In any case, in discussing the effects of punctuated cooperation on collectives exposed to its run, whether the collective concerned is a nation-state or a couple, the evolutionary concept of punctuated equilibrium that was discussed very briefly in the first chapter can possibly to a certain extent be re-employed. Exploring evolutionary processes in terms of punctuated equilibrium allows the tracing of different velocities of development and change associated with different levels of order within a population in question. Individual organisms and species are located at a level at which the speed of adjustment is low, as both species and individuals are ‘homeostatic systems – . . . amazingly well-buffered to resist change and maintain stability in the face of disturbing influences’ (Eldredge and Gould 1972: 114). At another level of order, not genes but populations and, beyond populations, distinct species are at stake once the theory of punctuated equilibrium is applied to the process of species selection (Gould 1982: 90–7). This higher level of order is where punctuated equilibrium comes to be associated with the incidence of drastic change. The early understanding of punctuated equilibrium resulted from applying the idea of allopatric speciation to the interpretation of fossil records (Eldredge and Gould 1972: 93–6). In allopatric speciation, new species are created from populations of individuals who are separated from the original species, for example by a spatial barrier. Isolated from one another, the two populations subsequently develop distinct traits along with a specific mechanism of homeostasis attuned to their respective environments, and they gradually turn into distinct species. Once the spatial barrier disappears or is surmounted by one of the new species, both species start to compete with one another, and the results of this competition are distinct changes left in the fossil record, changes which, by geological standards, appear sudden and abrupt. Very briefly speaking, the incidence of punctuated equilibrium is triggered by the separation and reunion of populations after the relative uniformity of the fossil record as an expression of the homeostasis of species has been broken up by a disruption incurred on a higher level of ecological order. Turning back to social order, we have seen that, if not exactly nothing, little else succeeds like succession in splitting up a population of

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participants. In Alvin Gouldner’s (1954a, 1954b) gypsum mine case, organization members segregate into coalitions and into attending different strategies of mobilizing keys, if not altogether into different worlds (see above, 4.3). As in the case of an ecological barrier bringing about allopatric speciation, the punctuation was incurred from without a local homeostasis by the decision at headquarters to bring on the successor. The hierarchy affording this intervention was clearly not in the same sense external to the homeostasis of strategies at the mine as an ecological barrier would be to the homeostasis of species; the membership break-up at the mine was produced by a local redistribution of strategies rather than exacted upon it from without as managers and workers associated in separate coalitions after the intervention had taken place. At the same time, it was the hierarchically elevated position of the successor and of those having elected him that allowed the succession situation to take place in this highly disruptive manner. In succession cases, we are indeed dealing with a disruptiveness introduced by the embedding of local activities into a hierarchical order that is able to affect local equilibria ‘from above’: from the ecological huddle of actual work being done, to the local ecology of the gypsum mine, to the ecology of the business enterprise as a whole. To associate the disruptiveness of the succession situation with the existence of various levels of order resonates well with what the main advocates of the concept of punctuated equilibrium have been claiming about its potential contribution to hierarchy theory in biology (Vrba and Gould 1986: 225; Gould 1992: 68; cf. Vrba and Eldredge 1984) and also with some applications of the concept in studies of formal organizations (Tushman and Romanelli 1985: 178–81; cf. Van de Ven and Poole 1995: 530–1; Farazmand 2004: 352). As discussed earlier (4.1), hierarchy may be analysed as an outcome of the formalization of expectations, produced and sustained by upkeying activities towards attending posts, domains and authorities, adding laminations to the run of social situations and the collective repertoire of keys. The resulting layering of situations is as immediate and robust as any differentiation of social order into levels can become, and the distinctness of layers is experienced as such by participants learning ‘the ropes’ both formally and informally. A careful analysis of the way in which the formal organization of strategies within a collective is implicated in the transmission of disruptiveness may therefore be a promising direction in which to take the sociological exploration of punctuated equilibrium. In dealing with formal organizations, we are dealing with a powerful mechanism of bringing about and maintaining separation of members and coalitions. The formal organization of human collectives may,

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possibly, already have left us with many historical records of punctuated coordination equilibria remaining to be recognized as such – associating participants in nation-states may be an obvious example. It is probably wise to defer further discussion of punctuated coordination equilibrium at this point, until some of the remaining problems of establishing and coordinating the sociologically meaningful records and models have been resolved. However, the homeostatic processes at work in the adjustment of strategies employed within populations (cf. Skyrms 2010: 50–3; Young 1998: 44–65), and the fact that such homeostasis is evidently vulnerable to interventions which, by striking at coalitions with clearly defined formal membership, also strike at correlated strategies that are particularly prominent in the wake of disruptiveness, clearly encourages further probing of potential evolutionary dynamics. Is it really necessary to keep apart historical research and evolutionary theorizing by appealing to the observation that there is no ‘single logic’ to social change, or to disruptions incurred, transmitted, accommodated in human populations (Mann 1993: 738)? In the perspective offered here, such observations need not discourage us from addressing the historical development of order in a given collective in terms of evolutionary processes. Rather, the correlation of strategies across participants suggests that evolution does take place in terms of selection processes within and across distinct productions of contexts and order, that numerous selection mechanisms amenable to further analysis are involved, and that the present treatment has achieved little more than drawing attention to one of the more easily discernible patterns: adjustments of strategies which in responding to varieties of disruptiveness – from ecological huddles among participants of social situations and members of formal organizations to ecologies across situations and organizations – shift participants’ focus in attending events and activities towards forming coalitions. 6.5

Assembling empirical records

Addressing the phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium in this preliminary manner flips the perspective maintained throughout this investigation in one important respect: whereas the incidence of disruptions and runs of punctuated cooperation have been used throughout as starting points for gathering intelligence about coincidental or subsequent processes of social change, exploring punctuated equilibrium begins with pieces of evidence of drastic change and then goes on to establish the particular processes and disruptions accounting for the drastic change. Analysing equilibrium punctuation needs to establish processes accounting for the rapid transformations of empirical measures, and while the

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present investigation has been working with heterogeneous empirical indications rather than with discrete measures of social change, it allows pointing out a couple of crucial factors to be taken into account in trying to assemble sociological evidence of changes within a given collective in a more systematic fashion. The general task is to connect more systematically change in individual strategies to overall patterns of social change in order to gradually close the large gap between, for example, the endogenous order of violent engagements and the processes and structures of collective warfare discussed at the end of the last chapter – a point at which the discussion very explicitly had to appeal to theoretical plausibility (5.6). Most notably, tracing shifts of strategies towards a focus on forming coalitions may provide a way of working backwards from records of drastic change to instances of punctuated cooperation, and to initial disruptions or disequilibrium, as well as forward from specific instances of punctuated cooperation to possibly yet unrecognized correlates emerging from the reiteration of accommodated strategies. In order to progress from the more or less impressionistic indications collected here towards an articulation of theory closer to a systematic appraisal of empirical data, issues of data collection and aggregation need to be considered. The notion of social fields was introduced early on in order to characterize to some extent how distributions within a collective may be affected by disruptiveness. Since it explicitly has not been the concern of the present investigation to track down more specifically the effects of spectacular disasters or catastrophic instances of social change (though the fifth chapter has suggested something very similar in terms of a longrun dynamic), field-specific redistributions have been explored only very circumstantially. At least one clear suggestion with respect to investigating the distribution of resources in distinct social fields can, however, be offered: if the marking and transmission of disruptiveness is indeed associated with a distinct shift of strategies towards forming coalitions, and if indeed strategies in these cases marginalize normative and cognitive keys in favour of relational ones, then there should be a shift in the value of resources available within the collective in favour of social capital at the expense of rights and cultural capital through episodes of disruptiveness. Since sociologists can traditionally claim a certain expertise in tracking down collective distributions of resources, this possible extension of the present findings may be a good starting point for considering how to cover the distance from the present exploratory appraisal to more systematic forms of empirical research and analysis. Extending the general finding to the distribution of resources is commonsensical enough: if expectations are frustrated and participants

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cannot be sure whether what they know and understand is appropriate (read: value of cultural capital), and if they feel uneasy about what they ought to expect from themselves and others in such a situation (read: value of rights), then affiliating with others and being able to draw on associations and forms of mutual membership become more important (read: value of social capital). This reasoning suggests that the value of social capital will be the main indicator to be measured in an empirical assessment of social change in the wake of disruptiveness. In the debate, excessive at times, about the ‘decline of social capital’ (Putnam 1995), measurement of social capital in terms of trust has dominated (Paxton 1999). Asking people whether they trust other people and institutions has been treated as a measure of belief in social capital, but there is little reason to believe that answers will adequately portray the actual value of social capital at respondents’ command. Network measures of social capital based on quantifying social capital in terms of empirical opportunities of participants to mobilize relationships would clearly be preferable (cf. Lin 2001: 211). However, network measures like, for example, degree or centralization are not easily aggregated to measures of the relative value of social capital either for any participant in the network or within the network as a whole. Network analysis can provide useful intelligence about the distribution of social capital but probably not about its relative value: just like the value of money is not established by determining the distribution of money but by investigating what it can actually buy, the relative value of social capital can only be assessed by exploring what participants can actually achieve by drawing on it, and how these achievements compare to other ways of accomplishing equivalent results. One way of establishing the relative value of social resources is to measure the value of one resource in terms of another. Network analysts have been particularly successful in showing how social capital translates into economic capital, for example in terms of getting jobs or positions (e.g. White 1970; Granovetter 1974). An even more common finding is the high correlation of economic and cultural capital (Boudon 1974) which is also elementary to the exploration of social fields by Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1996) who suggests an understanding of fields with respect to which the value of resources can be expressed in specific rates of exchange. The actual consequence of such a perspective, though, has been to focus the analysis of rights on the sole type of right that can easily be measured: money. In the final analysis, the value of all other resources tends to be derived from measuring participants’ access to money.3 In 3

Bourdieu’s insistence on the fundamental character of economic capital, of course, comes to mind at this point (cf. Bourdieu 1977: 177, 183; 1991: 170). There is no space here

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order to provide some footing to the consecutively derived valuation of social and cultural capital by an actual valuation of money beyond an access-to-money measure, the data would need to be supplemented with some indicator of how participants actually employ their economic rights. More generally, social capital, rights and cultural capital would need to be measured simultaneously in both their distribution and their respective relative valuation in order to generate empirical records of those shifts in participants’ strategies which the sociology of disruption and social change needs to be interested in. The kind of systematic collection of empirical data called for in elaborating the current perspective, therefore, necessitates the production of empirical records of how signs, symbols and resources are actually employed (cf. Fligstein and McAdam 2012: 172). It requires data about the mobilizations of keys in strategies from which the relative value of resources to participants can be extrapolated. At present, this clearly means asking a lot, but some limited precedence does exist. In analysing historical cases, explorations of repertoires of collective action by the late Charles Tilly (2008: 14–15, 64–87), who called for ‘students of contentious politics to move away from classified event counts and singleepisode narrative towards procedures tracing interactions among participants in multiple episodes’ (211), provide a source of encouragement. Microevidence provided by audio and video recordings may provide data on contemporary episodes, and studies in conversation analysis have been making extraordinary progress since the programme was launched by Harvey Sacks (e.g. Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Schegloff 2007). Trying to gather intelligence about the regular use of signs, symbols and resources, though, more or less immediately turns into a problem of applying adequate coding schemes on strips of ‘raw’ sequential data (Goodwin 1994: 608–9). Just consider again the excerpt from Garfinkel’s reports: What’s the matter with you? You know what I mean. (Garfinkel 1967: 43)

In deviating from the interpretation offered earlier, we might treat this statement as containing a couple of cognitive keys, particularly once we make an effort to imagine a calm and collected interviewer asking, in a slightly humorous tone, for a clarification of information. At the same time, we will probably find it hard to not attribute some level of irritation to the speaker, which would indicate that a normative expectation is being to discuss Bourdieu’s theory of social resources at any length. Another reference to Coleman’s theory of rights (Coleman 1990: 45–64) needs to suffice as an indication that some disagreement may be involved.

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put to the test. Perhaps the speaker is also trying to appeal to a specific relationship here, and maybe a withdrawal of social capital is threatened. We may furthermore imagine the second part of the statement to involve some irony and a couple of different modulations, or more exotic conversational conventions among speaker and addressee. The problems of picking up signs, symbols and resources from any shred of evidence ask for a decoding by sociologists, who should ideally look at the full spread of evidence across the episode and the ecological huddle from which it was drawn and who should accustom themselves to the peculiarities of order within the collective they are dealing with, to then begin on this basis an in-depth inspection and aggregation of the data. Each step of decoding and recoding the keying of activities in ascertaining the strategies in play will beg questions of specificity and indexicality threatening to downgrade the possibility of systematically comparing strategies coded and compiled by different researchers in different settings. These problems are clearly not insurmountable, and they are intrinsic to any process of gathering data for the purposes of aggregation (cf. Maynard and Schaeffer 2000). Some scepticism, however, is justified with respect to whether the collection of historical and natural data will suffice to make significant headway in understanding the variety of processes potentially involved in the drift of strategies in a given collective of participants. Combinations of quantitative and qualitative approaches are likely to provide a better basis for assembling empirical records of adequate quality and depth, and the literature discussed in the present study is unusually rife with criticism of ‘sharp choices between quantitative and qualitative methods, between formal analysis and literary storytelling, between narrowly conceived pursuit of explanations and broadly conceived interpretations’ (Tilly 2008: 5), and of ‘epidemiology’ versus ‘narrative’ (Tilly 2008: 5); of the ‘false choice in which social science generally allows itself to be trapped, that between social physics and social phenomenology’ (Bourdieu 1990: 135) and the ‘whole series of secondary oppositions that haunt, like theoretic ghosts, the academic mind’ (Bourdieu 1988: 780). Conceptual and methodological ‘heterodoxy’ (Bourdieu 1988: 780), though, possibly needs to be complemented by a combination of empirical records of natural and historical runs of social situations on the one hand, and empirical records generated from the run of experimentally contrived and controlled social situations on the other, including the kind of modelling pursued by game theorists. The call to combine experimental and field studies has, within sociology, primarily been articulated by researchers of the behavioural tradition (cf. Homans 1961: 15–16; Bijou et al. 1969: 206). It is interesting to note that the response has been notably more positive among

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sociologists studying disruptions than elsewhere in the discipline (Guetzkow 1962: 353; Drabek and Haas 1967, 1969; Gersick 1991: 32). Garfinkel’s breaching experiments are evidence enough of how easily punctuated cooperation can be brought about experimentally. In his earlier laboratory study of leadership and crisis, Robert Hamblin introduced the element of crisis by simply changing the rules of the game during the run of the experiment (Hamblin 1958: 326). Taking into account the problem of recording natural data of spontaneous responses to disruptiveness by accident – often with little opportunity of gathering appropriate intelligence about participants’ strategies ex ante – and the ubiquitous role of emotional affect in responding to disruptiveness (which is hard to assess without appropriate recording equipment in place), sociologists studying disruptions can hardly afford giving up on the experimental method. Decades ago, Karl Weick (1969: 303) advised organizational researchers that ‘“back to the lab” seems just as good a recommendation . . . as does the now fashionable, “go out into the field”’. Nowadays, the balance appears to have shifted yet again in favour of advanced experimental methods, and towards running social situations on screen and paper. This has produced some notable results in studies of disruptiveness, particularly among organizational researchers (Lin 2000; Carley 1991; Krackhardt and Stern 1988). The problem of many simulation studies, however, is that their models tend to take microsociological considerations into account only very modestly, although in building appropriate models, disciplinary barriers have gradually started to dissolve (e.g. Ross 2005). Erving Goffman had his qualms both with the experimental method (1971: 20–1) and with the formal study of interaction by game theorists (1969). The considerable advances of game theory, especially in its evolutionary variants, taking into account processes of learning and the distribution of strategies within populations (Maynard Smith 1982; Binmore 1994, 1998; Young 1998; Fudenberg and Levine 1998; Skyrms 2010), still deserve a much closer look by sociologists, especially by those working in one of the microsociological paradigms. Game theory may in turn have something to gain from an engagement with sociologists in the context of further exploring the topics discussed here: coalition formation just happens to be where game theory’s success in modelling equilibrium selection has been limited (Binmore 1994: 77– 8; 1998: 14–15). The appeal of game theory to sociology is not so much that it would suggest more accurate or more consistent representations of how interdependent strategies actually change, but that game-theoretical investigations indicate coherent ways of thinking about these changes

Framing the relational

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and of analysing the implications of proposed mechanisms: how changes may be triggered, how they may diffuse within populations and how the respective patterns may be spotted across different sets of data; from the more aggregate qualitative assessment of strategies offered here to more traditional analyses of interdependent moves and utilities and onwards to the realm of the ‘unforgettable but unreal’. 6.6

Framing the relational

Many of the observations offered here appear to be easily associated with the stream of ‘relational thinking’ which Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) has contrasted with ‘substantialist’ social thought. The ontology of actual occasions on which the present perspective has been built maintains that events, activities, keys, participants, situations, organizations and so on emerge from the nexus of social situations. Therefore the present perspective agrees with ‘relational theorists’ who ‘reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pre-given units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis’ (Emirbayer 1997: 287) in principle (cf. Fuchs 2001: 64–5). Then again, are actual occasions not something of a surrogate concept for substance as they are ‘the final real things of which the world is made up’ (Whitehead 1929: 27)? Sticking to Whitehead’s terminology, this question would lead us to discuss the nature of prehensions, further on into deliberating about the ontology of social reality, and far beyond the scope of the present analysis. The more important consideration emerging from the discussion with respect to ‘relational thinking’ at this point is, I think, the fact that the role of the relational in the maintenance of social order within a collective emerges with utmost clarity not when ‘the relational’ is universalized as an essence of order or as an ontological principle, but when relational processes and alternative solutions to accommodating actual occasions in distinct productions of context are juxtaposed and systematically compared. Relational expectations are effective solutions to the problem of stabilizing strategies among participants confronting disruptions. Were it not for the axiomatic availability of equivalent expectations, this effectiveness could not be associated with any shift of strategies since we would universally think of participants as coalition-seekers. Relational expectations need to be discussed in their specificity, and this specificity can only be clarified with respect to other solutions to the problem of ‘cooperation in maintaining expectations’, solutions which are generally available to participants and which sometimes push relational expectations into the background. Once we do not look at the keying of activities in punctuated

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cooperation but at the keyings inherent to the normalization of disruptiveness, for example, the prominence of relational expectations is no longer apparent: normalization of events and activities considered as disruptive draws much more on cognitive (what happened when and why) and normative (assessments of deviance, sanctioning) keyings. A similar difference is registered by John Levi Martin, who contrasts structures – gained by ‘extrapolating the structural implications of the content of relationships’ (Martin 2009: 26) – with institutions linking equivalent sets of participants rather than specific participants (14, 336–41). When institutions break down, structures take over (16), but in more routine runs of activities institutions as ‘free-floating heuristics’ (339) regulate conduct very smoothly. We might consider cognitive and normative expectations as keys to maintaining such free-floating institutional heuristics and, due to their universalism, with respect to participants whose moves are correlated by them, as tools for decoupling expectations from particular addressees. Relational expectancies are less effective in this respect for the very reason that they suppose the kind of prerequisite correlation between strategies and particular forms of co-presence discussed above. Despite building his concept of social structures on an understanding of social ties and associations, Martin (2009: 8–9) argues against seeing network analysis as a general substitute for other types of structural analyses, writing that ‘attention to structures of interpersonal relationships is only a starting point’ (8–9). The present approach adds another degree of relativism about relationalism by claiming that even when social order is in its most elementary stage in the nexus of social situations, relational keying is only one of the available options open to participants. In this sense, relational order among participants is not prior but subordinate to participants’ eventual strategies; at times it is dominated by what participants consider right (normatively) or interesting (cognitively). The prominence of cognitive and normative keying in institutionalized runs of activity makes a lot of sense in terms of the present theory, as it does in Martin’s and, for that matter, in the famous treatment by Berger and Luckmann (1966). Keying that is universal and insensitive to types of participants can much easier be generalized within a collective since it is less vulnerable to fluctuations in participation and co-presence. Strategies focused on gathering information or asserting rights may, therefore, generally diffuse much quicker within a collective. Relational keying restricts the diffusion of strategies since their exercise depends on distinct forms of membership or status. It is intriguing to observe how the rise of the modern state system combines both aspects: on the one hand, the

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generation of universal forms of knowledge and open access to rights; on the other, the enclosure and control of aggressive tendencies and of the means to exercise them (cf. North et al. 2009). The present perspective suggests that a continuity of relational, cognitive and normative keyings is generally available to participants’ mastery of social situations, regardless of whether institutions, situations, organizations, professions, families and so on are at stake. This is why institutions, like associations and networks, like groups and classes, are not a fast sociological footing for relativistic stances towards knowledge, norms or any other aspect of social reality, but are themselves subject to the relativism of concrete social situations. This relativism is congenial to participants’ opportunism in focusing and continuously adjusting their strategies in coming to terms with events, activities and with one another. 6.7

Conclusion

The most general claim emerging from the sociology of disruption and disaster is that social change within a collective affected by disruptiveness is investigated most effectively by looking at strategies of response among co-present participants. The preliminary finding of a relational bias in strategies of response to disruptiveness has appeared robust across different instances of disruptiveness, from minor to disastrous disruptions, from single situations to broader accommodations of disruptive engagements. Observing changes in the distribution of social resources may ultimately suggest more reliable transsituational indicators of changes within a collective. Respective assessments, however, need to be carefully qualified by observations of how members of the collective utilize resources as keys in actual runs of activity. Otherwise researchers may be fooled, for example, by access-to-money measures and official discourses providing, among all the normalizations of disruptiveness, misleading intelligence about the actual value of resources available to participants. Particularly misleading assessments of collective responses to disruptions and disasters may be those for which some understanding of the rationalization of activities provides the standard of evaluation. The systematic gathering of information and the defence of certain entitlements and standards of well-being clearly do have a role to play in how collectives respond to disruptiveness. It is, of course, also a quite reasonable and sociologically very relevant question to ask whether and in which way a collective can improve on the effectiveness and efficiency of coordination. Maybe at some point in the future social science will have reached a

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stage of maturity at which respective comparisons and recommendations are possible in terms of some well-qualified ‘whiggery’ (Binmore 1998: 499–509). This point is unlikely ever to be reached if collective responses to disruptiveness are understood primarily in terms of the accumulation of information or the defence of certain values against adversity within the collective in question. If looking at collective strategies of response in terms of gathering information and asserting rights is an inadequate way of understanding social change in the wake of disruptiveness, then it will also be an inappropriate way of improving collective responses. Discourses of rationalization, biased in favour of universalistic strategies of response, have been consistently drawing attention away from the more particularistic forms in which collectives cope with disruptiveness, guided by the implicit assumption that no welfare could arise from divisiveness and particularism. It is ironic that the deficiency of such an approach has become particularly apparent in the discussion of organized cooperation, the traditional focus of collective efforts to rationalize the coordination of activities. Empirical indications point to a shift in participants’ strategies towards coordinating activities and expectations in a primarily relational manner in responding to disruptiveness. This shift is apparent in the salience of coalitions and, to some extent, it is apparent in the stratification among participants, but it remains to be more systematically established by aggregating sequential microevidence across records of situated activities and by connecting such evidence to different kinds of theorizing, experimenting and modelling. The methodology required for progress along these lines needs to be able to systematically direct the collection of microevidence, whether historical or experimental, with a clear idea of how to aggregate data about strategies. Clearly, it needs to involve further elaborations of both theory and method. It calls for sociologists working in sociological theory, phenomenology, ethnomethodology or symbolic interactionism to cooperate on a more sustained basis with game theorists, network analysts and with proponents of formal and quantitative approaches more generally, as well as with social psychologists, evolutionary anthropologists, management scholars and so on. Decades ago, across many of the disciplinary and methodological divides cooperation has been punctuated as researchers have been associating and segregating, sometimes in outright competition with one another, often as if completely oblivious to each other’s existence. The present non-coordination equilibrium, a state of specialization and reproductive isolation, will need to be punctuated time and again in order to gradually deconstruct the barriers of isolation.

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Ultimately, sociologists will find little need to hide behind other experts investigating disruption and disaster. They cannot, however, step up their efforts on a sustained level without a more active engagement with colleagues from neighbouring disciplines. In investigating punctuated cooperation, sociologists, not quite incidentally, do have some genuine intelligence of their own to offer. It appears to be about time to expose it and to see who will take a shot.

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Index

Abbott, Andrew 3, 121, 199, 200 accidents 12, 61, 95, 124, 128, 139, 148 normal 139–41, 148 accounting 188 accounts 39, 97, 106 actors see situations, participants of ad hoc communities 92–3, 102 Agamben, Giorgio 15 aircraft carriers 146, 148, 156 aircraft hijacking 45 anger see resentment anti-structure 96 anxiety 78–9, 99, 125, 164, 165, 167, 184, 189 architecture 35, 109, 112 Armenia earthquake 92 Armstrong, Peter 188 Ashworth, Anthony E. 173–4 Athens, Lonnie H. 165 attention 16, 34–6, 41, 45, 49, 50, 58, 69, 76, 79, 95, 127, 138, 141, 155, 199, 204, 221; see also inattention boundary of 35, 71 to disruptions 1, 5, 20, 206 mindful 147, 151 authority 114, 119, 125–6, 132–3, 135, 153–4, 168, 221 authority structures 116 leadership 183–4 Bacharach, Michael 30 background expectancies see expectations bad news 61, 79 Baghdad 102 banks 33, 157 bargaining 53, 57 Barnard, Chester I. 61, 124 Bartov, Omer 174–8 Bateson, Gregory 29 behavioural spillover 89 Berger, Peter L. 234 ¨ R. 72, 200 Bergmann, Jorg

Bettelheim, Bruno 11, 70–1, 74–6, 79, 83–4, 98–9, 101 Bhopal disaster 148 Binmore, Ken 15, 44, 53, 59, 191, 232, 236 blame 91, 93, 94, 143, 211 Bloor, David 17 Blumer, Herbert 32 Bourdieu, Pierre 17, 23, 24, 32, 49, 51, 51–5, 58–9, 64, 96, 117, 137, 199, 204, 213, 229, 231 breaching experiments 77–81, 83, 84, 86–7, 91–2, 94–7, 103, 205, 209, 224–5 Brouillette, John R. 124, 126 Brown, Richard Harvey 105, 117, 144 brutality see violence Buffalo Creek flood 69, 84, 93, 94 bureaucratization see cooperation, rationalization of Burgess, Ernest W. 81–2 calculation 45 capital cultural 53, 56, 136, 178, 228, 229 social 53, 63, 80, 135, 136, 160, 172, 219, 228 value of 229 symbolic 54 catastrophe 11, 100 catastrophe theory 11, 15 Challenger disaster 129, 143–4, 150, 211 Clark, Herbert H. 39, 48, 56, 120, 213 Clarke, Lee 1, 148–9 clearing the frame 97 coalitions 93, 131–4, 136–9, 155–9, 167–9, 172, 173, 178, 181, 190, 192–4, 197, 199, 216–17, 219, 220, 222–3, 226–7, 232, 236 cockpit communication 126, 127 cognitive bias 101, 158–9, 224 Cohen, Eliot A. 182, 185

269

270

Index

Coleman, James S. 24, 53, 56, 69, 108, 115, 116, 221, 230 Coleman, Penny 99 Collins, Randall 35, 40, 52, 53, 70, 105, 161, 163–9, 177–8, 199, 205 Columbia disaster 144 concentration camp imprisonment 11, 70, 71, 74–6, 79, 83–4, 98–9 prisoners’ strategies 74–5, 76, 83–4 as ‘unforgettable but unreal’ 99; see also retrospective unreality conflict 138–9 industrial 93, 133, 137, 158, 159, 224 violent 199; see also warfare confrontational tension 163–5, 167 confusion 205 contagion see disruptiveness, transmission of context 25 emergent 85–7; see also emergence production of 25, 30, 32, 36, 46, 62, 67, 74, 86, 87, 89, 94, 96, 137, 208 conventions 35, 41, 51, 54, 56, 60, 70, 76, 107, 119, 150, 184, 214, 220, 224 of event accounting 97 of framing disruptiveness 39, 95–7; see also normalization conversation 18, 43, 79, 91, 94 conversation analysis 230 cooperation 34, 37; see also expectations, cooperation in maintaining elementary 25, 28 formal 105 organized 105, 108–19, 120, 156, 236; see also organizations capability of coping with disruptiveness 144–5 embedding of 143, 154, 179–80 necessity of monitoring 160 punctuated 14, 60–2, 67, 121, 122, 136, 160, 206, 208 accommodation of 100, 161–2, 166, 179, 195, 200, 202–3, 214, 235 boundaries of 73 containment in 71–6 as decoupled from the marking of disruptions 156–7 as delimiting disruptiveness 91, 93, 94–5, 223, 224 difficulty of tracking down 208, 212–13 endogenous order of 75, 87, 90–3, 106, 166–9, 221 impact of 76, 98, 100, 104

involvement in 77–90 probability of 105 prominence of relational keys in 92–4 selectivity of 94 transcendence of 76, 87, 106 rationalization of 157–9, 235 spontaneous 92, 112, 124 coordination 2, 16, 30, 36, 37, 42 coordination equilibria, multiplicity of 48, 64 coordination equilibrium 48, 49, 51, 60–1, 64, 76, 95, 110, 138, 156, 167, 198, 208, 215, 217, 218, 219, 223 coordination problems 37, 38, 75, 96, 104, 190 in punctuated cooperation 75 correlation device 48; see also keys cosmology episode 78, 97, 142 crisis 9–10, 82, 100 crisis discourse 10 crisis theories 10, 208 noetic 79, 97 novelty-induced 141–2 quantity-induced 141–2 decision-making 115, 127, 129, 158, 181, 226 deviance 42, 44, 46, 71, 74, 80, 95, 100–1 neutralization of 39 normalization of see normalization, of deviance organizational 140 sociology of 32, 101 Dickson, William J. 174 dictatorship 191 disappointment see expectations, disappointment of disaster see disruptions, disastrous disaster myths 7, 100–1 disaster research 8, 92–3, 123, 152–4, 220 disaster response 145–6, 152–3, 235 disaster subcultures 102 disequilibrium 11, 60–1, 64, 67, 69, 78, 224; see also equilibrium, punctuated disruptions 1, 11, 14, 19, 22, 33, 42, 67, 71, 206–8, 211; see also disruptiveness disastrous 5, 8, 11, 24, 26, 61, 69, 92, 95, 106, 129, 139, 142–3, 145, 160–2, 170, 206–7, 209, 228 post-disaster convergence 144, 152, 154 post-disaster tribunals 143, 182, 202, 210

Index impact of 2, 30, 63, 77, 214 normalization of see normalization probability of attending to 141, 156 disruptiveness; see also disruptions accommodation of 97, 100 as analytical resource 1, 7, 38, 45 continuum of 12, 14, 26, 42, 61, 206–8, 235 difficulty of characterizing 15, 18 effectiveness of dealing with 151–5 endogeneity of 3, 15, 16, 20, 27, 62, 71, 74, 129–30 failure to mark 129, 141, 156–7 sociological investigation of 3, 26, 28, 66–7, 102–3, 105–6, 206, 212–13 as often an exercise in normalization 100, 103 tracking down 32, 39, 76, 206–13 transmission of 21–2, 26, 32, 62, 66–7, 70, 89–90, 102–4, 180–1, 191, 224, 226 vulnerability to 60, 67 domains 115, 119, 127, 135, 145 dominance 166–8, 169, 178 downkeying 118–19, 127–8, 129, 141, 142, 156, 159; see also keying, relational downsizing 127 Drabek, Thomas E. 120, 123–4, 126 ´ Durkheim, Emile 44 Dynes, Russell 1, 3, 173 ecological huddle 36, 46, 72–3, 75, 88, 163, 214, 219, 222 economics 15, 24 Eldredge, Niles 12–14, 225–6 embarrassment 39, 59, 78, 95, 149, 207 emergence 82, 85–8, 123–5, 152–3 emergency 61, 72, 92, 96, 154, 170, 191 emergency management networks 153 emergency phone calls 72, 96, 123, 200 Emirbayer, Mustafa 135, 137, 138, 233 emotion 20, 38, 44, 58–9, 61, 77–8, 121, 160, 164 enclosure see situations, containment in engrossment 61, 77, 78–9, 106, 141, 164; see also situations, involvement in entrainment 163 non-solidarity 165, 168 episodes 76, 89, 98, 104, 230 biographical 95, 98–100, 106, 211 of contention 193 cosmological see cosmology episode

271 disruptive 85, 89, 100, 106, 188, 191, 208–13, 228 historical 9, 11, 99, 100, 106, 187, 188, 211, 224 of social change 210 sociological reconstruction of 208–13 equilibrium 14, 48 of coordination see coordination prevalence of 12 punctuated 12–15, 132, 225–8; see also disequilibrium sociological investigation of 226 Erikson, Kai T. 69, 84, 92–3, 102 Esser, Hartmut 30 everyday life 5, 16, 32, 33, 36, 57, 59, 74, 76, 78, 97, 109, 163 evolutionary theory 12–15, 227 existential involvement 20, 28, 30, 38, 57–9, 77, 106; see also situations, involvement in exit 71, 80, 85, 106, 165, 223 expectations 16, 28, 40 background expectancies 40, 58, 86 cognitive 44–5, 50, 52–3, 57, 81, 101, 115, 204, 215, 219, 220, 223, 234 cooperation in maintaining 25, 28, 41, 110; see also cooperation cross-layering of 52, 55 disappointment of 40, 41, 45, 46, 47; see also frustration diversity of 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 159, 215, 220, 233–4 of expectations 52, 53, 55, 87 formal 109–13, 114, 116, 119, 120, 136; see also formalization; organizations change in 129–30 manipulating 53 normative 43–4, 50, 52–3, 57, 73, 80, 91, 94, 114, 139, 204, 216, 219, 220, 223, 234 relational 46, 50, 52–3, 57, 58, 74, 80, 114, 152, 172, 204, 215, 220, 222, 233–4 experimental research 87, 123–4, 232 experts 4–7, 184–5, 202 competition among 6, 237 expertise 156 financial 188 sociological 7, 9, 24, 237 Exxon Valdez oil spill 152 fear see anxiety fields 64, 105, 179–80, 195, 221, 224, 228–30

272

Index

fields (cont.) of organized cooperation 107, 109–18, 119, 121, 135, 137, 139 suitable for the investigation of disruptiveness 105–6 firemen 142–3 flashbulb memories 101 Fligstein, Neil 10, 60, 108, 138, 192, 198, 230 focal points 37, 47, 94; see also keys formalization 56, 109, 111, 113–14, 118, 135, 150, 158, 159, 168, 226; see also keys, formal expectations, formal lack of 136 limits of 112–13, 117–18, 130 practical sense of 113–14 rationality of 117 Forrest, Thomas R. 115 Foucault, Michel 101 frames 28, 30, 32, 33, 62, 79 laminations 119, 120, 156, 226 framing 25, 29–33, 34, 67, 87, 96, 98, 136, 139–45, 176–7, 207 framing contest 136–7, 159 psychological correlates of 30, 82–5 framing disruptiveness, timing of 141–3, 145 Freud, Sigmund 20, 101 Friedberg, Erhard 109, 111, 113 friendly fire 128, 164 Fritz, Charles E. 221–2, 223 frustration 1–3, 16, 41, 45, 60, 62, 75, 78, 80, 91, 94, 112, 163–5, 167, 180, 205, 219, 223, 228; see also expectations, disappointment of fuzzy sets 206–8 Gabriel, Richard A. 172–3 Galtung, Johan 43, 44 Gambetta, Diego 223 game theory 65, 66, 111, 217, 231, 232–3, 236 evolutionary 14, 44, 54, 227, 232 Garfinkel, Harold 32, 40, 44, 56, 70, 77–81, 83, 84–7, 91–2, 103, 113, 118, 119, 205, 221, 224–5, 230 Garfinkeling 130, 219 garrison state 189, 193–4 genocide 167, 176, 188, 199 Gephart, Robert P. 134, 135–6, 138, 143, 157, 158 Giddens, Anthony 7, 11, 13, 49, 71, 75–6, 77, 188, 193–4, 213 Gintis, Herbert 15, 48, 218

glossing 56, 117, 119 Goffman, Erving 8, 21, 23, 28, 29, 33, 39, 47, 50, 53, 63, 70, 72–3, 78–9, 95, 97, 109, 118, 131, 192, 207, 232 and Bateson 29 Frame Analysis 25, 29–31 Gooch, John 182, 185 Gould, Stephen Jay 12–14, 225–6 Gouldner, Alvin W. 115, 132–4, 135, 136–7, 138, 157, 158, 159–60, 226 groupthink 125, 152 Grusky, Oscar 133 Haas, J. Eugene 120, 123–4, 126 habitus 51, 65–6, 84, 91, 110, 138 Hallett, Tim 133, 137, 179 heedful interrelating 147–8, 152, 156, 220 Hertzler, Joyce O. 191 high-reliability theory 148–52, 155–6, 220 Hilbert, Richard A. 111, 157–8 Hirschman, Albert O. 71 historical sociology 10, 203 history 9, 10 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 38, 57–9, 110 Homans, George C. 37, 170, 171–2, 196, 204 homology 52, 56, 59–60, 65, 66, 196, 199, 201 Hughes, Will P. 155 ignorance see inattention immigrants 103, 112 improvisation 65 inattention 35, 43, 49, 53, 76, 141, 143, 156, 159, 160, 201, 204, 236; see also attention civil 73 fateful 128–9, 141, 143, 145, 150 functional 76, 130, 141 incubation periods 143, 145, 209, 210 inequality 53, 54, 63, 65, 92, 167, 186, 194, 219; see also stratification information 45, 50, 56, 81, 91, 94, 158, 216, 217, 222, 234 infrastructure 35, 53, 186–7, 188 institutions 56, 199, 234–5 interaction see situations interaction order 23, 31 interaction ritual 52, 163, 168 Janis, Irving L. 2 Janowitz, Morris 170–3, 174–5, 177–8, 183 Johnson, Victoria 135, 137, 138

Index Katz, Jack 22, 34, 59 Keegan, John 106, 161, 173, 183, 185 keying 47–56; see also keys by analogy 198, 199, 200, 201, 203 cognitive 201–2 compound 56, 57, 81, 91, 116, 117, 230–1 relational 92–4, 153, 155, 204, 222, 234; see also keys, relational pervasiveness of 92, 94, 138, 155, 156, 157; see also downkeying, rekeying, upkeying keynotes 48, 81, 82–3, 123, 189–90 keys 47–9, 63, 67 as battery of defences 57, 60 choice of 51 cognitive 50, 52–3, 81, 94, 101, 216, 234 as correlation devices 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 116, 214–15, 218 diversity of 49–50, 57, 65, 215, 228 formal 113–18, 119, 133, 135, 136, 226; see also formalization; organizations as generalized stimuli 49, 51, 53, 63 normative 50, 52–3, 81, 91–2, 202, 234 as psychological resource 83 recycling of 67, 104, 160, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203 relational 50, 52–3, 81, 91–4, 200–1, 204, 216, 219–20; see also keying, relational as correlating participants 220, 221, 222, 223 resources 52–3, 64, 179 centralization of 187, 191, 194, 195, 196, 202 value of 228–30, 235 signs 50–1 symbols 51–2, 96 Killian, Lewis M. 48, 81–3, 189 knowledge 52, 202, 235 Korten, David C. 221 Kreps, Gary A. 115, 161 Kripke, Saul A. 17 Kuhn, Alfred 54 Kuhn, Thomas S. 12 language 55, 116 Latour, Bruno 6, 36 law 202, 220 learning 14, 30–2, 36, 41, 45, 90, 101–4; see also socialization cost of 36, 84

273 organizational 145, 155–6 Lewis, David 38, 48, 51, 53, 218 Lin, Nan 53, 116, 229 Lindemann, Gesa 46, 49 Lindenberg, Siegwart 30, 191 Loosemore, Martin 155 Luckmann, Thomas 234 Luhmann, Niklas 10, 43–5, 49, 51, 52, 54, 109, 115 mangle of practice 21 Mann Gulch fire disaster 142–3, 151, 154, 157 Mann, Michael 181, 183, 187, 190, 193, 197, 227 March, James G. 113, 116 Marshall, S. L. A. 164, 166, 182–4 Martin, John Levi 46, 64, 184, 193, 197, 221, 234 Maynard, Douglas W. 61, 79 McAdam, Doug 10, 108, 198, 230 McNeill, William H. 168–9, 181–2, 187–8, 197 McPhail, Clark 82, 100, 205 Mead, George Herbert 43, 79, 81 membership 52, 53, 91, 172, 223, 226–7 military see organizations, military military-industrial complex see organizations, military, embedding of milling 81–2, 84, 91, 123, 127 Mills, C. Wright 203 mobilization 155, 181, 183, 188, 192–3 modelling 11, 233, 236 money 54, 229–30, 235 Murakami, Haruki 70, 72, 85, 88, 89, 93, 98, 100, 107 mutual monitoring 33, 36 NASA 143–4, 149–50, 209, 211 naturalistic fallacy 19 Nazis ideology 170, 175–7, 186 regime 83, 96, 177, 179, 186, 199 negative experience 78–9 network analysis 229, 234 network organizations 152 networks 152–4, 188, 189, 197, 229, 235 centralization of 189, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199 9/11 76, 96, 153 normal accidents theory 139, 148–50, 156 normality 39, 40, 41, 98, 225

274

Index

normalization 104, 166, 168, 210–11, 213–14 degrees of 97 of deviance 129, 143–4, 150, 209, 211 of disruptions 95–102, 106, 143–5, 158, 234, 235 legal 184 selectivity of keying 101, 104, 200–2, 211 of violence and warfare 180–5, 187, 201 norms 41, 52, 55, 73, 92, 202 nostalgia 101 ordinary troubles 8, 11, 26, 61 organization see cooperation, formal organizational collapse 142–3, 151 organizational decline 133–4 organizational deviance see deviance, organizational organizational doctrine 182–3 organizational failure 139, 158, 182–3 normalization of 143–5 retrospective transparency of 143, 150, 182 organizational theory 117–18, 155–9 organizations 105, 107–8, 117–18; see also cooperation, organized; expectations, formal; keys, formal dismissal of members 139 as fields 107–8, 109–18, 119, 135; see also fields, of organized cooperation high-reliability 146–51, 157 membership in 110, 116–7 military 105, 116, 164, 166, 168, 169–80, 199 British Army 181, 182 disintegration 170, 172–3 effectiveness of 170–1, 172–4, 186 embedding of 179–80, 181–2; military-industrial complex 188–9, 193–4 failure 182–3 French army in World War II 182 German army in World War I 181; in World War II 169, 170, 173, 174–9, 181, 186, 203; ideology of the offensive in World War I 182–3; isomorphism of 174, 181; Nazification of 175–9 primary group cohesion in 170–4, 178–9 Prussian army 179, 181 replacement systems 172

US Army in Korea 182; in Vietnam 172–3, 203 panic 123 forward 167, 202, 205 panic myths 100, 205 Park, Robert E. 81–2 Parsons, Talcott 54 Pearl Harbor 96 Perrow, Charles 139, 148 Porter, Bruce D. 194, 197 positions 46, 50, 135, 137, 171, 172 position-takings 138–9 posts 114, 115, 119, 132, 135 practical drift 128, 180 practical sense 17, 31, 34, 58–60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73, 78, 83, 91, 94–5, 101, 104–5, 138, 147, 152, 164, 179, 192, 198, 216, 219 of formal organization 108, 113–14 primary frameworks 63 psychology 3, 21, 29, 103, 150, 213 public places 35, 73, 76 punctuated cooperation see cooperation, punctuated Quarantelli, Enrico L. 124, 126, 153 rationalization see cooperation, rationalization of redistribution 64, 66, 160, 162, 186–95, 202, 228, 235 redundancy 146, 148, 149 rekeying 50, 78, 79–82, 89, 106, 118, 119, 126–9, 136, 141, 145, 151, 154, 158, 160, 199, 219; see also keying, relational effectiveness of 128 reflexive 199, 200 retrospective 100 selectivity of 57, 90, 91–5, 106, 156, 204, 214, 219–24 relational sociology 233, 234 reliability see organizations repair 39, 43, 91, 94, 158, 205 Repenning, Nelson P. 122, 128, 141–2 resentment 41, 44, 46, 61, 74, 78, 80, 93, 94, 205 resources see keys retrospective unreality 99–101, 106, 122, 144, 159, 201, 211–3, 224 revolutions 132, 190–3, 224 China 190–1 France 181, 190–1, 193–4 Russia 190–1

Index as triggering punctuated cooperation 191 rights 53, 73, 91, 108, 136, 153, 216, 217, 222, 228, 229, 234, 235 of ignorance 76 Riverbend 102 Roberts, Karlene H. 146–9, 152, 157 Roethlisberger, Fritz J. 174 Roman Empire 221 Rudolph, Jenny W. 122, 128, 141–2 rules 15–18 rumour 94 Sacks, Harvey 27, 39, 45, 56, 113, 118, 119, 230 Sagan, Scott D. 148–9 sanctions 50, 56, 91 Savage, Paul L. 172–3 scapegoating 93 scenes 72–3 Scheff, Thomas 25, 38 Schelling, Thomas 37, 47–8, 54, 198 Schelling–Lewis game 47–8, 85, 203, 214, 215, 218 Schmitt, Carl 15, 18 Schutz, Alfred 40, 50, 78, 95, 99, 213 science 6, 7, 188, 220 Scott, William Richard 49 security, ontological 7, 213 Selznick, Philip 183 Shils, Edward A. 170–3, 174–5, 177–8 shock 2, 78, 79, 90, 112, 130 signs see keys ‘Simon and Garfinkel principle’ 40–2, 45, 47, 57, 88, 113, 163, 211, 219 Simon, Herbert A. 40–1, 111, 113, 116, 183 situations 2, 14, 17, 18, 21–4, 26, 33 containment in 71–6, 224 breach of 72–3 legitimacy of 72 critical 71, 75–6 embedding of 198, 203 involvement in 19, 20, 23, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39, 62, 73; see also engrossment motivation to participate in 37 as nexus of actual occasions 18, 21, 28, 30 organizational claims on 107–8, 109 participants of 23, 33–8 classification of 220, 221–2 differences among 42 regathering of 105 violent 105, 161, 163–9 endogenous order of 166

275 as instances of punctuated cooperation 162, 164–5, 169 Skocpol, Theda 190–3 Skyrms, Brian 15, 48, 49, 214, 218, 222, 227 Snook, Scott A. 128, 180 social change 9, 12, 26, 31, 60–2, 84, 105, 159, 162, 186–95, 206, 210, 235, 236 sociological investigation of 227–33 social cost 84 social exchange 37–8, 53, 58, 64, 74 social movements 63 social skill 138, 192 social structure 22, 33, 53, 66, 139, 221, 226, 234 self-similarity of 200 socialization 30–1, 51, 53, 58, 146, 147–8, 177, 216; see also learning organizational 110–12, 130–2, 165, 168, 226 sociological theory 8, 233, 236 failure of 8, 11, 24, 40 promise of 4, 27 soldiers conscript 105, 165, 179 homecoming 99, 103, 201–2 veterans 164 space 35–6, 73, 108, 109 organizational 110 private 35 social 64 spacing of activities 109 Stallings, Robert A. 3, 153 state expansion 188, 193, 224 state of the exception 15, 18 state system 200, 224, 234 states 188–9 as protection rackets 194–5 formation of 196–7, 224 status 52, 53, 56, 58, 80, 91, 114, 126, 172, 223 stimulus generalization 41, 51–5, 116; see also keys Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 109, 111, 113, 116, 118, 119 strain 120–1 strategies 14, 23, 32, 43, 57, 62, 65–6, 83, 85, 91, 113, 144, 154, 166, 205, 212–14, 224 change in 65, 66, 103–5, 122, 124–9, 131, 145, 156, 157, 204, 221–2, 227, 230, 232, 235–6 impact on fields 228 of dealing with disruptiveness 16

276

Index

strategies (cont.) diffusion of 234–5 effectiveness of 66, 218, 235 evolutionarily stable 44, 54, 222, 224 focus of 156, 159, 215–16, 222–3 in punctuated cooperation 77 recycling of 104, 160, 196, 200, 212 selectivity of 214, 215, 230 stabilization of 41, 44, 218 stratification 167–9, 178–9, 184, 190, 192, 195–7, 199, 220, 236; see also inequality situational 199 stress 2, 60, 112, 120–2, 129, 141, 144, 159, 160, 165, 180, 183, 191, 198–9, 206, 208 and change in strategies 122 as a mechanism of contagion 198–9 perpetuation of 128, 141, 156, 160 and punctuated cooperation 122, 125, 129 stressors 122, 128, 191 subsidiarity 72, 124, 200 succession 129–34, 139, 144, 157, 160, 220, 225–6 Sugden, Robert 15, 37, 41, 44, 54, 61, 111, 198 symbols see keys technology 6, 35, 36, 136, 139, 148, 156, 164, 165, 166, 188, 189 Tenerife air disaster 126, 127–8, 141, 157 Thomas, William I. 103 Thompson, James D. 115, 123, 145 threat 125–6, 141, 144, 180, 198–9 endogeneity of 129 threat-rigidity effects 125–6, 127, 141 Tierney, Kathleen 100–1 tight coupling 140 Tilly, Charles 1, 181, 190, 193–5, 200, 230–1 tipping points 13, 141 Tokyo gas attacks 71–2, 76, 85, 88–9, 93, 94, 98, 100 Tomasello, Michael 34 training 30–1, 112; see also socialization, organizational military 166, 168–9, 183 trauma 2, 18–21, 103 combat neuroses 184–5 post-traumatic stress disorder 21, 166, 202 traumatization 20 Travers, Tim 170, 181–3 trial and error 81–3, 86, 151

Turner, Barry A. 143, 149, 182, 209 Turner, Jonathan H. 20, 58 Turner, Ralph H. 48, 81–3, 189 Turner, Victor W. 96 turnover 112 uncertainty 56, 81, 87, 89, 95, 97, 146, 157, 164 upkeying 118–19, 127–9, 133–4, 141, 156, 159, 226; see also keying, relational Vanderschraaf, Peter 49 Vaughan, Diane 129, 140, 143–4, 150, 151, 209 Ventresca, Marc J. 133, 179 victimization 104 violence 74–5, 105–6, 161–2, 164–5, 169 accommodation of 179–86, 195–6, 201 anticipation of 198 collective exposure to 161–2 fight myths 165, 168, 169 normalization of see normalization of violence and warfare pathways to 166–9, 178–9, 186, 199 theories of 177 voice 80 Vrba, Elisabeth S. 226 vulnerability see disruptiveness, vulnerability to warfare 105–6, 161–2, 212, 224; see also conflict, violent accommodation of 179–86, 195–6, 201 industrialization of 182, 188, 189, 194 normalization of see normalization of violence and warfare total 187 rhetoric of 189–90 trench 173–4, 182, 202 Weick, Karl E. 116, 126, 127, 139–40, 142–3, 147–8, 151–2, 154, 155–6 White, Harrison C. 25, 46, 52, 54, 96, 193, 221 Whitehead, Alfred North 18, 19, 40, 55, 58, 233 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17 work–life balance 110 workplace recovery 129 World War I 170, 173–4, 182, 184–5, 187, 190, 203 World War II 164, 166, 170, 187 Young, H. Peyton 14, 227 Znaniecki, Florian 103