while
you’re doing historical. Nevertheless, these are the areas that I’m
interested in. The
other
justification for it is that my undergraduate teacher at Harvard,
Talcott Parsons, had
a
really comprehensive theory that in many respects I didn’t like very
much, although he
was
very good at teaching you the important ideas of Weber and Durkheim.
Parsons
himself
had a micro-to-macro view. The micro part of it I actually didn’t like
very much.
It was
the individual being socialized into norms and values, although he did
a more
interesting
version of that by connecting it with Freud, who was very big in the
1950s. I
always
felt this was intellectually respectable to do because Parsons at any
rate had
attempted
to do it.
We
see several themes in your work, a Durkheimian thread and a conflict
thread. Do you
see
these threads developing in sequence, in parallel? And are they in
conflict with one
another?
How do you bring them together?
Well,
it’s pretty typical to see the Durkheimian school as being a
functionalist school. It
certainly
got interpreted that way, and Parsons was instrumental in creating
that. There’s
a lot
of justification. I mean Durkheim is pretty much a functionalist,
before the term was
created.
And for that matter, Erving Goffman, the most striking of all the micro
sociologists,
a lot of people think of him as a symbolic interactionist. He never
liked that.
He
liked me because I was one of the few people who could see that he
wasn’t a
symbolic
interactionist, but he was right out of the British social anthropology
school, the
Durkheimians,
and sort of a micro-functionalist.
Given
my political background and connections and biases, you might think
that I’d be
hostile
to this, but somewhere pretty early on it struck me that you could use
the
Durkheim
model for processes of group solidarity and it’s the groups that are in
conflict
with
each other much more than individuals. But that’s actually become sort
of a running
theme
and I’m far from the only person who has thought of this. It really
means, “don’t
use
the individual as the unit of analysis.” The micro version of that is,
you could say,
“use
the group as the unit of analysis.” That kind of sounds like a crude
version of
Marxism,
you know, classes really do have unity. That’s far too crude for the
way things
operate.
You could try to make that more complicated by using Weber’s class,
status, and
party.
But most people find that too formalistic a classification scheme.
The
way I’ve come to work it is to emphasize that the real unit of analysis
is the situation,
and
situations have their dynamics and individuals get constructed out of
those situations.
And
then you’re able to bring in a lot of really good micro-research. You
know,
ethnomethodology
is often hard to translate into anything else, but if you look at it as
being
concerned with “how do situations operate,” for example, “how do
conversations
operate”
-- for example, what Sacks and Schegloff call the rules of turn-taking
in
conversations
-- you can see that’s really a kind of Durkheimian ritual of
maintaining this
very
fine-grained solidarity on the micro level. I think that helps solve a
lot of problems.
Encounters
do have this sort of magnatism that pulls people in. Some of the
“ethnos,”
like
John Heritage, noticed there is this bias toward reconstructing the
same social
structure
in the micro situation. Conflict is pretty much hard to mobilize at the
micro-
level.