The Social Organization of Behavior: Interactional Approaches

Abstract

This review deals with a more principled and powerful formulation of the social organization of behavior. It calls for a description of the ways people organize concerted activities in each other's presence. We review research that adopts methods which assume that a person's behavior is best described in terms of the behavior of those immediately about that person, those with whom the person is doing interactional work in the construction of recognizable social scenes or events. Not all human behavior occurs in settings in which people are immediately available to each other's senses, but a great range of it does, and we are concerned to describe the ethnographic victories which can be won with a careful attention to immediately concerted behavior. Interactional approaches to the social organization of behavior have proceeded under several subdisciplinary banners: cognitive anthropology, conversational analysis, ethology, ethnomethodology, exchange theory, kinesics, network analysis, sociolinguistics, and even symbolic analysis. No

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