INTERACTION ORDER AS

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY WITHIN

URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
Waverly Duck and Mitchell Kiefer

ABSTRACT
Classic urban ethnography has often viewed urbanization and the urban
condition as pathological and the city as disorganized, with urban areas pro-
ducing problems to be solved through the managerial control of urban space.
This chapter presents an alternative view, introducing an Interaction Order
approach within urban ethnography. This way of studying culture builds on
the work of Emile Durkheim (1893), W. E. B. Du Bois (1903), Harold
Garfinkel (1967), Erving Goffman (1983), and Anne Rawls (1987).
Interaction Orders are shared rules and expectations that members of a group
use to coordinate their daily social relations and sense-making, which take
the form of taken-for-granted practices that are specific to a place and its
circumstances. The power of this social order, which is constructed by the
interactions among participants themselves, renders outsiders’ interventions
counterproductive. Understanding local interaction orders enables ethnogra-
phers to interpret problems differently and imagine solutions that work with
local culture.
Keywords: Urban ethnography; urban sociology; Interaction Order;
ethnomethodology; race and place; social order

INTERACTION ORDER AS CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

WITHIN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
This chapter introduces the idea of an “Interaction Order” as a key concept for
studying culture within urban ethnography, which builds on the work of

Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges

Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 16, 113 130
Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1047-0042/doi:10.1108/S1047-004220190000016009
113
114 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

Durkheim (1893/1933), Du Bois (1903/1983), Garfinkel (1967), Goffman (1983),

and Rawls (1987). Interaction Orders are shared rules and expectations that
members of a group use to coordinate their daily social relations and sense-
making, which take the form of unconscious, tacit, taken-for-granted practices
that are specific to a place and its circumstances. This approach is in line with
Durkheim’s notion that social facts where social order is sui generis, as well as
with Harold Garfinkel’s idea of ethnomethodology. Garfinkel emphasized that
what Durkheim regarded as “social facts” are produced within interactions; the
ethnomethodology Garfinkel developed reconstructs the ways people interact in
specific situations and create a form of mutually understood social order.
Therefore, social facts can only be studied by examining the interaction order
ethnographically, in local contexts and from the viewpoint of the rules and
expectations of the participants.
Urban ethnography, which is the systematic study of culture in urban areas,
like its parent discipline of sociology more generally, has typically viewed the
transition from rural to urban life as pathological and destructive of social
order. Such assumptions are apparent in theories of capitalism (Simmel, Marx,
Weber, Durkheim), modern collective consciousness (James, Freud, Mead,
Cooley), and urbanization (Park, Wirth, Burgess). Simmel (1903/1950), one of
the founders of urban sociology, described the negative effects of the metropolis
on the individual psyche, characterizing the city as a site of chaos, anonymity,
and meaninglessness, with the reduction of communal ties to the private pursuit
of money. Similarly, Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels (1845) viewed urban
places as disorganized and miserable, as the corrosive forces of capitalism
pushed people from poor, but stable, rural areas into large industrial centers
where life was reduced to the bare minimum.
In this respect, Durkheim’s (1893) conception of the modern city is excep-
tional: although he agreed that nineteenth century capitalism exhibited patholo-
gies, he held that these were temporary, and that they could be eliminated if
society adjusted to the demands of a modern division of labor. He regarded the
interdependencies produced by the capitalist division of labor as a good thing,
given appropriate self-regulation. Durkheim argued that the shared values con-
stitutive of premodern societies would be replaced by the interdependencies
brought about by capitalism; instead of shared values, people would be bound
together by shared practices and expectations. This would result in a more, not
less, egalitarian social order, but only if citizens met as equals, which is required
among other things that inherited wealth, which produces an elite that distorts
the division of labor, be abolished.
Yet the conception of the city as pathological espoused by Durkheim’s
contemporaries ultimately prevailed, and its legacy continues to influence con-
temporary scholarship and public policy. This legacy has had unfortunate conse-
quences: cities are widely considered disorganized, albeit dynamic, spaces, and
their non-elite residents are stigmatized. Whether the problems of the urban
poor are blamed on their environment or their culture, the people of color and
recent immigrants who are stuck in inner cities are seen as disorderly masses.
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 115

In what follows, we trace the origins of this perspective and critique its
assumptions. Rather than presuming that cities are chaotic, we advocate an
Interaction Order approach to urban spaces that investigates them on their own
terms, that is, as the people who are at home there make sense of them. This
approach has the advantage of capturing urban cultures, and the endogenous
orders they generate, without judging inhabitants according to external criteria
that do not fit with their lived experiences. Local Interaction Orders must be
understood before any meaningful discourse about urban problems and poten-
tial solutions to them can be produced.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE URBAN CONDITION

The urban condition is based on urban experiences how it is to live in an
urban place, particularly for individuals. The shock of rapid urbanization
and the spatial and social transformation of urban form at the turn of the
twentieth century made the city an especially significant site of study for
sociologists. Simmel (1918) analyzed the transformation in lived experience
when society became centered in urban rather than rural places. The logic
underlying his theoretical analysis of what it means to live in cities is neces-
sarily comparative. That is, the urban condition can only be conceptualized
against what it is not, whether the rural past or contemporaneous suburbs.
For Simmel, the most fundamental characteristics of the “metropolis” are its
money economy and rational structuring of the world. These structures, in
turn, foster individualism and the compartmentalization of different parts of
life. American sociologists, such as Wirth (1938), explored the social features
of the city, but also pointed out that city is a spectrum rather than a space
of absolutes. Hence, urban spaces share some features with rural and subur-
ban communities. The question then becomes, “How can urban sociology
capture lived experiences that are qualitatively different from those of rural
and suburban residents?”
Two other early twentieth-century American urban theorists, Park and
Burgess (1925), arrived at similar conclusions in their analysis of what the city
means for the organization of life. They, too, was concerned primarily with the
city’s impact on individual consciousness and experience. Park and Burgess
emphasized the changes experienced by rural-to-urban migrants and immi-
grants. While urban, rural and suburban places represent a continuum of experi-
ences, frameworks such as Durkheim’s (1893) conception of mechanical
(traditional) vs organic (interdependent) solidarity and Tönnies’s (1887/2001)
formulation of gemeinschaft (community) vs gesellschaft (society) illustrate the
differences between premodern and modern collective consciousness, which
characterize the city as well as shaping how we study urban populations. The
concept of an Interaction Order, which explores how shared practices and sense-
making work, helps us to overcome theoretical dichotomies such as agency vs
structure, mechanical vs organic solidarity, and gemeinschaft vs gesellschaft by
focusing on situated action via ethnography.
116 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

According to Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who collaborated in studying

emerging social orders in Chicago and its ethnic neighborhoods:
The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have
expended on the study of the life and manners of the North American Indian might be even
more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and gen-
eral conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side of Chicago, or in
recording the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the
neighborhood of Washington Square, New York. (Park & Burgess, 1925, p. 2)

Whereas rural societies organized life around the family, relationship ties, and a
common culture, the city organizes life on the impersonal “market of vocation.”
Park saw the city as a place where people are allowed indeed, forced to
develop their individual talents, creating solidarities based on common interests
rather than sentiment. Like Simmel, he claimed that money is the cardinal
medium facilitating this reorganization. Park (1925, p. 27) also described the
urban condition as one of excess and exaggeration: “the effect of the urban envi-
ronment is to intensify all effects of crisis.” He attributed this intensification to
corporate action and commercialized behavior.
At the same time, Burgess (1925) presented a conception of the urban condi-
tion centered on spatial segregation and mobility. He argued that the city is
simultaneously centralized and segregated. Segregation facilitates a division of
labor, both economically and organizationally. Given such fragmentation and
specialization, both of which are organized spatially around with race-ethnicity
and class, urban residents rely on the increased means of mobility cities provide.
Following Du Bois (1899) and Booth (1903), Burgess pointed out that cities
were segregated into different functional districts (commercial, warehousing and
transportation, manufacturing, and residential) and that neighborhoods were
segregated around patterns of labor, with varying relationships to the city’s cen-
tral and decentralized functional districts. Geographic upward mobility within
urban locales, in turn, allowed a detachment from previously strong kinship and
social bonds which, however, was compensated for by the commercialized
bonds that city life entails.
W. E. B. Du Bois provided a different take on early twentieth-century
American cities that focused on their racial composition and dynamics. In con-
trast to the members of the Chicago School, who raised the problem of the
“urban” as such and centered class, immigration, and ethnicity, Du Bois probed
the problems experienced by people of color living in the deplorable conditions
created by racism, which shaped the structure of cities in fundamental and con-
tinuing ways. In a study predating those of Park and the Chicago School, the
African American, German-trained sociologist described life for an urban
underclass: people of color living in Philadelphia’s crowded seventh ward (Du
Bois, 1899). This line of inquiry continues to inform contemporary studies of
marginalized groups living in urban spaces. These inner city residents, he
showed, were forced to bear the weight of the hardships created by urbanization.
Where an industrial organization of labor predominated, blacks, with their his-
tory of enslavement and relegation to servitude, were barred from the new
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 117

“market of vocation” and confined to low-paid, unstable jobs, mainly in the ser-
vice sector and casual labor. Moreover, Du Bois offered a methodological
model to sociologists, showing how knowledge can be gained by rooting field-
work in the voices and viewpoints of the people being studied.
A more theoretical point to be drawn from Du Bois’s work concerns the rela-
tionship between groups, geography, and capitalism: the urban condition for a
group of people is in large part determined by that group’s historical relation-
ship with capitalism. Those who propel urbanization by bringing capital and
power together in cities live differently than those groups who are forced into
cities by economic and social demands. The underclasses, such as blacks barred
from most urban occupations, are marginal because of their longstanding subor-
dination to capital. This history follows groups into cities, manifesting not only
in spatial segregation but also in the underclass’s confinement to degrading con-
ditions. Moreover, while Du Bois theorized about a marginalized population,
the connections he identified between class, race, history, and capital apply
equally to privileged groups.

THE GHETTO AS DISORGANIZATION

The history of the ghetto is intimately tied to the history of Jewish oppression,
expulsion, and segregation in Europe (Duneier, 2016). Many of those who stud-
ied the emerging urban social order were Jewish (Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and
Freud), and focused particularly on modern collective consciousness. In the
United States, however, the ghetto was not a space reserved solely for Jews, but
was initially inhabited by recent immigrants from multiple European countries.
Many of the early studies of these immigrant populations worked very hard to
normalize them by emphasizing the disruptions and challenges these groups
faced during the Industrial Revolution. In the American context, these groups
would ultimately move into the middle class and be accepted as white.
Even before the major ethnographic studies of the poor conducted by sociolo-
gists, including Du Bois in Philadelphia and Park and his colleagues at the
University of Chicago, social reformers such as Engels (1845), Booth (1903),
and Addams (1910/1990) were providing rich descriptions of the lives of rural to
urban migrants and immigrants in British manufacturing centers: London, and
Chicago. These social investigators all used biography, ethnography, mapping,
and statistics to document the lives of the poor. The early Chicago School,
under the leadership of Park, Burgess, and Louis Wirth, suggested a more eth-
nographic orientation to the study of communities similar to those conducted by
anthropologist such as Franz Boas. What distinguishes sociological ethnography
from the anthropological tradition is sociology’s theoretical framework and its
use of multiple methods. Early ethnographic studies in sociology were never
simply thick description, but incorporated other methods, such as descriptive
statistics, life histories, and mapping. Scholars such as George Herbert Mead,
W. I. Thomas, and John Dewey were developing the American philosophical
tradition of pragmatism, while contemporaries like Robert Park, Robert
Mackenzie, Louis Wirth, Florian Znaniecki, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and
118 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

Ernest Burgess were laying the groundwork for a tradition of ethnography-based

urban studies.
Over time, Chicago School researchers produced works that did not patholo-
gize urban populations. From W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish
Peasant (1919) to Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto (1928), Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold
Coast and the Slum (1929/1982), and William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner
Society (1943/1973), works from the first half of the twentieth century familiar-
ized, and thereby de-exoticized, a range of immigrant and ethnic groups.
Conversely, despite their best efforts, researchers have been unable to normalize
black ghetto dwellers a significant source of consternation for ethnographers. A
series of ethnographic studies by urban sociologists such as Liebow (1967),
Anderson (1976), Stack (1974), and more recently, Venkatesh (2006), Rios (2011),
and Goffman (2014) has closely examined the social organization of poor black
communities. Despite these works on specific localities, however, the dispropor-
tionate number of blacks who live in urban ghettos, coupled with the inability of
many to move up and out into the middle class, means that urban sociology
equates the ghetto with black Americans and recent immigrants of color.
Urban sociologists and white Americans have wondered why black people
have remained stuck in impoverished ghettos, while over time successive
European immigrant groups were upwardly mobile in socioeconomic terms, and
consequently, spatially mobile, moving first to ethnic neighborhoods and then
dispersing throughout the city and its suburbs. Before the mid-1960s, ethno-
graphic studies of the black ghetto identified the problem as one of isolations
and disorganizations. Then, perhaps in reaction to the civil rights activism and
urban uprisings of that decade, sociologists began to ascribe these features of the
ghetto to its predominantly black inhabitants themselves, rather than to their
environment. This shift drew on the “culture of poverty” arguments made
famous by Oscar Lewis, who on the basis of research in Mexico City (1961) and
in Puerto Rico and New York (1966), argued that individual and familial beha-
viors and attitudes were the origin and motor of an intergenerational cycle of
poverty. Policy makers tended to adopt this framework in their efforts to diag-
nose the problems that beset urban black communities (Mayer, 1997;
Moynihan, 1965). Residents’ values were said to be inferior to those of the dom-
inant white middle class, such that they live in a state of chaos rather than being
guided by appropriate social norms. Although, these arguments faced harsh crit-
icism, most notably for “blaming the victim” (Ryan, 1971) and for describing
female-headed households as deviant, the culture of poverty paradigm continues
to pathologize ghetto residents without taking into account race and its strong
connections to structural forces, social policy, and individual life chances.

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF URBAN DISORDER

Today, it is popular to consider “broken windows” the trash and graffiti that
are seen as characteristic signs of disorder as evidence of communities’ lack of
“collective efficacy,” which makes them magnets for crime. Wilson and Kelling
(1982) are prominent proponents of this view, interpreting broken windows as
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 119

vandalism, memorial murals as graffiti, vacant lots as symptoms of neglect, and

piles of trash as uncollected litter. They posit that disorder and decay express
and intensify the disintegration of the social fabric of a neighborhood, opening
it up to predators.
The least racialized formulation of this viewpoint posits that social disorgani-
zation results from poverty (e.g., Harding, 2010; Small, Harding, & Lamont,
2010). Poor neighborhoods, it is argued, lack the “social cohesion among neigh-
bors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common
good” (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997, p. 1) required to remedy their
physical and social deficits, thereby inviting the presence of drug dealers and
other criminal elements (Morenoff, Sampson, & Raudenbush, 2001; St. Jean,
2008). According to these accounts, the force of collective efficacy would dimin-
ish crime rates in impoverished neighborhoods because residents and criminals
are seen as having opposing interests.
Apart from insufficient collective efficacy, other social observers blame the pro-
blems of poor communities on deficits of individual morality, most notably the pre-
sumed failure of black fathers to provide financially for their children (Liebow,
1967). But these notions are blind to the fact that residents of these communities
demonstrate a great deal of personal responsibility and collective agency. While
poor urban spaces look disorderly to outsiders, this apparent disorder is, in fact, an
orderly adaptation that ensures survival in a context of isolation and exclusion
from most of the opportunities that American society supposedly guarantees its
citizens. Because poor communities’ survival strategies arise in this context, they
do not resemble those familiar to white, native-born Americans. Ghettos only
seem disorderly when looked at with a middle-class gaze.
Within many impoverished enclaves, residents have produced a form of life
for themselves that they understand and can navigate in everyday life. Indeed,
there is no other place they understand as well, or where they feel as accepted.
Generation after generation, they have organized for survival in the bleak spaces
left to them as others fled, transforming these physically deteriorating and eco-
nomically disadvantaged neighborhoods into livable communities. Contrary to
popular misconceptions, conditions in poor communities do not indicate a lack
of social order or morality, but rather a highly developed social organization
that enables people to survive under increasingly desperate circumstances. These
circumstances have been documented by William Julius Wilson (1987), who
shows how concentrated disadvantage has been intensified by the war on drugs,
the criminalization of children for minor offenses, the elimination of the welfare
safety net, and the deterioration of schools. All this, combined with a lack of
awareness on the part of many white Americans that such conditions even exist,
has forged profoundly isolated, oppressed, and volatile communities. Arguing
against the common tendency to blame the people in such places for being poor
because they subscribe to a “culture of poverty,” Wilson insisted that poverty,
not culture, is the problem. In my own work (Duck, 2015), I have found that
the culture in places that outsiders, including the police, regard as chaotic is
directly responsive to the poverty and isolation against which people have orga-
nized for survival. Poverty is indeed a primary culprit, but so are the divisions of
120 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

race and class that create and perpetuate isolation. The resulting local
Interaction Order is a rational adaptation to otherwise impossible circum-
stances. Local Interaction Orders arise from these circumstances; they do not
explain them.

LOCAL INTERACTION ORDER AS A

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
Social situations generate their own order, including rules that govern interper-
sonal interactions and make daily life relatively predictable. Even events that
appear senseless and chaotic from an outsider’s perspective are from the perspec-
tive of insiders, orderly and expected. In No Way Out (2015), I show that there
was a great deal of personal responsibility and collective agency in the black
community, I studied. Despite facing serious obstacles because of their race and
economic situation, people living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty
have created a self-sustaining culture that contrasts sharply with the dominant
white culture.
Interaction Orders are based on trust and reciprocity, which depend on mem-
bers orienting their actions around shared rules, norms, and expectations. When
interactions work and trust conditions (Garfinkel, 1963) are intact, the partici-
pants make sense together and their selves are affirmed. Because norms and
expectations differ across Interaction Orders, however, trust conditions are espe-
cially fragile and susceptible to break down in encounters between those who
subscribe to different rules governing for social relationships (Rawls, 2000;
Rawls & Duck, 2017).
According to Garfinkel (1963), trust conditions the pervasive assumption
by members of a society that fellow members share their expectations and prac-
tices for the production of social facts and identities are necessary for making
sense in modern societies. But divisions and inequalities between people prevent
them from being able to fully commit to the reciprocal practices that sustain
such societies, making it impossible for them to make sense with those outside
the local Interaction Order. The concept of Interaction Order was developed by
Erving Goffman (1983, p. 5), who posited that:
the workings of the interaction order can easily be viewed as the consequences of systems of
enabling conventions, in the sense of the ground rules for a game, the provisions of a traffic
code or the rules of syntax of a language.

While Goffman’s exposition of the Interaction Order was at times ambiguous

or underdeveloped, inviting various misunderstandings, Anne Rawls has devel-
oped it into a tightly knit theory with four key components. First, “the social
self needs to be continually achieved in and through interaction” (Rawls, 1987,
p. 136), meaning that the Self, as a social construction, is produced and sus-
tained through actors’ cooperative practices. Second, “constraints not only
define the interaction order but also may resist and defy social structure”
(Rawls, 1987). Goffman describes the Interaction Order as a domain of face-to-
face engagement that is relatively autonomous from, but “loosely coupled” with
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 121

large-scale structures. It is through local Interaction Orders that these structures

exert their effects, making an understanding of such orders indispensable for social
analysis. Moreover, because of their relative autonomy, local Interaction Orders
can entail involvement obligations for example, reciprocity and mutuality
that can conflict with the demands of external social hierarchies. Third, “interac-
tion is conceived of as a total production order wherein a commitment to that
order generates meaning” (Rawls, 1987, pp. 136 137); all individuals engaging in
an interaction must be committed to both the Interaction Order and its rules if
they are to benefit from the interaction. Lastly, “persons must commit themselves
to the ground rules of interaction for selves to be maintained” (p. 137). This last
point is not simply a practical imperative, but also a moral one, as the very exis-
tence and coherence of the modern Self depends upon it.
In this framework, Garfinkel’s notion of trust and Goffman’s conception of
the interaction order are complementary. If trust is a shared commitment to the
rules and practices that comprise the interaction order, then logically, trust con-
stitutes the basis for such an order. The presence of trust aids in establishing the
Interaction Order; if trust is not present, interactions break down. Accordingly,
it is essential that the parties to a given interaction adhere to the ground rules of
the local interaction order. Should one party deviate from the rules for exam-
ple, if a person playing checkers were to abruptly take two consecutive turns
an anomic state ensues, resulting in confusion and distrust. Therefore, it is vital
that the parties share an understanding of the Interaction Order’s rules and a
commitment to respecting and enforcing them. Hence, Interaction Order studies
can be carried out in a wide range of settings. By focusing on local sense-making
and the interactions that occur in a specific place, autism clinics, neighborhoods,
work place studies and total institutions can all be studied qualitatively by focus-
ing on the local rules that govern them (Duck, 2015; Garfkinkel, 1967;
Maynard & Turowetz, 2017). One early example of different Interaction Orders
can be found in the work of Du Bois (1903) concerning race.

DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE INTERACTION

ORDERS OF RACE
While Du Bois is generally thought of as a Marxist rather than an interactionist,
his work provides a starting point for analyzing interactional differences across
lines of race, offering a glimpse both of racism in action and of the African
American worldview that developed in opposition to the pervasive power of
white racism.
The key question in this context is how systemic economic and social inequi-
ties between black and white societies, which often give rise to tensions and con-
flicts between them, translate themselves first into differences in moral
obligation and ultimately into differences in interactional and communicative
practices that manifest as clashing Interaction Orders. Profound differences in
moral orientation must find a mode of expression in interaction and the presen-
tation of Self in order for Others to be able to assess our commitment to shared
122 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

goals and values. Similarly, these differences give shape to moral commitments,
as different kinds of selves and different interactional preferences are displayed.
While Du Bois did not address the issue of interactional differences
abstractly, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903, p. 134), he included communicative
issues in his consideration of double consciousness. Du Bois posited that there
are four levels of “race contact”: physical proximity, economic relations, politi-
cal relations, and “less tangible” patterns of communication and conversation.
It is this fourth level which we take up. According to Du Bois (1903, p. 135),
this interactional level of race contact consists of:
the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and librar-
ies, and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid
which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of social contact
in everyday life.

Du Bois’s treatment of interaction as an essential form of race contact suggests

his awareness on the role that daily interactional practices play in the formation
of individual self-consciousness, the achievement of mutual intelligibility, the
creation of narratives, rumors, and stereotypes, and finally, in creating those
institutional structures that result from and place constraints on these differences
in communicative practices. Du Bois (1903, p. 147) explains:

It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little
actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it is these little things which are
most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life taken
as a whole.

While interaction is essential, its “elusive” workings are curiously invisible. This,
according to Du Bois, “is peculiarly true of the South.” Much later, Garfinkel
(1940) pointed out that the tacit social structures of the Jim Crow South broke
down when black Americans made them explicit by refusing to participate in
their own humiliation.
According to Du Bois, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, the forces
at work are so subtle that “the casual observer visiting the South sees at first lit-
tle of this” (1903, p. 148). People are living in different socially constructed
worlds. Eventually, however, a black visitor:
realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams;
they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming care-
lessness, then they divide and flow wide apart.

These two racially defined worlds seldom come into personal or intellectual
contact:
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical
contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of
transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other. (p. 149)

This is very different from the close daily contact that occurred between black
and white people in the South before the Civil War, and Du Bois dated the
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 123

separation between races to the end of reconstruction. The problem, as Du Bois

eloquently developed it, includes the idea that not being able to achieve mutual
reciprocity and equality with a group of “others,” particularly through close
daily contact, is damaging to the development of the Self.
In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar
or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and
speeches, one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social ame-
nities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars.
(1903 1915)

While black and white Americans appear to occupy the same physical space,
they rarely occupy the same interactional space. Even today when we more
often occupy interactional space together, Interaction Orders that have devel-
oped in separation for over 150 years, can not only diverge but also conflict,
and displays moral behavior by members of one society, can look like devi-
ant behavior to members of the other. Interaction Orders have this moral
dimension because their use is necessary for the social production of both
Self and intelligibility, both of which are essential human goods (Goffman,
1971; Rawls, 1987).
Because the demands on participants in the two Interaction Orders are not
the same, white and black people often violate one another’s moral sense.
African Americans experience an additional difficulty: as individual Selves who
are forced to present in two conflicting Interaction Orders, they are held to two
different and often conflicting sets of demands. In order for them to construct
recognizable practices in one Interaction Order, they often must violate moral
prescriptions required by the other. This double set of incompatible require-
ments confronts the African American Self on a daily basis. A degree of moral
tension much greater than the stigma of having one’s identity differentially
shaped and valued from group to group is involved. Approaching the issue
interactionally changes the interpretation of double consciousness from an issue
of multiple identities within a single social framework to a problem of conflict-
ing social constructions of Self and expected moral behaviors within contradic-
tory social frameworks.

OUTSIDERS VERSUS LOCAL INTERACTION ORDERS

Because they inhabit a distinct Interaction Order, the problems and practices of
people who live in poor urban spaces are not easily recognizable to outsiders.
Residents of poor, racially segregated neighborhoods tend to live out their lives
without access to jobs that pay livable wages, attend failing schools that have
been condemned by state boards of education, and, all too often, find themselves
and their relatives incarcerated. In the popular imagination, urban areas inhab-
ited mostly by impoverished African Americans and other marginalized people
of color are viewed as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and ran-
dom violence make daily life dangerous for everyone.
124 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

In contrast, when we take the perspective of an insider, which is embedded in

the Local Interaction Order, we find not disorder, but order. Indeed, the Local
Interaction Order is highly organized, and abiding by its rules is essential for
survival. For example, adhering to rules concerning dress, behavior, and speech
can have life-or-death consequences for inner city youth. The Interaction Order
and its code of conduct create stable expectations for meaningful social action
and identity and organize events in predictable, albeit sometimes harmful, ways
for most residents, including drug dealers. Although, the underground economy
is often an inescapable presence, residents are not “victims” of their circum-
stances; rather, their actions and choices are an intelligent and rational response
to those circumstances. A better understanding of how residents order their lives
in response to their environment can dispel stereotypical notions of “neighbor-
hood decay” and “poor values” and ultimately point to more effective solutions
for improving the lives of those who reside in inner city neighborhoods. The
Interaction Order argument was used in my ethnography No Way Out (2015) to
illustrate the contradictions between insider and outsider views of the neighbor-
hood, but also to place an emphasis on practices as opposed to values. No Way
Out demonstrates that the Local Interaction Order is not a product of values
and beliefs, which are ironically quite conventional. It is, rather, generated
through the concrete, intricately ordered practices residents enact as they engage
with one another and with the outsiders who frequent their neighborhood. At
the same time, it records the sense that residents make of the local order and the
incomprehension shown by outsiders who represent the dominant society.

SUGGESTIONS FOR A PRACTICE-BASED

MORAL ORDER
Durkheim warned of the high cost of inequality in The Division of Labor in
Society (1893), arguing that unequal conditions of life and work nullified the
interdependence inherent in the division of labor, producing an “abnormal
form” that would undermine social cohesion. Du Bois made a similar point in
1943, arguing that the ideal of competitive individualism celebrated by white
Americans rationalizes and fosters inequality, depriving society of its moral cen-
ter. As a counterbalance to this ideal, he proposed an alternative one: that of
submission to the good of the whole, which he attributed to black Americans.
The argument that inequality erodes meaning-making and damages identity was
elaborated by Garfinkel (1949, 1956) and Goffman (1959 [1956]), this time with
a focus on interaction and the interactional performance of self (Duck, 2017;
Rawls, 1987; Rawls & Duck, 2017). It is significant that all four of these social
thinkers were members of racially marginalized groups (Durkheim, Garfinkel,
and Goffman as Jews; Du Bois as African American), and thus had a privileged
view of the effects of inequality on their societies. Du Bois (1903) called this per-
spective “double consciousness” and “second sight.” Each makes the argument
that equality is a necessary requirement for a just society.
For Durkheim (1893), whereas premodern (“mechanical”) societies were held
together by shared values and beliefs, modern (“organic”) societies are held
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 125

together by shared practices. Because modern science and work have come to
depend increasingly on a form of practice Durkheim called “constitutive,” in
which shared practices create social facts “on the spot,” rather than in a ritual-
ized way, these forms of knowledge production and value creation have been
able to free themselves from the bonds of tradition and become innovative. Yet
this modern “division of social labor,” along with the constitutive practices on
which it rests, requires enough equality to support reciprocity between partici-
pants. Durkheim (1893) called this the “justice requirement,” Garfinkel (1963)
the “trust condition,” and Goffman variously “involvement obligations” (1971)
and the “working consensus” (1959).
These arguments have important implications for social policy, which when
sensitive to the social order created within communities, can foster cohesion
rather than undermining it. For the most part, social policies have intensified
the effects of concentrated disadvantage, exacerbating disparities in wealth and
housing, criminal convictions and imprisonment, school disciplinary actions,
and educational attainment. Overlapping surveillance agents police, schools,
social workers, public housing officials, landlords, lenders, and probation and
parole officers impose multiple, contradictory expectations on residents, such
that interactional commitments between residents and those in positions of
authority can be impossible to satisfy. Meaningful interactions require at mini-
mum, a basic level of trust and reciprocity between participants (Garfinkel,
1963); each must recognize and support the self-identity of the other projects
(Goffman, 1959). All too often, however, people who make policies for these
communities fail to acknowledge the identities of residents, undermining trust
conditions, and with them, residents’ security.
Take gentrification as an example. Gentrification processes may be presented
to the public as urban renewal or urban redevelopment, and may even begin
with policy makers’ sincere attempts to bring resources into poor communities.
Yet, the rebuilding of areas perceived as blighted or deteriorated is accompanied
by an influx of affluent people and a displacement of poor people. Gentrification
is a global process resulting from favoring profit over people. As Loretta Lees
and her colleagues (Lees, Shin, & Lopex-Morales, 2016) argue, gentrification
has common roots and social effects around the globe. Focusing on the role of
transnational corporations, Lees explains how real estate groups enforce specific
policies, such as head-counting tenants, which create strict boundaries on legal
property rights. These policies, coupled with the lack of state regulation that
characterizes neoliberal governance, tend to overvalue or undervalue certain
pieces of land and neighborhoods, generating drastic differences in personal prop-
erty values. As Loïc Wacquant (2015, p. 254) shows territorial stigmatization
defined as the tendency of the real estate market to undervalue land associated
with the lower class and racial-ethnic minorities alienates groups inhabiting
those spaces.
This trend exemplifies the Marxist notion of use and exchange values. Land’s
use value comes from how people value it for its propensity to (re)produce social
capital and deliver socially beneficial services. Land’s exchange value comes
from land as a commodity, and focuses on its ability to generate financial
126 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

capital. By prioritizing exchange value, developers create spaces geared toward

consumption and capital accumulation. The alternative would be to prioritize
use value, not only ensuring decent hosing for all but also developing spaces
devoted to facilitating social cohesion, participatory artistic expression, social
rather than solitary pleasures, public dialogue, and other alternatives to private
consumption. When development practices prioritize exchange value over use
value, built spaces embody the dominant order in which they are produced. This
alienates those who are either excluded from or resist the commodified social
order. In other words, it marginalizes those whose Interaction Orders do not
mesh with those who are making decisions about urban spaces. Gentrification
erects physical and symbolic boundaries among people who differ in their class
positions, racial-ethnic identities, and cultural affiliations. This separation limits
contact to largely commodified experiences, as capitalist spaces become the only
places where separate groups coexist, but seldom interact directly (Marcuse &
van Kempen, 2000).
Another key concern about gentrification is the displacement it produces,
given the propensity of speculative real estate activity to replace long-term resi-
dents with wealthier residents and commercial establishments (Jennings, 2016).
Since gentrification involves the redevelopment of areas deemed blighted or dis-
tressed, Kenichi Sereno (2014) claims that its most notable negative impacts are
on racial and ethnic minorities. Neil Smith (1996) established this line of argu-
ment two decades ago, contending that indigenous inhabitants of gentrifying
neighborhoods are harmed by displacement and made to bear the externalized
costs of economic growth. This argument directly links the processes of gentrifi-
cation with the disproportionate burdening of marginalized groups. Many econ-
omists downplay the harmfulness of gentrification by either casting doubt on the
link with displacement (Freeman, 2006; Freeman & Braconi, 2004) or arguing
that the positive benefits outweigh the costs (Buntin, 2015). These critics should
be read carefully, as their evidence against the negative impacts of gentrification
often uses overly narrow definitions of displacement, completely ignoring the
phenomenological loss of place associated with a new and different demographic
moving into a neighborhood. This social recomposition constitutes an encroach-
ment on and breaching of local Interaction Orders, causing instability in the
lives of inhabitants, even if perhaps especially if policies are developed by
experts under the assumption that more wealth and more commodities will fix
the “chaos.”

INTERACTION ORDER AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Centering on Interaction Orders means focusing on groups’ holistic lived experi-
ences and thinking about urban life from the vantage point of locally situated
actors who make meaning of and for themselves, their community, and their
city through everyday encounters. Local Interaction Orders are means of pro-
ducing meaning and stability, even if outsiders see meaningless chaos. These
orders, particularly those of groups coping with persistent poverty, may contra-
dict dominant social norms and hierarchies that often foreground economic
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography 127

exchange and commodified spaces. The concept of the “right to the city” offers
a prescriptive political project aimed at reorganizing cities from capitalist spaces
to places of connectivity, engagement, and interaction. Moreover, it implies
beginning from an analysis of Interaction Orders.
First formulated by Lefebvre (1996 [1968]) as a right of citizens that is inte-
gral to the social contract, the right to the city has been taken up and developed
by scholars such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells, as well as critical theor-
ists such as Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer. The concept has gained currency
among contemporary scholars, who have transported it from its European
Marxist origins onto new territories. In parallel with its academic trajectory, the
right to the city has also become a popular slogan among urban movements,
beginning with the Paris protests of 1968. Today, the right to the city has
become a globally recognizable lens through which urban movements frame
their practices and goals.
The right to the city is a demand for the collective urban citizenry to direct
the path of urbanization according to their own interests, values, and concerns.
This concept articulates a way forward where social groups struggle to democra-
tize urban life, gain local control over decision making processes, and “master
[their] own conditions of existence” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 135). These goals build
on Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, which recognizes the relation-
ship between how spaces are produced and how they are experienced. Lefebvre
insisted that “the transformation of society presupposes a collective ownership
and management of space founded on the permanent participation of the ‘inter-
ested parties’, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests”
(1991, p. 422). Here, ‘interested parties’ refers to people who inhabit urban
spaces, particularly those who are marginalized and left out by powerful institu-
tions. Local self-management of urban space would organize the city in ways
that build on and promote inhabitants’ meaningful interactions and encounters
with one another. Implicit in this demand are the key elements of Interaction
Orders: people cooperatively establish shared rules and practices in the places
where they meet. Often, urban policies and practices that arise out of capitalist
approaches to the city and elite-led notions of social problems are not congruent
with these orders.
The right to the city, then, is both a theory of, and demand for, a form of
urban citizenship that guarantees the basic material necessities to life and allows
for self-determination in how physical, social, and political spaces are created
and organized. Rather than state-based institutions managing and controlling
urban space, urban policies would emerge out of local Interaction Orders, rely-
ing on these as guidelines for determining the shape and meaning of urban life.
From this, we can better understand how groups make sense of requisite social
problems and determine ways of addressing them. At its core, the right to the
city redefines cities and urban spaces. Rather than conceptualizing them as
places whose indigenous inhabitants are pathologized and managed by powerful
external institutions, it seeks to empower local inhabitants as people who are
capable of determining their own meanings, orders, and futures.
128 WAVERLY DUCK AND MITCHELL KIEFER

CONCLUSION
What this framework proposes is rather simple: if people find themselves
isolated in a place with no jobs, educational opportunities, or external social
supports, they will organize for survival. This organization is neither disorderly
nor pathological, but a rational adaptation to challenging and recalcitrant cir-
cumstances. Although the public policies related to the ghetto have changed
over time, they have tended to perpetuate rather than remedy its poverty and
isolation. Effective remedies to urban problems will require long-term, sustain-
able commitments that privilege insiders. Although, chronic impoverishment and
racial segregation are underlain by structural factors, their effects have been
deepened by gravely misconceived social policies devised by outsiders. Those
who have resources have deliberately removed themselves from the poor.
Inequality and social distance profoundly distort the power dynamics between
those who make policy and those who are subject to it. The lack of reciprocity
and absence of meaningful exchanges between the architects of social welfare
programs and those whom they are supposed to serve leads to misguided poli-
cies concerning employment, housing, and criminal justice. Practical policy solu-
tions must place the concrete, lived experience of residents at their center. And
this experience must be understood in the context of the Interaction Order in
which it is embedded. Otherwise policy initiatives, however well-intentioned, are
likely to conflict with local lifeways and practices, ultimately doing more harm
than good.

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