Social Practice and Social Interaction

Abstract

Social practice and social interaction are two of the phenomena addressed in sociology, which bear on the relationship between structure (the large-scale patterns and relationships in a society) and agency (the free actions of the individual). Social interactions are the smallest-scale social behavior, consisting of any social contact or action involving more than one person. Social practices are routinized, habituated behaviors that are shared by individuals with similar backgrounds. Social interactions thus develop into and enforce social practices, which shape the social structure that in turn influences the individuals who make up the society and perform those social interactions.

Overview

Sociology is the study of human society, through the human relationships and behaviors that create it. Two of the types of behavior examined in sociology are social practices and social interactions. Social interactions are the simplest form of social behavior, consisting of any exchange between two or more people. Social practices are behaviors that have become routinized and exist in a relationship between other related practices, in a context that can be understood to have cultural, economic, or political dimensions. Handing a cashier money for groceries is a social interaction; shopping for groceries is a social practice, one that is related to the social practices of cooking and eating. Furthermore, that social interaction with the cashier is itself likely part of a routinized social practice that many people adopt when they are in the customer role in a retail situation, which may encompass the exchange or lack thereof of small talk and a cluster of habits dealing with speaking to retail clerks: specific tones or volume of voice, changes to accent and word choice, and so on.

Social interactions consist of the simple actions and behaviors that involve at least one other person and are the building blocks of social relationships, networks, and systems. Social interactions are generally discussed in terms of dyads, which involve two people; triads, which involve three; and larger groups. Social interactions provide the basis for larger social phenomena: rules and norms, institutions, systems, and structure. Further, social interactions are the "base unit" of social practice.

Consider the ways that norms are formed through social interactions on even the smallest scale: for example, a student takes the same seat in a given class with unassigned seating every day and is put out if someone else breaks the pattern and takes the seat; even though there has been no official agreement, ownership of the seat may seem to have been established by an expressed preference for proximity to the window, by the instructor's expectation of the student's settled location, by the assignment of nicknames and discovery of common interests among neighbors. These are all small-scale social norms pertaining to social identity in relation to the people with whom one interacts on a regular basis. Individuals who have regular social interactions with one another form social groups, which may be either informal (a group of friends) or formal (a family, a work group, members of a church).

Social interactions are sometimes differentiated by type. Accidental social interactions are also called social contacts. Like accidental social interactions, repeated social interactions are not planned, but are probable occurrences based on the habits of the people involved, such as periodically seeing people who work in the same building. Regular social interactions are also not planned, but are more routine than repeated ones and include such encounters as greeting the security guard in one's office building. Regulated social interactions are both planned and subject to consequence if they are missed. Attending a work meeting or coming home to one's family are regulated interactions. Social relations are often derived from repeated, regular, or regulated social interactions.

Further Insights

Social practice is the subject of practice theory, which was first formulated by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1972 book Outline of a Theory of Practice. Bourdieu was the first significant intellectual of his era to prioritize the role of the body in social behavior and social processes, and was a staunch critic of rational choice theory, a theory introduced by neoclassical economists that spread to sociology and political science. Rational choice theory models social and economic behavior by groups as the aggregate result of consistent, goal-oriented behavior by individuals. Bourdieu's objection was with the theory's underlying assumptions about individual behavior. While rational choice theory depicts these individuals as acting in rational ways in response to, for instance, economic criteria, in Bourdieu's work they act according to bodily impulse and habitus.

In sociology, habitus is a system of tendencies—habits, in a sense—within an individual that influence their behavior by affecting their social perceptions and reactions. Bourdieu emphasized the bodily aspect of habitus, also called hexis: body language, habits of posture and gesture, accent and tone of voice, and other mannerisms. Combined with the intangible aspects of habitus, these collections of tendencies give rise to intuitions, gut reactions, tastes, and attitudes about the social world.

The tendencies of habitus are learned by the people the individual is surrounded by, and so tend to be shared by people of similar ethnicity, education level, profession, religion, or other background characteristics. The strongest criticisms against the theory of habitus, in fact, argue that it paints a deterministic picture of social behavior. The habitus was Bourdieu's way of explaining the relationship between group culture and the individual.

Researchers following Bourdieu have examined the habitus of chamber music players and IV drug users, the role of habitus in the development of public morality, the role of pedagogy in constructing habitus, and the relationship between habitus and concepts of honor. German sociologist Norbert Elias famously used the "national habitus" of Germany to explain how the Holocaust had been allowed to happen.

Habitus is also very similar to the concept of tacit knowledge: informal knowledge that is difficult to verbalize and in many cases difficult to even be conscious of. For instance, knowing what the dishes on a menu are is explicit knowledge, but when sitting in the restaurant the diner also has knowledge of certain undefined manners expected in the restaurant—that it would be rude to take off one's shirt if the room felt hot—and protocols—that food typically arrives in a specific order by category and that all people seated together expect to receive their food at roughly the same time. Much of this knowledge is generally learned through mimesis: observation and mimicking of those around you. (The term doxa is also used, by Bourdieu and other sociologists, to refer to tacit knowledge that is society- or field-specific, but particularly the body of such tacit knowledge that is deeply held, considered self-evident, and non-negotiable.)

The other key concept of Bourdieu's practice theory is that of fields. Fields are semi-autonomous social spaces, each of which is structured hierarchically by the power relationships among actors, in which social activities center on different kinds of capital. While economic capital—money, credit, and other economic resources—is the most familiar form of capital, the idea of capital includes species of cultural capital and social capital that consist of assets that are useful to the actor in their social sphere.

For instance, while an individual from a wealthy, well-educated family, whose ancestors and other relatives include elected officials, heads of business, and alumni of prominent universities has significant economic capital, they also have social and cultural capital that is likely not possessed by an individual of equivalent economic wealth who has made that money themselves and raised themselves out of poverty. The first individual's non-economic capital includes social connections in the business and political worlds, specific cultural competencies related to the upper class, and priority "legacy" status for themselves or their children at those universities. This kind of capital may make it easier to launch a political career, or simply to preserve the economic capital through subsequent generations.

In Bourdieu's field, the individual's habitus comes into play in conferring to them some level of competence at maneuvering within the field (which may be anything from Chicago politics to the Mardi Gras krewe culture of New Orleans to Weird Twitter). That is, while the actors within a field are competing for position in the hierarchy of the field, their habitus bears on what Bourdieu calls their "feel for the game." This is where the family and social background of our example of the well-connected wealthy individual is relevant: Before entering politics, business, or the university, this individual has picked up some of the "suitable" behavior and attitudes of these fields by way of family upbringing.

Issues

Two of the main subfields of sociology are microsociology, which focuses on analysis of everyday social interactions, and macrosociology, which examines social behavior on larger scales, and so deals with social networks and social structure. Practice theory is employed by both. In microsociology the habitus and fields of the individual can be examined alongside issues such as gender, class, or the family; whereas in macrosociology, large-scale social issues like the culture wars or income inequality can be examined with social practice and habitus in mind. In the theory of structuration by British sociologist Anthony Giddens, neither microsociology nor macrosociology is sufficient; instead, social practices provide a way to examine social systems in a framework in which neither the structure nor the agent (individual) has primacy.

This relationship between structure and agency is one of the most important areas of study in the social sciences, and practice theory was formulated in large part to address it. Structure or social structure refers to social relationships at various scales, such as the class structure and social institutions of a society, at the macro scale, or the impact of social and cultural norms on individual behavior, at the micro scale. Practice theory is one model for explaining the relationship between structure and agency: Individual agents contribute the social behaviors that create social structure, and are in turn shaped by that structure. For instance, social norms emerge from the feelings and preferences of the majority. They may also emerge and be enforced by dominant pluralities, or persist in social structure for a time after popular sentiment has drifted. For any given norm or group of interrelated norms, there are both normal (norm-abiding) and abnormal (norm-defying) populations, whose relationships to the other population and to society as a whole is impacted by their alignment to the norm. Because the norm-abiding population is usually the majority, this results in social structures that favor the norm-abiding, at the expense or exclusion of the norm-defying.

This sheds some light on what it means, for instance, for the United States to be a country that is "culturally Christian." There are numerous norms, from legal prescriptions against polygamy, to the arrangement of school, business, and social calendars around the major Christian holidays that favor the Christian majority without consideration for regularity of church attendance, piousness, or other indicators of the strength of an individual's devotion to the Christian faith. What is important is not church-going so much as the role that Christianity played in the cultural background of the individuals who created the social institutions and social practices of the country. Members of religious minorities are consequently at a disadvantage. Though laws and assumptions about freedom of religion are grounded in the first amendment guarantee of "freedom of religion," culturally and socially non-Christians either participate in Christian social practices or are socially excluded.

This in turn ties in to one of the points Giddens makes in his work on structure: that social knowledge and an understanding of the social sciences is an important source of power and agency for the individual, because greater understanding of norms and structure leads to (to return to Bourdieu's framing) a better feel for the game. Non-Christians in the United States have long been adept at maneuvering in implicitly Christian fields, as women have been adept at maneuvering in male-dominated fields, non-whites in white-dominated fields, and so on. That the minority should not have to become competent at the social practices of the majority should go without saying; that they have historically benefited from doing so is nevertheless both true and, of course, a problem that has contributed to preserving the dominance of those majorities.

Terms & Concepts

Agency: The idea that any individual being (agent) is autonomous, meaning they are able to make and act on informed decisions; by extension, the capacity of autonomy.

Determinism: The idea that for every event, there is a set of conditions that can result only in that event; in the social sciences, deterministic views are those that downplay or do away with the individual's free will or agency.

Habitus: A collection of tendencies held by an individual, including bodily tendencies, such as mannerisms and posture, and mental tendencies, such as inclinations toward certain attitudes, biases, or values; learned through mimesis from social peers of similar background.

Practice Theory: In sociology, a framework for examining the relationship between social structure and individual social behavior.

Social Practice: Routinized human behaviors that inform human relationships and are interrelated to other behaviors.

Sociology: The scholarly study of society and the social relationships and behaviors that constitute it.

Bibliography

Campos Andrade, M. M., & Fukuda, C. C. (2016). School inclusion of people with physical disabilities: The role of social interactions. Interpersona, 10(Suppl.1), 22–33. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=120476323&site=ehost-live

Coslor, E. (2016). Artistic practices: Social interactions and cultural dynamics. Cultural Sociology, 10(1), 131–-132. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=112802919&site=ehost-live

Kalman, E., & Keay, K. A. (2017). Hippocampal volume, social interactions, and the expression of the normal repertoire of resident-intruder behavior. Brain & Behavior, 7(9).

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Suggested Reading

Collison, H., & Marchesseault, D. (2018). Finding the missing voices of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP): Using a "Participatory Social Interaction Research" methodology and anthropological perspectives within African developing countries. Sport in Society, 21(2), 226–242. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=127116515&site=ehost-live

Galatolo, R., & Caronia, L. (2018). Morality at dinnertime: The sense of the Other as a practical accomplishment in family interaction. Discourse & Society, 29(1), 43–62. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=126921530&site=ehost-live

Meier, P. S., Warde, A., & Holmes, J. (2018). All drinking is not equal: How a social practice theory lens could enhance public health research on alcohol and other health behaviours. Addiction, 113(2), 206–213. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=127216737&site=ehost-live