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Article published In:
Morality and language aggression
Edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Vahid Parvaresh
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7:1] 2019
► pp. 32–55

Everyday incivility and the urban interaction order

Theorizing moral affordances in ritualized interaction

 | University of Guelph, Canada
Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention (Goffman 1963), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces.
Drawing on select empirical materials – from unsolicited commentary to queue-jumping – gathered under the auspices of the Researching Incivility in Everyday Life (RIEL) Project this article builds upon the ‘everyday incivilities’ approach pioneered by Smith, Phillips and King (2010) to examine moral dimensions of everyday encounters between strangers. Preliminary analysis of the RIEL data indicates that ritual dimensions of interaction between strangers in public space provide interactants with moral affordances, that is, opportunities to align themselves with an idealized moral order through projective moral action.
Keywords: moral order, interaction ritual, strangers, affordances
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What we do and do not know about strangers and uncivil encounters
    • 2.1Strangers and pragmatics: Problems of common ground
    • 2.2Strangers and urban sociology: Idealized sociability
    • 2.3Interaction ritual and the social reproduction of moral order
  • 3.Mutual commitment and moral order
    • 3.1Urban interaction order as moral order
  • 4.Accounting for accounts: From observed behaviours to interpreted experiences
  • 5.Stranger encounters and/as the problem of moral order
    • 5.1Retrospective voicing: Where is the moral order if no bystander intervenes?
  • 6.Outline of a theory of moral affordances: Stranger interaction as moral landscape
    • 6.1Moral order as moral landscape: Aspirational accounts and projective moral action
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00018.hor
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