2.1The distinct realm of urban interaction

“Social interaction can be identified narrowly as that which uniquely transpires in social situations, that is, environments in which two or more persons are physically in one another’s response presence” (Goffman 1983Goffman, E. 1983 “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1–17. , 2).

The particularities of collective life in cities provide analysts of social interaction with a rich vein to mine. Almost a century ago, sociologist Louis Wirth noted that urbanism is a “distinctive mode of human group life”, offering a “minimal definition” of the city “as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” (1938Wirth, L. 1938 “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24. http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2768119, 8). Where this “minimal definition” of urbanism’s “distinctive mode of human group life” (1938Wirth, L. 1938 “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24. http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2768119, 8) overlaps with Goffman’s attunement to what “uniquely transpires” (1983Goffman, E. 1983 “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1–17. , 2) when persons are copresent, we find that slice of intersubjective reality termed the “urban interaction order” (Horgan 2017aHorgan, M. 2017a “Interaction, Indifference, Injustice: Elements of a Normative Theory of Urban Solidarity.” In Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century, ed. by F. Kurasawa, 61–94. Heidelberg: Springer Berlin. ; 2019Horgan, Mervyn 2019a “Everyday Incivility and the Urban Interaction Order: Theorizing Moral Affordances in Ritualized Interaction.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 7(1), 32–55. ). Like the interaction order in general, the urban interaction order is a “substantive domain in its own right” (Goffman 1983Goffman, E. 1983 “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48: 1–17. , 2).

This distinct realm of urban interaction between strangers animates much of Goffman’s work (1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press., 1971Goffman, E. 1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper Row.). “To grasp some aspects of urban secular living” (1967Goffman, E. 1967 Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books., 95), he employed “a version of urban ethnography” (Goffman and Verhoeven 1980Goffman, E., and J. Verhoeven 1980 “An Interview with Erving Goffman.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 26: 317–348., 318). In this spirit, interactionally attuned sociologists emphasize the particularity of the interactional dynamics characterizing types of social contact between strangers in urban public spaces (Duneier and Molotch 1999Duneier, M., and H. Molotch 1999 “Talking City Trouble: Interactional Vandalism, Social Inequality, and the ‘Urban Interaction Problem’.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 1263–1295. http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.1086​/210175; Lofland 1973Lofland, L. 1973 A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space. New York: Basic Books.; Morrill et al. 2005Morrill, C., D. A. Snow, and C. H. White (Eds.) 2005 Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places. Berkeley: University of California Press. ; Raudenbush 2012Raudenbush, D. T. 2012 “Race and Interactions on Public Transportation: Social Cohesion and the Production of Common Norms and a Collective Black Identity.” Symbolic Interaction 35: 456–473. ).

While recent work in pragmatics and related fields has also developed new methods for analysis of public interaction between strangers (Mondada 2009Mondada, L. 2009 “Emergent Focused Interactions in Public Places: A Systematic Analysis of the Multimodal Achievement of a Common Interactional Space.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1977–1997. ; Smith 2017Smith, R. J. 2017 “The Practical Organisation of Space, Interaction, and Communication in and as the Work of Crossing a Shared Space Intersection.” Sociologica 2: 1–19. ), as discussed below, encounters between copresent persons with no prior knowledge of one another outside of institutional or service settings have largely escaped the attention of im/politeness researchers.

2.2The relative absence of copresent strangers from im/politeness research

Impoliteness research began to cohere within a decade of Brown and Levinson’s (1987)Brown, P., Levinson, S. C. 1987 Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. foundational work on politeness with Culpeper’s (1996)Culpeper, J. 1996 “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367. delineation of the “anatomy of impoliteness”. Since that time, impoliteness research has grown remarkably with great variation in focus (Bousfield 2008Bousfield, D. 2008 Impoliteness in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; 2010Bousfield, D. 2010 “Researching Impoliteness and Rudeness: Issues and Definitions.” In Interpersonal Pragmatics, ed. by M. Locher and S. Graham, 101–134. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.; Bousfield & Culpeper 2008Bousfield, D., and J. Culpeper 2008 “Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora.” Journal of Politeness Research. 4(2): 161–168. ; Bousfield & Locher 2008Bousfield, D., and Locher, M. 2008 Impoliteness in language. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ; Culpeper 2011Culpeper, J. 2011 Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Culpeper et al. 2017Culpeper, J., M. Haugh, and D. Z. Kádár (Eds.) 2017 The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ; Locher & Graham 2010Locher, M. & Graham, S. 2010 Interpersonal Pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ; Terkourafi 2012Terkourafi, M. 2012 “Politeness and Pragmatics.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by K. Allan, and K. Jaszczolt, 617–637. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Watts 2009Watts, R. J. 2009 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). Though the body of research on impoliteness is now both extensive and diverse, many arenas of social life – including impoliteness between copresent strangers – remain underexplored.

For Leech, “conflictive illocutions tend, thankfully, to be rather marginal to human linguistic behaviour in normal circumstances” (1983Leech, G. 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman., 105; see also Watts 2009Watts, R. J. 2009 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 5).33.Contextual cues facilitating Leech’s “banter principle” (1983Leech, G. 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.) may not be fully operational the urban interaction order, as banter depends primarily on at least loosely bounded groups with some sort of explicitly shared bond (for example, on friendship groups, see Vergis and Terkourafi 2015Vergis, N., and M. Terkourafi 2015 “The Role of the Speaker’s Emotional State in Im/politeness Assessments.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34: 316–342. ; on “mock impoliteness” between familiars, see Dynel and Poppi 2019Dynel, M., and F. Poppi 2019 “Risum teneatis, amici?: The Socio-Pragmatics of RoastMe Humour.” Journal of Pragmatics 139: 1–21. ). Similarly, Culpeper reports that impoliteness “casts a much larger shadow than its frequency of usage would suggest … Behaviours and expressions considered impolite are more noticed and discussed than politeness” (2010Culpeper, J. 2010 “Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3232–3245. , 3239). RIEL data digs down on this apparently marginal class of phenomena, adopting the everyday incivilities approach to analyze these often minor annoyances that are part of the humdrum of everyday urban life. Uncivil encounters are likely much less frequent than civil ones, but this does not mean that uncivil encounters are rare; over a quarter of RIEL participants reported an uncivil encounter with a stranger within the previous week, and well over a half within the previous four weeks.

Research focused exclusively on copresent strangers is underrepresented in im/politeness research, though related research focuses on linguistic differences. For example, Barros García and Terkourafi (2014)Barros García, M. J., and M. Terkourafi 2014 “First-Order Politeness in Rapprochement and Distancing Cultures” Pragmatics 24: 1–34. treat strangers as those who do not share a language. and Mondada (2018)Mondada, L. 2018 “Greetings as a Device to Find Out and Establish the Language of Service Encounters in Multilingual Settings.” Journal of Pragmatics 126: 10–28. examines how initial greetings establish what language will be used in multilingual settings (see also Culpeper 2010Culpeper, J. 2010 “Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3232–3245. ). Similarly, im/politeness research tends to focus on settings where there is an explicit social connection – whether affective or instrumental – such as in workplaces, or in institutional and service circumscribed exchanges (Bousfield 2007Bousfield, D. 2007 “Beginnings, Middles and Ends: A Biopsy of the Dynamics of Impolite Exchanges.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 2185–2216. ; 2018Bousfield, D. 2018 “Face(t)s of Self and Identity in Interaction.” Journal of Politeness Research 14: 225–243. ). Incivilities occurring in workplaces and in the everyday functioning of institutions may differ from those occurring between strangers in public space, where rules of behavior between physically copresent others are less institutionally circumscribed.44.For example, Bousfield (2007)Bousfield, D. 2007 “Beginnings, Middles and Ends: A Biopsy of the Dynamics of Impolite Exchanges.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 2185–2216. provides an astute analysis of the problems traffic wardens face in public interaction. Additionally, recent im/politeness research has seen a significant shift from a focus on face-to-face interaction towards online and technologically mediated interaction (Bou-Franch & Blitvich 2014Bou-Franch, P., and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. 2014 “The Pragmatics of Textual Participation in the Social Media.” Journal of Pragmatics, 73: 1–3. ; Graham 2019Graham, S. L. 2019 “Interaction and Conflict in Digital Communication.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict, ed. by M. Evans, L. Jeffries, and J. O’Driscoll, pp. 310–327. New York: Routledge. ; Jay 2018Jay, T. 2018 “Swearing, Moral Order, and Online Communication.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 6: 107–126. ; Locher 2010Locher, M. 2010 “Introduction: Politeness and Impoliteness in Computer-Mediated Communication.” Journal of Politeness Research 6(1): 1–5. ; Parvaresh and Tayebi 2018Parvaresh, V., and T. Tayebi 2018 “Impoliteness, Aggression and the Moral Order.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 91–107. ). While this is important research, the interactional worlds populated and produced by copresent persons remain vast and underexplored.

Attention to uncivil encounters between strangers beyond institutional and service provision encounters expands the orbit of im/politeness studies. In the spirit of eclecticism and curiosity that characterize im/politeness research (Bousfield and Culpeper 2008Bousfield, D., and J. Culpeper 2008 “Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora.” Journal of Politeness Research. 4(2): 161–168. ), this article widens the lens from impoliteness to incivility (Sifianou 2019Sifianou, M. 2019 “Im/politeness and In/Civility: A Neglected Relationship?” Journal of Pragmatics, 147: 49–64. ), shedding new light on familiar phenomena.

2.3Stranger interactions beyond im/politeness research

Im/politeness research is not alone in overlooking the distinctiveness of interactions between copresent strangers. Stranger interactions prove analytically troublesome in many areas. For example, foundational studies of initial interaction in work groups and institutional settings relied on hypothetical situations and on interactions leading to ongoing contact rather than one-off encounters (Berger and Calbrese 1975Berger, C. R., and R. J. Calabrese 1975 “Some Explorations in Initial Interaction and Beyond: Toward a Developmental Theory of Interpersonal Communication.” Human Communication Research 1: 99–112. ). Some research in pragmatics examines phatic talk between strangers, though this tends to be under experimental conditions (Flint et al. 2019Flint, N., M. Haugh, and Merrison, A. 2019 “Modulating Troubles Affiliating in Initial Interactions: The Role of Remedial Accounts.” Pragmatics 29(3): 384–409. ), or in institutional rather than public spaces (Edmondson and House 1981Edmondson, W. and J. House 1981 Let’s Talk, and Talk about It: A Pedagogic Interactional Grammar of English. München: Urban u. Schwarzenberg.; House 2013House, Juliane 2013 “Developing Pragmatic Competence in English as a Lingua Franca: Using Discourse Markers to Express (Inter)Subjectivity and Connectivity.” Journal of Pragmatics 59: 57–67. ). Other work on encounters between strangers focuses on the intentional search for connection – in speed dating, for example (Korobov 2011Korobov, N. 2011 “Mate-Preference Talk in Speed-Dating Conversations.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 44: 186–209. ; Stokoe 2010Stokoe, E. 2010 “ ‘Have You Been Married, or …?’: Eliciting and Accounting for Relationship Histories in Speed-Dating Interaction.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 43: 260–282. ) – or on encounters oriented towards future cooperation (Svennevig 2014Svennevig, J. 2014 “Direct and Indirect Self-Presentation in First Conversations.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33: 302–327. ). Beyond sociology there is little research on interactions between strangers in public spaces who remain as strangers.

In social psychology related research on rudeness has also grown significantly over the last two decades, tending to connect rudeness and aggression (Hamilton 2012Hamilton, M. A. 2012 “Verbal Aggression: Understanding the Psychological Antecedents and Social Consequences.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31: 5–12. ), or focusing on predicting rudeness by way of personality traits, often through analysis of interaction in the laboratory rather than naturally occurring interaction (Ickes 2009Ickes, W. J. 2009 Strangers in a Strange Lab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ; Ickes et al. 2012Ickes, W., A. Park, and R. L. Robinson 2012 “F#!%ing Rudeness: Predicting the Propensity to Verbally Abuse Strangers.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31: 75–94. ). There also exists an extensive literature on workplace incivility (Leiter 2013Leiter, M. 2013 Analyzing and Theorizing the Dynamics of the Workplace Incivility Crisis. New York: Springer. ).

Overall, research on uncivil encounters between strangers has been given short shrift. Studies of interaction between strangers tend to treat it as a precursor for the development of stronger ties and/or a shared task orientation. Fleeting encounters between strangers in public space who continue as strangers to one another remain under-analyzed.

While im/politeness research has advanced our understanding of linguistically mediated interactional conflict, the RIEL data reported below suggests that not all interactions between strangers are linguistically initiated or mediated (Sifianou & Tzanne 2010Sifianou, M., & Tzanne, A. 2010 “Conceptualizations of Politeness and Impoliteness in Greek.” Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4): 661–687. ). So, while the properties of linguistic incivilities are well described (and debated) in im/politeness research, my analysis differs in several ways by;

• examining uncivil encounters between copresent strangers beyond institutional settings and service encounters in urban public spaces,

• treating impoliteness as linguistic incivility, a subset of incivility more generally

• not assuming continued post-encounter contact

• taking seriously ritual dimensions of stranger interactions

While focusing on the particularity of uncivil encounters between strangers in public space is a very specific subset of impoliteness in general, as I show here, examining everyday incivilities between strangers opens broader classes of interactional phenomena to analysis.

Since civil inattention is here treated as interaction ritual (Goffman 1967Goffman, E. 1967 Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books.), a focused discussion of ritual is warranted.

3.1Civil inattention as urban interaction ritual

As a widely experienced form of urban interaction, civil inattention occurs with more regularity than the “mere exchange of friendly glances” (Goffman 1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press., 101). Indeed, civil inattention is “the most frequent of our interpersonal rituals” (1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press., 101, emphasis added), involving a restricted range of attentional adjustment whereby “one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him [sic]), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention…so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design” (Goffman 1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press., 84). So, while civil inattention “is perhaps the slightest of interpersonal rituals…[it is] one that constantly regulates the social intercourse of persons in our society” (1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press., 84). Our core thematic concern, then, is ritualized urban interaction – here termed, urban interaction ritual.

Shared commitment to civil inattention through the mutual indifference of strangers makes ordinary everyday urban life amongst strangers possible (Durkheim 1964Durkheim, É. 1964 The Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press.; Horgan 2017aHorgan, M. 2017a “Interaction, Indifference, Injustice: Elements of a Normative Theory of Urban Solidarity.” In Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century, ed. by F. Kurasawa, 61–94. Heidelberg: Springer Berlin. ; 2017bHorgan, M. 2017b “Mundane Mutualities: Solidarity and Strangership in Everyday Urban Life.” In Place, Diversity and Solidarity, ed. by Oosterlynck, S., Schuermans, N., and Loopmans, M., 19–32, New York: Routledge. ; Simmel 1971Simmel, G. 1971 On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.). My analysis delineates variations in the ways that basic breaches of the ritual of civil inattention play out. While I am mindful of and have much to say about them, I leave aside entirely more macro and ontogenetic questions about the relationship between interactional ritual and moral order more generally.55.For an outline of the normative foundations underpinning stranger interactions – ‘moral affordances’ – and a basic conceptual schema for delineating the relationship between interaction ritual and moral order, see Horgan (2019)Horgan, Mervyn 2019a “Everyday Incivility and the Urban Interaction Order: Theorizing Moral Affordances in Ritualized Interaction.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 7(1), 32–55. . Before outlining the typology, the next section considers the place of ritual in im/politeness research and cultural sociology.

3.2Ritual at the intersection of im/politeness research and cultural sociology

While pragmatics in general, and im/politeness research in particular, find conceptual footing in general social theory, connections between them are under-elaborated.66.For example, while Brown and Levinson draw upon the work of Giddens to justify their interest in the “triviata of everyday life” (Giddens 1973, 15 cited in Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, P., Levinson, S. C. 1987 Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 239), they do not delve into how Giddens’s interest in such ‘triviata’ connects to his broader theory of structuration. Similarly, they reference Durkheim’s conception of the sacred, but leave aside the fact that his theory of collective life hinges on the concept (Horgan 2019bHorgan, M. 2019b “Review of ‘Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction’”. Contemporary Sociology 48, 318–320. ). Recent research on ritual in im/politeness studies provides opportunities for enhanced connections, though work in this vein too replicates some of the oversights of im/politeness research noted above. For example, Kádár (2013)Kádár, D. 2013 Relational Rituals and Communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave. focuses on ritual breaches or ‘destructive rituals’ in formalized or in-group contexts. Stranger interactions remain underscrutinized, and since they rely upon minimal common ground, they pose an important analytic challenge.

Throughout Goffman’s oeuvre, public conduct – particularly stranger encounters – appears as a morally loaded domain of interaction, where the sanctity of persons manifests and is affirmed (see especially, 1963Goffman, E. 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press.; 1971Goffman, E. 1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper Row.). For Goffman, this sanctity is made and renewed through interaction ritual. Following Durkheim, Collins notes that “rituals are the source of the group’s standards of morality” (2005Collins, R. 2005 Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press., 39): it is within ritual that a sense of what is civil and what is uncivil is made manifest. It is here that cultural sociology enters the fray.

In connecting ritual and social order, cultural sociologists foreground some problems confronting ritual in the context of complex social organization where little common ground might be shared (Alexander 2004bAlexander, J. C. 2004b “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22: 527–573. ; Alexander et al. 2006Alexander, J. C., B. Giesen, and J. L. Mast (Eds.) 2006 Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). Like Goffman, Alexander bases his conception of ritual on Durkheim’s (1995)Durkheim, É. 1995 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. late work.

Rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication’s symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another’s intentions … Contemporary societies revolve around open-ended conflicts between parties who do not necessarily share beliefs, frequently do not accept the validity of one another’s intention, and often disagree even about the descriptions that people offer for acts.(Alexander 2004bAlexander, J. C. 2004b “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22: 527–573. , 527)

Alexander suggests that successful ritual performance is increasingly difficult in societies characterized by higher degrees of social and cultural complexity. Thus, contemporary multicultural urban environments – animated by density and heterogeneity along multiple axes of social difference – provide fertile ground for examining ritual dimensions of interaction between strangers.

My micro-application of civil sphere theory (Alexander 2006Alexander, J. C. 2006 The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ; see also Alexander 2004aAlexander, J. C. 2004a “Rethinking Strangeness: From Structures in Space to Discourses in Civil Society.” Thesis Eleven 79: 87–104. , 2004bAlexander, J. C. 2004b “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22: 527–573. ) shows how everyday actors’ interpretations of one another’s conduct operate through a basic symbolic classification of action into a discursive binary of civil/uncivil. As Alexander demonstrates, “the civility of the self always articulates itself in language about the incivility of the other” (2006Alexander, J. C. 2006 The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , 50). Along these lines, ritual breach precipitates lay adjudication of when and how civil inattention becomes uncivil (see Table 1 and Figure 1).

5.1Data and methodology

“Data is a major problem for impoliteness research” (Culpeper 2010Culpeper, J. 2010 “Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3232–3245. , 3241). Naturally occurring data is notoriously difficult to collect, and this may partly explain the tendency in im/politeness research to seek out impoliteness phenomena in publicly available online interactions and in contrived situations on television (for example. Culpeper 2005Culpeper, J. 2005 “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link.” Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 1: 35–72. ; Parvaresh and Tayebi 2018Parvaresh, V., and T. Tayebi 2018 “Impoliteness, Aggression and the Moral Order.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 91–107. ). Existing research on strangers in public space tends to rely on observation and analysis of naturally occurring interaction (Lofland 1998Lofland, L. 1998 The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.; Smith 2017Smith, R. J. 2017 “The Practical Organisation of Space, Interaction, and Communication in and as the Work of Crossing a Shared Space Intersection.” Sociologica 2: 1–19. ), rather than on how interactants interpret the conduct of others. As subjectively interpreted phenomena, uncivil encounters are not amenable to objective measurement through naturalistic observation or video data of naturally occurring interaction.

To address this shortcoming, RIEL Project methodology builds upon the ‘everyday incivilities’ approach developed by Smith et al. (2010)Smith, P., T. L. Phillips, and R. D. King 2010 Incivility: The Rude Stranger in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. in the Everyday Life in Australia Survey (ELIAS). ELIAS researchers accessed “civil relations in public” (14) by conducting telephone survey research to examine demographic, spatio-temporal, and emotional aspects of everyday experiences of incivility. Adapting and extending this methodology, RIEL researchers systematically solicited accounts of uncivil encounters with strangers in Canada’s most urbanized region through short face-to-face interviews (n = 326).88.Interviews were conducted under the author’s supervision by sociology students trained in qualitative research methods as part of a multi-step course assignment which included transcribing the interviews verbatim. All elements of data gathering were approved by the University Research Ethics Board. Thus, RIEL Project data consists of post hoc accounts that provide details of the genesis and content of specific uncivil encounters.

Interview guides were initially piloted in 2014, and interview data was then collected in four waves between 2015 and 2018. Interviews begun with questions to gather participants’ demographic information. Participants ranges in age from 18 to 72, with an average age of 27. 66% of participants identified as women. Demographic questions were followed by detailed questions about participants’ ‘most recent encounter with a rude stranger in public space’,99.Three types of encounters between strangers in public spaces were excluded: (1) encounters where both parties were drivers were excluded due to the “limited expressive equipment” (Katz 1999Katz, J. 1999 How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) afforded to interactants by automobiles; (2) provider-client service encounters were omitted as service roles circumscribe the course of such encounters, particularly their inherent – and often automatic – asymmetry that builds subordination and superordination into ascribed provider-client roles. They thus lack the presumption of interactional equality that pertains, at least in principle, between strangers in public settings (Horgan 2012Horgan, M. 2012 “Strangers and Strangership.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33: 607–622. ); (3) also excluded were artistic interventions explicitly engineered to disrupt quotidian urban life (Bourriard 2002Bourriard, N. 2002 Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.; Liinamaa 2014Liinamaa, S. 2014 “Contemporary Art’s ‘Urban Question’ and Practices of Experimentation.” Third Text 28: 529–544. , 533). including basic spatio-temporal data on the uncivil encounter (e.g. physical location, time of day, duration), and open-ended questions designed to solicit detailed accounts. Interviews ranged in length from 10 to 30 minutes. Transcriptions generated a corpus of over 500,000 words, and were coded by the author and one research assistant. A random sample of 15 interviews were cross-checked for inter-coder reliability. Numerical data from the survey-type questions (demographics, time of day, number of turns) was categorized and tabulated, while qualitative data was coded and analyzed to examine patterns and types of uncivil interactions.

5.2The civil/uncivil line: Interpreting interaction ritual breaches

In general, breaching the ritual of civil inattention means crossing a culturally proscribed – thus also historically and situationally variable – line from civil to uncivil. The in situ lay classification of conduct aligns with culturally available meanings organized around a basic sacred/profane binary (Alexander 2004aAlexander, J. C. 2004a “Rethinking Strangeness: From Structures in Space to Discourses in Civil Society.” Thesis Eleven 79: 87–104. ; Durkheim 1995Durkheim, É. 1995 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.). This binary provides a system of classification through which everyday actors can interpret the actions of others (Alexander 2006Alexander, J. C. 2006 The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ). Simply put, civility is deemed sacred and threats to it profane. Because conduct is interpreted, the breaches dealt with here are specific instances where at least one party in an encounter deems another’s conduct to be uncivil.

In the spirit of ‘second-wave’ im/politeness research (Eelen 2001Eelen, G. 2001 A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St. Jerome.; Watts 2009Watts, R. J. 2009 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), the everyday incivilities perspective (Smith et al. 2010Smith, P., T. L. Phillips, and R. D. King 2010 Incivility: The Rude Stranger in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), and cultural sociology more generally, an act is treated as uncivil if it is interpreted as such by an interactant. In fleeting conduct between strangers in public space, intention cannot necessarily be determined, but rather is socially ascribed (Blum and McHugh 1971Blum, A. F., and P. McHugh 1971 “The Social Ascription of Motives.” American Sociological Review 36: 98–109. ; Mills 1940Mills, C. W. 1940 “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.” American Sociological Review 5: 904–913. ; Scott and Lyman 1968Scott, M. B., and S. M. Lyman 1968 “Accounts.” American Sociological Review 33: 46–62. http://​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2092239). In this formulation, the intention behind an uncivil act is of less relevance than its interpretation (Culpeper 2011Culpeper, J. 2011 Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 23; Locher & Watts 2005Locher, M., Watts, R. 2005 Politeness Theory and Relational Work. Journal of Politeness Research 1, 9–33. ): no encounter is in itself inherently uncivil, rather it must be interpreted by one or more consociates (Schutz 1970Schutz, A. 1970 On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) as uncivil. Thus, we treat as uncivil, stranger encounters where at least one party to the encounter interprets some behavior as crossing from civil to uncivil conduct.

All incivilities cross a civil/uncivil line, and many also cross an attentional line. The two ways that civil inattention can be breached are represented in Figure 1.

In the context of an encounter between two or more strangers in urban space where norms of civil inattention prevail, an incivility is any act – whether verbal, gestural, physical, or any combination of these – adjudicated by one or more copresent persons to be outside the bounds of conduct deemed civil. While incivility may include a verbal exchange, not all uncivil encounters do. Thus, incivility is (1) interactionally produced, (2) evaluative, and (3) incorporates – but is neither exclusively rooted in, nor reducible to – linguistic exchange.

In 30% (n = 97) of reported cases, participants’ most recent encounter with a rude stranger involved an encounter coded as uncivil inattention (see Table 2 below). These cases involve conduct that participants reported as rude which was not directed – initially at least – at another individual in particular. Such conduct reported in the data includes, for example, carelessness with payload (such as backpacks on public transit), shoving in crowded spaces, use of profane language within earshot of young children, and loud conversation about sexual exploits on public transit. Of these 97 cases, 12% began as an incident of uncivil inattention, and then became an incident of uncivil attention, or, put more simply, such cases involved incidents where a stranger’s conduct was uncivil in general before being directed to a particular person.

Thus we find that while cases where strangers direct their uncivil attention towards a particular person constitute the majority (70%) of cases, almost one third of cases involve general – that is, non-directed – incivilities best understood as uncivil inattention.

While the RIEL data provides dozens of other dimensions for comparison and correlation, in the remaining space I highlight core observations from a slice of the data that has direct bearing on im/politeness research, namely, variation between types of incivilities initiated in different ways.

6.1From initiation to escalation

From here, the next question is whether or not the type of initiating move appears to relate in any way to subsequent moves in the encounter. We asked RIEL participants to describe any escalation in the encounter, and specifically to recount any verbal exchange that ensued following the initiating move.

Here we see that 58% of reported incivilities involved subsequent verbal exchange following the initial uncivil act, while 42% involved no subsequent exchange. Examples of the latter include rude comments that go unanswered, unchallenged queue-jumping, and leering that is ignored. Significantly, the type of initiating move appears to be related to the likelihood of exchange. Incivilities that are either physically or gesturally initiated are the least likely to generate any form of verbal exchange (40% and 42% respectively), while 65% of those that were verbally initiated led to further exchange. Over one-third of verbally initiated incivilities involve no verbal exchange. Notably, those encounters that appear most likely to escalate are those that are initiated both verbally and physically, with 82% of such incivilities involving some subsequent verbal exchange. For example, a shouting queue jumper appears to invite more verbal response than a silent one. In terms of the likelihood of escalation, then, the initiating move appears to be impactful.

When we dig down into this data, some interesting patterns emerge. Taking a slightly different tack, we scrutinized the extent of exchange following the initiating move. To do this we asked participants to recall as much detail about any form of verbal exchange that occurred in their most recent encounter with a rude stranger. As reported in Table 5 below, when there were verbal exchanges, most were very brief. For example, one participant recounts a verbally initiated incivility that involved no subsequent exchange when she accidentally dropped her books while walking through a doorway into a public building:

there was a person behind me … I guess they were in a hurry … The guy just said, “what are you doing, get out of my way” … I thought it was rude because he either could have gone around me or help me pick it up … I just picked up my books and … just got out of the way and let him through(RIEL#18016)

Another participant recounts walking in a pedestrianized area early in the morning:

I walked past someone, I was texting on my phone, and we came pretty close to knocking into each other. And he yelled at me to watch where I was going and then continued on his way … I yelled … back at him … “go ‘f’ yourself”.(RIEL#16040)

While these exchanges were short, others were more protracted. For example, in another case of verbally initiated incivility, a white woman reports walking through a shopping mall with her Mexican partner:

we had a man come up to us and he looked at us and he said he was disgusted that me, being a Caucasian, could be with someone of a different background, and that I should be with someone who is a Caucasian … I told the man that he should keep his views to himself … and he shouldn’t walk up to random strangers and basically verbally abuse them … I told him to ‘have a nice day, carry on as you will, like we’re not affecting you, we aren’t doing anything other than what two Caucasians would be doing’, and he … scoffed at me.(RIEL#18066)

Another example, of more extensive and intense escalation happened as a young white man left a busy downtown bar:

it was a weekend so obviously there was people drinking and everything … there was two guys as I was walking to my truck … and in passing they started saying vulgar things, rude things, egging me on trying to start fight and it escalated to pushing, shoving, them being again very vulgar and then, I sort of de-escalated it and walked back to my truck where I had 3 friends of mine waiting … As we went to pull away, these guys came back … they started kicking the truck and hitting it … Eventually we got fed up, we all stepped out of the truck and … again at first, trying to de-escalate the situation, these guys were just not cooperating at all. They were trying to mouth off and everything and so one of my larger friends … decided to get physical with him and just shoved him away and pushed him and eventually they just backed off …

In an example of a physically-initiated incivility, a group of white women are waiting in a lineup at a bustling bar:

there was nowhere to move, and there was this guy that was standing in front of us…He was pushing us and shoving us, and we had like nowhere to go and he was just being very physical with us…at first we didn’t really do anything, like there was nothing that we could really do…there was nowhere we could move, we were being pushed from behind, and I was pushing this guy, but it wasn’t me it was everyone behind me. So I was trying my best to not push him but he was just pushing back so hard, so I let it go for 10 minutes, but then it was getting ridiculous, he was using so much unnecessary force, and then he ended elbowing my friend in the face and I was like ‘okay this is enough, like you need to relax’…he actually told us to ‘fuck off’ so…he had like no remorse at all.

These examples illustrate that some incivilities involve brief and minor escalation, while others are more extended and serious. Data reported in Table 5 shows the distribution of initiating moves by extent of subsequent verbal exchange. Here, initiating moves are categorized into the four most frequently occurring types: verbal; physical; gestural; verbal & physical.1010.Eight cases – making up 3% of the total – involve other combinations and are omitted from the following analysis due to their relative infrequency.

For coding purposes, number of turns refers to the total number of turns involved in the exchange following the initiating move. Thus, the column headed None includes all cases where there was only an initiating move, with no further response; One includes all cases involving a single verbal response to the stranger’s initiating move by the participant; Two includes all cases where exchange ended with the initiator verbally replying to the participant’s response; Three includes all cases where exchange ended with the participants’ second response. Subsequent responses beyond two turns each are collapsed into the column labeled Four+.1111.Because we rely on participants’ capacity to recall details of any verbal exchange, in piloting our interview guides we found that participants had difficulty recounting precisely what was said beyond the fourth turn, and so instances of four or more turns are grouped together.

Here we see that, when they occur, verbal exchanges in physically and gesturally initiated incivilities tend to be short, with only 8.7% and 8% respectively extending to four or more turns. In contrast, almost one third of verbally initiated uncivil encounters extend to four or more turns, while 41% of encounters initiated verbally and physically involve such protracted series of verbal exchange. In the RIEL data then we find that initiating moves that combine verbal and physical elements tend to correlate with longer verbal exchanges.

Clearly, further research into these variations is merited if we are to develop a fuller picture of the landscape of uncivil encounters between strangers in public spaces. The opportunities for future research here are wide ranging. As a beginning, this article offers an empirically grounded understanding of how linguistic and non-linguistic forms of incivility differ from one another. This warrants further scrutiny, especially given that non-verbally initiated incivilities make up 40% of the RIEL data.

It would seem pertinent then to investigate further where the formal similarities between linguistic and non-linguistic incivilities begin and end. The prevalence of non-verbally initiated incivilities may warrant that research on ritual in im/politeness research be complemented also by research on multimodal interaction.