2: Interaction, Social Worlds, and Figurational Structures

Sociological analysis is concerned with the interaction that results from the association of socially situated actors. It is this ‘sociation’ that constitutes their ‘society’ – their companionship and antagonism, their cooperation and conflict – and is the basis of all that they do and all that they produce. Reviewing the ideas of the classical sociologists in Europe and the United States, Albion Small's founding statement for the Chicago School of Sociology held that

This was the view that inspired successive generations of Chicago ethnographers and gave birth to both symbolic interactionism and the work of Erving Goffman. It was in the work of Talcott Parsons, however, that interaction was treated comprehensively as the cornerstone of a general theoretical statement of the principles involved in the sociological analysis of systems of structured social action. In The Social System, Parsons (1951) set out a paradigm for understanding social interaction that specified the basis on which diverse approaches to social theory could explore not only the fully integrated, consensual forms of interaction but also the relations of conflict and deviance that abound in actual systems of interaction.