Class Acts
Warrants for an interactional approach to class analysis, from Randall Collins, in Interaction Ritual Chains:
My argument is that micro-situational data has conceptual priority. This is not to say that macro-data means nothing; but amassing statistics and survey data does not convey an accurate picture of social reality unless they are interpreted in the context of their microsituational grounding. Micro-situational encounters are the ground zero of all social action and all sociological evidence. Nothing has reality unless it is manifested in a situation somewhere. Macro-social structures can be real, provided that they are patterned aggregates that hold across micro-situations, or networks of repeated connections from one micro-situation to another (thereby comprising, for instance, a formal organization). But misleading macro “realities” can be built up by misconstruing what happens in micro-situations. Survey data is always collected in micro-situations by asking individuals such questions as how much money they make, what they think is the prestige of given occupations, how many years of schooling they have, whether they believe in God, or how much discrimination they think exists in society. The aggregate of these answers looks like an objective picture of a hierarchic (or for some items a consensual) structure. But aggregated data on the distribution of wealth does not mean anything unless we know what “wealth” actually is in situational experience; dollars in inflated stock prices do not mean the same thing as cash in the grocery store.
In other words: class is a process, not a thing, and should be studied accordingly. Not exactly rocket science, as anyone off the streets—but outside the social sciences—will tell you, and yet it’s surprising how much play aggregate statistics get in evaluating class. So I’m clear, I’m not against statistics. I refer to them all the time, whether in relation to my work or not. But they only tell part of the story, and maybe a limited part at that. Real explanatory power derives from ethnographic data that reveals people in action.
