Systems of Social Action

"This book is about social action as it is carried out in everyday life. To some readers, the phrase social action may evoke the idea of people taking the initiative for change at the political and economic level of society; these are social actions that take days, months, or years to accomplish. The kinds of actions this book is concerned with are, instead, much more rapid and minute. They are actions performed on the fly, in the back-and-forth of ordinary interaction; they are actions like questions, answers, complaints, compliments, and requests. As a species of social action, requests serve a basic function: getting help from others. Every day in a community, people make hundreds of requests of one another, most of which are small requests for mundane things such as passing an item or performing a service around the house. Another way of thinking about requests is as the exercise of social influence in our everyday encounters, the kind of influence with tangible effects on the subsequent conduct of those around us. The book reports on an extensive study of requests "in the wild", through the methodical observation and analysis of naturally occurring social interactions captured on video. Using the case of everyday requests among speakers of Italian, the book shows that our resources for social action are organized in systems, that is, in coherent sets of interdependent practices. It argues that such systems are part of the social order, as they shape, constrain, and enable interaction between people"--