Face to Face: Toward a Sociological Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (review)

"The currency of most face-to-face interactions is emotions," writes Turner. The reason is that, evolutionarily, we are basically apes, and as such we have a strong solitary streak. As this was a liability, once our ancestors descended from the trees onto the savanna, where they needed to cooperate to catch prey and defend themselves, our brains were gradually rewired to reward sociality with positive emotions. Evolution bequeathed us additional characteristics as well, including an orientation to visual cues and various means of emitting them (hand gestures, facial expressions) — all of which predisposes us to emotion-laden, face-to-face encounters.

With this as his (admittedly speculative) backdrop, Turner spends most of this book developing his main argument about the dynamics of human encounters. Briefly, people arrive to encounters with expectations, derived from culture, past experiences, and the apparent role claims made by others. These are expectations about what will happen during an encounter, and more precisely, about how our "transactional needs" (e.g., for self-confirmation, exchange benefits) will be satisfied as a result. When these expectations are met or exceeded, people experience positive emotions, which leads them to feel good about themselves, about specific others, or about larger categorical or corporate units, the attribution depending on whom or what they attribute the success to. Contrarily, when the expectations are not met, negative emotions are produced, which lead people either to resent those they are interacting with, or more encompassing categorical/corporate units, or to experience shame if they blame themselves. Both types of emotions have repercussions: positive emotions motivate one to positively sanction others, initiating a cycle of mutual reinforcement that lasts until people tire of one another, while negative emotions may motivate one to negatively sanction others, following which those others may retaliate, or to employ "defense mechanisms" (repression, displacement, projection), with further interactional difficulties down the road.

This is an ambitious model, pulling together several strands of theory into a single account of what people enter an encounter with (expectations), what happens within it (these are confirmed or disconfirmed), and what follows in its wake (feelings of pride/attachment, or else shame/resentment). It is at this sort of thing that Turner, an unabashed full-time theorist, is at his best. In the course of developing this model, Turner develops constructive arguments about a range of theoretical issues in microsociology. There is, for one, a subtheory of emotional combinatorics, or the way in which the universal emotions of happiness, fear, anger, and sadness are combined so as to produce the more nuanced emotions, such as gratitude and regret, which play such a critical role in social life. Then there are his hypotheses about the way in which expectations are shaped by the embedding of encounters in larger institutional structures. Here his argument both dovetails with recent work within conversation analysis on "institutional talk," while challenging it to view the strength of such expectations as a matter of degree rather than as all-or-nothing. A third component of the theory pertains to the various degrees to which one can be emotionally invested in a performance. Turner argues that we have the most to lose when the self we are presenting is our "core self," and less to lose when the presentation is scripted by its immediate embedding. Here he attempts, I think successfully, to reconcile Goffman's view of the self as arising from situational dynamics with the idea of an inner self that can find better or worse expression in particular encounters.

The main weakness of this genre of writing is the lack of integration of theory and empirical research. This includes research that would have directly bolstered Turner's claims, such as that on conformity in small groups, which is entirely consistent with his assertion that people have an inherent need for "facticity," or agreement with others about the state...