On the Sociology of Occasions

Abstract

This article fills a long-standing gap, proposing a framework for what Goffman called for in 1967’s Interaction Ritual: a sociology of occasions. Occasions are omnipresent throughout the sociological literature yet are often only casually analyzed. The author proposes a perspective that solidifies occasions as a basic unit of sociological analysis. This proposal offers a framework based on (1) four resources, (2) three patterns, and (3) five properties. These simple and interlocking tools situate the occasion as a valuable and adaptable sociological focus.

Stitching together the heterogeneous party: A complementary social data science experiment

“…These temporalized shapes, we speculate, may well be about as close as our computational data allows us to come to the 'elementary forms' of party sociality; the very stuff, that is to say, out of which social atmospheres are made and remade during this kind of interaction ritual (Goffman, 1963;Wynn, 2016). Yet, it remains hard to know what meaning to ascribe to these specific shapes: what is the party atmosphere like from inside a 'stick' pattern (first picture), compared to when the party reconfigures into a 'dotted' form (the last picture)?…”

“…From a computational point of view, a single student party may seem like a 'frivolous' object of inquiry; yet, the importance of parties as ritual occasions of collective life is deeply ingrained in sociological and anthropological traditions, from Durkheim to Goffman and beyond (Ronen, 2010;Wynn, 2016). Moreover, as we intend to show, the methodological and ethical ramifications of our approach are equally serious.…”

“…complementary (Blok and Pedersen, 2014), non-hierarchical ways that jointly leverages analytic capacities for studying social occasions (Wynn, 2016).…”

“…The present article draws on this programmatic argument, as noted, by way of setting up a practical experiment in 'big data-ethnography', where the hyphen suggests an initial, inherent and deliberate uncertainty as to which of the two terms (big data, ethnography) is here context for the other; which is figure and which is ground. Attempting to explore the dynamic intensities and atmospheres of a specific DTU student party facilitates this experiment, we argue, because these collective properties of a party as a 'meso-social' (Wynn, 2016) occasion of bodily co-presence among many participants, with many different forms of engagement, are both real yet elusive to get at via either digital-transactional or ethnographic means. In setting up this space of methodological experimentation across standard quantitative-qualitative divides, we thus seek to recast and conceptually challenge a number of more-or-less established conventions concerning not only digital transactional data and their different social affordances (e.g., Ruppert et al, 2013) but also, and importantly, about the epistemic and critical capacities of ethnography itself (e.g., boyd and Crawford, 2012).…”

“…This approach of ours shares its overall orientation, as noted, with like-minded attempts to work across the ethnography-big data divide (e.g., Curran, 2013;Ford, 2014;Taylor and Horst, 2013) -while also, we believe, adding notions of complementarity, stitching and granularity as novel methodological orientations for what that might entail in practice. Moreover, the particularities of our data test site mean that we inscribe this exploration into the wider research field of college parties (e.g., Ronen, 2010;Sweeney, 2014), understood here in the Goffmanian sense of a relatively dense, evanescent yet semi-coordinated social occasion of bodily co-presence (Goffman, 1963;Wynn, 2016). While our approach gives us little to say on such otherwise important topics as gender and sexual relations (e.g., Tye and Powers, 1999) or alcohol consumption (e.g., Workman, 2001), we thus conceive of our joint big data-ethnography focus on party intensities as aligning closely with Goffman's Durkheim-inspired interest in the social forms and affective-normative patterns of interaction rituals.…”