PRESENTATION
Reggio Emilia – June 28-29th, 2024
Bypassing Interaction:
New Pathways to Structural Change
Pieter Vanden Broeck, Columbia University & UNIMORE
Mathieu Berger, University of Louvain
Much of our daily life is spent in the immediate presence of others. The interaction processes resulting from this circumstance are widely regarded as a necessary and inevitable constituent of social life, both by sociologists and lay people. This perceived necessity is even more acute in situations where the prospect of structural change is believed to hinge on the outcome of interactions. Such a belief underlies various scenarios. Whether a staff meeting at work, citizens gathered in a town hall, pupils lectured by their teacher, a felon in court, or a patient on the therapist’s couch – in all these and even a few more settings, interaction is viewed as central to produce the desired change, whether by undoing existing structures or building new ones (Luhmann, 2011). Yet precisely in these contexts the need for interaction is today questioned and even sidestepped. This workshop aims to investigate the strategies and mediations by which non-interactional, often technological solutions are leveraged to achieve the structural change previously sought through interaction.
In economic life, where markets since long facilitate coordination without interaction, this evolution seldom registers as problematic. We self-scan items at the supermarket or we order our groceries directly from online shops, where it is impossible to run into someone else. Should problems arise, chatbots stand ready to assist. When renting a holiday home, platforms enable hosts and guests to coordinate without ever having to meet each other. But even in contexts where the stakes are markedly higher and human contact is deemed important, interaction no longer seems the panacea. In the public sector, citizens often no longer interact with the state (official) at the counter but rather click their way through faceless portals.
Current debates on participatory democracy furthermore illustrate how all parties involved came to view public meetings as a burden to be strongly reduced (Berger, 2024), or even abandoned (Loisel & Rio, 2024). In other contexts, skipping interaction raises considerable consternation. This is notably the case for some “people processing” professions, where the turn to algorithmic tools has prompted vocal protest among practitioners and their academic spokespersons (Pasquale, 2019; Turkle, 2017; Poritz & Rees, 2017).
Rather than merely denouncing the thus changing status of interaction, this workshop invites both empirically grounded papers and theoretical reflections that examine, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• Varieties of bypassing techniques: Which strategies and mediations are used to skip face-to-face interaction? Do they bypass interaction entirely? Which elements do they retain? How do interaction-skipping strategies (re)define the change interactions aspire to? What variations exist in strategies across societal domains, geographic regions, or professional jurisdictions?
• Motivations and justifications: What are the motivations and justifications used to bypass interaction? How do they relate to the demands that interaction processes place on their participants – on their mental and physical presence? How do they relate to expectations of effectiveness – to an interaction’s ability to steer change?
• Problems of control: How do strategies to skip interaction relate to organizational or public oversight? How does professional judgment, its practice and its measures for success, change, resist or adapt when new tools or techniques allow to bypass them? How are responsibility and accountability reorganized when interaction is bypassed?
• Redefining interaction: What are the repercussions for the sociological understanding of interaction? Do bypassing techniques affect or reshuffle the differences between interaction, organization, and society? What role do ambiguity and uncertainty, both inherent to interaction, play in the noninteractional alternatives experimented to provoke structural change?
Bypassing Interaction:
New Pathways to Structural Change
Pieter Vanden Broeck, Columbia University & UNIMORE
Mathieu Berger, University of Louvain
Much of our daily life is spent in the immediate presence of others. The interaction processes resulting from this circumstance are widely regarded as a necessary and inevitable constituent of social life, both by sociologists and lay people. This perceived necessity is even more acute in situations where the prospect of structural change is believed to hinge on the outcome of interactions. Such a belief underlies various scenarios. Whether a staff meeting at work, citizens gathered in a town hall, pupils lectured by their teacher, a felon in court, or a patient on the therapist’s couch – in all these and even a few more settings, interaction is viewed as central to produce the desired change, whether by undoing existing structures or building new ones (Luhmann, 2011). Yet precisely in these contexts the need for interaction is today questioned and even sidestepped. This workshop aims to investigate the strategies and mediations by which non-interactional, often technological solutions are leveraged to achieve the structural change previously sought through interaction.
In economic life, where markets since long facilitate coordination without interaction, this evolution seldom registers as problematic. We self-scan items at the supermarket or we order our groceries directly from online shops, where it is impossible to run into someone else. Should problems arise, chatbots stand ready to assist. When renting a holiday home, platforms enable hosts and guests to coordinate without ever having to meet each other. But even in contexts where the stakes are markedly higher and human contact is deemed important, interaction no longer seems the panacea. In the public sector, citizens often no longer interact with the state (official) at the counter but rather click their way through faceless portals.
Current debates on participatory democracy furthermore illustrate how all parties involved came to view public meetings as a burden to be strongly reduced (Berger, 2024), or even abandoned (Loisel & Rio, 2024). In other contexts, skipping interaction raises considerable consternation. This is notably the case for some “people processing” professions, where the turn to algorithmic tools has prompted vocal protest among practitioners and their academic spokespersons (Pasquale, 2019; Turkle, 2017; Poritz & Rees, 2017).
Rather than merely denouncing the thus changing status of interaction, this workshop invites both empirically grounded papers and theoretical reflections that examine, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• Varieties of bypassing techniques: Which strategies and mediations are used to skip face-to-face interaction? Do they bypass interaction entirely? Which elements do they retain? How do interaction-skipping strategies (re)define the change interactions aspire to? What variations exist in strategies across societal domains, geographic regions, or professional jurisdictions?
• Motivations and justifications: What are the motivations and justifications used to bypass interaction? How do they relate to the demands that interaction processes place on their participants – on their mental and physical presence? How do they relate to expectations of effectiveness – to an interaction’s ability to steer change?
• Problems of control: How do strategies to skip interaction relate to organizational or public oversight? How does professional judgment, its practice and its measures for success, change, resist or adapt when new tools or techniques allow to bypass them? How are responsibility and accountability reorganized when interaction is bypassed?
• Redefining interaction: What are the repercussions for the sociological understanding of interaction? Do bypassing techniques affect or reshuffle the differences between interaction, organization, and society? What role do ambiguity and uncertainty, both inherent to interaction, play in the noninteractional alternatives experimented to provoke structural change?
References
Berger, M. (2024). The Frame Analysis of Participation.
A Goffmanian Take on Democratic Interaction and Its Ambiguities. Forthcoming in Symbolic Interaction.
Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1-17.
Loisel, M. & N. Rio (2024). Pour en finir avec la démocratie participative. Paris: Textuel.
Luhmann, N. (2011). Strukturauflösung durch Interaktion. Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen. Soziale Systeme 17(1), 3-30.
Pasquale, F. (2019). A Rule of Persons, Not Machines. George Washington Law Review (87)1, 2-55
Turkle, S. (2017). Reclaiming Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 14(2), 237-248.
Poritz, J. A., & Rees, J. (2017). Education is Not an App. New York, NY: Routledge.
Stark, D. & P. Vanden Broeck (2024). Principles of Algorithmic Management. Forthcoming in Organization Theory.