3.1 The Routine and its Rules
A routine is an activity or set of activities which, over a period of time, one performs without the need to reflect or make decisions, or in other words, which one carries out automatically. Routinization may occur in all spheres of human activity. Generally, people develop routines for going to bed and getting back out of it, for keeping themselves clean or preparing food, for completing tasks on the job or mingling with family or friends at home. Routines often form part of one’s existence in such a way that one loses awareness of them, especially when they are within the most basic spheres of daily life: diet and hygiene, work and leisure. Such daily routines are activities that are so institutionalized, they are accepted as “natural” occurrences; they become the background in front of which the unique events of each day stand out. Insofar as these routines become imperceptible in some way as a “natural background,” they are given as assumptions. When asked “Have you done anything today,” those who have not done more than their daily routines will nevertheless respond that they have not; it occurs to no one to mention that they have washed themselves in the morning, or to find any significance in having completed their normal tasks.
Harold Garfinkel (1967) asked his students to conduct a series of small “field experiments” in which daily assumptions were called into question, producing a substantial rupture in social interaction. In this way, a break with presupposed routines demonstrated their basic role in configuring social life and their reaffirming (reproductive) function for the needs of the established social system. Text Nine presents two of these experiments.
Simply questioning the routine ways by which people relate to others produces a rupture in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, meaning “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action which people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable normality, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its very nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it involves values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, which are not even seen as independent, let alone as the products of history.
Straightforward questions regarding routinary forms of communication produce ruptures in social interaction. Garfinkel (1967, p. 76) talks about a common culture, referring to “the socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action that people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume others use in the same way.” This common culture is the privileged sphere of ideology, in other words, the “place” in which the primary interests which shape a social system are articulated and actualized. It is precisely its presupposed nature, its unquestioned and unquestionable naturalness, which the common culture converts into the fundamental basis for affirming the chief values of a social system. Its same nature as something implied defends the “common culture” from possible change, since it concerns values which are not perceived as contingent, and in this sense, not even seen as self-contained, let alone as the products of history.
Nevertheless, in that “common culture” of daily assumptions, there are some norms, or more precisely, norms of “common sense,” which, in classic terms, establishes one's familiarity with social knowledge and differentiates the citizen from the unfamiliar, the“idiot.” For that reason, Garfinkel discusses a “common-sense knowledge of social structures.” Those rules of common sense bond accepted routines to the core of a social system, thus more firmly accomplishing the reaffirmation and reproduction of that system as something left unnoticed, let alone as something contingent or questionable.
In this process of the system’s reproduction achieved through routines, daily language plays a crucial role, above all through daily, inconsequential conversation. For Berger and Luckmann (1968, p. 191), “the most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation.” In conversation, each individual confirms the validity of his subjective world through the subjectivity of others, above all, of “significant others,” which implies a reaffirmation of an intersubjective objectivity, of a reality which has been transmitted to an individual through socialization. “The great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality; indeed, its massivity is achieved by the accumulation and consistency of casual conversation—conversation that can afford to be casual precisely because it refers to the routines of a taken-for-granted world” (Berger and Luckmann, 1968, p. 192).
Berger and Luckmann provide a very timely example of the role of casual, everyday language. It is possible to imagine—they say—what effect an exchange of words like the following may have over the quality of conversation: “‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Okay, darling, don’t forget to take your gun with you.’” The assumption is that, in societies like the ones Berger and Luckmann write about, nobody goes around carrying a gun to their everyday job. However, such a conversation would not at all be surprising in the circumstances in which Salvadorans in 1988 now live. It is more than likely that many Salvadoran men of wealth are frequently reminded by their wives to bring their gun with them or to call their bodyguards. The dynamic character of “casual” (and thus “normal”), which may include carrying around a gun or not, demonstrates the bond between the reality one assumes and the society in which one lives.
In a study on the role of marriage in the formation and reproduction of reality, Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner (1970) state that marriage is one of the chief institutions on which the social system relies to validate its own structure, the configuration of the world which it puts forward. Berger and Kellner start from the assumption already indicated, in which the social world is a construction which must be continuously mediated and actualized in each individual, to the end that it becomes and remains that individual’s world: this mediation and actualization take place daily through the most routine interactions with the most significant people in our lives who confirm that reality is reality, especially through conversation concerning that reality, that world. For a husband and wife, the most important conversation of their lives occurs between them, establishing their own private sphere, perhaps one which is only possible in contemporary society. Thus, spouses mutually become part of their significant other par excellence and thus serve as each other’s chief point of reference for constructing and maintaining their own reality, which is continuously subjected to mutual validation. The permanent dialogue between spouses is not only the mechanism which objectifies present reality (sometimes, things do not acquire a definitive configuration or reality until they are “discussed”), but also what produces a reinterpretation of the past and a clearer projection of the future.
In this way, marriage produces a stability in married people's lives, a stability particularly reinforced by other social groups, above all, their own children. “The narrowing and stabilization of identity is functional in a society that, in its major public institutions, must insist on rigid controls over the individual’s conduct. At the same time, the narrow enclave of the nuclear family serves as a macrosocially innocuous “play area,” in which the individual can safely exercise his world-building proclivities without upsetting any of the important social, economic, and political applecarts” (Berger and Kellner, 1970, p. 65). Of course, these social functions of marriage are not conscious objectives, and for that reason, they remain hidden and even denied by the well-known ideology of marriage as love, sexual fulfillment, and social maturity.
The system is reproduced through the institution of the family: family members accept the chief imperatives socially operating in the daily rules to which they subject their lives, while they compensate for some of their ambitions and frustrated desires in the private space of marital intimacy. The stability obtained through marriage in such individuals, even those considered “immature” or “unstable,” is stable as far as the parameters required by the social system are concerned. People are formed in their work, in the completion of their familial and community duties, which brings them to accept even many of the most traditional moral norms against which they could have rebelled at some point in their youth. The political conservatism which often emerges around the time of marriage is no more than an ideological reflection of the system’s reproduction accomplished through the institution of the family (See Text Ten).
Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that the reproduction of the social order is a mechanical process; if this were the case, societies would neither experience essential changes nor evolve, phenomena which indeed occur. In fact, there is often a bit of novelty in the process of reproduction. In most cases, such innovation necessary for the survival of the system coincides precisely with the well-known saying from The Leopard: “everything must change so that everything stays the same.” Some sociologists and psycho-sociologists, especially those with a symbolic-interactionist perspective, affirm that the social order is continually subject to a process of negotiation.
The fundamental idea of symbolic interactionism is that people transform themselves and their environment through interaction and, in particular, through processes of communication. This transformation entails the creation of symbols: things and acts acquire particular meanings, and those shared meanings reflect back onto their creators, who find themselves obligated to respond to the products of their own activity (See Text Eleven). However, we cannot simply talk about a continuous process of creation, but a continuous recreation, especially if one takes into account the fact that the majority of activities do not change the fundamental parameters of social life at all, but instead reaffirm them. In other words, the majority of the most important meanings and symbols in the life of each society are already established, and individuals do nothing more than assume them through socialization and confirm them in the fulfillment of their daily routines.
The concept of the social order’s negotiation has been chiefly expounded upon by the North-American sociologist Anselm Strauss (1978; Strauss et. al., 1963). Strauss studied the social order of hospitals, and he came to the conclusion that the hospital personnel developed different strategies of negotiation for resolving problems which emerged in the organization. Certainly, such negotiations were shaped by the formal structure of the hospital and by the objectives it held as an institution; nevertheless, Strauss emphasized the importance of the personnel’s negotiating procedures in deciding how to respond to problems arising day after day. A negotiation means, from this perspective, an affirmation of a certain social order (in this case study, the affirmation of the hospital’s order) which also subjects it to changes in order to respond to evolving circumstances and the particular interests of the actors involved in the system.
However, it is important to ask what the limits and boundaries of negotiation in daily interaction are. It would be naive to think that a social system allows its central values and interests to be negotiated; on the contrary, any given negotiation within the social order is precisely subjected to the demands of existing institutional structures themselves—current forms of thought, emotion, and behavior—and to all the mechanisms of power at play in the confrontation between the major social classes of each system. As we saw in the case of marriage, spouses can negotiate a private order to establish a sphere of intimacy between themselves which is constituted by their deepest desires—and even then, only partially, since the constitution of that world must begin from the most elementary conditions, such as space, disposable goods, and internalized attitudes. But what spouses cannot at any moment negotiate are the fundamental demands of the macrosocial order, beginning with the makeup of their own family structure, whether concerning their standards about relationships or the rearing of their children.
In sum, the chief way through which a social order is reproduced is through institutionalized routines, which configure the majority of people’s daily activity. Those routines sit upon the basic interests and values of the system, interests and values which are reaffirmed through the norms regulating routines and solidifying them into naturalized, unquestioned, and unquestionable assumptions. The reproduction of the system goes through minor modifications which are functional for the system, since they allow it to adapt to changing internal and external environmental conditions. These changes are realized above all through the negotiations which take place in social interaction, but most of the time, these negotiations reinforce ruling forces and, in the final stance, reform a part to conserve the whole.
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