Social Order: Chapter Summary And Analysis

A social order involves a sense of how individuals all fit together in shared spaces.
Social order could not be made and repaired unless individuals were able to make sense of, and make use of, shared norms which govern our behaviour in shared spaces. The ordinariness of these shared norms and expectations means that we often take social order for granted because it is so much a part of our ordinary everyday actions. In fact, we only tend to become aware of the complexity of social ordering when it is disrupted in some way, as in the car accident example at the beginning of Chapter 7. Similarly, because social order is not universal or fixed, we are able to notice different ways of ordering in different cultures or societies and in different historical periods.

For Goffman, social order is produced through the regular practices, performances and interactions of people in their daily lives.
Goffman was concerned with the ways in which people's actions and interactions are
In particular, he is interested in the powerful ways in which order is imagined, talked about and written about - the ways in which knowledge about order comes to circulate in society. He uses the idea of discourse (sets of ideas) to explore how knowledge and power are connected in the processes of shaping what can be known, what can be thought and what can be said about social life. Power works through discourse - what can be talked about - to shape popular attitudes. These discourses can be used, and are used, as a powerful tool to normalise behaviour. In relation to social order, discourses make it possible for people to know that if they behave in a certain way they are normal. Thus, forms of knowledge serve as a force of