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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.
Sociological Theory
2016, Vol. 34(3) 276 –286
© American Sociological Association 2016
DOI: 10.1177/0735275116664554
stx.sagepub.com
Original Article
On the Sociology of Occasions
Jonathan R. Wynn1
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.
Keywords
occasions, situations, mesosociology, interaction rituals
Crowds gathering for events are marvelously complex. These effervescent moments of
copresence can be planned or uncoordinated, contested or embraced (see Campos-Castillo
and Hitlin 2013). Events can be large or small; they contain arrivals and departures, various
small interactions and groupings, and lots of participants with many motivations. They can
be tightly controlled and carefully monitored, as in an opera performance, or loosely
arranged, like the international music day Fête de la Musique, when musical performances
are scattered across a city. These occasions are not, however, systematically understood as
sociological phenomena.
In Interaction Ritual, Goffman (1967) proposed that events should be a “subject matter in
their own right, analytically distinguished from neighboring areas, for example, social rela-
tionships, little groups, communication systems, and strategic interaction” (p. 2). Goffman’s
fellow traveler Howard Becker ([1982] 2008) stated that “collective action and the events
they produce are the basic unit of sociological investigation” (p. 370). Substantively, occa-
sions certainly abound in our discipline, albeit often presented as sociological epiphenom-
ena. In this article I focus on events to offer a general theory, answering Goffman’s call for
a sociology of occasions.
To develop this idea, I first distinguish Goffman’s two proposals for a sociology of occa-
sions: a more restrictive one from his 1982 American Sociological Association (ASA) presi-
dential address on “the interaction order” (IO) and a more adaptable second proposition
1Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jonathan R. Wynn, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Sociology, Thompson Hall, 200 Hicks Way,
Amherst, MA 01003-9277, USA.
Email: wynn@umass.edu
664554
STXXXX10.1177/0735275116664554Sociological TheoryWynn
research-article2016
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Wynn 277
pieced together through his earlier books and articles that I call ESGO, a system composed
of encounters, situations, gatherings, and occasions. I then offer a tripartite framework for
studying occasions based on (1) resources (i.e., economic, physical, social + human, and
symbolic), (2) patterns (i.e., confetti, core, and citadel), and (3) properties (i.e., longevity,
repetition, porosity, density, and turbulence). In so doing, I propose a few simple and inter-
connected ideas that hold promise for a wide range of social scientists studying similar
phenomena.
IO VERSUS ESGO: ASSEMBLING AN APPROACH TO OCCASIONS
The idea of studying large, semicoordinated activities as a convergence of harmonious and
conflicting motivations and perspectives dates back to book 6 of Aristotle’s Physics.
Conceptually, this focus weaves through Durkheim’s ([1912] 1966) effervescent rituals,
Simmel’s formal sociology, Thomas and Thomas’s (1928) situations, Alexander’s (2006)
recent appropriation of performance studies to examine rituals as cultural communication,
and through the more general analysis of rites, interactions, and events across a variety of
disciplines. Approaches range from the historical (Clemens 2007; Somers 1996; Wagner-
Pacifici 2010) to the more empirical (Caren and Panofsky 2005).
Goffman’s position on occasions originates with Durkheim, as traced through anthro-
pologist and Radcliffe-Brown protégé W. Lloyd Warner. The connections between Goffman
and Warner were numerous.1 Collins (1986:110; 1988) underscores the significance of
Warner’s thought to the first of three phases in Goffman’s intellectual career, without identi-
fying how occasions play a key role in the rest of his work.
Like many similarly inspired Durkheimian anthropologists,2 Warner had an interest in
rituals and social dramas. In the fifth volume of his expansive Yankee City study, The Living
and the Dead (Warner 1959), he analyzed Newburyport’s tercentennial celebrations, par-
ticularly a “grand historical progression” that served as the culmination of the festivities. For
Warner (1959), the event unlocked an understanding of how people “collectively state what
they believe themselves to be,” and he was careful to mark what was “put in and left out,
selected and rejected” and who “had the power to choose the [significant] symbols,” which
in turn was critical for connecting “the inner world of those involved and the present beliefs
and values of the collectivity” (p. 107). Yankee City details how the parade’s content, a set
of 42 scenes portraying the city’s history, was constructed to overrepresent some decades,
including some voices while excluding others, and crystalized Newburyport’s collective
community sentiments.
Goffman’s intellectual debt is evident if not fully understood. Although at one point he
described himself as a “Hughesian urban ethnographer” (Verhoeven 1993:318; see also
Jaworski 1996, 2000), his paper “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” (Goffman 1956)
opens with a confession to being “under the influence” of the British anthropological tradi-
tion of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown. Goffman (1963) revised his understanding of com-
plex group activity in his subsequent Behavior in Public Places, drawing from Durkheim’s
([1912] 1966) Elementary Forms to turn attention from more elaborate and religious events
to everyday interactions, without sapping their relevance to both participants and social sci-
entists. Goffman wrote of fleeting moments replacing one-time supernaturally infused ritu-
als. Pointedly, he defined the social occasion as a
wider social affair, undertaking, or event, bounded in regard to place and time and
typically facilitated by fixed equipment; a social occasion provides the structuring
social context in which many situations and their gatherings are likely to form, dissolve,
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278 Sociological Theory 34(3)
and re-form, while a pattern of conduct tends to be recognized as the appropriate and
(often) official or intended one. (Goffman 1963:18)
For Goffman, occasions are where behaviors are shaped, shared meanings crafted, interac-
tions set, and rules and norms communicated. Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967:2), which
includes his famed paper on deference and demeanor, opens with the aforementioned call for
a sociology of occasions.
Despite a surfeit of ideas for understanding the properties of large social activity, Goffman
left no clear model. This is unsurprising, as gentle readers have concluded that he was more
taxonomist than theorist (Lofland 1980), and more of a “wondrous voyeur” than a system-
atizer (Fine 2005:1287), who failed to fully map the “theoretical territories” he explored
(Collins 1980:206). Even worse, fellow travelers are left with the pieces of not one perspec-
tive on occasions but two. Closer examination is required to tease them apart.
Goffman took no less a venue than the 1982 ASA presidential address to develop his most
concise vision of an occasion-based model, outlining what he called the interaction order. He
suggested two smaller levels first: ambulatory units (i.e., persons either “singles” or “withs”)
and contacts (i.e., entering into copresence). Next come conversational encounters and for-
mal meetings: the class of arrangements in which people “come together into a small physi-
cal circle as ratified participants in a consciously shared, clearly interdependent undertaking,
the period of participation itself bracketed by rituals of some kind” (Goffman 1983:7).
Penultimately, one finds platform performances (i.e., presenters set before audiences) and,
finally, celebratory social occasions (i.e., events requiring admittance, coordinated participa-
tion, and “a sense of official proceedings”) (Goffman 1983:6–7). The IO thus reads as
follows:
Ambulatory Units < Contacts < Conversational Encounters
< Formal Meetings < Platform Performances
< Celebratory Social Occasions
The celebratory occasion sits at the highest and most complex level, with smaller activities
potentially, but not necessarily, embedded within. Here, Warner’s (1959) The Living and the
Dead is given its due, as Goffman (1983:10) claimed it to be the “best treatment” of occa-
sions, before concluding with an affirmation of their centrality to social research.
The IO, however, appears restrictive when compared with a model that can be assembled
using Goffman’s earlier concepts, and it is this second formation that should be rendered in
contrast. This second perspective offers a more adaptable set of tools for understanding large
group interactions.
Throughout his early work, Goffman repeatedly described the various strata below the
wider and more inclusive definition of the occasion given in Behavior in Public Places
(Goffman 1963). First are smaller events called encounters, which are consensual, face-to-
face, personal, and focused interactions (e.g., a job interview or a romantic date) (Goffman
1961a:17, 158, 355, 368; 1961b). Building from the encounter, Goffman defined a situation
as not just a focused interaction but an “environment of mutual monitoring possibilities,
anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all
others who are ‘present,’ and similarly find them accessible to him.” Next comes a gather-
ing, a divided and loose aggregate of participants (Goffman 1964:135).3 This line of thought
culminates in the introduction of Interaction Ritual (Goffman 1967), in which the occasion
is defined as a “normatively stabilized structure” that is a “shifting entity, necessarily eva-
nescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures” (p. 2). Goffman (1964) noted that
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although nested, larger units do not necessarily require smaller ones, as a “given social gath-
ering of course may contain no encounter, merely unengaged participants bound by unfo-
cused interaction” (p. 135). This second order can be constructed as follows:
Encounters < Situations < Gatherings < Occasions
For this discussion, let us call this the ESGO model.
Seeing IO as the culmination of Goffman’s thoughts on large group activity is alluring
and understandable, because of the high profile of its presentation (as the ASA presidential
address), its chronological place at the end of his career, and for emotional reasons (i.e., the
address was delivered in absentia, as he was battling stomach cancer, which he succumbed
to only a few months later). Similarities also encourage such a conclusion: both the IO and
the accumulation of concepts I label ESGO nest their activities, and in both models the cul-
tural rules of the wider gathering “socially organize the behavior” in smaller events (Goffman
1964:135; see also Goffman 1983:5). Yet the ESGO model has tangible advantages. ESGO
(1) avoids mixing foci of analysis (e.g., people as “ambulatory units” with interactional
engagements like “platform performances”), (2) avoids restrictive modifiers (e.g., “celebra-
tory” events and gatherings rather than “formal” meetings), and, therefore, (3) offers greater
utility.
On this last point, ESGO’s general applicability is a significant advantage. For example,
although seemingly similar in scale to IO’s formal meetings and platform performances,
ESGO’s situations and gatherings are flexible in form and in their opportunity for varied
participation. Goffman’s definitions of situations and gatherings can be informal and
unscripted, whereas activities in the IO cannot.4 Likewise, some gatherings certainly have
mutually shared “groupness” similar to IO’s formal meetings and platform performances,
but, in describing assemblies of poker players in a casino, Goffman (1961b:11) noted that
this kind of collective affinity is certainly not a requirement for an event to occur.5 Finally,
regarding the confining nature of IO, the modifier in “celebratory social occasions” unnec-
essarily hamstrings the focus of Goffman’s analysis: festivals, protests, conferences, and
riots could all hold formal and informal, celebratory and contentious, activities.
RESOURCES, PATTERNS, AND PROPERTIES
Assembling a few ideas from Goffman’s underdeveloped ESGO model, I propose a set of
three components to garner a better understanding of how occasions work. Of note, these
different levels of encounters, situations, gatherings, and occasions do not simply mimic
each other. Smaller interactions may or may not reproduce aspects of a larger gathering.6
This framework allows one to compare occasions and connect larger occasions with their
own embedded encounters, situations, and gatherings. These components serve as the scaf-
folding for what Goffman (1963) called the occasion’s “structuring social context” (p. 18).
Resources
Four kinds of resources flow through the ESGO model. These resources are privately or col-
lectively held assets that might be extracted, bolstered, nurtured, restricted, or liberated
through an occasion. The first variety of resource might be the most obvious: economic. An
occasion such as the quadrennial FIFA World Cup, for example, requires massive amounts
of private and public funding and may bring a limited amount of economic resources back
into a surrounding community (e.g., visitor spending, fees, and taxes). An annual block party
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280 Sociological Theory 34(3)
or an arts fair necessitates comparatively lower levels of economic resources yet generates
modest financial gains for participants. A public protest might require no economic resources.
Economic resources, however, are unlikely the sole measure of a particular occasion.
Just as economic resources can be exploited and nurtured during an occasion, so too can
physical resources be used or fortified. Physical resources can be public (e.g., streets and
sidewalks) or private (e.g., opera houses, cafés, and bars) spaces. A community dance, for
example, might be hosted in a public park or a local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. These
resources can be purchased, rented, donated, or occupied, and they can be clustered together
or dispersed over a wide geographic area.
A third resource is an amalgam of groups, individuals, and their talents, which could be
called human + social resources. Occasions have their organizers, workers, leaders, partici-
pants, and even unwelcome guests. Warner (1959), in his study of the Yankee City parade,
for example, noted that “everyone was involved,” from aristocrats to “the clam-diggers of
the river flats” (p. 107). Occasions set individuals (e.g., artists, politicians, out-of-town visi-
tors, investors) in coordination with organizations (e.g., municipal governments, media, cul-
tural institutions). A small cadre of actors might meet in a situation to plan for a larger
occasion, an event they may or may not participate in.
Last, there are symbolic resources. Like the sacred symbols in Durkheim’s rituals or
Warner’s significant symbols in a parade, meaningful signs and icons can be nurtured,
broadcast, contested, and revered. Symbolic resources are image- and idea-based goods that
can be linked to, or promoted within, an occasion. Cultural goods can also be actively gener-
ated, poached, or challenged in cases of riots and protests, or invoked retroactively, as media
and other storytellers grasp a particular symbolic facet of the occasion to serve a kind of
synecdochical purpose.
Patterns
Although he is not the only scholar to think of social life in terms of patterns,7 Goffman’s
(1983:4) definition of occasions includes the phrase “pattern of conduct,” citing environ-
mental psychologist Roger Barker’s “standing behavior pattern” in the IO. This is an attempt
to think through the shape of events as a kind of social geography. As both physical and
social place, some occasions are more tightly controlled and limited in their scope (e.g., a
dance competition), others are more expansive (e.g., a protest), and some have a mixture of
tightly private and thoroughly open social spaces (e.g., Rio de Janeiro’s Carnivál). Differences
in the spatial arrangements of occasions can shape the smaller and embedded gatherings,
situations, and encounters among individuals and groups, both inside and surrounding the
larger activities and resources.
A citadel pattern consolidates and isolates events within a bounded and definable space.
The resultant occasion is tightly controlled, as entry and egress are limited, activities are
regulated with little external influence, and roles are likely to be strictly defined. Such gath-
erings and situations (e.g., a professional convention) are confined and regulated.
A core pattern is looser than a citadel pattern, with mixed levels of admittance (e.g., some
activities are more accessible than others), and perhaps using public and private spaces.
Take, for example, a traditional jazz funeral in New Orleans: a religious ceremony is held
inside a church, followed by a march to the cemetery with a coterie of family and friends
around the casket and a brass band in front, which is followed by a “second line” of rowdy
revelers that anyone can join (Turner 2009). A core-patterned occasion might have an assort-
ment of official and unofficial gatherings and situations that are all part of the larger
occasion.
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A confetti pattern likely brings together the widest array of actors, organizations, and
experiences. This arrangement affords the least amount of control over encounters, situa-
tions, and gatherings, allowing possible “shadow” events to occur. This could be a holiday
(Etzioni 2000), like Día de los Muertos, when intimate vigils occur in homes and large
events occur in public gatherings, and more solemn activities are held in smaller towns while
more lively and irreverent events happen in bigger cities, such as Oaxaca.
These patterns are typifications of social geography, and they are real and observable to
participants and analysts alike. The shape of each occasion influences the distribution and
use of the aforementioned resources. A more confined occasion can better regulate varied
activities. Conversely, the more dispersed the occasion, the greater freedom of access, the
greater potential struggle over resources, and the wider the potential impact across a variety
of groups and organizations.
Properties
Many of Goffman’s key ideas around this topic can be reformulated into five properties that
track how resources flow through these patterned activities. I cast them as longevity, repeti-
tion, porosity, density, and turbulence. The first and second properties are the most straight-
forward: longevity and repetition. For Goffman (1967:2), an occasion is a
“temporary . . . shifting entity,” and as such, each level of ESGO is transitory and potentially
sequential. The Buenos Aires San Telmo flea market, for example, occurs on Sundays from
10 a.m. to 4 p.m., repeating on a weekly basis in the same location. The different gatherings
within the event might have different temporalities, as a stall might close at 2 p.m. rather
than 4 p.m. The length of time and terms of repetition are thus features worth cataloging at
different strata of the ESGO.
Goffman’s (1963:198–215) work often pivots on issues of entrée, engagement, and activ-
ity in groups: comparing “tight” social engagements, in which attitudes and interactions are
restricted, and “loose” occasions, when they are more lenient. Three other properties along
these lines present potential for deeper analysis. The third property, porosity, is an assess-
ment of access. In Behavior in Public Places, Goffman (1963:24, 179–90; see also Goffman
1967:132–33) offered the paired ideas of “contained” and “uncontained activity,” in which
a lack of control over participation leads to a greater diffusion of attention, more porous
boundaries of social exchange, and even the opportunity for countering and alternative
activity. Compared with Goffman’s (1983:7) treatment of celebratory social occasions, in
which participants are “admitted on a controlled basis,” the idea of porosity addresses how
different groups and individuals have different access to events.
The fourth property is density. This is a Durkheimian term Collins (2005:116–17, 127)
elaborated that signifies the quality of prolonged engagement, when participants maintain a
degree of attention and membership to an activity. Goffman (1963:24) introduced the terms
focused and unfocused interaction to explain how people are differently obligated to social
exchange (e.g., the focused interaction of a heated marital row vs. the unfocused interaction
between a professor and her daydreaming student). Commitment to copresence is likely
easier in a smaller social context, where one’s actions are more legible to the group.
The last property is turbulence, which has to do with the spectrum of harmonious motiva-
tions and “disruptive activity” (Goffman 1961a:199) occurring within and around the occa-
sion. This property is different from porosity and density in that it addresses the presence and
range of unscripted and even opposing activities. Turbulence might be more noticeable (and
more effective) in a smaller gathering, and it might be easier to accomplish in a larger occa-
sion (but perhaps have a weaker effect in a large group). Disruption, of course, depends on
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perspective—disorder for one person might be opportunity for another; in contrast, the idea
of turbulence allows multiple perspectives.
In summary, particular individuals and organizations (e.g., organizers, municipal govern-
ment, a nonprofit arts group) within a social geography (e.g., a neighborhood, city, cultural
scene) mobilize resources (e.g., funding, spaces, talent, resonant symbolic images) to create
an occasion (e.g., block party, parade, the World Cup) within a finite time period (e.g., a long
weekend). Participating actors collaborate within a temporary but repeatable pattern of
semiorganized activity that on one hand holds a shape and activates its planners’ intentions
(e.g., to attract industry professionals or tourists, improve community visibility) and on the
other hand cannot possibly dictate each participant’s actions, motivations, and interpreta-
tions of such events, and might include uninvited and unwelcome participants. A variety of
properties shape and inform participants’ experiences in these collective events, from inclu-
sion and exclusion, and from “buying into” versus challenging the occasion itself.8
DISCUSSION
This outline of four resources, three patterns, and five properties provides a scaffolding for
the analysis and comparison of these moments of copresence. Reviewing a few familiar and
ubiquitous events can demonstrate the utility of this approach, offering a quick sketch of the
various dynamics at work. By comparing focused and commemorative events alongside two
examples of somewhat unfocused activities, the following discussion aims to introduce the
nimble quality of the proposed framework.
First, and in keeping with the anthropological tradition, we can look to a few highly effer-
vescent rituals: bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings (Knudsen 1968; Lidz 1991; Rodriguez
2013). The contemporary U.S. bar or bat mitzvah commonly involves a religious service in
a temple, followed by a festive reception at another location. Conventional weddings follow
a similar pattern: a two-part occasion of a ceremony at which nuptials are exchanged fol-
lowed by a celebration. Both types of events might be citadel patterned, in the sense that they
are invitation-only. These high-density occasions cultivate prolonged engagement and mem-
bership with their activities. Barring any dramatics at the altar, weddings and the like are
rather low in turbulence.
As vastly larger phenomena, sporting events or stadium concerts might appear to be
quite different, and yet the same tools can be applied. A football game, for example, is a
high-density, low-porosity citadel-patterned event inside the walls of a stadium that
requires tickets and demands closely monitored activities. This event, however, is often
preceded by a highly porous and turbulent set of activities in the parking lot (i.e., tailgat-
ing) that is, for many participants, just as much a part of the proceedings as the game itself.
Turbulent activity in the stadium is unlikely to be tolerated. Sports events can be compared
with more accessible occasions. Political rallies and Pride parades (Kates and Belk 2001),
for example, are highly porous events exposed to undesirable turbulence from proximate
unofficial situations and gatherings. An event such as a wedding or a football game has
fixed boundaries. Wedding crashers are rare, and turbulence from parking lot tailgating is
unlikely to disrupt the event within the citadel of the stadium. Recalling Warner’s (1959)
analysis of Newburyport, an occasion such as a parade uses public spaces with more
porous social geographies. Warner detailed how Newburyport’s “grand historical proces-
sion” was highly scripted, and although contemporary parade organizers may try to limit
or regulate participation (by defining membership policies and roles), controlling for tur-
bulence in these occasions can be a major challenge. Indeed, organizers might find that
little can be done to prevent counterprotests.
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On the other hand, turbulence could also be a desirable outcome in cases such as a
political protest or rally, from Occupy Wall Street to a parade of white supremacists
(Armstrong and Crage 2006; Rosental 2013).9 Such events might have low-porosity initial
gatherings—to determine how a spatial resource like a park might be used, and how sym-
bolic resources will be coordinated and deployed—but at the protest or rally that follows,
participants may welcome, or even provoke, turbulence. Examples do not have to be so
dramatic. We can use the more everyday case of a mime or busker: street performers often
poach the resources of a focused occasion, targeting crowds as they wait for an official
event or casually assemble in a public plaza. These congregations are not meeting for the
purpose of witnessing the unofficial entertainer: buskers create encounters that exploit
more official resources, from the physical space of a sidewalk queue to the economic
resource of any proffered tips. Street performers may be escorted away in due time, or
passively tolerated because they contribute just the right amount of curiosity to be enjoy-
able to some passersby. A busker outside a music festival one year, in fact, can be invited
to perform on stage a year later (Wynn 2015).
This brisk tour of varied social phenomena illustrates the dynamic and multidimensional
quality of occasions and provides a structure for description and examination. The sociology
of occasions shows how social actors engage in large group activities differently; how sym-
bolic resources are deployed, but challenged; and how economic and spatial resources can
be used for formal and official proceedings, but how they can also be poached for alternative
purposes.10 The ESGO perspective provides tools for understanding how an occasion may
bolster resources in one case, while exploiting assets in another. It links different lived expe-
riences, perspectives, and on-the-ground interactions with larger institutional efforts and
cultural concerns. Comparisons can be made across cases (between a bat mitzvah and a
football game) and within them (between a festival occasion and the gathering of a queue
that a busker exploits).
CONCLUSIONS: OCCASIONS AS MESOSOCIOLOGY
The sociology of occasions, as outlined here, should be seen as a contribution to mesoso-
ciology (Fine 2010; Maines 1982; Turner 2005). Occasions have several qualities similar
to other mesosociological forms, like organizations, roles, social movements, and net-
works. Goffman (1983:9–11) stated that occasions allow individual participants to
“affirm their affiliation and commitment to their collectivities, and revive their ultimate
beliefs,” and they offer a “loose coupling” between micro-level phenomena and struc-
tural forces. Indeed, occasions provide a “gap-bridging” function (Krause 2013) between
the micro- and macro-levels of social life, demonstrating how structural issues are fun-
neled to individuals through varied meso-level activities and, conversely, how individual
actions within and through occasions potentially shape large organizational, historical,
and societal phenomena (e.g., the political sphere and economic markets). Occasions are
also like organizations, social movements, and networks in their scalable and mutable
nature: occasions can be big or small, complex or simple. And finally, like networks but
unlike roles and social movements, occasions have a matryoshka-like nesting quality:
smaller events are set within bigger ones, reproducing and possibly challenging the quali-
ties of their larger forms.
As Smelser (1997:28) wrote in Problematics of Sociology, mesosociology is our signifi-
cant yet “most vague” level of analysis. The ESGO model clarifies Goffman’s structuring
social context through its framework of resources, patterns, and properties. There are tangi-
ble benefits to the sociology of occasions as a systematic way to examine a rarely explored
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284 Sociological Theory 34(3)
aspect of social life. And yet, more examples and comparisons are needed to show how
occasions can be sites where actors from local organizations, communities, and corporations
come together, where groups produce shared resources, and where collective activities and
individual experiences are shaped.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Andrew Deener, Claudio Benzecry, Howard Becker, Jack Katz, Alexandre Frenette, Patrick Inglis,
and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.
NOTES
1. Warner taught Goffman in his comparative institutions seminar, hired him as a research assistant on the
massive Yankee City study, served as the only constant committee member for his MA and PhD, and
hired him after graduation to write a report on the dilemmas and contradictions of work at a service
station for his market research agency (Goffman 1953; see also Smith and Winkin 2013). Becker, not
coincidentally, also owes a debt to Warner.
2. Durkheim’s ([1912] 1966) Elementary Forms of Religious Life includes highly sensuous elements
(e.g., using descriptions of Warramunga fire ceremonies) to illustrate denser analyses of rites and
totemic classifications, finding that collective sentiments are manifested through and, indeed, are
dependent on these effervescent experiences. Following Durkheimian anthropologists Radcliffe-
Brown and Gluckman, Turner (1980) depicted Zambian religious folktales as “social dramas” to note
their four-stage cycle, and Myerhoff (1978) analyzed four occasions to see how moments reinforced
the religious identities of elderly residents in a Jewish community in Venice Beach.
3. In his essay “The Neglected Situation,” Goffman (1964) used an analysis of the contexts of speech to
formulate a typology of situations from its prior, casual treatment. He stated that situations, too, “war-
rant analysis in their own right, much like that accorded other basic forms of social organization” (p.
134).
4. Collins (2005:7; see also pp. 15, 235) inherited Goffman’s commitment to rituals as bounded and
focused activity, or face-to-face copresence that shares and generates “solidarity and symbols of group
membership.” Collins (2005:115–18, 131), in fact, proposed preconditions for rituals, including shared
motivations and an awareness of social boundaries.
5. Such attention to the distinctions between focused and unfocused gatherings also emerges in Behavior
in Public Places (Goffman 1963).
6. Collins’s (2005) interpretation is a central but not sole contribution to the study of events (see also
Gonos 1977; Perinbanayagam 1974). Collins noted that situations range from small, micro- to meso-
phenomena, pointing to the need for understanding how smaller group activities connect with larger
ones without offering the structure here.
7. Thomas and Thomas (1928) wrote on the “behavior pattern” and its relationship to the concept of
the situation (see also Thomas 1928), and Benedict (1934) illustrated the patterns of three tribes as
refracted in interactions and beliefs.
8. Thomas found a tension between the interpretations of individuals and the social constructs people
find themselves within in The Unadjusted Girl: “There is always a rivalry between the spontaneous
definitions of the situation made by the member of an organized society and the definitions which his
society has provided for him” (quoted in Perinbanayagam 1974:522–23).
9. The Social Order of a Modern Factory (Warner and Low 1947), Warner’s fourth Yankee City vol-
ume, examined how a series of shoemaker strikes undermined the community’s craft production and
increased bureaucratization.
10. True to the initial claim of occasions as large, semicoordinated activities that are the result of harmoni-
ous as well as conflicting motivations and perspectives, a patterned potentiality for disruption differ-
entiates the ESGO from IO as well as Collins’s interaction ritual chain model. IO highlights “platform
performances” and “celebratory social occasions” (e.g., weddings, sports events), whereas ESGO wid-
ens and deepens the investigation of events to include the multivariate dynamics of the occasion.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan R. Wynn is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and
the author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (2015)
and The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (2011).
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... Social life is patterned by a multiplicity of occurrences, such as parliamentary discussions, religious and civil festivities, and historical celebrations (Wynn, 2016). Not all these occurrences can be seen as events. ...
... Such a categorization singles recurrent events as a specific category of events, different from unexpected ones because of their recurrency, planning, and regularity. Recurrent events also differ compared to other categories used to define the social organization of processes of meaning-making, such as occasions (Wynn, 2016) and rituals (Turner, 1967). Wynn (2016, p. 277) defines occasions as social situations characterized by "(1) resources (i.e., economic, physical, social + human, and symbolic), (2) patterns (i.e., confetti, core, and citadel), and (3) properties (i.e., longevity, repetition, porosity, density, and turbulence)." ...
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... The appeal to collective experiences and identity was important in subjugating individual resistance, biasness, interests and desires on the performance stage. Thus, the musician was able to reorient the audience to focus more on performance as a "social event" (Wynn, 2016). ...
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