Interaction Ritual Chains

Interaction ritual chains is a theory developed by the sociologist Randall Collins, most fully set out in his 2004 book Interaction Ritual Chains, building on earlier work by Erving Goffman on the small-scale rituals of everyday face-to-face interaction and on Emile Durkheim's account of how collective rituals generate shared emotion and solidarity. Collins argues that successful face-to-face interactions, which involve shared focus of attention and a shared emotional mood among participants, generate a kind of emotional energy, a feeling of confidence and enthusiasm that participants carry with them afterward, along with shared symbols that come to represent the interaction and the group involved in it. Because this emotional energy is a valued resource, Collins proposes that individuals are motivated to seek out further interactions likely to replenish or increase it, and to avoid interactions that drain it, so that a person's life can be described as a chain of successive interaction rituals, each shaped by the emotional energy and symbolic resources carried forward from the ones before it. Collins extends this individual-level chain outward to explain larger patterns of social stratification, arguing that unequal access to emotionally rewarding interactions and to culturally valued symbols across a person's interaction ritual chain helps produce durable inequalities between individuals and groups over time.