Marvin B. Scott and Stanford Lyman, ̶Accounts.” American Sociological Review, 33 (1 ):46-62.
Reprinted in D. Brisset and C, Edgley (Eds.) Life as Theater: a Dramaturgical Sourcebook. 2nd ed. Chicago; Aldine Publishing Company, 1990, pp.219-238.
From time to time sociologists might well pause from their ongoing pursuits to inquire whether their research interests contribute in any way to the fundamental question of sociology, namely the Hobbesian question: How is society possible? Attempts to answer this question could serve to unite a discipline that may not yet have forgotten its founders, but may still have forgotten why it was founded.
Our purpose here is not to review the various answers to the Hobbesian question, but rather to suggest that an answer to this macro-sociological problem might be fruitfully explored in the analysis of the slightest of interpersonal rituals and the very stuff of which most of those rituals are composed—talk.
Talk, we hold, is the fundamental material of human relations. And though sociologists have not entirely neglected the subject, the sociology of talk has scarcely been developed. Our concern here is with one feature of talk: Its ability to shore up the timbers of fractured sociation, its ability to throw bridges between the promised and the performed, its ability to repair the broken and restore the estranged. This feature of talk involves the giving and receiving of what we shall call accounts.
An account is a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry. Such devices are a crucial element in the social order since they prevent conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation. Moreover, accounts are “situated” according to the statuses of the interactants, and are standardized within cultures so that certain accounts are terminologically stabilized and routinely expected when activity falls outside the domain of expectations. [end p.219 ]
By an account, then, we mean a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior—whether that behavior is his own or that of others, and whether the proximate cause for the statement arises from the actor himself or from someone else. An account is not called for when people engage in routine, common-sense behavior in a cultural environment that recognizes that behavior as such. Thus in American society we do not ordinarily ask why married people engage in sexual intercourse, or why they maintain a home with their children, although the latter question might well be asked if such behavior occurred among the Nayars of Malabar. These questions are not asked because they have been settled in advance in our culture and are indicated by the language itself. We learn the meaning of a “married couple” by indicating that they are two people of opposite sex who have a legitimate right to engage in sexual intercourse and maintain their own children in their own household. When such taken-for-granted phenomena are called into question, the inquirer (if a member of the same culture group) is regarded as “just fooling around,” or perhaps as being sick.
To specify our concerns more sharply we should at this point distinguish accounts from the related phenomenon of “explanations.” The latter refers to statements about events where untoward action is not an issue and does not have critical implications for relationship. Much of what istrue about accounts will also hold for explanations, but our concern is primarily with linguistic forms that are offered for untoward action. With this qualification to our concern, we may now specify further the nature and types of accounts.
Types of Accounts
There are in general two types of accounts: excuses and justifications. Either or both are likely to be invoked when a person is accused of having done something that is “bad, wrong, inept, unwelcome, or in some other of the numerous possible ways, untoward.” Justifications are accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it. Thus a soldier in combat may admit that he has killed other men, but deny that he did an immoral act since those he killed were members of an enemy group and hence “deserved” their fate. Excuses are accounts in which one admits that the act in question is bad, wrong, or inappropriate but denies full responsibility. Thus our combat soldier could admit the wrongfulness of killing but claim that his acts are not entirely undertaken by volition: he is “under orders” and must obey. With these introductory remarks, we now turn our focus to a more detailed examination of types of justifications and excuses.
Excuses are socially approved vocabularies for mitigating or relieving responsibility when conduct is questioned. We may distinguish initially four modal forms by which excuses are typically formulated: 10 appeal to accidents, appeal to defeasibility, appeal to biological drives and scapegoating. [end p.220]
Excuses claiming accident as the source of conduct or its consequences mitigate (if not relieve) responsibility by pointing to the generally recognized hazards in the environment, the understandable inefficiency of the body, and the human incapacity to control all motor responses. The excuse of accident is acceptable precisely because of the irregularity and infrequency of accidents occurring to any single actor. Thus while hazards are numerous and ubiquitous, a particular person is not expected ordinarily to experience the same accident often. In other words, social actors employ a lay version of statistical curves whereby they interpret certain acts as occurring or not occurring by chance alone. When a person conducts himself so that the same type of accident befalls him frequently, he is apt to earn a label—such as “clumsy' ‘—which will operate to stigmatize him and to warn others not to put him and themselves or their property in jeopardy by creating the environment in which he regularly has accidents. When the excuse is rooted in an accident that is unobservable or unable to be investigated—such as blaming one's lateness to work on the heaviness of traffic—frequent pleas of it are likely to be discredited. Excuses based on accidents are thus most likely to be honored precisely because they do not occur all the time or for the most part to the actor in question.
Appeals to defeasibility are available as a form of excuse because of the widespread agreement that all actions contain some “mental element.” The components of the mental element are “knowledge” and “will.” One defense against an accusation is that a person was not fully informed or that his “will” was not completely “free.” Thus an individual might excuse himself from responsibility by claiming that certain information was not available to him, which, if it had been, would have altered his behavior. Further, an individual might claim to have acted in a certain way because of misinformation arising from intentional or innocent misrepresentation of the facts by others. An excuse based on interference with the “free will” of an individual might invoke duress or undue influence. Finally both will and knowledge can be impaired under certain conditions, the invocation of which ordinarily constitutes an adequate mitigation of responsibility—intoxication (whether from alcohol or drugs) and lunacy (whether temporary or permanent) being examples.
in ordinary affairs and in law a person's actions are usually distinguished according to their intent. Further, a person's intentions are distinguished from the consequences of his actions. Under a situation where an action is questioned an actor may claim a lack of intent or a failure to foresee the consequences of his act, or both. If the action in question involves a motor response—such as knocking over a vase—the situation is not very different from that subsumed under the term accident. When actions going beyond motor responses are at issue, the actor's intentions and foresight can be questioned. “Why did you make her cry?” asks the accuser. The presentational strategies in reply to this question allow several modes of defeating the central claim implied in the question, namely, that the actor intended with full knowledge to make the lady weep. The accused may simply deny any intention on his part to have caused the [end p.221]admittedly unfortunate consequence. However, men ordinarily impute to one another some measure of foresight for their actions so that a simple denial of intent may not be believed if it appears that the consequence of the action in question was indeed what another person might expect and therefore what the actor intended.
In addition to his denial of intent an actor may also deny his knowledge of the consequence. The simplest denial is the cognitive disclaimer, “I did not know that I would make her cry by what I did.” But this complete denial of cognition is often not honored, especially when the interactants know one another well and are expected to have a more complete imagery of the consequences of their acts to guide them. A more complex denial—the gravity disclaimer—includes admitting to the possibility of the outcome in question but suggesting that its probability was incalculable: “I knew matters were serious, but I did not know that telling her would make her weep.”
Still another type of excuse invokes biological drives. This invocation is part of a larger category of “fatalistic” forces which in various cultures are deemed in greater or lesser degree to be controlling of some or all' events. Cultures dominated by universalist-achievement orientations tend to give scant and ambiguous support to fatalistic interpretations of events, but rarely disavow them entirely. To account for the whole of one's life in such terms, or to account for events which are conceived by others to be controlled by the actor's conscience, will, and abilities is to lay oneself open to the charge of mental illness or personality disorganization. On the other hand, recent studies have emphasized the situational element in predisposing certain persons and groups in American society to what might be regarded as a “normalized” fatalistic view of their condition. Thus, for example, Negroes and adolescent delinquents are regarded and tend to regard themselves as less in control of the forces that shape their lives than whites or middle-class adults.
Among the fatalistic items most likely to be invoked as an excuse are the biological drives. Despite the emphasis in Occidental culture since the late nineteenth century on personality and social environment as causal elements in human action, there is still a popular belief in and varied commitment to the efficacy of the body and biological factors in determining human behavior. Such commonplaces as “men are like that” are shorthand phrases invoking belief in sex-linked traits that allegedly govern behavior beyond the will of the actor. Precisely because the body and its biological behavior are always present but not always accounted for in science or society, invocation of the body and its processes is ‘available as an excuse. The body and its inner workings enjoy something of the status of the sociological stranger as conceived by Simmel, namely, they are ever with us but mysterious. Hence, biological drives may be credited with influencing or causing at least some of the behavior for which actors wish to relieve themselves of full responsibility.
The invocation of biological drives is most commonly an appeal to natural but [end p.222]uncontrollable sexual appetite. Among first and second generation Italians in America the recognition and fear of biologically induced sexual intercourse serves men as both an excuse for pre- and extramarital sexual relations and a justification for not being alone with women ineligible for coitus. Thus one student of Italian-American culture observes:
What the men fear is their own ability at self-control. This attitude, strongest among young unmarried people, often carries over into adulthood. The traditional Italian belief—that sexual intercourse is unavoidable when a man and a woman are by themselves—is maintained intact among second-generation Italians, and continues even when sexual interest itself is on the wane. For example, I was told of an older woman whose apartment was adjacent to that of an unmarried male relative, Although they had lived in the same building for almost twenty years and saw each other every day, she had never once been in his apartment because of this belief.'
Biological drive may ‘be an expected excuse in some cultures, so that the failure to invoke it, and the use of some other excuse, constitutes an improper account when the appropriate one is available. Oscar Lewis provides such an example in his ethnography of a Mexican family. A cuckolded wife angrily rejects her wayward husband's explanation that the red stains on his shirt are due to paint rubbed off during the course of his work. She strongly suggests, in her retelling of the incident, that she would have accepted an excuse appealing to her husband's basic sex drives:'
And he had me almost believing it was red paint! It was not that I am jealous. I realize a man can never be satisfied with just one woman, but I cannot stand being made a fool of.
Homosexuals frequently account for their deviant sexual desires by invoking the principle of basic biological nature. As one homosexual put it: “It's part of nature. You can't alter it, no matter how many injections and pills they give you.
Another of the biological elements that can be utilized as an excuse is the shape of the body itself. Body types are not only defined in purely anatomical terms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of their shared social meanings. Hence fat people can excuse their excessive laughter by appealing to the widely accepted proverb that fat men are jolly. Similarly persons bearing features considered to be stereotypically “criminal” may be exonerated for their impoliteness or small larcenies on the grounds that their looks proved their intentions and thus their victims ought to have been on guard. The phrase, “he looks crooked to me,” serves as a warning to others to carefully appraise the character and intentions of the person so designated, since his features bespeak an illegal intent.
The final type of excuse we shall mention is scapegoating. Scapegoating is derived from another form of fatalistic reasoning. Using this form a person will allege that his questioned behavior is a response to the behavior or attitudes of [end p.223] another. Certain psychological theory treats this phenomenon as indicative of personality disorder, and, if found in conjunction with certain other characteristic traits, a signal of authoritarian personality. Our treatment bypasses such clinical and pathological concerns in order to deal with the “normal” situation in which individuals slough off the burden of responsibility for their actions and shift it on to another. In Mexican working-class society, for example, women hold a distinctly secondary position relative to men, marriage causes a loss of status to the latter, and sexual intercourse is regarded ambivalently as healthy and natural, but also as a necessary evil. Such a set of orientations predisposes both men and women to attribute many of their shortcomings to women. An example is found in the autobiography of a Mexican girl: “I was always getting into fights because some girls are vipers; they get jealous, tell lies about each other, and start trouble.” Similarly, a Mexican youth who tried unsuccessfully to meet a girl by showing off on a bicycle explains: “She got me into trouble with my. father by lying about me. She said I tried to run her down with my bike and that all I did was hang around spying on her.” In another instance the same youth attributes his waywardness to the fact that the girl truly loved was his half-sister and thus unavailable to him for coitus or marriage: “So, because of Antonia, I began to stay away from home. It was one of the main reasons I started to go on the bum, looking for trouble.”
Like excuses, justifications are socially approved vocabularies that neutralize an act or its consequences when one or both are called into question. But here is the crucial difference: to justify an act is to assert its positive value in the face of a claim to the contrary. Justifications recognize a general sense in which the act in question is impermissible, but claim that the particular occasion permits •r requires the very act. The laws governing the taking of life are a case in point. American and English jurisprudence are by no means united on definitions or even on the nature of the acts in question, but in general a man may justify taking the life of another by claiming that he acted in self-defense, in defense of others' lives or property, or in action against a declared enemy of the state.
For a tentative list of types of justifications we may turn to what has been called “techniques of neutralization.” Although these techniques have been discussed with respect to accounts offered by juvenile delinquents for untoward action, their wider use has yet to be explored. Relevant to our discussion of justification are the techniques of “denial of injury,” “denial of victim,” “condemnation of condemners,” and “appeal to loyalties.”
In denial of injury the actor acknowledges that he did a particular act but asserts that it was permissible to do that act since no one was injured by it, or since no one about whom the community need be concerned with was involved, or finally since the act resulted in consequences that were trifling. Note that this justification device can be invoked with respect to both persons and objects. The denial of injury to persons suggests that they be viewed as “deserving” in a special sense: that they are oversupplied with the valued things of the world, or [end p.224] that they are “private” persons (“my friends,” “my enemies”) who have no standing to claim injury in the public, or to be noticed as injured. Denial of injury to objects involyes redefining the act as not injurious to it but only using it, e.g., car “borrowing” is not theft.
In denial of the victim the actor expresses the position that the action was permissible since the victim deserved the injury. Four categories of persons are frequently perceived as deserving injury. First, there are proximate foes, i.e., those who have directly injured the actor; second, incumbents of normatively discrepant roles, e.g., homosexuals, whores, pimps; third, groups with tribal stigmas, e.g., racial and ethnic minorities; and finally, distant foes, that is, incumbents of roles held to be dubious or hurtful, e.g., “Whitey,” the “Reds,” “politicians.” Besides categories of persons, there are categories of objects perceived as deserving of injury. To begin with, the property of any of the above mentioned categories of persons may become a focus of attack, especially if that property is symbolic of the attacked person's status. Thus the clothing of the whore is torn, the gavel of the politician is smashed, and soon. Second, there are objects that have a neutral or ambiguous identity with respect to ownership, e.g., a park bench. A final focus of attacked objects are those having a low or polluted value, e.g., junk, or kitsch.
Using the device of condemnation of the condemners, the actor admits performing an untoward act but asserts its irrelevancy because others commit these and worse acts, and these others are either not caught, not punished, not condemned, unnoticed, or even praised.
Still another neutralization technique is appeal to loyalties. Here the actor asserts that his action was permissible or even right since it served the interests of another to whom he owes an unbreakable allegiance or affection.
Besides these “techniques of neutralization,” two other sorts of justification may be mentioned: “sad tales,” and “self-fulfillment.” The sad tale is a selected (often distorted) arrangement of facts that highlight an extremely dismal past, and thus “explain” the individual's present state. For example, a mental patient relates: “I was going to night school to get an M.A. degree, and holding down a job in addition, and the load got too much for me.” And a homosexual accounts for his present deviance with this sad tale:
I was in a very sophisticated queer circle at the university. It was queer in a sense that. we all camped like mad with “my dear” at the beginning of every sentence, but there was practically no sex, and in my case there was none at all. The break came when I went to a party and flirted with a merchant seaman who took me seriously and cornered me in a bedroom. There was I, the great sophisticate, who, when it came to the point, was quite raw, completely inexperienced; and I might tell you that seaman gave me quite a shock. I can't say I enjoyed it very much but it wasn't long after before I started to dive into bed with anyone.
Finally we may mention a peculiarly modem type of justification, namely, self-fulfillment. Interviewing LSD users and homosexuals in the Haight-Ashbury [end p.225] district of San Francisco, we are struck by the prominence of self-fulfillment as the grounds for these activities. Thus, an “acid head” relates: “The whole purpose in taking the stuff is self-development. Acid expands consciousness. Mine eyes have seen tbe glory—can you say that? I never knew what capacities I had until I went on acid.” And a Lesbian states: “Everyone has the right to happiness and love. I was married once. It was hell. But now I feel I have fulfilled myself as a person and as a woman.”
We might also note that the drug users and homosexuals interviewed (in San Francisco) who invoked the justification of self-fulfillment did not appear to find anything “wrong” with their behavior. They indicated either a desire to be left alone or to enlighten what they considered to be the unenlightened establishment.
Honoring Accounts, and Background Expectations
Accounts may be honored or not honored. If an account is honored, we may say that it was efficacious and equilibrium is thereby restored in a relationship. The most common situation in which accounts are routinely honored is encounters interrupted by “incidents”—slips, boners, or gaffes which introduce information deleterious to the otherwise smooth conduct of the interactants. Often a simple excuse will suffice, or the other interactants will employ covering devices to restore the status quo ante. A related situation is that in which an individual senses that some incident or event has cast doubt on that image of himself which he seeks to present. The authority on impression management writes, “At such times the individual is likely to try to integrate the incongruous events by means of apologies, little excuses for self, and disclaimers; through the same acts, incidentally, he also tries to save his face.”
One variable governing the honoring of an account is the character of the social circle in which it is introduced. As we pointed out earlier, vocabularies of accounts are likely to be routinized within cultures, subcultures and groups, and some are likely to be exclusive to the circle in which they are employed. A drug addict may be able to justify his conduct to a bohemian world, but not to the courts. Similarly kin and friends may accept excuses in situations in which strangers would refuse to do so. Finally, while ignorance of the consequences of an act or of its prohibition may exculpate an individual in many different circles, the law explicitly rejects this notion: “Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law but because ‘tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him.”
Both the account offered by ego and the honoring or nonhonoring of the account on the part of alter will ultimately depend on the background expectancies of the interactants. By background expectancies we refer to those sets of taken-for-granted ideas that permit the interactants to interpret remarks as accounts in the first place. Asked why he is listless and depressed, a person may [end p.226] reply, “I have family troubles.” The remark will be taken as an account, and indeed an account that will probably be honored, because “everyone knows” that “family problems” are a cause of depression.
This last illustration suggests that certain accounts can fit a variety of situations. Thus in response to a, wide range of questions—why don't you get married? Why are you in a fit of depression? Why are you thinking so heavily?— the individual can respond with “I'm having family problems.” The person offering such an account may not himself regard it as a true one, but invoking it has certain interactional payoffs: since people cannot say they don't understand it—-they are accounts that are part of our socially distributed knowledge of what “everyone knows”—the inquiry can be cut short.
Clearly, then, a single account will stand for a wide collection of events, and the efficacy of such accounts depends upon a set of shared background expectations.
In interacting with others, the socialized person learns a repertoire of background expectations that are appropriate for a variety of others. Hence the “normal” individual will change his account for different role others. A wife may respond sympathetically to her depressed husband because his favorite football team lost a championship game, but such an account for depression will appear bizarre when offered to one's inquiring boss. Thus background expectancies are the means not only for the honoring, but also for the nonhonoring of accounts. When the millionaire accounts for his depression by saying he is a failure, others will be puzzled since “everyone knows” that millionaires are not failures. The incapacity to invoke situationally appropriate accounts, i.e.' accounts that are anchored to the background expectations of the situation, will often be taken as a sign of mental illness. There are grounds then for conceptualizing normal individuals as “not stupid” rather than “not ill.” The person who is labeled ill has been behaving “stupidly” in terms of his culture and society: he offers accounts not situationally appropriate according to culturally defined background expectations.
Often an account can be discredited by the appearance of the person offering an account. When a girl accounts for her late return from a date by saying the movie was overlong—tbat no untoward event occurred and that she still retains virgin status—her mother may discredit the account by noting the daughter's flushed appearance. Since individuals are aware that appearances may serve to credit or discredit accounts, efforts are understandably made to control these appearances through a vast repertoire of “impression management” activities.
When an account is not honored it will be regarded as either illegitimate or unreasonable. An account is treated as illegitimate when the gravity of the event exceeds that of the account or when it is offered in a circle where its vocabulary of motives is unacceptable. As illustration of the former we may note that accidentally allowing a pet turtle to drown may be forgiven, but accidentally allowing the baby to drown with the same degree of oversight may not so easily [end p.227] be excused. As illustration of the latter, male prostitutes may successfully demonstrate their masculinity within the subculture of persons who regularly resort to homosexual acts by insisting that they are never fellators, but such a defense is not likely in heterosexual circles to lift from them the label of “queer.”
An account is deemed unreasonable when the stated grounds for action cannot be “normalized” in terms of the background expectancies of what “everybody knows.” Hence when a secretary explained that she placed her arm in a lighted oven because yoices had commanded her to do so in punishment for her evil nature, the account was held to be grounds for commitment to an asylum.43 In general those who persist in giving unreasonable accounts for questioned actions are likely to be labeled as mentally ill. Or, to put this point another way, unreasonable accounts are one of the sure indices by which the mentally ill are apprehended. Conversely, those persons labeled as mentally ill may relieve themselves of the worst consequences of that label by recognizing before their psychiatrists the truth value of the label, by reconstructing their past to explain how they came to deviate from normal patterns, and by gradually coming to give acceptable accounts for their behavior.
Beyond illegitimacy and unreasonableness are special types of situations in which accounts may not be ‘acceptable. One such type involves the incorrect invocation of “commitment” or “attachment”45 in account situations where one or the other, but only the correct one, is permitted. By commitment we refer to that role orientation in which one has through investitute become liable and responsible for certain, actions. By attachment we refer to the sense of vesting one's feelings and identity in a role. Certain statuses, especially those dealing with distasteful activities or acts that are condemned except when performed by licensed practitioners, are typically expected to invest their incumbents with only commitment and not with attachment. Hangmen who, when questioned about their occupation, profess to be emotionally attracted to killing, are not likely to have their account honored. Indeed, distasteful tasks are often imputed to have a clandestine but impermissible allure, and so those who regularly perform them are often on their guard to assert their commitment, but not their attachment, to the task.
Organizations systematically provide accounts for their members in a variety of situations. The rules of bureaucracy, for instance, make available accounts for actions taken toward clients—actions which, from the viewpoint of the client, are untoward. Again, these accounts “work” because of a set of background expectations. Thus when people say they must perform a particular action because it is a rule of the organization, the account is regarded as at least reasonable, since “everyone knows” that people follow rules. Of course, the gravity of the event may discredit such accounts, as the trials of Nazi war criminals dramatically illustrate.
Under certain situations behavior that would ordinarily require an account is [end p.228] normalized without interruption or any call for an account. Typically such situations are social conversations in which the values to be obtained by the total encounter supersede those which would otherwise require excuses or justifications. Two values that may override the requirement of accounts are sociability and information.
In the case of sociability the desire that the interactional circle be uninterrupted by any event that might break it calls for each interactant to weigh carefully whether or not the calling for an account might disrupt the entire engagement. When the gathering is a convivial one not dedicated to significant matters—that ‘is, matters that have a proactive life beyond the engagement itself—the participants may overlook errors, inept statements, lies, or discrepancies in the statements of others. Parties often call for such behavior but are vulnerable to disruption by one who violates the unwritten rule of not questioning another too closely. In unserious situations in which strangers are privileged to interact as a primary group without future rights of similar interaction—such as in bars—the interactants may construct elaborate and self-contradictory biographies without fear of being called to account.
In some engagements the interactants seek to obtain information from the speaker which is incidental to his main point but which might be withheld if any of the speaker's statements were called into account. Among the Japanese, for example, the significant item in a conversation may be circumscribed by a verbal wall of trivia and superfluous speech. To interrupt a speaker by calling for an account might halt the conversation altogether or detour the speaker away from disclosing the particularly valued pieces of information. Among adolescent boys in American society engaged in a “bull session” it is usually inappropriate to challenge a speaker describing his sexual exploits since, no matter how embellished and exaggerated the account might be, it permits the hearers to glean knowledge about sex—ordinarily withheld from them in the regular channels of education—with impunity. Calling for an account in the midst of such disclosures, especially when the account would require a discussion of the speaker's morality, might cut off the hearers from obtaining precisely that kind of information which is in no other way available to them.
So far we have discussed accounts in terms of their content, but it should be pointed out that accounts also differ in form or style. Indeed, as we will now suggest, the style of an account will have bearing on its honoring or dishonoring. [end p.229]... [p.230-232 cut]
Negotiating Identities and Accounts
As our discussion of identity switching emphasizes, accounts always occur between persons in roles—between husband and wife, doctor and patient, teacher and student, and so on. A normative structure governs the nature and types of communication between the interactants, including whether and in what manner accounts may be required and given, honored or discredited.
Accounts, as suggested, presuppose an identifiable speaker and audience. The particular identities of the interactants must often be established as part of the encounter in which the account is presented.57 In other words, people generate role identities for one another in social situations. In an account-giving situation, to cast alter in a particular role is to confer upon him the privilege of honoring a particular kind of account, the kind suitable to the role identity conferred and assumed for at least the period of the account. To assume an identity is to don the mantle appropriate to the account to be offered. Identity assumption and “alter-casting” are prerequisites to the presentation of accounts, since the identities thus established interactionally “set” the social stage on which the drama of the account is to be played out.
The identities of speaker and audience will be negotiated as part of the encounter. Each of the interactants has a stake in the negotiations since the outcomes of the engagement will often depend on these pre-established identities. In competitive or bargaining situations the interactants will each seek to [end p.233] maximize gains or minimize losses, and part of the strategy involved will be to assume and accept advantageous identities, refusing those roles that are disadvantageous to the situation. Every account is a manifestation of the underlying negotiation of identities.
The most elementary form of identification is that of human and fellow human negotiated by the immediate perceptions of strangers who engage in abrupt and involuntary engagements. Thus once two objects on a street collide with one another and mutually perceive one another to be humans, an apology in the form of an excuse, or mutually paired excuses, will suffice. Those persons not privileged with full or accurate perception—the blind, myopic, or blind-folded— are not in a position to ascertain immediately whether the object with which they have collided is eligible to call for an account and to deserve an apology. In overcompensating for their inability to negotiate immediately such elementary identities, the persons so handicapped may indiscriminately offer apologies to everyone and everything with which they collide—doormen and doors, street-walkers, and street signs. On the other hand, their identification errors ate forgiven as soon as their handicap is recognized.
Some objects are ambiguously defined with respect to their deserving of accounts. Animals are an example. House pets, especially dogs and cats, are sometimes imputed to possess human attributes and are thus eligible for apologies and excuses when they are trodden upon by their masters. But insects and large beasts—ants and elephants, for example—do not appear to be normally eligible for accounts even when they are trodden upon by unwary (Occidental) humans.
However, there are instances wherein the anthropomorphosis of the human self is more difficult to negotiate than that of a dog. Racial minorities in caste societies often insist to no avail on the priority of their identity as “human beings” over their identification as members of a racial group. Indeed the “Negro human being” role choice dilemma is but one instance of a particular form of strategy in the negotiation of identities. The strategy involves the competition between ego and alter ovçr particularistic versus universalistic role identities. In any encounter in which a disagreement is potential or has already occurred, or in any situation in which an account is to be offered, the particularistic or universalistic identity of the interactants might dictate the manner and outcome of the account situation. Each participant will strive for the advantageous identity. A Negro psychoanalyst with considerable experience in Europe and North Africa has shown how the form of address—either consultative or deprecatingly casual—and the tone used, are opening moves in the doctor's designation of his patient as European or Negro: “Twenty European patients, one after another, came in: ‘Please sit down . . . Why do you wish to consult me?” Then comes a Negro or an Arab. “Sit here, boy And, as the psychoanalyst points out, the identity imputed to the patient might be accepted or rejected. To reject the particularistic identity in favor of a universalistic one, the [end p.234] Negro patient might reply, “I am in no sense your boy, Monsieur” and the negotiations for identities begin again or get detoured in an argument.
In an account situation there is a further complication. Once identities have been established and an account offered, the individual has committed himself to an identity and thus seemingly assumed the assets and liabilities of that role for the duration of the encounter. If he accepts the identity as permanent and unchangeable, however, he may have limited his range of subsequent accounts. And if he wishes to shift accounts to one appropriate to another identity he may also need to account for the switch in identities. Thus, in the face of a pejorative particularistic identity, a Negro might wish to establish his claim to a positive universalistic one devoid of the pejorative contents of the imputed one. However, once this new universalistic identity has been established, the Negro might wish to shift back to the particularistic one, if there are positive qualities to be gained thereby, qualities utterly lost by an unqualified acceptance of the universalistic identity. But the switch might require an account itself.
Identity switching has retroactive dangers, since it casts doubt on the attachment the claimant had to his prior identity, and his attachment may have been a crucial element in the acceptability of his first account. On the other hand, the hearer of an account may have a vested interest in accepting the entire range of accounts and may thus accommodate or even facilitate the switch in identities. Thus the hearer may “rationalize” the prior commitment, or reinterpret its meaning so that ‘the speaker may carry off subsequent accounts. Another strategy available to a hearer is to engage in alter-casting for purposes of facilitating or frustrating an account. The fact that individuals have multiple identities makes them both capable of strategic identity change and vulnerable to involuntary identity imputations.
In ordinary life, accounts are usually “phased. “ One account generates the question which gives rise to another; the new account requires renegotiation of identities; the identities necessitate excuses or justifications, improvisation and alter-casting; another account is given; another question arises, and so on. The following interview between a Soviet social worker and his client, a young woman, nicely illustrates this phenomenon.
A girl of about 19 years of age enters the social worker's office and sits down sighing audibly. The interview begins on a note of mystification which ends abruptly when the girl establishes her identity—abandoned wife.
“What are you sighing so sadly for?” I asked. “Are you in trouble?” Lyuba raised her prim little head with a jerk, sighed pianissimo and smiled piteously.
“No . . . it's nothing much. I was in trouble, but it's all over now
“All over, and you are still sighing about it?” I questioned further. Lyuba gave a little shiver and looked at me. A flame of interest had leaped into her earnest brown eyes.
“Would you like me to tell you all about it?”
“It's a long story.” [end p.235]
“My husband has left me.”
The interview carries on in what must be regarded as an unsuccessful approach by the social worker. He establishes that Lyuba still loves her wayward husband, has lost faith in men, and is unwilling to take his advice to forget her first husband and remarry. The abandoned wife turns out to be an identity with which the worker has difficulty coping. He, therefore, alter-casts with telling effect in the following manner.
“Tell me, Lyuba, are your parents alive?”
“Yes, they are. Daddy and Mummy! They keep on telling me off for having got married.” “Quite right too.”
“No, it's not. What's right about it?”
“Of course, they're right. You're still a child and already married and divorced.”
“Well . . what about it! What's that got to do with them?”
“Aren't you living with them?”
“I have a room of my own. My husband left me and went to live with his . . . and the room is mine now. And I earn two hundred rubles. And I'm not a child! How can you call me a child?”
Note that little bits of information provide the cues for alter-casting, so that Lyuba's volunteering the fact of her parents' disapproval of her first marriage, provides the grounds for the social worker's recasting her in the child role. However this new identity is rejected by Lyuba by further evidentiary assertions:
she supports herself and maintains her own residence. The child role has been miscast. Even the social worker gives up his attempt at switching Lyuba out from her role as abandoned wife, He writes: “Lyuba looked at me in angry surprise and I saw that she was quite serious about this game she played in life.” Thus negotiations for identities-as in financial transactions—usually end with both parties coming to an agreeable settlement.
The sociologist has been slow to take as a serious subject of investigation what is perhaps the most distinctive feature of humans—talk. Here we are suggesting a concern with one type of talk: the study of what constitutes “acceptable utterances” for untoward action. The sociological study of communications has relegated linguistic utterances to linguists and has generally mapped out nonverbal behavior as its distinctive domain. We are suggesting that a greater effort is needed to formulate theory that will integrate both verbal and nonverbal behavior.
Perhaps the most immediate task for research in this area is to specify the background expectations that determine the range of alternative accounts deemed [end p.236] culturally appropriate to a variety of recurrent situations. We want to know how the actors take bits and pieces of words and appearances and put them together to produce a perceivedly normal (or abnormal) state of affairs. This kind of inquiry crucially involves a study of background expectations. On the basis of such investigations, the analyst should be able to provide a set of instructions on “how to give an account” that would be taken by other actors as “normal.” These instructions would specify how different categories of statuses affect the honoring of an account, and what categories of statuses can use what kinds of accounts.
Future research on accounts may fruitfully take as a unit of analysis the speech community. This unit is composed of human aggregates in frequent and regular interaction. By dint of their ‘association sharers of a distinct body of verbal signs are set off from other speech communities. By speech community we do not refer to language communities, distinguished by being composed of users of formally different languages. Nor do we refer simply'to dialect communities, composed of persons who employ a common spoken language which is a verbal variant of a more widely used written language.
Speech communities define for their members the appropriate lingual forms to be used among themselves. Such communities are located in the social structure Of any society. They mark off segments of society from one another, and also distinguish different kinds of activities. Thus, the everyday language of lowerclass teenage gangs differs sharply from that of the social workers who interview them, and the language by which a science teacher demonstrates to his students how to combine hydrogen and oxygen in order to produce water differs from the language employed by the same teacher to tell his inquisitive 6-year-old son how babies are created. The types of accounts appropriate to each speech community differ in form and in content. The usage of particular speech norms in giving an account has consequences for the speaker depending upon the relationship between the form used and the speech community into which it is introduced.
A single individual may belong to several speech communities at the same time, or in the course of a lifetime. Some linguistic devices (such as teenage argot) are appropriate only to certain age groups and are discarded as one passes into another age grouping; others, such as the linguistic forms used by lawyers in the presence of judges, are appropriate to certain status sets and are consecutively employed and discarded as the individual moves into and out of interactions with his various status partners. Some individuals are dwellers in but a single speech community; they move in circles in which all employ the same verbal forms. The aged and enfeebled members of class or ethnic ghettos are an obvious example. Others are constant movers through differing speech communities, adeptly employing language forms suitable to the time and place they occupy. Social workers who face teenage delinquents, fellow workers, lawyers, judges, their own wives, and children, all in one day, are an example. [end p.237]
In concluding we may note that since it is with respect to deviant behavior that we call for accounts, the study of deviance and the study of accounts are intrinsically related, and a clarification of accounts will constitute a clarification of deviant phenomena—to the extent that deviance is considered in an interactional framework.