Situational Orders: Interaction Patterns and the Standards for Evaluating Public Discourse

How do civic groups judge what issues are appropriate for public discourse? And how do they know what kinds of arguments to use where? Cultural sociologists identify varying “orders of worth,” that is, historically defined systems of typification and evaluation people draw on to evaluate public arguments. Yet it remains unclear how these take form in ongoing group practices. This article theorizes how groups’ ongoing interaction patterns, or “style,” typify social scenes to steer members toward distinct orders of worth in varying situations. As I argue, different typifications of public and private scenes condition the type of arguments members deem appropriate for public discourse, with meaningful implications for their politics. Combining style and orders of worth allows us to ask how ostensibly similar groups may publicly define different political goals and value varying forms of civic engagement. I illustrate this theoretical framework with an ethnographic study of two culturally distinct groups of libertarians in the United States.