Tilly, Charles (2006). Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons…and Why.
Chapter 2: Conventions, pp. 32-60.
4 Major characteristics/aspects of Conventions:
1) The criterion for acceptability is not truth, but appropriateness to the given social situation. (p.
33).
2) In particular, how appropriate the Convention is to the relationship between giver and receiver
largely determines how acceptable it is when applied as a reason (p. 45)
3) Giving and acceptance of conventions as reasons has significant consequences for the parties
involved and for the relationship between them. Examples:
- Convention can define the relationship and justify practices that one party has toward
another (p. 48)
- They “mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders” (p. 31, 40)
- Proper negotiation of convention as reason is an indicator of social competence. This is
more obvious when used for “repair or concealment of publicly visible errors and
derelictions, but the observation applies more generally to the conduct of social interaction”
(35).
- When a convention is applied inappropriately, there can be a refusal to act on the part of
the receiving party (pp. 48-50). My NB: 1) Conventions as reasons reflect the relation as
perceived by the reason-giver. They are accepted or rejected according to the relation as
perceived by the reason-receiver. 2) The refusal to “play” can be done vindictively or in a
passive/aggressive exercise of power. (This was often the case in the hospital workers, who
may have little power otherwise over patients or doctors.)
4) Conventions as reasons justify practices that would not be compatible with other reasons
and/or definitions of the relationship. (pp. 41-45)
(3) And (4), above, lead to the triangle of interrelations that Tilly makes between “Reasons,”
“Relationships” and “Practices.” “Reasons, relationship, and practices align” (48).
Other characteristics:
Giving Conventions as reasons “enacts a kind of self-representation but it always does so in relation to
others” (37). They sometimes constitute a bid to be seen as “normal”; and are often given to avoid
embarrassment. Something as little as calling a person “Sir” or “Ma’am” can change the tenor of a
reason. They need not be verbal (41) (e.g., construction site boss gesturing commands with a
cellphone’s antenna, like a modern-day riding crop; girl in the dorm, going through motions of looking
for a piece of mail), and can sometimes be a bid for acceptance as “normal people.” (e.g., patients in
mental hospital explaining/justifying their being there, p. 37.)
Downsides to Conventions as Reasons. War and Universities examples (pp. XX):
People sometimes make conventional assumptions about a situation, use them to justify certain
practices, and never go back to check whether those practices actually had the intended effect/results.
They don’t check the empirical evidence that resulted from relying on those assumptions. Convention
becomes institutionalized and sometimes applied inappropriately. [Me: They don’t check whether it
was appropriate to treat the given case as a conventional one, possibly perpetuating ineffective
reactions based in tradition and perhaps in expectations that no longer reflect current reality.]
I say that both Social Aspects and General Observations can be summarized for the most part by two
points:
1) Conventions as reasons aim for an easy assimilation of a situation by the Receiver(s). It makes a
situation “easy to swallow”; “Ca passe mieux!”
2) So, Conventions as reasons situate the actors and their behavior in socially accepted
hierarchy/roles, it puts them in a conventionally accepted framework that allows the inattentive
Receiver to overlook certain details and swallow the situation as a whole. (Think, “Clothes make
the man.”) Allows people to accept the new situation without too much disturbance to
themselves, without their having to think or to really consider the situation. (cf Hume’s ease of
mind to go from one idea to another)
Personal NB: I don’t like social hierarchy or convention and tend to be oblivious to both. I don’t play this
game, which sometimes results in social ineffectiveness.
Questions:
- p. 48 I don’t understand significance of Emergency Room stories.
- p. 51 Isn’t this an example of Codes?
- p. XX I don’t like the idea of the abuse of power that is manifest in his story about paying fellow sailors,
and the discretion he wielded to apply or to ignore certain complicated regulations.
Quotes
pp. 14-15: “…people do not give themselves and others reason because of some universal craving for
truth or coherence…people are clearly negotiating their social lives.”
p. 35: “[T]he ability to give appropriate reasons stands as a crucial sign of social competence.
Conversely, the inability to give appropriate reasons ordinarily causes acute embarrassment.”
p. 45: “ ‘Sorry, officer, I didn’t see the sign’ may satisfy the traffic cop, but not, ironically, your spouse.”
p. 45-46: “Appropriate reasons vary dramatically with the equality, inequality, and intimacy or distance
of the relationship. A superior speaking to an inferior need give no more than perfunctory
reasons for actions that damage or threaten the inferior; even parents speaking to their
rebellious children sometimes resort to ‘Because I say so!’ An inferior speaking to a superior
must often offer defensible reasons coupled with apologies – however truthful and heartfelt –
for failures and misdeeds; ‘Sorry, Boss, I just wasn’t thinking’ illustrates this mode. Equals
generally owe each other reasons having at least the appearance of mutual consideration, in the
vein of ‘Excuse me, I didn’t see you waiting for me.’ “
p. 51: “Often invisibly, but sometimes visibly and angrily, parties to a relationship are negotiating both
its definition and the practices that belong to it as they interact. At the extreme, in defense of a
valued practice o privilege, one of the parties denies a relationship that would otherwise apply:
‘sorry, friend, but business is business,’ ‘rules are rules,’ ‘I’m bound by higher loyalties,’ and so
on. In these cases one party is justifying practices that disappoint or damage the other party.”
p. 56: With the “contraception” example, “couples adjusted reasons [for using a particular type of
contraception] and practices as their relationships evolved.” Their reasons “constituted
justifications more than they involved cause-effect explanations.”
p. 59: “Institutional arrangements build in assumptions about important factors – and it’s really difficult
to get data on the effect of those arrangements.”