From Small Talk to Microaggression

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction. In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as "scaled." Focusing on US-based sciences of interaction from 1930 to 1980, Lempert meticulously traces efforts to study conversation microscopically and shows how scale-making has defined pioneering work in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, "micropolitics," and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences and how new tools and technologies were developed to get to the heart of social life at its most granular. Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them--and with each other--across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect our treatment of language and communication today.