Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 038
Authority sets the terms of participation
Meetings succeed through situated rules of attention, turn-taking, face, and repair—not message content alone
Premise
A meeting can invite participation formally while making contribution interactionally costly. Erving Goffman’s interaction order reveals the social infrastructure produced whenever people are in one another’s immediate response presence. Participants monitor gaze, silence, timing, posture, turns, attention, and breaches; through these practices they continually make the encounter intelligible and workable.
For leaders, this redirects diagnosis from personality and content alone to situational design. Seating, speaking sequence, interruption tolerance, acknowledgment, and response timing distribute participation rights before anyone announces them. Hierarchy remains real, but executives can decide whether the immediate encounter allows relevant knowledge to enter or makes status the organizing signal.
What the model is: The Interaction Order in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainConversation & Relationships
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.
- KnowledgeThe Interaction Order