The Fragile Achievement That Holds Us Together

By Assoc. Prof. Melisa Stevanovic

We talk about “interaction” as if it were self-evident — something everyone needs more of, something that can be improved, managed, or taught. In this blog, Melisa Stevanovic explores what lies beneath that comforting word: the fragile, complex process through which people build understanding and hold the social world together.

We often speak of “interaction” as though we know exactly what it is. In everyday talk, the word carries a reassuringly positive tone: we are told that workplaces, schools, and families need more interaction; that good leaders and teachers are those with strong interaction skills; that relationships thrive on interaction and wither without it. The concept seems self-evident—the moral opposite of isolation, disengagement, or indifference. At the same time, “interaction” has become something to be optimized: we must strive for good interaction, effective communication, or meaningful connection. Yet behind this normative glow lies a surprisingly simple question that often goes unasked: what, precisely, is interaction?

When we look closely, it turns out that we know far less about interaction than we assume. Much of what passes as “communication” in policy documents, training manuals, or popular psychology rests on metaphor rather than observation. We imagine interaction as a kind of smooth exchange of ideas, an invisible channel between minds, or a soft skill that can be mastered through practice. But decades of micro-analytic research show a far more intricate picture. What people actually do when they talk, gesture, or remain silent is governed by complex patterns—rules of timing, sequencing, and embodied coordination that largely operate below the threshold of awareness. These patterns are not arbitrary; they are what make understanding possible in the first place.

Through detailed study of naturally occurring interactions—in homes, hospitals, classrooms, therapy rooms, online meetings—researchers in conversation analysis have uncovered the subtle machinery of social life. They have shown how meaning is built not just through words but through resources like touch, gaze, gestures, facial expressions, moving bodies, and intonation; how every pause and overlap is part of a shared choreography that allows people to interpret each other’s behaviors as social actions. They have revealed that what looks like random confusion, delay, or hesitation can perform vital functions: it can protect face, express care, or invite collaboration. As this body of research has made evident, interaction is not a simple exchange of messages but a continuous process of coordination — a dance that people perform together, adjusting moment by moment to each other’s movements.

Understanding this hidden order has profound implications. First, it helps us grasp how cooperation and mutual understanding emerge in real time. We tend to think of understanding as a private mental act, but in practice it is a joint achievement—produced and displayed through patterns of initiating and responsive actions. Recognizing this helps to explain also why it sometimes fails—even among people with the best skills and intentions. Interaction is never fully controllable: meanings shift, opportunities to respond close or open unexpectedly, and actions can have consequences no one planned. Awareness of these integral features of interaction shifts attention from blaming individuals for communicative “failures” to appreciating how meanings emerge—not by perfect understanding, but by shared willingness to keep repairing it.

A second implication concerns how we understand competence. Interaction is often imagined as an individual capacity—some people are “good communicators,” others less so. But close analysis reveals that competence rarely belongs to one person alone. It emerges between participants, who adjust continuously to one another’s words, gestures, and silences. What seems like imbalance—one person leading, another struggling to follow—is often evidence of active collaboration, where each compensates for the other’s gaps and sustains the flow of meaning together. Such a shift away from the impulse to diagnose, train, or measure communicative ability as an individual attribute has ethical and practical consequences: it invites us to see competence as something that lives in social relations themselves.

A third and increasingly urgent reason to study interaction lies in its epistemic dimension—in how knowledge itself is socially produced. In every exchange, participants orient to what can be treated as fact, what invites doubt, and what requires justification. Such orientations are rarely conscious, yet they determine whose accounts are accepted and whose are dismissed. Understanding this process is crucial in a time when truth is contested across media, institutions, and everyday talk alike. It reveals that knowledge does not simply flow from experts to audiences, but emerges through ongoing acts of alignment, challenge, and explanation between people. What we take to be “true” is sustained by the subtle moral and affective work of treating some statements as solid and others as questionable. Seeing knowledge as a social and interactional achievement allows us to grasp how epistemic authority operates—not only in classrooms and clinics, but in the wider circulation of public discourse—and to recognize that the stability of our shared reality depends on the minute, everyday labour of maintaining it together.

Finally, looking closely at the hidden order of interaction also opens a space for more critical reflection. The everyday ideology of “good communication” often hides the power dynamics that shape who gets to define what counts as “good.” When interaction is framed purely in normative or managerial terms—as something to be trained, measured, or corrected—it can serve institutional interests more than human ones. Calls for more “open dialogue” or “effective communication” may sound benign, but they impose cultural models of interaction that may marginalize those whose ways of speaking (or not speaking) do not fit the ideal. However, a deeper, empirically grounded understanding of interaction can expose the limits of such ideologies. It also invites humility: if even the simplest exchange of greetings rests on layers of tacit coordination, then “better communication” cannot be achieved by slogans or training alone. What is at stake is something far more fundamental: the fragile, continuous process through which we create and sustain the social world around us. In the end, it is this ever-delicate sense of shared understanding that holds us together and makes collective life possible at all.

This article was written by Melisa Stevanovic, Associate Professor in Social Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Finland

Research Handbook on Social Interaction is available to read as a Hardback and eBook. Learn more

Read now at ElgarOnline here.