ABSTRACT
The word itself harks back to the diplomatic encounters between heads of states during the post-Renaissance period of nascent nationalism; and the interpersonal conventions of the interview—its formality, equality, and transience—as then established, have been carried almost intact through all its subsequent cultural adventures. Whether motivated by impulses of fear or reform, the early formal interviews by sociologists and social workers often assumed that the new people should become like the old people. In 1948 one of us accompanied Georges Friedmann on a visit to the Hawthorne plant to talk to the counselors. The Hawthorne experience would seem to raise a more general question about nondirective interviewing as well as counseling. Rapport in the interview often means calling on group memberships shared with the respondent to obscure the lines of social cleavage which lead to the respondent in the first place.
