ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interactional order, to analyze how interviewees produce and sustain themselves in a particular context, achieving an impression of stability and order, and communicating meaning. It analyzes the through interactions in the interviews themselves, between the interviewers and the respondents. The chapter delineates the interactional order and demonstrate its relevance for the study of decision making. It looks at some interviews in which the respondents use unorthodox interactional ploys to produce themselves, or seem unwilling to sustain interaction. Selves depend on each other for their successful production; but this interdependence allows the communication of meaning and the creation of order. The chapter looks at the moments in which this interactional order of exchanges of ritual respect were disrupted because the interviewees produced selves that did not do “face work” in quite this way.
