ABSTRACT
As mentioned in the introduction, this study adopted an EM/CA approach to analyze and describe the organization of naturally occurring everyday interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children with a view to raising some empirically grounded questions and reflections on the study of socialization in general, and investigations of young children’s everyday interactions with their parents in particular. Before offering my own analysis of parent–child interactions, I will in this chapter attempt to contextualize EM/CA’s proposal to investigate socialization via detailed examination of adult–child or child–child interactions in the very broad field of sociological and psychological studies of socialization. A look at the Anglophone context during the period from the 1950s to the early 1970s makes it clear that EM/CA’s early investigations of children’s interactions emerged in a wider movement of change occurring in the social and human sciences. This movement was characterized by the appearance of new sociological approaches that sought to review the by-then predominant paradigms of structural functionalism (Parsons 1951, 1960, 1966) and reproduction theory (Baudelot and Establet 1973; Bourdieu 1966; Bourdieu and Passeron 1964, 1970; Bourdieu, Passeron, and Saint-Martin 1965; Coleman 1966). In the broadest sense, and schematically put, this movement implied that:
… terms to do with structure, reproduction, statistics, combinatorial analysis, invariance, universality, and binary logic fade away, in favor of notions of organizational chaos, fractality, events, process, meaning, complexity, auto-organization, construction, strategy, convention, autonomy, actioning … (Dosse 1995: 13, translated by Duncan Brown)
