Social disorder: a view from the Washington School of the Ethnography of Communication

Abstract We review 4 decades of scholarship on the relationship between social disorder and social interaction generated by the Washington school of the ethnography of communication. We identify 5 key insights from the review regarding the ontological status of social disorder, the multiple scales of disorder, the mutually constitutive relationship between disorder and interaction, the dialectical relationship between order and disorder, and social disorder’s historically and politically contingent character. Our review invites scholars working in the sociocultural theoretical tradition to approach social order and disorder as scalar phenomena, to view social order as subject to contestation, and to rethink the relationship between social interaction and disorder as the result of scarcity, excess, design, or lack of communicative competence.