This book addresses the matter of how social audiences, both formal agents of social control (the NYPD and the Park Enforcement Control) and the ordinary, everyday park-goer, react when they encounter what they consider wrongdoing, or “deviance.” The focus is on the micro or face-to-face interactional level; the larger structural forces are held in abeyance and assumed to operate, but they are not analysed or accounted for here. Likewise, literary and philosophical speculations as well as considering political and ideological implications have been left to other analysts. What constitutes devi ... More

This book addresses the matter of how social audiences, both formal agents of social control (the NYPD and the Park Enforcement Control) and the ordinary, everyday park-goer, react when they encounter what they consider wrongdoing, or “deviance.” The focus is on the micro or face-to-face interactional level; the larger structural forces are held in abeyance and assumed to operate, but they are not analysed or accounted for here. Likewise, literary and philosophical speculations as well as considering political and ideological implications have been left to other analysts. What constitutes deviance in an unconventional public setting remains the central issue throughout the volume. Visitors to the park—one that is known for celebrating difference and diversity—observe behaviour or utterances by an actor or a speaker in their presence that, they feel goes too far in violating their sense of acceptable norms. What do they do? How do they sanction the offender? The analysis in this book presents the reader with a series of anecdotes—events or episodes observed or statements overheard by the researcher that audiences, judging by their reactions, consider untoward. The action-reaction-interaction dynamics constitutes the lodestone of this volume. Washington Square Park is a “text”; this book represents a sociological “reading” of that text.