Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations

Abstract

All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social relations are seen as being anchored in three orders—epistemic order, deontic order, and emotional order—each of which, we argue, also pertains to action recognition. This framework allows us to account for common ambiguities in action recognition and to describe relationship negotiations involving a complex interface between knowledge, power, and emotion. (Action recognition, social relations, conversation analysis, status, stance, epistemic rights, deontic rights, emotion)*