When Things Get Odd: Exploring the Interactional Choreography of Taken-for-Grantedness

Institutions are often taken for granted, serving as backgrounded typifications that guide our interactions. Instead of considering this taken-for-grantedness as a natural, self-sustaining feature of institutions, I argue here that it is a fundamental, precarious, and ongoing accomplishment. Drawing on ethnomethodology, I theoretically elaborate the intricate interactional choreography through which taken-for-grantedness is achieved—as institutional typifications are skillfully drawn into, and enacted in, social interactions—and highlight how this choreography can itself generate oddities, or breaks in the typified expectations between interactants. These oddities, if not resolved by interactants’ corrective sensemaking, generate substantive breaches in taken-for-grantedness, potentially with significant downstream consequences for institutional maintenance and change. I then expand upon this baseline interactional model by suggesting that local choreographies vary in their characteristics, in ways that affect the incidence of oddities and breaches across settings. I theorize four such characteristics: choreographical fluidity, ordinary accountability, directorial sensegiving, and material scene-setting. I then close by discussing implications for institutional theory and future research.