On the deep utility of parties as sites of transformation

Alice Goffman, Go to More Parties? Social Occasions as Home to Unexpected Turning Points in Life Trajectories, Social Psychology Quarterly, First Published December 19, 2018: https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272518812010.

Abstract: Reviving classical attention to gathering times as sites of transformation and building on more recent microsociological work, this paper uses qualitative data to show how social occasions open up unexpected bursts of change in the lives of those attending. They do this by pulling people into a special realm apart from normal life, generating collective effervescence and emotional energy, bringing usually disparate people together, forcing public rankings, and requiring complex choreography, all of which combine to make occasions sites of inspiration and connection as well as sites of offense and violation. Rather than a time out from “real” life, social occasions hold an outsized potential to unexpectedly shift the course that real life takes. Implications for microsociology, social inequality, and the life course are considered.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

Addendum, early morning Monday 12.24.18: 

My good friend David Porush tells me that business is done over dinner. The details may be worked out and papers signed in an office, but the commitments are made during a social occasion, in a place apart, a party if you will. Perhaps on the golf course as well, at least for a certain generation or two and in certain businesses.