Upon reading Aaron Cicourel’s The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice, fifty years later

Fifty years after its publication, The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice merits being read for its documentary value and as a milestone in the history of sociology and in the work of its author, and in particular his epistemological history. If, in Juvenile Justice, a gamble was being taken (under an ethnomethodological banner) to consider the whole social system through a microanalytic lens, by the end Aaron Cicourel was taking a more micro approach to better understand and hold the macro through the micro, or see how micro processes are related to macro structures. Still today, we can see the toing and froing of Cicourel between the two, and try to understand the relevance of more microanalytical approaches. In order to loosen the “vice” of the micro/macro schema, it is argued that it would be better to frame interactional order as a boundary condition of social systems and hence obtain a deeper understanding of the sui generis nature of social life.