Table of Contents

1. Redirecting incivility research; 2. The fundamentals of the incivil encounter; 3. Everyday incivility and the everyday round; 4. Emotions and sequences; 5. Gender, age and class: divergent experiences?; 6. After the event: coping, avoiding and changing; 7. General attitudes towards the stranger: exploring fear and trust; 8. How to confront incivility; 9. Twenty questions and answers.

Promotional Information

This book analyses everyday encounters with rudeness and asks what can be done to improve civic life in a world of strangers.

About the Author

Philip Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Deputy Director of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, Connecticut. Timothy L. Phillips is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tasmania. Ryan D. King is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York, Albany.

Reviews

'How much of a menace are rude people in public places? For the first time, this book gives us the data to find out. The biggest problem is not when nice middle class people venture into bad neighbourhoods. Rudeness happens mainly in ordinary crowds where the foot traffic is heaviest, and it is middle class men pushing obliviously through that are the main culprits. Smith, Phillips and King explain what kinds of situations cause what kinds of rudeness and what victims do about it. The authors do for pedestrians what Jack Katz did for road rage in his famous 'Pissed Off in LA.' This book pushes in alongside Goffman's Relations in Public as a classic of interactional sociology.' Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory

'An innovative sociological study of an issue that today generates much anxious chatter but little sustained analysis - rudeness between strangers in public places. By treating incivility as a routine part of everyday life, rather than a policy problem to be fixed, the authors shed new light on this issue and offer some wise words about what can - and cannot - be done to produce civil social relations.' Ian Loader, University of Oxford