Rivalry as a social relationship: conceptualizing the micro-foundations of competition

ABSTRACT

Recent sociological conceptualizations of competition emphasize its discursive or institutional aspects, such as rankings. Although macro- and meso-sociological takes on competition are more or less well established, micro-sociological approaches are less so. What does it mean to be in competition from the perspective of everyday social relationships and interactions? A possible answer is provided by the concept of rivalry. In this paper, I examine the evolution of the concept of rivalry and its development in the sociological tradition in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially in the work of Georg Simmel, Leopold von Wiese, Karl Mannheim, but also, later, Erving Goffman. I argue that a micro-sociological focus on rivalrous social relationships and interactions is able to address at least some of the issues concerning a micro-sociology of competition. Grounded in an examination of this tradition, I discuss how rivalry relates to sociological notions such as social knowledge, action, worth, and evaluation. I distinguish two intersecting logics of competition, namely, the logic of action and the logic of observation. I argue that a typology of rivalries cutting across various domains of social life can be worked out according to this intersection. A micro-sociology of rivalries can make a genuine contribution to the sociological investigation of competition.

KEYWORDS:

• social relationships
• rivalry
• competition
• micro-sociology
• interactions
• social knowledge
• action

Introduction

The notion of competition, liberally used in the media, policy discourses and economic recipes (to name but a few areas), is employed to designate an extensive number of arrangements across various domains of activity (e.g. within arts, sports, culture and science), as well as a set of discourses in the public sphere, intrinsic to globalization processes (e.g. Heintz and Werron 2011). It is often presented as a (necessary) blueprint of social organization, for instance, in calls for having more competition in education, public services and the like. The ‘competition state’ (Fougner 2006, 167; Genschel and Seelkopf 2017, 236) is seen as a historical stage, as well as the political enactment of competition as a principle of societal organization.

This variety and ubiquity pose the sociological challenge of elaborating a conceptual scaffolding distinct both from the tropes of policy and media discourses and from economics (e.g. Rosa 2006; Werron 2014, 2015; Jessop 2015). More recently, sociologists have debated this scaffolding as having a relational component, in that they see competition as ‘the construction of a relationship among actors that centers on something scarce and desired’ (Arora-Jonsson, Brunsson, and Hasse 2020, 2), as ‘the relation between two or more actors aiming for an end that cannot be shared between them’ (Aspers 2011, 7), or as a form of actor coordination (Karpik 2011, 71).

A fuller understanding of competitions then means analyzing this relational component on an interpersonal level as well by paying attention to rivalries. I am saying this not least because classical economic thought has associated competition with rivalries as interpersonal relationships: the right price is found through rivalries between sellers and buyers in the marketplace, rivalries for which haggling provides an interactional template (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991, 67; Schumpeter 1954, 98; Dennis 1975, 93). Yet, the complexity and variety of rivalries in social life do not appear as reducible to short-lived struggles or haggling in the marketplace. How do we conceptualize rivalries as a social relationship, and how does this help us understand competition itself?

Hence, it is worth investigating rivalry, not only because it is pointed at by classical political economy but also because it seems unwarranted to assume short-lived marketplace struggles as a general template for a broad range of varied rivalries. However, there is a perhaps more important rationale: if we are to examine processes of comparison and valuation, we need to take into account the social interactions that generate knowledge enabling (collective) decisions about what is valuable in specific situations. Rivalries as interpersonal relationships within which social attributes are experienced and tested appear as significant in this respect.

In asking how we shall conceptualize rivalries, we will have to address several aspects: first, what kind of issues do rivalries address? Second, are the latter a necessary, or only a contingent way of addressing these issues? Third, how can we identify a broader sociological typology of rivalries? If the boundaries between economic and non-economic relationships are fragile (e.g. Zelizer 2011, 203, 375), attempts to circumscribe these relationships exclusively to economic domains would be self-undermining.

In this paper, I explore how such a micro-sociological approach can be elaborated, building upon intellectual traditions and sociological efforts that have acknowledged and grappled with strategic and competitive dimensions of social interactions and relationships.

I start by shortly presenting the proto-concept (Swedberg 2014, 65) of rivalry as it emerges in the aesthetic theory of the Renaissance and is transformed within the political-economic discourse from the late sixteenth century on (Prochno 2006, 8; Dennis 1975, 44). Proto-concepts highlight specific issues that will be addressed later by sociological concepts and, as such, cannot be entirely left outside the theoretical investigation. Tracing the various transformations in the career of this notion is relevant because: (a) it highlights conceptual evolutions and transfers across domains of reflection. (b) It allows us to situate and distinguish sociological traditions vis-à-vis other domains of reflection. (c) It shows that rivalry as a topic of inquiry does not originate in and is not the sole domain of economic thinking. (d) It shows a preoccupation with taking competitive interpersonal relationships into account. (e) It prepares thus the ground for a more systematic micro-sociological inquiry.

My goal, though, is not a reconstruction of the intellectual history of the proto-concept of rivalry. My goal is to highlight first how the transformations it goes through within classical political economy sever its original association with social relationships and then to analyze how a genuinely sociological notion of rivalry restores the association on a conceptual level, making concrete rivalries distinctly analyzable as (dyadic or triadic) relationships. This, among others, is justified by the sustained attention rivalry as a competitive relationship gets from sociology in the early and mid-twentieth century,¹ pointing to efforts toward developing comprehensive investigations, overcoming the limitations of the proto-concept.

In the next step, I focus on interpersonal rivalries and on the interaction formats which support them. I argue that, in the sociological tradition of Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Leopold von Wiese, and later Erving Goffman, rivalry is seen as different from struggle, conflict, controversy, feud, or enmity. It is conceived as a relational category in its own right, and as being related to (though not coextensive with) the social institution of the contest. In a third step, I show how rivalry as a relational category is supported by particular types of social interactions. In a fourth step, I examine the ways in which rivalry can be connected with sociological concepts such as audiences, social knowledge, worth, or evaluation.

Rivalry in the aesthetic debates of the Renaissance

In the Renaissance, two notions, emulatio (rivalry) and paragone (contest), come to define what it means to compete.² They emerge in close relationship to the status of art making (e.g. drawing, painting, sculpting) as a liberal activity (and not yet a profession), but also to issues concerning the status of art in society and relationships among artists.

Renaissance artists were not tied to the rules and constraints of guilds. The latter guaranteed equal incomes to their members, restricted membership and activities, and excluded individual styles (Prochno 2006, 266, 269, 278). Painting and sculpture work was not parceled out to artists by guilds. Artists did not price their works according to the number of hours spent working on them, which was the general rule for guilds (Alpers 1988, 89, 107). They were dependent on patrons, but also had to advertise their craft in order to get commissions.

The practice of emulating, or copying the masters of the Antiquity, intrinsic to artistic education (Alpers 1988, 119; Prochno 2006, 6), required justifying imitations of ancient masters as progress from the originals (Gombrich 1966, 62). The challenges of comparing and qualifying (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Espeland and Sauder 2007; Espeland 2013, 327) Renaissance art as progress, and of justifying the status of art in society on grounds other than religious representation led to the introduction of two interrelated notions: the virtues of artworks, and the virtue of the artists.

The former was to be ensured by paragone (contest). This distilled and justified the practice of placing (notarized) wagers against other artists, of the kind, ‘I, painter X, bet you, painter Y, that I can do a better St. Joseph than you.’ Notarized wagers (sponsored by rich patrons and adjudicated by a jury or by the public) made it possible for artists to get a reputation beyond the confines of their cities (Ten-Doesschate Chu, Harper, and Avery 1996; Holman 2005, 521). Artists could follow individual strategies in trying to win, for instance, by choosing to depict a subject in ways that emphasized their artistic and technical strengths (e.g. Holman 2005, 539–540).

The legitimation of wagers occurred in ethical terms. Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini justified them as substituting a bad form of envy with an ‘honest’ one. Paragone presented artists with the opportunity of channeling their ambitions into public displays of skills, and thus to attain fame by honorable means (Holman 2005, 543). In the seventeenth century, artistic contests became institutionalized and given a formal organization. The creation of the French Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture led to the first formal contests for young artists from 1667, with rules establishing entry conditions, the nature of works to be submitted, genres with their own aesthetic criteria (e.g. landscape, portrait, historical scene), and the jury (Ten-Doesschate Chu, Harper, and Avery 1996; Prochno 2006, 165, 171).

Public contests were presented as arrangements for control (of the artists), for establishing the aesthetic value of artworks, and for making visible artistic rivalries to audiences (Holman 2005, 521, 545). Giorgio Vasari introduced a distinction between virtuous and damaging rivalry (Clifton 1996, 27–8). Virtuous rivalry contributed to artistic progress and was manifested by the declared ambition of an artist to surpass the rivals’ skill (Clifton 1996, 31). Damaging rivalry, by contrast, was manifest in the artists’ scheming against and belittling each other in private. Paragone promoted good rivalry, albeit the relationship between (two) artists was not confined to the limits of a public contest. By contributing to artistic progress, good personal rivalry emulated a greater one, namely that between the visual arts and literature (Watts 1996). As painting strived to be ‘visible talk’, the practice found itself in a rivalry relationship with literature. Rivalry as ‘good ambition’ was present not only at individual level, but also at the collective one.

Being tied to progress, rivalries are organized hierarchically, with a figure at the top, who rivals seek to emulate. Advancement in the hierarchy is a matter of progress. The (artistic) figure at the top is not supposed to engage in rivalries. This hierarchy is, at least in principle, respected in the Renaissance, when Michelangelo, seen as the topmost artist of the time, does not directly engage in any wager, but sends instead his pupils as proxies (Holman 2005, 514, 548).³

Relevant in the present context is that social relationships (rivalries) entwined with institutions (contests) address particular issues specific to a domain of activity that will become professionalized first in the seventeenth century (Alpers 1988, 89). They are meant to address specific knowledge problems within the domain and to confer status. Rivalries contribute to the progress of an entire domain of activity and take place at both at collective and individual level, while contests are arrangements for carrying out and displaying rivalries. The latter have temporal dimensions that go beyond the duration of a contest.

The re-conceptualization of rivalries as economic struggles

The notion of emulatio makes its way into economic thinking in the late sixteenth century by way of political treatises arguing that states produce great soldiers and merchants in the same way in which art produces great artists (Dennis 1975, 23–4; Schumpeter 1954, 154fn11, 164, 339–40). Mercantilist authors expand this to the idea that states engage in rivalries too, and the interests of merchants are coextensive with those of the state. Thus, rivalry is transferred from the level of social relationships, projected onto, and replicated into political and economic realms at the level of collective entities (corporations) and of governing bodies. It is stripped of ethical aspects and reworked as an abstract, hostile relationship between states, concerned with control over specific economic activities, such as trade with the colonies (Dennis 1975, 30–2). It is renamed competition. Later in the nineteenth century, the conceptualization of an abstract, hostility-based, accumulation-oriented struggle is projected back onto the level of individual relationships and represented as a general organizational principle for all society.

This does not mean that the issues addressed by the Renaissance notion of rivalry disappear. The transposition of the term first onto mercantilistic struggles and later its association with a view of generalized struggle anchored in biology ignores the continued relevance of conceptualizing comparisons in both cognitive and ethical terms.

The object of emulation morphs from aesthetic representation to the acquisition of economic goods, associated with power and status (Dennis 1975, 32). The new understanding – which represents a crucial shift – is that competition implies both imitation and (possibly hostile) striving for acquiring more goods, with the ultimate goal of consolidating status and the power of the state in international relations (i.e. vis-a-vis other, comparable states). This combination (emulation and struggle) projects (and distorts) the conceptualization of social relationships at the individual level onto states and firms. It is used now to explain and legitimate the actions of political and economic institutions, as well as those of individual sellers and buyers in the marketplace (Schumpeter 1954, 545).

Imitation combined with the relentless striving to surpass others in the accumulation of goods (Schumpeter 1954, 892; Boltanski and Thévenot 1991, 244) is perceived as an abstract organizational principle,⁴ later used as a ‘crutch,’ a purely heuristic assumption in the analysis of price equilibrium (Stigler 1957; Vickers 1995, 3; Dennis 1975, 193; Winter 1987, 108; Hicks 1934, 339). This principle is seen by some as the outcome of evolutionary forces,⁵ dislodging custom from its dominant position in economic life (Mill 1929, 243–5). Others see this principle as being an effect of the private property over the means of production and the accumulation of such means (Morgan 1993, 570, 575; Marx and Engels 1970, 91–2), combined (or not) with the fallacy of treating economic agents as freely contracting individuals, unjustly disregarding the social bonds among them (Knight 1923, 590–2). In either case, a struggle for existence⁶ at the expense of others ensues (Morgan 1993, 579–80), with fights over the allocation of resources, both at the individual and collective level. Such fights, in their turn, need to be kept in check, chiefly by the state designing mechanisms of control and intervention (Morgan 1993, 582, 585). Within the capitalist class, emulation aims only at outdoing one’s peers in the excessive accumulation of goods and status symbols (Veblen 1899, 33; 2003, 176).

The fact that under a system of private property and individual contracts emulation is seen by institutionalist thinkers as having chiefly negative effects (and is mainly confined to the capitalist class) does not mean though that, in the opinion of others, it cannot be harnessed in a productive fashion. The distinction between capitalist and socialist competition, discussed by Lenin (1964, 404, 409–10, 413) is mainly that under a system of collective ownership, emulation becomes a collective positive endeavor. The tendency to imitate and outdo one’s peers in a domain of activity is separated from the ownership of the means of production and seen (by Lenin) as a positive behavioral feature when the means of production are collectively owned. The coupling between competition and the associated institutions is sometimes conceptualized as tight, and sometimes as loose (as Lenin’s argument implies).

At this point, we can look back and reconsider how the proto-concept of a specific social relationship, emerging in the Renaissance, has been transferred and morphed into an abstract principle of social organization, with a manifold of implications, according to how social institutions are positioned around it. This transformation does not solve the problem of conceptualizing comparisons in cognitive and ethical terms and leaves out of sight micro issues of interactions and relationships, together with knowledge components. Concomitantly, it provides the opportunity for a micro-sociological reconsideration of rivalries with regard to the issues they address. This reconsideration starts with the analysis of rivalries as a sui generis interpersonal relationship, distinct from struggles.

The social relationship of rivalry

While the object of a struggle⁷ can be the acquisition of, or control over material goods (or money), the object of rivalry is a different one. Rivalries have an intrinsically relational dimension; by definition, rivals will have to relate to each other, act and react to each other’s actions in a sustained way over a longer period of time. This endows rivalries with an internal dynamic that can include, but is not limited to, moments of struggle and antagonism (Von Wiese 1929, 21, 29). Parties in a rivalry can attempt to deceive, manipulate, or backstab (Von Wiese 1929, 31). However, deceit and manipulation are neither the dominant nor the exclusive interaction format of rivalries. Writing forty years after von Wiese, Erving Goffman (1969, 43, 113, 132, 138, 140) insisted that strategic interactions – to which one would ascribe deceit and manipulation as game moves – are distinct from and not coextensive with social relationships. Quite the contrary: strategic interactions require a trust-based, fundamental relational format as a condition of their possibility within particular contexts and with a limited duration. Consequently, while rivalries might include sequences of strategic interactions, the latter are neither dominant nor exclusive.

Rivalries can be fueled, at least in part, by status issues, but are not identical with feuds. Nor are they reducible to violent outbursts meant to solve status uncertainties in the absence of formal mechanisms for addressing such issues. As Roger Gould (2003, 179) has noticed, most status contests end with one contestant deferring to the other. However, temporary deference neither implies, nor automatically produces robust deference. When the status of a person or organization is ambiguous, it can be challenged by peers time and again (White 2008, 37, 228; 2003). In this perspective, status challenges can be intrinsic to rivalries, without the latter being reducible to the former. Status is maintained within networks of social relationships, and maintenance work implies keeping up relationships, deploying adequate narratives, and making use of appropriate signals. Practical challenges to one’s status (which can unfold along one or more of these lines) require responses within rivalries.⁸

Overall, rivalries have an open, internal dynamic, one that is not predetermined by any law-like biological or cultural principle, or by a given interaction format. Interpersonal rivalries are guided by the motto of ‘we can what you can – only better.’ With that, rivalry relationships have a cognitive dimension. Before being able to say, ‘only better,’ any rivals will have to display that they can do what their counterpart can. This implies skills and knowledge of the said counterpart, and awareness of one’s own knowledge as intrinsic to any rivalry relationship: the knowledge produced in rivalries is regarded by Simmel (1955, 59) as benefitting both sides. As this knowledge becomes apparent only in the relational dynamics between rivals, rivalries have an experimental character (Von Wiese 1929, 34). They are experimental not only in that such a motto can be confirmed or not but also in that they produce social knowledge. Rivalries can take different turns in their internal dynamics: they can morph into struggles, or they can include moments of partnership or of conflict. They differ in this respect from antagonisms, where the ties are pre-defined, or from controversies, which unfold primarily in a dialogic manner and imply an opposition of viewpoints.

A rivalry relationship can be initiated as an imaginary one or can be imagined by audiences. An example is provided by fans of soccer players (musicians and film stars as well), who imagine their idol as being in a rivalry relationship with the idol of other fans (Bairner and Shirlow 2001) and use this to enter into a real rivalry with other fan groups. Rivals can imitate each other, adopt and adapt each other’s ideas, or even (occasionally) collaborate. Karl Mannheim (1929, 75) emphasizes in his analysis of intellectual competitions that, in this respect, economic competitions replicate general aspects of social rivalries. Similar to Leopold von Wiese (and, as I shall argue, to Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman), Mannheim sees rivalry as a particular format of social relationships distinct from struggles or from conflicts.

The experimental character of rivalries comes from their guiding motto (which requires proof), from their open-ended and under-determined dynamics, as well as from the requirements they place upon parties (to do what they can). As proof is intrinsic to a rivalry, audiences can intervene in it. In some situations at least, rivalries cannot be kept entirely secret, in the way a romantic affair can. They can be an open secret, something everybody knows, but does not talk about. Yet, rivals can strive to obtain the favors of an audience, which distinguishes them from a secret affair, for instance.

Rivalries can be a dyadic relationship, but they can also be open to the (active) participation of audiences, even if the latter are not always present or intervening in the relationship. The question becomes, thus, what are the consequences of audience interventions in dyadic rivalries? How does the rivalry dynamic change with the shift from a dyadic to a triadic relationship? Conversely, how do rivalries evolve if they remain dyadic? Instead of assuming audiences as a necessary presence in rivalries, we can ask the question of audience interventions and their consequences.

The audience can be a public of one (in a romantic rivalry, for instance) or a larger public that engages with the rivals along particular dimensions (e.g. in a mercantile rivalry). Rivalry, then, can be seen as a double relationship: on the one hand, a relationship between competitors (dyadic rivalry), and on the other hand, the relationship of a particular audience with the rivals (triadic rivalry). While the dimensions along which wooing takes place can differ (romantic wooing, for instance, is different from how two rival scientists woo their audiences), attracting the audience on one’s side is intrinsic to rivalries. Audiences, however, can take an active role and not only dispense favors to rivals, or evaluate them but also encourage and support relationships between rivals. Sebastian Smee’s analysis of the rivalry between Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning highlights the role of audiences in framing this artistic rivalry (2016, 280). In this respect, the audience of a rivalry relationship is similar to the rivals and not restricted to a passive role, as observer or evaluator (Simmel 1908, 149, 1955, 62–3). Similarly, Goffman (1969, 74) notices that strategic interactions are often triadic, and not dyadic.

We can see then rivalries as relational arrangements through which participants experience, test, and evaluate social attributes in particular situations. Such arrangements can be dyadic or triadic. In the latter case, the audience participates in constituting rivalries with various structuring effects.

The temporality of rivalries is underscored by Georg Simmel (1908, 323), who sees them as radically different from a mere fight over money or material goods. Werner Sombart (1928, 558–9), writing only six years before Simmel’s Sociology was published, distinguished violent competition from performance and suggestive competitions. When an opponent is eliminated, absorbed, or controlled, the struggle ends; performance and suggestive competitions are much more protracted. In both cases, argues Sombart, competitors strive for the favors of their audiences either on grounds of quality attributes (e.g. quality merchandise, exclusive merchandise, etc.), or on grounds of positive public exposure that should excite audiences. Quality attributes or positive public exposure are only instruments toward gaining the favor of specific publics. Randall Collins (1980, 197) notices too that overt fights occur seldom and that conflict is as much a form of interaction as cooperation is.

Thus, rivalries do not take the form of short outbursts of violent conflict (although conflictual encounters, such as a duel with weapons, can be part of them), but are ongoing chains of action-response activities between the parties. In triadic rivalries, parties compete for the favors of the public (Simmel 1908, 327), and the public fans up the relationship.⁹ Rivalries can have a public format, in the sense that the chains of action-responses are at least in part witnessable by publics and judged upon. This does not mean that audiences need to witness rivalries uninterruptedly. It means, though, that audiences (close up or from afar) participate in the relationship. Rivalries require rules as well (formal in some cases), which bind participants to particular action formats and responses. They can require both partisanship and neutrality, in the sense that they can mobilize partisan publics but also accept referee judgments. Rivalries can have resolution or not – romantic rivalries, for instance, can come to a resolution, but in other cases, rivalries can be transmitted across generations. In short, rivalries appear as durable relationships supported by particular sets of institutions.

Rivals can encounter each other in tight games (Goffman 1969, 119): that is, in rules-determined, controlled settings (such as a championship or a tournament) where they play against or by each other. Rivalries, however, are not reducible to such settings. Neither are they reducible to loose games – that is, to strips of strategic interactions mediated by loose social conventions and distributed over time and locales. Fiction writers or visual artists for instance, can play alongside each other (Simmel 1955, 70) at book fairs or artistic salons, and they can play protracted loose games as well over whole careers (see Smee 2016). A rivalry relationship can include one or both games without being reducible to either.

Summarizing: rivalries are intense social comparisons to identify and evaluate attributes that matter to the participating parties in specific situations. They (a) have open ended, evolving temporal horizons; (b) they imply reciprocal, intimate knowledge of the rivals, as well as mutual adaptation; (c) they can involve specific publics that witness their evolution, and which can intervene in the rivalry, actively supporting it. (d) Rivals can relate not only to each other but also to their publics and await responses from the said publics. (e) The emotional bonds between rivals, on the one hand, and between rivals and their public, on the other hand, are not predetermined and not reducible to hate. Rivals can show respect or affection for each other too (Fine 2021, 104) – as illustrated by terms such as frenemy or Intimfeind (intimate foe). (f) Rivalries can unfold in public (making publics intrinsic to this relationship), as well as in the private sphere (since rivals are emotionally bound to each other).

Rivalries, social knowledge, and worth

If these are the formal features of rivalries, two questions remain, though: first, what is at stake in them? Seeing jealousy as the emotional driver of rivalries does not mean that rivalries are simply irrational emotions or that they unfold for jealousy’s sake. Second, where does their necessity come from? What do they accomplish that cannot be accomplished otherwise? Thorstein Veblen argued that rivalries among members of the capitalist class are necessary in order for said members to achieve public recognition, thus implying that status is not automatically provided by wealth, and that it requires displays within particular relationships. In other words, displays of wealth alone are not enough for status recognition, but must be framed by particular relationships dynamics (e.g. X displaying against Y and alongside Y’s displays). Rivalries are necessary frames for wealth displays if the latter are to produce the desired effect (status), but as frames, they can be put on display too. There is a social obligation to display (at least occasionally) a specific relationship (of rivalry) in order to get one’s status acknowledged (Veblen 1899, 250).¹⁰

The object of rivalries can be seen through not only with respect to social status but also to social knowledge. In a rivalry where both parties compete for acknowledgement from specific audiences, the object of that acknowledgement is not only the individual but also the attributes or qualities they put on display, and which are considered as socially significant or desirable by the rivals, as well as by the audiences. Speed, or endurance, or patience, or agility can be among such attributes. But speed, agility, or endurance, are seldom if ever, purely individual attributes. They are produced by group efforts. For instance, speed in an athlete implies a group effort involving coaches, physiotherapists, and nutritionists. Speed in an athlete requires knowledge of speed in one’s rivals too, and of the coaching strategies producing that speed. An attribute like speed is the product of social knowledge. The audiences are asked to judge not only who of the rivals is speedier, more agile, more enduring, or more cunning. The audiences are expected to make judgments upon what an attribute such as speed entails in terms of skills, group knowledge, and contextualized display against other efforts. What is the worth of being cunning, or agile, or speedy, in particular situations?

This requires first establishing what cunning, or speed, or agility means in a particular situation. What kind of actions and responses to action can be deemed as cunning, and what are the consequences of being cunning in that situation? The worth of attributes is not limited to the personalities of the rivals, yet it cannot be easily decided upon without witnessing such attributes as embodied and enacted in a particular relational dynamic. In other words, the outcome of a rivalry relationship is not only (and not primarily) the acknowledgment that ‘rival A is better at X compared with rival B’. The outcome is knowing what ‘having X’ as the product of a group effort means in a particular situation. It is not just the acknowledgment of the rivals’ status either. It is the social knowledge and the social acknowledgement of a particular set of attributes put on display as valuable.

Hence, the first logic at work in establishing the worth of a set of attributes is the logic of making them observable in an organized fashion.¹¹ Some attributes deemed as having social worth cannot be directly observed but can be inferred from their observable outcomes. We cannot, for instance, evaluate the social worth of fiction writing from simply observing two or more writers typing. While typing contests were not unknown in the era of the typewriter, they were about different skills, such as speed or orthographic accuracy. Putting fiction writing skills on display has a different timeframe than that of a typing contest. The skills of fiction writing – inventiveness, metaphorical expression, innovative use of language – can be only inferred from the end product of a particular writing process. Therefore, indirect observation of attributes can be relevant – brushstrokes on canvas or sentences on paper display inventiveness or expressivity, for instance, as attributes requiring different timeframes from those of organized direct displays. An indirect observation would require then, in Goffman’s terms, a loose game rather than a tight one.

A central aspect of Simmel’s argument is that values are objectified in rivalries (1908, 325). Social attributes, as products of group efforts, within specific rivalry relationships, put on display in front of audiences, become objectified. A dyadic relationship would not objectify attributes because it remains opaque to outsiders (104). More recently, Pierre-Michel Menger (2014, 280) has argued that artistic talent as a set of attributes is honed and amplified in multiple, repeated ‘trial(s) of competitive comparisons’ because the uncertainties which persist in creative activities have to be dealt with in a ‘dynamic tension of testing’. This reminds us of the Renaissance view that artistic skills are honed in rivalries, while grounding the necessity of the latter not primarily in solving temporary status issues but as a more durable form of social relationships through which the worth of human attributes is set, even if temporarily.

A similar argument is made by Erving Goffman (1967, 186, 194), who, without using directly the term rivalry (and drawing fully on an analysis of contests), asks the same question: how can social action establish which human attributes are worthwhile or not? This question cannot be answered in a general fashion because attributes are situationally bound: speed, or cunning, or endurance, may be valuable in particular situations, but not in others. Moreover, speed, or cunning, or endurance, may have internal varieties, the worth of which has to be judged upon (physical or mental endurance, for instance, can be expressed differently according to the situation). This question cannot be answered based on routines either, because routines are not the best way for putting such attributes to test. Action though, as opposed to routines, is relevant here; in action, participants ‘knowingly take(s) consequential chances perceived as avoidable’ (Goffman 1967, 194). Borrowing from Robin Wagner-Pacifici (2017, 65), action is eventful because it implies ruptures – that is, unexpected interruptions of the normal future orientation of participants. Such interruptions generate uncertainties, making it more difficult for participants to know what comes next (as is the case with routines). Participants must take chances, understood as practical guesses of what is the appropriate next step in the sequence of action.

This taking of chances can reveal the social worth of particular attributes in that the latter are tested against uncertainties. Moreover, uncertainties can be designed or set in such a way as to test particular attributes. Being purposeful, the testing of attributes in action will be organized: it will have spatio-temporal boundaries, a material setup, implicit and explicit rules, participants, and audiences. In testing the participants’ attributes, time can be a resource, a benchmark, as well as an organizational device (Fine 2015, 81). Time can create its own uncertainties. In his ethnography of chess competitions, for instance, Gary Alan Fine underscores that a match can be lost not only by making wrong move decisions but also by making decisions too slowly (83). If rivalry relationships are under-determined, full of uncertainties, and open-ended, as Mannheim and von Wiese argued, they would offer a format for testing attributes against uncertainties produced by the rivals themselves.

If we were to think of alternative social procedures through which such worth would be set, what could these be? One could argue for negotiation as a procedure. Yet, if this were to be the case, human attributes would be merely talked about, not displayed in social interactions. Or, one could argue that rituals are procedures in which attributes are put on display, to be judged upon. While rituals can mark the beginning or the closing of a rivalry relationship, they are focused on group solidarity reinforced in stereotypical actions (Collins 2004, 49; Alexander 2006, 32). Rituals are ‘moments in and out of time’ (Turner 1969, 96) in which community is produced, not moments in which communities are asked to make a judgment on what is valuable in their members’ attributes and on what is not.

More important, perhaps, is that rituals (and ritual-like activities) presuppose that the attributes put on display (such as endurance or courage) are performed according to a script and in an authentic fashion, as a condition for achieving fusion with the audiences (Alexander 2006, 40, 55). How can we know, then, that such attributes are authentic, without subjecting them to uncertainties? A script-based performance implies that the social worth of said attributes is already agreed upon and not subject to uncertainties. In this perspective, fusion would be significantly different from what Erving Goffman (1967, 262, 268) calls vicarious experience, where audiences participate in chance taking as a prerequisite for making a judgment on what endurance or courage mean, among others.¹² Seen from a different angle, and following here Claude Lévi-Strauss’s argument (1966, 30), rituals, in opposition to contests, are meant to achieve equilibrium, meaning that their outcome is expected and can be foretold. The outcome of rivalries (and of contests as one of their institutions) cannot be foretold, since by definition they are under-determined.

However, when rituals are part of a string of strategic interactions as one of the rivals’ game moves (Goffman 1969, 124), the worth of relevant attributes can be set within performing a ritual. For instance, the worth of metaphorical inventiveness in delivering sermons can be witnessed and evaluated within rituals, especially when the latter are game moves in a rivalry relationship between clerics.

Rivalries appear as necessary with respect to the process of finding out values – that is, what human attributes entail, whether they are valuable and desirable for the community, and how exactly. They are necessary because, as Von Wiese notices, rivalries are underdetermined and open-ended. One does not know from the start how rivalries will evolve; how the attributes at stake in them will be displayed and evaluated in particular situations; which attributes will be judged as relevant when; which attributes will be judged as undesirable, and how. In other words, the necessity of rivalries with respect to human attributes is that the value of the latter can be established primarily within such relationships. (This does not mean, of course, that human attributes can be exercised only within rivalries.)

The social institution of the contest tests the exercising of skills and abilities (Goffman 1967, 207). In contests, the abilities and skills of the participants are exercised on opponents in interpersonal action, usually (but not always) segregated from ‘serious life’ (Goffman 1967, 209). This suggests that contests are institutions geared toward providing rivalry relationships with organized occasions for being displayed. At the same time, however, rivalries are not limited to formal contests. A romantic rivalry, for instance, will not be put on display within a formal contest. Yet, occasions for public contest can be used by romantic rivals in a fashion that becomes intrinsic to the rivalry. Rivalries do not necessarily need to be put on display permanently. Contests, in their turn, are not the only institution geared toward the display of rivalries. The artistic salon, world fairs, festivals, trade fairs, professional conventions are similar institutions that provide occasions for initiating, reproducing, or advancing rivalrous relationships, visible to publics. Moreover: since worth can be produced by direct or by an indirect display, respectively, we should be able to identify institutions adapted to the logic of observation, be it direct (a broad variety of contests), or indirect, such as rankings or ‘person of the year’ (e.g. athlete, financial analyst of the year and so on) proclamations, fairs, salons, festivals, conferences, conventions and many more.

Direct and indirect observations can use a variety of judgment devices (e.g. measuring instruments, indices, benchmark indicators) in order to segment, classify, and rank participants, valuing thus both products and actors (Chiapello and Godefroy 2017: 156–7; Stark 2020, 10). Can we say that judgment devices substitute rivalry relationships with standardized valuations? Let’s have a look at two domains that use standardized judgment devices extensively: competitive swimming, which uses automated timers (Harris 2016), and figure skating, which uses a set of athletic metrics such as the height of jumps and number of spins (Lom 2015). Timers and video cameras do not evaluate the attributes of dryland coaches, fitness coaches, tactical coaches, nutritionists, or physiotherapists who collectively contribute to producing the swimmer’s stroke. A timer will rank the swimmers in a given situation, but will not tell us – including here coaches and swimmers – which qualities of the stroke brought swimmers in that particular position in the ranking, in a given situation, and how these qualities can be worked on and adjusted for future similar situations. In order to deal with these uncertainties, left unsolved by timers, swimmers and coaches resort to relationships and interactions with teammates (including rivals) and with other teams. In figure skating, as Stacey Lom (2015) reports, a shift to athletic metrics as a judgment device led to a reconfiguration of the relationships between judges and coaches, from antagonism to collaboration, but did not substitute for rivalries.

Or take another judgment device: the Parker Wine Guide. The guide is a points-based wine scoring system; variances in scores impact variances in futures prices for Bordeaux wines, albeit to different degrees, depending among others on preexisting classifications (Hay 2007, 204). Does this mean that it substitutes social relationships between wine growers, buyers, testers, and Parker scorers? Accounts of how the guide is produced (Langewiesche 2000) show that: there is more than one guide scorer involved; scorers make regular trips to vineyards and entertain relationships with wine growers; these relationships are sometimes antagonistic, and sometimes not; wine growers try sometimes (successfully) to persuade scorers to change the score; wine growers sometimes badmouth each other in conversations with the scorers. All this indicates that relationships continue to play a role and that the guide does not simply supplant them, but rather provides opportunities for relational configurations.

In the accounts of Simmel and Goffman, rivalries can develop their own institutions. In addition to (or instead of) assuming that institutions are exclusively external scaffoldings or triggers for rivalries, the dynamics of this particular type of relationship, geared toward testing the social worth of human attributes, is, at least in some situations, seen as capable of generating institutional settings, according to particular logics of display.

The coupling between rivalries and the institution of the contest should thus not be seen as a tight one. Rivalries do not need organized contests all the time in order to unfold. Informal situations of the contest can be organized by the participants themselves, for instance, in situations where two or more participants challenge each other to race their bikes down the street, or to swim a number of laps in the pool. This author has witnessed a situation in a subway car where a group of young males challenged each other to do the most pull-ups on a support bar in front of all other passengers.

Rivalries and audiences

Rivalries can be played out for audiences which, be they direct, face-to-face or synthetic ones (Knorr Cetina 2009), are never passive. Audiences have an impact on the outcome of contests (Leifer 1995, 237; Heath 2013, 55) and a stake in them (Goffman 1967, 262). If audiences have a stake in the institutions supporting rivalrous relationships, it is plausible that they will have a stake in the said relationships too. Goffman’s argument is that audiences have such a stake because they participate vicariously in fateful actions, as well as in the display of character (that is, of potentially valuable attributes) intrinsic to contests. Expanding on this argument, we can say that audiences can participate (vicariously) in rivalrous relationships outside contests too. Instances in this respect are provided among others by artistic and literary rivalries – fans and patrons of literary rivals can participate vicariously in the relationship. In English soccer, rivalries between fans of competing soccer teams continue outside and beyond the game and have a durable quality (e.g. Elias and Dunning 1966; Dunning, Murphy, and Williams 1986). Rivalries between fans of rap musicians continue outside music battles and dissing contests (Lee 2016, 110).

This raises the question of whether audiences can initiate or steer rivalries, influencing their internal dynamics. Food manufacturers, for instance, send product samples to specialized laboratories that analyze the components of several manufacturers’ products and sell them back data on biochemical compositions and organoleptic attributes, including data on the competitors’ products (Dubuisson-Quellier 2013, 258–9). We can ask, to what extent are rivalries between food engineers working for different manufacturers triggered by the scientific laboratory as an audience? Or rivalries between wine growers by the Parker Guide scorers as an audience? To what extent can audience reactions steer the internal dynamics of a rivalry in a particular direction, bringing it closer to, or away from conflict? An almost standard example of how audiences not only steer but create competition on purpose is provided by auctions (Smith 1989, 61; Heath 2013, 82). Another example in this sense is provided by Dick Cavett, a 1980s PBS talk show host, who, while on air, pointedly insisted on asking the writer Mary McCarthy, which writers she thinks are overrated, a question McCarthy answered by mentioning only Lillian Hellman, her longtime rival. This interview is well known for triggering a defamation lawsuit, a contemporary instance of the Greek echthra (Ackerman 2011, 32–3).

If audiences participate vicariously in displays of valuable attributes by the competitors/rivals, their reactions would not only tend to be ‘taken personally’ (that is, taken by participants as judgments of character) but also influence the relationship between rivals. At the same time, rivalries can transfer to audiences, which will create then their own, second-order audience for their relationship. In their study of rival soccer teams, Dunning, Murphy, and Williams (1986, 234) show that fans of soccer clubs will develop their own durable rivalries, played in fights outside the stadium, mainly for the benefit of the police as an audience, but sometimes engaging with the police as a rival. Rival fan groups and the police engage in confrontations where they take turns at providing the audience for each other, confrontations in which attributes of ‘masculinity’ (e.g. physical force, agility, aggression) are effectively validated in interactions.

Rivalrous relationships do not have to be outspoken all the time – in other words, a generalized and permanent awareness of their character is not necessary. Neither is a permanent presence of audiences. Being under-determined and with an open-ended dynamics, rivalries can maintain – for casual observers – the appearance of an acquaintanceship, or of professional collegiality, while unfolding their dynamics for specific, devoted audiences. They acquire this specific significance from being displayed simultaneously front- and backstage, in different ways, and for different audiences. This can create an affective bind between rivals and the ‘true’ audience of the rivalry (Goffman 1959, 215). The audience can become an active participant in the relationship, one who devotedly seeks and deciphers signs of the rivalry’s special nature. Literary or artistic rivalries, instead of being visible to a large public, can target a devoted, closed public (e.g. Farrell 2001, 296).

Can rivalries be seen as contributing to inequalities, at least in some instances? Turning Randall Collins’s definition on its head (2009: 100), we can say that a social class is perhaps a pool of potential friends, but certainly is a pool of potential rivals. Answering this question in a more systematic manner implies analyzing rivalries as triadic relationships. John Levi Martin clearly sees at least contest competitions as contributing to inducing dominance orders in some situations (2009: 124, 147). He acknowledges the role of audiences in the emergence of such orders (148). This argument resonates with Eric Leifer’s (1995, 116) earlier analyses of team sports, showing that the ascent and influence of nationwide audiences (through the medium of television) actually led to greater performance inequalities across teams.

The logics of rivalrous relationships

If rivalries are relational arrangements for enabling the situational observation, testing, and evaluation of social attributes through comparisons, then the latter has to subsume a logic of action (i.e. enacting the attributes at stake), as well as one of observation (i.e. how can such attributes be observed, directly or indirectly).

In his analysis of how relationships of dominance emerge, John Levi Martin distinguishes between contests and scrambles (2009, 123), a distinction that roughly corresponds to Simmel’s (1955, 70) distinction between Wettbewerb (competing against) and Wetteifer (competing along), and to Goffman’s (1969, 119) distinction between tight and loose games. Contests would require face-to-face encounters (a tight game), in which the worth of attributes is temporarily decided. We can regard at least some rivalries as requiring regular tight games (in tennis or soccer, for instance, but we also have music, dance, or eating contests, among many others).

In scrambles, rivals collect status signals to prove their worth. Literary rivalries are a case in point: one collects prizes, reviews, sales figures, state medals, media interviews, against those of rivals. Scientific rivalries would be another case in point: citation counts, Nobel Prizes, research funding, are collected against those of the rivals, without necessarily having to have a face-to-face encounter in which attributes of worth are decided. In the same way, in which contest rivalries have their institutions (tournaments, championships, trade fairs, to name but a few), scramble rivalries have theirs (medals, prizes, critics’ judgments, and many more).

We have thus a logic of action (rivals acting against each other or along with each other) and a logic of observation (depending on how attributes are displayed). Their combinations can prove useful in working out a typology of rivalries. In those situations where rivals enter against each other with direct displays, we have tennis tournaments, auctions, eating contests, university challenges, or spelling bees, among others. In situations where rivals enter against each other with indirect displays, we have something like architecture competitions. In situations where rivals enter along with each other with indirect displays, we have academic or literary rivalries, among others. Can we find situations though, where rivals participate along with each other with direct displays? I would argue here that we can find such situations in ‘races to do X’, as witnessed, for instance, among deep-sea divers, solo flying pilots, mountaineers, but also among scientists (see Table 1). In every such instance, rivalries are as much individual as they are group ones. They involve entire groups organized around producing the attributes at stake, be they speed, endurance, aesthetic novelty, or metaphorical inventiveness. Yet, in many such games, the attribute at stake is presented front stage as embodied by a single individual, while it is in fact a group achievement. We would need to investigate than a double set of rivalry relationships, unfolding front- and backstage at once, namely the relationship between the rivals taken to embody the attribute, on the one hand, and the relationship between the rival groups producing the attribute, on the other hand. For instance, while on the front stage, metaphorical inventiveness may be produced by rival fiction writers, on the back stage we might encounter associated rivalries of literary agents, editors, and critics.

Table 1. A typology of rivalries.

Action	Direct observation	Indirect observation
Rivals against each other	Tight games: person-focused tournaments (sports, eating, spelling contests, etc.)	Intermediate tight games: object-focused tournaments (architecture competitions, art salons, literary prizes)
Rivals along each other	Loose games: person-focused scrambles (races to do, discover, or decipher X)	Intermediate loose games: object-focused scrambles (research grants, publications, exhibitions, media appearances)

Within this typology, the rivals’ audiences do not have to always be identical or permanently present. Yet, this would not impact the rivalries as such. In cases where rivals participate along with each other, for instance, audiences may differ or only partially overlap. Rival literary figures may have different fan bases, but instead of diminishing the rivalry relationship, this has the potential of fanning it up.

In all these types, we can encounter negative instances of the kind designated by Sombart as violent competition – that is, instances where rivals can try and cut each other off from audiences, with more or less legal means.

A question arising at this point is, to what extent is the notion of rivalry as a relationship applicable to the analysis of market exchanges and, more generally, of economic life? In classical economic thought, haggling is seen as a form of short-lived rivalry (Smith 1776: 59–60), as I mentioned in the introduction of this paper. Nevertheless, haggling is not the only kind of price negotiation we encounter: price transactions can have, under particular circumstances, a relational quality with a longer time horizon. They may require initiating a framework of mutual knowing between the parties involved, making a transaction into an anchored relationship, different from the patterned, anonymous interaction at a market stall (Goffman 1971, 227). As is the standard argument in economic sociology (e.g. White 2002, 267; 2008, 211; Burt 2005, 128; Powell 1990, 297), transactions are not restricted to ephemeral interactions aiming at moving the price of a good in a particular direction (e.g. Orr 2007), but involve more durable relationships. To what extent, then, and how can such relationships be rivalries, in the sense articulated above? Networks of relationships do not have to be exclusively collaborative: they open up the possibility of rivalries both for more limited periods of time and for extended, if not lifelong ones. This resonates with Veblen’s argument that, in business life, personal rivalries play an important role – an aspect which should be closely examined by a sociology of rivalries.

Since rivalries are under-determined, it becomes crucial to analyze their internal dynamics: what features make rivalries take particular turns and evolve into fights, struggles, or into cooperation? To what extent is the framework of mutual knowing, to use Goffman’s expression, significant in this respect? This framework, albeit in a different terminology, is emphasized by Simmel as well. And to what extent are economic rivalries encouraged or even triggered by audience interventions? If we follow Simmel’s argument that rivalries are about the values of the rivals (understood as the attributes they put on display), then the personal aspect of the rivalry relationship becomes relevant with respect both to its internal dynamics and to its substantive outcome. In the case of an economic transaction, then, the personal aspect can become relevant with respect to the turns the rivalry takes, but also with respect to price as the outcome of the negotiation, for instance.

At least as important, perhaps, is an analysis of how various types of economic relationships and transactions which are usually lumped together can actually be seen as different from each other, according to the types discussed above. In financial markets, for instance, we encounter both trading contests and ‘trader of the year’ judgments; we encounter both direct displays of attributes judged as worthy, and rankings of financial analysts, of mergers and acquisitions specialists, and so on. This indicates not only that the dynamic of rivalries can vary but also that the institutional setups associated with them address different types of issues related to how worth is evaluated and judged upon.

An objection that could be raised is that oftentimes organizations and not individuals are involved in economic transactions. Yet, as it is often the case, transactions are conducted by individuals on behalf of and as representatives of organizations. It becomes relevant then to investigate how personal aspects relevant in rivalrous interactions are transferred from the individual to the collective (or organizational level) and taken as representative for the latter. This would only be an extension of Simmel’s argument that values are objectified in rivalries.

Conclusion

I have started the argument by discussing shortly the proto-concept of rivalry and its trajectory from aesthetic theory to political economy, in order to situate better the sociological effort of reconceptualizing rivalry as a relationship, away from abstract and general organizational principles, and from the heuristics of price finding.

Rivalry is a specific kind of social relationship supported by associated institutions (such as contests, artistic and literary salons, world fairs, or trade fairs, to name but a few). Rivalrous relationships are neither general, nor universal, nor all-on-all relationships. They are not reducible to generalized dominance and status orders in and outside the marketplace (Collins 1976, 137, 242). They can involve third parties, participatory audiences for whom, and with whom the relationship unfolds. Audiences can create rivalries too, in the sense that their responses to two actors can make these enter a rivalry or can transform an acquaintanceship or a friendship into a rivalry. Following the argument put forth by Von Wiese, rivalries are under-determined and open ended; they have duration; they do not necessarily have resolutions.

What is though their necessity? The formal features of rivalries alone cannot justify their existence or the necessity of studying them more systematically. To go back to von Wiese, the principle of rivalries is ‘what you can, I can.’ This is a precondition for appending ‘only better’ to it. This raises issues of social knowledge, values, and valuations in relationship to human attributes intrinsic to the rivalry process. Seen like this, rivalries are different from a mere controversy, where at stake is establishing the attributes of an external state (as in scientific controversies – see for instance Latour 1988; Collins 2004, 781), an object, activity, or discipline (e.g. as in an artistic controversy).

The necessity of the rivalry relationship is that it objectifies values – to use Simmel’s phrase – in other words, that rivalries enable collective decisions about what is valuable ‘character’ (in Goffman’s words). This means that attributes deemed valuable for social interactions within particular domains of activity are experienced and tested situationally within rivalrous relationships. Such attributes cannot be decided upon on a purely discursive basis, or in a universal and standardized manner, or once and for all. Rivalries, thus, are not fully co-extensive with competitions: while the former implies some form of competition, not every aspect of competitions necessarily has to involve rivalries.

If we accept that rivalries are relational arrangements for experiencing and testing what social attributes are valuable in what situations, then such arrangements can be investigated at individual and collective levels. Rivalries between artists, athletes, or scientists (to name but a few) would all share the feature of dealing with issues of ‘character’, in the sense that they situationally test specific, activity-relevant attributes. These latter, in their turn, acquire (temporary) validity within such collective experiences of rivalry. Since rivalries cannot a-temporally validate ‘character’, the elements of this latter can and will change in time. The attributes seen as valuable in a scientist, for instance, in an athlete, or in an artist, can change in time through rivalry dynamics.

Seen in this perspective, a sociology of rivalries would investigate how rivalrous relationships produce knowledge about human attributes and ‘character’ – that is, how they produce and validate attributes of individual and collective actors. For instance, what makes an artist ‘innovative’, ‘rebellious’, ‘maverick’ or ‘marginal’ is neither a simple declaratory exercise, nor a given, nor externally assigned, nor exclusively a matter of that artists’ networks (see also Menger 2014, 283). It is related to the display and validation of specific attributes not only of artwork but also of the person. If we were to follow the arguments presented here, this validation would require a rivalry relationship, one in which audiences can intervene. To come back to a previous example: what is at stake ultimately in competitive swimming is the stroke, an apparently simple athletic move jointly produced by swimmers, coaches, nutritionists, and physiotherapists. What makes a stroke powerful, efficient, elegant or rough cannot be decided solely with recourse to a timer. In fact, it can be argued that the outputs of a timer provide starting points and occasions for producing such qualifiers in action within rivalry relationships at the group and individual level. Similarly, if the Parker Guide produces wine scores, to what extent does the web of social relationships (and possible rivalries) that coalesces around the guide produce not only attributes such as ‘clarity’, ‘depth’, ‘floral notes’ but also human attributes such as fine noses, discriminating eyesight, and discerning palates? A sociology of rivalries should investigate the relational production and validation of these attributes.

Sometimes, rivalries have their own institutions, which contribute to the organized observation and validation of attributes. Contests, prize cycles (e.g. the Pulitzer, the Booker prizes), art salons, athletic championships, fairs, duels, ‘battles’ (of musicians, for instance), rankings, ‘personality of X’ proclamations, or trade conventions have at least one thing in common: they organize and channel the display of attributes relevant for the activities at stake. These can be widened to include personal attributes relevant to ‘character,’ such as civility or sociability (e.g. McCormick 2014: 2264).

While particular types of relationships such as collaborations have been studied in depth (e.g. Solomon 2008, 252), there have been comparatively few investigations of rivalry as a social relationship. What are the internal dynamics of rivalries? What triggers them, and what possible role do audiences play in this triggering? Under what conditions and how do rivalries achieve closure? How do personal rivalries transfer at the collective level? For instance, the personal rivalry between two CEOs can be transformed into firm rivalry – a point noted by Veblen.

A micro-sociology of rivalries would contribute to the sociology of the professions too. Many occupational skills, such as sports-relevant ones, seem to have been professionalized at least in part in relationship to contests. At least some professions seem to have institutional proclamations, such as ‘professional of the year’ or ‘top ten professionals in the area of X’. A sociology of rivalries would investigate how such proclamations intervene in professionalization processes, but also how rivalries impact professions and the extent to which they are associated with proclamations or not.

A micro-sociology of rivalries would investigate, among others, the role of gender and ethnicity in rivalry relationships, in the organization and dynamics of contests and scrambles (e.g. Demoor, Saeys, and Lievens 2008; McGhee Hassrick 2012; Boyle 2005), respectively, and in the constitutions of audiences.

Overall, a micro-sociology of rivalries can contribute to the scaffolding for analyzing competitions and to correcting the public rhetoric about the latter as an unavoidable and ubiquitous necessity.

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The author also owes a debt of gratitude to Hendrik Vollmer, John Levi Martin, Rita Samiolo, and Leon Wansleben, who on multiple occasions have engaged in reading manuscript drafts, comments, and discussions. The author has greatly benefitted from their critical insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Alex Preda

Alex Preda is a sociologist working at King's College London. He is the author of, among others, Framing finance. The boundaries of markets and modern capitalism (2009) and Noise. Living and trading in electronic markets (2017), both published with the University of Chicago Press. His research interests are in the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of finance.

Notes

1 In 1928, for instance, the Sixth Conference of the German Sociological Association has ‘Competition’ as its main topic (Verhandlungen 1929), with the explicit aim of making rivalry a sociological concept, distinct from economic competitions. Previous efforts include Simmel’s (1908) extensive treatment of competition, Robert Park’s (1967) approach, the interest in strategic interactions present in the work of Jesse Bernard (1954) and Erving Goffman (1969), or the development of conflict theory by Randall Collins (1976), among others. With the exception of Robert Park and Jesse Bernard, early attempts to examine competition sociologically have a distinct interactionist bend and focus on interpersonal rivalries and strategic interactions.

2 Ancient Greece knew two ostensive, non-normative terms that point to two different sets of practices and relationships: those of agōn and of echthra, respectively. The first designated, with historical variations, forms of (mostly, but not exclusively) athletic contest (see Golden 2004, 5; 2008, 92; Pleket 2014, 39; Farrington 2014, 177, 181; Poliakoff 1987, 114; Scanlon 2014, 14). The second designated a publicly acknowledged relationship of personal rivalry that was distinct from mere hatred or anger (Alwine 2015, 28, 31, 54). These two ostensive terms differ from the normative, Renaissance ones which ground an aesthetic theory.

3 Similarly, the institution of the duel in Britain forbade members of the royal household, seen as the top of the aristocratic hierarchy, to engage in duels (Allen and Reed 2006, 97). Duels between aristocrats and workers were forbidden (Collins 2008, 213). Duels between female aristocrats, while rare, do occur.

4 Jean-Christophe Agnew (1986, 9, 17–8) shows that, up to the eighteenth century, political philosophy as well as pre-classical economic thinking develops a general and abstract notion of the ‘market’ only very slowly and that representations of lively individual transactions in specific marketplaces play a significant role in this respect.

5 Mary Morgan (1993) has highlighted how, under the influence of biologism, over the course of the nineteenth century, the principle of competition changes from a more or less civilized struggle in the marketplace to a generalized struggle for accumulation. For reasons of space, this transition is not discussed here.

6 This view finds its way into sociology in the work of Robert Park (1967, 70, 75, 79), among others, who sees generalized struggle as an explanatory principle for all organic, social, and economic life. From a mere tool allowing market actors to find the (just or unique) price, rivalry becomes a generalized principle of all existence and, with that, of social order (Park 1967, 83). This essentially means that an external deterministic principle is adopted as a general explanans: biological/economic struggles (Park sees them as amounting to the same) determine social life. This is less of a genuinely sociological concept than the (logically unwarranted) adoption and generalization of a heuristic tool initiated in classical political economy (and formalized by neoclassical political economy) for accounting for the price mechanism.

7 Thorstein Veblen implicitly distinguishes rivalries from struggles. For Veblen (1899, 34), rivalries consist in ‘invidious comparisons’ and have to do with the social worth of the individuals and groups involved, not with mere accumulation of goods. The notion of jealousy, which is also invoked by Simmel in relationship to competition (as distinct from envying material goods), implies that competitions have psychological (rather than biological) underpinnings.

8 Such challenges can occur within organizations, but they involve individuals. They imply contesting authenticity, or honour, or respect, by means of counter-narratives or of countersignals targeted at a public, or at one’s network of relationships, or at both. Examples in this sense are, among other, rap music rivalries (e.g., Harkness 2013), but also the rivalries in the wine industry (Garcia Parpet 2008).

9 Similarly with Leopold von Wiese and with Karl Mannheim, but before them, Simmel sees rivalries as having a durable relational quality that is distinct from the accumulation of goods by depriving a counterparty (see also Duina 2011, 165). Rivalries are not reducible to the economic sphere; their motor is not envy (for material goods), but (status) jealousy (Simmel 1908, 318–9). In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu seems to conceive rivalries as status-relevant struggles for control of both ‘taste’ and access to ‘taste’, as in the case of the Parisian salons (Bourdieu 1992, 135–142). The drive of rivalries is the jealousy of one party toward the other. Thus, rivalries are inter-actor relationships, not actor-artefact ones.

10 In his analysis of how relationships of dominance are formed, John Levi Martin emphasizes the significance of ritualized submission, which requires a public (2009, 118, 146). In other words, a prerequisite for such a relationship is that it is displayed to relevant publics at key moments.

11 Rivals can also observe moves that are not intentionally put on display, for instance athletes or coaches observing the training routines of their competitors.

12 Goffman acknowledges that contests can and do include ritualistic moments (1967, 178–9); yet, these moments are either subordinated to the broader scope of problematic and consequential engagements (casino players kissing dice before throwing would be such an instance), or are moves in a strategic game (1969, 125).