ACTION THEORY Flashcards

Question

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM - DRAMATURGICAL MODEL Goffman and Roles

Answer 1

Goffman’s view of roles differs strongly from the functionalist perspective… functionalists believe our roles are tightly ‘scripted’ by society and so we completely internalise our script via socialisation. Goffman rejects this in favour of arguing that there is a distance between our real self and our roles. Goffman believes that we are not the roles that we play. He believes that roles are loosely scripted by society and so we have a large deal of freedom in how we play these roles e.g., studious, and lazy students. Role distance also suggests that we may not always believe in the roles we play and that our performance may be calculated. The actor may resemble a confident trickster, who manipulates his audience into accepting the impression that conceals his true self. Appearances are changed so that the actor can present themselves to their best advantage.

Answer 2

It neglects wider social structures like class inequality and such.

Answer 3

Reynolds sent a questionnaire to 124 interactionists of whom 84 responded – they were asked to identify concepts they felt were essential, 38 chose role, 37 chose self, and 37 chose interaction. only 2 chose power or class which structural sociologists view as fundamental... Symbolic interactionism is correct then?

Answer 4

Not all our actions are meaningful… traditional action is performed unconsciously and may have little meaning for the actors. In interactions, everyone plays actor and audience – they are unrehearsed and improvised, not scripted.

Answer 5

Husserl developed phenomenology… He argues that the world only makes sense because we impose meaning and order on it through the construction of mental categories that we use to ‘file’ information coming from our senses e.g., four-legged furniture for eating off of allows us to recognise a table. From this perspective, we can only obtain knowledge of the world through mental acts of categorising and giving meaning to our experiences

Answer 6

Alfred Schutz applies this to the social world, as he argues that the categories and concepts, we use are not unique to ourselves, because we share them with other members of society.

Answer 7

Shared categories are identified as typification’s. These enable us to organise our experiences into shared meanings - In Schutz’ view, the meaning of any given experience varies because of its social context. The meaning is not given by the action but the situation it takes place in. Meanings may be unclear and unstable, particularly if others classify it differently to yourself. Though, typification’s stabilise and clarify meanings by ensuring we all agree on the meanings of things. This makes it rare for miscommunication etc. Social order would not exist without these typification’s.

Answer 8

In Schutz’ view, members of society have a shared ‘life world’, which is a stock of shared common-sense knowledge that enables us to make sense of our experiences. Schutz calls this ‘recipe knowledge’ because we can follow it without thinking too much and still get desired results in everyday life. E.g., we all know red means stop/danger. This helps us when driving and walking. This knowledge is not about the world, for it is the world.

Answer 9

Husserl states rightfully that the world can only be a product of our mind. For Schutz, the social world is shared and can only exist we share the same meanings.

Answer 10

Society appears to be real to us, though it appears to exist outside of us. Schutz uses the example of posting a letter to a bookshop to order a book. By doing so, he believes we are assuming that some unknown person will perform a series of operations in a sequence which would end in us receiving the book. We do get the book, and so this encourages us to adopt a ‘natural attitude’, which leads us to assume that the social world is a solid, natural thing. For Schutz, this highlights how all of those involved share the same meanings which allows us to cooperate and achieve goals.

Answer 11

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann argue that though Schutz is right to focus on shared knowledge, they reject his view that our society is inter-subjective, highlighted by how Schutz believes that once society has been constructed, it takes on a life of its own and becomes an external reality that reacts back on us. E.g., religious ideas start of in our consciousness, but they are solidified in powerful structures such as the churches, who then constrain us through influencing laws on homosexuality and such.

Answer 12

Emerged in the USA during the 1960s.

Answer 13

Harold Garfinkel influenced this heavily through the ideas stemming from phenomenology… like Schutz, he rejects the very idea of society being ‘out there’.. Garfinkel wanted to know how social order was achieved. Parsons believed that social order is made possible by a shared value system into which we are socialised - though, Garfinkel believes that social order is created from the bottom up. He believes that order and meaning are not achieved through puppetry, but rather, our social order is an accomplishment.

Answer 14

It tries to uncover how we actively construct our social order in everyday life using common-sense knowledge. They study how people understand the world.

Answer 15

Interactionists care about how meanings have effects, but EM is interested in the methods we use to produce those meanings in the first place

Answer 16

Garfinkel calls the ‘meanings always being potentially unclear’ as indexicality. Nothing has a fixed meeting and so everything depends on its context. Indexicality is a threat to social order because communication can become unclear, and this may cause social relationships to break down.

Answer 17

There is a paradox, as indexicality suggests we cannot take any meaning as fixed or clear, but we do this most of the time. Garfinkel believes that reflexivity is what enables us to behave as if meanings are clear. This refers to how we use common-sense knowledge to construct a meaning of sense and order to stop indexicality from happening, similar to typification’s.

Answer 18

Language is fundamental for establishing reflexivity, because for EM, when we describe something, we are creating it at the same time. Our description gives it depth and reality and removes uncertainty surrounding it. However, though language gives us a sense of existing ‘out there’ it really is just constructing a set of shared meanings

Answer 19

Garfinkel tried to demonstrate social order through ‘breaching experiments. Garfinkel and his students tried to behave as lodgers in their own families by being polite and avoiding personal touch… this was to disrupt people’s sense of order and challenging their reflexivity by undermining assumptions. Parents of the students called them nasty or assumed they were ill because of the switch in behaviour

Answer 20

He concluded that by challenging people’s assumptions, the experiments highlighted the orderliness of everyday life, and showed how they were not inevitable but actually an achievement of those who take part in them. He believed that social order is produced by the members themselves.

Answer 21

Garfinkel wanted to see what methods we used to achieve reflexivity, to make the world orderly. Coroners, for example, make sense of death by selecting features of numerous facts about the dead such as their employment or mental health, and then using them as real patterns. They might use this, for example, to conclude that typical suicides happen to the mentally ill and unemployed. Garfinkel believes that humans are continually trying to impose order by seeking patterns which are really just social constructs. The pattern those suicides are mentally ill mean that this sets the precedent for future cases of suicide. The coroner interprets them as examples of the assumed pattern. Cases that follow the pattern will be classified as suicides and will seem to improve the existence of the pattern that the coroner had constructed. This pattern becomes self-reinforcing which doesn’t actually give us any insight into the external reality

Answer 22

Garfinkel criticises conventional sociology of using the same methods as ordinary members of society to create order and meaning, which means conventional sociology is not actual objective knowledge. Sociologists’ beliefs on suicide, consequently, are no truer than those of other members of society as we use the methods of the coroners to identify who committed suicide – this is the decision made by the coroner, using their understanding (common-sense knowledge) of what kinds of people end their lives.