Interactionism Flashcards
What are action theory’s concerns?
Discovering and understanding the processes by which interactions between individuals or small groups take place.
Understanding how people come to interpret and see things as they do.
Understanding how people define their identities.
Understanding how the reactions of others can affect people’s view of things and the sense of their own identity.
What are the features of the action theory approach?
- Society and social structures/institutions are seen as socially constructed creations of individuals, not something separate from and above them.
- An emphasis is placed on the voluntarism, or free will and choice, of people to do things and form their own identities, rather than them being formed by external forces as suggested in the deterministic approach of structuralism.
- Focus placed in the individual or small groups of individuals rather than the overall structure of society. Interpretivists are more likely to study a juvenile gang, to see how they came to be seen as labelled deviant, and they see themselves see the world. Referred to as a micro approach.
- People’s behaviour is viewed as being driven by the beliefs, meanings, feelings and emotions they give to situations.
- The main methodological approach is interpretivist, using qualitative research methods, seeing the world through the eyes of those they are studying.
What is symbolic interactionism? Introduction
Mead (1863) was the founder of S.I, though it was Blumer (1969), a follower of Mead, who actually first used the term S.I sees society as built up by interactions between people which take place on the basis of meanings held by individuals. Blumer suggests interactionism has 3 basic features.
- People act in terms of symbols, which are things, like objects, words, expressions or gestures, that stand for something else and to which individuals have attached meanings, and they act towards people and things in accordance with these meanings.
- These meanings develop out of the interaction of an individual with others, and can change during the course of interaction.
- Meanings arise from an interpretive process, as people try to interpret the meanings others give to their actions by imagining themselves in their position and taking on their role. Individuals can only develop a conception of themselves by understanding how others see them, and they will be unable to interact successfully with others unless they can do this.
What was Cooley’s (1998) ‘The looking glass self’ theory?
Cooley developed the concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ to describe this process of negotiated interaction. As we consider the image of ourselves reflected in the reactions of other people to us, we may modify and change our view of ourselves and our behaviour. Cooley is alleged to have described the looking glass self in these terms: ‘I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am. Our self concept and social role are not therefore simply handed down by the social structure, but socially constructed and subject to constant change through the process of interaction.
What is Becker’s labelling theory?
Labelling theory suggests that people label individuals and situations in particular ways, which will affect the way those so labelled behave. For example, the sociologist’s task might be to understand the point of view and experience of the disillusioned black youth who is very hostile to the police and feels ‘picked on’ because of misleading stereotypes and racist assumptions held by the police about black people.
Sociologists should try to understand how and why the police label some black youth as deviant, and what happens to the behaviour of those young people once they have been classified in that way, and whether it amplifies defiance and generates deviant careers.
What is Goffman’s impression management theory?
Goffman studied the ways people construct meanings and interpretations in the process of interaction, using what has been described as a dramaturgical model, based on the idea of society being like a stage, with people acting out performances like actors do in a play or TV drama. Like actors, people in society are constantly engaged in managing the impressions they give to other people by putting on performances or a ‘show’ to try to convince others of the identities they wish to assert. Goffman calls this I.M. Goffman says everyone is engaged in this process of manipulating others and being manipulated by them to give the best possible impression of themselves.
What is Phenomenology?
Schutz
Phenomenology is another strand of interpretive thinking. It focuses on the typifications of daily life.
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) argues that the categories and concepts we use are not unique to ourselves.
Schutz called these shared categories typifications. Typifications enable us to organise our experience into a shared world of meaning.
The meaning of any given experience varies according to its social context. For example, raising your arm means one thing in class and quite another at an auction. The meaning is not given by the action itself, but by its context. For this reason, meanings are potentially unclear and unstable - especially if others classify the action in a different way from oneself.
Typifications stabilise and clarify meanings. This makes it possible for us to communicate and cooperate with one another and thus to achieve our goals. Without shared typifications, social order would become impossible. For example, if you see a certain object as a desk, while I take it for an altar, considerable problems might result.
Members of society to a large extent do have a shared ‘life world’ - a stock of shared typifications or common-sense knowledge that we use to make sense of our experience. It includes shared assumptions about the way things are, what certain situations mean, what other people’s motivations are and so on. Schutz calls this ‘recipe knowledge’: like a recipe, we can follow it without thinking too much, and still get the desired results in everyday life. For example, we all ‘know’ that a red light means stop or danger and this knowledge enables us to drive safely.
For Schutz, the social world is a shared, inter subjective world that can only exist when we share the same meanings e.g. red light.
Evaluation of phenomenology
- Berger and Luckman (1971) agree that people do use shared common sense knowledge on a daily basis. However they say Schutz May exaggerate the extent of socially constructed meanings on a daily basis. Instead they say that social institutions have powerful structures that direct and control us.
What is Garfinkel’s indexicality and reflectivity theory? (Ethnomethodology)
Garfinkel’s (1967) ideas set, from phenomenology. Like Schutz, Garfinkel rejects the very idea of society as a real objective structure ‘out there’.
Like functionalists, Garfinkel is interested in how social order is achieved. He thinks that social order is created from the bottom up. Order and meaning are not achieved because people are ‘puppets’ whose strings are pulled by the social system, as functionalists believe. Instead, social order is an accomplishment - something that members of society actively construct in everyday life using their common sense knowledge.
Indexicality is clearly a threat to social order because if meanings are inherently unclear or unstable, communication and cooperation become difficult and social relationships may begin to break down.
Indexicality suggests that we cannot take any meaning for granted as fixed or clear - yet in everyday life this is exactly what we do most of the time. Reflexivity refers to the fact that we use common-sense knowledge in everyday interactions to construct a sense of meaning and order and stop indexicality from occurring. This is similar to Schutz’s idea of typificsfions.
Language is of vital importance in achieving in reflexivity. Garfinkel is a well critic of Durkheim’s approach to studying suicide. Durkheim accepted definitions of ‘suicide’ without really questioning how the details were defined. Garfinkel points out the role of the Coroner is key to defining suicide. These definitions are often just based on common sense notions of a typical suicide and tell us nothing about the meanings and motivations of individuals.
Evaluation of ethnomethodology
✅ EM draws attention to how we actively construct order and meaning e.g. we are not simply puppets.
❌ Craile argues that it’s findings are trivial and that EM takes too much time ‘uncovering’ taken-for-granted rules that turn out to be no surprise to anyone. For example, one study found that in phone conversations, generally only one person speaks at a time.
❌ EM denies the existence of wider society seeing it as merely shared fiction. In reality norms are fact not fiction.
❌ EM ignores how wider structures of power and inequality affect the meanings that individuals construct.
Further evaluation - the integrated approach - combining structure and action
A third or middle way between structuralism and action theories recognises the importance of both the constraints of social structure and the possibilities for choice.
Society is best understood as a mixture of both structural and action approaches.
Social structures like the family, the law and education limit and control behaviour and have important influences on the formation of individual and group identities.
However, individuals can make choices within those structures and change them.
What did Weber say?
Weber’s sociology does not fit neatly into either structuralist or action approaches. He is often regarded as the original social action theorist, and he was the first sociologist to emphasise the importance of understanding the subjective meanings people held and how they viewed the world. This is reflected in his concept which he termed in German, Vestehen, which literally means ‘understanding’.
Weber rejected what he regarded as the crude determinism of structures theories, and particular Marxist economic determinism, and recognise that people had choice and could act of change structures, and we’re not simply puppets controlled by them.
At the same time, he recognised that people did not have a completely free choice in how they behaved. Weber did not dismiss the importance of social structures, particularly the structures of inequality, with his concepts of class, status and party, and how these influenced people’s ideas, shaped their lives and life chances, and limited the choices available to them.
In Weber’s study of the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe, The Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism (2001 [1904]) he showed the significance of the religious ideas (the Protestant ethic in the Calvinist religion) that people held in generating changes in the social structures.
What did Giddens (postmodern/late modernist) say?
Giddens’ (1986) theory of structural ion is an attempt to continue both structure and action, which he regards as two parts of the same process. Structure and action depend on one another, and structures only exist because of people’s action, and people can only act because the structures enable meaningful action to take place.
Giddens referred to this link between structure and action as the duality of structure. Structuratioj and the duality of structure refer to the two-way process by which people are constrained or shaped by society and social institutions, but these structures can only exist as long as people continue to take action to support the, and they can at the same time take action to shape and change the,.
This change occurs through reflexivity, whereby people are constantly reflecting on the things they do and how they do them as they live their daily lives.
Giddens’ theory suggests that the existence of the social structure, including social institutions, beliefs, values and traditions, provides people with a framework of rules and established ways of doing things that enable them to live in society, and by doing so they are at the same time reproducing that structure. At the same time, individuals can change this structure by ignoring, modifying or replacing rules or conventional ways of doing things.
Evaluation of integrated approach
- overstates the capacity of individuals to change society’s social structure.
- underestimates the power of changes to society’s social structure.
- this balance suggest they probably got it right!
