Social Action Theory Flashcards
Social Action Theorists
Otherwise known as bottom up theorists, these believe individuals structure societies not vice versa.
People’s behaviour and life-chances are not determined by their social background. Instead, social action theorists emphasise the role of the active individual and interactions between people in shaping personal identity and in turn the wider society.
Sociologists who adopt social action perspectives usually reject the view that society has a clear structure that directs individuals to behave in certain ways. Some social action theorists do not deny the existence of a social structure, but see this structure as rising out of the action of individual; others argue that there is no such thing as a social structure.
Four Key Theories
Weber - Founder of social action theory
Mead - The role of the active individual
Goffman - Dramaturgical theory of social action
Labelling theorists - Focuses on definitions
Weber
Its key to develop an empathetic understanding to uncover the personal meanings and motives individuals give to their own actions, and that this was crucial to understanding how social structures changed over time.
However, he also believed that we could make generalisations about types of motive people had and that these general motivations were influenced by the wider society – thus he is half way between structure and action theory, rather than a pure ‘social action’ theorist.
Weber’s Actions
Weber focuses on the motivations of social actions.
Affective action – based on emotion
Traditional action – based on custom and habit
Rational action – actions that are carried out to achieve a certain goal, you do something because it leads to a result
Weber and Verstehen
Weber argued that before the cause of an action could be ascertained you had to understand the meaning attached to it by the individual.
Aktuelles Verstehen – or direct observational understanding, where you just observe what people are doing. For example, it is possible to observe what people are doing – for example, you can observe someone chopping wood, or you can even ascertain (with reasonable certainty) someone’s emotional state from their body language or facial expression. However, observational understanding alone is not sufficient to explain social action.
Eklarendes Verstehen – or Empathetic Understanding – in which sociologists must try to understand the meaning of an act in terms of the motives that have given rise to it. This type of understanding would require you to find out why someone is chopping wood – Are they doing it because they need the firewood, are they just clearing a forest as part of their job, are they working off anger, just doing it because they enjoy it?
Mead
George Herbert Mead developed ‘Symbolic Interactionism’, and he put more emphasis on the role of the active individual than Weber.
For Mead, there is still a society ‘out there’ which constrains human action, in the sense that there are a number of pre-existing social roles which people have to take on in order to get by in society. However, individuals have considerable freedom to shape their identities within and between these social roles.
Mead also argued that everything about society is open to multiple interpretations and meanings – the same institutions, social roles and individual-actions can mean very different things to different people.
For Mead, individuals are constantly interpreting and re-interpreting each other’s ‘symbolic actions’ – and this is an ongoing, complex process – if we want to understand human action we need to understand the micro-details of how people interpret other people’s actions, and how their re-actions are in turn re-interpreted and so on.
In order to truly understand why people act in the way that they do, we need to understand people’s ‘self-concept’ – their identities, there ideas about the ‘generalised other’ (society) and micro-interpretations.
Blumer
Developed Mead’s approach and identified 3 key principles of Interactionism:
People act in terms of symbols - e.g objects, words, expressions or gestures, that we have attached meanings to.
These meanings develop from interactions with other people.
These meanings arise from interpretation as we take on the role of those we are interacting with - Individuals can only develop an image of themselves by understanding what others think of us.
Goffman
Erving Goffman’s developed Mead’s work in his Dramaturgical theory of social action.
He argued that the most appropriate way to understand people is to view them as if they are actors on a stage – people use props (such as clothes and body-language) to project idealised images of themselves to a social audience – people have multiple identities which change according to the social setting and the audience they find themselves performing in front of.
As well as the social world, the front stage, we all have backstage areas (mostly the home) where we prepare for our social performances, and reflect on how good or bad our performances have been, and plan to change them accordingly. For Goffman, individuals are very active and manipulative, and we may never actually get to see people’s real identities unless we spend considerable time with them during their day to day lives.
Labelling Theory
Focuses on how the definitions (meanings) people impose on situations or on other people can have real consequences (even if those definitions are not based in reality) and argues that people in power generally have more ability to impose their definitions on situations than the powerless.
For example, parents, teachers and the police generally have more power to make labels stick and make these labels have consequences compared to working class youths. Labelling theory criticises both Mead and Goffman, arguing that while we need to look at micro-level interactions and meanings to examine labelling, we still need to understand where people are located in the power-structure of society to fully understand the process of labelling and identity construction.
Cooley
This includes the view of Cooley that there is a looking glass self whereby we see ourselves as others see us by taking the other persons role in social interactions and so we become what we think others perceive us as.
Becker developed labelling theory by examining deviancy, claiming that an act is only perceived as deviant once it has been labelled as such.
Weber and Methodology
Observation alone is not enough to understand human action, we need empathetic understanding. Gaining Verstehen is the main point of Sociology.
Understanding individual motives is crucial for understanding changes to the social structure.
Different societies and different groups emphasise the importance of different types of ‘general motive’ for action’ – so society still affects individual motives, but in a general way.
Phenomenology - Schultz
Phenomenology: Stems from the idea that someone’s perception of reality is constructed: it requires a conscious mind. They study the structures of conscious experience from a first-person point of view.
Edmund Husserl (founder) argues that to answer the question of how we can appreciate phenomena in the world, we need to understand the experience of consciousness.
Jack Douglas studied concepts of suicide and found that there were different motivations for committing suicide, suggesting that the purpose of committing suicide is determined via the conscious mind.
Ethnomethodology
Society is considered a social construct on an individual basis: it cannot be studied objectively. It is the sociologist job to uncover the ‘rules’ in everyday interactions that people unknowingly use to construct their reality.
Harold Garfinkle (founder states that verbal interaction is a means of constructing your world (primary method). He discusses the “etcetera principle” (process by which information can be skipped over in conversations), the benefits a ‘shared identity’ brings to conversation and the relative value of indexicality. Turner (1974) describes indexicality as “… the hearer’s ability to make out what is meant from what is said …”
Atkinson’s study of coroners reports (suicide) supports the idea of indexicality as suicides were identified using the coroners own construction of reality.
Indexicality – the ability to draw meaning from the context in which people are placed.
Evaluation of Symbolic Interactionism
Shows that individuals create and negotiate meanings and makes sense of the world through interactions with others. By seeing that they are not just puppets of society this overcomes the determinism of structuralism.
Doesn’t pay enough attention to the structures of society and how they have an affect on us, not all individuals have free choice.
Evaluation of Phenomenology
Daniel Dennett (1942 ) has criticised Phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach. Phenomenologists would counter-argue that natural science can make sense only as a human activity which assumes the fundamental structures observed by the first-person perspective.
