Socialization & Identity (Week 3) Structural & interactionist theories

Question 1

Micro - Interactionist approaches

Answer 1

• focuses on how individuals shape their world.
• People have agency.

Question 2

Interactionism - bottom up approach

Answer 2

• People create and re-create society on a daily basis through their daily routines.
• Produce social order through individual and combined behaviour.
• Interactionists argue that to explain human behaviour we need to study peoples’ interactions at a micro level.
• Societies are constructed through social interaction based on meanings.
• Meanings of our actions eg. choice of clothes, language - always open to interpretation.
• The meaning of something is never completely clear and its meaning can changed depending on the social context.

Question 3

Interactionism - labelling

Answer 3

Labelling theory argues that when we name something, categorise them such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ we associate the name with a set of characteristics that are then used to guide our behaviour. These characteristics influence our behaviour and attitude to the named person, object or situation.
* if the meaning of something is only developed through interaction, then meanings can change.

Question 4

Social Action Theory

Answer 4

• Founded by Max Weber
• Weber believed that sociology was a study of social action.
• He believed that social actions should be the focus.
• a ‘social action’ was an action carried out by an individual to which an individual attached a meaning.
• A social action is one that is the result of conscious thought.

Question 5

Symbolic interactionism

Answer 5

• Sociologists include Mead, Goffman and Blumer.
• Symbolic interactionists emphasise the way in which society is actively shaped by the conscious and deliberate actions of its members.
• Concern with ‘meaning’ – it’s the significance we give to things that make them important not the things themselves.

Question 6

Labelling theory

Answer 6

• A deviant label can create a self fulfilling prophecy
• Howard Becker labelling theorist
• Looked at the concept of the ‘ideal pupil’ in school > if you are labelled as an ‘ideal pupil’ you will succeed. > labelled as bad pupil, it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and you will fail.

Question 7

Phenomenolgy

Answer 7

• Outlined by Edmund Husserl
• Human beings do not experience the world at first hand
• We interpret the world through our senses in a way that is meaningful to us.
• Schutz emphasised that the way we classify things in the world is a collective process.
• The categories we use to put things into are shared with other members of society.
• He calls these categories typifications.

Question 8

Ethnomethodolgy

Answer 8

• This means ‘the methods used by people’
• It is the study of the methods used by social actors to make sense of their social world.
• For Garfinkel, members employ a documentary method to make sense of their social world.
• This involves taking certain aspects of a situation, defining them in a particular way and then using this definition to provide evidence for some underlying pattern.
• Ethnomethodology is a form of research used by interactionists or interpretivists

Question 9

Structuration

Answer 9

• Giddens (1984) developed a perspective called Structuration.
• outlines the importance of both the structure and action in considering the relationship between society and the individual.
• Structuration is the idea that as people develop relationships, the rules they use to guide their behaviours are formalised into routine ways of behaving towards each other (practices).
• Through the huge range of practices in our lives, a sense of structure develops in our social world and this involves rules.