symbolic interactionism Flashcards
what is symbolic interactionists
moves away from deterministic assumes - human conduct has meaning
George Mead - animal behaviour is simply stimulus-response but human beings have interpretive phase in between - respond to meanings
Charles Cooley - develop sense of ourselves by interpreting messages we receive from others - looking glass self
Herbert Blumer - developed symbolic interactionism as a fully fledged theory - people act in accordance to meanings attached - actions are partly predictable because we internalise expectations of others but not fixed as room for negotiation
structural criticisms
ignores influence of social structures - no free choice
cannot explain the consistent patterns we see in people’s behaviour - functionalists see patterns as the result of norms, marxists see them as result of internalised ideology
only focuses on the level of the meaning and ignores the level of cause that Weber argues is essential to understand social action
conflict criticisms
underestimates distribution of power in society - not everyone has same change of getting definition or classifications of others to stick - Becker and Goffman - power differences between people in negotiating meaning
marxists and feminists - interactionists lose sight of role ideology plays in meanings
postmodernism - it is just one of many conflicting metanarratives claiming to provide a full explanation of social life - this is no longer possible due to fragmentation
labelling theory
thomas - if people define a situation as real - has consequences - label
cooley - self-concept develops through looking-glass self - give rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy - we see ourselves as others see us
becker - labelling - leads down career path - master status
labelling criticisms
- accused of determinism - self-fulfilling prophecy almost inevitable consequence of labelling
- struggles to identify the origins of the labels and why they were originally applied and by whom
the dramaturgical model
Goffman
- everyday social interactions - manipulate performance to manage impressions
- audience monitoring our performance to check for leakage eg language, nonverbal communications
roles are loosely scripted by society - freedom how we choose to play them
avoids determinism implicit in labelling and draws attention to the work individuals put into creating and maintaining impressions of self
the dramaturgical model evaluation
fails to take into account of the dual roles we play in interactions as both actor and audience at the same time
applied symbolic interactionism
method
- emphasis on small-scale interactions and meanings - almost always interpretivist approach
Becker - unstructured interviews in study of labelling in education - uncovered meanings of ideal pupil on which teachers based their labels
some interactionists continue to use ethnography to study the urban cultures of today eg Paul Willis
Phenomenology
Alfred Shutz - meaning of any action depends on context - meaning potentially unclear and unstable
- we can classify objects is collective rather than individual
- use categories called typifications which build up into a stock of common-sense knowledge (recipe knowledge)
Cicourel - police offers use these typifications whether to label certain actors as deviant or not
- we can follow recipe knowledge without thinking about it too much eg traffic lights - product of our mind
phenomenology - finding out about living experience eg Cicourel used unstructured interviews with police officers to uncover the typifications
Phenomenology evaluations
Marxist - common-sense knowledge such as typifications are in fact imposed on us by ruling-class ideology and legitimate and reproduce capitalism
feminism - common-sense knowledge - part of patriarchal ideology and serve to justify the dominance of men
Crossley - Schutz seems to adopt an individualist perspective and loses sight of the way community itself functions as a system
ethnomethodology
Harold Garfinkel
- employ a documentary method to sense of the social world - involves taking certain aspects of a situation from an infinite number could have been selected, defining them and using definition to provide evidence
Atkinson’s study of suicide - underlying pattern was coroner’s common-sense view of what constituted as suicide - classifying deaths itself gives further support to the belief in the existence of an underlying pattern
ethnomethodology evaluations
Garfinkel’s breaching experiments showed that social order is an accomplishment
he asked students to go to department store and haggle and others to behave as lodgers at home
- produced anger and confusion - social order is in fact very fragile and only maintained by mutual assumptions of members
methods
choice of topic - everyday life
unstructured interviews - do not report an extent reality displayed in respondents - not useful sources of data as reveal the way in which conversation is constructed within a content - interviews useful as a topic of study
breaching experiments - disrupt the underlying unconscious conventions of everyday life in order to reveal them
structuration theory
Giddens - attempted to recast and solve the structure / action debate
no social laws of social life - people are knowledgeable about the world and create and reproduce social structures
structure and action are not separate - duality of structure
structuration theory evaluation
criticised for merely repeating weber’s theory and has done little but changed the language used
accused of redefining the question as rules and resources are arguably distinct from structure and action - rather than answering the dilemma, he answers different question
