Theory & Methods - Social Action Theories (Interactionalism)

How are Social Action theories different to Structuralist theories?

- Structuralist theories often see society as a real entity existing over and above us, shaping our ideas and behaviour; with individual like puppets, manipulated by society.

- Action theories start from the opposite position. They are micro level, bottom-up approaches that focus on the actions and interactions of individualism.

- Action theories are more voluntaristic, as they see individuals as having free will and choice.

- Our actions and ideas are not determined by society, for we have the ability to act as free agents, creating and shaping society through our choices, meanings and actions.

Who was Max Weber (1864-1920)?

- One of the 'founding fathers' of sociology & his greatest contribution to the subject to encourage researchers to try and understand how individuals shaped & viewed the world.

- He acted as the bridge spanning between the two ways of understanding society, as he saw both structural & social action approaches as necessary for a full understanding of human behaviour (a bit like theoretical triangulation).

Summarise the contribution that Weber made to the topic of Belief Systems?

- Religion strengthens the value consensus within society.

- Society is sadly becoming more rational.

- Religion can be a force for change e.g. Protestant work ethic.

What is Symbolic Interactionism?

- It was first developed at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century.

- Like other action theories, it focuses on our ability to create the social world through our actions and interactions.

- It sees these interactions as based on the meanings we give to situations and we convey these meanings through symbols, especially language.

What does George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) observe?

- Our behaviour is not shaped by fixed, pre-programmed instincts. Instead, we respond to the world by giving meanings to the things that are significant to us.

- In effect, we create and inhabit a world of meanings. We do this by attaching meaning to the world. Unlike animals, therefore, we do not simply respond to a stimulus in an automatic, pre-determined way.

- Instead, an interpretive phase comes between the stimulus and our response to it i.e. before we know how to respond to the stimulus, we have to interpret its meaning. Once we have done this, we can choose an appropriate response.

How to interpret other people's meanings according to Mead?

- The Way in which we interpret other people's meaning is by taking the role of the other i.e. putting ourselves in the place of the other person and seeing ourselves as they see us.

- Our ability to take the role of the other develops through social interaction. We first do this as young children through imitative play when we take on the role of significant others such as parents.

- Later, we come to see ourselves from the point of view of the wider community - the generational other.

How does reflection impact the individual according to Mead?

- Mead recognised that people had the capacity to reflect on their own actions. This is because everyone has a 'self', which consists of two parts:

+ For Mead, to function as members of society, we need the ability to see ourselves as others see us. Through shared symbols, especially language, we become conscious of the ways of acting that others require of us.

+ The best-known application of symbolic interactionist ideas is that of labelling theory. However, not anyone has the capacity to empathise e.g. psychopaths.

Summarise the contribution of labelling theory to the following topics?

Education: Students respond to what they perceive teachers to think about them - then this becomes either a positive or negative self-fulling prophecy (Nell Keddie). Racialised expectations (Gillborn & Youdell).

Crime & Deviance: Being labelled as a criminal as a master label which can propel people into a deviant career (Howard Becker).

What did Erving Goffman (1922-82) argue?

- Labelling theory describes how the self is shaped interaction. If often sees the individual as the passive victim of other people's labels.

- By contrast, the work of Erving Goffman describes how we actively construct our 'self' by manipulating other people's impressions of us.

- Goffman's approach is known as the dramaturgical analogy, as he believes that we are all 'actor' in daily lives acting out a number of different roles.

How do we present ourselves according to Goffman?

- For Goffman, we seek to present a particular image of ourselves to our audience to see how they are responding, and monitoring and adjusting our performance to present a convincing image.

- As social actors, we have many techniques for impression management.

- We may use language, tone of voice, gestures and props such as dree and make-up. By using these techniques skilfully, we can 'pass' for the kind of person we want our audience to believe we are.

What does Goffman believe about social roles?

- Unlike the functionalist view where the roles that we play are tightly 'scripted' by society, Goffman believes that there is a 'gap' or role distance between our real self and our roles.

- Roles are only loosely scripted by society, and we have a good deal of freedom in how we play them e.g. some teachers are strict and others are easy-going.

What does Goffman's idea of role distance suggest?

- It suggests that we do not always believe in the roles we play and that our role performance may be cynical or calculating.

- In Goffman's studies (especially in the work that he did in institutions such as asylums), the actor sometimes manipulates their audience into accepting the impression that conceals their true self and real motives.

- In the dramaturgical model, appearances are everything and actors seek to present themselves to their best advantage.

How might Goffman's work help us to understand criminals?

- Criminals are especially adept at impression management e.g. Fraudsters.

What is Phenomenology?

- In philosophy, the term 'phenomenon' is used to describes how the world appears to our senses.

- Phenomenologists argue that the world only make sense, because we impose meaning and order on it by constructing mental categories that we use to classify and 'file' information coming from our senses.

What does Phenomenology propose?

- The categories and concepts we use are not unique to ourselves, but we share them with other members of society.

- Typifications enable us to organise our experiences into a shared world of meaning. They also stabilise and clarify meanings by ensuring that we are all 'speaking the same language' i.e. all agreeing on the meaning.

- This makes it possible for us to communicate and cooperate with one another and thus to achieve our goals. Without shared typifications or common-sense knowledge, social order would become impossible. e.g. the social constructions of 'laws', 'childhood', etc.

How does common-sense knowledge apply to real-life?

- This common-sense knowledge is not simply knowledge about the world; it is the world.

- The social world is a shared, intersubjective world that can only exist when share the same meanings.

- However, society appears to us as a real, objective entity existing outside of us.

Provide some examples of how daily action could go horribly wrong without typifications?

- local knowledge, sense of humour & cultural references.

What does Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011) argue?

- Nothing has a fixed meaning; everything depends on the context. This indexicality is threat to social order because if meanings are inherently unclear or unstable, communication and co-operation become difficult and social relationships to break down.

How does indexicality impact social meanings?

- What enables us to behave as if meanings are clear and obvious is reflexivity i.e. we use common-sense knowledge to construct a sense of meanings and order to stop indexicality from occurring. Language is of vital importance in achieving reflexivity. When we describe something; we are simultaneously creating it.

- Our description gives it reality, removing uncertainty about what is going on and making it seem clear, solid and meaningful. Although language gives us a sense of reality existing 'out there', in fact all we have done is to construct a set of shared meanings. e.g. Radiohead Music video for 'Just'.

What did Garfinkel and his students demonstrate?

- They sought to demonstrate the nature of social order by a series of so-called breaching experiments e.g. they acted as lodgers in their own family homes.

- The aims was to disrupt people's sense of order and challenge their reflexivity by undermining their assumptions about the situation.

- He concluded that by challenging people's taken-for-granted assumptions, the experiments showed how the orderliness of everyday situations is not inevitable but is actually an accomplishment of those who take part in them.

- In his view, social order is participants produced by members themselves.

What is an evaluation of Social Action Theory? (1)

- Social Action theory has shown how individuals actively construct order and meaning, rather than seeing people as simply puppets of the social system, but it has been criticised as:

+ Not all actions is meaningful as much is performed unconsciously or routinely and may have little meaning for actors.

What is an evaluation of Social Action Theory? (2)

+ It can be argued that it's findings are rather trivial, as they seem to spend a lot of time 'uncovering' taken-for-granted rules that turn out to be no surprise to everyone.

+ It ignores how wider structures of power and inequality affect the meanings that individuals construct. Marxists argue that 'common-sense' knowledge is really just ruling-class ideology and the order it creates serves to maintain capitalism.