Sociologies of Interaction E-Book

Alex Dennis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 493

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Social interaction lies at the heart of our everyday experience. We make our way down the street and avoid crashing into others, take our place in the supermarket queue, take care in the way we talk about others in conversation, acknowledge the social status of people we meet, and enjoy leisurely pursuits in the company of friends and like-minded others. All these things are fundamental parts of human sociality that can be discovered and understood through ‘sociologies of interaction’.

This book provides an invaluable introduction to the theoretical foundations and practical applications of interactionist approaches to everyday life. Beginning with an overview of three core traditions - symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, along with Goffman’s work on the interaction order - the text moves on to examine in detail topics such as leisure, work, health and illness, deviance, class, status and power, education, ethnic relations and gender. Highlighting a range of empirical studies, the book shows how sociologies of interaction have the capacity to reframe and make us rethink conventional social science topics.

This illuminating book will be of interest to undergraduates across the social sciences, particularly in sociology, social psychology and communication studies, as well as those who have an interest in understanding the interactional underpinnings of everyday life.

Leseprobe

Sociologies of Interaction

Sociologies of Interaction

Alex Dennis, Rob Philburn and Greg Smith

polity

Copyright © Alex Dennis, Rob Philburn and Greg Smith 2013

The right of Alex Dennis, Rob Philburn and Greg Smith to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-7202-1

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Contents

Introduction

1   Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism

2   Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

3   Conversation Analysis and the Interaction Order

4   Status and Power

5   The Body, Health and Illness

6   Work

7   Deviance

8   Leisure

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Introduction

Social interaction – the actions and responses of people to each other’s activities – fills our everyday lives. The phone rings and we interrupt our conversation with a family member in order to answer it; we get on the bus and quickly scan the area to choose a place to sit – but not just anywhere; we enter an elevator and find the only other occupant is a senior manager where we work and momentarily feel uncomfortable; we invite a friend to lunch and there is a hesitation before she turns us down, proffering a plausible excuse. These instances of social interaction are the stuff of our daily lives, at home and at work, with our friends and with strangers. Two points can be made straightaway. One is that such ordinary face-to-face dealings with one another make up the world of daily life, a world that is for us what Alfred Schutz called a ‘paramount reality’. The world of daily life is paramount in our experience because it provides us with a sure sense of our being in the world – that ‘this’ really is ‘it’ for our own existence and that of others. The second point is that social interaction in everyday life is not haphazard but structured, patterned and orderly. That structure, pattern and orderliness indicates its socially organized character. It is thus not surprising that sociologists have paid close attention to everyday instances of social interaction in order to discover the sources and nature of that orderliness.

Over the past half-century, sociology has accumulated a significant body of knowledge about social interaction. The close sociological understanding of practices of social interaction and the forms and processes assumed by these practices was developed by three traditions of sociological work: symbolic interactionism (as defined by Herbert Blumer and Everett C. Hughes), ethnomethodology (as defined by Harold Garfinkel) and conversation analysis (as defined by Harvey Sacks). We might follow what has become a convention and abbreviate these as the approaches of SI, EM and CA. The important and highly original contributions of Erving Goffman should also be considered alongside these traditions. While Goffman can be regarded as a symbolic interactionist, his ideas also go beyond that approach and impact on how we might understand both spoken interaction and the routine establishment of everyday order and in some respects act as a bridge between these perspectives, revealing their similarities and differences.

We want to alert readers of this book to the scope of these three traditions that make up the core of contemporary sociological approaches to interaction. While sociology’s topics and approaches often seem unduly subject to pressing social issues and current intellectual fads and fashions, the work we have selected seems to us to form a set of robust traditions within which a modest cumulative knowledge can be traced, and upon which the myriad of contemporary interactionist empirical studies rest. In our view, the sociologies this book examines represent one of contemporary academic sociology’s most understated achievements. One of our aims in writing this book is to curate these sociologies, to exhibit exactly what it is that makes them distinctive and productive as traditions of sociological work.

Our book examines, compares and evaluates these leading interactionist approaches to sociology. Each of the three traditions we consider might be regarded as alternate sociologies – that is, alternatives to mainstream, conventional sociological work, especially as it was practised in the second half of the twentieth century in the USA, the land where sociology has been most fully developed and most thoroughly professionalized. Similarly, SI, EM and CA are rooted in US sociology but have become diffused across the world, especially in places where sociology has flourished such as Europe, Australasia and Japan. Sometimes they are situated as arcane specialties. At other times they are claimed as the ‘loyal opposition’. Occasionally it is maintained that the opposition has evaporated and that the interactionist sociologies now have been incorporated by mainstream sociology.

Whatever view is taken of their current status, SI, EM and CA originated as alternate sociologies that, as we shall show, were critical of the analytical and methodological practices of the established orthodoxies of academic sociology. These points of divergence are vital in placing each tradition in the context of debates about the nature of human action and the methods appropriate to its apprehension. Our book discusses these broader methodological issues and seeks to show how they are worked out in empirical studies. Our primary concern in articulating the three sociologies of interaction lies with these wider questions about method rather than with research methods as such. Certainly, we shall discuss questionnaires and interviews, observational and documentary research, but ours is not a research methods book. The interested reader is directed to texts such as ten Have (2007), Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) and Silverman (2011) for more detailed guidance about how to conduct studies in the styles outlined in our text.

We do not want to suggest that the three sociologies of interaction that we have identified are templates for doing studies. Certainly there are shared methodological and analytical precepts. However, there is also much variation and scope for innovation within each approach, as we try to convey in the discussions of specific studies.

We have organized the book into eight chapters. In the first three of these we will introduce the three key traditions outlined above – symbolic interactionism (including a discussion of pragmatism), ethnomethodology (including a discussion of phenomenology) and conversation analysis (including a discussion of the interaction order). Following this, chapters 4 to 8 will discuss specific concerns for all three of these traditions.

In chapter 1, we introduce the sociological perspective known as symbolic interactionism, formulated theoretically by Herbert Blumer and empirically by Everett C. Hughes (and their students). We show how it developed from studies undertaken at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and how it moved beyond these studies’ ethnographic and biographical approaches to create a distinctively interactionist theoretical position and a set of research policies congruent with that theory. We also explain how the philosophical position known as pragmatism – based on the writings of, among others, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead – informed these developments and provided a consistent epistemological basis for the position. The methodological implications of the symbolic interactionist perspective are outlined, in particular its emphasis on fieldwork as a research tool. Finally, some criticisms – both ‘internal’ ones, and those of other interactionists – of the approach are outlined.

Chapter 2 traces ethnomethodology’s roots in phenomenology. Sociology’s appropriation of phenomenology owes much to Alfred Schutz. He showed how the specialist philosophical approach that Husserl developed was of direct relevance to Max Weber’s advocacy of a sociology that was interpretive in scope – i.e., that addressed the meaningful character of social action as its centre piece. Schutz’s constructive critique showed how Weber’s interpretive sociology underestimated the scope and importance of the common-sense cultural knowledge that social actors use in the course of their everyday actions. Yet it remained an essentially philosophical approach to common-sense knowledge and ordinary action. It was Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology that succeeded in transforming Schutz’s philosophical approach into an empirical programme for the investigation of knowledge and social action. On the way, Garfinkel showed how Schutz’s ideas helped to remedy the omissions and shortcomings of the once-influential account of social action offered by his teacher, Talcott Parsons. The chapter charts this episode in the intellectual history, highlighting how these developments led to an analytical understanding of social competence and human action. Garfinkel offered a radically different account of what it meant to be a social being (a ‘member’ of society), and how members orientated to and recreated social rules. The chapter concludes with demonstrations of how this new understanding has been put into productive practice in studies of mental illness, rule-following and professional vision.

In chapter 3, we examine the interactionist approach to understanding everyday life known as conversation analysis. As in the two previous chapters, we begin this chapter with an outline of some philosophical ideas whose sociological appropriation proved highly consequential, including the ordinary language philosophy encouraged by the thought of the later Wittgenstein, which gave a new significance to the use of everyday language in the context in which it operated. We then move on to consider in some detail the work of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and others who pointed to fundamental sequential and organizational features of naturally occurring conversation that both underpin interactional orderliness and invoke, imply, allow persons to infer, and impact on social and personal identities. Following this, we examine some of Erving Goffman’s key comments on what he termed ‘the interaction order’ and show how and why he regards the ritualistic and dramatic aspects of spoken interaction as just as important as its sequential and organizational features for understanding interactional orderliness and identity concerns in spoken interaction.

In chapter 4, we discuss the ways these three approaches have been used to examine the concepts of status and power. Each, we argue, builds on a Weberian – as opposed to Marxian – analysis of social inequality and social stratification. The symbolic interactionist approach, we argue, emphasizes the ways in which status positions are conferred on social actors, and how they can be accepted, resisted or altered through interaction. We go on to examine the ways in which these positions are institutionalized – built into more complex and bureaucratized forms of interaction – to reduce the likelihood of open conflict, for example through the segregation of professionals along the lines of race. The ethnomethodological position, on the other hand, emphasizes the ways in which rules are used in interaction to legitimize forms of discrimination, separation and inequality. Rules are talked up or modified to achieve differences in status and power and – in extreme cases – to question the appropriateness of conferring social membership on particular individuals (such as the mentally ill). Finally, we examine conversation analytic approaches to status and power, starting with Sacks’ early examinations of membership categories – ways of conferring a particular social identity on an actor or group of actors – and category-bound activities – things that are conventionally associated with people and groups so defined. We go on to consider how talk can be used to achieve dominance or submission, and how conversation analysts after Sacks have used his ‘mature’ analysis of turn-taking to examine how different categories of interlocutor may orientate differently to the distribution of talk across different parties.

Chapter 5 examines some themes in the sociology of embodiment, with particular emphasis on issues of health and illness. Bodies are commonly thought to lie outside the realm of society and culture, being matters of sometimes brutal biological fact. Yet the appearance and functioning of our bodies turns out to be socially influenced to a surprising degree. There is a substantial body of interactionally oriented studies of the healthy and ill body, some of it developed in opposition to Parsons’ classic identification of the sick role. Alternative formulations, grounded in ethnographic research in medical settings, emphasize the performative and contested aspects of the sick role. Similarly, studies of illness trajectories and patient careers have shown the importance of the temporal dimension. Diagnoses and treatments take time, illnesses run their courses and the experience of the ill person is often shaped by hospital schedules and therapeutic programmes. The chapter considers why we make the decision to go to see a doctor, the nature of medical encounters, the vexed issue of how doctors exercise their authority, and how chronic illness, death and dying are managed as social processes.

In chapter 6, we examine the ways interactionists have examined the concept of work. Symbolic interactionists, we argue, have emphasized the temporal dimensions of work with the concepts of ‘career’ and ‘turning point’, focusing on how progression into, through and beyond employment are not smooth transitions but require complex negotiations. Negotiation and agreement are central to this perspective’s analysis of how work identities are managed, but symbolic interactionists – particularly Hughes – repeatedly caution against taking those identities for granted. Status differentials between different occupations – prostitutes and psychiatrists, for example – should not prevent us from seeing what features those trades have in common. Ethnomethodologists, on the other hand, expand the concept of ‘work’ to include almost any social achievement, from Sudnow’s study of glances to Garfinkel et al.’s analysis of the discovery of the first pulsar. They develop the temporal analysis of symbolic interactionists by considering how both the past and the (possible) future are invoked in making decisions, and emphasize the ways in which ‘rules’ for getting things done are interactional achievements rather than fixed, stable, independent features of the social world. Finally, they emphasize process over outcome in a radical manner, rejecting the mainstream notion that the products of social interaction (documents, policies, etc.) can be treated as adequate descriptions of how those artefacts are themselves generated. This distinction between process and outcome informs our discussion of conversation analysis, wherein we consider two approaches to work: the ‘talk at work’ programme of Drew and Heritage, and the membership categorization analysis of the early Sacks. While both legitimately claim their heritage in Sacks’ own writings, we argue that the former tends to neglect the situated production of categories, while the latter tends to downplay the temporal elaboration of a setting through turns at talk. This tension, we argue, is perhaps an inevitable feature of attempts to ‘apply’ Sacks’ insights, as exemplified in the field of computer-supported co-operative work.

In chapter 7, following a critical overview of various criminological perspectives on understanding deviance (classical, physiological, psychological, ecological, structural-functionalist), we move on to discuss interactionist perspectives to deviance, again organized around the traditions outlined in chapters 1–3. The chapter considers how bodies, biographies and behaviours are central to understanding deviance from an interactionist perspective, how information control and stigma management are often central to the negotiation of meaning in interaction and how, ultimately, various formal interventions can lead to the development of deviant careers. The chapter also considers how recognizing and theorizing about deviance involves practical applications of stocks of (professional and specialist) knowledge in a range of contexts (such as coroners’ courts, jury rooms). Working alongside such specialist stocks of knowledge are common-sensical notions of what can be ‘fairly’ and ‘by anyone’ seen as deviance. Together, these two forms of knowledge can be extremely powerful in explaining phenomena as deviant. Finally, we consider how deviant identities can be inferred, invoked, ascribed and disavowed in and through some of the features of naturally occurring conversation discussed in chapter 3, including the sequential exploitation of talk, the use of membership categories, and adherence to or departure from the ritual and dramatic features of ‘fresh talk’ and other, more formulaic interchanges.

Chapter 8 focuses on the relationship between identities and leisure and consumption practices in contemporary everyday life. Looking at a range of consumption practices, leisure pursuits and recreational activities, the chapter examines how such things as rules, relationships and roles are transformed in and through leisure practices; how affiliations, associations and often authenticity can be a central concern as we go about such activities and engage in such practices; and how ‘leisure experience’ can be understood both against and in contrast to, and as part of, the backdrop of the everyday life. Again, we focus very much on identity concerns in this chapter and how they are realized in and through the symbolic, practical and spoken features of leisure interaction.

Finally, in our conclusion, we consider how the three perspectives relate to mainstream sociology, and the extent to which they differ from one another. Our central argument here is that they each offer convincing alternative approaches to the ‘mainstream’ analysis of key sociological concepts, but that they are sufficiently distinctive from one another to prevent any coherent attempt to join them together. Their differences mean that a choice must be made between the symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches. If we have been successful, this book will have shown how, in making that choice, a sociologist wishing to engage in interactionist studies of the social world can mobilize a way of working that has philosophical, theoretical and methodological coherence.

1

Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism

Introduction

Symbolic interactionism and the Second Chicago School

The symbolic interactionist approach to doing sociology was developed at the University of Chicago in the decades following the Second World War, through the work of a gifted generation of graduate students supervised or influenced by Herbert Blumer and Everett C. Hughes. Blumer was at Chicago from 1925 to 1952, when he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, while Hughes returned to Chicago in 1938 (after having completed his Ph.D. there ten years before), staying until 1961, when he moved to Brandeis University. Blumer and Hughes, and their colleagues at Chicago (in particular Louis Wirth, Anselm L. Strauss and William Lloyd Warner), led what has been called the ‘Second Chicago School’ (Fine 1995). Through a series of remarkable empirical studies, students like Howard S. Becker, Fred Davis, Erving Goffman, Ray Gold, Julius Roth, Tamotsu Shibutani and Gregory Stone exemplified a way of doing sociology that stood in sharp contrast to the functionalism of Harvard and Columbia Universities, and which has had a deep and long-lasting impact on sociology across the world.

The term ‘symbolic interactionism’ was coined by Herbert Blumer (1937) to refer to a particular way of doing social psychology (then a branch of sociology), and his most explicit statement on the approach was published thirty years later (Blumer 1969). Only a small minority of the students associated with the ‘Second Chicago School’ adopted the term for themselves, however, and there is mounting evidence (Abbott 1999; Becker 1999) that Chicago sociology was as much about the personal and professional divisions between Blumer and Wirth on one side, and Hughes and Lloyd Warner on the other, as about any shared vision for sociological work. As Becker (1999: 10) argues, however, the group epitomized a ‘vigorous and energetic school of activity, a group of sociologists who collaborated in the day-to-day work of making sociology in an American university and did that very well’. We will use the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ to describe the kind of work done at Chicago, as it is the one most commonly used, while recognizing that many sociologists who do that kind of work – including some of the most famous such as Becker and Goffman – actively resisted the label’s application. Symbolic interactionism draws on two earlier American intellectual traditions: the Chicago School of Sociology (Bulmer 1984) and pragmatist philosophy (Menand 2001).

The Chicago School

The (first) ‘Chicago School’ was a group of researchers, organized and supervised by William I. Thomas and Robert Park at the University of Chicago. Their remit was to treat the rapidly growing city as a sociological laboratory, wherein the most striking features of Chicago’s development (rapid growth and industrialization, waves of migration, racial and religious conflict, and increasing levels of poverty and crime) were to be studied as sociological phenomena in situ. The city, it was argued, had a social ecology – just like a rainforest or an ocean have plant and animal ecologies – and by studying every part of the city it would be possible to map out how different social groups thrive, survive or decline in relation to one another.

What was most striking about the group was their emphasis on empirical investigation: sociological questions were to be answered by doing research, in particular fieldwork (ethnography), rather than through theorizing. This did not mean that their work was not theoretical, but rather that, for them, theory was something that facilitated investigations and allowed the findings from one study to be used to generate questions for the next. Researchers used a wide range of techniques, including demography, textual analysis, life-histories, interviews and surveys. Encouraged by Park in particular, however, some of the most famous and influential Chicago studies were those conducted using fieldwork, in which researchers would participate fully in the activities of those being investigated and use their own experiences as part of the ‘data’ under consideration. Studies employing this method included Anderson’s (1923) study of homeless men and Cressey’s (1932) study of taxi-dance halls (places where men could dance with women for money).

Pragmatism and practicality

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach developed by, among others, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has had an immense influence in the fields of education policy, social studies, political science and law (Menand 2001), and on contemporary philosophers including Richard Rorty (1979), Stanley Fish (1980) and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Pragmatism is based on the notion that meaning is based on practical utility.

This can mean that choices between alternative ideas can only be made if there will be practical implications to those choices:

What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (James [1907] 1977: 377)

The Copernican revolution in astronomy is an example of such a ‘practical difference’. Practically speaking it makes little difference to most people whether the sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth revolves around the sun. Indeed, even though we now all agree that the Earth revolves around the sun, we still use expressions like ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ which might seem to indicate that the Earth remains stable and objects in the sky move around it. The discovery by Copernicus that the sun is the centre of the solar system, however, made an immense practical difference to two groups: the Church and the scientific community. The Church advanced the belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe, with other celestial objects revolving around it. The fact that this could be demonstrated to be incorrect represented a grave threat to its authority. At the same time, however, the scientific community was developing increasingly sophisticated observations and theories about the nature of the cosmos. A theory (that the Earth revolves around the sun) that fitted these observations better, and allowed for alternative theories to be superseded, would be of immense use. Copernicus’ ideas were not published until after his death, but for centuries after they were regarded as heretical by the Church – even though subsequent scientists like Galileo could not have conducted their work without them. The ‘practical difference’ made by Copernicus was about authority over scientific findings: who should be the final judge of what is true, religious authorities or secular working scientists? This debate is still ongoing, even though now hardly anyone seriously argues against Copernicus’ ideas.

More fundamentally, pragmatism can mean that what anything ‘is’ depends entirely on what practical effects that thing might have: ‘Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’ (Peirce [1878] 1992: 132). It is this more radical approach that most strongly influenced the symbolic interactionists.

The centrality of meaning

The sociology of the Chicago School, particularly in its ethnographic form, and the philosophy of pragmatism both converge on a concern with meaning. Just as behaviour in the city was found to be orderly and meaningful by the Chicago sociologists, the nature of meaning itself was found to be the product of human activities by the pragmatists. The basis of symbolic interactionism is the entwining of these two observations: activities are meaningful, and meaning derives from human activity.

Blumer’s three premises

Blumer ([1963] 1969: 79) defined symbolic interaction as ‘the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it takes place between human beings’. Humans, uniquely, use symbols to interpret and define the contents of their world, including one another’s actions, and act on the world on the basis of those interpretations and definitions. Symbolic interactionism, the sociological study of human activities, rests on three ‘premises’.

The first premise is that human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them. Such things include everything that the human being may note in his world – physical objects, such as trees or chairs; other human beings, such as a mother or a store clerk; categories of human beings, such as friends or enemies; institutions, such as a school or a government; guiding ideals, such as individual independence or honesty; activities of others, such as their commands or requests; and such situations as an individual encounters in his daily life. The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows. The third premise is that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters (Blumer 1969: 2).

These ‘premises’, although formulated on the basis of previously undertaken empirical studies, can be understood to underpin the symbolic interactionist approach to research. They will be addressed in turn.

Things are acted upon according to their meanings

The meaning of objects

When Blumer says that things are acted upon according to their meanings, he is arguing against the idea that any one ‘thing’ has one fixed meaning. The meaning of an object depends on the uses to which it can be put. A brick can be part of a built structure, a weight to hold something down, a means of roughly measuring length, or even a weapon, depending on the intentions and needs of the person coming across it. When the brick ceases to be part of an ongoing action, it is not acted upon and ceases to be relevant: it has no meaning. If you are reading this inside a building made of bricks, what meaning does any one currently have to you? This approach to meaning derives from John Dewey’s arguments about the nature of human action, in which the notion that ‘meaning’ derives from use first appeared.

Stimulus–response and individualism

Dewey’s analysis of meaning was influenced by, and was a rejection of, early psychological notions of human behaviour. Early ‘scientific’ psychologists construed human behaviour, alongside that of other organisms, as a series of ‘reflex arcs’. A reflex arc is a semi-automatic response to an external stimulus, forming the basic building block of more complex activities. James (1890) illustrated this with a psychological redescription of a child’s encounter with a candle. Seeing the candle’s light, the child reaches out to touch the flame, is burnt, and withdraws his hand in pain. A stimulus (seeing the light) elicits a response (extension of the hand to touch), which in turn leads to another stimulus (feeling the candle’s heat), and another response (withdrawing of the hand). Such activities leave traces in the child’s brain, so the next time he sees a candle the initial reflex arc (seeing the light and reaching for it) is interrupted by the response part of the second (withdrawing of the hand). The child has ‘learnt’ not to try to touch the flame, and this can be explained solely with reference to stimulus–response arcs and the residues they leave in the brain’s hemispheres.

Dewey and the reflex arc

Dewey ([1896] 1981), in one of the most important papers in the history of psychology, questioned the usefulness of this way of looking at human behaviour. He made three criticisms of the stimulus–response arc. Firstly, it is based on an unresolved dualism: rather than looking at behaviour in a consistent manner it shifts from one to another, and then back again, without explaining why. Every stimulus could also be described as a response, and every response as a stimulus. The child’s seeing the light is not merely a response to a stimulus, but is also an active, instrumental, process in its own right. To see the light, the child must move his eyes to face it, focus his vision, perhaps even turn his head, stop looking at other things in his visual field, and so on. All of these are clearly active, responsive, processes. Equally the ‘response’ of extending the hand to touch the flame could be described as a series of stimuli. To reach out and touch something accurately does not just entail the firing of motor neurons to activate muscle movements. It also requires the operation of sensory neurons to allow balance and accuracy of movement (to allow you to ‘feel’ that you have made the correct movement). The ‘response’, then, could also be described as a stimulus. It makes no sense, according to Dewey, to distinguish between stimuli and responses, as all human perception and movement can be described as either.

Secondly, according to proponents of the stimulus–response approach to behaviour, brain functions are divided between the peripheral and the central. Peripheral activities are those concerned with movement and perception (experiencing and responding to stimuli), while central activities are those concerned with cognitive processes (such as attention and memory). As with the distinction between stimuli and responses, it is unclear how this distinction can be justified conceptually. The nervous system is an organic unity, made up of largely identical brain cells firing at, and being excited to fire by, one another. Distinguishing between different parts of it on the basis of their apparent function – so some parts are responsible for ‘thinking’, and others for ‘perceiving’ or ‘moving’ – has no good analytical justification. Indeed, the unified nature of the nervous system’s physiology might indicate that such distinctions actually misrepresent what is really going on.

Finally, Dewey pointed out that activities are always essentially meaningful, and the stimulus–response arc relies upon this meaningful nature without acknowledging it. Dewey argues that one can usefully distinguish between stimuli and responses, but this distinction is not a physiological one, but rather a semantic one: human behaviour can reasonably be described as being stimulated by, or responsive to, external phenomena on the basis of what that behaviour is an attempt to do. ‘Getting burnt’ and ‘avoiding getting burnt again’ are both acts, which depend on complex sensory-motor co-ordination, and the sense of those acts allows one to determine which elements are stimuli and which are responses. The overall sense of what someone is doing determines which parts of it are stimuli and which are responses, even in James’ example of the child being burnt, but this sense does not appear in the final description: instead, the meaning of an action appears as if it is made up of those stimuli and responses, organized into ongoing (peripheral) and stored (central) sets of brain function. We are prepared to accept that some things are ‘obviously’ stimuli (seeing the candle’s light) and others ‘obviously’ responses (reaching out to touch the candle), some ‘obviously’ sensory or motor (the firings of sensory neurons in the optical nerve or the firing of motor neurons in the radial nerve) and others ‘obviously’ cognitive (the firings of neurons in the brain itself). The reason we are prepared to make those distinctions, and treat them as self-evident, is that, when viewed from the point of view of the co-ordinated act, that is how they appear. Stimuli and responses, and central and peripheral nervous functions, do not make up a meaningful act; a meaningful act allows us to categorize nervous activity into stimulus and response, and central and peripheral function.

The meaning, therefore, of all the components in this act, are derived from the act itself. The flame can be a source of light or a source of pain, something to explore or something to avoid, depending on the intentions and understandings of the child. The flame has no ‘single’ or ‘objective’ meaning, but its sense is derived from the uses to which it can be put.

Meaning is derived from social interaction

Gestures and symbols

Meaning is not an individual matter, however. Most of our understandings are shared, capable of being communicated to one another, and are modified by our interactions with other people. We have more complex means of understanding the world around us than other animals, because of our capacity to use symbols – in particular language – to make sense of, classify, modify and communicate about our environment. What distinguishes us from other animals is the capacity to take one another’s points of view, to see things as someone else might see them. George Herbert Mead provided the clearest pragmatist account of this distinction, and was the key influence on the later symbolic interactionists, particularly Blumer.

Mead (1934: 63) argues that, for animals, action is largely gestural. A snarling dog will elicit a response of submission or challenge from another dog. This is not ‘interpreted’ or ‘considered’, but is directly caused by the stimulus: the snarl elicits either submission or challenge as an exchange of gestures. The dog does not try to work out what the other intends, but simply acts on the basis of the other’s behaviour. Some human activities, according to Mead, are gestural in this sense. A baby will startle at a loud noise as a reflex – without that noise having any particular ‘meaning’.

Usually, however, human understandings are symbolic rather than gestural. We work out what is meant by someone else’s words or actions, and act on them accordingly. In a negotiation, for example, neither side takes the other’s opening position as a matter of fact, but rather each takes it as an opening bid to be negotiated upon. An employer calling for a pay freeze may really only want to give a pay rise of 1 per cent, while a union representative negotiating with that employer might call for a pay rise of 5 per cent when they would really be satisfied with 3. The real negotiation is between 1 and 3 per cent, but if the employer were to start with an offer of 1, or the union representative with an offer of 3, they would have nowhere to go in the course of the negotiations: they would not be able to move and so would appear intransigent and unreasonable. ‘A pay freeze’ and ‘5 per cent’ are symbols for – as yet undisclosed – amounts which will emerge over the course of the negotiations – and both parties know this from the start. Although the employer will not know how low the union will settle, and the union will not know how high the employer will raise his or her offer, they each know that the other’s starting bid is just that, a bid, and not a ‘real’ offer. Furthermore, each side will insist more and more strongly that their opening offer cannot be changed in the course of the negotiations, to make any concessions seem more valuable than they may be. An employer who insists for hours that there can be no pay raise will be able to make any change to that position seem to be harder-won, although the union negotiator will know that the employer could use that tactic, and so will attempt to work out the extent to which there ‘really’ can be no raise as opposed to the extent to which there may be room for manoeuvre.

The point about symbolic communication is that it requires interactants to elicit the ‘meaning’ of a behaviour by taking the point of view of the other: one must try to work out why someone is doing what they are doing, and determine how to respond on the basis of the attribution. This can be cynical (a union representative’s attitude towards an employer’s pay offer), naive (a child believing in Santa Claus because her parents tell her he exists), everyday (assuming that the person behind the wheel of a bus is the bus driver and so is the person to whom one should pay a fare) or unusual (discovering that a long-held prejudice just doesn’t fit the nature of the group one is prejudiced against). In each case, however, interpretation is required, based on treating others’ behaviour as symbolic and taking their point of view to work out what it is symbolic of: what its ‘real’ meaning is.

Interaction and meaning

Sensory stimuli are thus designated as objects on each occasion of their appearance, to ascertain their usefulness, suitability, potential for resistance, and so on. This means nothing has a ‘meaning’ fixed outside use: the same length of copper wire can be a logistical problem for the person trying to deliver it, an engineering problem for the people installing it, or a financial advantage for the person subsequently stealing it. Its salient features (weight and volume when delivering it, length and flexibility when installing it, potential market value and ease of discreet access when stealing it) are not intrinsic features, but are the designations particular human beings make to themselves in the course of their wire-related actions and interactions. Although these definitions are not intrinsic features of the thing being designed, they are equally not individualistic or arbitrary: one cannot decide what something is without reference to how that thing will be used in interaction. How something is defined is a function of how it is to be used: how it is to be incorporated into social interaction. What something ‘means’ depends on how it can be brought into a line of action, which typically involves considerations of other people. Taking the example of the wire again, the delivery person has to orientate to the capacity of the vehicle he or she has been allocated, what other deliveries have to be made, what delivery time has been requested, and so on: all these factors provide further nuance and depth to what ‘the wire’ is, and, crucially, all involve an orientation to other people: managers who allocate vehicles and delivery jobs, other customers whose different requirements have to be reconciled, and the wire’s particular recipient. All human action, then, is mediated by interpretation and definition, and that mediation involves a complex orientation both to the purpose of the action and to any other people who might be relevant to the action’s development over time. The purpose, the other people, and the purposes of other people can change over the course of the action, thus changing its meaning and organization.

On cooling the mark out

A good empirical example of how these issues map out can be found in Goffman’s (1952) analysis of giving bad news. Goffman uses the organization of a confidence trick as an exemplar of how this works. If someone is conned in public, he argues, she does not just lose money. More importantly, she loses her sense of being a shrewd operator – after all, she would not have taken part in the con if she had not thought she could win (and thereby demonstrate her superiority over the people organizing the trick). It is here that the con artists’ assistant comes into play. This assistant ‘cools the mark [the person being conned] out’ by shoring up their sense of self, making them accept the situation they are in and, most importantly, preventing them from making life difficult for the people organizing the con.

Goffman describes a number of techniques that can be used to cool out marks, which have in common an attempt to ameliorate real practical damage by saving the victim’s face, sense of self. Breaking up with a partner, being made redundant, realizing that one has been treated shabbily and has no recourse, being turned down for a date, and so on, are all events that are typically handled by making the person who is being disappointed feel that this is not their fault. It is rare that someone is given bad news without some kind of sugar-coating, as in the British situation comedy The Thick of It, in which the Prime Minister’s ‘enforcer’ Malcolm Tucker tries to persuade a Minister that his sacking might actually have a positive spin:

Look, people really like it when you go just a bit early! You know, steely jawed, faraway look in your eyes! Before they get to the point when they are sitting round in pubs and say ‘Oh, that fucker’s got to go!’, you surprise them! ‘Blimey, he’s gone! I didn’t expect that! Resigned! You don’t see that much anymore! Old school! Respect! I rather liked the guy! He was hounded out by the fucking press!’ How about that, ah? What a way to go! Yeah!

This, like Goffman’s use of a confidence trick as an example, is funny because we recognize it as a ubiquitous feature of letting people down: it has been done to us and we have to do it to others, and, indeed, some people are employed specifically to do it. These forms of interaction are symbolic because they require one to take the point of view of the other into account – successfully cooling someone out means working out what is valuable to them, and demonstrating that, although they are right to be disappointed in some ways, they have other grounds to feel that their sense of self is undamaged. Information is not simply given to the ‘mark’: it is tailored to what they believe and feel, and the risk of them taking things further – making trouble – is reduced.

Meaning is thus symbolic rather than gestural, and social interaction depends on it having this status: any one social activity is social to the extent it relies on the actor taking into account the likely beliefs, values and actions of others.

Meanings are interpreted

Against causality and structural determinism

Blumer’s third premise, that meanings are interpreted, is a radical rejection of the notion of cause and effect being appropriate concepts to use in sociological investigation. Much sociology (and other branches of the social studies such as psychology, human geography, history, demographics and so on) accounts for human behaviour by looking at what precedes it, and by considering the structural context in which events take place. Blumer argues that such ‘causal’ and ‘structural’ explanations cannot possibly account for human behaviour in any meaningful sense.

‘Causal’ explanations are those which seek to account for human phenomena in the same way as ‘hard’ sciences like physics, chemistry and biology. Human actions are to be accounted for on the basis of their ‘causes’, which must be both necessary and sufficient. To take an example from physics, water boils at 100 °C. Applying heat of more than 100 °C to water will therefore make it boil: its state changes from being a liquid (water) to a gas (steam). The heat causes the water to boil because it is necessary (without heat the water would not boil) and sufficient (the heat is enough on its own to effect the state change: nothing else is required).

Symbolic interactionists reject the application of such causal models in sociology for two reasons. Firstly, they simply do not reflect how human behaviour works. The most important feature of sciences, according to Blumer, is that they are empirical: they seek to explain how things work with reference to the real world, rather than with reference to theories (as in philosophy) or beliefs (as in religion). Any cursory investigation into the workings of the social world will reveal that it does not operate in a cause–effect manner. The ‘same’ phenomenon will make different people respond in radically different ways (and so that phenomenon cannot be sufficient to cause a particular effect), and the ‘same’ behaviour can be elicited by all manner of different influences (so no one influence can be necessary to cause that behaviour).

A decrease in interest rates, for example, might encourage people to spend their savings and take out loans, for example, thus stimulating the economy. It could also, however, have the opposite effect: if people take the decrease to indicate that they are in troubled economic times, it could signal to them that shoring up their finances by spending less and paying off more would be more sensible. This brings us on to SI’s second critique of causal models: that human behaviour is always interpretive. Apart from a very small number of purely biological reflexes, we can give reasons, justifications, for the things we do. These reasons are based, in turn, on how we interpret the conditions of our acting: if we believe that the economy is in trouble we may act more cautiously, while if we believe that we can get a bargain we may take a risk. The two behaviours make some sense, but can be ‘caused’ by the same set of circumstances. Without reference to the meaningful nature of human behaviour, it appears chaotic and uncertain: any ‘cause’ can make people do radically different things, and the ‘same’ effect (behaviour) can be caused by a very wide range of different ‘causes’ (circumstances).

‘Structural’ explanations are those which seek to explain individual human behaviour with reference to ‘macro’ social-structural changes. A classic example of such an account is Durkheim’s ([1897] 2006) analysis of suicide. Durkheim pointed out that, far from being a purely psychologically determined phenomenon, people typically commit suicide when there have been major changes in their life circumstances. Sudden changes in one’s personal arrangements, like losing a job or breaking up with a partner, seem to increase the likelihood of committing suicide but, strangely, so do other, more positive, life changes. Some people commit suicide after coming into large amounts of money, or after achieving a life-long ambition. These are strange findings, quite at odds with what we would expect: surely people should be more likely to commit suicide when they are suddenly unhappy, when their lives change for the worse, rather than when good things suddenly come right? Durkheim goes on to point out that all such changes have one thing in common: they tend to weaken the bonds between an individual and those close to him or her. Just as a divorce breaks an individual’s ties to those he or she knew in common with his or her spouse, a sudden and unexpected increase in income or status makes relationships with former peers more difficult to maintain. Durkheim went on to argue that contemporary societies are increasingly anomic – characterized by individualism and moral deregulation – and it is this structural characteristic of such societies that makes suicide more likely. Without adequate moral regulation, individuals feel cut off from the community as a whole, and tend towards the enactment of less well-controlled urges. Suicide, then, although it may be ‘set off’ by personal changes, is actually caused by the moral order of society as a whole.

Symbolic interactionists reject such explanations for two reasons. Firstly, they obscure individual differences: there are lots of reasons why people might kill themselves (indeed, Durkheim lists four kinds of suicide: altruistic, anomic, egoistic and fatalistic), and different people kill themselves for different reasons. Even if society is more anomic in its moral order, that does not mean that all the suicides in that society will be anomic ones: some people may still commit suicide for altruistic reasons (for instance, so their family members may gain an insurance payment). Social-structural factors cannot, therefore, explain all individual actions.

Secondly, structural explanations are problematic as they implicitly rely on individuals’ interpretive activities. For someone to commit suicide they have to weigh up the pros and cons of the action, and make an active decision to carry it out. Even if societies are becoming more individualistic and alienating, and even if those social changes push people into committing suicide, the people who do commit suicide still have to make a decision to do so. Society does not ‘cause’ them to do anything without their having any say in the matter. Rather than causing behaviour, then, social-structural changes seem to make it more likely that larger numbers of people will make similar choices, and that those choices will then form a pattern that, in turn, changes the social structure. A perception that a tax is unfair, as with the 1990s Community Charge in the UK, may lead to individuals choosing not to pay that tax and thereby risking prosecution. Should enough people make that choice, the tax will become impossible to collect and administer, and will have to be changed or abolished as a result. The tax system, even though it appears to be ‘structural’, in fact depends on the consent and acquiescence of those charged with paying, collecting and administering it. If they fail to engage in these activities in the ways expected, they will change their structural conditions – from ones of being subject to an unfair tax to ones of being in rebellion against it.

Marijuana use

Becker’s (1953) account of marijuana use provides a good example of the way meaning is derived from interaction. The first times someone uses marijuana, they typically do not know how to smoke the drug, and as a consequence it has no real physiological effect. Even once they have mastered a technique of successfully smoking, however, marijuana users do not get high: they are unable to recognize the physiological effects. Becker discusses how novice users have to have the ‘symptoms’ of marijuana intoxication pointed out to them by others to understand that they constitute being high. Thus, eating, giggling, feeling numb or cold, having rubbery legs and so on all have to be pointed out to the novice user as ‘symptoms’ before he or she can recognize them as ‘being high’. Even ‘internal’ states – feelings – derive their sense from others’ interpretations of one’s behaviour, and can be classified and corrected by any competent other person who can ‘take one’s point of view’.

Structure, contingency and regularity

Methodological individualism

These premises seem to point away from sociology and towards some form of psychology. It might appear as if the world is made up of individuals defining situations, rendering meanings, and working out what is going on, in quite individual and arbitrary ways. Blumer’s early definition of his enterprise as ‘social psychology’ (after W. I. Thomas and the Chicago School’s use of this term, not its contemporary meaning) seems to give further weight to this suspicion. As any sociologist knows, however, the world is not so arbitrary or individualistic: regular patterns of activity and understanding persist across large groups of people, and are resilient over time. Furthermore, society is not just made up of interacting individuals, but is also a collection of institutions, from kinship organization (the ways families are structured and organized) to national and international bodies (armies, the United Nations), from faith groups (the Catholic Church) to instrumental and practical enterprises (people who sweep the streets). How can a sociology that does not recognize these institutions, enterprises and organizations claim to be sociology at all?

Blumer and the symbolic interactionists do not reject or ignore social structure, but construe it in a very different way from other sociological perspectives. As mentioned above, symbolic interactionists reject the notion of structural determinism (the idea that social structures shape and determine human behaviour), but that does not mean that they reject the notion of social structure. Structures exist, but – for the symbolic interactionists – they are the product of human behaviour, and have no existence separate from that behaviour.

In this sense the symbolic interactionists share Weber’s notion of methodological individualism. Methodological individualism is the idea that any collective description – an army, a church, the family, the nation state – is a shorthand term for the activities, understandings and orientations of the people who make it up. In principle, something as complicated as Islam should be capable of being described in terms of the activities of all those who subscribe to, disagree with, join or leave the faith – because it is through their actions (or non-actions) that the religion is constituted. Weber’s point is not that this is always possible or desirable (why would such a description, even if it were logistically possible to put one together, assist in proselytizing for or condemning Islam?) but rather that it should in principle be something which could be done. This means that – unlike other intellectuals and commentators – sociologists should always keep in mind that collective terms and descriptions are shorthand descriptions of complex and integrated activities. What constitutes ‘Islam’ today is very different from what constituted it twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago – and the disputes and debates (internal and external) concerning what ‘it’ might ‘really’ be are a part of its nature.

The difference, then, between symbolic interactionist notions of structure and those of other sociological perspectives, is that the former do not essentialize structures and organizations. There is no attempt to determine what any structure ‘really’ is, because its contradictions and ambiguities are as much a part of it as those things that maintain its unity. The question for symbolic interactionists, therefore, is not how structures are organized, but how they are maintained over time: how, despite changes in personnel, attitudes and beliefs, language and so on, institutions carry on across generations.

Language is always social

The basic building blocks of social organizations are, for symbolic interactionists, people working in collaboration with a shared, often collective, orientation. This is built upon a shared language. As Mead argues, what distinguishes humans from other animals is their capacity to use symbols: to allow the same sentiment or understanding to appear to all parties to communication. This could be as simple as seeing someone fall and injure herself eliciting feelings of shock and pain in an observer, or the shared understanding of a teacher realizing why a pupil cannot understand a mathematical transformation and explaining it again to get past the blockage. The point of symbolic interaction is that it generates the same feelings or understandings across interactants, thus allowing them to organize themselves through interaction (rather than as individuals operating separately in a shared space).

For people to do this, they require a shared symbolic system: a language. Language is always social, taught to each and every member of a culture and passed on, generation after generation. It changes over time, and there may be differences between how older and younger people speak, but the capacity to share experiences, information and understanding through language defines a culture. Language is the basis of social symbols, and it is our capacity to understand one another through language that allows us to take one another’s points of view. Equally, however, our capacity to work together requires us to use language to picture and describe collective activities and endeavours, not just those of particular other individuals. Again, Mead describes how this capacity might develop.

Play, game and the generalized other

Mead (1934: 152–64) describes how, as children develop, their capacity to see things from others’ points of view develops in turn. Initially, he argues, children play with their parents and with one another. Play is a simple, fun, form of interaction often based on repetition. A baby will happily gurgle at her father hiding his face behind his hands and then revealing it again – now you see it, now you don’t – for long periods of time. This play enacts disappearance and reappearance, but does not have a ‘start’ or a ‘finish’, it does not develop over time, and it does not require either competition or co-operation to occur. It stops when one or both parties to the play becomes bored, falls asleep or is distracted by other tasks and responsibilities. The parties to the play are ‘self’ (the baby) and ‘other’ (the father), and each orientates to the other directly without reference to anyone or anything else. Children playing, therefore, have to learn to take the other’s point of view – to see things from the point of view of the specific other person they are playing with – to have fun. Play is interesting to the extent that each participant can imagine what the others are doing and seeing.

As children grow, however, they start to learn more complex forms of play that involve rules and regulations. Games, these more structured forms of play, typically require an orientation to external sets of rules (such as the rules of Snakes and Ladders or Snap) to make sense and be fun. They may have winners and losers. Furthermore, some games (like football or rounders) require participants to orientate to co-operation as part of a team as well as competition with others. In these more complex games, children do not just have to orientate to specific others: they also have to orientate to the generalized other. As well as taking the role of the specific other person (as in play), they have to take the role of the generalized other, a collection of other people viewed as a unit or a normative orientation to the game as a whole.

By ‘generalized other’, Mead means two kinds of things. Firstly, he argues, the generalized other can relate to the general expectations and requirements that any participants in a particular game need to have. The rules of Snakes and Ladders, for example, are generalized because they apply on each occasion the game is played. They cannot be varied, even if varying them would make the game more fun (i.e., one cannot decide not to go down a snake one has landed on just because that would make it easier to win). Rather than the specific, ad hoc, improvized nature of play, games require their players to show a held-in-common orientation to a situationally independent set of rules. The ‘generalized other’ in this sense is the shared values of a community of players, as codified in a rulebook. Secondly, however, the ‘generalized other’ can be a group or team understood as a collection of co-operating participants. In playing football, for example, one must orientate to the opposing team as a group of people joined