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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Robert N. St. Clair
INTRODUCTION
Symbolic Interactionism represents a major break from the more
traditional and positivistic practices of sociology. It rejects the use of the natural
science model among the social sciences with its emphasis on cause and effect
thinking, its hypothesis testing, its creation of universal laws, its goals for the
prediction of behavior, and its use of mathematical and statistical techniques of
representing information. Within the social sciences, one approaches the study of
society in far more concrete terms. People within these disciplines investigate the
concrete perspective of human beings and the everyday realities that they
perceive.
They want to replace universal laws and statements about the
predictability of human behavior with new tasks: describing and understanding.
Symbolic Interactionism grew out of the Chicago School of Sociology and with
the followers of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and his theory of the social
self. These include Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) and his concept of the
looking-glass self, and William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) with his concept of the
definition of the situation. The theory of Symbolic Interactionism, however, is
directly attributed to Herbert Blumer, a student of Mead.
Many of Blumer’s
students went on to establish this new framework in sociology. They include
Erving Goffman, Leo Strauss, Howard Becker, Victor Turner, Norman Denzin,
and Tamotsu Shibutani. As for the philosophical foundations for this discipline,
they can be found in American Pragmatism: the semiotics of Charles Sanders
Peirce (1839-1914), the individual psychology of William James (1842-1910),
and the progressivism of John Dewey (1859-1952). As one can see from the dates
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of birth and death associated with each of the aforementioned members of the
Chicago school, the group had its heyday around the first three decades of this
century.
What made the faculty and the students at the University of Chicago
different was based on a legacy of work, self, and society. Generations of students
at the University of Chicago were allowed to study urban sociology from the
perspective of the workers themselves. Hence, their research portrayed work as a
world of personal meanings which overlay the workers’ social and material world.
This focus on the sociology of everyday life allowed the faculty and their graduate
students to capture the drama of the workplace. These studies brought a different
perspective to sociology and allowed researchers to assess social structures within
the contexts of microsociology. What made them different, in essence, is the fact
that they argued for an understanding of social forms and structures that are
predicated on the sociology of everyday life and grounded in knowledge based on
the social details of macrosociology. It was their interest in pragmatism that led
them to focus on detailed studies of social interaction, document the established
patterns, and explicate them within the situated knowledge of those who gave
agency to those interactions. Their perspective was ethnographic. They wanted to
know the worlds of both the observer and the participant.
GEORGE HERBERT MEAD
Mead was born in Massachusetts, the son of a minister. When he was
seven, his father moved to Oberlin College where he took a chair in homiletics,
the art of preaching. Mead grew up in the environment of this newly founded
seminary. Oberlin was an interesting college. It was founded by a militant
Congregationalist reformer, but the college was not exclusionary in its practices.
It was among the first American college to admit Blacks; it was the first coeducational college to grant bachelor degrees to women, and, in the years
preceding the Civil War, it was one of the chief stations on the Underground
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Railroad that helped thousands of Southern slaves to escape to the North and to
Canada. One should also mention that Oberlin is where the Anti-Saloon League
originated. These were some of the childhood influences on Mead. This familial
setting at Oberlin changed when Mead’s father died and left the family deprived
of an income and a lack of savings. His mother sold the house and the moved into
a rented room. She took a job teaching at college and he waited on tables for a
living. After his graduation from Oberlin, Mead taught classes there for a while.
He had a dream of starting a literary paper in New York, but ended up working
with the Canadian Pacific Railway in the Northwest. His mother went on to
become the President of Mount Holyoke College. His long period of being
unsettled changed when he decided to follow his close college friend to Harvard
to pursue a career in philosophy. It was at Harvard that he worked with the
philosophers Royce and James. He was converted to the pragmatic philosophy of
James.
Upon leaving Harvard, Mead went to Germany for advanced studies in
philosophy. He first went to Leipzig to study with Wilhelm Wundt. It was here
that he was introduced to the concept of “gesture” which he integrated into his
later theories of social psychology. He also went to Berlin and worked with the
eminent American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall. It is believed that he may have
been introduced to the sociological thoughts of Georg Simmel who taught there at
the time. Mead received his doctorate in philosophy and psychology and took a
position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This was an important
university for American intellectuals. His colleagues included Charles H. Cooley
and John Dewey. They soon became intellectual companions. It was at Michigan
that Mead began to study physiological psychology, a field of endeavor that had
interested him ever since he met Stanley Hall in Berlin.
In Chicago, John D.
Rockefeller endowed a new university in 1892. Its new president made a strong
and bold effort to recruit the best intellectual minds from noted eastern colleges.
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His greatest accomplishment was in attracting John Dewey away from the
University of Michigan. In 1893, Mead accepted an invitation by John Dewey to
join him at Chicago in the Department of Philosophy. Mead found himself
teaching a course in social psychology. Many of his great ideas were developed in
this course and many famous scholars were influenced by him, in particular the
philosopher Charles Morris and the many sociologists who were later labeled as
The Chicago School.
There are many myths about George Herbert Mead. He is often cited as
the founder of the Chicago School of Sociology. In actuality, he was not in the
Department of Sociology. That was headed by Albion Small. The concept of
symbolic interactionism was not even known at that time. It was coined later by
one of his students, Herbert Blumer, one of the members of The Chicago School.
Mead did not even consider himself to be a sociologist much less the founder of a
school. He saw himself as an exponent of pragmatism and his personal heroes
were John Dewey and William James. Furthermore, he had great difficulty with
writing. He agonized over putting his ideas down on paper and as a consequence
only those who had the opportunity of being in his lectures benefited from his
ideas. His most influential book, Mind, Self and Society, was published in 1934
after his death. So what was it that made Mead a hero among intellectuals? First,
he was at the forefront of the pragmatism movement and he was well respected
for his views in this area.
Second, he introduced numerous ideas in his classes in social psychology
that would have strong ramifications for social theory. He argued against the
concept of a Monad that Leibniz espoused in his book, Monadologie. Mead did
not see individuals as isolated units of consciousness. He saw them as individuals
who are related through society. Individuals, Mead argued, are born into a certain
nationality, located at a certain geographical region, and born into a given family.
Men are born into social structures they did not create. They live in institutions
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and a social order that they did not make. They are born with the limitations of
language, codes, customs, and laws. They do not exist as isolated individuals.
They are in society and society exists in their minds.
Third, Mead made an important distinction between “I” and “me.” The
former is the response of an individual to others. It is the psychological self. The
latter is the response of others to the individual. It is the social self. What appears
in consciousness is always the self as an object, as a “me.” Individuals belong to a
social structure, a social order. When a child learns to say “me” he has imported
that social order into his own mind. He becomes a social being.
Fourth, Mead was one of the leading scholars in the study of
consciousness. He linked the genesis of consciousness to the creation of the
social self. When children play, they take on roles. At first they consider these
roles as a form of play. It is only later in life that they mature and begin to create
these roles in their imagination. It is at this time that they adopt these roles by
acting them out. A child who plays doctor will create this role as a career in his
mind and will become a doctor.
Mead feels that human communication is
possible only when the symbol that one arouses in him is aroused in others. Here
are the seeds of Blumer’s symbolic interactionism.
Fifth, Mead created the concept of “role-taking.”
This idea is very
common in current studies of conversational analysis and ethnomethodology, but
it was an established concept that he shared with his students in his classes on
social psychology. Related to this idea of role taking is the “generalized other.”
One must understand the role of the other in order to interact with them. Role
taking is important because a person sees himself as an individual only because of
his relationship to others and their roles.
Sixth, Mead had an interesting concept of the mind. He argued that
consciousness is an inner discourse carried on by public means. In other words,
inner experiences are made possible through symbolic interaction, viz., language
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and gesture. Mead was careful to note that his sociology was objective (social
objectivism). He did not want to reconstruct the world only through introspection
as Wundt did in Germany and Cooley did in America.
Seventh, Mead advanced the concept of the self not as a substance, but as
a process. It is part of a larger social process in which interactions with others are
rehearsed by an individual and internalized. Language plays an important role in
this process of internalization.
Finally, Mead is noted for his concept of “gestures.” It appears that he
derived this concept either directly or indirectly from Georg Simmel in Germany
while he was a student in Berlin. He saw in gesture the key mechanism through
which social acts take place. He made a distinction between those gestures that
were nonsignificant and those that were significant. The former was an
unconscious act, the latter was fully conscious. Human thought arises when there
are symbols: language, vocal gestures, and nonverbal gestures. These become
significant when a person can visualize his own performance. In this concept, one
finds the seeds of Erving Goffman’s work on the presentation of self in everyday
life.
Individuals, Mead argued, are born into a certain nationality, located at a
certain geographical region, and born into a given family. Men are born into
social structures they did not create. They live in institutions and a social
order that they did not make. They are born with the limitations of language,
codes, customs, and laws. They do not exist as isolated individuals. They
are in society and society exists in their minds.
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CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Another noted intellectual who was associated with the Chicago School
was Charles Cooley. He was born near the Ann Arbor campus of the University
of Michigan. He came from a prominent family. His father was a noted lawyer
who was eventually elected to the Supreme Court of Michigan. Charles Horton
Cooley attended this famous university in Michigan and graduated in engineering.
He was not dedicated to this engineering career and continued to search for his
forte. One of the topics that continued to interest him was the subject of the self.
He returned to graduate school to work in the areas of political economy and
sociology. He was granted a doctorate in 1894. His dissertation topic was on a
theory of transportation and human ecology.
As noted earlier, Cooley was
fascinated by the topic of the self and that this interest may have been
autobiographical in nature. Cooley, it should be noted, suffered from a variety of
real and psychosomatic ailments in his youth. He was shy and had a speech
impediment. He had few friends and was fond of being alone immersed in a
book. This may have been the reason that he was known to shun controversy and
he avoided conflicts.
One of the most important concepts that Cooley developed was the
“looking glass-self.” He wanted to dwell on the reflected character of the self.
“Each to each a looking-glass, reflects the other that doth pass.” He noted that
when a person sees his face, figure, and dress in the mirror, he is interested in the
image because it is his own. One creates an image of how one looks in the eyes of
another, a looking-glass self. He went on to add that there are three principal
elements in this concept. First, one imagines how he appears to others. Next, he
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is concerned with their judgment of his own appearance. Finally, he is aware of
his own feelings of pride or mortification.
Another contribution by Cooley was his model of society as an organism.
“Self and society,” he said, “are twin-born.” What he means by this is that the self
and society are linked by an unbreakable bond. This is why he speaks of society
as an organism. His analogy is not with biology, but with a holistic society. He
wanted to stress the fact that there are systemic interrelations between all social
processes. “Our life,” he stated, “is all one human whole … if we cut it up it dies
in the process.” Why was he so adamant about making this point? The answer
lies in his reaction to the utilitarian individualism of Herbert Spencer, the Social
Darwinist. Hence, he placed an emphasis on the wholeness of human life.
The concept of the “primary group” is another contribution that Cooley
made to sociology. He wrote about peer groups and gangs long before the current
fixation on this topic. He noted that a primary group is based on harmony and
love and these passions play a socializing role in the creation of a primary group.
Even when there is competition in such groups, they tend to relate to a common
discipline of the spirit. Such groups are built upon a diffuse solidarity of its
members and not upon an exchange for services or for benefits. Whereas Mead
spoke of the “I” and the “me” in social theory, Cooley focused on the “we.” Given
the fact that Cooley often faced isolation as a child, it appears that he was seeking
an ideal world, one that he never had in which individuals were able to share a
group bonding, the inclusive “we.” What is important about this concept of the
primary group is that it is not limited to gangs. It can be the communal bonding
of a whole village. Furthermore, Cooley’s views provided an interested contrast
with those of Durkheim who viewed society as an object in the external world.
Cooley views society as part of the individual self.
Independently of Max Weber, Cooley provided arguments for the study of
human actions as being meaningful. Human actions are concerned with meaning
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and human actors attribute them to situations they are in. Social knowledge is
developed from contact with other human beings. Even public opinions, he noted,
result from interaction. Finally, it should be noted that even though Cooley was
not at the University of Chicago, his concepts of the social self were concomitant
with theirs. Hence, he is characteristically associated with that group.
WILLIAM ISAAC THOMAS
Another scholar that was a member of the Chicago School was William
Thomas. He was born in a farming community in Virginia. When he was in
college, he matriculated in literature and the classics at the University of
Tennessee. He was an excellent student and won many honors. He was impressed
by German scholarship and vowed to go to Germany to study amidst the great
intellectuals who gathered there in Leipzig and Berlin. In the meanwhile, he
worked on his Greek, Latin, German, and French. After graduating, he stayed on
at the same campus and taught classes. He finally obtained a leave of absence
and spent a year at Berlin and G ttingen. His interests changed from literature to

ethnography and he immersed himself in Wilhelm Wundt’s folk psychology
(Vlkerpsychologie). He also took courses in old French and old German and
continued to study Greek culture under a famous German scholar, Wiliamowitz.
Upon his return to the United States, he took a teaching position as a professor of
English at Oberlin.
He received news of the creation and opening of a first American
Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He gave up his teaching at
Oberlin and enrolled for graduate studies in Chicago. He completed his doctorate
in 1900 and was retained there as a professor. What Thomas did in Chicago was
phenomenal. He began to work with the Polish communities in the area. He
learned the language and did ethnographic research based on letters, interviews,
and other forms of correspondence (the life-history method). The Poles were the
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largest and most visible ethnic group in the area and he became fully aware of
their many social problems. He took a trip to Poland in 1913 and met Florian
Znaniecki, a young philosopher who was committed to the idea of Polish
nationalism. Znaniecki was an expert in Polish peasant life and Thomas worked
with him to research this topic which eventually resulted in a co-authored book,
The Polish Peasant in Europe and in America. After his research in Poland,
Thomas returned to Chicago.
A year later, Germany invaded Poland and
Znaniecki also left Poland for Chicago.
The joint research of Thomas and Znaniecki was a landmark publication
(Thomas, 1923). It was essentially concerned with issues of ethnic identity and
ethnic subcultures. What was unique about this work is that it attempted to go
beyond the purely individualistic or subjective approach to sociology. It included
a generalized and objectivistic interpretation of social life, and an attempt to reject
a purely positivistic approach to social data. The book provided an objective
interpretation of cultural values and how they are embodied within institutions.
Social values for Thomas were concomitant with the notion of “cultural reality.”
These authors investigated the various social forces that operate during a time of
social change. In a sense, their findings were close to what Marx said — people
make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please.
They are
constrained by the various social forces that they encounter.
Another contribution by Thomas was his model of ideal types. He created
a suggestive typology of human actors. Some people were Philistines who are
always conformists and who are against social change. Their polar opposites were
the Bohemians who do not want to conform to any system that society offers
them. The third group consisted of Creative men. These were not individuals who
simply followed tradition, nor did they find themselves being overly rebellious
about their society. Thomas considered these three types to be social ideals. What
he meant by this is that people belong to one or more of these types. He used this
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nomenclature, however, to argue for a point — Philistines and Bohemians destroy
society and only the Creative men can save a society. Another reason why he
created these ideal types was to counteract the behaviorist claims about human
nature that was being promulgated by John B. Watson, the famous industrial
psychologist.
Another important contribution that Thomas made was that of “situational
analysis.” Lower animals have no choice but to obey stimulation with a response.
Higher animals such as humans, however, have the power of refusing to obey
stimuli.
Evidently, he assumed that lower animals only possess involuntary
autonomic systems. They are able to examine and define the situations that they
are in and respond accordingly. This concept was another attempt to counter the
radical behaviorism of Watson and his followers. People do not respond to the
objective features of a situation, but to the meanings that the situation has for
them. His example of defining the situation involves a woman who decides to
wear a certain dress. Men may define her in terms of her sexual attractiveness,
but she only wanted to focus attention on the design or the color of the clothes.
Similarly, a child may view a teddy bear as a protective talisman, but it is only a
toy to the adult. Both have defined the context of the situation in different ways.
One final note on William Isaac Thomas should be made. The Chicago
Tribune newspaper attacked him in 1918 because they were perturbed by his socalled “unsound ideas.” They had Thomas arrested by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation on an alleged violation of the Mann Act. The President of the
University of Chicago had him dismissed and offered no explanation. His career
was shattered at age 55 and he was never more to receive a permanent position at
a university. The University of Chicago Press broke its contract with Thomas and
refused to publish his books. The Carnegie Foundation had earlier commissioned
him to write several volumes in their Americanization Series and published his
work under the names of Robert Park and H. Miller, who were minor co-authors.
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Thomas moved to New York and lectured at the New School for Social Research.
Pitirim Sorokin also offered him visiting lectureships to Harvard. What the
Chicago Tribune did under an abuse of power could not be undone. Thomas was
an unconventional scholar. He is in excellent company along with Thorstein
Veblen, Charles Bear, and Harold Laski.
ROBERT EZRA PARK
Another person associated with the Chicago School is Robert Park. He
was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Minnesota at an early age. Upon his
completion of studies at the University of Minnesota, he transferred to the
University of Michigan.
He was a student of John Dewey but the famous
philosopher was not the driving force in his life. Dewey introduced him to
Franklin Ford, a newspaperman who had a pet theory that stock prices can be
shown to react to public opinion. Park was fascinated by Ford and his idea, and,
not surprisingly, he also became a newspaperman. What is important about this
anecdote is that Park came to view the city as a living laboratory for the study of
the new urban man. This new kind of city dweller, he noted, was the product of
any industrial society.
Park decided that he needed to continue his academic studies and entered
Harvard to study philosophy with Royce and James. He also studied psychology
under Muensterberg. Upon completing his M.A., Park went to Germany for
further studies and was greatly influenced by Georg Simmel and B. Kistiakowsi, a
Russian sociologist. He wrote his dissertation under Windelband and returned to
Harvard to teach.
Robert Park was an activist.
When he was a student at Harvard he
remembered an essay by William James that deeply impressed him. James spoke
about the problems that blind people experience and the difficulties that they face
in attributing meaning in their lives and others. When Park heard this he
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immediately thought of the social problems of the Blacks in America. At some
point in his life, he met Booker T. Washington, the President of Tuskegee
Institute, and joined forces with him. He became the informal secretary to the
famous President and even traveled with him on research trips to Europe. They
co-authored a book (Washington, Park, and St. Clair Drake, 1912), The Man
Farthest Down. They worked together for nine years and spent seven winters
teaching at the Tuskegee Institute.
Park said that he learned more from
Washington than from any of his teachers.
In 1914, Park joined the Sociology Department at the University of
Chicago. He loved Chicago because he loved mega-cities. He saw the city as a
social organism and spent much time investigating the nooks and alleys of the
Second City. Park combined his newspaper experiences with those of sociology.
His commitment to social issues never waned, and he was the first President of
the Chicago Urban League. He was also an excellent teacher and had many
famous students such as Herbert Blumer, E. Franklin Frazier, and Robert
Redfield.
Park noted that sociology was rich in theory but weak in working
concepts. When his students proposed a research project, he would always ask
them why. He urged them to arrive at a system of classification and a frame of
reference upon which to do their research. One needs to know the components of
a system, identify them, and describe them. In this way, his students were able to
arrive at systematic explorations of their social projects.
There are four major social processes outlined by Ezra Park that merit
serious
sociological
investigation.
These
are
competition,
conflict,
accommodation, and assimilation. Competition is a universal phenomenon, which
he defines as interaction without contact. When people compete, they do not
mentally make contact with their enemies. For this reason, competition is
impersonal. It is only when minds meet that social contact can be said to exist.
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At this moment, competition turns into conflict. Competition is impersonal while
conflict is personal. Accommodation occurs when there is a cessation of conflict.
This occurs when matters of status and power are temporarily resolved. What this
means is that the conflict may still be latent if the temporary adjustments between
parties fail for any reason. The final social process is that of assimilation. This is
a process in which persons or groups of persons acquire the memories, sentiments,
or attitudes of others. This can be a rather long and slow process and it is almost
always takes place within individuals rather than in groups. Park has much to say
about these processes in relationship to social control. Society, he argues, is a
control organization. Its function is to organize individuals, integrate them, and
direct their energies. It is comparable in many ways to a corporate society. Stable
societies exist when social control leads to accommodation where people are
appeased, images are saved, and wrong parties are comforted. The goal of society
is not to allow conflicts to arise. Park also envisioned social change in terms of
these four processes. He notes that social change takes place in three steps: from
unrest to social movements and to accommodation, a kind of reconstructed of
social order. Park begins his study of social change by looking at crowds and their
behaviors. A crowd, he notes, consists of agents in a state of unrest. It should be
noted that Le Bon, the French social psychologist wrote several tomes on crowds.
Park embellishes on this research by showing how crowds can be marshaled into
social movements. He goes far beyond the charismatic leader theory of Le Bon.
Such rudimentary social formation has no tradition.
It has no symbols,
ceremonies, rites, or rituals. It has no obligations. It creates no loyalties. They
have no social purpose until they accept a leader among themselves who will
impose social control and transform the crowd into his own audience. If any
accommodation can be met between opposing groups, it will be through the
negotiations of their own chosen leader.
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“Distance” is derived from Latin through French [di two + stance stand]. It
means to stand at two different places at the same time. When one measures
distance, one measures between two standing points, here and there. The
concept of “social distance” has this meaning. The psychological ego (the “I)
looks at the social self (“me”) and comes to the realization that the individual
has two selves. They are not the same person. They stand apart from each
other.
Park has much to say about social distance. This is a concept that he
derived from Simmel and he finds it to be an important part of understanding the
differences between racial prejudices and racial antagonisms. He reminds his
readers that the word “prejudice” is not something than can be eradicated. It is
part of what humans do. They prejudge one another. People typify each other and
this is a natural part of being human. Park has noticed that race prejudice and
caste or class prejudice are merely one variety of a species. It has to do with
status or social distance. He notes that such differences occur even without racial
differences as in the case of white collar and blue collar workers. Where racial
antagonism came into play and results in conflict, he argues, is when a group does
not want to be limited to a lower status. He sees these conflicts as harbingers of
social change in racial or social status order. Conflicts like these are avoided by
the creation of new accommodations on behalf of the offended social groups.
Some social economists have argued that the concept of a middle class is such a
device. They note that most countries have only two classes: the rich and the poor.
In America, the rich make up 4% of the population. They own over 90% of all of
the wealth. By their standards, everyone else is poor. To avoid a conflict, the
concept of the middle class was created. They feel superior to the poor and they
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have the illusion that they are rich. They have been prejudged but they do not
know it. They have been accommodated by the system of class allocation.
“Prejudice” and “prejudge” have the same etymological roots. No one is
neutral and so no one is able to go through life without judging others in
terms of their own interests, desires, fears, and hopes. The problem comes
about when a prejudice turns into a stereotype. This word was coined by
Walter Lippman to mirror the metal type upon which newspapers were
printed. This type was called a stereotype and all of the newspapers or
printed books were exact copies of this original type. Stereotypes occur in
society when a group has a vocal or power political force to counteract the
judgments of others. All social movements have to do with removing
stereotypes. None will ever get rid of prejudices, natural acts of typification.
In English, prejudice has a bad connotation. In German, however, it does
not. One must consider that “a good reputation, a nice person, etc.” are also
forms of prejudging.
There is one final point to mention with regard to Robert Ezra Park and it has to
do with his concept of the “Biotic Order” and social order. He draws on the notion
of the Darwinian “web of life” as a biotic order. This is an order that is common
to animals and plants.
They form a community and live in a symbiotic
relationship with each other. More will be said about this analogy with
evolutionary biology in the chapter on Sociobiology.
THE REJECTION OF POSITIVISTIC METHODOLOGY
There is a common thread among the members of the Chicago School of
Sociology. Many of its scholars have rejected aspects of scientific positivism, the
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Symbolic Interactionists were not the first to advocate this position. It is not
because they are against science, but because they do not believe that the scientific
method can adequately explain what it means to be human. August Comte is
directly associated with the rise of positivism. He is not only known as the father
of sociology, but he was also a part of an intellectual group of scientists in Paris
who wanted to use physics as a model for all scientific inquiry. Under this view,
sociology became not the study of people, but the study of social facts (faits
sociaux).
He wanted to quantify the human experience and express this
information as factual data. By way of contrast, Wilhelm Dilthey, a German
philosopher, was one of the first to react strongly to the group at the l’école
polytechnique de Paris and their school of positivism. He argued that history
would provide a better model for the study of human beings and their symbolic
worlds. Dilthey called his model die Geisteswissenshaft and he opposed it to the
model of positivism (die Naturwissenschaft). The reason why history proved to
be a better model for the study of human beings, he argued, is because historical
events are unique. They cannot be predicted. History deals with retrodiction, the
explanation of events after the fact of their occurrences. Consequently, there are
no general laws underlying historical forces. He argued against the imposition of
positivism as a model for studying human beings. Such a model cannot deal with
the arena of human affairs.
Models of Knowledge
(Wissenshaften)
Exemplar
Disciplines of Knowledge
Natural Sciences
Human Sciences
(Naturwissenschaften)
(Geisteswissenshaften)
Physics
History
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Nature of Evidence
Exemplification of a general
law
Prediction, forecasting of
future patterned events
Trend Analysis
Process of
Comprehension
Search for an explanation
(Erklärung)
Particular case study locked
in time and space
Retrodiction, explaining
what happened after the
event
Search for understanding
(Verstehen)
This dichotomy between these models of science is not limited to research
methodology within the natural sciences and the social sciences. This dichotomy
can also be found within most disciplines and their research paradigms.
ACADEMIC
DISCIPLINE
Psychology
Sociology
Linguistics
Models of Science among Academic Disciplines
POSITIVISTIC MODEL
HUMANISTIC MODEL
Clinical Psychology
Counseling, Educational
Psychology
Statistical
Sociological Sociology of Knowledge
Analysis
Symbolic Interactionism
Ethnomethodology
Existential Sociology
Formal Linguistics
Sociology of Language
Sociolinguistics
Anthropological Linguistics
Language Education
Ethnomethodology
At this point, it should be noted that the concept of science (Latin:
scientia) means a “body of knowledge.” In German, wissenschaft (science) still
retains
that
meaning.
Hence,
a
decent
interpretation
of
Dilthey’s
Geisteswissenschaften is “the human sciences.” It is the study of human beings.
Later, after the turn of the century, “the human sciences” was no longer used as a
term. It was renamed. The current term is “the humanities.” It is important to
note that only in French-speaking and in English-speaking countries does
“science” imply “natural science.” This nomenclature attempts to deny the fact
that the humanities are a kind of science. Richard Brown (1977) deals with this
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issue in his theory of cognitive aesthetics in his book on A Poetics for Sociology.
Consequently, Symbolic Interactionists also reject the scientific model because
they do not want to limit their research to the cause and effect models of the
natural sciences. Nor do they want to deny the study of particulars in the search
for general laws or universal claims. They do not want to limit the study of
sociology to quantification at the expense of qualitative information and insights
about human behavior. Hence, they favor the study of the social world from the
concrete and tangible perspective of human beings. They want to understand the
everyday reality that human beings perceive and they want to understand and
describe how human beings deal with their social worlds.
MORE ON THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
Although many of these ideas can be found in the pragmatic thinking of
the mathematician and semioticist Charles Sanders Peirce, and in the individual
psychology of William James, the person who is characteristically associated with
this model is George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). It was Mead who created the
concept of the social self. He noted that children use the word “I” when referring
to themselves. However, as they become socialized, they also learn to identify
their social selves, “me.” Mead saw life as a process in which people change and
take on many different social selves in their biographical histories. Later, Goffman
was to refer to these social selves as persona (Greek: persona “masks.”). The
concept of the social self will play a major role in the dramaturgical model of
sociology.
Nevertheless, Mead was a senior professor at the University of
Chicago and he attracted many other sociologists who shared his views of the
social self. It was Mead who argued that language is important for sociology
because it is the medium through which all knowledge is expressed. Mead argued
for a consensual social order. He believed that people agree to be social and
participate in shared meanings. It was this inter-subjective act that enabled them
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to establish social order. He wanted to argue that humans differ from animals
because of language and he enlisted the assistance of John Dewey in developing
the idea that human beings find “significant symbols” in language and that they
interact through these symbols. For example, as children learn to speak, they
employ these significant symbols and the meanings and values of their entire
culture are transmitted through language.
The early works of John Dewey profess Hegelian beliefs. He advocated the
holistic and organic doctrines of Hegel. Later, he came to realize that all of
life is not homogeneous, nor is it unified. He soon became involved in
pursuing the world of the individual and his personal experiences. He argued
that people operate on certain “warranted assertions.” They hold on to these
assertions as long as they are useful to them. When they are occasioned by
doubt or through conflict, they are reformulated. When Dewey was at the
University of Michigan in 1884-1894, he met George Herbert Mead and was
influenced by the idea of the social self. Dewey argued that no discussion of
human beings should exclude the social world of the individual. It was
Dewey who argued that what distinguishes human from animals is language.
Both scholars saw language as consisting of significant symbols. They also
shared a similar view of the human mind. For them, it was processual and
not structural. The mind was a function, not a thing.
Mead also worked with William James and adopted the pragmatic axiom that the
function of meaning is always a practical one.
William James (1890) was
grounded in classical British empiricism and become very interested in
developing the field of individual psychology.
He was concerned with the
distinctiveness of the experiences of individuals. He was concerned with the
subjectivity of the social world and realized that humans differ from the physical
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119
world because they create objects of meaning in their minds. If these ideas work,
they are deemed to be good. Hence, the pragmatism of James was based on a
practical theory of truth.
He argued that beliefs function as truths and he
differentiated subjective truth from objective truth.
James wrote about an
“awareness of being” and “having a self.” In this regard, he agreed with Mead on
the concept of the social self. He went on to argue that a man has many social
selves but singled out “identity” as a permanently lodged inner self.
Another influence on Mead was Charles Sanders Peirce.
He had
developed a general theory of signs, semiotics. He proposed that communication
between people was based on signs.
Types of
Charles Sanders Peirce and his theory of Semiotics,
the study of sign systems
Indexical These are pointing signs. They are non-verbal
Signs
expressions of meaning. Verbally, they exist as
demonstrative signs: this, that, these, those, here,
there, yonder, etc.
Iconic
Icons are picture and are based on relationships
between a source and a target. Within this model,
metaphors function as icons. They have to do with
relational thinking.
Symbolic
These are conventional signs that are inherited from
social traditions or created social to symbolize new
ideas, meanings, or forms.
Comment
Mead made use of indices in the form of gestures and symbols as
social conventions. Recent work in cognitive linguistics focus
on iconic signs such as metaphor and the other major figures of
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speech. All of these involve the use of relational thinking and
their cognitive blends.
People relate to one another through signs. He shared with Mead the
dictum that beliefs are important, but he held a disparate view with regard to the
differences between beliefs and feelings. For this reason, he created the “doubtbelief theory of inquiry. He argued that people wanted to establish habits and that
once these habits were thoroughly ingrained, they would become established as
beliefs.
When these beliefs functioned successfully, they would produce a
satisfied, stable, pleasant state within the individual. If they were not functional,
they produced discomfort and required change in the form of a new habits or
beliefs.
THE FIRST GENERATION OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISTS
Symbolic interactionism grew out of the Chicago School of Sociology and
eventually emerged as a separate system of thought. Many of the avatars of this
movement set down the foundations of this discipline. One of the early
Interactionists was Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929). He argued that the locus
of reality is situated within the individual’s mind. Current models of social
psychology are based on this insight. Psychology studies individuals; sociology
studies groups.
Social psychology, on the other hand, believes that each
individual has a concept of social groups internalized within his psyche. Each
individual has a social self. The social locus of reality is situated in the mind of
the individual. Hence, these scholars concur with Cooley (1902) that children
around the age of two have a strong “we feeling,” a strong social self. They do
possess a sense of others. They make presentations of self to others, in which the
“I” is the actor in the situation. Cooley was also sensitive to the role of emotion in
human behavior and he argued that people have a strong sense of others inner
Symbolic Interactionism
moods.
121
He referred to this understanding of others as “sympathetic
introspection.”
In particular, they emotionally experience the evaluations of
others and attempt to accommodate themselves to the emotions of others. As
noted earlier, Cooley called this “the looking glass self.” Cooley noted that the
people who immediately surround a child after birth constitute the “primary
groups” for that infant. They play a major role in the construction of the social
self of that child because they provide the “primary relationships” that occur in the
domestic environment of that child, the sense of “we-feeling.” As the child learns
to secure more control of his environment, he develops a sense of “I-feeling.” It
was this concept of child development that led Cooley to postulate “the looking
glass self.” Children are born into a social world and that world plays a major role
in shaping their concepts of self, mind, and society.
William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) was also part of the Chicago School of
Sociology. He shared a belief with Cooley that children develop a sense of self
through social interaction. The unique contribution of Thomas to the field of
sociology can be found in his concept of the Definition of the Situation. He argued
that if people define situations as real, then the consequences of this situation is
“real” for them. The definition of a situation is important because it provides
insight into how people possess unique reactions and evaluations to events and are
colored by those projections. How one defines a situation determines how he will
filter that experience. Eventually, other related concepts to the definition of the
situation would emerge in the literature of Symbolic Interactions. The most
important of these modifications of his theory of the definition of the situation can
be found in the concept of “conversational images.”
People construct
conversational images of others when communicating with them. When they talk
to others, they address the images that they have created of others. They do not
actually talk to each other. They talk to the images that they have of the other
person. These conversational images may last for a lifetime. The reason for this
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is simply that when one defines a situation, he must be able to maintain this social
construction of reality.
Often this constructed image of the other person is
renewed. This attempt to maintain the status quo is called reality maintenance.
HERBERT BLUMER AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
The name of Herbert Blumer is also associated with the theory of symbolic
interactionism. He is the originator of that term. He defined this discipline as a
down-to-earth approach to the scientific study of human group life and human
conduct. He found this world of group life and human conduct is a natural area
for empirical research. His new discipline rests on three premises:

Human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that those
things have for them. Blumer felt that this area of investigation was largely
ignored by others within the Chicago School.

These meanings emerge from the interaction of individuals with others. Here
he is arguing against the approach that claims an innate relationship of a
meaning to a thing. It is also against the approach that attributes of meaning
merely reside in the mind. They are the result of social interaction.

Human beings are hermeneutic entities who interpret their social interactions
with others and with their physical environments. Interpretation plays a major
role in the construction of meaning. In many ways, this model appears to be
concomitant with current models of cognitive linguistics in which meanings
are evoked within the human mind to lexical events (Strauss and Quinn,
1997).
In Blumer’s model the process involves two stages. First, the
individual must rely on internalized social processes to point out those aspects
of a situation that has meaning for him. After completing this process, he must
interpret the situation. This involves selectivity, verification, suspension of
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123
ideas, regrouping of ideas, and then the transformation of these cognitive
ventures into a meaning that may or may not be directed into action.
Hence, the core principles of Blumer’s theory are language, meaning and thought.
According to the first principle, human beings act towards persons, events, and
things because they have meaning for them. Human interaction is meaningful.
According to the second principle, it is language that gives human beings the
symbolic instrument that enables them to negotiate meanings through symbols.
Finally, in accordance with the third principal, it is thought that modifies an
person’s interpretation of symbols.
Thought is a language-based mental
conversation. It involves role-taking, imagination (imaginary rehearsal), and
participation in different mental points of view.
A major contribution to the field is the concept of the ParticipantObserver.
The Observers
(Outsiders)
The Boundary
The Participants
(Insiders)
A sociologist enters into a community as an observer.
When he is in this
framework, he arrives at an understanding of the group from a distance. If one
wants to study the everyday life of the group, he must become a participant in
their affairs. It is at this level that he is able to gain a deeper understanding of the
more esoteric forms of their life and social meanings. When one enters into
another social group, he encounters others in face-to-face interaction.
Blumer
argues that face-to-face communication is basic and needed in field work because
it enables the observer to more fully understand how other participants function in
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everyday life. When he is able to interpret and anticipate the behavior of others,
he assumes the role of a participant. He is able to entitle objects with the correct
symbolic labels and participate in the social world of these participants. He is
able to define the context of a situation as a full participant. He is able to
negotiate and reconstruct meanings the way that they do. At this point, the
observer becomes a participant. One may note that there is a boundary that
separates the observer from the participants. Can this barrier be transcended?
Blumer assumes that it can be transcended. Is this an illusion? Obviously there
are many events taking place among participants that will not be understood by
itinerant observers.
If they enter into another culture and reside among the
participants, at what point do they themselves become participants and lose their
observer status? Furthermore, when they lose their observer status, can they
return to that privileged position and regain social distance with the previous
experiences as participants in an event? These are concerns that need to be
addressed within the context of the observer-participant paradigm.
There are those who contend that one cannot really become an insider
because he is always constrained by observer status. He knows that he is an
outsider with a different value system, a different set of mores, and disparate
social expectations. When one crosses the invisible dividing line between
the observer and the participant, he remains at the edges of the group he is
investigating. He is not a full participant. The solution to this problem, it
appears, is to train participants to become observers of their own groups.
The problem with this approach is that there are numerous examples of
observers who have become participants in another culture and who have
returned to their native cultures as ambassadors of cross-cultural knowledge.
Blumer’s gave his social research a different focus from that of Mead.
He
emphasized the importance of shared meanings and how they are negotiated
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125
during social interaction. He also considered field work to be an important part of
sociological training and this is evidenced in his instance that his social observers
become participants in the groups that they were investigating.
Another
difference between Blumer and Mead had to do with the definition of culture. For
Blumer, culture is what people do. It is their patterns of behavior. These social
structures are formed from their interpersonal relationships with others in
everyday life. As noted earlier, when people interact, they must interpret and
anticipate the actions and behavior of others. These behaviors are symbolic and
people learn to interact with each other through these symbols (symbolic
interaction). As for the objective world, Blumer noted that people react towards
things on the basis of the meanings that these things have for them. These
meanings, it should be noted, are derived from social interactions with others and
this means that they have emerged from these interactions as social products.
The concept of the self was greatly expanded in Blumer’s social model. Human
beings are actors, he noted. They participate in social dramas and internalize
these roles. When they reflect on these roles, they learn to use them to understand
everyday life. They become self-indicators. They assist one in maintaining social
stability.
There were some members of the Chicago School who modified the work
of Blumer and created their own school of thought. One of these was Manfred
Kuhn and his Iowa School.
He founded a separate school which differed
substantially from the Chicago School. It differed in its methodology. Kuhn
wanted to make his model more empirical and he emphasized the significance of
testing social generalization.
This empirical model became known as “self-
theory.” Kuhn, it should be noted, was not a student of Blumer. He was a student
of Kimball Young, a graduate of the Chicago School who trained by Mead,
Thomas, and Sapir (the linguist). Kuhn believed that the structure of an entire
culture could be contained within its language. Nevertheless, Kuhn studied with
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Young at the University of Wisconsin and then left for Iowa where he created his
own school with its emphasis on the study of the “self” within an empirical
framework. Kuhn hoped to create generic laws which would extend to all humans
in different situations. There were several innovations to come out of the Iowa
School. One of these was the Twenty Statements Test and this was intended to
replace traditional questionnaires. Another modification was the creation of the
concept of the “Institutional Other.” This entity constitutes a set of persons that
the individual considers to be truly meaningful. Such people provide information
about how one feels about his goals, attitudes, and aspirations in life. These
people assist the individual, he noted, in internalizing their choices in life. Kuhn
felt that the traditional concept of the “Significant Other” did not really fully
dictate the image people have of themselves.
Another breach with traditional Symbolic Interactionism came from
Erving Goffman who created a dramaturgical model of social interaction. What
made this model different was the claim by Goffman that life is hostile. Blumer
and Mead both felt that life was a social consensus and that people worked
together. Goffman argued to the contrary. He wrote about all aspects of life as a
social theory, but he envisioned hostile audiences, severe critics, empty selves,
social collusions and conspiracies. Goffman was concerned with the presentation
of self in everyday life. People wore social masks. In his early work, he believed
that one’s identity was fully social. When one took off the social mask, he found
an empty face. Later, Goffman modified his theory to include the significance of
the individual in social interaction. At this stage of his work, when one took off
the social mask, he found a human face behind that mask. One has to protect that
face from society through various theatrical games, rituals, and other kinds of
stage management. One is always performing (front stage) and can only take of
his mask when he is no longer required to perform (back stage). Goffman’s
model is important for those who study narcissistic trends in society, or the
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psychopathology of shame cultures. People, he noted, are playwrights. They
write their own social scripts in life. Next, they become actors in their own social
dramas by living out these scripts. As actors, they are also aware that their
performances are being judged by critics and carping audiences. The actor must
win their approval. Finally, Goffman wrote about the stage properties. He was
well aware of how people stage their entrance by means of their nonverbal
expressions of self: their cars as status symbols, their choice of clothes as symbols
of a life-style, their body postures as expressions of self-confidence, and a
plethora of other social scenes that they have created to enhance their social
performance in the stage of life.
SOCIAL ROLES AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
The study of the self is an important part of symbolic interactionism. The
reason for this is readily understood.
People develop a sense of self from
interacting with others. As noted earlier, this happens in a child after he first
develops the concept of “I.” and comes to recognize his own social self as “me.”
It is this self-concept that sustains that child throughout his adult life. He will
learn to add new roles to his behavior and expand his understanding of his social
self. He will come to wear many social masks or personae. Most of these social
masks will be developed in highly contextualized situations. They are socially
contained and a person will learn to employ one role at work, another at home,
and many other diverse roles for other social situations. These roles will create
horizons for the individual. How he sees himself will determine what he will
attempt to do with his own life. If he feels that he is not talented in certain
cognitive tasks, he will avoid them. The information that he carries within him
will make it possible for him to recognize and define the social situations around
him. He will perceive reality from a certain perspective and he may never attempt
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to expand his horizons through new experience nor expand his understanding of
life through greater knowledge. His sense of self will dictate his consciousness.
He may limit his symbolic interaction with others.
Symbols provide a powerful code for representing and dealing with the
world of objects and events. Events take place and they are reported to others as
representations. Many of these are highly abstract. Similarly, people find things
to be important and they relate this information to others in general terms. What
is most important about these symbols is that they are social; they provide the
basis for interacting with others.
Language is important to Symbolic
Interactionists because people use language to socially interact with each other.
Language becomes a system of social symbols. It provides the medium for
symbolic interaction. It enables one individual to share his own mental states with
others. It is through language that people are able to designate things, refer to
them, or act towards things. But human beings do not live in a world of physical
things. They live in a world of mental objects. They respond to objects that have
social significance. Objects can be endowed with goals, purposes, and values;
things cannot.
SOCIOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
The sociology of everyday life is an orientation concerned with people
interacting in concrete situations. Consequently, it involves the study of how
language is experienced, how things, events, and concepts are observed through
language, how things and events are described as they occur, how they are
analyzed through language after their occurrence, and finally how people
communicate with each other in situations. This model treats language as the
medium for social interaction.
Experiencing the Language of the Inner Self
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Words take on special meaning when they become as part of one’s own
experience. Hence, the slogan: “You are what you experience.” There is a field
of neurolinguistic research which measures the emotional and intellectual
responses to lexical items. This research is called the Evoked Potential Response.
What is important about this research is that it proves that people differ
emotionally upon hearing the same word. This claim is not unusual. For example,
anyone who has experienced rape will not only react differently to that term, but
will also relive the nightmare of that experience. The word and its implications
will take on a special meaning for that individual. Similarly, anyone who has
been victimized by the ravaging disease known as cancer will feel differently
about this trauma than those who have not been diagnosed as a cancer patient.
The ordeal changes the person for life. The words commonly associated with this
condition take on a special meaning. Hence, the term “survivor” is no longer
merely a word. It represents survival after an encounter with death. The term
“caretaker” also brings with it many connotations about how people care for each
other. Perhaps the most devastating term is “body shut- down.” This term
represents the final stage of death when the body goes through a gradual loss of
function. Breathing becomes irregular and eventually ends up with the patient
gasping for air, and terminating with the final gasp for breath known as the death
rattle (râle).
Observing Individual Projections of Self
People project different behaviors when dealing with one another. One
could say: “People are what they project.”
Freud introduced the concept of
projection mechanisms in his discussion of sexual fantasies. What he described,
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however, is not limited to sexual fantasies. People do project their ideas, beliefs,
and desires onto others. This is just part of the process of being human. Linguists
who work in the field of nonverbal behavior are very aware of these mechanisms.
One can tell very quickly about a person by examining his home. What kinds of
pictures are on the walls? Are there stone statues in the yard? What kinds of
books does one read? What kind of furniture does one possess? Who are the
heroes and heroines in that person’s life? What kind of music does one listen to?
These patterns do not only occur nonverbally, they also form a part of one’s
speech. It is argued by interviewers that one’s own image of self is projected onto
others during the first four minutes of a conversation or interview. As noted in the
previous chapters, the person being interviewed uses language as a social
barometer. His is revealed by his language. The interviewer uses it as a social
probe. He uses language to assess and control the flow of the conversation (topic
control). One can glean another person’s desires from their speech and nonverbal
behavior. Sociologists have incorporated these concepts into their theoretical
frameworks. One of these concepts is known as the “conversational image.”
When one meets another person for the first time, he constructs a conversational
image of that person. If he is interested in status, he will seek to establish the
other persona in these terms. When he speaks to the other individual, he does not
address the person directly, but speaks to his conversational image of that person.
Couples may be married for decades and not know each other. They continue to
address their images of each other. They have physical closeness, but they lack
intimacy. They really do not know each other. They only know the conversational
images that they have created and project onto one another.
Projecting One’s Personality Type
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Another kind of projection occurs in the context of psychological
differentiation. Most studies of personality focus on the four personality types:
intuitive, sensate, thinking, feeling. The intuitive person always seeks the main
idea, the sensate is lost in details, the thinker organizes his world logically, and
the feeler emotes his way through life. These four types eventually develop into
combinations of types known as temperaments. Each personality type excels in
different cognitive contexts. Universities, for example, favor the temperament of
the intuitive thinker. This means that only eleven percent of Americans will do
well in college. Eighty percent of Americans do not because they have sensationfeeling temperaments. Their parents were mostly thinker sensation temperaments
and this dichotomy has often been referred to as “the generation gap.”. What is
interesting about the study of types and temperaments is that they influence how
one sees the world. Each type has its own listening styles, reading styles, lecture
styles, note-taking styles, etc. The thinker listens for how well a presentation is
organized logically. The intuitive person listens only for the main idea. The
sensation type wants to hear the details. The feeling type listens only if he is in the
mood. Similarly, the thinker reads logically, the feeler reads if he is in the mood,
the sensation type wants to focus on the details and the intuitive type merely wants
to get the main idea and he is bored with the details. When one asks these types
about their vacations, they differ significantly in their description of the event
because each of these types had a different vacation. The intuitive type likes the
idea of going to England or Japan. He is a name dropper. The thinker, on the
other hand, will relate the logical details of his itinerary, of how the trip was
organized. The sensation type will mention those things which he could smell,
touch, taste, and see. He will bring back samples of the sand, the pebbles, and
leaves that he will have pressed into a book. The feeling type will say only that it
was good or bad. He liked a place or he didn’t. He gives no details, he mentions
no itinerary, and has no vested ideas about anything. What is important about
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these studies in psychological differentiation is that they provide insight into the
social psychology of filters.
One sees social reality through these filters.
Information is filtered biologically (a deaf person lives in a different world than
one who hears), socially (people group themselves with others and identify with
their social worlds), psychologically (people differ in cognitive styles and methods
of information-processing), and so on.
Understanding Social Roles
What does it mean to understand the behavior of another person? How
does one know if another person is happy or sad? It is interesting to note that
people learn to interpret these patterns of expression by watching how others act.
Society provides a plethora of social roles. How does an individual learn to teach
when presented with his first class? He learns from his role models, the other
teachers. How does one know how to behave in church? The answer comes from
observing others who are in church. They provide the social roles which need to
be imitated. Some church roles require quietness and solitude; others demand
more overt verbal interaction. Some social roles are created commercially and do
not represent natural roles. Consider the case of how one is to behave upon
retirement. One used to speak about going fishing or hunting every day. Now,
one is concerned with traveling the country in a recreation van. This image is
socially constructed from advertisements manufactured by corporations which sell
recreation vans. Retirees are told that they must first sell their homes and buy a
huge recreation van or camper. Next the person must travel the United States and
share family photos with other happy campers. The man must wear an official
camper hat, preferably one with the van company logo on it. Although this
situation may seem ludicrous, it is not. Television has been telling people how to
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behave for decades. There are now several generations of children who have been
socialized by television situation comedies. Their sense of reality comes not from
those around them, but from the role models that they find on television.
Obviously, commercialized social roles are more prevalent that one would want to
believe.
Describing (native viewpoint of Relevance)
Each society differs in what it considers to be relevant. In Europe before
the turn of the century, one judged others in terms of social class. Being part of
the aristocracy was deemed to be very important. Other patterns of relevance had
to do with the Belles Artes. An aristocrat was a man of letters who read good
literature, enjoyed classical music, and participated in the proper tea parties. What
is interesting about the concept of relevance is that it changes from one social
group to another. Within the same country, each region may have its own code of
what is important behavior. Regionally, for example, one must be taciturn and
stoic to fit the projected self-image of the Oklahoma farmers around the time of
the dust bowl era. Nowadays, most of what is relevant comes from television.
Everything is made into a media event. People’s conversations center on these
mediated events. What people talk about is determined by the philosophy of mass
consumption.
Many things are no longer considered relevant in contemporary
American society. Philosophy, for example, is considered to be uninteresting by
businessmen.
It has no commercial value.
People who love science and
mathematics are tolerated only because there is a prosperous industry behind them
which is financially rewarded from their system of beliefs. There is a gap between
university students who are investing in a career and the general populace who is
presented a prepackaged view of social reality.
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Analyzing (Inferencing)
Why do some behaviors occur and others do not? What psychological
structures are involved?
Sociologists are interested in the study of what is
tangible (perceived and selected) as well as the study of the intangible (not given
saliency or focus). They ask, what part of this tacit knowledge is social or
psychological? How does one reason and infer structures when dealing with overt
knowledge?
Many of these studies have appeared under the rubric of
ethnomethodology
and
they
have
to
do
with
inferencing
structures.
Anthropologists differ from sociologists when looking at what constitutes a
natural kind of logic across different cultures (ethnography = study of culture,
methodology = logic). Anthropologists focus on overt verbal systems. They want
to ascertain the linguistic items that are used and perceived across different
cultures.
Their focus is on language and form (cf. Ethnomusicology,
Ethnolinguistics, Ethnobiology, and Ethnoscience). Sociologists, on the other
hand, use ethnomethodology to study how people see their social worlds through
language and behavior. They are interested in tacit social knowledge. They want
to understand the social construction of reality involved in a situation. What
sociologists want to do is to enter the social realities of the people that they are
observing. They want to experience how these people assemble their world views
and how they organize knowledge.
Communicating About People
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What does it mean to be human? What is the human condition? In order
to understand what it is like to be human, one must deal with concrete events in
the life of an individual. The quantifying of information may provide insight into
trends, but such global statements do not explain human behavior. Hence the
focus on face-to-face interaction is part of this model. It is also known that people
have different views of life with the passage of time. Their internal views of the
world change with their own biographical histories. Hence the focus is on what it
means be human with regard to the inner meanings and feelings (die innere
Sprachformen) people have within the context of a situation, their coping
strategies, the stages of growth that they are experiencing, and the levels of
wisdom that they may have attained about others.
The Study of Natural Situations of Human Behavior
People do not react the same way to a crisis. Hence, sociologists are
interested in how people change according to the situations in which they are in.
People may say one thing, but do another when involved in face-to-face situations.
Imagined situations differ from real situations and events. Sociologists want to
know what people really feel, perceive, think, and do in concrete situations This
is a continuation of the previous section with its focus on what it means to be a
human being. The focus here is on the context of the situations with others. It
allows one to comment on the role of irony in life, and argues that current models
of scientific empiricism are inadequate in explaining human behavior. This is the
continuation of an argument by Wilhelm Dilthey and his Geisteswissenshaft
model during the last century when he noted that the methodology of physics
(positivism) was inadequate as a model for the study of human beings.
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The Study of Common-Sense Meanings and Feelings
Meanings refer to feelings, perceptions, emotions, moods, thoughts, ideas,
beliefs, values, morals. Hence, they refer to the internal experiences of language.
The study of emotions has not been a central part of scientific research. It was
assumed that emotions are the biological consequences of human physiology.
However, the situation is more complex. Feelings are the way that a person
perceives himself. They represent a reaction to the world around the individual.
They have to do with an awareness of life based on one’s needs and expectations.
Feelings have to do with such matters as to be hurt, to feel pride, to have fear, to
doubt, to be happy, and to feel sad. Recently, sociologists and anthropologists
have given more credence to the role of emotions in human behavior. They
realize that feelings and emotions are important because they signal the human
body that it needs to be protected from dangerous events within a person’s life.
They also know that feelings can distort reality and how the world is perceived.
They have also turned their attention to what has been called “common sense.”
Common sense is a term that was used during the Middle Ages. At that time, it
was believed that all sensations to the brain had to go through a common point
which they called “the common sense.” There is no physiological evidence for a
“common sense.” Nevertheless, the term is still being used in English with a
different connotation. Nevertheless, what is common-sense in one culture many
not be common-sense in another as ethnomethodologists have learned. Their
concern is with how this knowledge is acquired socially. How is it constructed
socially? How is it imparted during secondary socialization?
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One cannot predict what will happen in any given situation. The world is
a puzzle that each person assembles differently from others. One may arrive at
statistical information about what people do in different situations, but even
though such statistical information may be interesting, symbolic interactionists
consider such information to be irrelevant with regard to life in personal terms.
The fact that more than 99 percent of airplanes do not crash may be interesting,
but this information is not relevant for the person who is on an airplane which is
about to crash. What a person says he will do and what he actually does under
conditions of stress may differ radically. For example, a woman may be against
abortion, but will behave very differently when she is forced to face that situation
in her own personal life. Similarly, one may think altruistically, but never help
others when they are in need. Life is problematic and what one does in dealing
with the problems of life is the concern of this model of the sociology of
knowledge. One may espouse an ethical system of values, but what one does
ethically under certain conditions and certain situations is the focus of this field of
sociology. It should be noted that the study of Situational Ethics takes a similar
approach to the problems of life.
Recipes for Living
People construct or create meanings and actions for most situations that
emerge in their lives. Some of these constructions are based on personal copingstrategies, noted experiences of others, expected social behavior, etc. Some of
these reactions may even be routine behaviors. Many recipes for living come
from learning and incorporating the social roles of others into one’s life.
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
Therefore, people interpret events and situations in term of their own
personal lives.

People infer and make guesses about strategies for solving problems.

People infer outcomes and expectations; they have goals.
Defining Social Reality
People make up recipes for living based on how they define social reality.
These definitions are imparted onto the individual through primary and secondary
socialization. Therefore, most concrete situations are partially constructed from
recipes for living in a society.

Individuals construct the conversational images of others.

Individuals must define situations.

People must typify and prejudge (type others). They negotiate social
reality.
All of these sociological matters are topics of interest for the student of symbolic
interactionism. The sociology of everyday life has to do with the language of the
inner self, the nature of self projections, the understanding of social roles, the
concern for sociological relevance, the use of inference, common-sense attitudes
and recipes for living.
These topics reflect different aspects of how people
interact with each other through the symbolic use of language.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
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When individuals view themselves from the standpoint of others, this
process is called “role taking” What this means is that an individual considers the
vantage point of others when acting in a social situation. It is a process that he is
conscious of. This role taking may be based on specific individuals who are
actually present (the specific others) or they may be based on an idealized
individual who is not present (the generalized other). What is interesting about
role-taking is that enables people to structure their lives and more fully participate
in the social order. By taking the roles of others, an individual is essentially
making a role for himself. It becomes a part of his self-concept. It is important to
note that socialization is never complete. Some individuals refuse to fully comply
with certain roles. Other individuals may fully comply with a role and in this case
their own personality is hidden behind the role. Such an individual has an empty
self. One of the more interesting questions that social psychologists have asked
about empty roles has to do with the contexts of these roles. One learns a role in a
specific context. The role of the teacher occurs in the classroom. The role of the
mother has to take place in a family setting in which there are children. These
roles become different kinds of personalities which are always kept apart from
each other by means of the contexts in which they occur. Occasionally, one may
have a role conflict.
When the principal of a school has to address the
delinquency of his own child at the institution in which he works, he finds himself
being both a parent and a principal. The roles are in conflict with each other.
Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) addressed an interesting hypothesis about the
contexts of role behavior in his book on the sociology of mass media, No Sense of
Place. He noted that sociologists were unable to account for changes in social
roles. People are involved in many social roles, but they work hard to maintain
their performance in each social situation.
So how does one change roles? In
particular, Meyrowitz is asking why people have lost a sense of public self. They
want to be natural and act in public as they would at home. They have lost their
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sense of civility and have not learned to locate their role behaviors into a specific
context in the social arena. How have these changes come about? The answer,
according to Meyrowitz, is television.
socialization of the public.
It has been a major force in the re-
It acted as their babysitter, and later provided them
with new role models based on characters in situation comedies, or soap operas.
They have mirrored themselves on these episodic lives. Television has fostered a
different world view and, most importantly, it has taken away the context of these
roles. The television broadcast goes into the home and it is associated with the
vagaries of the private self. But it is also a social phenomenon, but it is not
interpreted only within the domain of the public self. It has been conflated into
one behavior. There is no longer front-stage versus back-stage behaviors. The
roles are no longer isolated to different context.
People no longer project
themselves into different behavior, public versus private. Public and private life
has become the same place. The differences between the contextualization of
public and private behavior are no longer contextualized. In a spectator culture,
one forgets to distinguish private self from public self. There are many spectator
roles. One behaves differently in public while watching a movie than he does at
home while watching television. When these distinctions of contextualization of
the private self in public are lost, the result is what Meyrowitz calls “no sense of
self.”
The work of Meyrowitz (1985) is important because it calls to attention the
role that contextualization plays in everyday life situations. The rituals that
human beings perform originate in highly specified situations. They are
always contextualized. What happened in No Sense of Place is that events
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141
Richard Sennett (1978) was also interested in the change of social roles.
He investigated the concepts of private and public self and traced these traditions
back to Roman times. It was a time when dignitaries were known by their public
service and how well they governed and not in terms of what they did in their
personal lives. There was a clear separation from public and private self. The
interest in the private lives of public officials began with the rise of narcissism
during the second Industrial Revolution.
Sennett spent a year in France
reconstructing the Zeitgeist of this period. He tried to reconstruct the period by
studying public behavior.
He investigated court records to see who was
considered a criminal and why they were judged as people who were outside of
the law. He studied plays and reviews of plays to find out who the hero were and
who the villain were. In his study of the times, he found that the new merchant
class, the nouveaux riches, played a major role in the creation of the narcissistic
self. It appears that the aristocracy was being imitated by the new rich merchant
class. It was difficult to differentiate between the wealthy people who came from
aristocracy and those who came from new money. Both groups found it in their
interest to engage in public presentations of self. This great use of public display
by the rich merchant class led to a narcissistic spirit of the time. Sennett
documents this trend for both Paris and London. He notes that there was a major
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population shift at that time from the country to the city. Both Paris and London
quadrupled in population over a 40-year period. The documentation of one’s self
was a challenge for those with money. Were they the new merchant class or
members of the aristocracy?
What is interesting about the rise of narcissism is that it became a part of
public behavior. The ostentatious display of private self in public became a social
trend. By 1915 in the United States, advertisers were able to use this public
sentiment to market their products (Ewen, 1977). Before mid-century, narcissism
as a public expression of the private self had become a reality in American culture
and it was characteristically associated with the marking of the consumer culture
(Lasch, 1979, 1983).
What happened during this process of constructing a
consumer culture is now very clear. The self became a marketing symbol. It
became a cultural commodity. It came to possess cultural capital (Bourdieu,
1977l; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The self has become an economic social
symbol. It has entered the cultural commodities market.
Sennet directly addressed the concept of private self and how it changed
with the rise of capitalism. The concept of self continues to appear in various
works dealing with social models and this concept of self is usually taken to mean
the social self (Taylor, 1989). However, when the study of the private self appears
it plays a very different role. When Europe existed as a theocracy, the private self
was called the “soul.” With secularization, the self was introduced as “character.”
Later, with the rise of the novel and the emergence of the theater in Europe, the
personal self was equated with a representation of one’s identity on stage. With
the emergence of narcissism, the private self was made public and became a part
of a socially constructed public self. The claim that one is being oneself or acting
naturally is essentially the display of the public self in public as a social
construction.