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Joint Actions, Stories and Symbolic Structures:
A Contribution to Herbert Blumer’s Conceptual Framework
Abstract
Despite its centrality in Blumer’s conceptual framework, the notion of joint
action remains theoretically underdeveloped and empirically underutilised.
To fill this void, the present article focuses on the dynamics inherent to the
formation of joint action, and highlights actors’ deployment of available
symbolic rules and resources for constructing the legitimising accounts that
normally accompany their lines of action. The construction of such
accounts, or stories, is viewed here as the prime means of reducing the
intrinsic contingency of joint action and determining its content and terms as
well as its direction and prospects. The article concludes by underscoring
the importance of the suggested theoretical input for tapping some of the
potential of Blumer’s approach, especially the one regarding its capacity to
address subtle forms of power.
Keywords
Control, Defining Activities, Joint Action, Meaning, Social Contingency,
Symbolic Resources, Symbolic Interactionism
Introduction
Herbert George Blumer (1900–1987) is certainly among the major sociologists who have
exerted a noticeable influence on the shaping of the discipline. An ardent interpreter and
proponent of George Herbert Mead’s legacy, he was one of the leading figures of the Chicago
School style of symbolic interactionism and made a significant contribution to the
development and consolidation of this tradition – a tradition which after decades still finds its
clearest and ‘most parsimonious formulation’ in his work from 1969 (Craib, 1984: 72).
To a great extent Blumer’s prominence is due to his well-known methodological
outlook, consisting of an uncompromising rejection of the idea of sociology as a positivist
science and a solid advocacy of more empathetic and participant modes of inquiry which, in
his view, better fit the particular nature of the subject matter of the discipline. Hand in hand
with this methodological outlook is his theoretical framework, which stems from a novel
ontological stance and which – as many observers have pointed out – is the main source of
Blumer’s influence on the discipline (Becker, 1988; Fine, 1993; Hall, 2003; Kuhn, 1964; Lal,
1995; Lauer and Handel, 1983; Manis and Meltzer, 1972; Meltzer et al, 1975; Plummer,
1990; Reynolds and Heman-Kinney, 2003; Sandstrom et al, 2002; Shalin, 1986; Shotter,
1980; Stryker, 1980; Warshay, 1975).
Within this theoretical framework, however, the notion of joint action occupies
a central position. As shown below, this concept captures Blumer’s particular image of social
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reality, and encapsulates many of the essential features of his brand of symbolic
interactionism with its characteristic emphasis ‘on the flow of interaction and interactive
processes, looking at the way in which meanings develop and change’ (Craib, 1984: 74-75).
Despite its obvious centrality, however, this concept has hitherto received relatively little
theoretical attention (Baugh, 1990; Forte, 2001; Halas, 2012; Harvey, 1987; Low, 2008;
Lyman, 1984; Lyman and Vidich, 1988 and 2000; Maines, 1988; McPhail and Rexroat,
1979); and as its articulation falls short of specification in some important areas, many of its
potentials remain unexploited.
Given the rather scarce supply of work specifically devoted to Blumer’s key
concept, the main purpose of the present article is to contribute to its theoretical elaboration
and highlight the crucial role this concept can potentially play in addressing the question of
power from a symbolic interactionist point of view. More specifically, the main rationale of
this undertaking has less to do with a purely scholastic interest in the history of symbolic
interactionism than with a concern for the potential and prospects of this tradition with regard
to the treatment of issues that are of crucial importance to sociology, notably those concerning
the more subtle, discursive forms of power and domination which – by no means novel –
become increasingly prevalent in contemporary societies (Hardy et al, 2000; Schiffrin et al,
2003; Seidel, 1987).
To serve this purpose however the article begins with a brief presentation of the
concept and some of its main properties. It then continues with an identification of the areas
where – due to the vagueness of Blumer’s own articulation of the notion – some clarification
and elaboration is needed. In the next step the article targets the core of the formation process
of joint action, notably the participants’ ‘defining activities’ (Blumer, 1969: 5), and draws on
some of the ideas put forth by Harrison White (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1984) in order to
elaborate theoretically on the participants’ efforts at defining, interpreting and making sense
of the interaction situation in which they are engaged, as well as their attempts to determine
the content, terms, direction and prospects of the joint action that is in the making between
them. Finally, the article discusses some of the implications of the suggested theoretical
specifications and elaborations.
Definition and Properties
Building on, and presenting a substitute for, Mead’s idea of ‘social act’ (Blumer, 1969;
Blumer and Morrione, 2003; Collins, 1988) the concept of joint action has an almost allinclusive empirical referent, and denotes any case of social interaction where the participants’
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individual courses of action cross and fit into one another, for instance in ‘a trading
transaction, a family dinner, a marriage ceremony, a shopping expedition, a game, a convivial
party, a debate, a court trial, or a war’ (Blumer, 1969: 70).
Among its various characteristics there are a few distinct but closely connected
features that are of particular relevance to the purpose of this article. First, essential to the
constitution of a joint action is ‘the fitting together’ of the separate and distinct acts of the
individual parties, each party occupying a different position and launching his or her act from
that position (Blumer, 1969: 70). Being more than the sum of the individual acts of its
participants, joint action is conceived by Blumer as ‘a societal organization of such acts
(Blumer, 1969:17, italics added), and as such it is an ‘emergent’ (Cuff et al., 1998: 135)
phenomenon in that ‘while made up of diverse component acts that enter into its formation,
[it] is different from any one of them and from their mere aggregation’ (Blumer, 1969: 17).1
The second property is the inbuilt interdependency amongst the participants in a
joint action, as each constantly seeks to work out his or her own line of action by noting,
recognising and interpreting what others are doing and by adjusting own action to their
doings. This interdependency is emphasised by Blumer when he (1969: 97), for instance,
asserts that ‘what one’s associates are doing becomes the context inside which one’s own
developing act has to fit;’ or when he on another occasion (1969: 8) maintains that
…the activity of others enter as positive factors in the formation of
[the actor’s] own conduct; in the face of the actions of others one may
abandon an intention or purpose, revise it, check it or suspend it,
intensify it, or replace it.
Finally, far from being a straightforward response to stimuli or a smooth enactment of
predefined social roles, joint action in Blumer’s view is a contingent accomplishment, taking
shape through the ongoing mutual fitting attempts of its participants and through the
interlocking of their courses of behaviour. For instance, he (1969: 72) underlines the
uncertainty that characterises joint action by asserting that although
…usually the course of a joint action is outlined in advance […], there
are many joint actions that encounter obstruction, that have no preestablished pathways, and that have to be constructed along new lines.
On other occasion he – in refuting the presumed causal relationship between attitudes and
behaviours – maintains that human action is not an expression of a predisposed ‘already
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organised tendency’ but a ‘construction’ (Blumer, 1969: 94) that takes shape in an ongoing
interactive process into which the actor enters only with an ‘initial bid for a possible line of
action’ (Blumer, 1969: 97) without any certainty about its development. Therefore, as the
interaction among the participants unfolds,
…given lines of action may be started or stopped, they may be
abandoned or postponed, they may be confined to mere planning or to
an inner life of reverie, or if initiated, they may be transformed
(Blumer, 1969: 16).
In fact, Blumer (1969: 72) goes even further, and proclaims that ‘uncertainty, contingency and
transformation are part and parcel of the process of joint action.’ In the face of this feature, it
is therefore ‘a sheer gratuitous assumption’ in his (Blumer, 1969: 72) view to believe that ‘the
diversified joint actions which compromise a human society are set to follow fixed and
established channels;’ and it is to capture this feature that he (1969: 72) underlines the
incremental character of joint action, pointing out that
…just because [a joint action] is built up over time by the fitting
together of acts, each joint action must be seen as having a career or a
history. In having a career, its course and fate are contingent on what
happens during its formation. …The career of joint actions also must
be seen as open to many possibilities of uncertainty [italics added].2
Voids and Remedies
So conceptualised, the notion of joint action of course encapsulates, and is in full agreement
with, the fundamental elements of Blumer’s sociological thought. On one hand, it reflects his
position that social interaction is inherently indeterminate and that its outcomes are
contingent upon the specific ways in which it unfolds. Blumer’s conception of joint action,
in other words, expresses his basic vision of human actors as active interpreters, planners and
schemers, and mirrors his uncompromising rejection of the over-socialised (Wrong, 1961)
conception of human action as it is typically pictured from structural-functionalist
perspectives (Stryker, 1988). Moreover, Blumer’s conception of joint action lays the
conceptual foundation of his root image of empirical social reality as an ever-changing web
of ongoing, developing interaction, which in accordance with the Simmelian vision (Low,
2008), constantly changes formation. Furthermore, this conception underpins his rather harsh
criticism of the ‘mechanistic’ sociological explanations based on the ‘simplistic cause and
effect mode of reasoning’ and associated with the conventional mode of inquiry known as
variable analysis (Shibutani, 1988: 29); and naturally this conception also fits his own
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alternative notion of proper sociological method well, with its typical emphasis on the indepth exploration of the meanings created in and conveyed through interaction. In short,
Blumer’s conception of joint action as the emergent and unpredictable product of the
interactive processes that are ceaselessly in the making is thus indispensable to his approach,
and reflects the coherence of his entire system of thought.
Nonetheless, Blumer’s account of this notion lacks sufficient specification and
lucidity in several important regards. This theoretical deficiency comes to the surface, for
instance, when he only in the passing highlights general reasons why actors, especially in the
highly diversified and heterogeneous contemporary social settings, seek to align their lines of
action. For instance, he (1969: 76) only briefly mentions that in such settings
…the participants may fit their acts to one another in orderly joint
actions on the basis of compromise, out of duress, because they may
use one another in achieving their respective ends, because it is the
sensible thing to do, or out of sheer necessity. This is particularly
likely to be true in our modern complex societies with their great
diversity in composition, in lines of interest, and in their respective
worlds of concern.3
Yet he leaves the matter at that, and declines to offer any specified account of the social
forces and processes which bring these actors together and which induce them to try to fit
their lines of action. Or to take another example, on several occasions he refers to two
distinct steps in the formation of joint action, notably ‘first identifying the social act [with
which the participants] are about to engage and second, interpreting and defining each
other’s acts’ (Blumer, 1969:70). Yet, he does not elaborate on the issue, and makes no effort
to specify these steps any further.
However, the theoretical deficiency of joint action considers in particular what
constitutes the core of this phenomenon, namely the participants’ defining activities.
According to Blumer, as actors are called on to act in given situations they have to ascertain
the meaning of the actions of others and design their own lines of action in light of such
interpretations. In his view the participants’ ongoing defining activities constitute the essential
property of human interaction, present and observable in all cases of joint action. The point is
repeatedly underlined by Blumer (1969: 67), who, for instance, asserts that
…in the flow of group life there are innumerable points at which the
participants are redefining each other’s acts. Such redefinition is very
common in adversary relations, it is frequent in group discussions, and
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it is essentially intrinsic to dealing with problems (and I may remark
here that no human group is free from problems.)
Moreover, in his view the description of the interactive process in terms of participants’
ongoing defining and redefining activities holds true even for actions unfolding along
established paths, as in individual occasions of institutionalised interaction situations such as
weddings or funerals. In his (1969: 18) own words, this kind of action is
…just as much a result of an interpretative process as is a new form of
joint action that is being developed for the first time. …[the] meanings
that underline established and recurrent joint action are themselves
subjective to pressure as well as to reinforcement, to incipient
dissatisfaction as well as to indifference; they may be challenged as
well as affirmed, allowed to slip along without concern as well as
subjected to infusions of new vigour.
In fact, it is on the basis of the significance ascribed to such activities that Blumer (1969: 3)
asserts that their thorough investigation constitutes the ‘very distinctive position [of symbolic
interactionism]’ and that this kind of investigation draws a ‘major line of difference’ between
this brand of sociology and other approaches which normally take meaning for granted. Yet
despite the significance that Blumer evidently attaches to the ongoing mutual defining
activities of actors, and despite an explicit ambition to bring them to the fore, he fails to
specify the issue sufficiently; and, more concerned with drawing attention to their mere
existence rather than exploring in detail their various aspects, he leaves us only with a few,
embryonic comments on what, in his view, represents the most characteristic feature of
symbolic interactionism.
What is particularly missing from Blumer’s treatment are specified accounts of
the questions about how the fitting of the participants’ individual lines of action occurs or
through which mechanisms the participants jointly produce the alignment of their behaviour.
That is, Blumer makes it clear that the arrival at common definitions and meanings is central
to the formation of any joint action and obviously, in his view, arriving at such common
definitions and meanings represents the very source of the participants’ interdependence and
the ensuing contingency of the joint action unfolding between them. Nonetheless he leaves
untouched the question of how the participants jointly determine and endorse the meanings of
the situation in which they find themselves. Nor are there, in his account, any specifications
regarding the particular forms that the defining activities of the participants take, and the
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interactional resources, skills and strategies they use to secure their individual projects and
steer the process of interaction in the desired directions and towards the intended outcomes.
Against this unfortunate omission, however, the present article takes the view
that due to the weight ascribed to the defining activities of actors, Blumer’s approach
represents a theoretical framework with significant potential for an adequate and insightful
investigation of very subtle forms of power, influence and domination in society. This quality
is, however, admittedly only a potential one, meaning that Blumer’s approach provides only a
fertile soil in need of much theoretical cultivation in order to grow into a fully-fledged
framework for addressing power issues; and it is out of this conviction that an attempt at such
theoretical cultivation is made below – an attempt that, targeting the core of joint action and
the dynamics of its formation, is carried out in three steps, all in line with the main tenets of
Blumer’s perspective.
First, the contingency that, according to Blumer, is constitutive of joint action
induces the participants to seek efficient control regarding its career, that is, the directions it
might take and the outcomes it might generate. Second, such attempts normally permeate the
very core of the unfolding joint action – the participants’ defining activities – and are carried
out in the form of the legitimising narratives or stories (White, 1992) that normally envelop
any purposeful line of action – be it motivated by material interests, emotions, and values or
otherwise. Finally, in constructing their stories participants typically draw on the symbolic
rules and resources available (Giddens, 1984), which are provided by the symbolic structures
prevailing in wider society. These steps are unpacked sequentially below.
Contingency and Control
As mentioned above, the very construction of joint action entails interdependency among the
participants in that each one’s behaviour is interlocked to those of the others and takes shape
only within the interactive context that is made up of these others’ behaviours. Thus, as none
of the participants is in the position to pursue his or her initially chosen course of action
independently from the lines of action that others might choose, the direction, path and form
that the joint action eventually takes are most likely to differ from the trajectories outlined by
the participants. No matter how carefully designed in advance, the actual course of the
unfolding interaction can, in other words, derail from the ones that any of the participants
initially had in mind and develop in unanticipated directions and produce unexpected results –
sometimes even beyond the participants’ perceptual horizons. The career of any joint action
is therefore inevitably bound to be uncertain in that the participants can seldom predict with
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sufficient certainty which results the ongoing process will eventually generate and with what
probability.
What is crucial here is that this open-endedness turns continuity, preservation
and fulfilment of the chosen line of action the key concerns of the participants, and induces
them to try to reduce as far as possible the contingency involved. In other words as the joint
action unfolds the participants face the risk of their schemes being upset, and the need to cope
with this challenge generates reasons to gain and exercise efficient control over the course
that the interaction may take and the outcome it may produce. Indeed, the inherent
interdependency and uncertainty that, especially in heterogeneous settings, characterise joint
action make it an inevitable condition for any of the participants to try to secure his or her
individual project and steer the unfolding interaction into preferred routes and towards the
projected outcomes; and in the face of such inbuilt social contingency ‘control attempts’
(White, 1992) become imperative for the achievement of any objective that triggers any line
of action, be it an instrumental and strategic action in the narrow sense, or communicative,
emotional, value-laden etc. Regardless of the driving forces, the purposes at hand and the
outcomes in view, such attempts in other words represent a universal and omnipresent
element in all kinds of purposive action, which are mainly fuelled by the participants’
pervasive need to narrow the range of the possible directions and outcomes of the joint action,
and which are launched to restrict the array of possible paths. Constantly and mutually
undertaken, such control attempts are instigated and carried out mainly for the purpose of
setting the stage for the actual unfolding of the interaction, for confining the potentially openended situation, and for preserving the continuity of their own line of action and securing its
accomplishment. As such they therefore constitute an integral, ever-present element of any
designed and purposeful action, and are essential to its fulfilment.
Control and Construction of Stories
Once it is granted that the contingent nature of joint action makes control efforts necessary,
the question that arises naturally is as to what specific form these efforts take. The answer
suggested here is that it is primarily through the construction of stories – and counter-stories –
that actors seek to determine the state of the interaction situation as well as the conditions and
terms of the joint action that is unfolding; or as White (1992: 68) puts it, ‘stories come from
and become a medium for control efforts: that is the core.’
To unpack this ‘core’ we need to recall that in developing the notion of joint
action Blumer starts out with the distinctive assumptions of the hermeneutic perspective,
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according to which human beings invariably assign meaning to their own actions and to those
of others, and that such meanings constitute the basis on which they relate themselves to these
others (Bauman, 1978; Ricoeur, 1981). As he repeatedly emphasises, however, human actions
do not carry a baggage of invariable meanings once and for all attached to them. Their
meanings are instead open to actors’ creativity and adaptability, and are determined
contextually. They can therefore be best understood as jointly generated social products. That
is, the actual meanings that human actions assume emerge only out of the particular unfolding
interaction processes; Or, as Blumer (1969: 110) puts it, they arise out of the ‘ceaseless
movements of definition and redefinition’ in which participants constantly interpret own
actions and that of the others by ‘arresting, recognizing or adjusting their own intentions,
wishes, feelings, and attitudes’ as well as assessing ‘the fitness of norms, values and group
perceptions for the situation being formed by the acts of others’ (Blumer, 1969: 70) – a task
that becomes increasingly challenging as the whirl of modern life brings together many actors
from distinct regions of the highly differentiated contemporary social landscape who need to
fit together and reconcile their diverse, heterogeneous and often conflicting perceptions
regarding the reasonable, legitimate and acceptable mutual rights and obligations, as well as
expectations and claims.
The openness of joint action with regard to its meaning – and thereby the
indeterminacy of its career – presents participants with the opportunity to carry out their
mutual control efforts in subtle forms through purposefully constructed representations of
their lines of action, however. More specifically, it gives rise the possibility of each
participant making his or her line of action appear in a certain way and loading it with certain
values and assessments, while simultaneously portraying the behaviour of others in certain
other ways and assigning certain other meanings to it. That is, the absence of intrinsic
meanings and interpretations turns the participants’ lines of action potentially subjected to a
range of possible constructions and representations and – not given prior to the unfolding
interaction – the actual meanings that the participants’ courses of conduct assume become
dependent on how they succeed in articulating their individual lines of action (Hall, 2006;
Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Therefore, the activities through which the meaning of the joint
action takes shape become the key control issue, their determination becomes the main target
of the participants’ mutual control attempts, and their construction becomes the focal site at
which these efforts are typically carried out – with the effect that the career of the joint action
inevitably becomes a negotiated outcome emerging from and determined by the ongoing
mutual control efforts of its participants.
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It is against the background of such dynamics that the significance of the
participants’ stories and their functions stand out. The concept of story – which is basically a
generalisation of the notion of account (Scott and Lyman, 1968) – refers to the organised and
explicit narrative which encapsulates the actor’s perceptions, definitions and interpretations as
well as his or her assessments and evaluations of the situation that it covers. Broadly
speaking, a story is a narration constructed for ordering the experience and for conferring
meaning to it. As such, it is an act of organising what might otherwise be perceived as an
experiential chaos, giving it a more-or-less coherent decipherable semblance. Reporting on
the actor’s experiences and understandings of the state of the social situation and of the
conditions and terms of the interactions unfolding there, the construction of such a story
involves a selection of what is to be included or excluded, emphasised or downplayed,
celebrated or rejected – all woven together more or less skilfully according to the context.
Regardless of their specific make-up, however, stories perform vital functions.
That is, a story is primarily a justifying narrative told by a participant in a given situation to
furnish his or her purposeful line of action with valid representations that are contextually
familiar to the listeners, and that underpin the aptness, adequacy, and above all the legitimacy,
of the behaviour in question. The prime purpose of its construction is to endorse the
expectations and claims that the chosen line of action entails – a purpose which is typically
materialised through favourably influencing others’ perceptions of one’s own action.
Moreover, in the face of the inbuilt indeterminacy of joint action and the need to reduce
contingency and gain control over its career, it becomes imperative for the participants to seek
to exercise efficient control over the unfolding situation and increase the probability of the
desired outcome; and stories are the main devices used for this purpose. In other words, it is
through the construction of stories and counter-stories that participants in a joint action seek
to determine the kind of situation that is unfolding, and the issues that are at stake. By
deliberately assigning meaning and conferring value to their own actions and to those of the
others, the participants mutually try to bestow legitimacy over their own intentions and
objectives while simultaneously trying to discharge the validity of the interests and
expectations of the others; and by doing so they pursue to enlarge their own manoeuvring
space and enhance their own action capacity, while at the same time attempting to limit the
options open to the others by narrowing the range of possible interpretations, meaningassignments, and the responses that these others can invoke when constructing their stories.
Stories from Structures
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As Mills (1940) and others have pointed out, such justifying narratives do not arise from
within the participants. Stories, in other words, are by no means the results of purely
individual imagination and never take shape according to the actors’ entirely individually
devised preferences in a socio-cultural vacuum where society has vanished in ‘the universal
solvent of definitional and interpretative processes’ (Stryker, 1988: 38). On the contrary,
when constructing their stories actors find themselves invariably within specific universes of
meaning, which provide them with a menu of perspectives, definitions and interpretations that
they can call into play. Put differently, rather than being totally sealed off from the larger
social settings, actors are normally embedded in generic and relatively durable symbolic
structures (Giddens, 1984), which consist of institutionalised – that is socially endorsed and
sanctioned – schemes of perception and appreciation that vary considerably across the spheres
and regions of highly differentiated modern societies.
Similar to the ways in which the generalised grammatical procedures of a
language (langue) generate the concrete and particular use of spoken words (parole), these
symbolic structures are generic schemes ‘instantiated in action’ (Giddens, 1984: 6), in that
they make their presence felt as transposable principles that enter, guide and discipline the
defining activities of actors in the form of current normative conventions (such as reciprocity
or solidarity), taken-for-granted common-sense conceptions (of fairness or civic manner for
instance), and dominant principles and styles of action (such as economic rationality or rule of
law). ‘Picked up’ from various social settings and internalised by actors as their stock of
interactional dispositions and skills, these rules and resources are facilitating devices which
are actualised whenever necessary, enabling actors to decipher their social situations
relatively effortlessly. They are the ready ‘…recipes for interpreting the social world and for
handling things and men in order to obtain the best result in every situation with a minimum
of effort’ (Schutz, 1964: 95). In that capacity these rules and resources underpin the practical
mastery of actors (Bourdieu, 1977), and function as formulae for interaction or as
‘instruments for guidance and formation of action’ (Blumer, 1969: 5).
Put differently, the widely sanctioned and frequently invoked rules and
resources embedded in symbolic structures guide actors in their interpretations of social
situations and help them to go along the flow of everyday life. As such they are contingency
reducing devices, without which actors would lose direction and their interactions would
come to a halt, as they would lack reliable cues regarding the suitability and/or legitimacy of
their lines of action. It should also be emphasised, however, that the relationship between the
available symbolic rules and resources on the one hand and the actors’ deployment of these
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devices on the other hand is the kind of ‘loose coupling’ that Goffman (1983: 11) speaks of,
in that there is no strict one-to-one correspondence and no rigid and mechanical ‘gearing’ of
these devices ‘into interactional cogs.’ Instead, actors enjoy a considerable degree of freedom
in weaving together their stories, which allows them to ‘…select, check, suspend, regroup and
transform the meanings in the light of the situation’ (Blumer, 1969: 5) and which enables
them to make new adjustments whenever they face disruptions. That is, due to their creative
and performative abilities, actors can actively choose and purposefully combine the various
symbolic devices available to them on the basis of the ‘interest prevailing at the moment’ –
the interest that ‘determines the elements which the [actor] singles out to define his [their]
situation thinkingly, actingly and emotionally, to find his [their] way in it, and to come to
terms with it’ (Schutz, 1966: 123).
Needless to say, there are no standard or prescribed patterns of how actors come
to construct their stories, as their defining activities vary from one stance of joint action to
another – sometimes producing ‘fresh action’ (White, 1992) with unprecedented and groundbreaking outcomes. Yet, neither the variability of stories across social realms nor their
adaptability alters the fact that – despite the openness of meaning to the participants’ creative
defining activities – stories and counter-stories are never designed without substantial
reference to external auspices. Although stories are worked out in the actual process that
unfolds ‘then’ and ‘there’, and are shaped according to the actual characteristics of the
situation, the participants do not enjoy an absolute, limitless and unconfined freedom in
making them. On the contrary, the participants’ stories are essentially social in their origin,
content and design. They emerge from the unfolding interaction, and originate from sources
that are socially provided. Their utility as an efficient means of affecting the career of joint
action comes from their reliance on existing rules and resources, and they owe their
legitimising properties to the social forces beneath and behind these symbolic devices. Actors’
story construction can therefore more advantageously be viewed as a relatively bounded
social practice which is both made possible and constrained, both endorsed and curbed, by
the symbolic rules and resources which, in each segment of the social world, provide the
dividing line between what is socially possible, plausible and permissible, and what is not.
Leverage
The incorporation of the ideas presented above into Blumer’s conceptualisation of joint action
has several pay-offs, some of which are highlighted below. As mentioned at the outset, the
articulation of this concept suffers from an insufficient specification with regard to the
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participants’ defining activities – for which Blumer himself bears a good deal of the
responsibility. As result, the notion has until now remained largely equivocal and,
subsequently, difficult to bring into touch with empirical experience. Indeed, it seems rather
ironic that Blumer, who ‘believed that ambiguity was the basic problem with [many
important] social psychological concepts’ (Tucker, 1988: 108) and who revealed ‘the
deficiencies of most concepts in the social sciences’ (Tucker, 1990: 1326), would decline to
fine-tune the key concept of his own framework and leave behind an imprecise and
‘tremendously abstract’ (Becker, 1988: 18) theoretical perspective.
The theoretical input presented above, on the other hand, enables us to examine in
detail how actors in any given situation purposefully deploy the symbolic rules and resources
at their disposal to construct legitimising veneers for their own action, how they confront the
counter-stories of other participants and adapt their own stories according to the unfolding
interaction, and how the actual career of the joint action is determined through such processes.
In doing so the suggested specification helps us remove some of the ambiguities that until
now have hampered both the application and validation of this central concept, and facilitates
a more effective and mutually fruitful interrelationship between the concept of joint action
and its empirical referents.
In addition, the proposed elaboration also offers the opportunity of addressing a
number of important substantive questions, among which the potential of Blumer’s
conceptual framework for the analysis of crucial power issues stands out in particular.
Recently it has been suggested that Blumer’s brand of symbolic interactionism is essentially
based on the principle of sociality rather than domination, and that it is not conceptually fit for
addressing power issues (Athens, 2009).4 The main argument of the present article however is
that there is nothing in Blumer’s theoretical framework that necessarily commits it to the
vision of society as an entirely harmonious and smoothly functioning system (Layder, 2006).
Conversely, as some observers have pointed out, Blumer’s approach to social reality
embraces conflict as an indispensable feature of dynamic contemporary social settings
(Tucker, 1990). Indeed, this feature of Blumer’s approach is to be found in the very premises
of his conceptualisation of human action, as he avoids the ‘fallacy of roles’ (Bourdieu 1977)
and discards the ‘over-socialised’ conception of actors (Wrong, 1961) according to which
people merely enact their internalised social roles in full agreement with the prevailing
cultural prescriptions. Instead, as indicated by his uncompromising advocacy of the
characteristic contingency of joint actions, Blumer allows for frictions and clashes among
actors who – encountering and interacting in the highly heterogeneous social settings of our
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time – design their individual lines of action according to different logics, standards and
criteria. As shown above, at the heart of these conflicts and clashes stand the defining
activities of the actors who – ‘each occupying a different position and launching his or her act
from that position’ (Blumer, 1969: 70) – are creative authors of their individual lines of
action, and who are capable of making strategic use of the available symbolic rules and
resources in order to determine the definition of the situation and the appropriate line of
action.
As this feature of Blumer’s approach remains underdeveloped, however, the ideas
suggested above can contribute to the advance of his approach towards a fully-fledged
framework for addressing power issues from a symbolic interactionist point of view. More
specifically, as the present article has tried to demonstrate, through the deployment of the
concept of story, Blumer’s approach can fruitfully be used for addressing adequately subtle
and yet fundamental forms of conflict, power exercise and the uneven distribution of
symbolic devices in larger society, as well as the systematic effects of this unevenness on the
ability of actors to determine the fate of the joint actions in which they voluntarily or
otherwise partake. By specifying the participants’ defining activities through the notion of
story, the theoretical contribution suggested above puts us in a conceptually better position to
map out, in any given situation, the relative availability of symbolic rules and resources to the
participants, as well as these participants’ capacities and skills to invoke these devices when
articulating their courses of action. Subsequently, the suggested theoretical input allows for
empirical studies of subtle power exercise in various social settings across levels and realms,
and enables us to explore in detail important questions regarding the asymmetries that usually
prevail among various groups of actors with regard to their access and their capacity to use
the existing and potentially available symbolic rules and resources to affect the content, terms,
directions and outcomes of their interactions.
Looking Ahead
In the light of the ideas presented above it seems only reasonable to stress what others have
pointed out earlier, notably that although ‘one might expect that everything worth saying
about the work of Herbert Blumer has already been said [it] is not true’ (Tucker, 1990:
1326), and that it may still be ‘too early for a final assessment of [his] work’ (Shibutani,
1988: 30). In this spirit the present article finds it rewarding to view the key element of the
formation of joint action – the defining activities carried out in the form of stories – as a
relatively bounded social practice that is both made possible and constrained by symbolic
14
rules and resources. More specifically, the theoretical elaboration of this notion along the
lines suggested above can help us bring out the potential of Blumer’s approach regarding the
detailed and empirical enquiry into the ways in which subtle discursive modes of power and
domination enter the interaction situation and decide its fate – the modes of power which
stem from and rest on the definition of social categories and relationships among them, and
which operate through the placement of events, actions and individuals in symbolic
hierarchies or ‘regimes of representation’ (Hall, 1997). By the same token, the theoretical
elaboration suggested above helps us materialise the potential of Blumer’s approach so as to
account for the kind of social order that is generated, sustained and reproduced through the
asymmetric distribution of access and ability to deploy symbolic rules and resources to
construct legitimising stories. That is, the theoretical input proposed above provides us with
the first necessary conceptual tool needed to explore the forces and the mechanisms through
which the bulk of inherently contingent and potentially open-ended situations grow regular,
patterned and predictable in their outcomes, and how diverse joint actions fall in and evolve
within institutionalised frameworks, and thereby largely unintentionally generate and sustain
the regularity and the stability that is easily observable in society at large.
An example of this possibility prefigures already in Blumer’s (1985a, 1958b,
1965a, 1965b) own series of work on race relations in the United States. At the heart of the
race system lies, in his view, a fundamental structure which represents a historically rooted
hierarchical social organisation and which embraces and brings together various racial
groups, positioning them in relationship to one another and regulating the flows of
interaction among them. This hierarchical social organisation is institutionalised in time and
space and derives from the collectively endorsed definitions of social groups and shared
conceptions of the appropriate relative positions of these groups and relationships among
them. From this underlying, institutionalised definition of social categories then stems the
fundamental asymmetries among the country’s various racial groups, with regard to their
access and ability to draw on the available pool of symbolic rules and resources which can
be used for constructing their legitimising stories, endorsing their lines of action and
determining the fate of their inherently contingent and potentially open-ended interactions.
The adequate treatment of these topics of course requires much more
theoretical elaboration, as well as empirical validation, which is well beyond the scope of the
present article. However, what has been put forth above should suffice to substantiate the
statement that many sociological insights are still to be tapped from Blumer’s heritage and
how such an endeavour can enhance the capacity of symbolic interactionism to explore both
15
theoretically and empirically the link between social production – the process of creation of
meaning in the flows of interaction – and social reproduction – the process through which
various forms of social order persist despite the creative and transformative capacities of
actors (Giddens 1976).
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Notes
1
Blumer occasionally elaborates on this emergent character of joint action by, for instance
holding that
In my judgment, the most important feature of human association is
that the participants take each other into account. …Taking another
person into account means being aware of him, identifying him in
way, making some judgment or appraisal of him, identifying the
meaning of his action, trying to find out what he has on his mind, or
trying to figure out what he intends to do. … Taking each other into
account in this mutual way not only relates the action of each to that
of the other but intertwines the actions of both into what I would call,
for lack of a better word, a transaction – a fitting of the developing
action of each into that of the other to form a joint or over-bridging
action. …[Such a] transaction is something other than an addition of
the actions of the two individuals; these two line of action in their
developing inter-relationship constitute a singleness, such as we
recognize when we speak of an argument, a debate, a discussion or a
fight (Blumer, 1969: 108-110, italics in the text).
2
He (1969: 71-72) also makes an attempt to pin down the factors that cause the uncertainty:
Let me specify the more important of these possibilities. One, joint
actions have to be initiated – and they may not be. Two, once started a
joint action may be interrupted, abandoned, or transformed. Three, the
participants may not make a common definition of the joint action into
which they are thrown and hence may orient their acts on different
premises. Four, a common definition of a joint action may still allow /
wide differences in the direction of the separate lines of action and
hence in the course taken by the joint action: a war is a good example.
Five, new situations may arise calling for hitherto un-existing types of
joint action, leading to confused exploratory efforts to work out a
fitting together of acts. And six, even in the context of a commonly
defined joint action, participants may be led to rely on other
considerations in interpreting and defining each other’s lines of action.
3
Of course, it also should be mentioned that Blumer (1969: 115-6) does emphasise that ‘there
are cases of human associations which are heavily ritualized, as in a stylised religious
ceremony, wherein each overt action of each participant is definitely prescribed at each given
point…’ but he nonetheless is quick to point out that ‘such instances are relatively infrequent
in human group life and should not be used as prototype of human group life.’
4
Such assessments have recently been voiced particularly within the nascent current known
as radical interactionism which emphasises the impact of domination on social interaction
and which takes as its main task the examination of how power is exercised in and through
everyday encounters (Athens, 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2013). Although this current highlights
some much-needed modifications with considerable potential for the revitalisation of
symbolic interactionism, it excludes Blumer from its perspective, with the argument that his
19
approach is essentially based on the principle of sociality rather than domination (Athens,
2009).
20