interactionism/microsociology overview lecture

Human society is to be seen as consisting

of acting people, and the life of the society

is to be seen as consisting of their actions.

The acting units may be separate

individuals, collectivities whose members

are acting together on a common quest, or

organizations acting on behalf of a

constituency… There is no empirically

observable activity in a human society that

does not spring from some acting unit. This

banal statement needs to be stressed in

light of the common practice of sociologists

of reducing human society to social units

that do not act – for example, social classes

in modern society. — Herbert Blumer (186-187)

1FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

Nobody is always stupid, but

everyone is stupid sometimes.*

* attributed to George Herbert Mead


FOAR701: Research paradigms (2016)

Interactionism: overview

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Greg DowneyDepartment of Anthropology

Faculty of Arts

Macquarie University

[email protected]

Twitter: @gregdowney1

mailto:[email protected]

‘social or cultural

constructivism’*

* another variant (like cultural hermeneutics & structuralism).

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symbolic interactionism

microsociology

phenomenology


Symbolic Interactionism and Pragmatism

• George Herbert Mead, William James, Charles Peirce,

and John Dewey.

• Development of the self through communication.

• Focus on social practice as determining social process

(institutions as the abstraction of process-based

patterns).

• Shares with phenomenology a focus on the ‘meaning’ of

objects & people as linked to their potential for

engagement (highlights the social learning involved).


Why include phenomenology?

Phenomenology as a philosophical movement dedicated to understanding how

experience, concepts, or reality is achieved, generally through interaction.

Could be included, in variations, in many different paradigms (like feminism)…


Society as

interactionExperience + action.


Action*

* key difference to psychodynamics, hermeneutics & structuralism…


Interaction (George Herbert Mead through Blumer)

• Symbolic interaction: requires interpretation of

meaning (intrasubjective understanding)

• Non-symbolic interaction: ‘conversation of gestures’;

non- or pre-interpretive.

Much of human interaction is non-symbolic.


‘Gesture’

• Part of a meaningful act.

• Symbolic interaction requires

interpretation of the whole of

which gestures are a part.

• ‘What is it that we are doing

here?’

Ongoing negotiation of the

‘frame’ of the gesture or the

interpretive situation.

• Goffman’s example: ‘the wink.’

• ‘Joint action’ is the chief

product of understanding.

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Meaning

Because meaning is always

vulnerable to reinterpretation,

situations and acts can change it.

Highlights instability and possibility

of change more than many

perspectives.


‘Intersubjectivity’

Inherent in any understanding is the

taking of each other’s roles.

‘Mutual role taking’ is necessary for

symbolic communication.

Helps us to understand the social

formation of self & negotiation of

social life.


‘Self’

• One acts towards one’s self, and from the position of, taking

one’s self as a certain kind of object: role-taking.

• At the same time, we know that, for SI, all meaning is learned

through interaction: so is the ‘self.’

Requires seeing one’s self ‘from the outside’ (inc. individuals,

groups & ‘generalised other’).

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“The self... is not an organic thing that

has a specific location, whose

fundamental fate is to be born, to

mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect

arising diffusely from a scene that is

presented.”

— Erving Goffman


Self-engagement

Person is continually engaged with

one’s self during daily life as a

social interlocutor.

Social first, becomes internalised.


“Choose your self presentation

carefully, for what starts out as a

mask may become your face.”

— Erving Goffman


Implications:

• Institutions are ‘recurrent patterns of joint action’ (Blumer,

p. 17). Theorists misled into idea of ‘social order.’

‘They share common and pre-established meanings of what is expected in

the actions of the participants, and accordingly each participant is able to

guide his own behaviour by such meanings.’ (p. 17)

• Areas of unprescribed behaviour are also natural to social

life.

Even areas of recurrent joint action can be under pressure

and possible instability.

‘It is the social process in group life that creates and upholds the rules, not

the rules that create and uphold the group.’ (p. 19)


Institutions

Networks of interlinked,

interdependent chains of actions.

De-reify institutions into the settings

in which they manifest.

‘Assemblage’ of roles &

expectations that is contingent.


Example: prisons

Structural functionalist

Marxist

Post-structuralist

Interactionist


Phenomenological link

• Stream of thinking on

embodiment (Merleau-Ponty,

feminists like I.M. Young, G.

Weiss).

• Motility: capacity for action that

underwrites perception.

• Blockage: felt experience of

incapacity (social exclusion).

• Variation as a critique of overly

universalist phenomenology.


Rapid overview

game or marketsuper-organism

or systemtheatre, game

modelling of

utility-driven

transactions

homeostasis or

role fulfilment

dynamic role

achievement,

frame shifts in

constant flow


Rapid overview

interpretation is

contextualisation

destabilising

meaning

interpretation is

social act

culture as texts deconstruction meaning in action

linking of

referencescritical stance

construction of

situations


‘Grounded theory’

Partial understandings or situated

forms of knowing & acting are the

goal.

Focus on qualitative work.

Very tightly confined project

description.


Core of interactionist theory

• Epistemology: Radically localised, socially originated understanding of

truth.

Knowledge is always situated in play.

• Ontology: Focus on social determination and humanist interest in

meaningful, experiential world.

Phenomenology can reject access to unmediated reality.

• Methodology: Interpretive approach based on the a variety of

guiding metaphors (theatre, frame) and qualitative inquiry.


Strengths of interactionist paradigm

• Associated with qualitative research including participant

observation.

• Strong focus on very local social phenomena; facilitates

research in wide variety of settings.

• Central role of joint action, so a positing of an irreducible

social level at a small scale (intermediate between individual

and societal scale).

• Balances a focus on social constraint (and other restraint) with

strong sense of social determinism (failed performances).

• Recognises the degree of self awareness of humans and how

this utterly alters the way that they interact.


Prominent strains of interactionist thought

• Actor Network Theory: Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law (influence of post-

structuralism & Donna Harraway; note: Latour objects).

• Situational analysis & ‘grounded theory’:

• ‘Practice’ theory: Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant (but note Marxist & post-structuralist,

even structuralist influences).

• Social psychology (social interactionism): Jean Piaget, Elizabeth Bates, Alison Gopnik,

Andrew Meltzoff, Catherine Snow, Anat Ninio.

• Education: Lev Vygotsky (socio-cultural interaction), Jerome Bruner, Bambi Schieffelen

(anthro), Elinor Ochs.

• Poststructuralism: Strong focus on ‘performativity’ in work by theorists like Judith Butler,

• Strong streams in sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, performance studies,

behavioural economics, practice-based studies (design, nursing, applied sociology,

medical practice).


Criticism of interactionist approach

• Difficult to engage in macroscopic social analysis, so political

dimensions can be neglected. (social analysis ‘in a vacuum’)

• Unfalsifiable interpretive exercise (similar to psychoanalysis,

hermeneutics).

• Not really a paradigm so much as an analytical technique because it

eschews making causal claims.

• Within the school of thought, competing streams of qualitative and

quantitative analysis (behavioural observation can seem to drop the

focus on meaning).

• Also an internal debate over the guiding metaphors (dramaturgy, game,

negotiation).

• The origin of meanings can be unexplored.

• (Over time, a narrowing of paradigmatic difference through combination.)


Thanks for your

attention!

Bibliography online at iLearn

Photos public domain at Pixabay

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