User:Ceplm/Symbolic Interactionism

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Blumer (1969), p. 21) (probably the most authoritative sociological text on the symbolic interactionism[1]) characterizes the symbolic interactionism as “a perspective in empirical social science” or as a kind of paradigm of the social science. The basic point of view of the symbolic interactionism on a society is 'dynamic' and 'constructivist'.[2]

The influence of the constructivist thinking on symbolic interactionism cannot be overstated. Symbolic interactionist understanding of reality as an interpreted set of symbolic objects stands behind every piece of SI thinking. Mead (1934) based their theory on finding that people do not perceive reality directly but always through the lenses of their interpretation as a symbolic reality. That does not mean (as many suggested later) that there is no reality “out there” and everything is just social construct, but it means that such reality is much less relevant, because what really matters are social interpretations of such reality (and other things) in minds of individual actors.

When this distinction of 'perceived reality' and 'objective reality' is considered, we can see that we all 'necessarily' and without any 'exception' have a wall of 'indication' and 'interpretation' standing between and what we could call “the world out there” (which stands for what in different philosophical traditions was called by different names, like “things 'an sich'”, “natural world”). We could not perceive things in “objective”, meaning-free manner.

Other main foundation idea of the symbolic interactionism (and which makes it different from most other theoretical perspectives in social sciences) is appreciation and understanding of the 'dynamic character' of most social phenomena. All phenomena which are in other sociological streams considered either unchangeable or result of the long development (like values, culture, social order, or class) are understood by the social interactionists as processes and thus possible objects of change. Moreover, all such phenomena are understood to be processes created in the development of human action, so that they are never fixed and there is no-one who could determine their final stage with the final authority.

Actually, this dynamic character of the symbolic interactionism is considered by its supporters (e. g., Blumer (1969) or Hewitt (1976)) as its most important and distinctive contribution to the social sciences. They point many times to how this distinction of SI is misunderstood by other sociologists, who then describe core concepts of SI as static and the human decision-making as just a function of their selection of static external factors. (Hewitt 1976, p. 61) illustrates this stream of SI when he writes: “[…] ‘I’ and ‘me’ represent phases in this process […], not entities within the person that can be identified in any concrete sense.” The point the author tries to make in this quote is that traditional sociology (here mostly the structural sociology of the Talcott Parsons and his students) of the over-socialized understanding of human nature tends to understand human personality as the product of the socialization process, which is more or less fixed in the adulthood. However, although SI accepts tremendous importance of the socialization on the creation of self, generalized other and role-taking process, it still considers these objects (in SI meaning of the word, see below) as constantly changing and dynamic parts of the social interaction.

“Fundamentally, action on the part of a human being consists of taking account of various things that he notes and forging a line of conduct on the basis of how he interprets them. The things taken into account cover such matters as his wishes and wants, his objectives, the available means for their achievement, the actions and anticipated actions of others, his image of himself, and the likely result of a given line of action.” (p. 15) The symbolic interactionist paradigm points out that every human action is thus viewed as a social action[3] of 'indication' and 'interpretation', when the actor indicates which objects[4] are related to her decision-making and interprets their meaning. The actor selects different possible lines of action (or inaction, of course) and evaluates from the outsider-like position, which symbolic interactionism calls her 'self'. The perspective of social interactionism stresses the importance of the interpretation of the facts that influences the decision. In every action (or in its preparation) actor must understand through interpretation what is the relation of every individual observed object to the proposed line of action and how different objects relate to each other (in context of such line of action). For the same reason (preserving dynamic character of the social interaction) although symbolic interactionists do not reject patterns of similar behavior and rules of behavior, they claim that “every instance of [a] social action has to be formed anew” [p. 18] and that every preestablished form of social action is constantly challenged by changing circumstances and attempts to improve the form (pre-established form of social action is a fancy SI--aware name for what in other areas of social science is called “rules of human conduct” or even “tradition”, but with acknowledging its dynamic form).[5]

In the context of this choice among the possible lines of actions and navigating future action among indicated and interpreted social objects, symbolic interactionism uses another concept which is relevant for the theories shown below as a basis of my research’s analysis. Hewitt (1976), p. 53) characterizes “generalized other” in the following way:

This concept calls attention to the fact that ongoing conduct is oriented not only to the expected responses of those physically present, but to the general expectations as a whole of the group to which the individual belongs. In the course of socialization […], the persons learns to take the role of various others—parents, teachers, friends, officials, strangers, and so on. Out of this process of role-taking the individual abstracts what Bernard Meltzer has called a “composite” role—that is, “a generalized or standpoint from which he views himself and his behavior. This generalized other represents … the set of standpoints which are common to the group.”[6]

Therefore, the symbolic interactionist theory draws our attention to the image in our mind of attitudes of all “significant others” (in true, non-euphemistic meaning of the word) and assumes these attitudes to be one of the objects among which we try to navigate our actions.

The same process that applies to the individual action applies similarly to the preparation of a social action. Except that instead of only fitting one line of action to the (observed and interpreted) set of objects, now the chosen line of action have to also fit into the expected line of action of other. Such social action is not only addition of two (or more) individuals’ actions, but it has distinctive nature wider than just the sum of its parts. Marriage, trading transaction, parliamentary discussion, church service and many others social actions have certainly as their parts individual actions of their participants, but there is more to the social action than just that. Aside from their own decision making process, participants of the planned social action indicate to each other proposed course of action and interpret signals from others. So there are two decision making processes—the individuals’ decision leading to a social action and each participants’ own action formation separated from the actions of other participants in the social action. For a better understanding of the concept of social action, it should be emphasized that social action does not have to imply cooperation. There is a fair amount of research on crime as a social action, analyzing victim and perpetrator considering each other’s line of action and fitting their own action to it.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Of course, Blumer was not the only author influential in the symbolic interactionist tradition or in the area of related constructivist theories—Berger and Luckman, Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, Alfred Schutz, and of course George Herbert Mead.
  2. ^ There is an other approach how to understand symbolic interactionism. The whole idea of the symbolic interactionism is then related to the more philosophical tradition of interpretativism, hermeneutics, and constructivism (Carey 1989)(Bernstein 1978) with roots in the long tradition of the epistemological skepticism by philosophers like Kant and many others. This line of thought teaches us that our understanding of the reality independent of humans (which has many different names—“natural world”, “reality as it is”, and of course the “thing-in-itself” of Immanuel Kant) is always perceived through our interpretation and that such interpretation is socially construed in the interaction between observer and other social objects, which include tradition, and other actors in the given situation. The conclusion of this philosophical line of thought is similar to what all sociological constructivists claim—that there is no such thing as reality independent from an observer and that every observation is mixed with interpretation, so we should focus on the quality of such interpretation.
  3. ^ Blumer (1969) uses a term “joint action” instead. However, that may be misleading because it seems to imply cooperative action only, which does not have to be the case (see below).
  4. ^ Objects in the symbolic interactionist’s terminology are “anything that can be indicated, anything that is pointed to or referred to—a cloud, a book, a legislature, a banker, a religious doctrine, a ghost, and so forth” Blumer (1969), p. 11). This definition is intentionally so broad as it seems to be—the concept of object covers anything material or immaterial, which has a meaning, which “sets the way in which [the actor] sees the object, the way in which he is prepared to act toward it, and the way in which he is ready to talk about it. […] The meaning of objects for a person arises fundamentally out of the way they are defined to him by others with whom he interacts.” '(Ibid.)'
  5. ^ In the similar way as SI incorporates into its dynamic understanding of reality concepts like “tradition”, it is also includes idea of “path dependency”, i. e., that past actions influence the current and future ones.
  6. ^ Here Hewitt quotes Meltzer (1972), p. 10).

[edit] Bibliography

Bernstein, Richard J. (1978). The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812277422. 

Hewitt, John P (1976). Self and Society: A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology, First, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0205054714. 

Carey, James W (1989). Communication as culture: essays on media and society, media and popular culture. Unwin Hyman, Inc.. ISBN 0044450621. 

Meltzer, Bernard N; Bernard Meltzer (1972). "Mead's Social Psychology", Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 15-??. 

Mead, George Herbert (1934). Mind, Self, and Society : From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 440. ISBN 0226516687. 

Blumer, Herbert (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, First, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc..