Sociologies of Interaction

Alex Dennis, Rob Philburn, Greg Smith

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745646077, 9780745646060
• eBook ISBN: 9780745672021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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

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

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

1

Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism

Introduction

Symbolic interactionism and the Second Chicago School

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

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

The Chicago School

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

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

Pragmatism and practicality

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

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

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

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

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

The centrality of meaning

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

Blumer’s three premises

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

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

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

Things are acted upon according to their meanings

The meaning of objects

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

Stimulus–response and individualism

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

Dewey and the reflex arc

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

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

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

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

Meaning is derived from social interaction

Gestures and symbols

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

Mead (1934: 63) argues that, for animals, action is largely gestural. A snarling dog will elicit a response of submission or challenge from another dog. This is not ‘interpreted’ or ‘considered’, but is directly caused by the stimulus: the snarl elicits either submission or challe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism
• 2 Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology
• 3 Conversation Analysis and the Interaction Order
• 4 Status and Power
• 5 The Body, Health and Illness
• 6 Work
• 7 Deviance
• 8 Leisure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index