The Faultline of Consciousness

A View of Interactionism in Sociology

David Maines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351482851
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this compendium of related and cross-referential essays, David R. Maines draws from pragmatist/symbolic interactionist assumptions to formulate a consistent new view of the entire field of sociology. Suitable for courses in social theory, qualitative methods, social psychology, and narrative inquiry, this volume will change the way the general public looks at interpretive sociology.This book is organized as an expression of the centrality of interactionism to general sociology. Each chapter is designed to articulate this view of the field. Symbolic interactionism, the way Maines has come to understand and use it, is essentially the concerted application of pragmatist principles of philosophy to social inquiry.There are four basic elements to this characterization. First, people transform themselves: people are self-aware beings who reflexively form their conduct and thus are capable of adjusting their lines of action and creating new ones. Second, people transform their social worlds: human action takes place in contexts of situations and social worlds. People can modify the social matrices in which they act, and thus people are agents of change. Third, people engage in social dialogue: communication is generic and is at the heart of both stability and change. A fourth element is that people respond to and deal with their transformations. Humans construct situations and societies; they establish social structures and cultures. These are the consequences of human action and, once formed, they reflexively function to direct and channel conduct.Maines argues that when people do things together they can create enduring group formations, such as divisions of labor, rules for inheritance, wage-labor relations, or ideologies. These are instances of group characteristics that influence human conduct and indeed are not reducible to the traits of individuals making up the group or society.

1
The Interactionism of Contemporary Sociology

Some of my more frustrating moments as a sociologist took place when I was on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University and a few of the more influential members of the department called me a “symbolic interaction-ist.” These acts never occurred as blatant instances of name-calling, as in “you dirty interactionist!” but the quieter and more effective form of dismissive labeling and indifference. Expressed only periodically, such conduct took several forms. Although I had taken my doctoral exams in stratification, urban sociology, and organizations, for example, I was assigned courses in social psychology because, so the logic-in-use went, in-teractionists do that kind of microlevel work. Actually, teaching those courses was fine with me, but in that department at that time, with about one-third of the faculty engaging in demographic analysis of one sort or another, such assignments were a form of ghettoizing. Another kind of dismissal is exemplified by an otherwise pleasant conversation I had with a colleague, in which she remarked that I was really aligned more with the humanities than with science. Interactionists, especially the Blumerians, are like that, she suggested. Alongside these kinds of deficit model utter-anees was an array of rather overtly nasty acts, but that department was a generally nasty one in the late 1980s, and a number of faculty were feeling the sting of the demography oligarchy that ran the place. Needless to say, I didn’t last long there—only five years—primarily because, from their point of view, interactionists were a drag on their aspirations to become a top-ten department. And I suppose I didn’t help myself much because I developed somewhat of a mouth.

Before I left in 1991, though, I conducted an informal survey of the department members for purposes of determining what in fact the major theoretical thrust of the department was. I had read something written by nearly every member of the department and had a pretty good idea of each one’s basic ideas (policy analysis was big, I knew), but it still was a bit of a surprise when I discovered that about one-fourth of the department’s faculty used some kind of interactionist theory in their work. Some used it more explicitly than did others, of course, but the clear conclusion was that if there was a single theoretical thrust to the department it was interactionism. The really fascinating thing about that department at that time was that, with the possible exception of one other person, I was regarded as the only in-teractionist there. So it could be said that here was an interactionist department that didn’t know it. The entire set of experiences got me thinking.

After musing for some time and scanning the journals in general sociology, I came to the conclusion that it was not just Penn State’s Sociology Department but the entire field of sociology that, without seeming to be aware of it, has been moving in the direction of symbolic interactionism. I realize that such a claim sounds rather presumptuous, but with some thought I suspect that most readers can come to see that, if not justified in its own right, the proposition is at least worth further consideration. Its plausibility, though, depends on the answers to several questions: (1) What is the conceptual nature or content of symbolic interactionism? (2) What is the character of the scholarship derivative from or consistent with that perspective? (3) How do we demonstrate increases in interactionist work? (4) How do we demonstrate that a certain number of sociologists are unaware they are doing interactionist work? I will address these questions in this chapter, in the course of which I will argue the position not merely of in-teractionism’s continuing relevance to general sociology but of its necessary relevance. To rephrase my argument in an even more presumptuous way, I would say that sociology has never had any alternative but to move eventually toward the interactionist perspective.

On Interactionism

What is interactionism? Several scholars over the years have provided descriptions and assessments of symbolic interactionism. Some have characterized the perspective in terms of its basic propositions (Rose 1962; Blumer 1969), some in terms of lists of assumptions [Strauss (1993) lists nineteen], others have provided discussions of the perspective’s background in social philosophy and its subsequent developments (Stryker 1980; Reynolds 1990), and still others have listed the perspective’s basic precepts and questions (Manis and Meitzer 1978; Stone and Farberman 1970). Like all perspectives, there is some variation among interactionists concerning how these assumptions, precepts, and propositions should be expressed, just as there is variation in what concepts and propositions should be emphasized or deemphasized. For my purposes, though, I will draw from these discussions to offer a list of simple facts and statements that can serve as a point of departure for issues I will take up later in this chapter.

All interactionists and some noninteractionists tend to take seriously the following facts.

1. People can think, and they possess self-awareness. Despite the variation in cognitive abilities among people and the various conditions under which people may be more or less aware of themselves, this statement of fact holds. Accordingly, we find interactionists who study and write theories about cognition, selves, and identities.
2. Communication is central to all human social activity. Because of this fact, interactionists tend to conceptualize cognition and selfhood as persons in communication with themselves, and they tend to privilege language and other forms of representations (i.e., symbols) in their studies of social phenomena.
3. All forms of human activity occur in situations. Human behavior must occur somewhere, and if that behavior is overtly social then it occurs with someone in a cultural, institutional, gendered, national, racial, economic, and / or historical context. Situationless conduct is unknown among human beings.
4. Human relationships and collectivities are forms of activity. These forms can range from interpersonal relations to social structures to global economies, but in each case the interactionist will regard them as action- and agency-endowed.

Unlike some theories, such as expectation states theory (Wagner 1984), which depends largely on a series of assumptions and axioms for its theoretical credibility,¹ interactionists tend to adhere rather tenaciously to fundamental characteristics of the human species for their theory’s credibility. Such adherence, of course, is basic to all worthwhile science insofar as it identifies a common content for disciplined inquiry. Accordingly, I call the above four statements “facts” in recognition that they apply to members of the species of animals that sociologists have identified for study. People can think and they possess consciousness, they communicate in a variety of ways that renders their conduct social, their activity is always situated, the features of their societies come from their activity, and those features influence subsequent activity. These facts are so obvious that they need not be stated, but inexplicably we still have sociologists who have conjured up explanations of human conduct that completely fly in their face.

From these four facts, interactionists have derived a series of orienting propositions that they use to conceptualize their research and scholarly inquiry. They include at least the following three:

1. Human activity involves transactions of meaning. If humans communicate on the basis of symbolic representations (e.g., words, money, clothing, fashion, bodily gestures, media), then they must interpret any communicative gesture in order to form a social response. Such interpretations incorporate meanings, and those meanings can range from taken-for-granted, habitlike embedded consensuality to conflictual, oppositional, overt nonconsensuality. Interactionists regard issues of meaning as fundamental to understanding and explaining human group behavior, and thus they tend to make it central to their approach to sociological inquiry.
2. Variation, change, and uncertainty are intrinsic to human group life. If we know anything about human societies, it is that even the most stable forms of social organization and institutional arrangements will not last forever. We also know that change and uncertainty go hand in hand, and that even in agreed-upon and controlled circumstances outcomes are never completely certain. The probabilistic nature of futures makes variation a natural component of social life, and together these three elements constitute much of the “ordered flux” that G. H. Mead saw in society.
3. “Society” and “the individual” are never separable but are merely different phases of social processes. Cooley (1909) said it earliest and best: society, he said, is the collective phase and individuals the distributive phase. Accordingly, individuals are always social beings, and societies are always composed of interacting individuals. The interactionist is relue-tant to study one without studying the other, and in any case, the choice is merely a matter of emphasis brought on by the research question at hand.

These four facts and three orienting propositions are not exhaustive, and they clearly do not constitute a theory. Moreover, I really do not know many practicing interactionists who spend much time dwelling on them in the abstract. Rather, they are a starting point for conducting research and perhaps eventually formulating a theory (Nisbet 1970:57-63). Before discussing the issue of the interactionist perspective as against interactionist theories, though, I wish to make a few observations about these seven statements in light of common images and claims made about interactionism.

First, the interactionist recognition that people think and have selves and the fact that some interactionists even study these aspects of human conduct does not render the perspective a subjectivist one with an individualistic bias. Nor does the interactionist focus on meaning render the perspective subjectivistic. This issue of interactionism as having a subjective bias, I suspect, can be traced to the early 1960s after Don Martindale’s The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (1960) was published, in which there was a concern with categorizing and classifying theory. This view also was fostered in the 1970s with the rise of ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and existential sociology and the resulting analyses of their relationships to symbolic interactionism (see Denzin 1969; Zimmerman and Weider 1970). These kinds of discussions, I propose, contributed to the view that symbolic interactionism is a subjectivistic perspective.²

That view, of course, is absurd. All sociologists recognize that people think and possess consciousness, including the “macro” or “structuralist” sociologists. If one thinks about it, the phrase “subjective sociology” is an oxymoronic impossibility. Subjectivity is real and may be composed of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, mental processes, perceptions, opinions, and prejudices, but once a person expresses them they are no longer subjective. Rather, they now belong both to the speaker and to the hearer of those expressions and thus are part of the social (see W. I. Thomas on jurisdictions). The subjective-objective dichotomy is an historically rendered rhetorical construction that has no relevance whatsoever to sociology, because sociological analysis begins with the utterance of a thought, feeling, or attitude. That is, by definition subjectivity cannot be directly studied in a sociological manner. The more productive distinction is private vs. public in recognition that we may have thoughts and experiences we do not express (the private) but once we express them they become part of the social (public). Interactionism, accordingly, takes into account the fact that people think but considers those thoughts at the point that they are expressed in interaction and thus are part of the public realm. I would include in this formulation those interactionists who claim to be studying “lived experience,” which is a redundancy that can be studied only in terms of one’s expressions of an experience (Bruner 1986).

Second, to assert the centrality of communication and meanings that are transacted through communication processes does not limit interaction-ism’s relevance solely to the area of social psychology. These processes are generic, and it is rather obvious that their relevance also is found in organizational studies, gender studies, economic sociology, sociology of sei-ence, race relations, urban studies, the sociology of religion, historical sociology, political sociology, stratification, and other areas. In these areas of study it is common to find scholars focusing on issues of media representations, language, information technologies, processes of persuasion and information control, the diffusion and segmentation of ideas, debates and assessments of various kinds of events and happenings, consensus-building, acts of collective secrecy and strategic alignments, policy formation, and so forth. All of these are issues of communication and meaning, and anyone engaging in a measure of clear-headed reflection on them can easily conclude that, while symbolic interactionism certainly is relevant to social psychology in a variety of ways, it has relevance to many other areas as well.

Third, and relatedly, the insistence by interactionists that human conduct is always situated does not fate the perspective to “micro” concerns. The concept of situation is a slippery one, but at a minimum it refers to those factors with which an actor must deal in forming a line of conduct. Elements of situations may include family income, racial and gender com-positions of groups, access to resources, regulation of space, language, relationships and networks, economic systems, societal disturbance or stability, norms of emotion display, processes of legitimation and authority allocation, urban and rural settings, family violence and abuse, location in a dual economy, or corporate monopolies. Situations quite clearly vary in scale and content, and they affect the paths of activity actors take by providing avenues of constraint and opportunity.

Fourth, the interactionist focus on human activity and agency does not constitute a denial of social structure and institutional arrangements. Allegations of that denial, I suspect, originated in sociology’s institutionbuilding phase in the 1920s and 1930s, and persisted through the 1960s as the discipline became more quantitatively oriented. In competing for intellectual space, it was in sociology’s vested interest to trade on a social fac-tist formulation in which group properties were seen as exerting causal influences on some form of behavior. In its simplest expression, the dominant proposition adopted by the field was that “social structures cause human action.” Within that general proposition we witnessed hundreds of studies in which some element of social structure (e.g., social class, power, education, residence, organizational size) would be used as an independent variable to “explain” through correlational statistics some independent variable (e.g., voting, self-esteem, earnings, socialization of children, neighboring). It was a research paradigm that worked wonders for the administrative and economic growth of the discipline and its legitimation in academic and governmental circles.

While that research paradigm was being developed, scholars such as W. I. Thomas, Robert Park, and Herbert Blumer, drawing from the philosophical pragmatists, were busy promoting an alternative formulation. They proposed that institutional and social structural arrangements were real, but that those arrangements were created, maintained, and changed through human activity and agency. In its simplest expression, the formulation they supported was that “human action causes social structures.” Clearly this proposition was terribly inconvenient and poorly timed for sociology’s institution-building phase, since it blurred the images of the relations between sociology and psychology. The conventional wisdom of the field was that the interactionists simply had placed the causal arrow in the wrong direction and as a consequence of that error their theories were of limited utility and potential for developing a genuine sociology. Fortunately, as will be discussed later, sociology seems to be growing out of that viewpoint.

My fifth observation pertains to research methods. There is nothing in the seven statements that requires interactionists to use, or prevents them from using, any particular set of research procedures common to sociological research. The fact of the matter is that most interactionists tend to be methodologically rather conventional. Yet, there has persisted a great deal of misinformation and unfortunate stereotyping about “interactionist methods,” some of which has been perpetuated by interactionists themselves, as if such methods have really existed. According to this distorted view, interactionists are naturally drawn to qualitative methods, which require the use of “sympathetic introspection” and “getting inside the actor’s head” to generate data about some individual’s inner experiences. Such a view, I declare, is categorically wrong.

Typically, these views are traced through distortions of Herbert Blumer’s various writings about research methods and his alleged out-of-hand rejection of quantitative analysis. It therefore is worthwhile to take a brief but saner look at his actual views and arguments. First, Blumer’s general position was that methodological choices and decisions should be derived from the research questions asked and with respect to the nature of the phenomena under study. Second, any procedure available can and should be used, including “the statistical, the case study, the historical, and the ecological” (Blumer 1939a:xxix), but in recognition that each has its own limitations. Third, research should be conducted insofar as possible in terms of intergroup relations and not necessarily in terms of individual experiences. Here, for example, are his recommendations for studying social protests.

The proper object of scholarly concern is not the protesting group but the arena of collective protest. One does not understand collective protest by merely studying the protesting group, by trying to find out what kinds of people compose it and their views, their motives and their actions. One must identify the other groups acting in the arena (echelons of authority, agents of authority, interest groups, and the general public) and observe what they do. Above all, it is necessary to see how the actions of these participating groups set the stage for one another and influence each other. Collective protest is a joint development involving the interplay of different groups and moving in diverse directions as a result of the interplay. (1978:51-52, emphasis in original)

Furthermore, while Blumer was critical of the ritualized and thoughtless use of variable-based survey analysis and thought that a variable-analytic orthodoxy was an unproductive approach for grounding an empirical sei-ence of society, he did not reject variable analysis out of hand and in fact was quite explicit in advocating its use. He expressed that advocacy in his presidential address to the American Sociological Society:

Variable analysis is a fit procedure for those areas of social life and formulation that are not mediated by interpretive processes. Such areas exist and are important. Further, in the area of interpretive life variable analysis can be an effective means of unearthing stabilized patterns of interpretation which are not likely to be detected through the direct study of the experience of people. Knowledge of such patterns, or rather of the relations between variables which reflect such patterns, is of great value for understanding group life in its “here-and-now” character and indeed may have significant practical value (1956:689-90).

I trust that some readers may be surprised to discover that the very person who coined the phrase “symbolic interaction” also explicitly stated that in some cases statistical survey research is preferable to methods designed for the study of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Interactionism of Contemporary Sociology
• I THEORETICAL CONCERNS
• II EMPIRICAL STUDIES
• III NARRATIVE SOCIOLOGY
• IV EPILOGUE
• References
• Index