Contemporary Sociological Theory

Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk, Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781119527244
• eBook ISBN: 9781119527237
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The new edition of the definitive undergraduate guide to contemporary sociological theory, with updated reading selections throughout

The fourth edition of Contemporary Sociological Theory offers a thorough introduction to current perspectives and approaches in sociology and social science. Covering a broad range of essential topics, this comprehensive volume provides students with the foundation necessary for understanding the theoretical underpinnings of present-day debates in the diverse field. In-depth yet accessible readings address micro-sociological analysis, symbolic interactionism, network theory, phenomenology, critical theory, structuralism, feminist theory, and more.

This classic text is fully revised to incorporate the most representative and up-to-date material, including new readings addressing debates on gender, power, and inequality. New editorial introductions clarify and contextualize the selected readings, while up-to-date examples highlight connections to today's theoretical discussions. This authoritative survey of contemporary sociological theory:

• Presents substantial primary source texts with detailed introductions, rather than brief excerpts and basic overviews
• Examines the sociological theories of Foucault, Giddens, Bourdieu, and Habermas
• Discusses debates over modernity and postmodernity, crisis and change, and race and difference
• Provides historical and intellectual perspective to each selected reading in the book
• Includes extensive references to further readings and resources

Contemporary Sociological Theory, Fourth Edition provides the depth of coverage students require for undergraduate courses in social and sociological theory as well as courses in wider social science programs such as human geography, anthropology, criminology, and urban studies. In combination with its complement?Classical Sociological Theory, Fourth Edition, Contemporary Sociological Theory remains the most complete overview of sociological theory available.

Part I
Symbolic Action

Introduction to Part I

1. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
2. Symbolic Interactionism
3. Interaction Ritual Chains

---

Introduction to Part I

Social life is part of every individual and every interaction – not only of the large-scale affairs of governments, economies, and complex organizations. Sociology that focuses primarily on persons and interpersonal relations is called “micro-sociology.” This can be relevant on a large scale: for example, how members of a corporation’s board of directors interact can determine whether 10,000 people lose their jobs or an entire country experiences an economic crisis. Micro-level decisions are the basis for many macro-sociological phenomena; individual decisions – each small in themselves – can also be aggregated to have huge effects. Consider how decisions to have children, to migrate, to invest in education, or about what and how much to buy combine to produce population crises, “brain drains,” burgeoning of college enrollments, or recession, respectively. Even without attention to their large-scale effects, micro-sociological phenomena matter because their effects can be seen on people involved in everyday life. Indeed, it is often easiest for us to see ourselves in the “micro” part of sociology where symbolic action occurs. In other words, these everyday micro-sociological interactions through the use of commonly shared symbols or language allow us to make sense of the actions of others and to be part of society.

There are many different approaches to micro-sociological analysis. Perhaps, the most prominent is symbolic interactionism, which was developed on the basis of work by George Herbert Mead in the early twentieth century and pioneered by Herbert Blumer. This approach emphasizes that people develop their identities and their senses of how society works and what constitutes fair play in the course of their interaction with each other. It is linked theoretically to the pragmatist school of American philosophy, which emphasizes the ways that not only social order but also all knowledge is achieved in practically situated action.

A second major line of micro-sociological analysis is rooted in the European philosophical tradition called phenomenology. This emphasizes close observation of human experience and especially the ways that the basic categories of understanding are formed. This has been developed directly in the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and followers like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (see Part VIII in Vol. 1), and has been a major influence on “ethnomethodology” – an approach developed especially by Harold Garfinkel and colleagues in California. Ethnomethodology refers to the methods ordinary people use to construct their own everyday understandings of social life, confronting practical challenges and shaping reality through the ways in which they conceptualize it. In this sense, it is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach to the study of culture (ethnos).

Still, a third approach reveals some similarities to each of the others; however, it is also distinct. This is the idiosyncratic, but highly influential, sociology of Erving Goffman. Goffman built his approach to micro-analysis on the basis of Durkheim’s social theory, trying to show how the sort of large-scale phenomena Durkheim analyzed was produced and reproduced in interpersonal interaction. Much interaction is ritualized, he suggested, in ways that make it reinforce the social order and prevent it from becoming highly disruptive. Goffman also developed theoretical approaches to aspects of communication, institutional analysis, and perhaps most famously the presentation of self in everyday life, that is, how we show ourselves to others (and simultaneously determine which aspects are visible and which hidden).

Challenges of Micro-Sociological Analysis

Micro-sociological theory grew, in large part, as a counterpoint to the dominance of structural functionalism in the mid-twentieth century, although its antecedents had been present in sociological theory, and in philosophy, far earlier. Structural functionalism, and the Durkheimian tradition in sociology more generally, focused on the social system as a whole, its functional requirements, and the ways that these requirements are met (see Classical Sociological Theory – the sister volume to this reader). In doing so, it tended to treat human agents as cogs in the machine of social forces. Even the early work of Talcott Parsons, which was greatly concerned with social action, was more clearly about action systems than about actors and their subjective orientation to the action at hand and to the other actors it involved.

Micro-sociologists, by contrast, emphasized the other side of social existence. Just as humans are shaped by the social system in which they act, the micro-sociologists emphasized that the social system was also a human creation. Rather than order being imposed on individuals by the system, micro-sociologists see social order as produced either from an emergent phenomenon formed through human interaction or as the result of discrete, self-interested action and exchange. It is created and maintained, they claim, by the institutions that we actively produce, even when we are not aware of them. Because of this, society itself rests on the ability of human agents to communicate with one another through the use of symbols to signify particular meanings. This highly evolved capacity for communication based on complex, abstract symbolic systems is, in fact, one of the features that distinguish humans from other species. Although there are different theoretical traditions in micro-sociology, some of which will be discussed more fully in the following text, in a general sense, it can be said that micro-sociology is characterized by at least three common elements.

First, micro-sociologists place emphasis on the face-to-face social interaction of human agents rather than on the workings of the social system as an abstract entity. It is not quite correct to say that they focus on individuals since it is really the creation and maintenance of stable systems of meaning between individuals that micro-sociologists find fascinating. However, it is true that micro-sociologists generally focus on the interactions of concrete human agents or sets of agents rather than abstract social units, such as classes.

Second, micro-sociologists place emphasis on meanings rather than functions. Here, the influences of Max Weber and George Herbert Mead are evident in later micro-sociology. For Weber, sociology was the study of social action. Because it is individuals who carry on social action, Weber stressed that sociology had to be an interpretive science. That is, we should strive to provide objective accounts of the subjective motivations of the actions of individuals. Doing this necessarily involved taking into account the meanings that people assigned to their actions. However, Weber’s own empirical analyses tended to examine highly routine forms of social action. Later, micro-sociologists began to examine the way that even everyday interactions are supported by the meanings produced and maintained in social interaction. Here, Mead’s emphasis on the role of verbal and non-verbal symbols in the creation of meaning becomes central to micro-sociology. Although we are all born with the capacity to interpret symbols, it is only through the use of such symbols in interaction that humans acquire a “self” – a sense of who we are in the world. In this way, micro-sociologists stress the intersubjective aspects of human existence.

Third, micro-sociologists emphasize lived experience rather than an abstracted (or reified) concept of “society.” The authors in this section generally grant that social institutions, once produced, do confront us as external and “objective” realities. Nevertheless, they focus on the way that human agents experience regularized patterns of social interaction (or “institutions”) and how they support them in both big and small ways. The exchange of symbols allows forming solidarity with others by letting us come to common definitions of the world. Even seemingly banal social institutions, such as greeting rituals, have important symbolic meanings. As the sociologist Harold Garfinkel showed, we rarely recognize the importance of such institutions until they break down.¹ When we cannot take such minor routines for granted in our interactions, we have to do a great deal of interpretive work to figure out how to understand each interaction we face. Additionally, as the readings in the following text will argue, our past experiences matter in how we interpret the world. This is why people who meet for the first time, especially when they come from very different backgrounds, have to spend so much more energy to understand one another than do people who see each other every day.

The Development of Micro-Sociological Analysis

Micro-sociology did not develop all at once, nor in the same way. While the core concerns of the authors presented in the following text are common enough to warrant including them in one section, we must take some care to note some of the different traditions of micro-sociological analysis as well. Loosely speaking, the authors in this section represent symbolic interactionism and the “dramaturgical” approach of Erving Goffman.

The major tradition of micro-sociology represented in this section is known as symbolic interactionism – a term coined by Herbert Blumer (1900–1987). For much of his career as a professor at the University of Chicago, Blumer’s work was deeply indebted to Mead, as well as to his colleagues Robert E. Park and W.I. Thomas. Particularly important for Blumer was Mead’s emphasis on the role of symbols in the maintenance of social interaction and the constitution of the self as a social process. In the same manner as Schutz’s phenomenology, symbolic interactionists place a strong emphasis on empiricism rather than on the social realism typified by Durkheimian and functionalist sociology.

The reading included here is from Blumer’s best-known work, Symbolic Interactionism (1969). Blumer begins by defining symbolic interaction as an approach that studies the “natural world of human group life and human conduct.” The reading uses this concept of “naturalistic” studies of social life to issue an extremely sharp critique of functionalist methods. Nestled within this critique is Blumer’s statement about how social analysis ought to be done. Blumer lays out four central claims: people act (in relation to things and each other) on the basis of the meanings attached to them; human interaction (“association”) is necessary for the making of meaning; social acts are necessarily embedded, therefore, in an interpretive process; and because of this, social networks, institutions, and other things are inherently fluid and are always being renegotiated to some extent.

The work of Erving Goffman (1922–1982) is often considered to be part of the tradition of symbolic interactionism (and, indeed, “symbolic interactionism” is often used misleadingly as a term for almost all micro-sociological analysis). Goffman’s graduate work at the University of Chicago overlapped with the last part of Blumer’s stay there, and Goffman later joined Blumer as a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley.² Nevertheless, Goffman built a body of work distinct from that of Blumer, and indeed distinct from just about everything else in the discipline. His work emphasized how people used symbols in the performance of their social roles. This is often called the “dramaturgical approach” because it suggests that people are always staging their performances for others and analyzes how such performances play out to others. A central concern of Goffman’s work is the tactical repertoire that actors develop in order to manage their social identities and to defend themselves from unwanted scrutiny and the negative appraisal of others. Sometimes, this leads them to act together, as when members of a group put on a team performance to gain what they want from others or when those sharing a common “stigma” (or a marker of an undesirable social identity) frame themselves in less damaging terms.

Like the other authors in this section, Goffman focused on the way that human social interaction makes the social possible. However, in contrast to the other authors in this section, Goffman had a certain affinity with the work of Durkheim. He saw himself as a sort of Durkheimian working on the “micro” side of the social equation. More than any of the other authors in this section, Goffman emphasized the importance of integration in the social process. To be an actor on the social stage requires not only that one claim a role, but it also requires that others recognize the claim, grant it, and act accordingly. Goffman also emphasized the fact that social performances serve broader functional needs. Our performances are done in such a way as to keep social life going smoothly. For example, even when we fail in our performances, others are likely to overlook our mistakes so as not to disrupt everyone’s performances.

The reading included here is from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. One of the central concepts in the reading is that of “front” – the part of a person’s performance that serves to define a relevant context for the “audience.” Therefore, it includes the props that go along with the physical setting, as well as the clothes, manners, and other symbols that can be used to corroborate the impression that one wishes to convey. The concept is important for pointing out not only the way that performances are realized, but also the degree to which they are situational. For example, it is easy for a person to put on a convincing performance as a serious professor or a diligent student in the context of a classroom – but it is difficult and awkward to maintain the same relation when the professor and a student notice each other in a supermarket or in a tavern.

The contemporary vitality of micro-sociological theory is reflected well in the work of Randall Collins (b. 1941) – one of today’s leading sociologists. Collins has made a number of important contributions to sociological theory, particularly in studies of social order, conflict, historical sociology, and social change. Recently, Collins has proposed a bold theoretical synthesis that builds upon Durkheim’s theory of moral integration through ritual and Goffman’s situational analysis. In his book, Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), from which a reading is taken, Collins contends that rituals are powerful because they instigate social interaction based on bodily co-presence and mutual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the Editors
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part I Symbolic Action
• Part II Structure and Agency
• Part III Institutions
• Part IV Power and Inequality
• Part V The Sociological Theory of Michel Foucault
• Part VI The Sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu
• Part VII Race, Gender, and Intersectionality
• Part VIII The Sociological Theory of Jürgen Habermas
• Part IX Modernity
• Part X Crisis and Change
• Index
• End User License Agreement