Interactionism

Paul Atkinson, William Housley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761962700, 9780761962694
• eBook ISBN: 9781446223147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Atkinson and Housley have produced a book that is a very competent, interesting and useful addition to other work in the field. Its distinctive contribution for me, lies in the exploration of the relationship between, and developments within interactionist sociologies? - Sociology

What is symbolic interactionism? This refreshing and authoritative book provides readers with:

· A guide to the essential thinking, research and concepts in interactionism

· A demonstration of the use of the interactionist approach

· An explaination of why the interactionist influence has not been fully acknowledged in Britain.

The authors argue that few sociologists in Britain have identified themselves with symbolic interactionism, even though many have engaged with interactionist ideas in their research and methodological work. We are all interactionists now, in the sense that many of the key ideas of interactionism have become part of the mainstream of sociological thought. Currently fashionable approaches to sociology display a kind of collective amnesia. A good deal of today?s ideas that are presented as ?novel? or ?innovative? only appear so because earlier contributions - interactionism among them - are not explicitly acknowledged.

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interactionism in perspective

This book is not a general survey of interactionism in the history of sociological thought. Nevertheless, an overview is necessary, if only to put the rest of our discussion into context. This is especially desirable, given that our brief concerns a specifically British perspective, and interactionism is not in itself an indigenous British perspective. On the contrary, its roots and its development are to be found within the intellectual traditions of American social science. Born of a particular constellation of social, institutional and personal influences in the early years of the twentieth century, it has continued to inspire a developing programme of empirical social research into the early years of the twenty-first. It is useful to gain a broad sense of its central concerns, not least because we shall go on to argue that they continue to have considerable relevance for current sociology. Rather than providing a detailed historical account (which in itself demands monograph-length treatment, and can be found in different versions already), we therefore try to convey a general flavour of its key ideas, its influential personnel, and some of the main continuities in its ideas. Equally, we are not interested in sectarian disputes as to who ‘really counts’ as an interactionist, or in theological disputes over the true messages. We are certainly not interested in trying to demarcate an orthodoxy, nor to establish tight boundaries. Rather, here and throughout this book we are treating ‘interactionism’ as a broad approach to sociology. It is, in any event, a sociological perspective that has had multiple origins and inspirations. It derives from the work of different founders, and has benefited from a number of strands of thought.

Inevitably, the story of interactionism in America is bound up with the story of sociology at the University of Chicago. Between the two world wars, that department was the site where interactionist sociology developed. After the Second World War, the same department saw a vigorous flowering of interactionist sociology. The Chicago influence was then dispersed much more widely, as there was something of a diaspora to other parts of the United States. The University of Chicago Department of Sociology was also a significant site in the development of research styles that would later be called ‘field work’ and later still ‘ethnography’. Chicago became associated, therefore, with field research in urban and institutional settings. Now, it is not our major task to outline and unpick those various strands of influence, and others have done the painstaking work already. However, in order to avoid misunderstanding, and to forestall being criticized for making claims we are not in fact making, it may be useful to summarize the general positions as follows:

• Interactionism is a broad perspective in sociology that traces its origins to some of the sociologists working at the University of Chicago in the inter-war years.
• By no means all the sociologists at the University of Chicago in that period are equally associated with the origins and inspirations of interactionism.
• Interactionism is broader than symbolic interactionism, which is explicitly linked to Mead’s social psychology, which is also a part of the University of Chicago’s intellectual history.
• Symbolic interactionism is a particular codification that does not capture all of the empirical work.
• The development of interactionism is associated with the development of qualitative field research in Chicago. But by no means all Chicago sociology was based on qualitative fieldwork, and not all of the urban fieldwork was ‘interactionist’.

In other words, this is far from being an account of the Chicago School itself (even if it makes sense to think of a Chicago School anyway). One has to think more flexibly than that, recognizing that institutional setting, theoretical ideas, empirical research and methodological commitments have rarely been coterminous. Rather, we are dealing with a series of elective affinities between sociologists and ideas, between practical research and epistemological glosses, between general theoretical trends and the work of individual sociologists.

It is especially difficult to produce a simple summary of interactionist thought and its institutional contexts. Contrary to some textbook over-simplifications, interactionism – whether or not defined as ‘symbolic interactionism’ – is by no means characterized by a single, consistent line of development. Rather, we must look to a number of different strands of theory and empirical research, which sometimes come together, and at other times trace parallel paths. Some sense of this rather ‘messy’ intellectual development may be gained from a variety of historical reviews. Consider, for instance, the authoritative essay by Berenice Fisher and Anselm Strauss (1978a). They point out that the referents of ‘interactionism’ and ‘symbolic interactionism’ are varied: interactionism, symbolic interactionism, the Chicago School – these terms seem to be used if not interchangeably, then at least imprecisely to cover a variety of related authors and topics. For some commentators, it is the contribution of Herbert Blumer that is central; for others, the work of the generation of Howard Becker. The role of George Herbert Mead is also accorded different significance by different commentators. Erving Goffman (e.g. Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1963) is sometimes included within the canon, and sometimes not. To complicate the issue further, by no means all the sociologists themselves associated with the interactionist tradition endorse the term ‘symbolic interactionism’, and distance themselves from unduly narrow definitions of a distinct specialism within sociology.

Fisher and Strauss (1978a, 1978b) resolve this, in part at any rate, by suggesting that there are at least two main traditions of interactionism, grounded in different intellectual traditions, and not always being in close conjunction. Interactionism is, they suggest, a ‘dual tradition’ (1978a: 458). On the one hand, there is a sociological tradition, associated with the University of Chicago School, that is rooted in the work of W.I. Thomas and Robert Park. On the other, there is the tradition that stems from George Herbert Mead (1932, 1934, 1938) that was codified by Herbert Blumer (1962, 1969). There are points of contact, and some individual scholars have been influenced by both traditions. Others have worked much more in one or another. Yet others, Fisher and Strauss suggest, probably cannot tell the difference, having been socialized into a generalized ‘interactionist’ perspective (see also Strauss, 1994).

The Park–Thomas tradition was particularly associated with the developing programme of empirical sociological research that developed in the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology. That department was special in several ways. It was part of a major new university, located within a city that was itself undergoing rapid social and economic transformations. Chicago changed with extraordinary speed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In the years following the great fire of Chicago, the city expanded physically and in terms of its population. It became a major centre for industry and commerce. It was a magnet for in-migration. Migrants came from the post-bellum southern States, and from Europe. The city’s ethnic mix became highly diverse. It became spatially differentiated. Successive generations of migrants established areas such as ‘little Italy’ or ‘little Poland’. The physical structure of the city and its spatial relations were also dramatic. Chicago was one of the first cities in which the distinctive modern high-rise style of the downtown district was established. Office blocks, department stores and other features of the modern metropolitan scene were built in the rapidly developing area of Chicago in the area that came to be known as ‘the Loop’.

For the sociologists of Chicago, the city around them provided inspiration and subject matter. Under the inspiration of Park, Thomas and others, the sociologists explored what they called the ‘natural areas’ of the city – its distinctive neighbourhoods. They explored the extreme differences between the poorest and the wealthiest neighbourhoods. The city provided them with what they themselves referred to as a ‘natural laboratory’. It furnished the opportunity to study the effects of social change and migration. The contrasts between the ‘old world’ of the Europeans’ origins and the ‘new world’ of the American metropolis were exciting opportunities for the sociologists. It allowed them, for instance, to study the social processes of disruption and renewal as new populations became detached from the cultures of their origins, and underwent their adaptations to the modern social contexts of Chicago (Thomas et al., 1921).

The programme was a thoroughly empirical one. It gave rise to one of the most famous of all American studies – the multi-volume study of the Polish peasant by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–20). It also fostered detailed investigations of various neighbourhoods and locales within the changing city – such as Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), Cressey’s study of the taxi dance hall (1932), or Thrasher’s study of territorial gangs (1927). The influence of Park and Thomas was profound in the development of interactionist research in general. Chicago sociologists were committed to the development of research methods and empirical inquiries of a wide variety of types. Subsequent accounts of the Chicago School can all too easily stress just one side of its development – often emphasizing the first flowering of urban ethnography in American sociology, while paying too little attention to the spatial and quantitative techniques that were also promoted within the department. It is, however, the strong Chicago commitment to the investigation of the local manifestation of societal processes of change that gives the subsequent history of interactionism some of its characteristic approaches. In that sense, therefore, the collective commitment to an ethnographic engagement with the urban milieu is a persistent legacy of Chicago. It owed much to Park’s own biography and intellectual development, reflecting as it did his experience as a journalist and his personal exploration of the urban scene.

It owed a great deal too to the distinctive conceptualization of the city. The Park–Thomas inspiration involved seeing the city as a distinctive social form in its own right, with its own dynamics and evolutionary movement. The city included in it a new ‘frontier’, where the old world met the new, in the ‘zone of transition’, where waves of new in-migrants first settled, while longer-established groups migrated out of the inner-city zones towards the suburbs. The idea of the frontier is significant in American thought, and the identification of this urban frontier was a powerful one. So too was Park’s metaphor of marginality. The ‘marginal man’ was the personal counterpart of the frontier (Wacker, 1995). Marginality was intrinsic to the social conditions of an emergent urban modernity. Wirth’s conceptualization of ‘urbanism’ as a way of life encapsulated several of the themes of the Park–Thomas strand of Chicago thought. The city was conceptualized not merely as a physical space, but as the site of a distinctive form of social life. It was marked by its density and its fragmentation; it provided multiple stimuli; it was a site in which anonymous strangers were engaged in multiple fleeting encounters (see Wirth, 1938).

Evolutionary change was thus being played out in the rapidly changing urban environment of the city of Chicago. Intensive local studies captured the general social processes at work. This was not, however, a programme merely of social observation. The Park–Thomas tradition was conceived as the exercise of engaged social science, geared to the understanding and promotion of social reform. Like other social scientists before them and like their contemporaries, the Chicago sociologists were exercised by the broad themes of evolutionary social change, its social, institutional and personal consequences. In the early decades of the twentieth century American intellectuals – including the sociologists – were grappling with the development of a modern industrial nation-state, to be forged out of diverse groups of new immigrants. Social disorganization, the weakening of primary social groups, and the rise of individualism all posed potential threats to orderly social change. The role of the engaged intellectual was to find ways of rational intervention in these social processes. The Chicago School approach to sociology was itself a part of the Progressive era in the United States. One version of the history of the department and its intellectual commitments emphasizes the role of the sociologists as engaged public intellectuals, involved in public affairs. They were indeed firmly committed not only to research but also to public discourse concerning crime, race relations, and other ‘social problems’.

Park and Thomas both believed in the inherent value of social organization and association. This is a recurrent preoccupation within American sociology, quite irrespective of the interactionist tendency. The existence and persistence of social institutions, they held, provided the basis for orderly social change. They sought a middle way between social determinism and pure individualism. They believed in the power of a well-informed public opinion. Park’s own work – substantially influenced by the work of Georg Simmel – distinguished between the ‘public’ and the ‘crowd’. The public permits the exercise of individual will, and is susceptible to rational intervention; the crowd subsumes the individual will within its collective identity. The goal of the public intellectual, then, was to promote rational social change through the promotion of a well-informed public and through the promotion of social organization (Matthews, 1977).

The Park–Thomas strand of thought was significant in the development of interactionist sociology. It stressed the centrality of social change. In doing so, the sociology of Chicago reflected the times: the manifest turmoil of the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. The transformations of an urban and industrial society, increasingly characterized by ethnic and cultural diversity, provided the backdrop and the subject matter of the sociological programme. The sociologists saw themselves, and acted as, public intellectuals, actively engaged in shaping social transformations, and involved in the creation of a well-informed public.

The second major strand in the formation of interactionist thought derived from the social philosophy and social psychology of George Herbert Mead (1932, 1934, 1938). Mead was also a University of Chicago figure. But it would be wrong to assume that there were direct lines of influence between Meadian philosophy and Chicago sociology from the outset. Mead developed a view of social change that was congruent with that of the sociologists. He believed that social change was a form of general evolutionary movement, but with a crucial difference from the processes of natural evolution. The crucial difference, he believed, lay in the distinctive human characteristic of language and its consequences. While all organisms can receive and transmit signals and stimuli, human language is unique. Mead referred to the general form of communication as ‘gesture’ and language as ‘significant symbols’ – a special evolutionary development of gesture. Animal gesture is essentially a matter of stimulus and response. The gesture or signal cannot be separated from its immediate behavioural contexts or consequences. On the other hand, human language allows the speaker to stimulate another in a way that is different from how he or she is stimulated. In other words, the animal may feel fear and convey fear to other species members. The human speaker does not have to feel fear in order to convey fear to others, or to warn others of danger, or to talk about danger, or to discuss the hypothetical or future possibility of danger, or to describe the feeling of fear or danger in the past, or on the part of some third party. Language thus transcends the concrete limitations of stimulus–response reactions. Language allows for the creation of culture, in that human social actors can exchange experiences, cumulate experiences and share meanings.

The human actor can also act reflexively on herself or himself. Language permits a particular kind of dialogue. In addition to the dialogue between actors, so there is the possibility of a sort of internal dialogue. The actor can treat herself or himself as a kind of ‘other’. Consequently, the human actor has a dual character. On the one hand, there is the origin of action – what Mead referred to as the ‘I’. On the other, there is the object of self-awareness – what Mead referred to as the ‘Me’. The I and the Me are aspects or moments of the Self: they are not separate entities. They refer to tensions in the self and its dual nature: the impulsive and creative impulse versus the socialized internalization of social mores. This general capacity therefore permits the human actor to take the role of the other – in being able imaginatively to grasp how another actor is stimulated. One can, therefore, monitor and adapt one’s conduct in the light of others’ perceived perceptions and judgements. The process of socialization also means that actors internalize not merely the judgements of concrete, specific others; they also develop a sense of the ‘generalized other’, so that they come into a fully socialized awareness of the social milieu in which they are placed.

The capacity of language gives rise to the possibility of culture. It also transforms the evolutionary process. It removes social change from the domain of natural processes and renders it susceptible to human direction. Social transformation is therefore susceptible to rational intervention. To that extent, then, Meadian philosophy was congruent with the progressivist ideals of the Chicago sociologists. They shared a commitment to rational intervention in social processes and problems, although Mead himself never formulated or engaged in a programme of social reform or sociologically informed expertise. Mead’s contribution to interactionist thought lies primarily in his thoroughly social view of the self, and his formulation of the triad of mind, self and society. In Mead’s treatment, these three terms do not stand for three separate entities. Rather, they are all three parts of the same general phenomenon: the self and the mind are both equally social processes.

Mead did not formulate a systematic sociology. His work was not directly influential in the earliest days of empirical social research in Chicago. It is, however, true that versions of social psychology were part of the developing school of sociological thought. The sociologists at Chicago were increasingly exposed to social psychology from Mead himself and others such as Faris. Indeed, interactionism in general is one of the few among earlier movements in sociology to have treated social psychology seriously. (The Frankfurt School’s inspirations in Freud and Marx is an obvious exception.) Cooley’s notion of the ‘looking glass self’ was an influential statement of the significance of self-consciousness in the development of the social self and the management of human conduct. Cooley suggested that others acted as a metaphorical mirror, reflecting back their perceptions and judgements, and in turn giving rise to feelings of pride or shame – depending on how those perceptions accorded or diverged from one’s self-perceptions. Cooley and Mead thus stressed the dialogic nature of conduct and the self as an emergent phenomenon arising out of such transactions (Cooley, 1902). Conduct is monitored by the self and by others. There is therefore – in principle at least – the possibility for conduct to become mutually aligned. This is not just a cosy picture of mutual gratification and accommodation, however. The mutual gaze of social actors and their simultaneous acts of perception and judgement can clearly be threatening and potentially damaging.

Authors like Fisher and Strauss (1978a, 1978b) are clearly right to provide a balanced view of the significance of Mead’s work as a theoretical basis for the early development of ‘interactionism’ as a programme of empirical social investigation (Fisher and Strauss, 1979). In the development of Chicago sociology, it was Georg Simmel who provided much of the intellectual impetus. The Chicago textbook of sociology (Park and Burgess, 1921) gave considerable prominence to Simmel. Simmel’s own sensitivity to the metropolis as a site of modernity had a close affinity with the emergent sociology of Chicago. The distinctive forms of urbanism were a common theme linking the Chicago School with European concerns with modernity, and Simmel was the key link (Rock, 1979). In some ways, therefore, one should think of the early development of social research in Chicago as a Simmelian rather than as a Mead-inspired programme. The role of Mead in the development of interactionist research is itself contested. On the one hand, Mead is acknowledged as a founding figure in the tradition; on the other, he may be viewed as a symbolic founding hero, invoked but with rather little direct influence.

It is really with the emergence of the so-called second Chicago School that the work of most direct relevance to us emerges (Fine, 1995). The generations that were taught in the Chicago department and then founded departments or groups elsewhere took forward key ideas and a distinctive programme of empirical research in a variety of domains. In the years following the Second World War, varieties of interactionism also became codified and promoted. One of the most important of these exercises was Blumer’s codification of ‘symbolic interactionism’, which explicitly linked the sociological work with Mead, and it is largely through Blumer’s formulations that Mead is widely perceived to be a founding influence (Blumer, 1969). Blumer himself inherited both strands of Chicago thought – the social psychology and the Park–Thomas strand. He is always referred to as an inspiring teacher, and his influence was direct as a mentor, as well as more widespread through the book Symbolic Interactionism, as well as his methodological writings. In attempting to establish a codified ‘symbolic interactionism’ he sought to establish a number of fundamental principles.

Blumer insisted that the subject matter of sociology is social action. His positive appeals on behalf of interactionism were thus also part of a critical dialogue with sociologies based on theories of the social system. Individual and group action, Blumer insisted, is meaningful. He thus stressed the ‘symbolic’ function in emphasizing that human beings act on the basis of their interpretations and understandings. This reflected not only Mead’s work on the significant symbol and its relevance for human conduct, but also Thomas’s formulation of the ‘definition of the situation’: suggesting that situations are real insofar as they are defined as real and are real in their consequences (Thomas, 1923). Meanings are themselves created through action – acts of interpretation and definition. Blumer’s account of symbol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Interactionism in perspective
• Chapter 2 We were never interactionists
• Chapter 3 The practical morality of types
• Chapter 4 Moral careers: learning and becoming
• Chapter 5 Questions of method
• Chapter 6 We are all interactionists now
• Chapter 7 Epilogue
• References
• Index