INTERPRETING THE SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS: CAN THERE BE A “TRUE” MEANING OF MEAD?

Many sociologists have tried in vain to find the “true” meaning of the classic works in the discipline. An interactionist perspective suggests that this search is not a valid one for sociologists, especially symbolic interactionists. Although there can be no “true” meaning, some authors use conventions of writing that make their work more or less clear. Using Mead's Mind, Self and Society as an example, we discuss the dimensions of clarity. We then argue that the sociological classics should be read to (I) simulate new theories and research (pragmatic analysis), (2) determine how sociologists have used that classic to support or refute particular theories or perspectives (rhetorical analysis), and (3) provide information about the sociological concerns of the author and his/her contemporaries (historical analysis).     

Interaction Theory in the Federal Republic of Germany: Development,Current Position,Themes, and Problems

After the end of World War II in West Germany, action and interaction theories and phenomenological sociology occupied only fringe positions. At the end of the 1960s, criticism of the prevalent neopositivistic research methodology, systems theory, and the rapidly spreading critical theory increased. This, coupled with the positive reception given symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology from the United States, caused interaction theories to flourish. Today they are among the four or five main schools of thought in West German sociology. In methodological work, the “interpretative” or “communicative” social research of the time developed the narrative interview and life history method. Group discussion and participant observation were also used for interactionist social research. A survey of the subjects interactionists have covered in their research shows how widely interaction theory has been applied. The main themes of current interaction theory are: (1) conceptualizing the difference between unpremeditated behavior and meaningful action, (2) formulating a theory that covers both “structure” and “action”, and (3) developing an interactionist macro theory. The future of interaction theory is analyzed and assessed optimistically.     

Whither the Internal Conversation?

The internal conversation has a venerable place in the symbolic interactionist tradition but has been the focus of little empirical research by interactionists. After reviewing selected research on the internal conversation (most by noninteractionist sociologists or nonsociologists), we argue that interactionists ought to conduct research of our own to examine claims we have been making and to better understand social life. We propose some worthy areas and avenues of investigation.     

Situation,Structure, and the Context of Meaning*

Two of the approaches at the forefront of contemporary sociological interest in meaning, symbolic interactionism and structuralism, share an interest in the role of signs and symbols in social life, yet take radically different standpoints concerning the nature of signs and the locus of meaning. Symbolic interactionists stress the ongoing process of the “situation” as the determinant of meaning, whereas structuralists claim that meaning must be sought at the deeper level of “system” or “structure” rather than at the surface. By comparing some foundational concepts underlying these traditions, such as the nature of the sign in Peirce and Saussure and Durkheim and Mead, and then exploring recent developments in structuralism and symbolic interactionism, a critical appraisal of their theories of meaning is made in the context of an emerging semiotic sociology.     

Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

Transverse Interaction: A Pragmatic Perspective On Environment As Other

This paper formulates an overlooked type of “transverse interaction” between symbol users and the physical environment. Understanding this type leads to recognition of objects constructed as environmental others. Other is a key concept within the interactionist tradition, but emphasis has been on the social life process rather than the physical world that is there. Parallel with the Generalized Social Other is a Generalized Environmental Other. These considerations emphasize naturalistic meanings as a central concern for interactionists.     

Mutual Interests,Different Lenses: Current Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction

As reflective thinkers, symbolic interactionists may well be curious about the organ with which we think. Leading neuroscientists are quite aware that a working brain depends on other brains. This article considers selected neuroscience approaches to topics traditionally addressed by symbolic interactionists including some confirmations, refinements, and challenges from current neuroscience. Confirmations support features of Mead's “objective reality of perspectives” and a relational epistemology, the inevitability of ad hoc “accounts,” self‐consciousness as behavioral control, and “self unity” as constantly re‐created illusion. Divergence between neuroscience and symbolic interaction mainly involves new evidence for the importance of unconscious cognition, emotion, and memory in shaping human behavior. The rooting of cognitive and perceptual processes in motor activity challenges the extremes of the “linguistic turn.” Refinement involves reasons for attending to the embodied salience of thoughts produced by “somatic markers” rather than mere content.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

Saul D. Alinsky: An Applied Urban Symbolic Interactionist

Urban sociology and symbolic interaction theory share Robert E. Park as a leading figure, yet there has not been a tradition of applying symbolic interaction theory to issues of urban research. A convergence is suggested as urbanists are becoming aware of the importance of sentiments and symbols in organizing and motivating urban behavior, and symbolic interactionists increasingly are becoming interested in social structure. Saul D. Alinsky demonstrated an applied symbolic interactionist perspective in his efforts to develop organizations capable of strengthening community cohesiveness and increasing citizen participation and involvement in local affairs.     

The Hobbesian Microcosm: On the Dialectics of the Self in Social Theory*

If Parsons is not guilty of holding an over-socialized conception of man, Wrong's critique does apply to the work of the “reality-constructionists” and “symbolic interactionists.” In underemphasizing Mead's “biologic individual” or “I,” contemporary sociological social psychology manages to evade the Hobbesian problem and, hence, amounts to a largely disembodied dialectic. By way of contrast, the compatibility of the Meadian and Freudian perspectives is stressed and the need for further development of a psychoanalytic sociology reaffirmed.     

The Spirit of Blumer's Method as a Guide to Sociological Discovery

Herbert Blumer did not offer textbook-style instructions for how to do research. What he offered, in his classic 1969 essay “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism,” is a broad account of what research must entail to accord with symbolic interactionist premises that human social life depends on meanings, interpretation, and interaction. Blumer's essay also voices a spirit of research that is ardently empirical, sociological, and creative. It is this spirit, I argue, that holds great value for guiding sociological research toward fresh discoveries. I make this argument by reviewing what Blumer meant by exploration and inspection, and then drawing out five Blumerian principles of inquiry. By embracing these principles we can avoid the problems of inadvertent theorizing, unreflective mesearch, analytic foreclosure, excessive subjectivism, and aprocessuality. I also suggest how we can enhance the sociological value of Blumer's method by paying more attention to power, inequality, and our own institutional biases. Embracing the spirit of Blumer's method, I conclude, can help a new generation of symbolic interactionists do more imaginative and insightful work.     

The Self as Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy

Using a combination of psychoanalytic and symbolic interactionist ideas, this article portrays the development of the self as a self‐fulfilling prophecy (SFP). A prominent psychoanalytic version of this idea is presented by Lacan's two mirror theories of the self. A prominent and more familiar symbolic interactionist account of the self as self‐fulfilling prophecy is the formulation by William I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas, which suggests that once situations are defined as real, they are real in their consequences. The aim of this article is to show that these two perspectives can be reconciled in interesting ways, because both recognize that emotions are part of the world “out there” of external goals and the world “in here” of the person's inner life. Emotions are therefore “bilevel.” The SFP creates a fault line in the self and a consequent emotional vulnerability when that line is engaged or disturbed. This article explains how this self‐fulfilling prophecy works and explores the weaknesses it inflicts on the self.     

Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy

Organizational sociologists often treat institutions as macro cultural logics, representations, and schemata, with less consideration for how institutions are ”inhabited“ (Scully and Creed, 1997) by people doing things together. As such, this article uses a symbolic interactionist rereading of Gouldner’s classic study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy as a lever to expand the boundaries of institutionalism to encompass a richer understanding of action, interaction, and meaning. Fifty years after its publication, Gouldner’s study still speaks to us, though in ways we (and he) may not have anticipated five decades ago. The rich field observations in Patterns remind us that institutions such as bureaucracy are inhabited by people and their interactions, and the book provides an opportunity for intellectual renewal. Instead of treating contemporary institutionalism and symbolic interaction as antagonistic, we treat them as complementary components of an “inhabited institutions approach” that focuses on local and extra–local embeddedness, local and extra-local meaning, and a skeptical, inquiring attitude. This approach yields a doubly constructed view: On the one hand, institutions provide the raw materials and guidelines for social interactions (“construct interactions”), and on the other hand, the meanings of institutions are constructed and propelled forward by social interactions. Institutions are not inert categories of meaning; rather they are populated with people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with local force and significance.     

Bridging the Gap: On the Collaboration between Symbolic Interactionism and Distributed Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Multi-Agent Systems Research

This article discusses the relationship in the U.S. between current symbolic interactionism and computer sciences—specifically, distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). The general thesis is twofold. First, current interactionist approaches to organization, science, and technology show a special affinity to goals and problems of DAI research, and in research style, methods, and theoretical concepts, symbolic interactionism can provide useful suggestions in the design of DAI systems. Second, a good way to analyze the relationship between computer sciences and symbolic interactionism is reflexive of theoretical concepts provided by interactionist approaches. In this sense, DAI is a “going concern” which extends across various fields and intersecting social worlds connected through a set of conceptual “boundary objects.” It is concluded that the interaction between technology and sociological thought must go beyond a mere exchange of ideas. What is required is continual, hands-on, trans-disciplinary collaboration.     

Adult–Adolescent Interaction and Adolescents' Brain Development: Integrating Pragmatism/Interactionism and Neuroscience to Develop a Platform for Research on Adolescents' Life Regulation

The aim of this paper is to outline a platform for research on adolescents' life regulation. Adolescents' brain development is described with the help of neuroscience and integrated with pragmatist and symbolic interactionist insights about how adolescents can learn to control their impulses and act thoughtfully. The foundation for the analysis is found in American pragmatism, where a biopsychosocial perspective is built on the understanding that the developed human brain is the essential precondition of a complex and civilized society. Today's interactionists, and in general, the majority of sociologists, show little interest in brain development and function. However, there is an opportunity for sociologists and neuroscientists to collaborate in order to better understand how the brain develops in relation to biological development and social experience.     

Symbolic Interactionism and I

This is a story of my involvement with symbolic interactionism and its influence on my thinking. The process included the following phases or stages: (1) an early foundation from Florian Znaniecki, David Hume, and Adam Smith; (2) participation in “the second Chicago school,” especially with Blumer, Hughes, and colleagues; (3) contact with an expanded circle of symbolic interactionists, working on various theories and concepts in many contexts, often united by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; (4) attempts at understanding and conceptualizing the interweave of my own work in several areas with my personal experiences; (5) use and development of four basic concepts: social roles, sentiments, identities, and self‐concept.     

Self and Society in Popular Social Criticism 1920–1980

Since the tumult of the 1960s, sociologists and cultural historians have suggested that a “new sensibility” has become more prominent in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies. In most accounts, the core of the change is an increase in expressive individualism, popularly justified by discourse very much indebted to the language of academic and clinical psychology. Among symbolic interactionists, Ralph Turner's proposal that there has been a shift from “institutional” to “impulsive” anchorage of the self has been the single most influential contribution to this debate. Turner's analysis is placed in the larger context of his work and considered in the light of changes in social criticism and the rhetoric of self in popular “conduct-of-life” literature published between 1920 and 1980. Three relatively distinct waves of social criticism are found in that literature during that period, with each one more firmly based on individualistic and psychologistic views of self and society than its predecessor.     

Cognition in Situations

The symbolic interactionist tradition can contribute to advancing sociological studies of cognition by setting dual process models on more solid ground. I draw on Blumer's epistemological statements and the interactionist tradition more broadly to consider how dual process models of cognition could be applied to naturally occurring situations. I suggest that attending to the ways the past and the future are handled and modified within social interaction provides a usable inroad for the sociology of cognition to engage with situational analysis. I identify “resonance” and “iterative reprocessing” as concepts that are suitable to this end.     

SYMBOLIC INTERACTION AND SOCIAL POLICY ANALYSIS*

This paper explores the contribution that interactionist approaches may make to the study and understanding of social policy based on a discussion of: (1) the general orientation of the interactionist line on inquiry and the general assumptions which the theoretical stance makes about the character of the world, (2) the problems that are of primary interest to those who work within this perspective, and (3) the methodological and technical aspects of this approach. Fruitful foci for basic and applied research from the interactionist perspective include: (1) how policy is constructed through negotiation within a structural context, (2) the multiple interpretations of policy intent and implementation, (3) the experience and meaning of social “problems” for those who are the intended objects of the social policies, and (4) the consequences of policies for the social order. Some of the major properties of the social policy context (uncertainty, decentralization, and political pluralism) are explored for their relevance to social policy analysis. Finally, we discuss the contribution of an institutional-contextual-social worlds approach as a macro-micro bridging mechanism in social policy studies.