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Micro-sociology: Interaction, symbolism and language

Dr Jordan McKenzie

SOC207: Lecture Three

Macro or Micro sociology?

• Micro approaches:

• Study society by analysing the interaction between individuals
• Develops theory out of observation
• Meaning, symbolism etc is understood by seeing it in practice.
• Seeks to connect micro phenomena with large scale events
• ‘Bottom up’ or grass roots style analysis.
• Pragmatic?

• Macro approaches:

• Look for patterns and trends in society.
• Place greater emphasis on structure than agency
• Seeks to make generalizable claims by studying the big picture.
• ‘Top down’ analysis.
• Values theory over pragmatism.

• e. historical materialism

1. These characteristics are very general. Views vary between theorists.
2. the task of sociologists…
3. explain/offer causal explanation (Erklären/Positivism).
4. understand/to interpret (Verstehen/Interpretation)

Positivists argue that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences and thus should only explain. (Eg. Durkheim, Comte)

Interpretivists argue that as human subjects – whose actions are intentional, meaningful and symbolic – are different from natural objects and that interpretation is the appropriate method. (Weber, Simmel)

Erklären or Verstehen

• Interpretive approaches offer an insider’s rather than an outsider’s knowledge of the social world (Merton 1972).
• For Interpretivists, social action is:

•Intentional

•Meaningful

•Symbolic

•Conventional – i.e. framed in terms of local rules; a ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein).

• Therefore, social action can be understood in terms of these local conventions/language games/forms of life.
• attempt to bridge understanding and explanation.

• The researcher is a part of the research. There is no ‘view from nowhere’.
• Therefore the principles of the natural sciences to not apply to human societies.

Interpretive sociology

• Hermeneutics:

•The art or science of interpreting text, knowledge, meaning.

•Originally aimed to uncover the ‘true meaning’ of sacred texts.

•Eventually discovered that the interpreter is inseparable from the interpretation, and therefore became the practice of enhancing subjective analysis.

• Phenomenology:

•The philosophy of perception.

•Aims to grasp the depth and limitations of human experience, awareness and knowledge.

•Challenges the notion that science is capable of capturing all that there is to know about people/societies.

Other Critiques of Positivism

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

• Micro-sociologist, dramaturgical sociology, interactionist sociology.
• For Goffman, social life is made up of interactions that can be read as performances.

• Scripts, actors, audiences etc.

• learn to perform characters through positive and negative reinforcement.
• Society is made up of tiny rules (like Durkheim’s social facts) that govern our exchanges and reinforces norms, values, power structures and so on.

Key text: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)

Goffman: impression management

• summarize, then, I assume that when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation. This report is concerned with some of the common techniques that interactants employ to sustain such impressions and with some of the common contingencies associated with the employment of these techniques. The specific content of any activity presented by the individual participant, or the role it plays in the interdependent activities of an on-going social system, will not be at issue ; I shall be concerned only with the participant’s dramaturgical problems of presenting the activity before others. The issues dealt with by stage-craft and stage-management are sometimes trivial but they are quite general; they seem to occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension for formal sociological analysis.” (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959).

Goffman: To have, to be or to maintain face

“So far I have implicitly been using a double definition of self: the self as an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking; and the self as a kind of player in a ritual game who copes honorably or dishonorably, diplomatically or undiplomatically, with the judgmental contingencies of the situation.” (Goffman p31)

“the public social image people want to project, which could be lost, maintained, or enhanced through social interaction” (Scott, S 2009)

Goffman:

Front and Backstage

“The backstage language consists of reciprocal first-naming, cooperative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, ‘sloppy’ sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and ‘kidding’, inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic acts, minor physical self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching, and flatulence. The frontstage behaviour and language can be taken as the absence (and in some sense the opposite) of this”

Interpretative Approaches In Sociology:
Symbolic Interactionism

• The term symbolic interactionism is usually attributed to the pragmatic philosopher and psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931).
• But the term ’symbolic interactionism’ was coined by Mead’s student Herbert Blumer (1900-87) who set out its basic principles: social action is the creative act of interpretation and communicated through symbols (Blumer 1969).
• The term was also used by Georg Simmel in whose work it is central.

Mead: Symbolism

Mead was interested in the symbolic meaning associated with objects, words, ideas etc that play a vital role in all forms of interaction.

For example, a word can have a practical meaning, as well as several symbolic meanings that have further implications.

An object, such as clothing, can have a practical as well as symbolic meanings.

The ‘I’:

• Refers to our inner self.
• conscious and self-aware. It experiences emotions and feelings.

The ‘Me’:

• the version the self that is presented to others. It is a representation of an ideal self.
• Individuals create a ‘Me’ through knowledge of the generalized other.

The Generalized Other:

• the individual’s knowledge of a culture, society, community etc.
• is the perception of the preferences, values and ideals of a group.
• This perception can be accurate or inaccurate depending on the knowledge of the individual.

The ‘I’, the ‘me’, and the generalized other

Not according to Mead. It is only through our interaction with others that we can know anything about ourselves.

“The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs . . . and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself.” (Mead 1934/1962:138)

It is language that makes all of this possible. In particular the symbolic implications of communication.

So is this all about acting?

Durkheim on the social self

“I fulfill obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions. Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them through my education” (2014 [1938]: 20)

Hochschild on Emotion and Performing Gendered Roles

• Symbolic interactionist approach
• Hochschild shows how we each have specific rules and roles that shape our interactions through emotion
• Emotional labour, management, regulation.

• Deep and surface acting

• Authenticity, Self, Identity
• Gender roles

Barbalet: Resentment and class structure

• What is the role of resentment in reinforcing class structure?

• “Resentment is a feeling experience by social actors when an external agency denies them opportunities or valued resources that otherwise would be available to them” (1992: 153)
• is experienced individually and incorporated into a sense of self, but it is also an embedded and collective dimension of social structure.

• is an emotion at the macroscopic level. Not reducible to an individual state, it structures our social relationships.
• Different classes have different emotion rules, systems and norms. These rules prevent movement between classes.

• g. Why is it rude to ask a colleague how much they make? How would workplaces be different if employees were told how much everybody else earned?