Symbolic interactionism

Symbolic interactionism offers what is very much an American perspective on life, society and the world. As already noted when discussing constructionism, it stems from the thought of pragmatist philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead. Mead’s teaching, which extended over a period of almost 40 years, principally at the University of Chicago, is encapsulated in a posthumous work, Mind, Self and Society (1934). This book was compiled by grateful students from papers Mead had left and lecture notes they had accumulated. It is to one student in particular, Herbert Blumer, that most credit must go for the impact Mead’s thought has had in the realm of sociology.

In a much-cited formulation, Blumer (1969, p. 2) enunciates three basic interactionist assumptions:

• ‘that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that these things have for them’;
• ‘that the meaning of such things is derived from, and arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows’;
• ‘that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters’.

To do them justice, these tenets need to be set against the backdrop of pragmatist philosophy, for the pragmatism informing Mead’s social psychology and Blumer’s sociology remains a significant dimension of symbolic interactionism today.

1. Pragmatist philosophy

Within pragmatism, the quintessentially American philosophy, we find diverse streams. There are, one has to say, many pragmatisms. For all that, pragmatist approaches display a number of common characteristics, even if attempts to articulate these characteristics, as in Rescher’s generalised account here, tend to reflect a popularised view of pragmatism rather than the careful nuances of its founders:

The characteristic idea of philosophical pragmatism is that efficacy in practical application—the issue of ‘which works out most effectively’— somehow provides a standard for the determination of truth in the case of statements, Tightness in the case of actions, and value in the case of appraisals. (1995, p. 710)

Pragmatism derives, in the first instance, from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In launching his pragmatism, Peirce was seeking a critical philosophy. He insisted (1931-58, vol. 5, p. 9) that ‘pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung but it is a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear’.¹⁰ Peirce went on to develop his own version of phenomenology—‘phaneroscopy’ he came to call it in the end —independently of the acknowledged founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. Peirce looked to determine the elemental categories present to the mind in their ‘Firstness’ or qualitative immediacy. In doing so, Peirce was, to a significant degree, paralleling the phenomenologists’ efforts to delineate phenomena encountered in immediate experience (Spiegelberg 1981).

Peirce’s work remained largely unknown, and certainly unacknowledged, until pragmatism became popular through the work of William James some years later. John Dewey had already been involved with pragmatism for many years and it was the James/Dewey version that now came to the fore. Peirce, unhappy with the turn pragmatism had taken, began to call his own approach ‘pragmaticism’ instead. This, he hoped, would prove sufficiendy ugly a term to discourage any would-be kidnappers!

What had happened to the pragmatism launched by Peirce that led him to disown it? Well, for one thing, it was far less critical. As we have already seen in discussing constructionism, some have gone so far as to accuse James’s and Dewey’s versions of pragmatism of being totally uncritical. While, in the case of James and Dewey, this appears to rest on a gross misreading, the allegation can certainly be sustained when levelled at the pragmatism that developed later. Pragmatism did become essentially an uncritical exploration of cultural ideas and values in terms of their practical outcomes. Even in James and Dewey, the authentic meaning of ideas and values is linked to their outcomes and therefore to the practices in which they are embedded. Pragmatism, says William James (1950, p. 15), is the ‘attitude of looking away from first things, principles, “categories”, supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts’.

When it is maintained that conceptualization is purposive [Peirce], or that thought is teleological Qames], or that ideas are instruments [Dewey], the methodological principle these doctrines suggest is that the analysis of meanings (of signs, i.e., ideas, concepts, statements) is an analysis of certain kinds of action in certain contexts . . . For the pragmatist, therefore, meaning has reference, if sometimes only remotely so, to the ordinary situations and conditions in which actions occur. (Thayer 1968, p. 429)

In this understanding of things, experience and culture come to be almost interchangeable terms. Seeking the meaning of experience becomes an exploration of culture. Dewey once remarked that he would have avoided many misunderstandings if he had used the word ‘culture’ instead of ‘experience’ (in Thayer 1968, p. 173, n.28).

The view of culture and society that pragmatism came to adopt is essentially optimistic and progressivist. The pragmatist world is a world to be explored and made the most of, not a world to be subjected to radical criticism. Horkheimer describes pragmatists as ‘liberal, tolerant, optimistic’ and believes, in fact, that pragmatists cannot deal with the possibility that, at a given historical moment, ‘truth might. . . turn out to be completely shocking to humanity’ (1974, p. 51). ‘Increasingly’, writes Horowitz (1966, p. 29), ‘pragmatism came to stand for acquiescence in the social order’. Mary Rogers describes what emerged as a ‘pragmatic- naturalist philosophy which focuses on the nature and genesis of a shared world, intersubjectivity, and communication’ (1981, p. 140).

This, to be sure, is the focus found in the work of Dewey’s associate, George Herbert Mead, through whose thought pragmatism enters sociology in the form of symbolic interactionism.

2. FROM MEAD TO ETHNOGRAPHY

As we have noted, Mead attributes our very personhood to social forces that shape us and our behaviour. ‘A person’, Mead says (1934, p. 162), ‘is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct’. This certainly puts the spodight on the practices found in any given culture as the very source of personhood. For Mead (1934, p. 7), ‘the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual)’. We owe to society our very being as conscious and self-conscious entities, for that being arises from a process of symbolic interaction—interaction, that is to say, by way of significant gestures.

Only in terms of gestures as significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking—which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures—take place. (Mead 1934, p. 47)

To ‘enter the attitudes of the community’ and ‘take over the institutions of the community’, as Mead argues we inevitably do in our emergence into personhood, we must be able to take the role of others. We have to see ourselves as social objects and we can only do that through adopting the standpoint of others. The process begins in childhood, Mead teaches us. It starts with early imitative acts and proceeds via play (in which children act out the role of others) and games (in which children have to put themselves in the place of others and think about how others think and act). With games the child starts to think in terms of the ‘generalised other’. Later this generalised other will be related to broader social institutions.

Here we find emerging a central notion of symbolic interactionism; the putting of oneself in the place of the other. Coser stresses this point:

Mead must be credited alongside Cooley and other pragmatists with having been instrumental in stressing the need for always considering situations from the point of view of the actor. For him, just as for Weber, when the sociologist refers to meaning, it is to the subjective meaning actors impute to their actions. (1971, p. 340)

In symbolic interactionism as a theoretical perspective informing methodologies for social research, this notion remains pivotal, as numerous commentators attest:

Methodologically, the implication of the symbolic interactionist perspective is that the actor’s view of actions, objects, and society has to be studied seriously. The situation must be seen as the actor sees it, the meanings of objects and acts must be determined in terms of the actor’s meanings, and the organization of a course of action must be understood as the actor organizes it. The role of the actor in the situation would have to be taken by the observer in order to see the social world from his perspective. (Psathas 1973, pp. 6-7)

Some interpretive sociologists—those identified as ‘symbolic interactionists’ for example—are content to operate with a relatively naive set of assumptions about how we come to know about social phenomena. They are prepared to accept the meanings that the actors attribute to social phenomena at face value, and proceed to erect their systematic interpretations on these foundations. This implies that the sociological observer must exercise sufficient discipline on himself to ensure that it is indeed the actors’ meanings that are recorded in his notebook and not merely his own. (Mitchell 1977, pp. 115-16)

Methodologically, symbolic interactionism directs the investigator to take, to the best of his ability, the standpoint of those studied. (Denzin 1978, P. 99)

This role taking is an interaction. It is symbolic interaction, for it is possible only because of the ‘significant symbols’—that is, language and other symbolic tools—that we humans share and through which we communicate. Only through dialogue can one become aware of the perceptions, feelings and attitudes of others and interpret their meanings and intent. Hence the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ (though it is a term that Mead himself never used).

Given the emphasis on putting oneself in the place of the other and seeing things from the perspective of others, it is not surprising that symbolic interactionism should take to its bosom the research methodology developed within cultural anthropology, that is, ethnography. American cultural anthropology was shaped most decisively by Franz Boas, whose experience in studying Arctic Eskimos is said to have turned him from a scientist’s view of cognition to an historian’s view of culture. Cultures, as Boas comes to see them, are irreducible and incomparable. Through Boas’s influence, cultural relativism succeeded in dominating                                                                               American anthropology, accompanied by a strong rejection of all ethno-centrism (Bloch 1983, pp. 124-8). Culture is not to be called into question; it is not to be criticised, least of all by someone from another culture. Instead, one is to observe it as closely as possible, attempt to take the place of those within the culture, and search out the insider’s perspective. Herein lies the origin of ethnography, born to anthropology but adopted (and adapted) by sociology.

For ethnography, then, as for the symbolic interactionism that now commonly forms its matrix, the notion of taking the place of the other is central.

. . . ethnography is a form of research in which the social settings to be studied, however familiar to the researcher, must be treated as anthropologically strange; and the task is to document the culture—the perspectives and practices—of the people in these settings. The aim is to ‘get inside’ the way each group of people sees the world. (Hammersley 1985, p. 152)

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.