social action theory Flashcards
(10 cards)
weber
Saw both structural and action approaches as necessary for full understanding of society
Level of cause - objective structural factors
Level of meaning - subjective meanings individuals give to actions
The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism - at structural level, protestant reformation introduced new belief system, calvinism, changing people’s worldview but at the subjective level, work took on religious meaning for calvinists.
Weber classified action into 4 categories - (weber’s typology)
Instrumental rational action - actor calculates most efficient means of achieving goal
Value rational action - action towards a goal that actor regards as desirable for their own sake
Traditional action - customary, routine, habitual action
Affectual action - action that expresses emotion such as by weeping out of grief.
give three criticisms of weber
Schulz - weber’s view of action is too individualistic and cannot explain shared nature of meaning
Weber’s typology of action is difficult to apply as many will come under two categories
We will never get true verstehen as we can never be that person
ethnomethodology
All is Garfinkel!!!
Rejects idea that society is a real objective structure out there
Interested in how social order is achieved
Social order is created from bottom up. It is an accomplishment - something that members actively construct in everyday life
Indexicality - nothing has a fixed meaning. Everything depends on context. It is a threat to social order because if meanings are unclear or unstable, communication becomes difficult which may cause breakdown of social relationships
Reflexivity - demonstrates nature of social order through series of breaching experiments - by challenging people’s taken-for-granted assumptions, experiments show how the orderliness of everyday situations is not inevitable but is actually an accomplishment.
Garfinkel was interested in the ways that reflexivity is achieved - in the case of suicide, coroners make sense of deaths by selecting particular features from the infinite number of possible facts about the deceased.
Humans strive to impose order by seeking patterns
give two evaluations of ethnomethodology
Draws attention to how we construct order and meaning rather than viewing us as puppets.
Craib - findings are trivial - take a lot of time uncovering taken-for-granted rules that are no surprise to anyone
symbolic interactionism
Focuses on our ability to create social world through actions and interactions
GH mead
by attaching symbols to the world we create a world of meaning.
Interpretive phase - comes between stimulus and our response.
To interpret the meanings of others, we take on the role of the other - the significant or the generalised other
Blumer
Our actions are based on meanings we give to situations, events, people etc.
These meanings arise from interaction process
Meanings we give to situations are the result of interpretive procedures used.
Labelling process - interactionist concepts underpin labelling theory
Thomas - if people define a situation as real, then it will have real consequences
Cooley - others act as a looking glass to us - we see ourselves mirrored in others’ responses to us
Becker and lemert - hierarchy of statuses - master status, determinism: seeing our action and identities by the way that others label us
Goffman
Dramaturgical model - describes interaction using drama as a framework - used for impression management, rejects functionalist view that roles are tightly scripted by arguing that there is role distance.
give three evaluations of symbolic interactionism
avoids determinism of structural theory.
Reynolds - sent a questionnaire to 124 interactionists of whom 84 responded. Only 2 chose power and class as crucial concepts to describe society.
Ethnomethodology - argue interactionism is correct in focusing on actors’ meanings.
structure and action
According to Giddens, there is a duality of structure - structure and action are two ideas of the same coin.
Though our actions we produce and reproduce structures over time and space but structure is what makes our action possible - this relationship is called structuration
A language is a structure that constrains our behaviour like one of durkheim’s social facts. However, a language would not exist if no one used it.
For giddens, structure has two elements:
Rules - norms, customs and laws
Resources - economic and power over others.
In Gidden’s view, although our action can change existing structures, it tends to reproduce the,.
We have a deep-seated need for ontological security - we need to feel that the world, both physical and social is how it appears to be.
We reflexively monitor our own action, constantly reflecting on our actions and their results.
give two criticisms of structure and action
Archer - he underestimates the capacity of structures to resist change
Craib - structuration theory isn’t really a theory as it doesn’t explain what actually happens in society, He fails to unite structure and action.
phenomethodology
Used to describe things as they appear to our senses
Hurssel - the world only makes sense because we impose meanings on it by constructing mental categories that we use to classify and file information coming from the world. We can only obtain knowledge about the world through mental acts of categorising and giving meanings to experiences.
Schutz
Typification - enable us to organise experiences into shared world of meanings. They stabilise and clarify meanings by ensuring that we are speaking the same language.
Members of society to a large extent have a shared life world - stock of shared typifications or commonsense knowledge that we use to make sense of our experiences.
The natural attitude - we assume that the world is real, objective thing existing outside of us
give one evaluation of phenomethodology
berger and Luckmann - they reject the view that society is merely an inter-subjective reality - once it has been constructed, it takes on a life of its own and becomes an external reality which reacts back to us .
