Sociology-theory and methods-action theories Flashcards

Question

What are three key interactionist concepts that underpin labelling theory?

Answer 1

The definition of the situation, the looking glass self, and career

Answer 2

A definition of something is a label for that thing. Thomas argued that if people define a situation as real, then it will have real consequences. If we believe something to be true, this belief will affect how we act and this may have consequences for those involved. Eg if a teacher labels a boy as 'troublesome' (whether he is or isn't) the teacher will likely act differently towards him eg by punishing him more harshly

Answer 3

Cooley uses this idea to describe how we develop our self-concept. Argues our self-concept arises out of our ability to take the role of the other. In interactions, by taking role of other we come to see ourselves as they see us. Through this process, a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs - become what others see us as. Labelling theorists use definition of situation and the looking glass self to understand effects of labelling. Through the looking glass self, the label becomes part of the individual's self concept, and a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs. Even if the initial definition was false, it becomes true and may have real consequences

Answer 4

In normal use, a career is stages through which an individual progresses in their occupation, each with own status, title, problems etc. However, labelling theorists such as Becker and Lemert extend the concept to apply it to groups such as medical students, marijuana smokers and those suffering from paranoia. Eg in relation to mental illness, individuals have career running from 'pre-patient' with certain symptoms, through labelling by a psychiatrist, to hospital in-patient, to discharge. Each stage has own status and problems eg ex-patient may find it hard to reintegrate into society. 'Mental patient' may become their master status in the eyes of society

Answer 5

Interactionism is generally regarded as a voluntaristic theory that emphasises free will and choice in how we act. However, labelling theory has been accused of determinism-of seeing our actions and identities as shaped by the way others label them

Answer 6

As passive victims of other peoples labels, however, the interactionist, Goffman, describes how we actively construct our 'self' by manipulating other people's impressions of us

Answer 7

It is often described as dramaturgical because he uses analogies with drama as a framework for analysing social interaction. We are all 'actors', acting out our 'scripts', using 'props', resting 'backstage' between 'performances' we present to our 'audiences' etc. Our aim is to carry off a convincing performance of the role we have adopted

Answer 8

Presentation of self, and impression management

Answer 9

For Goffman, we seek to present a particular image of ourselves to our audiences. To do so, we must control the impression our performance gives. This involves constantly studying our audience to see how they are responding, and monitoring or adjusting our performance to present a convincing image

Answer 10

We may use language, tone of voice, gestures and facial expressions, as well as props and settings, such as dress, makeup, equipment, furniture, décor and premises. By using these techniques skilfully, we can 'pass' for the kind of person we want our audience to believe we are

Answer 11

The different settings of interactions. As in theatre, there is a 'front' stage where we act out our roles, while backstage, we can step out of our role and 'be ourselves'. Eg the classroom is a front region where students must put on convincing role-performance for the teacher, while the common room is a back region where they can 'drop the act'. However, the common room may become another front region where students may have to carry off a different performance in front of their friends

Answer 12

Goffman's view of roles differs sharply from that of functionalism. Functionalists see roles as tightly 'scripted' by society and see us as fully internalising our scrips through socialisation. As a result, they become part of our identity and society determines exactly how we will perform them

Answer 13

He rejects the functionalist view and instead argues there is a 'gap' or role distance between our real self and our roles. We are not really the roles we play. In his view, roles are only loosely scripted by society and we have a good deal of freedom in how we play the, eg some teachers are strict and others are easy-going

Answer 14

That we do not always believe in the roles we play and that our role performance may be cynical or calculating. In Goffman's studies, the actor sometimes resembles a confident trickster, manipulating his audience into accepting an impression that conceals his true self and real motives. In the dramaturgical model, appearances are everything and actors seek to present themselves to their best advantage

Answer 15

Strengths, lack of explanation, Reynolds view, cannot explain everything, limitations, ethnomethodologists view

Answer 16

Interactionism largely avoids the determinism of structural theories such as functionalism. It recognises that people create society though their choices and meanings. However some argue it is more a loose collection of descriptive concepts than an explanatory theory

Answer 17

It focuses on face to face interactions and ignores wider social structures such as class inequality, and it fails to explain the origin of labels. Similarly, it cannot explain the consistent patterns we observe in people's behaviour. Functionalists argue these patterns are the result of norms dictating behaviour

Answer 18

He offers some evidence to show interactionism lacks an idea of structure. He sent a questionnaire to 124 interactionists, of whom 84 responded. When asked to identify the concepts they felt were essential, the most popular were 'role', 'self' and 'interaction'. Only two chose 'power' or 'class'-concepts that structural sociologists see as crucial

Answer 19

Not all action is meaningful-like Weber's category of traditional action, much is performed unconsciously or routinely and may have little meaning for actors. If so, interactionism lacks means to explain it

Answer 20

It is useful, but has limitations, eg in interactions everyone plays part of both actor and audience, and interactions are often improvised and unrehearsed

Answer 21

They argue interactionism is correct in focusing on actors' meanings, but that it fails to explain how actors create meanings

Answer 22

In philosophy, 'phenomenon' is a term used to describe things as they appear to our senses. Some philosophers argue we can never have definite knowledge of what the world outside our minds is really like 'in itself' - all we can know is what our senses tell us about it. This is the starting point for the philosophy known as phenomenology, developed by Husserl

Answer 23

That the world only makes sense because we impose meaning and order on it by constructing mental categories that we use to classify and 'file' information coming from our senses. Eg a category such as 'four-legged furniture for eating off' enables us to identify a particular set of sensory data as 'table'. In this view, we can only obtain knowledge about the world through our mental acts of categorising and giving meaning to our experiences. The world as we know it is, and can only be, a product of our mind

Answer 24

Schutz applies the idea of Husserl's philosophy to the social world. He argues that the categories and concepts we use are not unique to ourselves - rather, we share them with other members of society. These shared categories are typifications

Answer 25

They enable us to organise our experiences into a shared world of meaning

Answer 26

In his view, the meaning of any given experience varies according to its social context, eg raising your arm means one thing in class and another thing at an auction. The meaning is not given by the action in itself, but by its context. For this reason, meanings are potentially unclear and unstable - especially if others classify the action in a different way form oneself

Answer 27

Typifications stabilise and clarify meanings by ensuring we are all 'speaking the same language' - all agreeing on the meaning of things. This makes it possible for us to communicate and cooperate with one another and thus to achieve our goals. Without shared typifications, social order would become impossible, eg if you see a certain object as a desk while another takes it for an altar, considerable problems may result

Answer 28

In his view, members of society to a large extent do have a shared 'life world' - a stock of shared typifications or commonsense knowledge that we use to make sense of our experience. It includes shared assumptions about the way things are, what certain situations mean, what other people's motivations are and so on. This is what Schutz calls 'recipe knowledge' that we can follow without thinking too much

Answer 29

It is not simply knowledge about the world-it is the world. For Husserl the world as we know it can only be a product of our mind. Similarly for Schutz the social world is a shared inter-subjective world that can only exist when we share the same meanings. However society appears to us as a real, objective thing existing outside of us

Answer 30

Schutz gives the example of posting a letter to a bookshop to order a book. In doing so we assume that some unknown/unseen individuals will perform a whole series of operations in a particular sequence-and that all this will result in our receiving the book-the fact we do get the book encourages us to adopt what he calls 'the natural attitude'-it leads us to assume the social world is a solid, natural thing out there. However for Shutz it simply shows that al those involve share the same meanings allowing us to cooperate to achieve goals

Answer 31

They argue that while Schutz is right to focus on shared commonsense knowledge, they reject his view that society is merely an inner-subjective reality. Although reality is socially constructed, as Schutz believes, once it has been constructed, it takes on a life of its own and becomes an external reality that reacts back on us. Eg religious ideas may start off in our consciousness, but they become embodied in powerful structures such as churches, which then constrain us, eg by influencing laws about our sexual relationships

Answer 32

It emerged in America in the 1960s, mainly from the work of Garfinkel. Garfinkel's ideas stem from phenomenology. Like Schutz, Garfinkel rejects the very idea of society as a real objective structure 'out there'

Answer 33

Like functionalists such as Parsons, Garfinkel is interested in how social order is achieved. However he gives a very different answer from Parsons

Answer 34

Parsons argues that social order is made possible by a shared value system into which we are socialised. Parsons' explanation is in keeping with his top-down structural approach: shared norms ensure that we perform our roles in an orderly, predictable way that meets the expectations of others

Answer 35

Garfinkel takes the opposite view - social order is created from the bottom up. Order and meaning are not achieved because people are 'puppets' whose strings are pulled by the social system, as functionalists believe. Instead social order is an accomplishment - something that members of society actively construct in everyday life using their commonsense knowledge. EM attempts to discover how we do this, by studying people's methods of making sense of the world

Answer 36

While interactionists are interested in the effects of meanings (eg effects of labelling), EM is interested in the methods or rules that we use to produce the meanings in the first place

Answer 37

Like Schutz, EM sees meanings as always potentially unclear - a characteristic Garfinkel calls indexicality. Nothing has a fixed meaning: everything depends on the context

Answer 38

Indexicality is a threat to social order because if meanings are inherently unclear or unstable, communication and cooperation become difficult and social relationships may begin to break down. However there is a paradox here

Answer 39

Indexicality suggests we cannot take any meaning for granted as fixed or clear-yet in everyday life, this is exactly what we do most of the time. For Garfinkel, what enables us to behave as if meanings are clear and obvious is reflexivity. Reflexivity refers to the fact that we use commonsense knowledge in everyday interactions to construct a sense of meaning and order and stop indexicality from occurring. This is similar to Schutz's idea of typifications

Answer 40

Language is of vital importance in achieving reflexivity. Eg for EM, when we describe something, we are simultaneously creating it. Our description gives it reality, removing uncertainty about what is going on, and making it seem clear, solid and meaningful. But although language gives us a sense of reality existing 'out there', in fact all we have done is to construct a set of shared meanings

Answer 41

The nature of social order by a series of so-called 'breaching experiments'. Eg they acted as lodgers in their own families-being polite, avoiding getting personal etc. Similarly they tried to haggle over the price of groceries at the supermarket checkout

Answer 42

To disrupt people's sense of order and challenge their reflexivity by undermining their assumptions about the situation. Eg parents of students who behaved as lodgers became bewildered, anxious, embarrassed or angry. They accused the students of being nasty or assumed they were ill

Answer 43

That by challenging people's taken-for-granted assumptions, the experiments show how the orderliness of everyday situations is not inevitable but is actually an accomplishment of those who take part in them. In his view, social order is 'participant produced' by members themselves

Answer 44

The methods we use to achieve reflexivity - to make sense of the world as orderly

Answer 45

In the case of suicide, coroners make sense of deaths by selecting particular features from the infinite number of possible 'facts' about the deceased - such as their mental health, employment status etc. They then treat these features as a real pattern, eg they may use this information to conclude that 'typical suicides' are mentally ill, unemployed etc

Answer 46

Humans constantly strive to impose order by seeking patterns, even though these patterns are really just social constructs. Eg the seeming pattern that suicides are mentally ill becomes part of the coroner's taken-for-granted knowledge about what suicides are like. When faced with future cases with similar features, the coroner interprets them as examples of the assumed pattern. Finally, cases fitting the pattern will be classified as suicides and will seem to prove the existence of the pattern the coroner had originally constructed. The assumed pattern becomes self-reinforcing - but it tells us nothing about any external reality

Answer 47

He is critical of it and accuses it of merely using the same methods as ordinary members of society to create order and meaning. If so, then conventional sociology is little more than commonsense, rather than true and objective knowledge. Eg positivists such as Durkheim take it for granted that official suicide stats are social facts that tell us the real rate of suicide. In fact, they are merely decisions made by coroners, using their commonsense understandings of what types of people kill themselves. Therefore the supposed 'laws' positivists produce are just elaborate versions of coroners' commonsesne. Sociologists' claim to know about suicide are no truer than those of other members of society, such as coroners

Answer 48

Strengths, Craib's view, discredits itself, view of wider society, ignores wider structures

Answer 49

EM draws attention to how we actively construct oder and meaning, rather than seeing us as simply puppets of the social system as functionalism does

Answer 50

Craib argues that its findings are trivial. Ethnomethodologists seem to spend a lot of time 'uncovering' taken for granted tules that turn out to be no surprise to anyone. Eg one study found that in phone conversations, generally one person speaks at a time

Answer 51

EM argues that everyone creates order and meaning by identifying patterns and producing explanations that are essentially fictions. If so, this must also apply to EM itself, and so we have no particular reason to accept its views

Answer 52

EM denies existence of wider society, seeing it as merely a shared fiction. Yet by analysing how members apply general rules or norms to specific contexts, it assumes that a structure of norms really exists beyond these contexts. From a functionalist perspective, such norms are social facts, not fictions

Answer 53

It ignores how wider structures of power and inequality affect the meanings that individuals construct. Eg Marxists argue that 'commonsense knowledge' is really just ruling-class ideology, and the order it creates serves to maintain capitalism

Answer 54

Structural theories such as functionalism and marxism tend to be deterministic, seeing society as something objective, existing outside individuals and constraining them. By contrast, action theories tend to be voluntaristic, seeing society as the creation of its members through their subjective actions and meanings. Both types of theory appear to hold some truth as it is easy to see society as a real, external structure constraining us eg society's laws regulate our behaviour. Also it is easy to feel we freely choose our actions eg existence of law doesn't stop us from choosing to break it

Answer 55

Combine them into a single unified theory of structure and action. The best known example is Giddens' structuration theory

Answer 56

According to Giddens, there is a duality of structure, meaning that structure and action (or agency as he calls it) are two sides of the same coin; neither can exist without the other. Through our actions we produce and reproduce structures over time and space, while these structures are what make our actions possible in the first place. Giddens calls this relationship structuration

Answer 57

With language. A language is a structure, and is made up of a set of rules of grammar that govern how we can use it to express meanings. This structure seems to exist independently of any individual, and it constrains our behaviour, like one of Durkheim's 'social facts'. Eg if we wish to use language to communicate, we must obey its rules, or we will not be understood. This shows how our action (communication) depends on existence of structure

Answer 58

Eg a language would not exist if no one used it. It is produced and reproduced over time through the actions of individuals speaking and writing it. Furthermore, these actions can also change the structure. people give words new meanings and create new rules

Answer 59

Rules (the norms, customs and laws that govern action) and resources (both economic eg raw materials, technology etc and power over others)

Answer 60

Can either be reproduced or changed through human action, eg obeying the law reproduces the existing structure, while inventing new technology may change it. However, in Giddens' view, although our action can change existing structures, it generally tends to reproduce them. He identifies two reasons for this

Answer 61

Society's rules contain a stock of knowledge about how to live our lives. Earning a living, shopping and so on largely involve applying this knowledge to everyday situations. Similarly, when shopping eg we use resources in the form of money. So as we go about our routine activities, we tend to reproduce the existing structure of society

Answer 62

We reproduce existing structures through our action because we have a deep-seated need for ontological security-a need to feel that the world, both physical and social, really is as it appears to be, and especially that it is orderly, stable and predictable. This need tends to encourage action that maintains existing structures, rather than changing them

Answer 63

Despite the tendency to maintain the structure of society, action or agency can also change it, which can occur in two ways

Answer 64

We 'reflexively monitor' our own action, constantly reflecting on our actions and their results, and we can deliberately choose a new course of action. This is more likely in late modern society, where tradition no longer dictates action, thus increasing the likelihood and pace of change

Answer 65

Our actions may change the world, but not always as we intended. They may have unintended consequences. Eg according to Weber, the Calvinists who adopted the Protestant work ethic did so with the intention of glorifying God, but the actual consequence was the creation of modern capitalism

Answer 66

Strength, Archer's view, Craib's view of the theory and Craib's view of structure

Answer 67

Makes an important attempt to overcome the division between structure and action in sociological theory

Answer 68

Giddens implies that actors can change structures imply by deciding to do so. Archer argues he underestimates the capacity of structures to resist change. Eg slaves may wish to abolish slavery but lack the power to do so

Answer 69

According to Craib, structuration theory isn't really a theory at all, because it doesn't explain what actually happens in society. Instead, it just describes the kinds of things we will find when we study society, such as actions, rules, resources etc

Answer 70

Craib argues he fails to unite structure and action. He regards Giddens' work as a 'thoroughgoing action theory' that reduces the idea of structure to the rules governing routine everyday actions. Giddens fails to explain how his theory applies to large-scale structures such as the economy and the state