33 33 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 (orig. 1979).
34 34 The Risk Society, London: Sage, 1992.
Part I Symbolic Action
Introduction to Part I
1 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
2 Symbolic Interactionism
3 Interaction Ritual Chains
Introduction to Part I
Social life is part of every individual and every interaction – not only of the large-scale affairs of governments, economies, and complex organizations. Sociology that focuses primarily on persons and interpersonal relations is called “micro-sociology.” This can be relevant on a large scale: for example, how members of a corporation’s board of directors interact can determine whether 10,000 people lose their jobs or an entire country experiences an economic crisis. Micro-level decisions are the basis for many macro-sociological phenomena; individual decisions – each small in themselves – can also be aggregated to have huge effects. Consider how decisions to have children, to migrate, to invest in education, or about what and how much to buy combine to produce population crises, “brain drains,” burgeoning of college enrollments, or recession, respectively. Even without attention to their large-scale effects, micro-sociological phenomena matter because their effects can be seen on people involved in everyday life. Indeed, it is often easiest for us to see ourselves in the “micro” part of sociology where symbolic action occurs. In other words, these everyday micro-sociological interactions through the use of commonly shared symbols or language allow us to make sense of the actions of others and to be part of society.
There are many different approaches to micro-sociological analysis. Perhaps, the most prominent is symbolic interactionism, which was developed on the basis of work by George Herbert Mead in the early twentieth century and pioneered by Herbert Blumer. This approach emphasizes that people develop their identities and their senses of how society works and what constitutes fair play in the course of their interaction with each other. It is linked theoretically to the pragmatist school of American philosophy, which emphasizes the ways that not only social order but also all knowledge is achieved in practically situated action.
A second major line of micro-sociological analysis is rooted in the European philosophical tradition called phenomenology. This emphasizes close observation of human experience and especially the ways that the basic categories of understanding are formed. This has been developed directly in the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and followers like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (see Part VIII in Vol. 1), and has been a major influence on “ethnomethodology” – an approach developed especially by Harold Garfinkel and colleagues in California. Ethnomethodology refers to the methods ordinary people use to construct their own everyday understandings of social life, confronting practical challenges and shaping reality through the ways in which they conceptualize it. In this sense, it is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach to the study of culture (ethnos).
Still, a third approach reveals some similarities to each of the others; however, it is also distinct. This is the idiosyncratic, but highly influential, sociology of Erving Goffman. Goffman built his approach to micro-analysis on the basis of Durkheim’s social theory, trying to show how the sort of large-scale phenomena Durkheim analyzed was produced and reproduced in interpersonal interaction. Much interaction is ritualized, he suggested, in ways that make it reinforce the social order and prevent it from becoming highly disruptive. Goffman also developed theoretical approaches to aspects of communication, institutional analysis, and perhaps most famously the presentation of self in everyday life, that is, how we show ourselves to others (and simultaneously determine which aspects are visible and which hidden).
Challenges of Micro-Sociological Analysis
Micro-sociological theory grew, in large part, as a counterpoint to the dominance of structural functionalism in the mid-twentieth century, although its antecedents had been present in sociological theory, and in philosophy, far earlier. Structural functionalism, and the Durkheimian tradition in sociology more generally, focused on the social system as a whole, its functional requirements, and the ways that these requirements are met (see Classical Sociological Theory – the sister volume to this reader). In doing so, it tended to treat human agents as cogs in the machine of social forces. Even the early work of Talcott Parsons, which was greatly concerned with social action, was more clearly about action systems than about actors and their subjective orientation to the action at hand and to the other actors it involved.
Micro-sociologists, by contrast, emphasized the other side of social existence. Just as humans are shaped by the social system in which they act, the micro-sociologists emphasized that the social system was also a human creation. Rather than order being imposed on individuals by the system, micro-sociologists see social order as produced either from an emergent phenomenon formed through human interaction or as the result of discrete, self-interested action and exchange. It is created and maintained, they claim, by the institutions that we actively produce, even when we are not aware of them. Because of this, society itself rests on the ability of human agents to communicate with one another through the use of symbols to signify particular meanings. This highly evolved capacity for communication based on complex, abstract symbolic systems is, in fact, one of the features that distinguish humans from other species. Although there are different theoretical traditions in micro-sociology, some of which will be discussed more fully in the following text, in a general sense, it can be said that micro-sociology is characterized by at least three common elements.
First, micro-sociologists place emphasis on the face-to-face social interaction of human agents rather than on the workings of the social system as an abstract entity. It is not quite correct to say that they focus on individuals since it is really the creation and maintenance of stable systems of meaning between individuals that micro-sociologists find fascinating. However, it is true that micro-sociologists generally focus on the interactions of concrete human agents or sets of agents rather than abstract social units, such as classes.
Second, micro-sociologists place emphasis on meanings rather than functions. Here, the influences of Max Weber and George Herbert Mead are evident in later micro-sociology. For Weber, sociology was the study of social action. Because it is individuals who carry on social action, Weber stressed that sociology had to be an interpretive science. That is, we should strive to provide objective accounts of the subjective motivations of the actions of individuals. Doing this necessarily involved taking into account the meanings that people assigned to their actions. However, Weber’s own empirical analyses tended to examine highly routine forms of social action. Later, micro-sociologists began to examine the way that even everyday interactions are supported by the meanings produced and maintained in social interaction. Here, Mead’s emphasis on the role of verbal and non-verbal symbols in the creation of meaning becomes central to micro-sociology. Although we are all born with the capacity to interpret symbols, it is only through the use of such symbols in interaction that humans acquire a “self” – a sense of who we are in the world. In this way, micro-sociologists stress the intersubjective aspects of human existence.
Third, micro-sociologists emphasize lived experience rather than an abstracted (or reified) concept of “society.” The authors in this section generally grant that social institutions, once produced, do confront us as external and “objective” realities. Nevertheless, they focus on the way that human agents experience regularized patterns of social interaction (or “institutions”) and how they support them in both big and small ways. The exchange of symbols allows forming solidarity