SOCIAL THEORY constructivism and interactionism

1. http://bit.ly/soc97 Vaughn Tan SOCIAL THEORYconstructivism and interactionism

2. What does constructivism say about people's motivations for action?  • What do the readings say about where systems of meaning come from?  • How do the readings relate to how Durkheim describes social facts and the different kinds of social solidarity? • How do the readings relate to how Weber thinks about what connects members of status groups? • Is the constructivist/interactionist perspective a methodologically individualist or holist perspective? Why?

3. History • Response and reaction • Subjective meaning and mutuality • Focusing between, at the level of actors • Emphasising lived experience • Commonality

4. Symbolic interactionism Phenomenology Ritual/dramaturgy

6. = infant safe harbor = dead babies here

9. “We analyze that symbol and find out what is the intent in the mind of the individual in using that symbol, and then attempt to discover whether this symbol calls out this intent in the mind of the other. We assume that there are sets of ideas in persons' minds and that these individuals make use of certain arbitrary symbols which answer to the intent which the individuals had” (Mead 466).

10. “We are rather forced to conclude that consciousness is an emergent from such behavior; that so far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it” (Mead 469).

11. “the triadic relation of a gesture of one individual, a response to that gesture by a second individual, and completion of the given social act initiated by the gesture of the first individual” (Mead 470).

12. “The self, as that which can be an object in itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience” (Mead 473).

13. “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others;the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I’” (Mead 475).

15. Habit vs institution • Role-action relation • Shared history • Control and sanctions • Predictability of interaction • Shared actions and meanings • Institutions as objective reality

16. You move to a new neighbourhood in Brooklyn and you find a great café.

17. This actually exists and is great coffee.

18. You go there every morning at 7.49am and order a single espresso and a bran muffin. You’re out the door as soon as you pay so that you can catch the L train into the LES for work.

19. You get on a first-name basis with all the morning baristi because you’re there every day. Your order is always the same. You’re always in a hurry to pay and hit the road. Eventually, if life is good, what happens?

20. One day, you don’t show up. (Your alarm clock broke.) What happens? You go the next morning. What do you do? One of your friends who’s staying with you that week comes out with you to get coffee. What does he think?

21. “What is taken for granted as knowledge in the society comes to be coextensive with the knowable, or at any rate provides the framework within which anything not yet known will come to be known in the future” (Berger and Luckmann 51).

24. Performing, playing a part • Sincerity or cynicism • Front • Dramatization • Idealization

25. Line and face

28. Line and face • maintaining or being in face • wrong face

29. Line and face • maintaining or being in face • wrong face • Maintenance of face as interaction condition • Face work

33. Line and face • maintaining or being in face • wrong face • Maintenance of face as interaction condition • Facework • Aggression through facework • Homeostasis

35. “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” (IR 31).

36. “Socialization may not so much involve a learning of the many specific details of a single concrete part—often there could not be enough time or energy for this. What does seem to be required of the individual is that he learn enough pieces of expression to be able to "fill in" and manage, more or less, any part that he is likely to be given” (PS 64).

37. “A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is nonetheless something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized” (PS 65).

38. “The general capacity to be bound by moral rules may well belong to the individual, but the particular set of rules which transforms him into a human being derives from requirements established in the ritual organization of social encounters” (PS 65).

39. “What is taken for granted as knowledge in the society comes to be coextensive with the knowable, or at any rate provides the framework within which anything not yet known will come to be known in the future” (Berger and Luckmann 51).

40. Taking things for granted • Assumption of commonality’ • Breaching experiments

41. “The study of common sense knowledge and common sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the actual methods whereby members of a society … make the social structures of everyday activities observable” (Garfinkel 75).

42. “Although sociologists take socially structured scenes of everyday life as a point of departure they rarely see, as a task of sociological inquiry in its own right, the general question of how any such common sense world is possible … The member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation...Demonstrably he is responsive to this background, while at the same time he is at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist” (Garfinkel 36).

43. “Familiar objects—persons obviously, but furniture and room arrangements as well—resisted students’ efforts to think of themselves as strangers” (Garfinkel 46).

44. “the firmer a societal member's grasp of What Anyone Like Us Necessarily Knows, the more severe should be his disturbance when ‘natural facts of life’ are impugned for him as a depiction of his real circumstances … [because action requires that] the person assumes, assumes that the other person assumes as well, and assumes that as he assumes it of the other person the other person assumes the same for him” (Garfinkel 55).

45. “As race-markers come to be more salient and to be freighted with powerful social meanings, the odds diminish that an observer, starting with a mistaken view of a racial group, will process information in a manner that exposes the error and leads him away from reliance on the racial trait” (Loury 65).

46. “Everything depends … on racially biased social cognitions that cause some situations to appear … worthy of further investigation—while other situations appear normal, about right, … consistent with the social world as we know it. These cognitive distinctions tend to be drawn to the detriment of millions of racially stigmatized citizens … because of the taint of dishonor … that is part of the social meaning of race in the United States” (Loury 71).