Action Theories

Weber and Social Action

• Structural and Action approaches are necessary for understanding human behaviour, arguing that an adequate explanation involves 2 levels:

1.Level of cause- explaining the objective structural factors that shape behaviour

2.Level of meaning- understanding the subjective meanings that individuals attach to their actions

Weber: Different types of social action

Type Explanation

Traditional Action Action that is custom or habit e.g. buying gifts at Christmas

Affectual Action Action that is expresses by an emotional state, such as crying at a funeral

Value-rational action Action towards a goal the person regards as desirable e.g. Praying to get to heaven

Instrumentally rational actionThis is a highly rational form of action where people calculate the most efficient means of achieving a given goal

Symbolic Interactionism

• Symbolic interactionists emphasise the ways in which society is actively shaped by individuals and the meanings they attach to ‘everyday things’.

George Herbert Mead • Noticed most of our communication was symbolic

such as smiles, and frowns.

• There is an interpretive phase between a stimulus and our response to it, in which we interpret its meanings.

• We interpret other people’s meanings by taking their role (putting ourselves in their place, seeing ourselves as they see us)

• This ability develops through social interaction

• To function as members of society we need the ability to see ourselves as others see us. Through shared symbols esp. language we become conscious of the ways of acting that others require of us

Herbert Blumer• Blumer developed Mead’s approach and

identified 3 key principles of Interactionism:

1.Our actions are based on the meanings we give to situations, people etc. They are not based on automatic responses to stimuli e.g. (for example, interpreting the meaning of a red light before deciding how to react to it)

2.These meanings arise from interactions and are to some extent negotiable and changeable

3.The meanings we give to situations are mainly the result of taking the role of the other.

Labelling Theory• Perhaps the most well known application of symbolic

Interactionism is labelling theory. Used widely in Education and Deviance.

• Some groups have more power and are able to impose their meanings or interpretations on the rest of us

• Charles Cooper (1922) uses labelling to describe how we develop our self- concept

Uses 3 Interactionist concepts1.Definition of the situation- defining

something labels it. If people define a situation as real, it will have real consequences. Once ‘labelled’ people may changer their behaviour and become deviant- SFP

• Looking-glass self- Cooley argues that our self concept arises out of our ability to take the role of others. Others act as a looking glass to us: we see our self mirrored in how they respond to us and we become what they see us as (why SFP occurs)

• Career- apply concept to mental patients. The individual has a career running from ‘pre-patient’ with certain symptoms through labelling by a psychiatrist to hospital in-patient to discharge etc. ‘Mental patient’ becomes the master status

AO2:

• Labelling theory has been accused of determinism- of seeing our actions and identities as shaped by the way others label

them

•It fails to explain where labels actually originate from

Goffman’s Dramaturgical Model

• Argues that social interaction is about successful role playing

• We actively construct our ‘self’ by manipulating other people’s impressions of us

• Uses analogies with drama for analysing social interaction e.g. ‘actors’, ,scripts, ‘props’, ‘backstage’ etc

• We are all social actors engaged in the drama of everyday life

1. Presentation of self & impression management

• We seek to present a particular image to our audiences, controlling the impression our ‘performance’ gives

• Impression management techniques include tone of voice, gestures, dress, make up

• As in the theatre there is a ‘front stage where we act out our roles, while backstage we can step out of our role and ‘be ourselves’ e.g. Teachers behaviour in the class and staffroom

2. Roles- There is a gap (role distance) between our real self and our roles, which are only loosely scripted by society and allow us a lot of freedom in how we play them

• Role distance implies that we do not always believe in the role we play. We may be calculating, manipulating audiences into accepting an impression that conceals our true self

Evaluate Weber and Symbolic Interactionism

Phenomenology

• Phenomenon- things as they appear to our senses

• We can never have definite knowledge of what the world outside is really like, all we can know is what our minds tells us about it

• It examines the social construction of particular phenomena and the results of this subjective way of seeing and talking about them (a discourse) on people’s attitudes and behaviour.

Example

• Jack Douglas studied concepts of suicide, suggesting that some people viewed it as a means of crying for help, some as a way to get revenge, others as a spiritual hope of reaching a better place. These different motivations for suicide meant that it could not be regarded as a single type of act, making nonsense of analysing patterns in suicide statistics in the hope of finding causes

Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology examines how people speak to each other and interact in everyday conversations and relationships

• Rejects idea of society as a real objective structure

• Sociologists task is to uncover the taken-for –granted rules people use to construct social reality

• Summarise Ethnomethodology Evaluation (pg 249)

Combining Structure and Action

• Action Theories- micro level, voluntaristic that see society as inter-subjective, constructed through interaction and meaning

• Structural theories- macro, deterministic theories that see society as objective and external to individuals

Giddens Structuration Theory

• Seeks to combine the 2 approaches into a single unified theory of structure and action

• Argues that there is duality of structure. Structure and agency (action) cannot exist without the other

• Our actions produce, reproduce and change structures over time and space, while these structures are what make our actions possible

• This is called relationship Structuration

AO2:

Criticised for not being a theory at all; it doesn’t explain what happens in society. It just describes the

kinds of things we will find when we study society

He fails to explain how his theory can be applied to large scale structures e.g. economy & state

Reproducing Structures through agency

Giddens- Structure has 2 elements:

1. Rules- Norms, customs, laws that govern action2. Resources- economic & power over others• Rules & Resources can either be reproduced or changed

through human action. However our actions generally tend to reproduce rather than change them. This is because society’s rules contain a stock of knowledge about how to live our lives, so our routine activities tend to reproduce the existing structure of society

• We also reproduce existing structures because we have a deep-seated need to feel the world is orderly, stable and predictable

Changing Structures through agency

• Change can happen because:1.We reflect upon our actions and we

can deliberately choose a new course of action. In late modern society, where tradition no longer dictates action this is even more likely

2.Our actions may have unintended consequences, producing changes that were not part of our goal

AO2:

Giddens claim that actors can change structures underestimates the capacity of structures to resist change e.g. slaves

may wish to abolish the institution of slavery but lack the power to do so