Interactionist Theory

Interactionism
• Focuses on individuals and small groups in
seeking to interpret the social world
• They view individuals as the creators of
society through their everyday actions
• They believe that Sociology needs to study the
actions of people and to understand the
reason and meaning behind their actions
• They study how people use symbols to
establish meanings
• Sociology must determine the meaning that
actors bring to an act
• It includes Symbolic Interactionism,
Dramaturgy, Phenomenology and
Ethnomethodology
 Symbolic Interactionism
• Emphasizes the importance of symbols in
interaction
• Actions are not just actions, they have specific
meaning
• E.g. someone comes up to you on the street
with a balled, closed fist. How would you
interpret it?
• This illustrates that not just gestures are
important but it is the meaning attached to
them
• Main tenets:
(i)Ascribed Meanings
(ii)Meanings evolve out of communication
(iii)Interpretation
(i) Ascribed Meanings- actions are based on
meanings ascribed to objects or things
(ii) Meanings evolve out of communication-
meanings come out of interaction and
contact with others
(iii) Interpretation- Individuals undertake an
interpretive process through which they
assign meanings
 George Herbert Mead
• Three core elements:
1. Symbols
- symbols must be shared
- world is composed of symbols created to give
meaning or order
- helps members of society to share a common
perception of reality
- such symbols include language which facilitates
communication
2. The Self
- Mead refers to individuals as actors
- the concept of the self is the ability to see oneself as
an object
- basic mechanism of the development of self is
reflexivity i.e. the ability to put oneself in the place of
others
- mind and self are socially constructed
- two aspects of the Self; the I (individual idea of self)
and the Me (the idea we think people have of us)
3. Interaction
- no interaction is possible unless individuals
are aware of other’s intentions in society
- individuals assume that they share common
understandings of the symbols and then place
themselves in the place of others
• Related concepts:
1.Role-taking- seeing oneself from another
person’s point of view
2.Significant Others- those people who
surround the individual who teaches them
social behaviour
 Dramaturgy- Erving Goffman
• People ‘stage’ social life
• Discusses Impression Management and how it
explains the behaviour of individuals
• Impression Management refers to those
techniques that social actors use to maintain
particular images of themselves during
interaction
• He used the concepts of ‘front stage’ and
‘back stage’ to illustrate this
• Front stage- this is what the individual wants
the world to see. The roles tend to be formal.
• Back Stage- this is what is kept out of view of
the world. It is where the individual lets loose
and displays what is suppressed in the ‘front
stage’
 Ethnomethodology- Harold Garfinkel
• Social life appears to be orderly but in reality
it is chaotic
• Order is achieved through the documentary
method
• Individuals make sense of the life by observing
a set of unwritten rules which guide routine
situations
• He illustrated this with an experiment among
his students:
• He asked them to initiate a conversation with
friends or family and respond in ways out of
the ordinary
• E.g. “have a nice day” and the response, “nice
in what sense exactly?” “which part of the day
do you mean?”
 Phenomenology- Alfred Schutz
• Social action is explained by studying the
phenomena firsthand
• Attempts to discover the essence of the
objects being studied
• The focus is on a detailed observation of
individual experience and behaviour