Interactionism
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Interactionism1. Humans act towards things on the basis of meanings individuals have for them.
2. Meaning is created through interaction between people.
3. Meanings are modified through an interpretive process.
Interactionism argues that people's selves are social products, but that these selves are also purposive and creative. People act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them, and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation.
Interactionists focus on the subjective aspects of social life(micro level), rather than on objective social systems. One reason for this focus is that interactionists base their perspective on their image of humans, rather than on their image of society( as the functionalists do). For interactionists, human are pragmatic 实用的务实的 actors who continually must adjust their behavior to the actions of other actors. We can adjust to these actions only because we are able to interpret them, i.e. to denote them symbolically and threat the actions and those who perform them as symbolic objects. This process of adjustment is aided by our ability to imaginatively rehearse alternative lines of action before we act. The process is further aided by our ability to think about and to react to our own actions and even our selves as symbolic objects. Thusm the interactionist theorist ses humans as active, creative participants who construct their social world not as passive, conforming objects of socialization.
Social consists of organized and patterned interactions among individuals. thus, research by interactionists focues on easily observable face-to-face interactions rather than on macro-level structural relationships involving social institutions. Furthermore, this focus on interaction and the meaning of events to the participants in thos events shifts the attention of the interactionist away from stable norms and values toward more changeable, readjusting social processes. Thereas fur functionalists socialization creates stability in the social system, for interactionists negotiation among members of society creates temporary, socially constructed relations which remain in a constant flux, despite relative stabiity in the basic framework governing those relations.
These emphases on symbols, negotiated reality and the social construction of society lead to an interest in the roles people play.discusses roles dramaturgically, using an analogy to the theather with human social behavior seen as more or less well scripted and with humans as role -taking actors. Role-taking is a key mechanism of interaction, for it permits us to take the other's perspective, to see what our actions might mean to the other actors with whom we interact. At other times, interactionist emphasize the improvisational quality of roles, with human social behavior seen as poorly scripted and with human as role-making improvisers.
Ethonomethodology, raises the question of how people who are interacting with each other can create the illusion of a shared social order even when they don't understand each other fully and in fact have different points of view.
Interactionists tend to study social interaction through
participant observation, rather than surveys and interviews. They argue that close contact and immersion in the everyday lives of the participants is necessary for understanding the meaning of actions, the definition of the situation itself, and the process by which actors construct the situation through their interaction. Given this close contact, interactionists could hardly remain free of value commitments, and in fact ,interactionists make explicit use of their values in choosing what to study but strive to be objective in the conduct of their research.
Core Assumptions and Statements
The theory consists of three core principles: meaning, language and thought. These core principles lead to conclusions about the creation of a person’s self and socialization into a larger community (Griffin, 1997).
Meaning states that humans act toward people and things according to the meanings that give to those people or things. Symbolic Interactionism holds the principal of meaning to be the central aspect of human behavior.
Language gives humans a means by which to negotiate meaning through symbols. Humans identify meaning in speech acts with others.
Thought modifies each individual’s interpretation of symbols. Thought is a mental conversation that requires different points of view.
With these three elements the concept of the self can be framed. People use ‘the looking-glass self’: they take the role of the other, imagining how we look to another person. The self is a function of language, without talk there would be no self concept. People are part of a community, where our generalized other is the sum total of responses and expectations that we pick up from the people around us. We naturally give more weight to the views of significant others.
Example
A boy (Jeremy) and a girl (Kim) broke up last year. When Jeremy received an email from Kim to go out he agreed and they went to a bar. Jeremy had a different kind of meaning though in comparison with Kim. Jeremy went out as friends, where Kim went out as with the meaning of ‘potential boyfriend’. Also in the communication the language was misunderstood. Kim wanted to have a romantic night, while Jeremy wanted to have a talk in a bar. This is also caused by the nonverbal element of emails. The third miscommunication is under thought. When Jeremy replied so fast Kim thought that they were going out to a romantic place. Jeremy went out just as ‘friends’. They both used an internal dialogue to interpret the situation and to make a perception of the evening.
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Conflict Theory
Conflict theory states that the society or organization functions so that each individual participant and its groups struggle to maximize their benefits, which contributes to social changes such as changes in politics and revolutions. The theory is mostly applied to explain conflict between social classes, proletarian versus bourgeoisie, and ideologies such as capitalism versus socialism.
The essences of conflict theory is best epitomized by the classic "pyramid structure" in which an elite dictates terms to the larger masses. All major institutions, laws, and traditions in the society are designed to support those who have traditionally been in power, or the groups that are perceived to be superior in the society according to this theory. This can also be expanded to include any society's "morality" and by extension their definition of deviance. Anything that challenges the control of the elite will likely be considered" deviant" or "morally reprehensible." The theory can be applied on both the macro level (like the US or Soviet Russia) or the micro level (a church organization or school club). In summary, conflict theory seeks to catalogues the ways in which those in power seek to stay in power.
The four primary assumptions of modern conflict theory:
1) Competition. Competition over scarce resources ( money, leisure, sexual partneers, and so on) is at the heart of all social relationship. Competition rather than consensus is characteristic of human relationships.
2) structural inequality. Inequalities in power and reward are built into all social structures. Individuals and groups that benefit from any particular structure strive to see it maintained.
3) Revolution. Change occurs as a result of conflict between social class' competing interests rather than through adaptation. It if often abrupt and revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
4) War. Even war is a unifier of the societies involved, as well as war may set to an end to whole societies.
The central institution os capitalist society is private property, the system by which capital( money, machines, tools) is controlled by a small minority of the population. This leads to two opposed classes, the owners of capital and the workers, whose only property is their own labor time, which they have to sell to the capitalists.
Owners are seen as making profits by paying workers less than their work is worth, and thus, exploiting them.
Economic exploitation leads to political oppression, as owners make use of their economic power to gain control of the state and turn it into a servant of bourgeois economic interests. Police power, is used to enforce property rights and guarantee unfair contracts between capitalist and worker. Oppression also takes more subtle forms: religion serves capitalist interests by pacifying the population, intellectuals paid directly or indirectly by capitalists, spend their careers justifying and rationalizing the existing social and economic arrangements. Social institutions, serve to reproduce and perpetuate the economic class structure.
Conflict theory is based upon the view that the fundamental causes of crime are the social and economic forces operating within society. The criminal justice system and criminal law are thought to be operating on behalf of rich and powerful social elites, with resulting polices aimed at controlling the poor. The criminal justice establishment aims at imposing standard of morality and good behavior created by the powerful on the whole of society. Focus is on separating the powerful from who would steal from others and protecting themselves from physical attacks. In the process the legal rights of poor folks might be ignored. The middle class are also co-opted' they side with the elites rather the poor, thinking they might themselves rise to the top by supporting the status quo.
Thus, street crimes, even minor monetary ones are routinely punished quite severely, while large scale financial and business crimes are treated much more leniently. Theft of a television might receive a longer sentence than stealing millions through illegal business practices.
Like functionalism, conflict theory agree that society and culture influences individual behavior. The emphasis on the importance of structure and its influence on the individual does not, lead to stress consensus as the basis of social organisation. In fact, the reverse is true. Conflict stress the extent to which individuals, groups and classes within the society are in competition with each other for whatever people in society consider to be important or worthwhile.
1) it is desirable to convince people that their lack of power, influence, status, wealth and so forth is basically their own fault. If you can encourage people to compete against each other, them some will win and others will lose. If losers can be convinced that the competition is free and fair then their inability to achieve the good things in life can be rationalised as being their own individual fault. This is where cultural institutions such as religion, education and the media are important, since their role is to encourage people to see this way.
2) however, if for whatever reason people fail to be socialised completely into these values, then force is available to make them see the error of this ways. This is the least desirable socialisatione option, mainly because if you force someone to do something against their will you are setting up the conditions for conflict and resistance.
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Functionalism1) society is viewed as a system---a collection of interdependent parts, with a tendency toward equilibrium. 2) there are functional requirements that must be met in a society for its survival ( such as reproduction of the population). 3) phenomena are seen to exist because they serve a function.
Functionalism: the perspective of this is built upon twin emphases: 1) application of the scientific method to the objective social world 2) the use of an analogy between the individual organism and society.
The emphasis on scientific methods leads to the assertion that one can study the social world in the same ways as one studies the physical world. Thus functionalists see the social world as "objectively real," as obserable with such techniques as social surveys and interviews.
The second emphasis, on the organic unity of society, leads functionalists to speculate about the needs which must be met for a social system to exist, as well as the ways in which social institutions satisfy those needs. A functionalists might argue, that every society will have a religion, because religious institutions have certain functions which contribute to the survival of the social system as a whole, just as the organs of the body have functions which are necessary for the body's survival.
The analogy between society and an organism focuses attention to the homeostatic nation of social systems: social systems work to maintain equilibrium and return to it after external shocks disturb the balance among social institutions. Such social equilibrium is achieved, most through socialization of members of the society into the basici values and norms of the society, so that consensus is reached. where socialization is insufficient for some reason to create conformity to culturally appropriate roles and socially supported norm, various social control mechanism exist to restore conformity or to segregate the nonconforming individuals from the rest of society. The social control mechanisms range from sanctions imposed informally-- sneering and gossip, --to the activities of certain formal organizations, like schools, prisons, and mental institutions.
Society is viewed as a system of interrelated parts, a change in any part affecting all the others. Within the boundaries of the system, feedback loops and exchanges among the parts ordinarily lead to homeostasis. Most changes are the results of natural growth or of evolution, but other changes occur when ourside forces impinge upon the system.
Functionalist analyses often focus on the individual, usually with the intent to show how individual actors as decision-makers, although some critics have suggested that functionalist theorists are, in effect, treating individuals either as puppets, whose decisions are a predictable result of their location in the social structure and of the norms and expectations they have internalized, or sometimes as virtual prisoners of the explicit social control techniques society imposes. In any case, functionalists have tended to be less concerned with the ways in which individuals can control their own destiny than with the ways in which the limits imposed by society make individual behavior scientifically predictable.
Robert Merton, 1) he distinguishes between manifest and laten functions: those which are recognized and intended by actors in the social system and hence may represent motives for their actions, and those which are unrecognized and, thus unintended by the actors. Second, he distinguishes between consequences which are positively functional for a society, those which are dysfunctional for the society, and those which are dysfunctional for the society, the those which are neither.
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Functionalism ExplanationMarxist's explanations of functionalism: the explain the presence of a social fact in terms of the function that state of society performs.
1) the legal system of a capitalist democratic society performs the function of maintaining the class distinctions within such a society.
2) the educational system performs the function of reproducing economic inequality.
3) liberal/democratic institutions perform the function of keeping bourgeois power relations static.
4) the welfare system performs the function of reproducing economic inequality (poverty traps)
Cohen
The relation between legal and political institutions, class structure and economic structure.
The legal system reinforces class structure which reinforces economic structure
Eg: Striking creates a prisoners dilemma
1) if everyone strikes the strike succeed and wages raised
2) if no one strikes wages will stay low.
3) if everyone else strikes and i don't i will get my wages and they won't. maybe they will be sacked.
1 is the best option but everyone reasons ( in the absences of any coercive mechanism for enforcing solidarity or assurance that no one will defect) according to 3. Thus everyone strikes and 2 is the result. wages stay low, the worst possible outcome.
The sharing information and the generation of trust, however transforms the dilemma into an assurance game in which 1 is the outcome. For this to occur there must be perfect information and trust. In this case, class solidarity performs the function of transformation, revolutionary leadership is the mechanism "through continued interaction the worker become bother concerned about and trusting of each other."
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CapitalismCapitalism refers to an economic system in which the means of production are entirely privately owned and operated for profit and in which distribution, production and pricing of goods and services are determined by the operation of the free market.
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Positivism According to
Auguste Comte, society undergoes three different phases in its quest for the truth. There three phases are the theological ,the metaphysical and the positive phases.
The theological phase of man is based on
whole-hearted belief in all things with reference to God. God, he says, had reigned supreme over human existence pre-Enlightenment. Man's place in society was governed by his association with the divine presences and with the church that governed all. The theological phase deals with mankind accepting the doctrines of the church and not questioning th world. It deal with the restrictions put in place by the religious organization at them time and the total acceptance of any "fact" placed forth for society to believe.
The metaphysical phase of man , as the time since the Enlightenment, a time steeped in logical rationalism, to the time right after the French Revolution. This second phase states that the universal rights of man are mot important. The central idea is that
man is born with certain rights, that should not and cannot be taken away, which must be respected. With this in mind democracies and dictators rose and fell in attempt to maintain the innate rights of man.
The positivism: the central idea is the
idea that individual rights are more important than the rule of any one person. Comte stated the idea that
man is able to govern himself is what makes this innately different from the rest. There is no higher power governing the masses and the intrigue of any one person that the idea that he can achieve anything based on his individual free will and authority.
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UrbanizationEconomic effects: The most striking change accompanying urbanization is the rapid change in the prevailing character of local livelihoods as agriculture or more traditional local services and small scale industry give way to modern industry and urban and related commerce, with the city drawing on the resources of an ever-widerning area for its own sustenance and goods to be traded or processed into manufactures.
IndustrializationA process of
social and economic change from pre-industrial (an economy where the amount of capital accumulated per capita is low) to an industrial state. This is closely intertwined with
technological innovation, particularly the
development of energy production and metallurgy.
Most pre-industrial economies, the majority of the population were focued on producing what they need to survive. Majority of people became the labour force in arigculture. However, producing food and products don't make profits. It is the
trade and commerce make all the money off the production. -------Increasing trade and commercialisation happened everywhere in industrial regions.
Social StructureThe term social strcture, refers to
entities or groups in definite relation to each other, to relatively enduring
patterns or behaviour and relationship within social system, or to
social institutions and norms becoming embedded into social systems in such a way that they shape the behaviour of actors within those social systems.
The notion of the social structure as relationships between different entities or groups or as enduring and relatively stable patterns of relationship emphasises the idea that
society is grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meaning or purposes.
The notion of structure as embedded institutions or norms that shape the actions of social agents as
structural determination may accur as the actions of people and organisations are guided partially by the underlying structures in the system.
so: 1) the relationship of definite entinities or groups to each other
2) as enduring patterns of behaviour by participants in a social system in relation to each other and
3) as institutionalised norms or cognitive frameworks that structure the actions of actors in the social system.
