ACTION THEORIES
Concerns are explaining social behaviour and doing sociological research.
SOCIAL ACTON THEORIES
Main Assumptions
- Individuals or small groups are studied, not societies.
- Roles aren't imposed but negotiated by individuals.
- Rather than external causes of behaviour, the focus is on the meanings actors give to their own and other's behaviour.
- We can't take the role of others, so interaction is possible.
- The social world doesn't exist separately from the minds of individual actors.
- Shared meanings give social order (rather than being outside imposed).
- Methodology is interpretivist (interactionalist) and anti-scientific.
- Methods try to understand the actors' experience of the social world.
Types of Action Theory
- Social action theory, roots in Weber, people are actors acting to achieve goals, chosen, along with the means of achieving them, by the actors' social perception of the social situation rather than the objective nature of a situation.
- Symbolic interactionism, roots in mead and Cooley. Key concept is 'self', how we see ourselves as objects in the social world. We see ourselves as we think others see us. Cooley's 'looking-glass self'.
Evaluation
Arguments for
Mindless behaviour, like vandalism, can be understood from the actors point of view. Motives are from self, not just responses to stimuli.
Against
- Structuralists say there's an unwillingness to accept the influences of social structure on individual behaviopur. Conflict theories arues that unequal distribution of power is not focused on enough.
- Sometimes people have thought the studies dealing with individuals are trivial.
Main Applications
Interactionalism has been influential in sociology. It was the major arguement against Durkheim's study of suicide. Labelling theory and the concept of the self-fulfilling propheccy have been influence on the sociology of deviance, health and education.
Main writers
- Becker, application of labelling theory, and the social construction of deviance.
- Lemert, primary and secondary deveince/illness to show social reaction creating and amplifying deviance.
- Goffmann, developed Mead's concept of self, saying its presentation is like a dramatic production.
- Goldthorpe and Lockwood used social action approach to explain different behaviour of affluent workers in London.
CONCLUSION
- Weber, echoed by Parsons, Goldthorpe and lockwood, combined the theories of strudctrure and social action theories, criticising Marx for economic determinism, and Durkheim for not considering social action along with social facts.
- Marx refers to different types of social action, as well as looking at the imortance of consciousness for social action. More recently, Willis used interactionist methods, within a Marxist theoretical framework, to study the ways that working class boys understood school and work.
- Giddens introduced structuration theory to try and combine the insights of both structuralist and action theories.