MICROSOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Symbolic Interactionism

Sociology’s third grand theory, symbolic interactionism (or interactionist theory), proved its greatest influence through much of the 1900s. It is America’s unique contribution to the discipline and an answer to many of the criticisms of other paradigms. Symbolic interactionism helps us explain both our individual personalities and the ways in which we are all linked together; it allows us to understand the processes by which social order and social change are constructed. As a theoretical perspective, it is vital, versatile, and still evolving.

FOUNDER AND KEY CONTRIBUTIONS

Symbolic interactionism is derived largely from the teachings of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). But there were many others involved in the development of this particular school of thought, and it is worthwhile to examine the social context in which they lived and worked.

At the start of the twentieth century, sociology was still something of an import from the European intellectual scene, and American practitioners had just begun developing their own ideas regarding the nature and workings of society. The University of Chicago in the 1920s provided a stimulating intellectual setting for a handful of academics who built on one another’s work and advanced what became known as the first new major branch within the discipline. Since there were so few social theorists in the country, the head of the department, Albion Small, a philosopher by training, recruited professors from various eastern colleges who had often studied other disciplines such as theology and psychology. The fledgling sociology department grew to include such influential members as Robert Park, W. I. Thomas, Charles Horton Cooley, and later George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. This group, the theories they developed together, and the way they went about studying the social world are frequently referred to (either individually or collectively) as the Chicago School of sociology.

ON THE JOB

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Famous Sociology Majors

Sociology continues to be a popular major at colleges and universities in the United States and in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2019), over a half million bachelor of arts degrees in sociology were awarded in the United States between 1990 and 2018. Clearly, there are many reasons students are enthusiastic about the subject. What may be less clear is how to turn this passion into a paycheck. Students considering majoring in the subject often ask, “What can I do with a degree in sociology?” Their parents may be asking the same question.

Students interested in academic careers can pursue graduate degrees and become professors and researchers—real practicing sociologists. But the vast majority of sociology majors will not necessarily become sociologists with a capital “S.” Their studies have prepared them to be valuable, accomplished participants in a variety of fields, including law and government, business administration, social welfare, public health, education, counseling and human resources, advertising and marketing, public relations and the media, and the nonprofit sector. A major in sociology, in other words, can lead almost anywhere. And while the roster of former sociology majors contains names both well known and unsung—from President Ronald Reagan, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to the public defender giving legal aid to low-income clients and the health-care professional bringing wellness programs into large corporations—we will focus here on three important Americans you may not have associated with sociology.

Our first profile is of Michelle Robinson Obama (b. 1964), the first African American First Lady of the United States. Michelle Obama has become one of the most recognizable and widely admired sociology majors in the world, using her role as First Lady to fight childhood obesity, help working mothers and military families, and encourage public service. Born and raised in working-class Chicago, she can trace her ancestry to enslaved people on both sides of her family tree. Her father worked for the city’s water department but saw both of his children graduate from Princeton University and go on to successful professional careers. After obtaining her BA in sociology—her senior thesis dealt with alienation experienced by African American students in an Ivy League institution—she earned her law degree at Harvard, worked at a prestigious law firm in Chicago, and then served in the mayor’s office. In addition to law and politics, her choice of majors was a critical stepping-stone on her way to success.

Our next sociology major is Kalpen Modi (b. 1977), who served as an associate director with the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE) in 2009. In this role, he acted as a liaison to young Americans, the arts, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. He also served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. This may come as a surprise to those who know him as the actor Kal Penn, most famous for his role as the wisecracking, easygoing stoner Kumar in the Harold and Kumar film series or as Kevin on How I Met Your Mother. As an actor, Penn has been critical of the racial and ethnic stereotypes often associated with playing a person of South Asian descent. At one point, he nearly turned down a recurring role as a terrorist on the TV drama 24 because he didn’t want to reinforce the negative “connection between media images and people’s thought processes” (Yuan 2007). While it might be easy to make similar claims against Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, one of his co-stars defended the film by arguing that it “approached the level of sociology, albeit scatological, sexually obsessed sociology,” as “it probed questions of ethnic identity, conformism and family expectations versus personal satisfaction” (Garvin 2008, p. M1). In his new memoir, You Can’t Be Serious (2021), Penn discusses his New Jersey childhood; his experiences in Hollywood, including the constant racial microaggressions; and his time in the White House. As Penn explains, “This book is for anyone who has ever wondered if it’s possible to have more than one calling” (Rankin 2021). Penn continues to juggle politics with acting, reflecting a deep commitment to sociological ideals and a desire to use his influence to help build more positive media portrayals of minorities.

Our last sociology major is the poet and activist Amanda Gorman (b. 1998), who rose to fame with her breakout performance at President Biden’s inauguration. Gorman, who graduated from Harvard in 2020 with a degree in sociology, was the first person to be named National Youth Poet Laureate. She was asked to recite an original poem at the inauguration after Jill Biden saw a video of one of her performances. In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, she struggled to put pen to paper. But on January 6, 2021, after watching pro-Trump rioters storm the Capitol, she stayed up late and finally finished “The Hill We Climb.” The poem, which references the violence of January 6, was inspired by the words of historic leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. (another sociology major) and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the Broadway musical Hamilton. It’s also very sociological in nature: Throughout the poem, Gorman reflects on the intersection between history and biography and the way social forces shape our lives. In a nod to her own personal biography, she highlights that her ancestors were enslaved and that she was raised by a single mother. Even more importantly, though, she highlights how people can shape their societies in turn. Biden’s inauguration is not the only presidential inauguration this sociology major hopes to attend: She plans to run for president in 2036.

Regardless of whether you go any further in this discipline—or if you end up working in politics, the arts, or public service—the most important thing to take away from an introductory sociology class is a sociological perspective. Sociology promises a new way of looking at, thinking about, and taking action in the world around us, which will serve you well no matter where you find yourself in the future.

Chicago was in many ways a frontier city in the early twentieth century. Rapidly transformed by industrialization, immigration, and ethnic diversity, Chicago became a unique laboratory in which to practice a new type of sociology that differed both theoretically and methodologically from the European models. Instead of doing comparative and historical work like the macro theorists before them, the members of the Chicago School went out into the city to conduct interviews and collect observational data. Their studies were particularly inspired by Max Weber’s concept of verstehen as the proper attitude to adopt in the field. Their focus was on the micro level of everyday interactions (such as race relations in urban neighborhoods) as the building blocks of larger social phenomena (such as racial inequality).

The new school of thought was strongly influenced by a philosophical perspective called pragmatism, developed largely by William James and John Dewey, which was gaining acceptance among American social theorists in the early 1900s. To James, pragmatism meant seeking the truth of an idea by evaluating its usefulness in everyday life; in other words, if it works, it’s true! He thought that living in the world involved making practical adaptations to whatever we encountered; if those adaptations made our lives run more smoothly, then the ideas behind them must be both useful and true. James’s ideas inspired educational psychologist and philosopher John Dewey, who also grappled with pragmatism’s main questions: How do we adapt to our environments? How do we acquire the knowledge that allows us to act in our everyday lives? Unlike the social Darwinists, pragmatists implied that the process of adaptation is essentially immediate and that it involves conscious thought. George Herbert Mead would be the one who eventually pulled these ideas (and others, too) together into a theory meant to address questions about the relationship between thought and action, the individual and society.

Mead came from a progressive family and grew up in the Midwest and Northeast during the late 1800s. Mead attended college at Oberlin and Harvard and did his graduate studies in psychology at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin in Germany. Before he became a full-time professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and later the University of Chicago, Mead waited tables and did railroad surveying and construction work. He was also a tutor to William James’s family in Cambridge, Massachusetts; since his later theories were influenced by James, we can only wonder exactly who was tutoring whom in this arrangement! Mead’s background and training uniquely positioned him to bridge the gap between sociology and psychology and to address the links between the individual and society.

Mead proposed that both human development and the meanings we assign to everyday objects and events are fundamentally social processes; they require the interaction of multiple individuals. And what is crucial to the development of self and society is language, the means by which we communicate with one another. For Mead, there is no mind without language, and language itself is a product of social interactions (1934, pp. 191–192). According to Mead, the most important human behaviors consist of linguistic “gestures,” such as words and facial expressions. People develop the ability to engage in conversation using these gestures; further, both society and individual selves are constructed through this kind of symbolic communication. Mead argued that we use language to “name ourselves, think about ourselves, talk to ourselves, and feel proud or ashamed of ourselves” and that “we can act toward ourselves in all the ways we can act toward others” (Hewitt 2000, p. 10). He was curious about how the mind develops but did not believe that it develops separately from its social environment. For Mead, then, society and self are created through communicative acts such as speech and gestures; the individual personality is shaped by society, and vice versa.

Herbert Blumer (1900–1987), a graduate student and later a professor at the University of Chicago, was closely associated with Mead and was largely credited with continuing Mead’s life’s work. Blumer appealed for researchers to get “down and dirty” with the dynamics of social life. He also published a clear and compelling series of works based on Mead’s fundamental ideas. After Mead’s death in 1931, Blumer gave Mead’s theory the name it now goes by: symbolic interactionism. Thus, Mead and Blumer became the somewhat unwitting founders of a much larger theoretical perspective. Blumer’s long career at the University of Chicago and later at the University of California, Berkeley, ensured the training of many future scholars and secured the inclusion of symbolic interactionism as one of the major schools of thought within the discipline.

Despite its geographical location in a city full of real-world inequality (or perhaps because of it), the Chicago School of sociology had very few women or people of color among its membership. Take W.E.B. Du Bois and Jane Addams, for example: These two scholars were neither students nor faculty members at the University of Chicago, although both are often associated with Chicago School perspectives, values, and methods. Both led the way for other minorities and women to become influential scholars in the discipline of sociology.

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) was a notable pioneer in the study of race relations as a professor of sociology at Atlanta University and one of the most influential African American leaders of his time. After becoming the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, Du Bois did groundbreaking research on the history of the slave trade, post–Civil War Reconstruction, the problems of urban ghetto life, and the nature of Black American society. Du Bois was so brilliant and prolific that it is often said that all subsequent studies of race and racial inequality in America depend to some degree on his work.

Throughout his life, Du Bois was involved in various forms of social activism. He was an indispensable forerunner in the civil rights movement; among his many civic and political achievements, Du Bois was a founding member, in 1909, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization committed to the cause of ending racism and racial injustice. Because of his antiracist, antipoverty, and antiwar activism, Du Bois was targeted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy as a communist. However, he did not become a member of the Communist Party until he was ninety-three years old, and then only did so as a form of political protest against the persecution of its members by the U.S. government. Eventually, Du Bois became disillusioned by the persistent injustices of American society and emigrated to Ghana, where he died at ninety-five, one year before the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was another pioneer in the field of sociology whose numerous accomplishments range from the halls of academia to the forefront of social activism. Though she never officially joined the faculty because she feared it would curtail her political activism, Addams did teach extension courses at the University of Chicago and was among a handful of women teaching in American universities at the time. Though not a mother herself, Addams believed that women have a special kind of responsibility for solving social problems because they are trained to care for others. She was one of the first proponents of applied sociology—addressing the most pressing problems of her day through hands-on work with the people and places that were the subject of her research. This practical approach is perhaps best demonstrated by Hull House, the Chicago community center she established in 1889 to offer shelter, medical care, legal advice, training, and education to new immigrants, single mothers, and the poor. As a result of her commitment to delivering support and services where they were most needed, Addams is often considered the founder of what is now a separate field outside the discipline: social work. Addams also helped found two important organizations that continue to fight for freedom and equality today: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, along with W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP. She served as the president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and in 1931 became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

OFFSHOOTS

Symbolic interactionism opened the door for innovative sociologists who focused on social acts (such as face-to-face interaction) rather than social facts (such as vast bureaucratic institutions). They were able to extend the field in a variety of ways, allowing new perspectives to come under the umbrella of symbolic interactionism.

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) furthered symbolic interactionist conceptions of the self in a seemingly radical way, indicating that the self is essentially “on loan” to us from society; it is created through interaction with others and hence ever changing within various social contexts. For example, you may want to make a different kind of impression on a first date than you do on a job interview or when you face an opponent in a game of poker. Goffman used the theatrical metaphor of dramaturgy to describe the ways in which we engage in a strategic presentation of ourselves to others. In this way, he elaborated on Mead’s ideas in a specific fashion, utilizing a wide range of data to help support his arguments.

Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology (the study of “folk methods,” or everyday analysis of interaction), maintains that as members of society we must acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to act practically in our everyday lives (Garfinkel 1967). He argues that much of this knowledge remains in the background, “seen but unnoticed,” and that we assume that others have the same knowledge we do when we interact with them. These assumptions allow us to make meaning out of even seemingly troublesome or ambiguous events; but such shared understandings can also be quite precarious, and there is a good deal of work required to sustain them, even as we are unaware that we are doing so.

Conversation analysis, pioneered by sociologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, is also related to symbolic interactionism. It is based on the ethnomethodological idea that as everyday actors we are constantly analyzing and giving meaning to our social world (Clayman 2002; Heritage and Clayman 2010; Schegloff 1986, 1999, 2007). Conversation analysts are convinced that the best place to look for the social processes of meaning production is in naturally occurring conversation and that the best way to get at the meanings an everyday actor gives to the things others say and do is to look closely at how the actor responds. Conversation analysts therefore use highly technical methods to scrutinize each conversational turn closely, operating on the assumption that any larger social phenomenon is constructed step-by-step through interaction.

ADVANTAGES AND CRITIQUES

As society changes, so must the discipline that studies it, and symbolic interactionism has invigorated sociology in ways that are linked to the past and looking toward the future. The founding of symbolic interactionism provided a new and different way of looking at the world. It is “the only perspective that assumes an active, expressive model of the human actor and that treats the individual and the social at the same level of analysis” (O’Brien and Kollock 1997, p. 39). Therein lies much of its power and its appeal.

As a new school of thought focusing on the micro level of society, symbolic interactionism was not always met with immediate approval by the academy. Over time, symbolic interactionism has been integrated relatively seamlessly into sociology, and its fundamental precepts have become widely accepted. During the second half of the twentieth century, the scope of symbolic interactionism widened, its topics multiplied, and its theoretical linkages became more varied. In fact, there was some concern that symbolic interactionism was expanding so much that it risked erupting into something else entirely (Fine 1993). One of symbolic interactionism’s most enduring contributions is in the area of research methods. Practices such as ethnography and conversation analysis are data rich, technically complex, and empirically well grounded (Katz 1997; Schegloff 1999), giving us new insights into perennial questions about social life.

As a relative newcomer to the field of social theory, symbolic interactionism was dubbed “the loyal opposition” (Mullins 1973) by those who saw it solely as a reaction or as merely a supplement to the more dominant macrosociological theories that preceded it. Gary Fine sums up the critiques in this way: Symbolic interactionism is “apolitical (and hence, supportive of the status quo), unscientific (hence, little more than tenured journalism), hostile to the classical questions of macrosociology (hence, limited to social psychology), and astructural (hence, fundamentally nonsociological)” (1993, p. 65). Critics argue that the scope of symbolic interactionism is limited, that it cannot address the most important sociological issues, and that its authority is restricted to the study of face-to-face interaction.

Each of these critiques has been answered over the years. Ultimately, some critics have seen the usefulness of an interactionist perspective and have even begun incorporating it into more macro work. Even in the hotly contested micro-versus-macro debate, a kind of détente has been established, recognizing that all levels of analysis are necessary for sociological understanding and that interactionist theories and methods are critical for a full picture of social life.

DATA WORKSHOP

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Analyzing Media and Pop Culture

Theories of Celebrity Gossip

TMZ, which debuted in 2005, has become one of the most popular celebrity gossip websites in the world. It is consistently among the top 100 sites (of any kind) in the United States, with upward of 25 million unique visitors a month. TMZ provides users with up-to-the-minute pop culture news, publishing hundreds of posts each day that expose the real and rumored doings of celebrities. It has become the go-to site anytime a celebrity gets arrested, dies, goes to rehab, cheats, or behaves badly in some other way.

TMZ is part of a new breed of celebrity gossip outlets, including PerezHilton, ONTD, Radar Online, Dlisted, and PopSugar, that have radically transformed the way that celebrities and other public figures are covered in the media. These sites are providing more coverage than ever and at greater speed. Stories that used to take at least a week to appear in pre-digital-era print magazines such as People or Us Weekly can now be posted online nearly instantaneously. That sometimes puts gossip sites on the forefront of breaking news. For instance, TMZ was the first outlet to report the news of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna in 2020.

It’s not just the volume or speed of delivery that’s different; celebrity gossip sites are changing the substance of the coverage as well. Print magazines or mainstream television programs such as Entertainment Tonight or E! News used to provide mostly flattering coverage of celebrities. They were unwilling to report too many negative stories because they relied on the goodwill of celebrities to gain access into their lives. This tends to remain the rule in entertainment news, where there is still no shortage of promotional puff pieces and lightweight fare without much bite.

Gossip sites such as TMZ and others often take a harsher, more critical stance toward their subjects. They’ve also started engaging in investigative journalism practices, something that was formerly reserved for the mainstream news media. And they’re covering a wider range of “celebrities” that regularly includes professional athletes as well as business executives and even political figures.

Whatever your opinion of tabloid news, which many people regard as just mean, stupid, or shallow, you don’t have to enjoy celebrity gossip to see its sociological relevance. For this Data Workshop, we’d like you to immerse yourself in the celebrity gossip site of your choice. Pick three stories to work with. Scrutinize the pictures, read the headlines and text carefully, and review the reader comments. Then consider how you might answer the following questions according to each of sociology’s three major schools of thought:

1. Structural Functionalism

What is the function (or functions) of celebrity gossip for society? What purpose(s) does it serve, and how does it help society maintain stability and order? Discuss how notions of the sacred and profane are characterized. Are there manifest and latent functions of celebrity gossip? And are there any dysfunctions in it?

2. Conflict Theory

What forms of inequality are revealed in celebrity gossip? In particular, what does it have to say about class, race, gender, sexuality, body size, or other inequalities? Whose interests are being served and who gets exploited? Who suffers and who benefits from celebrity gossip?

3. Symbolic Interactionism

What does celebrity gossip mean to society as a whole? What does it mean to individual members of society? Can gossip have different meanings for different individuals or groups of individuals? How do those meanings get constructed in interaction? And how does celebrity gossip shape and influence our everyday lives?

There are two options for completing this Data Workshop:

PREP-PAIR-SHARE

Print out your three stories and bring them to class. Consider how each of the three sets of questions might be applied. Jot down your thoughts and make note of particular images and text. Get together in groups of two or three, and talk about your findings. How does each sociological theory fit with your examples? What new insights were provided by each perspective?

DO-IT-YOURSELF

Select the material you will analyze, and answer each of the three sets of questions in a three-page essay. Discuss the main principles of the three theoretical perspectives and explain how each can be applied. You will want to include specific examples from your chosen stories to illustrate your points. Did the theories overlap at all, or did they contradict each other? Was there any one theory you felt did a better or worse job of explaining celebrity gossip? Attach the stories to your paper.