Paper Topic:

“The Symbolic Interactionist’s explanations of the influence of social structures on behavior and attitudes are unconvincing” Critically discuss this statement.

Living in the modern feverish world with its unprecedented level of change which is generating new developments in social , political cultural , technological , and other spheres of our life , one may easily become engulfed by the dynamics of our social environment but remain ignorant of the actual mechanisms and hidden driving forces behind social processes . In their turn , various branches of social science have never abandoned attempts to establish and elaborate proper accounts that would explain how societies function , and what laws govern them . This ambitious task is on one hand made more

difficult by the mentioned ever accelerating dynamics of our modern social environment , as the rapid pace of changes produces new phenomena that social theories must accommodate or be amended . On the other hand , the modern dynamic world serves as a kind of a laboratory that can test the validity of some fundamental and influential theoretical perspectives . One such major school of sociology is symbolic interactionism , the theoretical perspective which suggests that attention to the subjective aspects of social relationships is necessary to understand that people are pragmatic players who have to correlate their actions with behaviour of other people , and that such adjustment is done through assignation to our actions , actions of other people , and even to ourselves of symbolic meaning that influences not only our behaviour and attitudes but existing social structures as well (Gingrich , 2000 . However , despite the firm place that this perspective holds in the field of social sciences , it has been suggested that explanations that symbolic interactionism gives for the influence of social structures on behaviour and attitudes are unconvincing . In this regard , let us take a closer look at the basic postulates of symbolic interactionism , and try to find out whether it indeed is incapable of proving itself out . For this purpose we should establish in what ways social structures can influence our behaviour and attitudes from the point of view of symbolic interactionism , and then critically examine whether symbolic interactionist 's explanations are always adequate

Symbolic interactionism has a long history of development that can be traced to the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920 , and to the American scholar George H . Mead (1863-1931 . Both of them accentuated the importance of pragmatism as the factor that influences social processes , and of subjective meanings ascribed to social processes and human behaviour . In 1902 Charles Cooley (1864-1929 ) detailed the way people tend to perceive themselves , and introduced the concept of the looking glass self under which people construct self-images as if through eyes of others . In 1934 George H . Mead in frames of his investigation of deviance proposed a theory that was focused on processes of differentiation of the conventional and denounced behaviour . One of the important conclusions of Mead was that our self-perception is always placed in the larger social context , and that the self has to be treated as the product of processing of social interactions and symbols by an individual mind (Denzin , 1992 , pp .2-21 In fact , the further studies of deviance...

7 pages

32.0 KB

Free sing-up