Microsociology: Social Interaction

Social interaction – the process by which people act and react in relation to others

 There are rules that guide social interaction

Microsociology – Erving Goffman

 Small aspects of social life are important to consider – not just major institutions
 Goffman focused on the way people interact each other, the settings, and the props
 Importance
o Our everyday routines provide and illustrate the structure of our lives
o Interactions reveal the importance of human agency
o Interactions can tell us a lot about larger society
 Dramaturgical perspective
o Demonstrates how we construct, maintain, and revise our identities in interaction with
others
o Look at all parts of human interaction
o “Performance” – all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves
to influence in any way any of the other participants
o Performances are both conscious (intentional action) and unconscious (nonverbal
communication)
o Definitions
 Line: a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which a person expresses his
view of the situation and through this evaluation of the participant, especially
himself
 Face: The positive social value a person effectively claims himself by the line
others assume he has taken during a particular contact
 Being in wrong face: When info is brought forth in some way about a
person’s social worth which cannot be integrated even with the effort
into the line that is being sustained for the person
 Being out of face: When a person participates in contact with others
without having ready a line of the kind of participants in such situations
are expected to take
 Saving one’s face: the process by which the person sustains an
impression for other that he has not lost face
 Face-Work
 The Avoidance Process
o Avoid contact in which these threats are likely to occur
o Protective maneuvers such as respect, politeness, discretion
o Studied non-observance
 The Corrective Process
o Challenge, offering, acceptance, and thanks
 Rules of everyday life
o Front Stage: Social actor undertakes a role performance that is directed toward others
 o Back Stage: When the actor steps out of the role
o “Expressive equipment”
 Setting
 Personal front (appearance and manner)
o Status – a social position that a person holds
 Status set: all statuses a person holds at a given time
 Ascribed status: received at birth or taken on involuntarily later in life
 Achieved status: a social position a person taken on voluntarily that reflects
personal ability and effort
 Master status: a status that has special importance for social identity, often
shaping a person’s entire life (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical ability,
economic standing, religion, education)
o Role: behavior expected of somebody who holds a particular status
 Role conflict: conflict among the roles connected to two or more statuses
(finding a work family balance)
 Role strain: tension among roles connected to a single status
 Role exit: process by which people disengage from important social roles
 Ethnomethodology: study of how we make sense of interaction
o Harold Garfinkel
o Tested the idea of background expectancies
Socialization: Theories, Agents of Socialization
 Socialization: the process whereby an innocent child becomes a self-aware knowledgeable
person, skilled in the ways of the culture into which he or she was born
o Develop human capacities
o Acquire a sense of self or social identity
o Learn the culture(s) of society in which they live
o Learn expectation for behavior, how to fulfill social roles
 Social Reproduction – the processes through which societies produce continuity over time
 Primary location for studying the significance of nature vs. nurture in human behavior
 Mead
o Laid foundation for Symbolic Interactionism
o Primary socialization – the portion of socialization that takes pace with infant and you
children
o Development of the “self”
o 3 Stages
 Preparatory stage (1-3yrs): children imitate behavior but don’t understand it
 Play stage(3-4): more understanding of behavior but don’t carry out roles
consistently
 Games stage: roles played assume consistency and purpose
o The Social Self
 I vs Me (I is subject, me is object)
 I – spontaneous, impulsive, initiating tendencies
 Me – internalized attitudes of other through which one views oneself and one’s
actions
 Cooley – “The Looking-Glass Self”
o We imagine our appearance or image in the eyes of the other
o Imagine some judgment of that image or appearance
o Experience some sort of self-feeling
 Agents of socialization
o Family
o Peer group
o School
o Religious community
o Workplace
o Mass media
 Socialization and identity
o Internalization of culture and construction of self
o Social identity (objective) vs self identity (subjective)
o Gender socialization – learning appropriate gendered behavior
 Piagent: Stages of cognitive development
1. Sensorimotor(birth-2): exploring the environment
2. Preoperational (2-7): egocentric
3. Concrete operational (7-11 yrs): basic abstraction
4. Formal operational (11-15yrs): further abstraction and hypothetical reasoning
Sociological Theory
 Theory is a statement of why specific facts are related
o Social theories don’t intend explain but to find out why
 Early Theorists
o Comte
 Coined “sociology”
 Sociology can contribute to the welfare of humanity by using science to
understand, predict, and control human behavior
o Interpreting modern development
 Durkheim
 Organic Solidarity – social cohesion that results from various parts of a
society functioning as an integrated whole
 Division of labor as a basis for social cohesion and organic solidarity
 Social facts (the aspects of social life that shape our actions) should be
studies as things
 Social constraint – conditional influence on our behavior by society
 Theory of suicide – both psychological and social process
o Social integration (varies inversely to degree of integration)
o Social regulation (number of rules guiding your daily life)
o Types
 Egoistic – too little integration
 Anomic – loss of integration
 Drugs=loss of integration
 Altruistic – imposed by a society for social purposes
 Marx
 Society is divided based on class differences caused by econ. Inequalities
of capitalism
o Bourgeois and Proletariats
 Weber
 Rationalization of social and economic life
 Importance of cultural ideas and values on social change
 Modern Theoretical Approaches
o Structural-Functional
 Social events can be best understood in terms of the function they perform
 Importance of moral consequences in maintaining order and stability in society
(norm)
 Manifest/latent functions
 Critique:
 Ignores inequalities that cause tension and conflict
 Conservative: focus on stability over conflict
o Social-Conflict
 Society is an arena of inequality that generates conflict and change
  Social pattern advantages some categories of people and at the same time
harms others
 Gender and race conflict approaches
 Critiques
 Largely ignores shared values and interdepence of members
 Cannot claim scientific objectivity (support political agendas)
o Symbolic Interaction
 Micro-level – focus on interaction in specific situations
 Society is a product of everyday interactions
Sociological Research Method
 Principles of scientific investigation
1. Objectivity
2. Replication
3. Precision
4. Reliability (stability and consistency of measurement)
 Participant error
 Participant bias – Hawthorne effect
 Observer error
 Observer bias
5. Validity – are we measuring what we think we are measuring
 Internal validity – demonstrated causality
 External validity – generalizability
 The Research Cycle
1. Formulate Question
 Topic selection
 Concepts (social behavior, attitude, role) and indicator (observable)
 Deductive (select theory and test if applicable)
 Inductive approach (start with general idea and develop ideas as data collection
proceeds)
2. Review Existing literature
3. Select method/approach
 Quant. Vs qual
 Depth vs breadth
 Data collection methods
 How well-formulated the theory is before observation
 The level of social interaction in question
 Type of info needed
 Resources available for research
 Ease of access
4. Collect Data
 Surveys
 Participant observation
 In-depth interviews
 Focus groups
 Experiments
 Content analysis
 5. Analyze data
 Pattern recognition and difference between groups
6. Report results
 Research Ethics
1. Consent
 Active/passive
 Informed/implied
2. Anonymity/confidentiality of subjects
3. Protection of vulnerable categories of subjects
Culture
 Values, norms, and material goods characteristic of a given group
 Society: systems of relationship between people
 Non-Material Culture
o Values: standards by which groups define what proper and not
o Key values of US culture (Williams)
 Equal opportunity
 Achievement and success
 Material comfort
 Activity and work
 Practicality and efficiency
 Progress
 Science
 Democracy and free enterprise
 Freedom
 Racism and superiority
o Global perspective
 Low income countries have cultures that value survival
 High income have cultures that value individualism and self-expression
o Norms: rules of conduct
 Folkways – norms with weak sanctions
 Mores – norms with strong sanctions (core values)
 Taboos – norms so strong that their violation may cause physical revulsion
 Material Culture
o Physical objects used within a culture
 Shared symbol systems
o Symbol: anything carrying a particular meaning recognized by people who share a
culture
o Cultural change
 Invention
 Discovery
 Diffusion
o Cultural Universals
 Language
 Forms of emotional expression
 Rules that guide child rearing
 Institution of marriage
  Incest prohibition
 Standards of beauty
o Multiculturalism
 Assimilation: taking on the culture of the dominant group
 Ethnocentrism: the practice of judging another culture by the standards of one’s
own culture
Social Reproduction
 Focuses on the existence of social inequality, especially the social mechanisms through which it
is sustained
 Habitus: the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we are socialized to have
 Cultural capital: skills and symbolic elements individuals acquire through being part of a
particular social class that can be translated into different forms of value as they move through
various institutions
 Cultural Logic of Child Rearing Varies by Class
o Concerted Cultivation:
 Organized activities and highly scheduled
 Adults seen as having a duty to entertain
 Extensive adult labor in promotion of children’s organized leisure
 Ubiquitous in middle-class families
 Practice of concerted cultivation results in
 Sense of entitlement
 Training for the rules of the game and how to make them work in their
favor
o Natural Growth
 Few organized activities
 Long stretches of leisure time
 Child-initiated play
 Played with cousins and neighbors
 Unlimited TV watching
 Clear boundaries between adults and children
 Practice of natural growth results in
 Sense of constraint
 Cultural logic of childrearing is out of sync with the standards of
institutions
 Knowledge of institutions is key
 Hidden injuries of class
o Ability as the badge of the individual
o Self-responsibility for personal position
o Blame themselves
 Individuals of different social locations are socialized differently

Stratification, Class, and Inequality

 Social stratification – structure ranking of entire groups of people that perpetuate unequal
rewards and power in society
 o Class, status, and power
 Social class
o Factor of wealth, income, education, and occupation
o Groups of people of similar economic and social position
 Stratification systems
o Systems of inequality organized around groups with a shared characteristic
o People’s life experiences and opportunities depend on the ranking of their social
category
o Rankings of groups change only very slowly
o Ex: Slavery (based on debt, crime, conquest – can be temporary and non-heritable)
o Ex: Caste (Status determined by birth and life-long membership, maintained by ritual
pollution rules and endogamy, sanctioned by custom, law, and religion)
o Ex: Class (Fluid, positions are achieved, economically based, large scale and impersonal)
 Theories
o Davis and more – functionalism
 All positions must be filled
 Some positions are more important than others
 These positions should be filled by the best people
 To motivate these better people, must offer them greater rewards
o Marx – 1D Conflict
 Class based on relationship to means of production
 Underscores antagonistic material interests
 “zero-sum-game” – material exploitation
 Exclusion of the exploited from access to and control over productive resources
 Exploiters need the exploited to work hard
o Weber – 2D Class and Status conflict
 Social prestige and power also plays a crucial role
 American Dream – How far you get in life is based on you “God-given ability”