Action theories are micro level, bottom up approaches that focus on the actions and interactions of individuals. Actions theories see individuals as having free will and choice. Our actions and ideas are not determined by society. Rather we have the ability to act as free agents, creating and shaping society through our choices, meanings and actions.
There are 4 main actions theories, they differ in how far they see a role for structural explanations of behaviour.
Weber’s Social Action Theory / Symbolic Interactionism (G.H. Mead) / Ethnomethodology
Weber saw both structural and action theories as necessary to develop a full understanding of human behaviour. An adequate explanation involves two levels:
- The level of cause – explaining the structural factors that shape people’s behaviour (objective)
- The level of meaning – understanding the subjective meaning that individuals attach to their actions.
/ This theory focuses on our actions and interactions, it sees these interactions as based on the meaning we give the situations. We convey these meanings through symbols, especially language.
Mead observed that, unlike animals, our behaviour is not shaped by fixed, pre-programmed instincts. Instead we respond to the world by giving meanings to the things that are significant to us. In effect, we create and inhabit a world of meanings. We do this by attaching symbols to the world.
Unlike animals, we do not simply respond to a stimulus in an automatic way. Instead an interpretive phase comes between the stimulus and out response to it – before we know how to respond to the stimulus, we have to interpret its meaning.
Mead illustrates this with an example. When a dog snarls as another, the snarl acts as a direct stimulus to which the second dog responds instinctively, automatically adopting a defensive posture. There is not conscious interpretation by the dog of the other’s actions. However, if a person shakes a fist at another. They are using a symbol (with a variety of possible meaning). To understand what is going on, the person must interpret the meaning of this symbol. Are they angry? Joking? Victorious? Only then can the second person respond appropriately.
How do we manage to interpret others’ meaning? We do this by taking the role of the other – putting ourselves in the place of the other person and seeing ourselves as us. Our ability to take the role of the other develops through social interaction. We first do this as young children through imitative play when we take on the role of significant others such as parents and learn to see ourselves as they see us. Later, we come to see ourselves from the wider community – the generalised other.
An application of symbolic interactionism is labelling theory. Developed initially by H Becker it has been used widely in Education and Deviance. We all label people and objects. Those with power are able to label someone, and make others accept that label. Labelling of humans can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the label is especially damaging, it can become a master status.
NB: Elaborate this point with your own example of labelling from either education or crime and deviance. / Ethnomethodology is based on the same principles are phenomenology. This argues that we can never have a definitive knowledge of what the world outside our minds is really like ‘in itself’ – all we can know is what our senses tell us about it. Therefore ethnomethodologists reject the very idea of society as a real objective structure ‘out there’.
Garfinkle believes that social order is created from the bottom up. Order and meaning are not achieved because people are ‘puppets’ whose strings are pulled by their social system, as functionalists believe. Instead, social order is an accomplishment – something that members of society actively construct in everyday life using their commonsense knowledge. EM attempts to discover how we do this by studying people’s methods of making sense of the world.
This is also where EM differs from interactionism. While interactionists are interested in the effect of meaning (for example the effects of labelling), EM is interested in the methods or rules that we use to produce the meanings in the first place.
Ethnomethodologists believe that the meaning of any given experience varies according to its social context. For example, raising your arm means one thing in class and quite another at an auction. The meaning is not given by the action in itself but the context in which it occurred. For this reason, meanings are potentially unclear and unstable – especially if others classify action in a different way.
EM sees all meanings as potentially unclear – this is known as indexicality. Nothing has a fixed meaning, everything depends on its context. Indexicality is a clear threat to social order because if meanings are inherently unclear or unstable, communication and cooperation become difficult and social relationships begin to break.
For Garfinkle, what enables us to behave as if meaning are clear and obvious is reflexity. Reflexity refers to the fact that we use commonsense knowledge in everyday interactions to construct sense of meaning and order and stop indexicality occurring.
Garfinkle and his students sought to demonstrate the nature of social order by a series of so-called ‘breaching experiments’. For example, they acted as lodgers in their own families – being polite, avoiding getting personal etc. The aim was to disrupt people’s sense of order and challenge their reflexity by undermining their assumptions about the situation. For example, parents of students who behaved as lodgers became bewildered, anxious and embarrassed or angry. They accused the students of being nasty and assumed they were ill. Garfinkle concluded that by challenging people’s taken for granted assumptions, the experiments show how the orderliness of everyday situations is not inevitable but is actually an accomplishment of those who take part in them.
This can be applied to Atkinson’s study of Suicide. A potential suicide case can be an example of indexicality as the meaning of the death is unclear. (Is it murder or suicide? Why did they commit suicide etc?)Atkinson found coroners look for primary clues. e.g. type of death and secondary clues e.g. biography of the deceased when investigating suspicious deaths. They use reflexity by putting the actions in the context of the situation. (Was there a note? Was there signs of a struggle?) However, coroners use different criteria in classifying particular acts as suicide. He concluded that coroners are a major source of bias in official suicide statistics. He maintains that variations in suicide rates between and within societies may simply reflect the different ways in which coroners go about categorising suspicious deaths.
Evaluation of Theories
- A strength of Weber’s approach to sociology is that it takes into account both structural and action factors when understanding behaviour.
- A weakness of Weber’s theory is that it has been criticised by Schutz for being an inadequate explanation of behaviour. For example, when a person at an auction raises their hand, they mean that they are making a bid – but Weber doesn’t explain how everyone else present also comes to give the same gesture the same meaning.
- A further flaw in Weber’s theory is that he advocated the use of verstehen (where we put ourselves in the actor’s place to understand their motives and meaning.) However, we cannot actually be that other person, meaning we can never be sure we have truly understood their motives.
- A major strength of Symbolic Interactionism is that it largely avoids the determinism of structural theories such as functionalism. It recognises that people create society through choices and meanings.
- However a weakness of this theory is that it cannot explain power relationships in society in the way that Marxists or feminists have. It does not explain why some individuals / social groups are more powerful than others.
- It concentrates too much on small-scale, trivial aspects of social life, therefore ignoring the much bigger picture of life at a society-wide level of analysis.
- A strength of EM is that it draws attention to how we actively construct order and meaning, rather than seeing us as simply puppets of the social system, as functionalism does.
- However, EM has been criticised by Craib who argues that its findings are trivial. Ems seem to spend a lot of time ‘uncovering’ taken for granted rules that turn out to be no surprise to anyone. For example one study found phone conversations, generally involved only one person speaking at a time!
- A further problem with EM is that it denies the existence of wider society, seeing it as merely a shared fiction. Yet, by analysing how members apply general rules or norms to specific contexts, it assumed that a structure of norms really exists beyond these contexts. From a functionalist perspective, such norms are social facts not fiction.
Gidden’s Structuration Theory
According to Giddens, there is duality of structure. By this he means that structure and action are two sides of the same coin; neither can exist without the other. Through our actions we produce and reproduce structures over time and space, while these structures are what make our actions possible in the first place. Giddens calls this relationship structuration.
This can be demonstrated with language. A language is a structure – it is made up of a set of rules of grammar that govern how we can use it to express meanings. This structure seems to exist independently of any individual, and it constrains our behaviour. For example if we wish to use a language to communicate, we must obey its rules, otherwise we will not be understood. This shows how our action (communication) depends on the existence of structure (our knowledge of language rules).
However, structure also depends on action. For example, a language would not exist if no one used it. It is produced and reproduced over time through the actions of individuals speaking and writing it. Furthermore, these actions can also change the structure. People give words new meanings and create new rules. /
- A major strength of Gidden’s Structuration Theory is that it attempts to overcome the division between structure and action in sociological theory.
- A major weakness of this approach is that it implies that actors can change structures simply by deciding to do so. Margaret Archer (1995) argues that Giddens underestimated the capacity of structures to resist change. For example, slaves may wish to abolish slavery but lack the power to do so.
- A further limitation of this theory comes from Craib. They point out that structuration theory is actually not a theory at all, because it doesn’t explain what actually happens in society. Instead, it just describes the kinds of things we find when we study society such as actions and rules.