Self and Society

Symbolic Interactionism

Objective

• To get you think about your own ‘authentic identity’ as a community development worker

• To get you to ‘imagine inside’ your roleplayed MI client, and the processes that led you to select that persons ‘identity’

• To see ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about identity, that form the basis of ‘prejudice’

• Masks• Stage• Scripts– Discursive– Performative

• 'symbolic communication’• ‘authentic self’• ‘deviant’ ‘otherness’

Who am I?• How do ‘I’ get

constituted, on a daily basis?

• What is the ‘I’ that I refer to?

• When am I being ‘me’?• Who are ‘you’?• Which you am I

perceiving?

Mead: The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’

• ‘I’ is the spontaneous unpredictable element of the self • 'I' memory is a store of creativity, adaptability and novelty in

the social process.• Where our most important values are located• Constitutes the realisation of the self - i.e. reveals a definite

personality• Seen as an evolutionary process• 'Me' is the conformist aspect of the self, and the reflexive,

organised aspect of the self (Mead 1934: 197).

Erving Goffman• Stigma (1963) Interaction Ritual (1967), Forms of Talk (1981)• Presentation of the Self in Everyday life (1956), • Dramaturgy - with human social behaviour seen as more or

less well scripted and with humans as role-taking actors.

– Role-taking is a key mechanism of interaction > reflexive awareness of self and others

– Role-making a key mechanism of interaction in unaccustomed situations

• improvisational quality of roles, with human social behaviour seen as poorly scripted and with humans as role-making improvisers.

Blumer ‘meaning’

• meaning states that humans act toward people and things based upon the meanings that they have given to those people or things.

• Language gives humans a means by which to negotiate meaning through symbols.

• Thought, based on language, is a mental conversation or dialogue that requires role taking, or imagining different points of view

“Minding”

• Minding is the two-second delay where individuals rehearse the next move and anticipate how others will react.

George Herbert Mead

‘I’ looking at ‘you’

STAGE

JohariOthersLike Me

Deviant Others

Learning/socialisation

• From a period of imitation without meaning for infants, through the play-acting world of children

• Through such play, one develops and internalizes a group of perspective on the self that Mead termed the "generalized other.“ (society? community? policy?)

• the "inner voice" of the generalize other continues to whisper the complex requirements of being "human.“

• (links to Foucault’s panopticism)

Michel Foucault Panopticism

• Surveillance & Spectacle• The silent power of editing what you do

because you are being watched, or think you are being surveilled.

Deviance & labelling

• Howard Becker• Outsiders: Studies in the

sociology of deviance(1969)

• Studies of group values among ‘delinquents’ and emergence of shared codes, values contra ‘mainstream’ values

Becker, labelling• Becker and labelling – ‘social groups create

(socially construct) deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders.

• From this point of view, deviance is not a quality, of the act the person commits,

• but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’.

• The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.

Taking the Role of the Other

• This is seeing the world through another’s eyes.

• Walking in someone else’s shoes

• Grown up version of having imaginary friends and talking to yourself.