1. Action Theories

2. Weber and Social Action
• Structural and Action approaches are
necessary for understanding human
behaviour, arguing that an adequate
explanation involves 2 levels:
1.Level of cause- explaining the objective
structural factors that shape behaviour
2.Level of meaning- understanding the
subjective meanings that individuals
attach to their actions

3. Weber: Different types of social action
Type Explanation
Traditional Action Action that is custom or habit e.g.
buying gifts at Christmas
Affectual Action Action that is expresses by an
emotional state, such as crying at a
funeral
Value-rational action Action towards a goal the person
regards as desirable e.g. Praying to
get to heaven
Instrumentally rational action
This is a highly rational form of
action where people calculate the
most efficient means of achieving a
given goal

4. Symbolic Interactionism
• Symbolic interactionists emphasise the
ways in which society is actively shaped
by individuals and the meanings they
attach to ‘everyday things’.

5. George Herbert Mead
• Noticed most of our communication was symbolic such
as smiles, and frowns.
• There is an interpretive phase between a stimulus and
our response to it, in which we interpret its meanings.
• We interpret other people’s meanings by taking their
role (putting ourselves in their place, seeing ourselves
as they see us)
• This ability develops through social interaction
• To function as members of society we need the
ability to see ourselves as others see us. Through
shared symbols esp. language we become conscious of
the ways of acting that others require of us

6. Herbert Blumer
• Blumer developed Mead’s approach and identified
3 key principles of Interactionism:
1. Our actions are based on the meanings we give to
situations, people etc. They are not based on
automatic responses to stimuli e.g. (for example,
interpreting the meaning of a red light before deciding how to react to it)
2. These meanings arise from interactions and are
to some extent negotiable and changeable
3. The meanings we give to situations are mainly the
result of taking the role of the other.

7. Labelling Theory
• Perhaps the most well known application of symbolic
Interactionism is labelling theory. Used widely in Education and
Deviance.
• Some groups have more power and are able to impose their
meanings or interpretations on the rest of us
• Charles Cooper (1922) uses labelling to describe how we develop
our self- concept
Uses 3 Interactionist concepts
1.Definition of the situation- defining something
labels it. If people define a situation as real, it
will have real consequences. Once ‘labelled’ people
may changer their behaviour and become deviant-
SFP

8. • Looking-glass self- Cooley argues that
our self concept arises out of our ability to
take the role of others. Others act as a
looking glass to us: we see our self
mirrored in how they respond to us and we
become what they see us as (why SFP occurs)
• Career- apply concept to mental patients.
The individual has a career running from
‘pre-patient’ with certain symptoms
through labelling by a psychiatrist to
hospital in-patient to discharge etc.
‘Mental patient’ becomes the master
status

9. AO2:
• Labelling theory has been accused of determinism- of seeing
our actions and identities as shaped by the way others label
them
•It fails to explain where labels actually originate from

10. Goffman’s Dramaturgical Model
• Argues that social interaction is about
successful role playing
• We actively construct our ‘self’ by
manipulating other people’s impressions of
us
• Uses analogies with drama for analysing
social interaction e.g. ‘actors’, ,scripts,
‘props’, ‘backstage’ etc
• We are all social actors engaged in the
drama of everyday life

11. 1. Presentation of self & impression
management
• We seek to present a particular image to our
audiences, controlling the impression our
‘performance’ gives
• Impression management techniques include
tone of voice, gestures, dress, make up
• As in the theatre there is a ‘front stage
where we act out our roles, while backstage
we can step out of our role and ‘be ourselves’
e.g. Teachers behaviour in the class and
staffroom

12. 2. Roles- There is a gap (role distance)
between our real self and our roles,
which are only loosely scripted by
society and allow us a lot of freedom in
how we play them
• Role distance implies that we do not
always believe in the role we play. We
may be calculating, manipulating
audiences into accepting an impression
that conceals our true self

13. Evaluate Weber and Symbolic
Interactionism

14. Phenomenology
• Phenomenon- things as they appear to our
senses
• We can never have definite knowledge of
what the world outside is really like, all we can
know is what our minds tells us about it
• It examines the social construction of
particular phenomena and the results of this
subjective way of seeing and talking about
them (a discourse) on people’s attitudes and
behaviour.

15. Example
• Jack Douglas studied concepts of suicide,
suggesting that some people viewed it as a
means of crying for help, some as a way to
get revenge, others as a spiritual hope of
reaching a better place. These different
motivations for suicide meant that it could
not be regarded as a single type of act,
making nonsense of analysing patterns in
suicide statistics in the hope of finding
causes

16. Ethnomethodology
• Ethnomethodology examines how people
speak to each other and interact in
everyday conversations and
relationships
• Rejects idea of society as a real
objective structure
• Sociologists task is to uncover the
taken-for –granted rules people use to
construct social reality

17. • Summarise Ethnomethodology
Evaluation (pg 249)

18. Combining Structure and Action
• Action Theories- micro level,
voluntaristic that see society as inter-
subjective, constructed through
interaction and meaning
• Structural theories- macro,
deterministic theories that see society
as objective and external to individuals

19. Giddens Structuration Theory
• Seeks to combine the 2 approaches into a
single unified theory of structure and action
• Argues that there is duality of structure.
Structure and agency (action) cannot exist
without the other
• Our actions produce, reproduce and change
structures over time and space, while these
structures are what make our actions possible
• This is called relationship Structuration

20. AO2:
Criticised for not being a theory at all; it doesn’t
explain what happens in society. It just describes the
kinds of things we will find when we study society
He fails to explain how his theory can be applied to
large scale structures e.g. economy & state

21. Reproducing Structures through
agency
Giddens- Structure has 2 elements:
1. Rules- Norms, customs, laws that govern action
2. Resources- economic & power over others
• Rules & Resources can either be reproduced or changed
through human action. However our actions generally tend
to reproduce rather than change them. This is because
society’s rules contain a stock of knowledge about how to
live our lives, so our routine activities tend to reproduce
the existing structure of society
• We also reproduce existing structures because we have a
deep-seated need to feel the world is orderly, stable and
predictable

22. Changing Structures through agency
• Change can happen because:
1.We reflect upon our actions and we can
deliberately choose a new course of
action. In late modern society, where
tradition no longer dictates action this
is even more likely
2.Our actions may have unintended
consequences, producing changes that
were not part of our goal

23. AO2:
Giddens claim that actors can change
structures underestimates the capacity
of structures to resist change e.g. slaves
may wish to abolish the institution of
slavery but lack the power to do so