The document discusses symbolic interactionism, a sociological perspective that emphasizes micro-scale social interactions and the meanings derived from them, particularly in relation to human behavior. It outlines key theorists like Herbert Blumer and George Herbert Mead, detailing the principles of how individuals construct meaning through social interactions and the implications of labeling theory. Additionally, the document highlights the criticisms of symbolic interactionism regarding its reliance on qualitative methods and its perceived neglect of larger social structures.

2. • The emphasis is on micro-scale social interaction
important in subfields such as urban sociology and
social psychology.
A straightforward practical way of thinking
about things or dealing with problems, concerned with results
rather than with theories and principles
• It is derived from American pragmatism
holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea is a
function of its practical outcome.
They rejected all forms of absolutism/totaliterianism and
insisted that all principles be regarded as working
hypotheses that must bear fruit in lived experience.
• Herbert Blumer coined the term and put forward an
influential summary of the perspective:

3. Cont’d
• “people act toward things based on the meaning those
things have for them; and these meanings are derived from
social interaction and modified through interpretation.”
• G. H. Meads SI (1863-1931), traces its roots to two
intellectual traditions:
 pragmatism
 psychological behaviorism.
• He adopted three important themes from the pragmatists :
1. a focus on the interaction between actors and the social world,
2. a view of both actors and the social world as dynamic processes,
and
3. the centrality of actors' ability to interpret the social world.

4. Cont’d
• Generally, both pragmatism and symbolic
interactionism view thinking as a process.
• Mead recognized the importance of overt/observable
behavior
• Also focused on the importance of covert behavior
and,
 Contrary to radical behaviorists, he believed that there
is a significant d/ce b/n human beings and animals:
don't allow for interpretation between stimulus and
response.
the human capacity to use language and
dynamically created social reality.
Majority of interactionist researches uses qualitative

5. Cont’d
Sociological areas that have been
particularly influenced by symbolic
interactionism include:
 the sociology of emotions,
deviance/criminology,
collective behavior/social
movements, and
the sociology of sex……………

6. Basic Principles of SI
• Herbert Blumer (1969), who coined the term "symbolic
interactionism," set out three basic premises of the
perspective:
1. "Human beings act toward things on the basis of the
meanings they ascribe to those things.“
2. "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out
of, the social interaction that one has with others and the
society.“
3. "These meanings are handled in (controlled), and
modified through, an interpretative process used by the
person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.“
Thus, actions>> meanings attached to the actions>>
through Symbols.

7. Cont’d
• Symbolic interactionist researchers investigate how people create
meaning during social interaction, how they present and construct
the self (or "identity"), and how they define situations of co-
presence with others. One of the perspective's central ideas is that
people act as they do because of how they define situations.
 Generally, the basic principles of symbolic interactionism include
the following:
1. human beings possess the capacity for thought, which is shaped
by social interaction
2. people learn meanings and symbols through social interaction;
and
3. people are able to modify or alter the meanings and symbols they
use in interactions by interpreting the situations they are engaged
in.

8. Cont’d
Socialization is one way individuals learn to
think, interact with one another, and understand
how to use meanings and symbols.
So, central concern is not how people mentally
create meanings and symbols but how they
learn them during interaction in general and
socialization in particular
People learn symbols as well as meanings in
social interaction.

9. Cont’d
Symbols are social objects used to represent
whatever people agree they shall represent.
language is vast system of symbols.
Symbols are crucial in allowing people to
act in distinctively human ways actively
creating and recreating the world acted in.

10. • Cont’d
Symbols in general and language in particular have many
specific functions for the actor:
Improves people‘s ability to perceive the environment
 Improves the ability to think (a symbol interaction with
one‘s self)
Enable people to deal with the material and social world
(allows naming, categorizing and remembers objects
encountered)
Greatly increase the ability to solve various problems
Allows actors to transcend (imagine) time, space, and even
their own persons
Allows us to imagine a metaphysical reality, such as heaven
and hell
Allows people to avoid being enslaved by their environment

11. Major Theorists
 George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)
Mind, Self and Society
Mead was a very important figure in 20th century social
philosophy.
Mind, Self and Society, one of his influential idea
In this work Mead focuses on how mind and self
emerge from the social process of communication by
signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of
sociology.
Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics and process
philosophy
 evolution of ideas occurs through a
dialectical (opposite/conflict), thesis, anti-thesis and
synthesis

12. Mead and mind
Mead presented the self and the mind in terms of a
social process.
The emergence of mind is dependent upon
interaction between the human organism and its
social environment;
it is through participation in the social act of
communication that the individual realizes their
potential for significantly symbolic behavior, that
is, thought.
This approach opposed traditional view of the
mind as separate from the body.

13. Cont’d
• For Mead, mind arises out of the social act of
communication.
 actions occur within a communicative process.
 A gesture: it is a preparatory movement that
enables other individuals to become aware of the
intentions of the given organism.
 Mead grounded human perception in an "action-
nexus”.
 We perceive the world in terms of the “means of
living”. To perceive food, is to perceive eating. To
perceive a house, is to perceive shelter.

14. Mead and self
• The self arises when the individual becomes an
object to themselves. Mead argued that we are
objects first to other people, and secondarily we
become objects to ourselves by taking the
perspective of other people.
• Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the
same way as we talk about other people, and thus
through language we become other to ourselves.
• In joint activity, which Mead called 'social acts',
humans learn to see themselves from the
standpoint of their co-actors. It is through
realizing ones role in relation to others that
selfhood arises.

15. “I and me”
The "Me" is the social self and the "I" is the
response to the "Me."
The "I" is the response of an individual to the
attitudes of others,
The "me" is the organized set of attitudes of
others which an individual assumes.
The "me" is the accumulated understanding of
"the generalized other" i.e. how one thinks one's
group perceives oneself, etc.
The "I" is the individual's impulses.
The "I" is self as subject; the "me" is self as
object.

16. Role Taking
• Mead defines the self as the ability to take oneself
as an object
• and identifies the basic mechanism of the
development of the self as reflexivity –
• Mead makes it clear that a self can arise only
through social experiences,
• As self gradually develops, children internalize the
expectation of large members of people. The ability
to take on roles eventually extends to being able to
take the role of an abstract entity, the group as a
whole.

17. Cont’d
• Taking the role of the other is essential if we are to
become cooperative members of human groups-
whether the family, peers or work.
• It is when we engage in interaction with that our
behavior is influenced and influence other.
• Learning to take the role of the other goes through
three stages
Imitation
Play
Games

18. Cont’d
• Imitation:
children under age 3
do not yet have a sense of self separate from other
they can only imitate people's gestures and words.
This stage is not actually role taking but prepares the
child for it.
• Play:
 children from 3 to 5 or 6 age
 pretend to take the role of specific people
(significant others).
 For instance, children first play the role of policeman and
then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers,"

19. Cont’d
• At play stage the children's learns limited self
because they can only take the role of distinct
and separate others,
• they still lack a more general and organized sense
of themselves.
• Games:
at this stage, organized play or team game begins
roughly with the early school years.
The significance of the self is that to play these
games the individual must be able to take multiple
roles
Children learn to take the role of (generalized others).

20. Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
• Dramaturgy
In his famous book entitled “The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life”, Erving Goffman, frames out
the theatrical performance that applies to face-to-
face interactions.
He believed that when an individual comes in
contact with other people, that individual will
attempt to control or guide the impression that
others might make of him by changing or fixing his
or her setting, appearance and manner.
Goffman saw a connection between the kinds of
acts that people put on in their daily life and
theatrical performances.

21. Cont’d
• Dramaturgy is a view of social life as a series
of dramatic performances,
• He was interested in how the self is shaped by
the dramatic interactions between social actors
and their audiences.
• The central theme in his work is impression
management, or the techniques that social
actors use to maintain particular images of
themselves when they encounter problems
during interactions.

22. Cont’d
• Goffman used the concepts of front stage,
personal front, setting, appearance, manner, and
back stage to discuss the theater of social life
fronts tend to become institutionalized and are
therefore selected rather than created
(pretention and formal)
Personal fronts consist of appearance, or
expressive equipment that tells the audience
what kind of role the performer expects to play
in a particular situation.
The back stage is where actors engage in
informal action that is suppressed/prevent when
on front stage.

23. Cont’d
• For example, when a lady who is attending a
formal dinner—and who is certainly striving to
present herself positively—trips, nearby party-
goers may pretend not to have seen her
fumble; they assist her in maintaining face.

24. Goffman and stigma
• Goffman also addressed the issue of stigma in his work.
 the shame or disgrace attached to something regarded as
socially unacceptable
Stigmas emerge when there is a gap between a person's
virtual/near social identity and actual social identity.
• Goffman differentiated between two types of stigma
 Discredited stigmas, which actors assume when their
stigmas are evident to audience members (like loss of a
nose) and
 Discreditable stigmas, which audience members are
unaware of unless an actor discloses this information (like
his being infertile.) According to Goffman, we all possess
some type of stigma, depending on the situations we are in
(urban-rural disparity).

25. Interaction order
• The interaction order from the smallest to the largest
will be presented as follows.
Persons: whether single, couples or colleagues
Contacts: either through physical co-presence,
telephone conversation or letter exchange.
Encounters: arrangements in which persons came
together into small physical circle as participants in a
consciously shared and interdependent undertaking;
for example love making and card games.
Platform performance: where activity is set before
audience; for exam formal meeting and music play.
Celebrative social occasions: gathering of in honor
of some jointly appreciated circumstances

26. Herbert Blumer
• One of Blumer's major accomplishments was his invention of the
term symbolic interactionism in 1937.
• He saw humans acting towards social objects in terms of the
meaning they attribute to those objects, rather than
their intrinsic character.
• Herbert Blumer defined interpretation in two ways,
The first is actor's identification of the objects in a
situation that has meaning
The second is an internal communication with him or
herself to decide which meaningful object to respond
to.
Blumer identified symbolic interaction as a uniquely
human process because it requires the definition and
interpretation of language and gestures, and the
determination of the meaning of the actions of
others.

27. Cont’d
• There were two types of symbolic
interactionism, symbolic and non-symbolic.
Non-symbolic interactionism is non-reflective
responsiveness to the action of another or others,
symbolic interactionism there is an interactive
response.
• Blumer believed there was no need to adopt
scientific techniques and methods to observe
symbolic interactionism; all you needed was a
direct, empirical study.

28. Cont’d
• Blumer came up with three core principles to his
theory.
• Meaning: humans act toward people and things
based upon the meanings that they have given to
those people or things.
• Language: Language gives humans a means by
which to negotiate meaning through symbols.
• Thought: Thought modifies each individual's
interpretation of symbols. Thought, based-on
language, is a mental conversation or dialogue that
requires role taking, or imagining different points of
view.

29. Labeling theory
• Labeling theory originating in sociology and
criminology, labeling theory (also known as social
reaction theory), was developed by sociologist Howard
Becker.
• Labeling theory holds that deviance is not a quality of
the act because it is the result of personality factors
associated with committing deviance.
• The theory is concerned with how the self-identity and
behavior of individuals may be determined or
influenced by the terms used to describe or classify
them.
• The theory was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, and
some modified versions of the theory have developed.

30. Cont’d
• If deviance is a failure to conform to the rules
observed by most of the group Family and friends
police officers or judges they label the person as
having offended against their social or moral norms
of behavior. The more differential the treatment, the
more the individual's self-image is affected.
• There are problems with stereotypes. The breach of a
rule may be treated differently depending on personal
factors such as the age, gender, race, etc. of the rule-
breaker

31. Cont’d
• The "criminal”
the labels applied to individuals influence their
behavior,
particularly the application of negative or stigmatizing
labels (such as "criminal" or "felon") promote deviant
behavior,
They becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,
• labeling theory postulates that it is possible to
prevent social deviance via a limited social shaming
reaction in "labelers" and replacing moral
indignation with tolerance. Emphasis is placed on
the rehabilitation of offenders through an alteration
of their label(s).

32. Cont’d
• labeling either habitual criminals or those who
have caused serious harm as "criminals" is not
constructive.
• Society may use more specific labels such as
"murderer" or "rapist" or "child abuser" to
demonstrate more clearly after the event of its
disapproval,
• Attaching/applying a long-term label may cause
prejudice against the offender, resulting in the
inability to maintain employment and social
relationships.

33. Cont’d
• The "mentally ill“
Scheff challenged common perceptions of mental illness
by claiming that mental illness is manifested solely as a
result of societal influence.
He argued that society views certain actions as deviant
and, in order to come to terms with and understand these
actions, often places the label of mental illness on those
who exhibit them.
In Gove’s view this idea in different way than Scheff, the
mentally ill behave unnaturally a lot of the time because of
their disorders, so we treat them differently.
A dozens of studies indicated that labeling can have a very
real and very large effect on the mentally ill. None of these
studies, however, proved that labeling is the sole cause of
any symptoms of mental illness.

34. Hardandsoft labeling
• Hard labeling –
 People who believe in hard labeling believe that
mental illness does not exist.
 It is merely deviance from the norms of society
that cause people to believe in mental illness.
Thus, mental illnesses are socially constructed
illnesses and psychotic disorders do not exist.

35. Cont’d
• Soft labeling –
People who believe in soft labeling believe that
mental illnesses do, in fact, exist.
Unlike the supporters of hard labeling, Soft labeling
supporters believe that mental illnesses are not
socially constructed.

36. Criticisms of Symbolic Interactionismand Its NewDirections
• Symbolic interactionism has been criticized for
relying too much on qualitative methodology and
for failing to incorporate quantitative
methodology into its research program.
• It has also been criticized for being too vague on
the conceptual front (vagueness of essential
Meadian concepts such as mind, self, I, and
• The other major criticism of symbolic
interactionism has been of its tendency to
downplay or ignore large-scale social structures.

37. Cont’d
• This criticism has been expressed in various ways.
 symbolic interactionism ignores the connectedness of
outcomes to each other
the micro focus of symbolic interactionism serves “to
minimize or deny the facts of social structure and the
impact of the macro-organizational features of society on
behavior
symbolic interactionism is not sufficiently microscopic,
that it ignores the importance of factors such as the
unconscious and emotions.
Similarly, symbolic interactionism has been criticized
for ignoring psychological factors such as needs,
motives, intentions, and aspirations.