Sociology of the Self

Sociology of The Self

• Emerging sociological approaches to the self reflect emphases on power, reflexivity, and social constructionism.
• Scholarship associated with Foucault places significance on power in shaping the self.
• Reflexivity is at the core of the Meadian tradition and provides a pragmatic foundation for understanding agency and political action.
• Social construction is a common principle to sociological approaches and guides recent empirical analyses.
• This study explores the sociological context of self-construction, the social resources employed in the construction process, and the growing importance of non-human objects in self-construction.

Introduction

• Contemporary social theory emphasizes the nature of the self, self-identity, and individual subjectivity.

• Concepts of self and identity moved to the center of intellectual debate in the social sciences and humanities in the past two decades of the twentieth century.

• Attention was spurred by developments in poststructuralism, cultural studies, feminism, and queer theory.

• Sociological forces outside of the academy have contributed to a growing concern with selfhood as globalization destabilizes traditional practices.

• Increasing individualization of social life, proliferation of roles, and emergence of "identity projects" led to increases in personal meaning and social location.

• Widespread concern with the self led to a new multidisciplinary and postmodern scholarship.

• Significant new developments in both theory and research have occurred in anthropology, history, political science, communications, and literary studies.

• Most new scholarship has not been influenced by symbolic interactionism, sociology's dominant theoretical approach to the self.

• Symbolic Interactionism finds itself limited today by its weird irrelevance to the debate over the postmodern condition

• Charles Lemert noticed a surface similarity between pragmatism and postmodern theory.

• Appreciation of language/communication, problematizing of symbols/objectivity, and recognition of the socially contingent nature of identity are shared.

• Some intellectual cross-fertilization has occurred around the concept of identity

• Most research on the self remains the relatively localized disciplinary concern of those working in the tradition of symbolic interactionism within U.S. sociology.

• Postmodernism has its origins outside of sociology in the fields of art, philosophy, and literary criticism.

• Epistemological differences and independent conceptual systems have been fundamental barriers to mutual elaboration.

• From a postmodernist stance, symbolic interactionism and the pragmatist tradition can be dismissed as mere vestiges of modernist thinking.

• Postmodern scholarship assumes a radical anti-essentialism that rejects the very concept of self.

• From the perspective of many symbolic interactionists, postmodernism offers little that is new or that has not already been said using an interactionist conceptual vocabulary.

• Postmodernism is simply a weak approximation of pragmatist thought and is therefore largely irrelevant to interactionist work.

• A postmodernist interactionism could never be sustained because it would "deconstruct itself in terms of its own epistemological arguments."

• Elements of the new literature can enhance the traditional interactionist understanding of the self, and a serious engagement of pragmatism can help clear the muddied conceptual pool surrounding the new scholarship.

• The discussion centers on three organizing concepts: power, reflexivity, and social constructionism.

• The principle of reflexivity provides a pragmatic foundation for understanding agency and political action, and social construction is common to both new and traditional sociological approaches.

Power and The Self

• The individual is one of power’s prime effects
• Postmodern and poststructural critics proclaim the death of self.
• Theorists such as Derrida, Laclau, and Baudrillard believe individuals are not rational with unitary selves.
• The idea that individuals have an essential nature and an independent consciousness is simply a political artifact of the European Enlightenment.
• The self is the direct consequence of power and can only be apprehended in terms of historically specific systems of discourse.
• Regimes of power bring the self into existence by imposing disciplinary practices on the body.
• Those in positions of power use "technologies" of surveillance, measurement, assessment, and classification in institutional settings.
• Practices normatively represented in support of community health, safety, and education actually serve as mechanisms of domination.
• Rationality, reason, and scientific knowledge are rejected as progressive sources of emancipation; are understood to be the discursive foundation of control and domination in modern society.
• The self is coerced into existence and becomes a mechanism of control; systems of discourse work from the inside out by creating a self-regulating subject.
• Stuart Hall (1996) stresses that there can be no true self hiding "inside" or behind the artificial or superficial because self and identity are constructed "within, not outside discourse."
• The analytical project is not one of discovery but deconstruction to challenge essentialist assumptions, and lay bare the manner in which the self is wholly dependent upon discourse.
• Hall argues analysis should focus on the specific historical and institutional sites of "discourse formation."
• Rose (1996) said that the deconstruction of the self does not lead to a social structure and personality approach that investigates how "different ages produce humans with different psychological characteristics, different emotions, beliefs, pathologies" because such analyses presuppose a way of thinking that is itself an outcome of history.
• Rose advocates a "genealogy of subjectification" concerned with localized attempts to produce meaning, especially as this occurs through professional vocabularies and the technologies and practices of science, medicine, government, and the workplace.
• Cushman's (1995) historical analysis of psychotherapy in the United States is an example because his work is premised on the assumption that "There is no universal, transhistorical self, only local selves; there is no universal theory about the self, only local theories."
• The primary contribution is linking the study of the self to the historical deployment of power, is constituted within relations of control, and is deeply embedded within systems of knowledge and discourse
• Foucauldian tradition creates difficulty to theorize the possibility of emancipation through organized resistance and political intervention if actors are conceived to be mere subjects of discourse.
• Foucault reduced consciousness and identity formation to coercive socialization, failing to grasp the individualizing possibilities created by modernity.
• This radical antihumanism posed the obvious problem of seeking social change without free and active agents.
• His work teeters on a slippery philosophical slope, and critics have forced Foucault and other postmodernists to defend the subject against charges of moral relativism.
• For Nicholson & Seidman (1995, p. 35), a solution to this political dilemma can be found in a social postmodernism, where critique is supplemented with positive possibilities of action.
• Mouffe (1995) does not believe that the deconstruction of gender as a feature of self must necessarily rob feminism of a coherent identity; proposes a politics where the aim is to "construct a 'we' as radical democratic citizens."
• Reformulation requires a conceptualization of the self as an embodied agent, a knowledgeable, problem-solving actor rather than an amorphous "subject position."

The Self As Rexlexive Process

• It is a mistake to say that identities are trans-historical and universal, but it is also a mistake to say that personhood and selves are not.
• Most theorists have criticized the essentialist assumptions of the modern self have done so without reference to Mead's social psychology.
• The new scholarship on the self is trapped by a "category error," or the failure to distinguish a generic self from particular identities
• For symbolic interactionists, the self is first and foremost a reflexive process of social interaction
• The reflexive process refers to the uniquely human capacity to become an object to one's self, to be both subject and object; not a biological given, but emerges from social experience.
• Wiley's neopragmatism argues that the self, defined as a semiotic process of interpretation, is a defining feature of human nature and thus both transhistorical and universal - a quality that does not extend to identities.
• The contingent nature of identity does not rest on the universality of the reflexive process, and accepting the self process as universal does not mean that the self can simply be reduced to language.
• Interactionists stress the primacy of social action.
• Dunn (1997, pp. 695–96) builds on Wiley's neopragmatism, arguing that post-structuralists offer a limited conceptualization of agency because they fail to appreciate the prediscursive capacity to act.
• In the Meadian view the 'I' is an internal experience of reflexivity that precedes the sense of linguistic reflexivity imparted by signification.
• Dunn reveals how the pragmatist position allows for understanding the self “as structured in and through discourse without being reduced to it.”
• Schwalbe defends the self "against postmodernism,” asserting that the self emerges and takes form, and is a "psychic process wherein signs and other forms of imagery answer to biologically rooted impulses."
• Humans have a sophisticated system of signs and gestures that enable and constrain perception, reflection, and action.
• For Schwalbe, Dunn, Wiley, Joas, Perinbanayagam, a full understanding of the self begins with the Meadian notion of reflexivity.
• Mead's notion of reflexivity allows for agency, creative action, and the possibility of emancipatory political movements, therefore it does not preclude the very real possibility that the self-regulating processes of reflexivity will be colonized.
• This configuration is not inconsistent with new, postmodern approaches.
• Pragmatists prefigure much of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment self by attacking the tendency to treat the rational capacities of self as impervious
• Symbolic Interactionist tradition has failed to develop a sophisticated conceptual understanding of the self in which relations of power are presumed to be constitutive.

The Self As Social Construction

• Today there is consensus within the discipline that the self is at some level a social construction.

• Whether phenomenal or discursive, fragmentary or unitary, emotional or rational, linguistic or embodied, the self is assumed to be a product of social interaction.

• The self is both a social product and a social force

• The self as a 1) bounded, structured object-Mead's "me" whereas 2) the self as a fluid, agentic, and creative response- Mead's "I."

• Self is a joint accomplishment, neither completely determined by the social world nor pre-given at birth.

• Following Cooley and Mead, most research in the symbolic interactionist tradition has focused on the social production of the personal self.

• The social construction of selfhood is also about the meanings and understandings associated with the public self

• The conceptions of the public self are collectively instituted, produced, and disciplined

• Cahill recognizes a tendency to psychologize which his work corrects.

• "the public person is not made in the image of a unique self; rather, an interpretive picture of a unique self is made in the image of the public person"

• This suggests that a full understanding of self-meanings, self-images, and self-concepts requires a broad conceptualization of context, which includes the historical and cultural settings.

The Sociological Context of Self-Construction

• Taylor (1989) offers a history of the modern self whose primary concern is with demonstrating the relationship between changing senses of the self and changing moral visions.
• Taylor examines the sociological context within which the modern assumptions regarding self and identity emerged
• The partitioning of the world into the inner sphere of private experience and the outer world of public experience is not in fact a cultural universal.
• Is a function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation dominant in the modern West now.
• The modern approach to identity arose because a wide range of religious, political, economic, familial, intellectual, and artistic practices converged.
• The dominant tendency has been either to focus on the immediate situation, as evident in Goffman's work, or to examine contemporary shifts in culture or social structure.
• The latter perspective is categorized as the social structure and personality approach which is associated with a long list of monographs addressing changes in a generalized communal self.
• This provides perspective from distance that directs our attention to common sociological forces that control, limit, and define the construction process.
• Can offer insight into the changing definitions and meaning of the public person.
• The generalizations sweep over the multidimensional, overlapping, and shifting cultural meanings of self and vary over the life course and across racial, ethnic, class, and gender categories.
• The most enduring and informative analyses link together historical shifts in the political economy, changes in particular social settings, and critical alterations in self-experience. The
• Hochschild's work is particularly strong in this regard, has produced insightful descriptions of workers who struggle with ambiguous self-understandings.
• Globalization is a highly contested topic within sociology and refers to the increasing dispersion of capital, people, information, and culture across international borders
• Facilitated by advances in travel and communication technologies.
• Effects of globalization on self seen through the disruption, elaboration, and colonization of local cultures.
• The most prominent changes are evident in adolescents/young adults with an increase in identity confusion occurring when disruption of traditional practices and loss of meaning occurs.
• collectivist values are declining in Japan and China because of Western influences.
• Rates of migration and global media cultures resulted in bicultural identities is where traditional meanings are maintained with globally-defined self.
• Some processes also segregated cultures into a dynamic, conflicted relationship.
• Research is exploring new ways negotiations are made with global meanings.

Resources for Self Construction

• Body of research on communication strategies symbols and employed in social construction of individual self-meanings.

• Include storytelling, cultural narratives/ ideologies, traits identities, and features of the corporal body. Although often invoked in quests for distinction and individuality.

• As part of a cultural "tool kit” these are interpersonally maintained within cultural spheres and deployed in society to accomplish social objectives.

• Maines uses them to tell stories and is helpful to their distinction

• storytelling is overt, conversational activity and narrativestructures prefigure the stories

• Can express self-narratives as autobiographical with cultural frames

• The use of narratives occurs from early life, is from early life, the production comes relatively early, and they are a culturally structured process

• One is compelled to narrate selfies, to have stability with the world, and narratives provide this explanation

• When disruption is perceived people create explanations with frameworks

• Narrative resources are used to defend an unstable social environment

• Conventional identities that are challenged by exclusion will resolve to "fictitious" storytelling in sustained self-understanding.

• The difference is whether an explanation is a shared community/belief or fictional to the one telling it

• Coordinated collective action is essential to narrative power as empirically demonstrated with transsexuals

• Shared meaning comes through with a shared self

• The corporal body can also be a resource through which the body itself may shape meanings to a specific self. However they are not singular constructs

• Meanings either sought or contested through alterations of the body such as is done in transsexual cases also develop

Products of Self-Construction

• Psychology is increasingly focusing on self
• Moving away from biology towards social models with its individual products as a subject for observation
• Includes self-enhancement, monitoring/efficacy regulation, presentations and guides etc.
• There is a tendency to focus on stability, unity and conformity while de-emphasizing social construction
• This can congeal/become culturally stable but is not permanently unchanging
• Structured to mirror social relationships. Power decides concepts where they are ignored and used as tools/vessels
• Self-esteem loses science as it became used as marketing (entrepreneurialism) where self-esteem became a tool with consistent culture.

Conclusion

• The quote refers to studying transient resort workers that thrive with unconventional relations/lifestyle.

• At the time many academics declared the end of the self, it continued to thrive especially in sociology and continues to thrive in academia.

• Admitting to constructivist nature and recognizing its origins as well as the self as a product of power does not remove it as an object and force.

• As its core: self is the universal human experience of self-objectification

• All levels include the historical nature where it is cultural and exposed

• Self will prosper.