Sociological Perspective of the Self PDF

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF II. OBJECTIVES At the end of this chapter, the students will be able to: 1. discussed the concept of ‘sociological imagination’; 2. explained the various sociological perspectives of the development of the SELF; 3. appreciat...

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF II. OBJECTIVES At the end of this chapter, the students will be able to: 1. discussed the concept of ‘sociological imagination’; 2. explained the various sociological perspectives of the development of the SELF; 3. appreciated the link between the self and the social world. II. Learning Activity Title: The Sociological Perspective of the Self Time Span: 20 minutes Instruction: 1. Read the article, “Personal Trouble vs. Public Issues: Dana’s Story” Personal Troubles Versus Public Issues: DANA’S STORY (Taken from SOCIOLOGY: A Critical Approach by K.J. Neubeck and D.S. Glasberg) This is a story about Dana, a sincere and pleasant young woman of 19. Dana grew up in a middle-class neighborhood with her parents and two younger brothers. She was relatively good student in high school, although she was the first to admit she coasted whenever she could. To provide the family the basic necessities, Dana’s parents both worked. They gave up vacations in order to put a small amount of money aside each month to help pay for their children’s college expenses. Dana and her brothers found part-time pay jobs to pay for their personal expenses. There were few luxuries. Dana’s family was proud last year when she went off to a public college that had a good reputation. It was just affordable with Dana’s summer earnings and a modest boost from the financial aid office. She was on track. But now her world is falling apart. Dana’s father has been out of work for over six months. He was laid off when his employer, an industrial firm where he had worked his way up to a middle-management position, “downsized” its labor pool. To his dismay, he found little interest from other employers. He wondered how much his being middle-aged had to do with it or if his physical disability, the result of a car accident, counted against him. He took it for granted that his dark skin was a liability. Dana’s mother had been working ever since her youngest child was old enough to care for himself after school. But salary as a clerk-typist in an insurance company was not sufficient to support much above the poverty level, let alone contribute to Dana’s college expenses. When Dana asked for more financial aid, the college aid office told her that the federal government had tightened the eligibility rules and it couldn’t give her anything more. Even with the part-time jobs she was holding down, Dana could not afford to stay at college. When Dana arrives home, she finds her family in turmoil. The stress seems to be ripping apart her parents’ marriage. Mutual hostility and periodic outbursts of physical abuse mark their relationship. Dana’s father was always strict but fair with his children. Now he behaves unpredictably. Her brothers seek refuge with their friends and try to avoid their father. They are also beginning to get in trouble at school; her mother is receiving a stream of calls and notes from school authorities. Dana spends a lot of time in her room, anxiety stricken and chronically depressed by the overwhelming facts of her difficult situation. Away from her friends, and too frightened to approach her parents, Dana suffers alone. NAME: Guide Questions: 1. What is the problem of Dana? (5 points) 2. What are the causes of Dana’s problem? (5 points) 3. What are the possible solutions to Dana’s problem that you could suggest? (5 points) III. INTRODUCTION Key Points: Sociological Approach of Understanding the Self Sociology is the systematic study of human society. It is the study of people as participants in and creators of society… and at the heart of it is the “sociological imagination”. C. Wright Mills’ coined the concept of sociological imagination. In Mills view, the sociological imagination is the ability to see the connections between individuals’ personal troubles and larger structural patterns in the society (Johnson 2008). Sociologists are interested in understanding the nature of society or social structure: its forms and patterns, the ways in which it develops and is transformed. Assumes that there is a reciprocal relationship between the self and society (Stryker, 1980 as cited in Stets and Burke, n.d.) ▪ means that we must also understand the society in which the self is acting, and keep in mind that the self is always acting in a social context in which other selves exist ▪ sociologists study the role of society in shaping behavior ▪ sociologists tend to look outward (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior The self is socially constructed in the sense that it is shaped through interaction with other people. ▪ Self develops only with social experience ▪ Social experience is the exchange of symbols ▪ Understanding intention requires imagining the situation from the other’s point of view The self is a relatively stable set of perceptions of who we are in relation to ourselves, others, and to social systems. ▪ Sociologists are more likely to focus on how different aspects of society contribute to an individual’s relationship with his/her world. People’s self-concepts are multidimensional. ▪ They may reflect roles associated with various personal characteristics as well as with the social positions they occupy. The concept of role links the individual’s self-concept to the structure’s features of the social world. ▪ These roles include those associated with gender, age, family, status, occupation, race or ethnicity, residential location, leisure time pursuits, general lifestyle preferences, and so on. ▪ Roles are likely to be partially structured by general cultural expectations as well as by specific expectations that develop among people who interact on a regular basis.  To further widens our understanding of how the sociological perspective helps in understanding the self, the lens of Symbolic Interaction Theory will be followed. Symbolic Interaction Theory sees society as the product of everyday interactions of individuals. Human beings are creatures who live in a world of symbols, attaching meaning to virtually everything. Reality is simply how we define our surroundings, our obligations toward others, even our own identities. The following are various sociological approaches under Symbolic-Interaction Perspective: a. George Herbert Mead’s Development of the Self b. Charles Horton Cooley’s The Looking Glass Self c. Identity Theory d. Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Self e. Herbert Blumer – Self as Multidimensional f. Manford Kuhn’s stable image of the social world g. Gerry Lanuza’s The Constitution of the Self IV. CONTENT A. Mead’s Development of the Self Many of the core ideas of symbolic interaction theory are grounded in the pioneering work of George Herbert Mead, particularly his perspective regarding the close relationship between the mental processes whereby people make sense of their environment and their interaction with one another. This relationship is manifested in the patterns of collaboration among people as they seek to develop shared interpretations of the situations they face. It is also reflected in how one’s self-concept develops through awareness of the perspectives of others. Social behaviorism, Mead’s perspective, criticizes psychological behaviorism. To him, the simple stimulus-response model of behavioral psychology ignored the subjective process of interpretation whereby the meanings of environment stimuli are established through interaction. Human beings respond to the environment intentionally, or they go beyond the automatic, nonreflective conditioned responses by integrating the process of subjective interpretation that occurs between stimulus and response. Mead regarded the mind itself as the thinking process whereby human being seeks to make sense of their environment in the process of adapting to it (Johnson, 2008). Mead emphasized that the active thinking process is often triggered by the appearance of a problem that blocks individuals’ efforts to meet their needs or goals or satisfy their impulses. The ability to think through alternative actions and try to anticipate their probable consequences represents a major evolutionary advance that enables human beings to adapt to their environment in a less risky and more efficient way than through trial and error. Mead emphasized the reciprocal interplay between the self as acting subject (the “I”) and the self as object, as seen through the perspective of others (the “me”). The self-concept to Mead is composed of the “I” and the “Me”. “I” – is the nonreflective aspect of the self and consists of one’s awareness of the actual behavioral responses he or she is making to the current situation as it is taking place. “Me” – this is reflexive. In the reflective process the individual evaluates the completed action from the standpoint of others as well as his or her own self-evaluation. Furthermore, Mead says that the key to developing the self is learning to take the role of the other. Individual’s self-concept is related to the acquisition of roles in the society. Roles are seen as the behavioral expectations associated with particular social status (mother, son, friend, employee, customer, citizen, member, and so on), though actual role behavior reflects individuals’ unique styles that may not necessarily conform completely to idealized expectations. A status on the other, is a social position that an individual occupies. The general perspective of role theory can be used to investigate how social roles are learned and incorporated in individuals’ identities and how people are linked through their roles to various institutional structures (Ralph H. Turner, pp. 233–254 in Jonathan H. Turner, ed. 2001). The self is, thus, both individual and social in character (Stets and Burke, n.d). ▪ It works to control meanings to sustain itself, but many of those meanings, including the meanings of the self, are shared and form the basis of interaction with others and ultimately social structure. To Mead, the development of the self also follows the following stages of role taking: a. Imitation – with limited social experience, infants can do this only through imitation, that is, they mimic behavior without understanding underlying intentions and, so, have no self b. Play – as children learn to use language and other symbols, the self emerges through play, which involves taking the roles of significant others, especially parents c. Games – gradually, children learn to take the roles of several others at once. By about age seven, most children have the social experience needed to engage in team sports. Generalized others – refer to widespread cultural norms and values we use as a reference in evaluating ourselves. SELF-CONCEPT ▪ Develops when humans point out who they are to themselves and to others – a view of who they are Here, humans are an entity that embodies content and a structure. ▪ Self-concept often meant self-esteem (one’s evaluation of oneself in affective (negative or positive) terms). ▪ the sum total of our thoughts, feelings, and imaginations as to who we are (Rosenberg, 1979 as cited in Stets and Burke, n.d). ▪ Later conceptions elaborated and refined this view suggesting that the self-concept was made up of cognitive components (given the collection of identities) as well as affective components or self-feelings including self-esteem (both worth-based and efficacy-based self-esteem) (Franks & Marolla, 1976; Stryker, 1980 as cited in Stets and Burke, n.d). ▪ The set of meanings we hold for ourselves when we look at ourselves. It is based on our observations of ourselves, our inferences about who we are, based on how others act toward us, our wishes and desires, and our evaluations of ourselves.  ▪ includes not only our idealized views of who we are that are relatively unchanging, but also our self-image or working copy of our self-views that we import into situations and that is subject to constant change and revision based on situational influences (Burke, 1980 as cited in Stets and Burke, n.d). ▪ It is this self-image that guides moment-to-moment interaction, is changed in situated negotiation, and may act back on the more fundamental self-views. B. Charles Horton Cooley’s Looking glass self Cooley’s perspective on the relation between a person’s self-concept and face-to-face interaction within primary groups is expressed in his frequently cited concept of the ‘looking glass self’. ▪ One’s identity is formed from the reflections one sees of oneself in the reactions of others. The self-concept emerges out of the reflected appraisal process most of what we know about ourselves is derived from others ▪ Has three elements: a. Our imagination on how we appear to others b. Our imagination on their judgments of that appearance c. Self-feeling ▪ Cooley stressed the importance of our emotional reactions to the responses from others. When we perceive the reactions of others as indicating either approval or disapproval, we feel pride or shame as a result. ▪ Our self-concepts are filtered through our perceptions and resemble how we think others see us (Shrauger and Schoeneman ,1979 as cited in Stets and Burke, n.d). ▪ Cooley also pointed out that our identity may extend beyond our selves to include our family, friends, and primary group relations. To speak of ‘my family’ or ‘my group’ is to expand our sense of self to include these relationships. Primary group – group with which we identify most strongly Secondary group – characterized by intimate face-to-face relationships. It is through primary groups (family) that individuals are bound together with the sense of unity and cohesiveness that finds expressions in the mutual regard (or sympathy) they have for one another in their common life. C. Role and Identity Theories C.1 Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgic Approach ▪ Goffman’s dramaturgic focused on the strategies people use in staging their “presentation of self” in ways designed to gain social validation and to overcome the precariousness and uncertainty of the social world. ▪ believed that meaning is constructed through interaction ▪ Interaction order -what we do in the immediate presence of others ▪ Dramaturgy - focuses on how individuals take on roles and act them out to present a favourable impression to their “audience”  ▪ Goffman argues that people are concerned with controlling how others view them, a process he called impression management ▪ o Using the language of the theater, Goffman described how individual’s employ various strategies to try to create a good impression on others and thereby obtain social validation of their self-concepts. o This approach reflects Shakespeare’s insight that all the world is a stage, a particular role to perform or character to portray and, finally, an exit. ▪ Individuals seek to control their appearance and physical setting in which they perform to “put their best foot forward” ▪ ▪ The self is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION FRONTSTAGE- People play different roles throughout their daily lives and display different kinds of behavior depending on where they are and the time of day BACKSTAGE - When people engage in back stage behavior, they are free of the expectations and norms that dictate front stage behavior. -Each definition of a situation lends itself to a different approach, and the consequences are real. -The self is a Social construction dependent of the situation. D. Sociological Imagination (C. Wright Mills) 1. Seeing the general in the particular. (Recognizing patterns.) This meant that sociologists seek out general patterns in the behavior of particular people. Although every individual is unique, a society shapes the lives of its members. Sociologists look for general patterns in the behavior of particular people. 2. Seeing the strange in the familiar. (Recognizing that things aren’t always what they seem.) The point is that looking sociologically means challenging the familiar idea that we live our lives in terms of what we decide, considering instead the initially strange notion that society shapes our experiences. This means trying to experience society as if it is your first time and everything is new. Why do sociologists "make the familiar strange?" they do this in order to see the world in an unknown perspective. If you’re making something familiar strange, you tend to see things about that were not seen before. 3. Seeing individuality in social context. (Looking for the influence of social forces.) Identifying the social forces which are shaping the individual's behavior. Applying the Sociological Perspective - It is easy to apply the sociological perspective when we encounter people who differ from us— whether around the world or in our own hometowns—because they remind us that society shapes our individual lives. But two other kinds of situations also help us to see the world with a sociological perspective: (1) living on the margins of the society and (2) living a social crisis. The greater people’s social marginality, the better able they are to use the sociological perspective. People at the margins of social life are aware of social patters that others rarely think about. To become better at using the sociological perspective, therefore, we must step back to our familiar routines and look at our lives with new awareness and  curiosity. Just as social change fosters sociological thinking, sociological thinking can bring about social change. The more we learn how the system operates, the more we may want to change it in some way. Benefits of Sociological Perspective: 1. The sociological perspective helps us assess the truth about common sense. A sociological approach encourages us to ask whether commonly held beliefs are actually true and, to the extent that they are not, why they are so widely held? 2. The sociological perspective helps us see the opportunities and constraints in our lives. Sociological thinking leads us to see that in the game of life, we have a say on how to play our cards, but it is the society that deals us the hand. The more we understand the game, the better players we will be. Sociology helps us “size up” our world so we can pursue our goals effectively. 3. The sociological perspective empowers us to be active participants in the society. The more we understand about how the society works, the more active citizens we become. For some, this may mean supporting society as it is; others may attempt nothing less than changing the entire world in some way. Evaluating any aspect of social life—whatever your goal—requires identifying social forces and assessing their consequences. 4. The sociological perspective helps us live in a diverse world. The sociological perspective encourages us to think critically about the relative strength and weaknesses of all ways of life, including our own. References: Stets, J. and Burke, P. A Sociological Approach to Self and Identity. http://en.bookfi.net/g/. Pp: 5- 48 Turner, Jonathan H. (2006). Handbook of Sociological Theory. Springer Science + Business Media LLC: USA.