Week 7 Symbolic Interactionism PDF

Foundations of sociological thought Symbolic interactionism (2) Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman and Arlie R. Hohschild  Symbolic interactionism and dramaturgy Herbert Blumer Erving Goffman Arlie R....

Foundations of sociological thought Symbolic interactionism (2) Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman and Arlie R. Hohschild  Symbolic interactionism and dramaturgy Herbert Blumer Erving Goffman Arlie R. Hohschild H. Blumer (1900 – 87; E. Goffman (1922 – 82; A. R. Hochschild (b. 1940 - ) Photo credit: ADE 2017  Actors not by our own choosing “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts” William Shakespeare, As you like it “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast” Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s crime and other stories  Readings  The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism (1969)  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)  Asylums (1961)  The Managed Heart (1983)  Social status and social roles  Social life is built around and sustained by social interactions.  Social interaction – process in which role performers with specific social statuses act in relation to others ; role-playing (Brym et al. 2016). These depend on shared meanings and constant interpretation by social actors of what is going on (definition of situation) and what others mean (Blumer 1969)  Status – a position within the social hierarchy.  Role – expected behaviour(s) connected with a specific status; role strain vs role conflict  Status sets and role sets We can (and usually do) hold more than one status at a time, and all of statuses together are what sociologists refer to as status set. Roles as “enacting of rights and duties attached to a given status” (Goffman 1959) All roles associated with any particular status are what is called a role set  Ascribed vs. achieved status Ascribed status:  usually assigned to us by others, based on our perceived inherent characteristics  cannot by changed or influenced by our actions Achieved status:  status to which we consciously aspire through sustained effort (hard work, education, making use of social capital)  can be enhanced through merit – we have control over what we can achieve  Master status  Some statuses have such influence on our lives in their entirety that they profoundly shape who we are, as well as what statuses and roles we are ascribed or can achieve, that we call them master statuses (Everett Hughes)  Example – disability (not chosen)  Example of voluntary master status (presidents of the USA and Russia (not chosen but it is up to the incumbent to accept or decline)  What statuses/roles do you hold/perform? Please think of two statuses you currently hold. Are they ascribed or achieved? For each of them, please think of at least two roles you may perform. Please write them down NB. Please write only such statuses and roles that you feel comfortable enough to share  The reality of social interactions  How ‘real’ is our social environment?  Is what happens between human beings on various levels of interaction ‘natural’? To what extent?  How do we make sense of our interactions with others every single day? Erving Goffman and the presentation of self  Erving Goffman (1922 – 1982) and the idea of presentation of self “[w]hen the individual enters into the presence of others (individuality as sacred)  We are playing out roles like actors in the theatre  based on the definition of the situation  Everyday life situations are our stage. There is a front and back stage, and an audience, for every interaction.  Dramaturgical analysis defines social interaction as a “reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s physical presence” (Goffman 1959)  Key terms An interaction – a “reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in another's immediate physical presence” Performance is “all activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” Part/routine – a pre-established pattern of action which unfolds during a performance. Social roles involve playing parts/routines in front of an audience (Goffman 1959)  The definition of situation “When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about [them] (…) [for] practical reasons. Information [that] helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what [they] will expect of them and what they may expect of them. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth the desired response in him” (Goffman 1959) Demeanour and deference Erving Goffman and the presentation of self  Creating a specific impression of themselves in the minds of others  Presenting yourself in the best light  impression management  What does it mean to be me?  Do you think you have a fixed character? As human and social beings, can we/do we escape ‘endless performing’? If so, in what situations? Erving Goffman and the presentation of self  Idealization – attempt to appear in the “best light”  Rationalization of motives  Example: manager mobbing employees at work claiming they are doing this to increase worker efficiency or company profit  Embarassment / “saving face”  The key is to prevent anything that would cause the interaction to break down Erving Goffman and the presentation of self  We wear masks, and those masks, Goffman says, are our ‘truer self’, our ‘second nature’ (Presentation of self 1959)  The belief  disbelief cycle: from sincere involvement to cynicism (or vice versa)  The recruit-soldier vs army etiquette example  The example of special status professions, such as doctors (positions of trust and idealism) Erving Goffman and the presentation of self  The front  Backstage  The self as a character  The self as a performer (our “truer selves” (Goffman 1959)  Resocialization  Resocialization – deliberate and rapid change in the person’s behavior and values, usually caused by a forceful socializing agent, often against person’s will (Brym et al., op. cit.)  Resocialization often takes place in correctional facilities, such as prisons, where inmates, isolated from the society, are forced to change their behavior under (mortification of self) the forced supervision (surveillance) administrative staff in a strictly controlled environment – so called total institutions; rebellion: secondary adjustment (Goffman 1961)  Total institutions “A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without a overall rational plan. The central feature of a total institution can be described as a breakdown of the barrier ordinarily separating these three spheres of life. (Goffman 1961)  Total institutions All activities are conducted in the same place under the same authority Each major social activity is conducted in the immediate presence of large numbers of other individuals, all of whom are treated alike and expected to do the same thing together All activities are tightly scheduled, and all activities form “a sequence imposed from above by formal rules and a body of officials” (Goffman 1961)  Role distancing  Role distancing – occurs when the role is unwelcome and/or stressful (remember alienation and the iron cage?)  When we just “go through the motions”  When we are not serious about our role (Brym et al. 2016) Secondary adjustments – when we refuse to accept a forced role or the other’s view of who we are (Asylums, Goffman 1961)  Ethnomethodology  Ethnomethodology: The study of how people make sense of what others do and say by adhering to pre-existing norms  Harold Garfinkel (1917 – 2011)  Preexisting shared norms and understandings  Tacit agreement between actors about what is normal and expected. (Brym et al. 2016, Superle 2016)  Breaching experiments  Breaching experiments: illustrating the importance of everyday, ritualistic interactions by disrupting interaction patterns When someone violates the assumptions underlying the stability and meaning of daily life, people are likely to become upset and end the interaction (Brym et al. 2016, Superle 2016) Discussion: Think of an example of a breaching experiment and describe its hypothetical consequences for the social interaction in question.  Emotional labor  Emotional labor – idea introduced into social sciences by Arlie Hochschild in 1970s  Emotional labor involves producing induced or suppressed emotions due to demands placed on an employee by their employer or rules of business and selling the product of this process (emotional work) for a wage/salary  In the United States, nearly half the jobs women do and one-fifth of the jobs men do involve substantial amounts of emotional labour (Brym et al. 2016)  Goffman and Hochschild  Erving Goffman’s influence on Hochschild  had the greatest impact on Hochschild’s conceptualization of emotions  For Goffman, embarrassment is studied less as an inner emotional state and more for what it contributes to the flow of interaction.  His situationalism leads him to view emotions as something “done” to the actor; embarrassment happens to the actor  Goffman and Hochschild  For Hochschild, emotional work (deep acting), feeling rules, and emotional labor are real and matter for more important reasons than simply not disrupting the social situation  it exacts considerable emotional and psychological toll.  Example: flight attendant:  The symbol of emphasized femininity; the figure of a mother  nurturing, caring, responsive to the needs of others  The professional: “transferring of homespun femininity to the impersonal marketplace” (Hochschild 1983 after ADE 2017/21)  Emphasized femininity Female flight attendants are expected to “enact two leading roles of Womanhood: the loving wife and mother (..) and the glamorous career woman (…) professional and very far from [the] home. (Hochschild 1983) Female flight attendants: “Men ask me why I am not married. They don’t ask the guys that. Or else passengers will say: ‘Oh, when you have kids, you’ll quit this job (…)’ And I say ‘No, I am not going to have kids’. ‘Oh yes you will’  Emotional labor in the workplace  Angelo Soares and his team interviewed 77 service professions employees based in Montreal, over the course of 5 years  Can we leave emotions at the door when we come to work?  Soares focused on a somewhat taboo subject of crying (Soares 2003)  Emotional labor in the workplace Soares’ conclusions:  Men were as likely to cry because of work as women  People who cried at work rarely did so in front of their ‘audience’ and went to the ‘back stage’ (either washroom or their home) (remember Goffman and ‘embarrasment/saving face’ ?)  People cried due to being overworked, overwhelmed and/or bullied, but often also for no apparent reason at all (the waitress example  she burst out crying even though she felt she was back in control (Ibid.)  Discussion questions How do "feeling rules" impact emotion work and emotional labor? What are the implications of Goffman’s theory of the “presentation of self” for our individual identities? What are the some of the implications of Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis for the analysis of structures of social inequality and their power over individuals? Think, for example, about Goffman’s Asylums (1961) and what happens to patients/inmates.  Conclusion  Social life as enacted dramaturgy  According to Goffman, there is no true self – our self depends on the social interaction with this specific audience in this specific situation  We act in order to make sure that the interaction will not be violated or interrupted in any way  the individual is  Emotional labor, feeling rules, and forced resocialization as (gendered) tools of social control