This document contains in-depth exam notes for the mid-term exam for sociological theory 1. In addition, it includes a glossary covering every term and concept required for the exam and a comprehensive summary of all the sociologists, such as Durkheim, Elias, etc.
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Exam 2 – Sociological Theory 1: Interactions and
Interdependencies
George Herbert Mead :
- The self is created through social interactions and is not biologically predetermined
o Especially through language (symbolic interaction)
- The self is a social structure → You exist because you are perceived
o Without social interactions → No thinking
- The creation of a stimulus-response model within ourselves
o Internal exchange of significant symbols = internal dialogue
- I, Me, and Generalized other
- Significant symbols → Allow for thinking
- The ‘Generalized other’ trains ‘I’ to comply with the ‘ME’.
- I and ME interacting is what creates the self.
Norbert Elias :
- Symbol emancipation: Symbols → Allow people to envision a different world →
adapt the world around them
Adapt the environment to their needs instead of adapting themselves
Randall Collins :
- All macro events are created from/caused by micro events
- The center of analyses is not the individual but the situation
- He believes that every interaction is an interaction ritual → which will build onto
one’s biography of the IR chain
- IR chains = Cumulative experiences of gaining or losing EE
- Thinks that all interactions are based on the human desire to be part of a group
(group membership)
- IRs + EE
- People gain EE and symbols from interactions which fuel their next interactions
- Reasoning from the PAST: prior interactions determine the next interactions
Alfred Schutz :
- Investigated the experience of everyday social life
- Coined the term, the Life-World
- Consciousness - The experience of being emerges from social interactions (means
the experience of being is not given)
- Overcome the tension of social consciousness
- Together we create a sense of meaning of / define the social situation/interaction
(e.g. lecture)
- How to deal with the fact that we are never 100% certain that we understand the
other?
Thomas Scheff :
SHAME → Focused on the negative experience of social interactions
o Refers to shame as the “Master Emotion” + “Triple Shame Spirals”
- Shame is the key that guides human behavior
- People as “subjects” and “objects”
Charles Horton Cooley :
- The looking-glass self: one’s self/identity is dependent on one’s appearance to
others
,Iddo Tavory :
- Think between situations (there is something between the next situation) → the idea
that we can anticipate what is happening next (not unprepared)
- People bring their histories into the situation (PAST)
A situation emerges from the past → in order to act in the situation you always have
to anticipate the FUTURE
- Instead of disruption “of” an interaction, a disruption “for” the interaction
o He believed that interactions do not need to run smoothly (opposite of
Goffman)
Erving Goffman :
- Self is about presenting yourself in a situation
o Social selves can exist only if they are confirmed by others
o The self as a dramatic effect
- Not individuals and their interactions, but interactions and their individuals
The self as a sacred object → “The cult of the individual” (related to Durkheim)
Compared social life to the theater → Impression management
- THE SITUATION SHOULD BE SMOOTH (avoid embarrassment) → about
intersubjectivity
o The management of spoiled identity → Stigma
- Behaviors in public places - (un)civil inattention/attention
Herbert Blumer :
- Joint action, is about the enactment of the shared meanings (Symbolic
interactionism)
- People interact with each other by interpreting the other person’s actions
Elijah Anderson :
- “The White Space” - What happens when Black people are in the White spaces?
- The connection between small scale interactions and durable inequality and social
divisions
- “Code of the street” - “Ghettoization” (as a negative icon) - “White / Black Spaces”
Georg Simmel :
- The Stranger → Strangers are close and remote + remote but close (what they have
in common and how they differ) → The stranger is literally a stranger.
- The stranger represents a social category rather than “being a person”
Erika Summers-Effler :
- Social change: The case of feminist resistance
- A micro-sociological explanation of macrostructural changes
- Explains the subordination of women (+ feminist resistance) in terms of IRs and the
distribution of EE
o A balance between minimizing EE losses and maximizing EE
o Clinging to the subordinate role or joining the emancipatory movement
Arlie Hochschild :
- Emotional management
- Feeling rules → The disconnect between how we feel and how we know we should
feel
- The idea of deviant emotions (repressing and managing them)
o Internalizing deviant emotions
, Pierre Bourdieu :
- People have different positions in society → causing disposition to arise
o Position in society determines the action in a situation
- He says → It’s the class structure that determines the predisposition
- Boundaries and distinction
Gary Alan Fine :
- He says that we need to look at ways that small groups create culture (idiocultures)
o How people develop a shared history and ways of acting
o Idiocultures give interactions the material to work with
Week 4 - Our Social Selves
Text: George Herbert Mead, “the self”
Text: Thomas J. Scheff 2003. ‘Shame in self and society’
Differentiated Selves : We carry a whole series of different relationships to different people.
We are one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. We divide ourselves up
in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances. There are all sorts of
different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions
- “We carry on a whole series of different relationships to different people. We are
one thing to one man and another thing to another. There are parts of the self which
exist only for the self in relationship to itself. We divide ourselves up in all sorts of
different selves with reference to our acquaintances. We discuss politics with one
and religion with another. There are all sorts of different selves answering to all
sorts of different social reactions. It is the social process itself that is responsible for
the appearance of the self; it is not there are a self apart from this type of
experience.”
Game Stage : The game stage when children can consider tasks and relationships
simultaneously
- The game has rules, it is not just play but you need to also understand the context
(e.g. understanding the place you’re in)
- Children start to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them and they
talk about the generalized other
1. First we understand how my mom sees me, my teacher sees me
2. But in the second stage you are able to move beyond particular people (how a whole
class sees me)
o Children cannot construct a ‘generalized other’. They develop the ‘I’ and then
a ‘Me’ over time but at a young age they cannot understand or have the
empathy to perceive a ‘generalized other’, they cannot figure that out
without a rule
Generalized Other : The collection of roles and attitudes that people use as a reference
point for figuring out how to behave in a given situation
- Not a specific person → It is how people exist in my imagination
o Social experiences, internal dialogue, what others will think of you
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