Table Of ContentTHE MAKING OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
By the same author
MAKING PEOPLE PAY
DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL (joint editor)
DRUGS AND POLITICS (editor)
The Making of Symbolic
Interactionism
Paul Rock
© Paul Rock 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1St edition 1979
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1979 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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Associated companies in Delhi
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rock, Paul
The making of symbolic interactionism
I. Symbolic interactionism - History
I. Title
30 I. 1 I HM24
ISBN 978-1-349-04086-5 ISBN 978-1-349-04084-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04084-1
This book is sold subject
to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
For Peter Manning and Robert Scott
Contents
Preface
IX
I Symbolic Interactionism as an Understated Sociology
2 The Roots of Symbolic Interactionism 24
3 Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism 59
4 The Self 102
5 Problematic Aspects of the Interactionist Idea of the Self 147
6 Participant Observation 178
7 Conclusion 2 I 7
Notes 239
Index 265
VII
Preface
There was a perverse strain in much of the sociology which I learned
as an undergraduate. My education introduced me to a number of
simple principles. Like many others, I was encouraged to distrust
ideas that stemmed from my own experience and reason. Sociology
was presented as a science whose precepts necessarily contradicted lay
thought and common sense. Its competence was emphasised by the
scale of contradiction. Ideas which seemed plausible and sensible were
most liable to be in error. Those which were extraordinary and
incredible became candidates for serious attention. I was led to
recognise distinctions between manifest and latent functions, ideol
ogy and science, false consciousness and truth. If assertions were not
amazing or confusing, they were likely to be either trivial or false. In a
sense, then, the world was turned on its head. All appearances became
deceptive, and descriptions which deferred to them were defined as
'journalistic' or superficial.
Sociology thus became a form of high mystery. The initiate was
required to shed worldly knowledge and take on the trappings of
intellectual innocence and naIvety. Learning revealed the hidden
order of things, an order which was immeasurably complex,
profound and subtle. Simple analyses were redefined as simplistic;
focused studies were held to lack context and breadth; and interest in
meaning indicated an improper fascination with the epiphenomenal.
For a while I was almost made to believe in a nightmare realm in
which all was strange and unexpected. Sociology being a mystery,
abstruseness became a guarantee of authentic knowledge. The more
opaque the analysis, the more arcane the thought, the greater was the
possibility of an argument being profound and illuminating. My
fellow students toyed with Talcott Parsons, the graver Marxists and
the weighty debates of grand sociology. They dismissed sociology
which was literate and lucid because it smacked of insubstantial and
frivolous thought.
It took me some time to discover that there were other sociological
possibilities. Anyone who studied symbolic interactionism in the
ix
x Preface
England of the early 1960s had to be an autodidact. Sociology
students had to build up a working knowledge of the approach in a
solitary and faltering fashion. They had to assemble bibliographies
and intellectual histories without any assistance from those who had
been formally trained in the sociology. After all, there was no older
generation of British interactionists. More'over a Ph.D. from a British
university hinges on an examination by thesis alone. It is acquired
without the organised co-operation and preparation that prevail in
North American centres of graduate education. Instead of the joint
work that is imposed by mandatory courses, the British student
proceeds in an environment of structured neglect. Intellectual
innovation is encouraged, but so is solitude. There are real bars to the
development of a network of peers and patrons. There is no orderly
arrangement of meetings between those who think alike. On the
contrary, all such encounters are either fortuitous or calculated to be
staged at a relatively late period in an intellectual career. It is only
when ideas are published and gossip emerges that academic anon
ymity wanes.
Those who explored interactionism in the 1960s were then isolated
for some time. Many produced personal syntheses which fused the
orthodox and the heterodox together. Some even created genuinely
novel observations and comparisons. 1 Lacking a common tradition
which might have suppressed distinction, they formed an array of
moderately independent thinkers. In time they were to emulate their
American counterparts by building a social world for themselves. 2 It
was a fairly cohesive world which celebrated shared interests and a
shared marginality. Britain is small enough to permit the develop
ment of a close association between the few who were concerned
with symbolic interactionism.
The thought of that world was curiously intertwined with the
original American sociology. At one level it was little more than a
reflection and refraction of American ideas. There was a borrowing,
sifting and redrafting which formed part of an unacknowledged
division of labour. Much work was performed on American
arguments; there was copious exegesis; controversies arose and
declined; and revisions were adopted and discarded. In the main the
American interactionists were unaware of those echoing debates in
Britain. Those who came to Britain were bemused by the extent of
the interest which they excited. That unawareness still persists. There
is very little reference in American writing to what transpired outside
the American universities during that period. British ideas did not
Preface Xl
feed back into thinking in the United States.
At another level the British version of interactionism possessed
deviant qualities. It was frail and unstable because it was not anchored
in an enduring tradition. Borne by a small number of identifiable and
changing people, it was itself volatile. Estrangement from the parent
tradition also made the subtler and more incommunicable contents of
interactionism inaccessible in Britain. The British adaptation was
compounded out of diverse ideas which are only infrequently
discussed in the United States. There were strands of Marxism and
existentialism which are quite foreign to American writing. More
important, that adaptation was the property of a distinct group
which acquired its own history, authority and intellectual autonomy.
The transformations undergone by British interactionism depended,
in part, on the comparatively contained and peculiar nature of its
context.
A few of the eccentric characteristics of this book must be
explained by my own initial experience of isolation and subsequent
exposure to the people working in Britain. Mine is a personal
construction of interactioni sm which was modified as I came to know
various members of the group who had flirted with the sociology. I
have never had an orthodox education in the approach. Yet it is that
education which has conferred many of the special qualities of
interactionism. As I shall argue in Chapter I, the sociology is lodged
in something of an oral culture which has been carried by three
generations of American scholars. Those scholars have tended to treat
the sociology as a version of normal science, refraining from the
analysis which might expose its philosophical basis and supports.
Their abstention from philosophy is itself a philosophical stance, but
it is a stance that is covert and largely unexamined. My own
intellectual marginality is perhaps best illustrated by this book's
concentration on the historical and epistemological roots of in
teractionism. I have described the sociology in a way that is probably
uncongenial to those who are more centrally placed.
In brief, I have attempted to expound interactionism as a particular
kind of answer to the dilemmas which confront all sociologists. The
fundamental problems which first produced sociology remain
unsettled, and interactionism is one significant strategy for contend
ing with them. Those problems revolve around the basic nature of
social life, the observer's relations with that life, and the sorts of
question which can properly be asked of it. Symbolic interactionism
is a working amalgam of two rather discrete solutions: the formalism
