Symbolic Interactionism

Mead divided the self into the I and the me. The me is the self as object, the organised attitudes of others taken over into oneself; the I is the self as subject, the spontaneous and unpredictable response. Conduct is a conversation between them, which is why people are socialised without being automata.

Cooley: the looking-glass self

Charles Horton Cooley put the same insight more memorably. A person's sense of self is formed as though in a mirror held up by other people, in three moments: we imagine how we appear to another; we imagine their judgment of that appearance; and we experience a self-feeling, pride or mortification, in consequence.

The important and often missed point is that what does the work is the imagined judgment, not the real one. A student who believes the class thinks them foolish behaves accordingly, whether or not the class thinks anything at all.

W. I. Thomas: the definition of the situation

Thomas's theorem is the perspective's most quoted line and its most useful export: if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

A rumour that a bank is failing is false; the queue outside it is not, and the bank may fail because of the queue. A community that believes the police will not help does not call them, and the belief is confirmed by the absence of help. This is the mechanism behind the self-fulfilling prophecy, a term Merton later coined for it, and behind labelling theory in Module II.

Goffman: the dramaturgical approach

Erving Goffman analysed interaction as theatre. People give performances, manage the impressions others form of them, work in teams, and use props and costume. He distinguished the front stage, where the performance is given, from the back stage, where it is prepared and dropped.

The courtroom is the standing illustration and one every law student can check. Robes, forms of address, seating, the ritual of rising: all of it is front-stage staging that produces authority rather than merely displaying it. The advocates' room is back stage, where opponents who were adversaries five minutes earlier discuss the listing amicably.

A worked example

A court summons is a piece of paper. Nothing in the paper explains what happens when one arrives.

For a company's legal department it means a file to be opened and a date to be diarised. For a first-time recipient in a village it may mean shame: neighbours see the process server arrive, and the meaning attached is that this household is in trouble with the state. The consequences differ completely, and neither follows from the paper.

Now apply Thomas. If the recipient defines the summons as a catastrophe, they may borrow money at ruinous interest to settle a claim they would have won. The definition, not the legal position, has produced the outcome.

Now apply Cooley. Much of the distress is not the litigation but the imagined judgment of neighbours, and it operates whether or not the neighbours have given it a thought.

Now apply Goffman. Both parties will perform when they reach court: dress, demeanour, the studied confidence of a client who is not confident. A lawyer who does not understand that they are staging a performance stages a poor one.

The perspective applied to law

• Labelling. The central application, and the whole of the labelling theory of deviance: a person becomes a criminal in the sociological sense partly through being processed and named as one. Developed in [Explaining Deviance: The Sociological Theories].
• Legal meaning is made in interaction. Whether conduct is cruelty, provocation or reasonable care is settled by interpretation in a courtroom, not read off the facts.
• Discretion. What a police officer, a prosecutor or a magistrate does depends heavily on how they define the situation and the person in front of them, which is where the perspective meets the conflict perspective's point about selective enforcement.
• Legal ritual. The staging of legal proceedings is not decoration; it produces the authority the proceedings claim.

Criticism

1. It neglects social structure. Studying interaction closely, it says little about class, caste, gender or the state, which set the terms on which people meet. A meeting between an employer and a worker is not two people freely negotiating meaning.
2. It neglects power. Whose definition of the situation prevails is a question about power, and the perspective describes the process without explaining the outcome.
3. Its method is hard to check. It relies on participant observation and on interpretation, so findings are difficult to replicate and open to the observer's own reading.
4. It cannot explain large-scale change. There is no account of why whole societies transform.
5. The concepts are imprecise. The self, the I and the me are difficult to define operationally.

The fair conclusion is that the perspective answers a question the macro perspectives do not ask, and vice versa. Macro theories explain the framework, symbolic interactionism explains what happens inside it, and a good answer says that rather than declaring a winner.

Micro and macro compared

Quick revision

1. Blumer's three premises: people act on meanings; meanings arise in interaction; meanings are handled through interpretation.
2. Mead: the self develops through play and game stages to the generalized other; the self is divided into the I and the me.
3. Cooley: the looking-glass self, imagined appearance, imagined judgment, self-feeling. What matters is the imagined judgment.
4. Thomas: if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
5. Goffman: dramaturgy, impression management, front stage and back stage.
6. It is a micro perspective, and its great application is labelling theory in Module II.
7. Criticism: neglects structure and power, hard to verify, cannot explain macro change.

Test yourself

1. State Blumer's three premises. People act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them; those meanings arise out of social interaction with others; and meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process that the person uses in dealing with what they encounter.

2. Explain the looking-glass self. Cooley's account of how self-conception is formed: we imagine how we appear to another person, we imagine the judgment they make of that appearance, and we then feel pride or mortification accordingly. The judgment that shapes us is the one we imagine, which need not be the one actually made.

3. State the Thomas theorem and give a legal illustration. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. A litigant who defines a summons as a catastrophe may borrow at ruinous rates to settle a claim they would have won; the definition, not the legal merits, produces the outcome.

4. What did Mead mean by the generalized other? The internalised attitude of the community as a whole, acquired in the game stage when a child must hold the roles of all the other participants in mind at once. Once acquired, the person can regulate their own conduct by reference to what the community in general expects, without any particular person being present.

5. Give two criticisms of symbolic interactionism. That it neglects social structure, saying little about class, caste, gender or the state, which set the terms on which people meet; and that it neglects power, since it describes how definitions of a situation are negotiated without explaining whose definition prevails, which is a question about resources and authority.