Читать книгу Contemporary Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 27

Social life is part of every individual and every interaction – not only of the large-scale affairs of governments, economies, and complex organizations. Sociology that focuses primarily on persons and interpersonal relations is called “micro-sociology.” This can be relevant on a large scale: for example, how members of a corporation’s board of directors interact can determine whether 10,000 people lose their jobs or an entire country experiences an economic crisis. Micro-level decisions are the basis for many macro-sociological phenomena; individual decisions – each small in themselves – can also be aggregated to have huge effects. Consider how decisions to have children, to migrate, to invest in education, or about what and how much to buy combine to produce population crises, “brain drains,” burgeoning of college enrollments, or recession, respectively. Even without attention to their large-scale effects, micro-sociological phenomena matter because their effects can be seen on people involved in everyday life. Indeed, it is often easiest for us to see ourselves in the “micro” part of sociology where symbolic action occurs. In other words, these everyday micro-sociological interactions through the use of commonly shared symbols or language allow us to make sense of the actions of others and to be part of society.

There are many different approaches to micro-sociological analysis. Perhaps, the most prominent is symbolic interactionism, which was developed on the basis of work by George Herbert Mead in the early twentieth century and pioneered by Herbert Blumer. This approach emphasizes that people develop their identities and their senses of how society works and what constitutes fair play in the course of their interaction with each other. It is linked theoretically to the pragmatist school of American philosophy, which emphasizes the ways that not only social order but also all knowledge is achieved in practically situated action.

A second major line of micro-sociological analysis is rooted in the European philosophical tradition called phenomenology. This emphasizes close observation of human experience and especially the ways that the basic categories of understanding are formed. This has been developed directly in the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and followers like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (see Part VIII in Vol. 1), and has been a major influence on “ethnomethodology” – an approach developed especially by Harold Garfinkel and colleagues in California. Ethnomethodology refers to the methods ordinary people use to construct their own everyday understandings of social life, confronting practical challenges and shaping reality through the ways in which they conceptualize it. In this sense, it is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach to the study of culture (ethnos).

Still, a third approach reveals some similarities to each of the others; however, it is also distinct. This is the idiosyncratic, but highly influential, sociology of Erving Goffman. Goffman built his approach to micro-analysis on the basis of Durkheim’s social theory, trying to show how the sort of large-scale phenomena Durkheim analyzed was produced and reproduced in interpersonal interaction. Much interaction is ritualized, he suggested, in ways that make it reinforce the social order and prevent it from becoming highly disruptive. Goffman also developed theoretical approaches to aspects of communication, institutional analysis, and perhaps most famously the presentation of self in everyday life, that is, how we show ourselves to others (and simultaneously determine which aspects are visible and which hidden).