History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
Sociology: An Introduction
(Part E)
by
Charles Lamson
Major Sociological Perspectives
Sociological perspectives are sets of ideas and theories that sociologists use in attempting to understand various problems of human society, such as the problem of population size, the problem of conflict between populations, the problem of how people become part of a society, and other issues that we will encounter throughout this analysis. Although human ecology (a study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments) remains an important sociological perspective, it is by no means the only one employed by modern sociologists. Other perspectives, to which we now turn, guide empirical description and help explain social stability and social change.
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Interactionism
Interactionism is the sociological perspective that views social order and social change as resulting from all the immense variety of repeated interactions among individuals and groups. Families, committees, corporations, armies, entire societies---indeed, all the social forms we can think of are a result of interpersonal behavior in which people communicate, give and take, share, compete, and so on. If there were no exchange of goods, information, love, and all the rest---that is, if there were no interaction among people obviously there could be no social life at all.
The interactionist perspective usually generates analyses of social life at the level of interpersonal relationships, but it does not limit itself to that micro level of social reality. It also looks at how middle and macro-level phenomena result from micro-level behaviors or, conversely, how middle- and macro-level influences shape the interactions among individuals. From the interactionist perspective, for example, a family is a product of interactions among the set of individuals who defined themselves as family members. But each person's understanding of how a family ought to behave is a product of middle- and macro-level forces: religious teachings about family life, laws dealing with education or child support, and so on. And these are always changing. You may have experienced the consequences of changing values that cause older and younger family members to feel differently about such issues as whether a couple should live together before marrying. In sum, the interactionist perspective insists that we look carefully at how individuals interact, how they interpret their own and other people's actions, and the consequences of those actions for the larger social group.
The general framework of interactionism contains at least two major and quite different sets of issues. One set concerns the problems of exchange and choice: How can social order exist and groups or societies maintain stability when people have selfish motives or being in groups---that is, when they are seeking to gain as much personal advantage as they can? The second set of issues involves how people actually manage to communicate their values and how they arrive at mutual understandings. Research and explanations of the first problem fall under the heading of "rational choice" (or exchange theory), while the second issue is addressed by the study of "symbolic interaction." In recent years these two areas of inquiry have emerged as quite different yet increasingly related aspects of the study of interaction.
Rational Choice: The Sociological View
Adam Smith, whose famous work The Wealth of Nations (1776) became the basis for most subsequent economic thought, believed that individuals always seek to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. If over time they are allowed to make the best possible choices for themselves, they will also produce an affluent and just society. They will serve others, even when they are unaware that they are doing so, in order to increase their own benefit. They will choose a constitution and government that protect their property and their right to engage in trade. They will seek the government's protections against those who would infringe on their rights or attempt to dominate them, but the government need do little more than protect them and allow them to make choices based on their own reasoning.
You may have already encountered this theory, known as utilitarianism, in an economic or political science course. In sociology it is applied to a variety of issues. Often this rational choice view of interaction is referred to as exchange theory because it focuses on what people seem to be getting out of their interactions and what they in turn are contributing to the relationship or to the larger group. In every interaction something is being exchanged. It may be time or attention, friendship, material values (e.g., wages or possessions), or less calculated values such as esteem or allegiance. The larger the number of interacting members, the more complex the types of exchanges that occur among them. When people perceive an interaction as being one way, they begin to feel that they are being exploited or treated unfairly and will usually leave the relationship or quit the group. In industry, for example, if workers feel that they are not being paid enough for their work, they may form a union, bargain collectively with the bosses, or even go on strike. But in doing so each worker will weigh potential benefits against potential losses---losses in pay, in esteem, in friendship, and so forth. The choices are not always easy, nor are the motivations always obvious. When many values are involved, the rational calculation of benefits and costs becomes even more difficult.
Rational-choice models of behavior prompt us to look at patterns of behavior to see how they conform to and depart from normal expectations of personal profit and loss. But those models do not always identify the underlying values. How we can learn what to value in the first place, how we communicate our choices and intentions, how we learn new values through interaction---all are subjects that require other concepts besides those found in rational-choice theory of behavior. Such questions lead us toward research about how human interaction is usually carried out and understood by people and their daily lives.
Symbolic Interactionism When we make choices about our interactions with other people, we may be said to be acting rationally. But there are likely to be other forces shaping our behavior as well. Our choices tell other people about us: what we like, what we want to become, and so on. Indeed, the way people dress, the way they carry themselves (body language), the way they speak to each other, and the gestures they make convey a great deal of information that is not always intentional or expressed in speech. Some forms of communication give information without speaking it, or speak one thing and mean another. But words are of great importance too, and the content of communication is made explicit in words and sentences. Socialists refer to all these aspects of behavior as symbolic interaction. From the symbolic interactionist perspective, society itself tends to be seen as a mosaic of little scenes and dramas in which people make indications to themselves and others, respond to those indications, align their actions, and so build identities and social structures.
Symbolic interactionists call attention to how social life is "constructed" through the mundane acts of social communication. For example, in all the choices people make---their joining of friendship groups, their learning of the informal rules, their challenging and breaking all those rules---the social order, or culture, is actually "constructed." Erving Goffman, whose work was mentioned in an earlier post, is known for his research on those processes. Goffman applied the symbolic interactionist perspective in the study of everyday interactions such as rituals of greeting and departure, of daily life in asylums and gambling houses, and of behavior in the streets and public places. His work examines how people behave in social situations and how their "performances" are rated by others.
The power of symbolic interactionism lies in its ability to generate theories about how people learn to play certain roles and how those roles are used in the social construction of groups and organizations. However, if we want to think sociologically about more complex phenomena, such as the rise of bureaucratic organizations or the reasons why some societies experienced revolutions, we also need the concepts developed by two other perspectives: functionalism and conflict theory.
Functionalism
Is society simply the sum total of countless micro-level exchanges and communicative interactions, or do organizations within a society have properties independent of the actions of individuals? When we speak of the family, the army, the corporation, or the laboratory, we generally have in mind an entity marked by certain specific functions, tasks, and types of behavior. The army requires that its members learn to engage in armed combat, even if that is not what they will be doing most of the time. The family requires that its members behave in nurturerent ways toward one another. The farm requires that those who run it know how to plant and harvest. Individual interactions may determine how well a given person performs these various tasks. But it is the larger organization---the army, the family, the farm that establishes specific ways of behaving, of doing the work of that organization, which the individual must master. In this sense the organization, which exists longer than any of its members, has its own existence.
The functionalist perspective also asks how society manages to carry out the functions it must perform in order to defend itself against attackers, produce the next generation, and so on. From this perspective the many groups and organizations that make up a society form the structure of human society. The social structure is a complex system designed to carry out the essential functions of human life. The functions of the family, for example, is to raise and train a new generation to replace the old; the function of the military is to defend the society; the function of schools is to teach the next generation the beliefs and skills they will need to maintain the society in the future; and a major function of religion is to develop shared ideas of morality.
When a society is functioning well, all its major parts are said to be well integrated and in equilibrium. But periods of rapid social change can throw social structures out of equilibrium. Entire ways of life can lose their purpose or function. When that happens, the various structures of society can become poorly integrated, and what were formerly useful functions can become dysfunctional.
Consider an example in agrarian societies, in which most people work the land, families typically include three generations, with many members in each generation living close to one another. Labor is in great demand; many hands are needed where there are no machines to perform work in fields and barnyards and granaries. The emphasis on early marriage and large numbers of children found in the agrarian family is highly functional for such a society. But when the society industrializes and its agriculture becomes mechanized, families may continue to produce large numbers of children even though the demand for farmlands has decreased. When they grow up, those children may migrate to towns and cities. The migrants are likely to continue to value large families and to have numerous children, but if there are a limited number of jobs in the cities, they may join the ranks of the unemployed and their children may grow up in poverty. In this situation the family can be said to be poorly integrated with the needs of the society; the value of large family size has become dysfunctional: It no longer contributes to the well-being of groups or individuals.
Conflict Theory
A major flaw in the functionalist perspective is the fact that we have rarely seen anything approaching equilibrium in human societies. Conflict and strife appear to be as basic to society as harmony, integration, and smooth functioning. In the 20th century alone, two world wars and many civil wars disrupted the lives of millions of people. Almost as devastating was the Great Depression of the 1930s, the most severe economic slump in modern history. Worst of all were the nightmares of the Nazi Holocaust and the purges of Stalinist Russia, in which more than 20 million people were exterminated.
The world wars, the depression, and the Holocaust shocked and demoralized the entire world. They also called into question the optimism of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social philosophers, many of whom believed in the promise of progress through modern science and technology. Between 1914 and the end of World War II, modern ideas and technologies were used for horrible purposes often enough to disillusion all but the most ardent optimists. Bewildered intellectuals and political leaders turned to sociology to find some explanation for those horrors.
One explanation was provided by Marxian theory. According to Marx, the cause of conflict in modern times could be found in the rise of capitalism. Under capitalism, forms of exploitation and domination domination spread. For example, in the early period of industrial capitalism, workers were forced to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week; in less developed areas of the world, large populations were virtually enslaved by the new colonial powers.
At the heart of capitalism, for Marx, is conflict among people in different economic classes, especially between those who control wealth and power and those who do not. Marx argued that the division of people in a society into different classes, defined by how they make a living, always produces conflict. Under capitalism this conflict occurs between the owners of factories and the workers. Marx believed that class conflict would eventually destroy or at least vastly modify capitalism. His theory is at the heart of what has come to be known as conflict theory or the conflict perspective.
In the 1960s, when protests against racism and segregation, the Vietnam War, pollution of the environment, and discrimination against women each became the focus of a major social movement, the conflict perspective became more prominent. It clearly was not possible to explain the rapid appearance of major social movements with theories that emphasized how the social system would function if it were in a state of equilibrium. Even Marxian theory did not do a very good job of predicting the protest movements of the 1960s or their effects on American society. The environmental movement and the women's movement, for example, were not based on economic inequalities alone, nor were the people who joined them necessarily exploited workers. Sociologists studying the role of conflict in social change therefore had to go beyond the Marxian view. Many turn to the writings of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who argued that conflict is necessary as a basis for the formation of alliances. According to Simmel, conflict is one means whereby a "web of group affiliations" is constructed. The continual shifting of alliances within this web of social groups can help explain who becomes involved in social movements and how much power those movements are able to acquire.
The concept of power holds a central place in conflict theory. From the functionalist perspective society holds together because its members share the same basic beliefs about how people should behave. Conflict theorists point out that the role of power is just as important as the influence of shared beliefs in explaining why society does not disintegrate into chaos. Power is the ability of an individual or group to change the behavior of others. A nation's government, as we will see in a later post, usually controls the use of force (a form of power) to maintain social order. For sociologists who study conflict and power, the important questions are who benefits from the exercise of power and who loses. For example, when the government intervenes in a strike and obliges workers to return to their jobs, does the public at large or the corporation against which the workers were striking benefit most? And what about the workers themselves? What do they gain or lose? Such questions are Central to conflict theory today.
The Multi-Dimensional View of Society
Each of the sociological perspectives leads to different questions and different kinds of observations. These are extremely powerful analytical tools. Anyone that masters them and learns to apply them in appropriate ways will have an immense advantage over more naive observers of the ever-changing parade of social life. From the ecological perspective come questions about how populations can exist and flourish in various natural and social environments. From the interactionist perspective come questions about how people get along and behave in groups and organizations of all kinds. Functionalism asks questions about how society is structured and how it works as a social system. And the conflict perspective asks how power is used to maintain order and how conflict changes society. These different perspectives developed as sociologists asked different questions about society. In contemporary sociology each continues to stimulate relatively distinct research based on the types of questions being asked. Yet a great deal of research combines the insights of different perspectives in ways that vastly increase the power of the resulting analysis.
*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 13-19*
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