Action theories
- Created by: WignallRose
- Created on: 27-05-17 18:49
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- Action theories
- Max Weber: social action theory
- Adequate explanation includes two levels: cause & meaning
- Subjective meaning: instrumental & value rational action, traditional & affectual action
- Evaluation
- Schutz = too individualistic cannot explain shared nature of meaning
- Difficult to apply, can never be sure of others motives
- Phenomenology
- Husserl = the world only makes sense because we impose meaning and order on it
- Schutz: typification = organise experiences into shared meaning to stabilise & clarify meaning
- Ensure all 'speak the same language', members share a 'recipe knowledge'
- Natural attitude = society appears as a real objective thing out there e.g. posing a letter to order book
- Those involved in the process share the same meaning = cooperation
- Berger & Luckman = once its been constructed it becomes an external reality that reacts back on us
- Symbolic interactionism
- Mead = an interpretative phase comes between the stimulus and the response
- Our ability to put ourselves in other position is due to social interaction (child play)
- Mead = to function as member of society we need to see ourselves as others do
- Blumer = actions based on meaning which comes from interaction, meanings due to interpretation
- Labelling: definition (label), looking glass self (self concept from verstehen), career
- Goffman: dramaturgicalmodel = self is shaped through interaction depending on who you interact with
- Key elements: presentation of self and impression management
- Descriptive, ignores social structures, not all meaningful, how create meanings
- Garfinkel: ethnomethodology (EM)
- Interested in how social order is achieved, social order is 'ppt produced'
- Meanings are always potentially unclear (indexiclity), nothing has fixed meaning
- Reflexibility (common knowledge construct order) enables us to behave as if meaning is clear
- We strive to impose order by seeking patterns even if social constructs (coroner & suicide)
- Trivial findings (Craib), order through fictional explanations true for EM, ignores wider structures
- Structure and action
- Giddens = structure seems to exist independently of any individual
- It constrains our behaviour but structure also depends on action (language)
- Rules and resources can be reproduced by human action
- Society's rules contain a stock of knowledge about how to live
- We reproduce these structures due to need for security
- Society's rules contain a stock of knowledge about how to live
- Rules and resources can be changed by human action
- We reflectively monitor our actions and deliberately choose a new course of action
- Evaluation
- Archer = undermines capacity of structures to resist change
- Craib = doesn't explain, just describes
- Fails to apply his theory to large scale structures (economy & state)
- Craib = fails to unite structure and action
- Giddens = structure seems to exist independently of any individual
- Max Weber: social action theory
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