Action theories

• Types of action


  • Instrumentally rational action
  • Value rational action
  • Traditional action
  • Affectual action
• Instrumentally rational action


  The actor calculates the most effective means of achieving a goal, such as a capitalist calculating the best way to maximise profit by lowering wages
• Value rational action


  Action towards a goal the actor views as desirable for its own sake, such as worshipping their god so they go to heaven. Here, there's no way of calculating if the means to the goal are effective
• Traditional action


  Customary routine or habitual action the actor does because they've done it before, with no conscious thought or choice going into it
• Affectual action


  Actions that express emotion, ie weeping from grief, lashing out in anger
• Weber sees affectual action as important in generating and political movements whose leaders attract a following with their emotional appeal
• Levels needed to fully understand human social action theory

  • The level of cause - explaining the objective structural factors shaping people's behaviour
  • The level of meaning - understanding the subjective meanings individuals attach to acts
• Weber's theory is a valuable corrective to the over-emphasis theories like functionalism and Marxism put on structural factors, and shows we have agency to act how we wish
• Schutz (1972) argues Weber's theory is too individualistic and therefore unable to explain the shared nature of meanings - the person raising their hand at an auction knows they are placing a bid, but how does everyone else know they applied that meaning to their act?
• Weber's emphasis of verstehen (putting ourselves in someone's shoes to see their subjective viewpoint) doesn't work as we'll never truly understand their meanings simply because we can't be another person
• Mead's work formed a basis for later interactionist theories
• Mead argued that human behaviour is shaped by the role-taking process, where we imagine how others see us and then act accordingly
• Blumer systematised Mead's ideas and identified 3 key principles of symbolic interactionism
• Key principles of symbolic interactionism

  • Our actions are based on meanings we give to events, situations, people, etc
  • These meanings come from the interaction process, and are changeable/negotiable rather than fixed
  • The meanings we give to situations result from interpretative procedures we use, e.g. taking the role of the other
• Blumer's argument is that although our actions are partially predictable because we internalise the expectations of others, it's not completely fixed - there is always some choice/negotiation in how we perform our roles
• Labeling theory shows how the self is shaped through seeing individuals as the passive victims of labels applied to them
• Goffman argues that we actively construct our self by managing people's impression of us
• Impression management


  We seek to present a certain image of ourselves, and we must control the impression our performance gives to do so
• Goffman compares this to the stage and backstage of the theatre
• Phenomenology


  A philosophical approach that describes things as they appear to our senses, and argues we can never have definite knowledge of what the world is like outside our mind
• Ethnomethodology (EM)


  The opposite of phenomenology, viewing reality as an ongoing practical accomplishment
• Garfinkel (1967) argues that the world only makes sense because we impose meaning and order on it by constructing mental categories that 'tidy' the info coming from our senses
• Schutz's phenomenological sociology applied the idea that categories and concepts we use aren't unique to ourselves but shared with other members of society
• Typifications


  Categories that enable us to organise our experiences into a shared world of meaning
• Schutz argues that the meaning of any given experience varies according to the social context - the difference between raising your arm in class vs at an auction
• Typifications stop meanings from becoming unclear/unstable, as they are shared between members of society and used to communicate. Social order would be impossible without typifications
• The phenomenological view argues that society has a shared world/stock of commonsense knowledge/typifications that allow society to be orderly
• A counter-argument is that this view forgets that it is structures in the first place that socialise and therefore teach us typifications, such as the family, education and religion
• Indexicality


  The idea that the meaning of an action depends on the context in which it occurs
• Reflexivity


  Refers to using or drawing on one's own knowledge in everyday actions to make sense of the social system
• Ethnomethodology draws attention to how we actively create an understanding of the social system/functions, showing that these are social facts, not objective foundations
• If everyone creates understanding by using and reproducing typifications, then there is no reason to accept that these have any objective basis
• Marxists argue that commonsense knowledge reflects the interests of the dominant class
• Giddens' structuration theory combines the structural and action perspectives, arguing that structure and agency are two sides of the same coin
• Through our actions, we produce and reproduce structures, which then constrain and enable our future actions
• We reproduce existing structures through our actions because we have a need for ontological security - to feel the world is stable and predictable
• Despite a tendency to maintain the status quo, Giddens argues that agency can change structures in two ways: 1) we can reflexively monitor our actions and deliberately choose a new course, and 2) our actions can have unintended consequences that change the world in ways we didn't intend
• Evaluations of Giddens' theory argue that it underestimates the capacity of structures to resist change, and that it is not a true theory but just a description of social life