Unit 5 Interaction and social structure

1. What are the four sociological views on interaction processes?

When two people are engaged in face-to-face conversation, they are involved in social interaction. In their interactions with others, people reciprocally influence one another's attitudes, feelings, and behaviour. The interactions are organised by the statuses that participants occupy and by the roles that they play. How do people create a shared social world through these social interactions? Sociologists have developed four perspectives on this problem.

First, symbolic interactionists suggest that people achieve interaction by using symbols to convey common meanings attributed to events or objects. According to George Herbert Mead and his followers, the meaning of social reality is constructed through symbolic interaction: a handshake, for example, is a symbolic expression of friendly greeting in our society. The same gesture or phrase can have different meanings in different contexts: a long stare can mean anger or romantic interest, depending upon the person looked at and the social circumstances. One important part of social interaction is role taking: we often put ourselves in the place of those with whom we interact, and thus come to know their feelings and intentions better. The process of role taking allows us to anticipate the response of others to a contemplated action: sometimes we choose not to act in a certain way because we anticipate the response of other interactants and we decide that this response is not desired. According to Mead and other symbolic interactionists, we play out roles in our mind before we speak, as we imagine how others are likely to respond.

Second, the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman sees life as a theatrical performance with " actors" following " scripts" (or roles) on various " stages." For example, people at bars try to communicate certain impressions of themselves. Their behaviour, talk, and dress tell others that they are here to have a quick beer or, alternatively, to find a new friend. According to Goffman, this " performance" is a process of managing the impressions that one hopes to leave with others. Different behaviour occurs in different regions of social space, as people try to create impressions that are appropriate for one occasion or another. For example, waiters may use obscene or vulgar language when talking " backstage" in the kitchen, but they may use proper and polite language when talking with customers " frontstage" in the dining room. The goal of the dramaturgical approach is to reveal the images that people create as they present a carefully constructed " self to others in social interaction.

Third, ethnomethodology exposes the taken-for-granted, routine assumptions that allow people to create order in everyday life activities. Ethnomethodology is an attempt to understand how people make sense of their social interactions. Harold Garfinkel reveals the rules governing routine behaviour by devising experiments that intentionally violate these assumptions. For example, many unspoken agreements and understandings occur in normal barroom interaction. What would happen if a customer ordered a drink " on the rocks, " and the bartender returned with a glass full of granite pebbles rather than the expected ice cubes? Interaction at bars goes smoothly and predictably because the people involved assume routinely that a drink " on the rocks" means a drink served over ice cubes. At moments when the expected social world seems to break down, we can appreciate the unstated, often unnoticed, assumptions that ordinarily keep it tied together.

Fourth, social exchange theorists like Blau and Homans see social interactions as rational calculations of mutually beneficial transactions. Simply stated, " You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." Social exchange theory is an example of rational choice theory, which holds that people weigh the anticipated gains and losses before choosing a course of behaviour. The norm of reciproc­ity requires that what we give in social interaction should be more or less equivalent to what we get in return. On a busy night at the bar, for example, the bartender might serve his loyal customers before strangers because he knows that the loyal customers will return even on the slow nights. Such obligations are important for establishing ties among participants in social interaction.

2. What are networks, and why are they important for understanding social interaction and social structure?

Most people have many different kinds of social relationships with many different people. The people whom we know and interact with regularly also interact among themselves to a greater or lesser extent. This web of social relationships among people who are linked together (directly or indirectly) through their various communications and dealings is called a network. Without much effort you can draw pictures of the networks in which you are a member: put yourself at the centre, arrange your friends and acquaintances around the centre, and draw lines (signifying relationships) connecting you to them. Then draw lines between those friends and acquaintances who can be linked in turn by ties of friendship, for example. You will begin to see that you are linked to several tightly linked clusters of people who are connected together by lines, but that in some cases you are the only person to link one cluster to another. Our linkages and connections, the networks in which we participate, are consequential for our opportunities.

Networks vary according to three characteristics. First, density refers to the degree to which all possible links among people are " filled" in fact with some kind of social relationship. If everybody in a network is linked to everybody else, the density is 100 percent; if each person is linked to only half of the others in a network, the density is 50 percent. Second, reachability refers to the number of steps (or links) a given person must cover before reaching another person in a network. For example, I am good friends with Bob, but I have no relationship whatsoever with Bill. Bob and Bill are the best of friends, however. For me to " reach" Bill by travelling through established social ties would require two steps: thus the reachability in this case is two. Third, range refers to the number of any one person's direct contacts in a social network. My relationship to Bob is direct; my relationship to Bill is indirect (that is, I am tied to Bill only through my relationship to Bob and through Bob's relationship to Bill). If I were to add up all of my direct relationships—such as my relationship with Bob-the sum would be my range.

The identification and description of social networks is a powerful tool for analysing social interaction and social structure. In effect, a status (as defined above) can be regarded as a position in a social network. The characteristics of that network and of its members—density, reachability, and range-allow for predictions about expected patterns of social interaction. We can understand better how various resources (everything from love to money) flow among groups of people by analysing their networks of ties. For example, research has shown that weak ties (as in my " indirect" relationship to Bill, in the example above) are often more useful for certain purposes than strong (or direct) ties because those with whom we are linked weakly often have information or skills that we lack. Too often, those with whom we are tied strongly merely replicate the information or contacts that we already have, making them less useful, say, for getting a job. Network analysis has also proved useful for examining connections and links among corporations, nations, or public agencies. That is, the " nodes" of a network (the units connected in a network) need not be individual people but may be collectivities such as institutions or organisations. Network analysis allows the sociologist to move between the macro and micro levels of inquiry: we can investigate the network of people who work in a large corporation, and then build up from that network to see how the corporation is linked in turn to other corporations that make up its industry.

3. How do structural and functional perspectives explain differently the integration of individuals in the larger society?

Sociologists are interested in learning how the large-scale organization of society imposes constraints on the opportunities and behaviour of individuals. Some adopt a macrosociological focus and limit their attention to large-scale structures and processes while overlooking the details of everyday life (such as the interactions that occur in a particular bar on a particular day at a particular hour). Macrosocial inquiry takes various forms: those who adopt a structural perspective see large-scale social patterns in terms of how they impose themselves on the behaviour of individuals. That is, they try to describe characteristics of society as a whole in ways that illuminate patterns of interaction among individuals. Those who adopt a functionalist perspective ask how the large-scale patterns of society as a whole contribute to the integration of society. Those who adopt a power perspective see large-scale societal patterns as the result of efforts by those in power to impose an order that is most beneficial to them.

Structural sociologists find that the distribution of people among positions (or statuses) affects decisions even as " personal" as the choice of a marriage partner. Peter Blau uses two structural characteristics of society—heterogeneity and inequality—to predict rates of intermarriage (that is, the frequency of marriage involving people from different racial, ethnic, or religious groups). Heteroge­neity refers to the level of sameness or differentiation within a population: heterogeneity is high if a population is divided into many different racial, ethnic, or religious groups; it is low if most of the people are the same in these respects.

Inequality refers to the distribution of valued resources such as wealth or education. In a society with high inequality, such resources are concentrated in the hands of the few, while the majority have very little left to divide among themselves; inequality is lower when these resources are divided more evenly among people in a society. According to Blau, higher rates of heterogeneity and inequality encourage people to interact with people different from themselves, and this interaction in turn increases the rate of intermarriage. It follows that higher rates of heterogeneity and inequality generally promote rather than discourage intergroup relations of all kinds. Note that the prediction of higher rates of intermarriage in societies with higher heterogeneity and greater inequality makes no reference to the specific beliefs, values, or preferences of those choosing marriage partners. The behaviour is predicted from the structure of the society itself rather than from the beliefs and attitudes of individuals. The level of integration of a society is a consequence of the distribution of people among social positions (that is, of the amount of heterogeneity and inequality).

Functionalists take a different perspective on the large-scale integration of society. These sociologists see society as composed of specialised institutions: patterned behaviours and status/role relationships that fulfil basic societal needs. For example, economic institutions are responsible for mobilising scarce resources in order to produce and distribute goods and services that people need. Dissimilar institutions are held together in an ordered whole because each is assigned the task of satisfying a particular societal need; each contributes to the overall functional integration of the society itself. Without families, for example, new generations would not be socialised to the dominant values and norms of the society. The functional view has been criticised by sociologists who adopt a power perspective. In their view, the institutional arrangement of society as a whole results from the efforts of those in power to organise society in such a way that most of the benefits fall to them at the expense of others.