Sociological Focus

Volume 40 Number 3 August 2007

Guest Editors Introduction: The Intellectual Legacy of Herbert Blumer: Theory, Method, and Contemporary Challenges Scott Grills 2007 North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address: Teaching and Learning and the Culture of the Regional Association in American Sociology Jay R. Howard Causality, Agency, and Reality: Plato and Aristotle Meet George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer Antony J. Puddephatt and Robert Prus Symbolic Interactionism and the Concept of Social Structure Alex Dennis and Peter J. Martin Extending and Broadening Blumers Conceptualization of Fashion: Adding Notions of Generic Social Process and Semiotic Transformation Phillip Vannini Mind, Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action Clinton R. Sanders

SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS Quarterly Journal of the North Central Sociological Association

Edited and published at the Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati, in association with Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado Volume 40 Number 3 Editor: Steve Carlton-Ford August 2007 ISSN 0038-0237 Associate Editor: Paula Dubeck

Guest Editors Introduction: The Intellectual Legacy of Herbert Blumer: Theory, Method, and Contemporary Challenges 247 Scott Grills 2007 North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address: Teaching and Learning and the Culture of the Regional Association in American Sociology 250 Jay R. Howard Causality, Agency, and Reality: Plato and Aristotle Meet George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer 265 Antony J. Puddephatt and Robert Prus Symbolic Interactionism and the Concept of Social Structure Alex Dennis and Peter J. Martin Extending and Broadening Blumers Conceptualization of Fashion: Adding Notions of Generic Social Process and Semiotic Transformation Phillip Vannini

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Mind, Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action Clinton R. Sanders Copyright 2007 North Central Sociological Association

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Call for Papers

A Special Issue of Sociological Focus

Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Health and Healthcare Jennifer Malat, Guest Editor

Sociological Focus solicits papers for a special issue titled Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Health and Healthcare. Papers that address processes and mechanisms affecting health status and/or healthcare quality, understudied populations, or understudied issues are of particular interest. The journal welcomes papers from a variety of methodological approaches. For further information about the special issue, please contact Professor Malat at the Department of Sociology, 1009 Crosley Tower, Box 210378, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0378 or email her at Jennifer.Malat@uc.edu. Send complete submissions to Sociological Focus, Department of Sociology, Box 210378, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0378, no later than December 7, 2007. Submissions should contain two printed copies of your paper (in ASA format), an electronic copy of the paper, and a $15 submission fee. Sociological Focus will forward manuscripts to the special issue editor. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Submission requirements may be found in a current (August 2006 or later) issue of the journal or at the journals Web site: http://www.ncsanet.org/sociological_focus/PUBINDEX.html

Call for Papers

A Special Issue of Sociological Focus

The Globalization of Crime: Focus on East Asia Liqun Cao and Shanyang Zhao, Guest Editors

Sociological Focus solicits papers for a special issue titled The Globalization of Crime: Focus on East Asia. This special issue focuses on the globalization of crime and its control. Topics may include, but are not limited to, testing of criminological theories with comparative data, crime control in East Asian cultures, human and drug trafcking, and various forms of emerging crimes such as Internet crime in East Asia. For further information about the special issue, please contact Professor Liqun Cao at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197 (e-mail: liqun.cao@emich.edu) or Professor Shanyang Zhao at the Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122 (e-mail: bzhao001@temple.edu). Send all manuscripts to Sociological Focus, Department of Sociology, Box 210378, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0378, by January 11, 2008. Submit two printed copies of your manuscript (in ASA format), accompanied by an electronic version of the paper on computer diskette, and a $15 submission fee (payable to Sociological Focus). Sociological Focus will forward manuscripts to the special issue editors. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Specic submission requirements may be found in a current (August 2006 or later) issue of the journal or at the journal Web site: http://www.ncsanet.org/sociological_focus/Pubindex.html

Editors Note

Welcome to the August 2007 issue. We are very pleased to present this years NCSA presidential address and four articles all focused on the current relevance of Herbert Blumers legacy. The presidential address marks our continuing effort to bring the annual conference to members who either did not have the chance to hear the address at the conference or who wish to revisit Jay Howards analysis of the changing role of regional sociological associations. He presents strategies for enhancing the relevance of regional meetings for high school teachers, undergraduates, graduate students, and professors at all levels. His essay on Teaching-and-Learning and the Culture of the Regional Association in American Sociology points out several ways to make sociology a more vital area for our disciplines diverse constituents. The four papers in this special issue, The Intellectual Legacy of Herbert Blumer: Theory, Method, and Contemporary Challenges are the direct outgrowth of an NCSA conference held in conjunction with the miniconference titled Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research 2005: The Intellectual Legacy of Herbert Blumer. Bob Pruss and Billy Shaffirs considerable efforts as conference organizers made the miniconference a success; Kathy Rowells work as NCSA program chair resulted in a seamless integration of the two conferences, enhancing both. These papers are the direct outgrowth of that joint conference. Scott Grills took on the tremendous work required to shepherd submissions from the conference through the review process, correspond with the anonymous peer reviewers, and mold the most successful papers into a coherent special issue. We know you will enjoy his thoughtful introduction to these excellent papers. Steve Carlton-Ford Paula Dubeck

Guest Editors Introduction The Intellectual Legacy of Herbert Blumer: Theory, Method, and Contemporary Challenges

This special issue of Sociological Focus is dedicated to the work of Herbert Blumer and his ongoing inuence on our discipline and our practice. I trust that readers will nd the articles included in this volume of interest to members of the sociological community more generally, rather than Blumer scholars more specically. Represented herein is a diverse range of voices, perspectives, and conceptual inclinations. All are rmly grounded in the range of questions that Blumers work encourages us to ask. Readers will nd that collectively, these articles comment directly on concepts and themes that have become central to the Blumerian contribution to the discipline: the critique of variable analysis, the limits on importing natural science models into our discipline, the analytical importance of an attention to generic social process, the concept of joint action, the sociological relevance of Meadian notions of self and mind, and the framing of social structure in action terms. If one were to identify the single unifying theme of this volume, it would be the importance of social process for contemporary sociology. I do not modify the term sociology here quite intentionallythat is, I do not limit the importance of these works to symbolic interaction or to interpretive thought. I join with Maines (2001), Prus (1996), and Stryker (1989), who, in different ways and in different contexts, argue for the realization within the discipline that interactionist ideas have permeated sociological thought. Even those outside the tradition, and in fact those who might hold themselves and their work to be critical of the tradition, have, nevertheless, incorporated Blumerian notions rather centrally into their work without necessarily attending to intellectual debts that may have been lost within the development of the discipline over time. In this context it is tting that the underlying theme of the volume is social process. For it is perhaps Blumers insistence on the study of the activities of people (and the interrelated emphasis on process, duration, situation, subculture, and meaning) that has most changed our discipline. This inuence is reected in the articles that follow. In their article Causality, Agency, and Reality: Plato and Aristotle Meet George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, Antony J. Puddephatt and Robert Prus frame the concept of causality in process terms. By drawing out some of the parallels and sympathies shared between classical Greek scholarship and the pragmatist-infused theories of Mead and Blumer, the authors encourage readers to consider models of causality that are not dependent upon antecedent variables but rather attend to the ways in which people enter causal processes.

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Likewise, Alex Dennis and Peter J. Martin (Symbolic Interactionism and the Concept of Social Structure) encourage readers to recognize that Blumers work is not so much astructural as it is part of a larger interactionist tradition that offers a processually located alternative to structural approaches. The authors extend Blumers critique of concept formation and apply it to the concept of structure. By so doing they offer a challenge to sociological determinisms. In Extending and Broadening Blumers Conceptualization of Fashion: Adding Notions of Generic Social Process and Semiotic Transformation, Phillip Vannini attends to an aspect of Blumers research that is rarely the focus of the more casual readerhis work on fashion. This article addresses the two key Blumerian themes of social process and the problem of meaning. By attending to the process of semiotic transformation foreshadowed in Blumers work, Vannini reframes and names this work explicitly in generic social process terms and extends the relevance of the original work. In his article Mind, Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action, Clinton R. Sanders encourages us to seriously and thoughtfully consider the notion that nonhuman animals engage in joint action. By so doing, Sanders encourages a critical reexamination of a rather central interactionist notion. The result is a lively argument wherein peoples relationships with companion animals are understood in the context of an interaction sequence where both parties attempt to assume the perspective of the other. These articles share an interest in understanding human group life in action terms. A commitment to the fundamental premises of a Blumerian symbolic interaction holds consequences not only for how we approach the empirical world but also for the concepts we use to make sense of the social worlds we share. In this volume are thought-provoking articles that have relevance and saliency far beyond the specic substantive interest that marks them. I close with a word of thanks. I wish to thank Steve Carlton-Ford and the editorial board of this journal for supporting this project. To the authors, I very much appreciate your commitment to this special issue and your willingness to share your ne work with us. I must also thank the many anonymous reviewers that were a part of the behind-the-scenes work that is an essential part of any enterprise such as this. Likewise, my thanks to Michael Wehrman, editorial assistant with Sociological Focus, for exercising his organizational skill throughout. Scott Grills Professor of Sociology and Vice President (Academic and Research) Brandon University Scott Grills received his PhD from McMaster University. He is coauthor of The Deviant Mystique (Praeger 2003) and editor of Doing Ethnographic Research (Sage 1998). He has previously served on the editorial board of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology and the interdisciplinary journal Dianoia. He can be reached at Brandon University, Manitoba, Canada, R7A 6A9 (grills@brandonu.ca).

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REFERENCES
Maines, David. 2001. The Faultline of Consciousness: A View of Interactionism. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Prus, Robert. 1996. Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research. Albany: State University of New York Press. Stryker, Sheldon. 1989. The Two Psychologies: Additional Thoughts. Social Forces 68: 4554.

2007 North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address: Teaching and Learning and the Culture of the Regional Association in American Sociology
Jay R. Howard*
Indiana UniversityPurdue University Columbus

In this essay, I examine the role of teaching and learning in the culture of the regional association in American sociology. I analyze the programs of (1) the 2007 joint meeting of the North Central Sociological Association (NCSA) and the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS); (2) the 2007 annual meeting preliminary programs of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS), the Pacic Sociological Association (PSA), and the Southern Sociological Society (SSS) along with the 2006 annual meeting programs of the MSS and NCSA, as well as the American Sociological Association (ASA); and (3) the 1991 NCSA and 1992 ASA annual meeting programs. I identify program trends with regard to teaching, professional development, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research on higher education. I conclude by identifying regional association annual meeting best practices regarding each of these areas.

When trying to settle on a topic for my NCSA Presidential Address, I was a bit overwhelmed. I dont remember my proseminar courses in graduate school addressing this occasion! Given the lack of guidance from my graduate training, I decided to take a look at what others have done with their presidential addresses. There seemed to be several approaches. A rst approach to presidential addresses is to take advantage of your captive audience and subject it to a talk on your area of research specialization. There are some presidential addresses of this type that have succeeded magnicentlyfor example, Kent Schwirians 2005 NCSA Presidential Address in which he analyzed the 2002 SARS outbreak in the Peoples Republic of China. He captivated us with stories of the outbreak and how political decisions contributed to the infection of more than 8,000 people and the deaths of 774 in just a few months. I thought about subjecting you to my areas of research specialization. But a dirty little secret about presidential addresses that take the Im going to make them listen to a talk on my area of research in focused detail approach is that despite the occasional smashing success such as Schwirians SARS talk, most presidential addresses of this type are deadly dull.

*Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to: Jay R. Howard, IUPUC, 4601 Central Ave., Columbus, IN 47203, jhoward@iupuc.edu.

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A second approach to presidential addresses is to attempt to assess the state of sociology as a discipline. Now, I am not arrogant enough to try to assess the state of the discipline as a whole. So I also scratched the assess the state of sociology approach off the list of possibilities. Well, sort of. Im not arrogant enough to address the state of sociology as a discipline, but as NCSA president, Ive had to spend a lot of time thinking about the role of the regional association in American sociology. In reviewing previous NCSA presidential addresses, I took note of Bruce Keiths 2004 talk examining the contextual and historical relationship between the national and regional associations in American sociology. He and I have had many discussions regarding the role of regional associations in general and the NCSA in particular. One outcome of those discussions was the creation of the NCSA Future Faculty Programbut more on that later. So taking my lead from Keith (2004) and building on his ndings, I want to take a look at one of the roles of regional associationspromoting effective teaching and greater learning in sociology. I also want to examine the role of the regional association in encouraging the professional development of sociologistsa task that clearly overlaps with promoting more effective teaching and greater learning. Why should we care about these issues? Arent professional conferences all about research? Why bother with a focus on teaching and professional development in the regional associations? There are a host of reasons why we need to pay more attention to these issues. First, accreditation organizations, state legislatures, and university administrators are all paying increasing attention to the assessment of teaching and learning. This year the governor of Texas proposed tying increases in funding for higher education to exit exams for college graduatessort of a No Child Left Behind program for higher education (Fisher and Hebel 2007). The students Academic Bill of Rights, which purportedly seeks to ensure that faculty members do not use their classroom position for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination has gained a hearing in several state legislatures (Horowitz 2006; Lipka 2006). Faculty members are increasingly being asked to provide assessment evidence regarding student learning outcomes. I think there is little doubt that others are beginning to take a careful look at what is happening in college classrooms. Perhaps we should apply our sociological imagination to our own daily setting and provide evidence of how sociology contributes to students learning to think critically and to see how social structures inuence their lives. Another of my favorite presidential addresses was Maxine Atkinsons (2001) address to the Southern Sociological Society, which focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Atkinson was a trailblazer in daring to use a regional association presidential address to talk about teaching! She stressed that in a culture of higher education increasingly concerned with educational reform, we need to make sure we have our house in order. A focus on effective teaching and the assessment of student learning can help us through the process of such initiatives as post-tenure review one of those things that state legislatures frequently demand. On the one hand, we should be concerned with teaching and learning because outside forces are going to make us document our contribution to the university whether

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we like it or not; on the other hand, we should be concerned with teaching and learning because it is the right thing to do. As the father of a college student, I face those tuition bills. I want to be certain that my child is learning something as a result of my signicant nancial investment in her education. It has been instructive to be on the other side of the equation for a while. Admittedly, many of our students are coming to us so that they can get a high-paying job when they graduate. But part of the bargain is they should get an education along the way. We have an obligation to offer them oneeven when they arent always sure they really want to be bothered with it.

THE ROLE OF REGIONAL ASSOCIATIONS IN AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY

Keith (2004) noted that regional sociological associations largely emerged in the 1930s in an effort to provide sociologists access to professional conferences because travel difculties and expense prevented many sociologists from attending the national meetings of the American Sociological Association. In essence, the meetings of the regional associations attempted to be mini-ASA meetings providing sociologists the opportunity to present their work and learn about the latest research ndings. Indeed, this continues to be a major and important goal of regional associations today. However, times have changed. Despite all the air-travel hassles that followed September 11, 2001, travel to the national meetings of the ASA is certainly cheaper and easier than it was in the 1930s. Many more faculty members can and do participate in the national association today than did in the 1930s. In particular, faculty members from research-oriented institutions have tended to focus their participation on the more prestigious national meetings. Keith (2004) suggests the result is that the regional associations, with some clear exceptions, largely serve the needs of faculty from institutions that do not grant PhDs in sociology. Keith (2004) examined ve major regional associations in American sociology: the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS), the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS), the North Central Sociological Association (NCSA), the Pacic Sociological Association (PSA), and the Southern Sociological Society (SSS). He found these regional associations to have much in common and to be diverging from the American Sociological Association (ASA). One of Keiths key ndings was that regional associations underutilize the populations they represent. The NCSA, squeezed in the area not claimed by the MSS and ESS, draws primarily from only three states: Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. This leaves the NCSA by far the smallest of the regional associations. Each of the other four regional associations is comparable in terms of membership, ranging from just under 1,000 members to roughly 1,300 members in 2003. By estimating the population base of prospective faculty and student members, Keith (2004) revealed that regional associations fall far short of their potential membership, with the NCSA reaching only about 11% of its potential population of faculty. Another key nding of Keiths (2004) analysis is that constituencies of the national and regional associations are diverging. Regional associations are increasingly serving

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faculty from four-year colleges, rather than from institutions granting MAs or doctorates. At the same time, it has proven difficult to attract members from two-year colleges. So whats a regional association to do? One strategy is to give up on doctoral institutions and focus exclusively on meeting the needs of faculty from two- and fouryear colleges, high school sociology teachers, and applied sociologists. However, as Keith (2004: 96) points out, 89% of graduates of those doctoral programs will end up with jobs at institutions that do not grant PhDs. Thus, regional associations have a role in the professional socialization of graduate students to prepare them for the types of jobs they are likely to nd when they complete their doctoral work. Additionally, graduate students constitute a signicant proportion of the membership of regional associationswe would be foolish to ignore them. So where do we go from here? I will offer some direction based on analysis of where we have been and where we are currently as regional associations. In particular, I am interested in the role of professional associations in promoting effective teaching and learning in sociology and in providing professional development opportunities for faculty members and graduate students. I believe these are important foci if regional associations are truly going to appeal to and meet the needs of faculty at two-year and four-year institutions and graduate students in doctoral programs. Clearly, everyone from state and national legislative bodies to accreditation agencies is interested in assessment of student learning. Likewise, given the seemingly always tight job market for sociology PhDs, anything that graduate students can do to better prepare themselves for jobs at the types of institutions where they are likely to work is a good thing. In addition, an increasing number of institutions is looking for ways of documenting faculty commitment to improvement and professional growth. Given these national trends, regional associations have an opportunity to stake out new ground and meet the needs of their constituents in ways we have not previously done.

RESEARCH METHODS
First, I examine the program of the 2007 combined annual meeting of the North Central Sociological Association and the Midwest Sociological Society. If we step back and look at the big picture, what are we doing? Second, I compare the preliminary programs of the 2007 annual meetings of the ESS, PSA, and the SSS to the 2006 programs of the NCSA and MSStheir most recent programs as separate associations. Next, I compare these with the 2006 program of the ASA. Finally, I make a comparison of the NCSA and ASA programs of 15 years ago with 2006 programs. By analyzing what we are doing with regard to teaching and learning as well as professional development in regional associations and the ASA, I hope to identify what were doing well, where we could improve, and what people in K-12 circles call best practices. I began by analyzing the conference programs to identify (1) teaching sessions, (2) professional development sessions, (3) sessions directed specically toward undergraduate students, (4) sessions directed specically toward graduate students, and (5) sessions focused on research pertaining to higher education. I dened teaching

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sessions as any program session that focused on the teaching of a particular course (e.g., Teaching Social Problems), focused on a particular pedagogical strategy (e.g., service learning), or any meeting that focused on teaching included on the program (e.g., a meeting of the teaching committee). If a single session combined teaching and research, I counted it as a teaching session if 50% or more of the paper topics were teaching-focused. For roundtable sessions with multiple tables with distinct topics, I counted each table with a topic that focused on teaching as a separate session. Professional development sessions were dened as guidance or advice for faculty members in areas other than teaching (e.g., Surviving the First Few Years on the Job or How to Negotiate with Your IRB). Undergraduate sessions were dened as sessions designed for the benet of undergraduate students (e.g., Applying to Graduate Schools) or sessions designed to give undergraduates an opportunity to present their work (e.g., undergraduate paper or poster sessions). Most graduate students present their research as a part of regular sessions at regional association meetings. However, some regional associations, such as the Pacic Sociological Association, have specially designated sessions for graduate student research, if the students prefer to present in a session that includes only other graduate students. These sessions, along with sessions directed toward graduate students (e.g., academic job search sessions), were labeled graduate student sessions. Finally, I identied sessions as research on higher education sessions if they addressed topics relevant to higher education but were not clear about teaching or professional development. For example, this category included sessions on such topics as Socioeconomic Status and Achievement in College and 21st Century Campus Race Relations. Because these sessions on research on higher education apply the sociological eye to our own institutional context, I believe they make a contribution that is qualitatively distinct from sociological research on other social institutions and processes.

2007 MEETING OF THE NCSA/MSS

As Table 1 shows, there are 40 teaching sessions on this years NCSA/MSS program, accounting for roughly 12% of the total program. There are sessions on teaching particular topics (e.g., Strategies for Teaching Politically Charged Topics), on teaching particular skills (e.g., Teaching Quantitative Literacy), on teaching particular courses (e.g., Rethinking the Introductory Sociology Course), and on the use of particular pedagogical strategies (e.g., The Use of Music in Sociology Classrooms). This years program also shows a commitment to professional development for sociologists with sessions that cover such topics as publishing (e.g., A Conversation with Journal Editors), funding sources (NSF Funding Opportunities), research skills (e.g., Social Analysis Tools from the Census Bureau), and mentoring (e.g., Feminist Mentoring). There are 14 professional development sessions on the program, which account for about 4% of the program sessions. Our commitment to students, as judged by the 2007 NCSA/MSS program, is weaker. There are only three sessions specically directed toward undergraduate

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Table 1. 2007 North Central Sociological Association/Midwest Sociological Society Joint Annual Meeting Program Sessions by Session Type Sessions Total 1. Teaching MSS/NCSA 2007 338 40 (12%) Sample Session Titles Strategies for Teaching Politically Charged Topics Teaching Quantitative Literacy Rethinking the Introductory Sociology Course The Use of Music in Sociology Classrooms A Conversation with Journal Editors NSF Funding Opportunities Social Analysis Tools from the Census Bureau Feminist Mentoring Undergraduate Research Poster Undergraduate Student Paper Competition Undergraduate Perspectives Graduate Student Paper Competition Feminists in Graduate School: Negotiating a Chilly Climate 21st Century Campus Race Relations Financial and Structural Issues in Higher Education Assessing the Collegiate Student Culture Self-perception of Student Achievement

2. Professional Development

14 (4%)

3. Undergraduate

3 (1%) 2 (.5%) 10 (3%)

4. Graduate

5. Research on Higher Education

1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 Combined

69 (20%)

studentsan undergraduate paper competition session, an undergraduate poster session, and a session called Undergraduate Perspectives. We also have only two sessions focused specically on graduate studentsa graduate student paper competition session and a session titled Feminists in Graduate School: Negotiating a Chilly Climate. The combined sessions specically directed toward undergraduate and graduate students account for only 1.5% of the program. Finally, we have research sessions on the topic of higher education. The NCSA/MSS joint program features ten such sessions, about 3% of the program. These sessions include such topics as Financial and Structural Issues in Higher Education, Assessing the Collegiate Student Culture, and Self-Perceptions of Student Achievement. In sum, roughly one of every ve sessions, 69 of the 338 sessions on the 2007 NCSA/MSS program, cover one of these ve topics: teaching, professional development, undergraduate students, graduate students, or research on higher education. This, of course, leaves about 80% of the program for sessions that are primarily traditional sociological research sessions. The question is: Is this the ideal balance? Is this

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balance in the long-term best interests of the NCSA, MSS, and other regional associations? A way to begin answering that question is to compare the NCSA and the MSS with other major regional associations, the ESS, the PSA, and the SSS. Are our approaches similar to or different from theirs?

COMPARING THE REGIONAL ASSOCIATION PROGRAMS

While our 2007 joint meeting of the MSS and the NCSA was a tremendous success, with over 1,500 sociologists in attendance, it is unique. There were more sessions and more participants in 2007 than in years past for both organizations. It is possible as well that the nature of the program changed because of our collaborative efforts. Therefore, in order to compare the programs of the MSS and the NCSA with other regional associations, I took the 2006 nal programs of the MSS and the NCSA and compared them with the 2007 preliminary programs of the ESS, the PSA, and the SSS. Table 2 presents the results of this comparison. Teaching Sessions in the Regional Associations The ve regional associations committed an average of 12% of the program to teaching sessions. The NCSA had the most teaching sessions both in terms of the number of sessions (30) and the percentage of the program focused on teaching (30%). The
Table 2. 2007 Eastern Sociological Society, 2007 Pacic Sociological Association, and 2007 Southern Sociological Society Preliminary Program Sessions and 2006 North Central Sociological Association, 2006 Midwest Sociological Society, and 2006 American Sociological Association Final Program Sessions by Type Regional Association Mean Percentage

Sessions Total 1. Teaching 2. Professional Development 3. Undergraduate 4. Graduate 5. Research on Higher Education 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 Combined

NCSA 2006

MSS 2006

ESS 2007

PSA 2007

SSS 2007

ASA 2006 608 48 (8%) 34 (6%) 5 (1%) 5 (1%) 5 (1%) 97 (16%)

99 197 272 228 165 30 22 12 20 14 (30%) (11%) (4%) (9%) (8%) 5 16 9 6 5 (5%) (8%) (3%) (3%) (3%) 4 10 4 14 14 (4%) (5%) (1%) (6%) (8%) 4 4 0 11 2 (4%) (2%) (0%) (5%) (1%) 0 6 1 21 4 (0%) (3%) (.004%) (9%) (2%) 43 58 26 72 39 (43%) (29%) (10%) (32%) (24%)

12% 4% 5% 2% 3% 28%

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ESS (12 sessions, 4%) had the fewest teaching sessions and the lowest percentage of total sessions dedicated to teaching. The MSS (22 sessions, 11%), the PSA (20 sessions, 9%), and the SSS (14 sessions, 8%) were clustered between these extremes. As with the 2007 MSS/NCSA program, the teaching sessions fell into four categories: (1) teaching topics covered in multiple courses, (2) teaching particular skills, (3) teaching specic courses, and (4) pedagogical strategies. The topics covered in the NCSA, MSS, PSA, and SSS were quite similar to each other. However, the ESS stood out because ve of the twelve teaching sessions at the ESS had titles that were generic. These included, Pedagogy (twice), Classroom Practice and Teaching, Pedagogy in Higher Education, and Teaching Substantive Topics. The other associations tended to have not only more teaching sessions than the ESS but sessions that were more focused. There were some unique approaches. The NCSA included a day-long high school teachers workshop in the program. NCSA teaching sessions were arranged so that at least one teaching session was scheduled in every regular time slot on the program, allowing members whose primary interest is teaching to attend those sessions. The NCSA also presented the teaching sessions as a program, allowing graduate students who attended ve teaching sessions the opportunity to earn an NCSA Future Faculty Program Certicate. This program was created in recognition that contributing to the professional socialization of graduate students is a valid and necessary function of regional associations. In both the call for papers and in the preliminary program, graduate students were encouraged to attend the annual meeting both to present their research and to earn a Future Faculty Certicate by simply attending a certain number of designated sessions and having the presiders initial a form. After the conference, graduate students who attended the appropriate sessions received a certicate certifying their completion of the NCSA Future Faculty Program. Professional Development Sessions in the Regional Associations Sessions emphasizing faculty professional development other than teaching, sessions focused on undergraduate or graduate students, and research sessions on higher education were less visible in the regional association programs than were teaching sessions. The MSS had the most professional development sessions with sixteen, accounting for 8% of the total program. Professional development sessions accounted for only 35% of the programs of the other regional associations. Publishing research, balancing work and family, obtaining tenure, and concerns of women and minorities in higher education were the most common topics. None of the regional associations attempted to offer professional development as a systematic program feature of the annual meeting. Sessions for Undergraduate Students Sessions for undergraduate students averaged 5% of the regional association program sessions. Both the PSA and the SSS had 14 sessions for undergraduate students8% of the ESS sessions and 6% of the PSA sessions. Both had many undergraduate paper, poster, and roundtable sessions. The MSS program included ten sessions for undergraduate students, including multiple paper and poster sessions. The ESS program

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primarily consolidated undergraduates into three poster sessions. The NCSA included undergraduate papers in three roundtable sessions. The SSS took what to an outsider appears to be the most systematic approach. Of the 14 undergraduate sessions on the SSS program, 13 were in two time slots early on Saturday morningthe nal day of the conference. This, in effect, places a mini-undergraduate research conference on the program of the SSS. Sessions for Graduate Students Because most graduate students participate in regular sessions at the regional associations annual meetings, it is perhaps not too surprising that there were fewer sessions directed toward graduate students than undergraduate students. The regional association programs averaged only 2% of the program sessions being directed toward graduate students. The PSA had eleven sessions for graduate students. This was due in part to a practice of having research sessions set aside for those graduate students who do not wish to participate in sessions with faculty members. Eight of the eleven PSA graduate student sessions were of this type. More typically, graduate student sessions featured graduate paper competition winners, offered advice on surviving graduate school, and presented information on the academic job search process. Higher Education Research Sessions Finally, research sessions on higher education typically accounted for only a small portion (3%) of the program sessions of the regional associations. The PSA was the exception with 21 sessions9% of the program. The theme of the 2007 PSA annual meeting was Sociology and the Academy: Its Current and Prospective Position. However, even without the 6 special presidential sessions on higher education, there were an additional 15 sessions dedicated to sociological examinations of higher education. In contrast, the NCSA had no sessions on the topic in 2006 and the ESS had only one higher education session in 2007. In total about 28% of the ve major regional association programs are dedicated to teaching, professional development, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research on higher education. How does this compare to what goes on at meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA)?

COMPARING THE REGIONAL ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE ASA

At the 2006 ASA annual meeting in Montreal, there were a total of 608 sessions on the program (see Table 2). Of these, 48 sessions, or 8%, were focused on teaching. This is two-thirds of the 12% average for the ve major regional associations. But the NCSA is a statistical outlier with 30% of the 2006 program dedicated to teaching. If you compare the ASA to the other four regional associations, the ASA has a comparable percentage of teaching sessions to the PSA (9%) and SSS (8%). It is not far behind the MSS (11%) and doubles the ESS (4%). In 2006 the ASA program featured 34 professional development sessions6% of the total program. That is more than any of the regional associations except the MSS,

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which dedicated 8% of the program to professional development. The regional associations, on average, dedicated a higher percentage of the program (5%) to sessions for undergraduates than did the ASA (1%). The ASA program had a similar percentage of sessions (1%) dedicated to graduate students to the regional associations (2%). Research on higher education did not receive much emphasis at the ASA meeting either, with only 1% of the program dedicated to the topic. In total, the 2006 ASA annual meeting dedicated 16% of the program to teaching, professional development, undergraduates, graduate students, and research on higher education, in comparison to 28% of the program at the regional associations. Only the ESS dedicated a smaller portion of its program (10%) to these ve areas. Perhaps it is logical for sociologys national association to have a stronger research emphasis in its program (84%) than the regional associations (ranging from 57% to 90%).

THE NCSA AND THE ASA: YESTERDAY AND TODAY

In order to consider change over time in the percentage of the NCSA and ASA programs dedicated to teaching, professional development, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research on higher education, I compared the 2006 NCSA program with the 1991 NCSA program of 15 years ago. I did not have easy access to the 1991 ASA program, so I compared the 2006 ASA program with the 1992 ASA program of 14 years ago. I discovered that although the number of sessions in the NCSA annual meeting has stayed about the same (near 100 sessions), the ASA has seen substantial growth from 377 program sessions in 1992 to 608 in 2006a gain of 231 sessions! (See Table 3.)

Table 3. 1991 and 2006 North Central Sociological Association and 1992 and 2006 American Sociological Association Final Program Sessions by Type Sessions Total 1. Teaching 2. Professional Development 3. Undergraduate 4. Graduate 5. Research on Higher Education 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 Combined NCSA 1991 104 15 (14%) 11 (11%) 5 (5%) 0 (0%) 4 (4%) 35 (34%) NCSA 2006 99 30 (30%) 5 (5%) 4 (4%) 4 (4%) 0 (0%) 43 (43%) Change 5 15 ( 16%) 6 (6%) 1 (1%) 4 4 8 ( 9%) ASA 1992 377 17 (5%) 28 (7%) 1 (.2%) 0 4 (1%) 50 (13%) ASA 2006 608 48 (8%) 34 (6%) 5 (.8%) 5 (1%) 5 (1%) 97 (16%) Change 231 31 ( 3%) 6 (1%) 4 ( .6%) 5 1 (na) 47 ( 3%)

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During this period the NCSA doubled the percentage of its program dedicated to teaching (15% to 30%) while the ASA increased from 5% to 8%. That is especially commendable given the overall increase in the number of program sessions at the ASA meeting. The real number of teaching-related sessions at the ASA went from 17 to 48, nearly a threefold increase! However, commitment to professional development has decreased. The NCSA has seen the percentage of its program dedicated to professional development cut in half. As far as I am aware, this was not an intentional decision. The percentage of the ASA program declined somewhat from 7% to 6%though the real number of sessions increased from 28 to 34. The NCSA has maintained roughly the same number and percentage of sessions dedicated to undergraduatesfrom ve to four (5% to 4%). The ASA has increased the number of sessions focused on undergraduates, but the percentage of the program is still less than 1%. In 1991, the NCSA had no sessions targeting graduate students and the ASA had none in 1992. In 2006, 4% of the NCSA program and 1% of the ASA program focused on graduate students. The NCSA program featured research on higher education in about 4% of the 1991 program, but no sessions in 2006. The ASA held steady with about 1% of the program in each year dedicated to research on higher education.

LESSONS LEARNED
So now that weve taken this descriptive tour of the programs of the regional associations in American sociology as well as that of the ASA, what can we learn from one another? Are there best practices? Are there opportunities and threats to take into consideration? I think there are several lessons to learn. The rst pertains to the signicant growth of the ASA program. This is further evidence that more sociologists are choosing to participate in the national ASA meeting. That is good news for the ASA and the discipline as a whole. I support sociologists participating in the ASA annual meeting. But given shrinking travel support in higher education, the increased participation in the ASA presents a challenge for regional associations. We have to work harder to attract and keep participants. What can regional associations offer to sociologists other than a shorter distance to travel to the meetings? What do we have to offer to sociologists at various stages of their careers? Let me emphasize that I am not suggesting that we quit presenting research at regional association meetings. Research has been and will always be an important part of our meetings. The problem occurs when research is treated as if it is the only thing that matters at the meetings. So lets continue to do good research and share it with our colleagues for critique and feedback at regional associations. But we need to do other things as well. What are the various regional associations doing well? How can we learn from one another? With regard to teaching, regional associations can learn from the NCSA. Organizing the program so that there is at least one teaching session in every time slot

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makes a lot of sense. Inevitably, at any professional conference there will be a limited number of sessions that pertain to the research agenda of any individual sociologist. So what should we do with the rest of the day at the annual meetings? Focusing on improving teaching and learning is one good use of that time. Every regional association should work to have at least one teaching-related session in every time slot on the program. I think the NCSA has also blazed some trails regarding teaching in a couple of other ways. First, the High School Teachers Workshop helps to build bridges between sociologists in higher education and those who teach sociology in high schools. If we want high school sociology courses to be truly sociological, we had better take the initiative to help those teachers develop effective courses. Second, the NCSA, in response to the challenge former president Keith (2004) set forth, has sought to become more graduate studentfriendly by organizing the teaching sessions on the program in such a way that graduate students can earn an NCSA Future Faculty Program Certicate. By taking steps to ensure that a teaching session is available in every time slot on the program, we can reward graduate students not only for presenting their research but for engaging in sessions that will help them be better teachers when we hire them as colleagues! The additional work to package what is already featured in the program in a fashion that will benet graduate students is minimal. And when we are hiring new colleagues, we need to give applicants credit for seeking to develop themselves as teachers as well as researchers. The regional associations have some good things in place with regard to teaching. But with the possible exception of the MSS, there is a lot of room for improvement with regard to professional development. If at the annual meeting of regional associations, we dont want sociologists to be drive-by participants who come in, present their papers, and leave, we need to offer benets that will encourage them to stay and engage in the meeting and the organization. What might do that? Every regional association program could include professional development sessions such as Surviving the First Years on the Job, Balancing Work and Family in Higher Education, Keys to Obtaining Promotion and Tenure, Strategies for Effective Department Chairs, Post-Tenure Review, Benets and Challenges for Sociologists in Administration, Strategies for Successful Departmental Reviews, Publishing in Scholarly Journals, and Writing Effective Book Proposals. Perhaps these sessions could be organized in such a way as to allow faculty members to earn a Professional Development Program Certicate from the regional association. Regional associations also need to take time to collaborate with community college faculty members when it comes to professional development. Community colleges are becoming the starting point for many students who will end up with a bachelors degree from another institution. We need to seek to meet the needs of and to learn from community college faculty. How can we organize regional association meetings to give community college faculty a reason to attend? First, I think an organized emphasis on teaching helps. The rst priority of virtually all community college faculty members is classroom teaching. How can we help them, as well as ourselves, become better teachers? Community college faculty may also be more likely to have participation in professional development activities as part of their job expectations.

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Can we organize our professional development sessions in a way that makes documentation of professional development easier for faculty who are expected to engage in it, regardless of the type of institution at which they teach? Second, we should avoid being paternalistic toward community college faculty members. We need to be willing to learn from them. For example, community college faculty members are more likely to have invested time and energy in assessing and documenting the contributions of sociology to general education. We need to ensure that these colleagues feel welcome and respected within our regional associations so that we can benet from each other. It will take a concerted, intentional effort to invite and involve these faculty members; since our associations have been focused so heavily on research in the past, many community college faculty members may not perceive the annual meeting program as having anything for them. Regarding undergraduate students, I think the regional associations could all borrow a good idea from the SSS. In 2007 the SSS, in effect, created a mini-undergraduate research conference on the last morning of the annual meeting. Undergraduate students could attend the rest of the meeting, taking in research sessions and keynote speakers, and nish by presenting their own work. There are a couple of challenges here. First, there will be a need to make undergraduate student membership affordable. Many colleges and universities are emphasizing undergraduate participation in research and even providing some travel funding. If regional associations make participation both affordable and nonthreatening by having a mini-undergraduate conference within our annual meetings, we may be beneciaries of this new emphasis in higher education. A second problem is nding faculty members willing to stick around for the last morning of the meeting to preside over and attend undergraduate paper sessions. Perhaps a good group to begin with is the regional associations teaching committee. Each teaching committee member could accept responsibility to chair one undergraduate research session as a part of his or her obligations as committee members. Alternatively, regional associations could create undergraduate committees to coordinate the miniconference within the meeting. Regardless, faculty members will have to step up and commit their time and energy to make this proposal work. Graduate students involvement in regional associations is unique. They are caught in a liminal stage between student and faculty member. However, in most ways regional associations treat graduate students more like faculty colleagues than like graduate students. But involving graduate students in the same way as faculty is not enough if we wish to entice them into joining regional associations and becoming long-term members. The aforementioned NCSA Future Faculty Program is one strategy for increasing graduate student involvement. Offering special sessions that include research only by graduate students, as does the PSA, may also be an effective way to allow graduate students the opportunity to present at a conferenceespecially for rst-time presenters. But graduate students could also benet by having special sessions directed to them each year. Some possible sessions for graduate students could be: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me during My First Year in Graduate School, Writing Effective Dissertation and Thesis Proposals, What to Look for When Selecting an Advisor, Negotiating the Academic Job Market, and even a session

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on How to Get More Involved in Your Regional Association: Opportunities for Graduate Students. These could be part of the Future Faculty Program or an additional benet of the program for graduate students. What about research on higher education? Perhaps this is my bias showing, but I think sociologists have a lot to offer by bringing the sociological imagination to our understanding of higher education. Most regional association members spend the majority of their waking hours in higher education institutions. We can take the tools of our discipline and help everyone understand why some students dont nish their degrees, why others dont survive even the rst year of college, and how race, class, and gender affect outcomes in higher education. It is ironic that sociologists are so effective at bringing sociological insights to others daily lives but are not always interested in turning a sociological eye upon their own world. The PSA is to be commended for making Sociology and the Academy the theme of its 2007 program. Perhaps other regional associations should follow its lead and occasionally make the institution where we live, higher education, the focus of our annual meeting.

THE ROAD AHEAD

If I may be so bold as to think that you believe some of these proposals are worth pursuing, where do we go from here? The next step is the hard part. It is up to the members of the NCSA and other regional associations to make changes happen. Regional associations are voluntary organizations. Things get done only because members want them done and are willing to work to see them accomplished. Which of these initiatives grabs your attention? Which would you like to see happen? Step up and volunteer. Talk to members of the NCSA Council or the leadership of other regional associations. Talk to your NCSA presidents (past, present, and elect). Push to ensure that the NCSA evolves the way you want it to. If the regional association in American sociology is to survive and thrive, it must change and evolve. It must give sociologists from all types of institutions and at every point in their careers additional and better reasons to participate. Consider this your call to action. Jay R. Howard is Professor of Sociology and Head of Liberal Arts at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Columbus. He served as the 20062007 President of the NCSA. His research interests range from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to religion and popular culture. He is a fellow of the P.A. Mack Center at Indiana University for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning. He also served as the 20062007 President of the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation Board of Trustees in Columbus, IN.

REFERENCES
Atkinson, Maxine. 2001. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Reconceptualizing Scholarship and Transforming the Academy. Social Forces 79: 12171230.

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Fisher, Karin and Sara Hebel. 2007. Texas Governor Seeks Financing Overhaul. Chronicle of Higher Education (February 16, 2007) available at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/ i24/24a03203.htm. Horowitz, David. 2006. After the Academic Bill of Rights. Chronicle of Higher Education (November 10, 2006) available at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i12/12b02001.htm. Keith, Bruce. 2004. Disciplinary Culture and Organizational Dissonance: The Regional Association in American Sociology. Sociological Focus 37: 83105. Lipka, Sara. 2006. Academic Bill of Rights Criticized. Chronicle of Higher Education (June 9, 2006) available at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i40/40a01202.htm. Schwirian, Kent. 2005. Globalization, Plague, and the Local Community: Healthcare Capacity, Politics, and the Microbe War. Sociological Focus 38: 151170.

Causality, Agency, and Reality: Plato and Aristotle Meet George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer
Antony J. Puddephatt
McMaster University*

Robert Prus
University of Waterloo

Causal theorizing in sociology is often presumed best handled in the domain of multivariate, quantitative variable research. In contrast, we argue that such theorizing may be more authentically accomplished within the theoretical and methodological impetus of symbolic interactionism. Analyzing notions of causality in the work of Plato and Aristotle, we consider their relevance for contemporary accounts of human group life with reference to the work of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. Rather than envisioning causality as a concatenation of external forces acting on people to produce outcomes, we focus on how people actively enter into the causal process through individual and joint action. Using the work of Plato and Aristotle, we bolster contemporary accounts of agency by locating the moving process of deliberation within the interplay of purposive activity, emotional states, bodily appetites, and changing character dispositions. Further, we show that agency as a conceptual locus point of social change is found not only in the spontaneity of linguistically enabled individuals but also in the emergent processes of deliberative interchange and collective action in the world.

Interactionist research is often criticized as antiscientic, astructural, and subjectivist in its depiction of social life (e.g., Grenier 1992; Huber 1973; Zeitlen 1973). Demerath (2002) has gone so far as to assert that causal theorizing is the purview of those who use a multivariate research strategy and that ethnographic researchers are left to generate merely descriptive theory. However, as Prus (1996, 1999) observes, these critiques are often based on partial and otherwise inadequate representations of the positions developed by George Herbert Mead (1934), Herbert Blumer (1969), Anselm Strauss (1993), and others working in Chicago-style interactionism (see Fine 1993; Reynolds and Herman-Kinney 2003). Nonetheless, these criticisms also reect

*We would like to thank Michael Adorjan, Robert Andersen, Tina Fetner, Steve CarltonFord, Scott Grills, Benjamin Kelly, Neil McLaughlin, Dorothy Pawluch, Aaron Segaert, and the anonymous reviewers from Sociological Focus for their critical commentary and suggestions at various phases of this project. Please address correspondence to Antony J. Puddephatt, Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Kenneth Taylor Hall, Room 722, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4M4, Canada.

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the unwillingness of interactionist scholars to incorporate the inuence of external, antecedent causes into their formulations of human group activity. Indeed, many interactionists also explicitly avoid considerations of causality in their work. Taylor and Bogdans (1984: 2) statement that the search for social causes is neither what this book is about nor where our research interests lie seems indicative of the distance from explanatory theory within the interactionist paradigm. Likewise, it is almost impossible to nd scholars who broach the topic of causality in the major qualitative methods manuals.1 Neither Denzin and Lincoln (2000) nor Reynolds and Herman-Kinney (2003) engage the issue of causality in any serious way within their collections. In contrast, the issue of causality has received a great deal of attention in the quantitative methods literature (Berk 1988; McKim and Turner 1997). Lazarsfeld (1959) outlined three essential criteria for establishing causal relations in variable analysis in social research. He lists these as: (1) antecedence; the cause must precede the effect in time, (2) correlation; the variables used must be empirically correlated together, and (3) there must be a control for spurious variables. Often added to these requirements is (4) the causal relationship identied should represent a reasonable expectation from some set of theoretical propositions. Since then, other quantitative scholars have invoked more exacting criteria for establishing cause in variable analysis. Cox and Wermuth (2001: 70) argue that (5) causal relations also ought to be found repeatedly in independent studies, especially if these are of somewhat different form. In this way, implied causal associations would be less peculiar to one particular survey and could be generalized across contexts. Cox and Wermuth further argue for (6) an increased attention to path analysis, where baseline variables are seen to affect intermediate variables, which then bring about effects seen in the nal response variable, to bolster proof of antecedence. Still, mindful of the philosophy of David Hume, many quantitative scholars (7) reject the imputation of causation to variable relationships entirely (Arjas 2001), and instead use the semantics of correlations and tentative generalizations. Nevertheless, the models constructed are still implicitly, if not explicitly, causal leading to conceptions of human behavior that are built upon the supposed deterministic properties of external structural conditions.2 Goldthorpe (2001) has observed that many quantitative researchers now treat causal relationships (8) in more probabilistic terms, such that the existence of causal variables do not guarantee a particular effect, but rather raise the probability of its occurrence. Further, Goldthorpe states that (9) the weakness of statistical methods is their inability to observe processes as they happen in real time, and asserts (10) the theoretical necessity of a focus on temporal processes, testing these with longitudinal designs. Further, Goldthorpe (2001: 15) stresses (11) the need to branch out into deeper, microsocial methodologies, due to the need for causal explanations of social phenomena to be grounded ultimately in accounts of the action and interaction of individuals. Arjas (2001: 59) agrees that ordinary statistical analyses . . . lead to generic conclusions . . . about cause and effect that have little contact with the true behavior and reasoning of the individuals considered. Given that some contemporary quantitative researchers locate a great deal of potential in qualitative, face-to-face

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approaches for their unique methodological abilities to study causal processes as they unfold in real time, it is particularly ironic that most symbolic interactionists have been reluctant to address the topic head-on. One reason for the neglect of causality in interactionist research may be that Chicago-styled interactionists have evolved from a tradition that has historically been set against structuralist approaches, and so still view themselves as the loyal opposition to positivist social science (Mullins 1973). The idea of studying causal relations may have been too closely associated with the very structuralist frameworks the interactionists were resisting.3 Blumer (1969) argued forcefully that such positivist methods are inauthentic and fail to respect the nature of their human subject matter. Blumers rejection of traditional variable-centered structural analysis would serve to rally the base and have the biggest impact on the interactionist tradition for years to come. Indeed, many of the Chicago-style symbolic interactionists (e.g., Loand 1976, 1995; Prus 1996; Strauss 1993) maintain that the dominant sociological emphases on variable analysis is misguided. This does not mean these scholars have ignored causal reasoning or structural explanations entirely. However, most Blumerian interactionists refuse to engage in causal analysis by reducing complex reality to survey variables and presumed or reied structural conditions that mysteriously act on people in deterministic ways (Prus 1999). Instead, the interactionists have tended to handle the issue of causality more implicitly, emphasizing the language of developing theoretical linkages, or attending to the evolution of social processes. Thus, although interactionists have actually laid out theories of causal relationships that consider the ways that people engage structural conditions in concrete empirical studies (e.g., Ferraro 1983; Prus and Irini 1980; Wiseman 1970), they have been reluctant to use the language of causality explicitly, probably because of its embeddedness in positivist frameworks. Despite this, some interactionists have been more explicit in the consideration of causality. Lindesmith (1981) argues that the pragmatist approach to scientic inquiry (specically Dewey and Mead) sees causes and effects as interactional properties of larger interdependent processes. To label something a cause, or an effect, depends upon its place within this larger process. Lindesmith contends that although sociologists often follow physics in their methodological constructs, biology is the better model, since it is based much more on whole systems of interdependencies rather than the isolation and control of variables (see also Gotschalk 1941). For Lindesmith, this biological analogy makes much more sense than does physics for the study of human societies, as the intention should be to study effects that stem from an irreducible interactional process as it goes on. More recently, Maines (2003: 10) has lamented the neglect of causation in symbolic interactionism, stating that the interactionist heritage is grounded in concerns about causation, using examples such as Thomas and Znanieckis (1918) Polish Peasant and Blumers (1990) study of industrialization. Maines argues that interactionists have been emphasizing all along what quantitative scholars have only recently begun to realize (e.g., Berk 1988; Britt 1997; Goldthorpe 2001)that causality in relation to group life must be treated indeterminately, with a central place for the role of human agency.

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In this spirit, we aim to develop a conceptualization of causality in more processual, interactionist terms with a concerted emphasis on the role of social collectives actively entering into the causal process. It must be recognized that humans are not passive mediums through which social forces work, but that they have the ability to enter into the causal process themselves as agents of change in their own right (Blumer, 1969; Prus, 1996, 1999; Strauss, 1993). Although people are not always successful or wise in their choices and activities, people have the ability to intervene in, and generate anew, causal sequences that may not be fully predictable by recourse to background conditions alone. To aid us in such a formulation, we draw not only on the foundational work of Mead (1934, 1938) and Blumer (1969) but also the early formulations of cause offered by Plato (420348 BCE) and Aristotle (384322 BCE). Although this may seem a conceptual disjuncture, Prus (2003, 2004) has indicated some of the useful affinities between classical Greek scholarship and interactionist ethnography. Scholars in the Greek era (circa 700 300 BCE) not only addressed the concept of causation in consequential ways, but they also considered these issues in materialist, humanist, and legalist terms. Further, these scholars have an understanding of agency that is richer and more nuanced than contemporary accounts, as it connects motivation and decisionmaking practices to changing character dispositions, bodily desires, and emotion. In the nal analysis, we hope to provide a conception of causation that indicates not only the ways in which people enter into the causal process but also how the agency of individuals and groups is contingent on the activities and interchanges of the social collective.

PLATO ATTENDS TO CAUSALITY

Plato is best known for his writings on theology, idealism, morality, and justice. Even though he is notably prescriptive in dening the moral order of the community in his two most comprehensive works, Republic and Laws, Plato remains acutely attentive to the processes and problematics of establishing and maintaining an assortment of institutions to regulate peoples lifestyles and participation within the community. Consequently, instead of merely prescribing and proscribing, as many moralists do, Plato frequently takes aspects of human group life apart, piece by piece, in more secular, pluralist terms. Plato offers a sustained dialectic analysis of a number of areas of human endeavor, such as politics, religion, poetics, friendship, rhetoric, education, scholarship, and science, often in ways that resemble American pragmatist emphases. Plato not only grounds much of his analysis in prototypic human situations, tendencies, practices, and deliberations but also examines these matters in extended, comparative detail. Thus, it is as a dialectician that Platos work is most signicant to the consideration of causality. Viewing dialectic analysis as the basis for developing a theory of knowledge, Plato takes a distinctively pluralist, generic approach to the matter. Despite the cynicism or totalizing skepticism often associated with Platos dialectics, Plato shows that although knowing may be problematic, it is essential for an understanding of the human condition. Although focused on causality more

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specically, the material we introduce here reects Platos philosophy of knowing more broadly and, as will become evident, has remarkable contemporary relevance. With Platos more distinctively pluralist, secular, and dialectic emphases in mind, we rst consider how Plato views causation as it operates in the material world. Second, we ask how he approaches the notion of cause more specically with regard to human behavior. As human cause is conceived to be intimately connected to deliberation and choice, this necessarily leads to a consideration of Platos theory of motivation and human action. Rather than providing an exhaustive consideration of Platos contributions to causality, we highlight those features that may be of particular relevance to social scientists in their respective research agendas. Hence, it is instructive to consider Platos explanations of physical changes in Statesman, where he contrasts contributory causes with the more nal or true causes in the physical world: Well then, lets look at two sorts of expertise that there are in relation to all the things that people do . . . one which is a contributory cause of production, one which is itself a cause. . . . Those which do not make the thing itself, but which provide tools for those that do tools which, if they were not present, what has been assigned to each expertise would never be accomplished: these are what I mean by the contributory causes, while those that bring the thing itself into completion are [true] causes. (281d-e) Plato clearly recognizes that one could identify an endless number of causes for the generation, existence, or depletion of anything, as the succession of causal chains continue backward in time ad innitum. As such, they are of little interest in the construction of what is meant, for Plato, as a true explanation. Instead, Plato believes that the development of a true explanation should be sought by recourse to the more nal and consequential phases of development. This argument relates to Lindesmiths (1981) insistence on the methodological decision to close the system at some point, and try to identify those features deemed most relevant to a particular investigation. This becomes especially relevant in the attempt to explain human behavior. As actions are most often the direct result of, and follow through, the immediacy of the deliberative process, scholars who are interested in the true causes of behavior ought to be more mindful of this more nal phase of deliberation that leads to and accompanies action. Beyond recognizing that deliberation is often the most nal cause sequentially, Plato considers the explanatory value of agency and the thought processes associated with choice in action that is distinctly human in character. The mere sequence of temporal succession is not as relevant for prioritizing a true cause for Plato in the case of human behavior. Rather, it is the more central moving force of deliberative action by the actor who enters knowingly into the causal process. The following excerpt, in which Socrates is speaking, indicates this emphasis: [I]n trying to tell the causes of everything I do, to say that the reason that I am sitting here is because my body consists of bones and sinews . . . the relaxation of and contraction of the sinews enable me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent. . . . If someone said that without bones, and sinews, and such things, I should not be able to do what I decided,

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he would be right, but surely to say that they are the cause of what I do, and not that I have chosen the best course, even though I act with my mind, is to speak very lazily and carelessly. Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. It is what the majority appear to do, like people groping in the dark; they call it a cause, thus giving it a name that doesnt belong to it. (Plato, Phaedo 98c 99c) At some point, one needs to strip away causal elements judged to be less central in trying to nd the most consequential explanation for action. Plato stresses the necessity of attending to the most central determining causes of action, those of human thought, deliberation, and choice. It is worth noting that Plato puts deliberation rst as the most central explanatory feature, over and above the nality of physical motion. This is justied in that muscular action can be seen as a sort of preexisting potential, and as such, a contributory cause; musculoskeletal action is like a tool that the act of deliberative thought puts into action. Further, since the deliberative process follows through the action temporally, deliberation is not entirely antecedent but also coexists with and follows after physical action. If deliberation is seen as the most consequential determinant of human action, it is important to understand Platos model of deliberation. Platos account of deliberation reveals a multiplex model of human motivation, deliberation, and action (see also Cooper 2000). Rather than taking a purely rational choice approach, Plato in Republic (Book IV) divides the human soul (also psyche [Greek], de anima [Latin]) into three separate spheres, all of which are seen to be active during the process of human conduct. These are (1) reason (the faculty of rational thought); (2) appetite (inclinations toward food, drink, sex, bodily pleasure); and (3) spirit (energy and associated emotions such as anger and excitement). Still, Plato denes virtuous activities as those actions that are guided in such a way that the appetite and spirit are adequately moderated by the faculty of reasoning. Plato locates reasoning within the inseparable nexus of appetite and emotion. As such, Plato holds that bodily appetite, emotional energy, and reasoning constitute the synergy for the human psyche, and thus, provide a complex integrated model for human motivation, thought, and action. For Plato, human deliberation involves an overlapping and often ongoing conict between the three areas of the human psyche. It is the human capacity for reason Plato prizes most highly, as it is this capacity that overrides, tames, or moderates appetite and spirit such that an individual can act justly in the world. Mindful of these themes, let us consider what Plato offers contemporary considerations of causation in social analysis. First, Plato provides a justication for the primacy of isolating nal or true explanations, especially in the case of human behavior. This is in opposition to questing after less relevant and potentially innite conceptions of contributory causes, which are shown only to allow for the true or nal causes of a particular act to occur. We contend that the central failing of most quantitative analyses is that, at best, they produce highly detailed, rigorous, and sophisticated models of contributory causes of human behavior. By drawing attention to correlations, time antecedence, and potential spurious variables, quantitative analysis

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provides knowledge about some of the working parameters of human action. However, virtually all quantitative data, including those focusing directly on attitudes and preferences, miss the nal and more determinative cause of human behavior the process of minded, deliberative, and adjustive activity. To explain peoples activities and the actual outcomes they experience with recourse to the most consequential causes, the nal analysis requires the unique theoretical and methodological toolkit of symbolic interaction and ethnographic research. We contend that to develop better, more thoroughgoing models of peoples behavior in certain situational settings, it is necessary to concentrate squarely on the conscious processes by which these contributory elements may be taken into account, utilized, avoided, or ignored in the construction of action. As such, external elements can be more connected to actor decisions (and given causal signicance) insofar as they become internal to deliberative action and enter into the minded thought processes of individuals and collectives as they construct lines of individual or joint action. Plato allows us to reevaluate what this phase of deliberation entails, and how we might reconceptualize our understanding of the human actor. Rather than providing a calculating or rational, means-ends model of motivation, Plato envisions deliberation as a dynamic, humanly engaged process. Reasoning does not occur in a vacuum as disinterested exercises in rationality (Descartes) or dialectic skepticism (Nietzsche) but unfolds within peoples concerns with purposive, meaningful activity amid the sway of human emotion and the temptation of bodily appetites. In short, deliberation is inseparable from the unity of reason, emotional energy, and the habits, preferences, and resistances that people develop. As such, these ought to be much more primary in the analysis of human action, which, as Plato teaches us, is extremely consequential in explanations of situational behavior.

ARISTOTLE ENGAGES CAUSATION

Although Aristotles considerations of the human condition are greatly informed by Platos scholarship, Aristotles approach to causality and the human condition differs in important respects. Whereas Plato emphasizes a dual-world metaphysics (sensate versus divine realities), Aristotle insists on the biological, material, and experiential constitution of human thought. Accordingly, Aristotle views the development of peoples psyches as evolving in an integrated, processual fashion within the context of community lifewherein human knowing and acting presupposes the acquisition of language. In relation to this, Aristotles notions of causation are informed by distinctions between inanimate objects, organisms, and humans as animals with the capacity for speech and recollectable memory. Like Plato, Aristotle envisions the concept of cause as necessary for explaining change in the world. Further, Aristotle recognizes that to understand how things work and how change occurs, the most relevant causes of change ought to be isolated and examined: [W]e must proceed to consider causes, their character and number. Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing until they have grasped the why of it (which is to grasp the

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primary cause) (Physics 194b1523). Viewing the mind as an emergent entity that develops through experience with the sensate world and through instructed association with others (see Spangler 1998), Aristotle realizes that causes may be viewed as terms people invoke or assign to things in their quest to know (develop meanings) things. It is important, thus, to acknowledge Aristotles awareness of the constructed quality of human knowledge claims. A simplied statement on Aristotles full conception of causality, his doctrine of the four causes, serves as a useful starting point for our analysis.4 The doctrine encapsulates the following features: (1) the matter or substance of which something is constituted; (2) the shape or form that something assumes; (3) the mover of the process or the source of the effect (the efficient cause); and (4) the end or purpose of the product or outcome (the nal cause). Although Aristotle clearly intends to encompass all physical instances in his statement on causation, he does not ignore the role of human agency. Nevertheless, commentators often present these notions in highly truncated forms and have tended to focus on purely physical or material notions of causality. We intend to consider what Aristotles conceptualization of the four causes does for an understanding of causality as a process and how human actors may enter into this process as active agents of change. Aristotles consideration of the rst cause (materials or components) emphasizes the importance of permanence and continuity in change: that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, is called a cause, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl (Aristotle Physics 194b2426). This way, the cause can be seen not only as existing antecedently but also as coexisting with the effect. This enables one to conceptualize causal relations as processes by which change does not happen in absolute terms, but rather occurs through a temporal phase, whereby continuities (e.g., the silver of the bowl) are as important as discontinuities (the changing of shape) in the larger moving process. This solves the problem of antecedence and concurrence, as materials and components are seen to meet both requirements. Further, the emphasis on continuity and change, as will become apparent, links closely with contemporary interactionist formulations (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934; Prus 1996; Strauss 1993). The second cause listed by Aristotle, that of the form or shape assumed, points to the constructed nature of causal propositions: the form or the archetype, i.e., the denition of the essence, and its genera, are called causes (e.g., of the octave the relation of 2:1), and the parts of the denition (Physics 194b2729). Indeed, in order to recognize effects and attribute causes to these effects, people must rst come to a denition of the essence to be explained. Aristotle was aware of the necessity of people imputing categories, meanings, and forms to things such that they can be conceptualized and indicated. Whereas Plato discusses these forms as eternal, divinely given entities, Aristotle views forms as constructed from the sensate experiences that take place in the process of engaging instances of things and attributing meaning to events in the world. The third efficient cause considered by Aristotle involves the primary cause, or what is considered the agent of change. This directly allows for the role of the human actor to enter into the causal process. Aristotle denes this third cause as the primary source of the change or rest: e.g., the man who deliberated is a cause . . . what makes

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of what is made and what changes of what is changed (Physics 194b30 33). Aristotle gives explicit credence to the fact that the human being, through the act of deliberation, can be the efficient cause of change in the human and material world. He allows the process of deliberation, or the activation of agency and choice, to take a central role in humanly engaged causal relations. This becomes much more evident in his considerations of responsibility and the attribution of blame in questions of morality and justice (see Nichomachean Ethics [NE], Rhetoric). It is here that the agent as cause becomes more central as a way to justly attribute blame or innocence to offenders. The nal cause considered by Aristotle is the sense of end or that for the sake of which a thing is done (Physics 194b34 35), which also allows for explanations to be constructed around human deliberation. An end may be purely materialistic and devoid of human intention. For example, a ower in bloom is the end that explains the change from a bud. However, an end may also be understood teleologically, in terms of human purpose. Thus, for Aristotle, the human denitions of purpose are necessary in explaining the causes of voluntary (as opposed to involuntary) behavior on the part of individual or joint activity. If Aristotle sees human action as constitutive of causal relations in social life, then what does his model of human action look like? Aristotle provides a highly complex theory of behavior and shows that human action can be brought about by a number of different causes, not all of which are voluntary. Aristotle recognizes, for example, that people are not always fully cognizant of, or able to fully control, their actions. In his consideration of ethical conduct, Aristotle (NE, Book III) contends that people not only act voluntarily (with awareness and choice), but also nonvoluntarily (without an awareness of situational parameters) and involuntarily (without choice). In Rhetoric (1369a510), Aristotle denes those forms of action that are not due to the agent in question. There is the explicit recognition that people often do things by chance (accidents, misunderstandings, unpredictability), compulsion (coercion by an external force), and nature (the activation of the human senses). Thus, it is important to recognize that these elements of conduct may enter into the causal processes of human group life in determinate ways and bring about unintended consequences. However, given our concerns with the role of actors intervening into causal relations as agents, we will turn to Aristotles view of voluntary activity and then more centrally to his account of deliberation and choice. Acknowledging habits, passions, and extenuating circumstances, it is apparent that not all voluntary actions are a result of conscious deliberation or choice. Habitual activity, for example, is voluntary, but does not require the exercise of deliberation to proceed. Still, Aristotle recognized the vital importance of habitual activity in generating ones character, and hence, ones predisposition to act in prescribed ways in the future: [B]y doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or condence, we become brave or cowardly . . . states arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of

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a certain kind. . . . It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference. (NE Book II: 1103b10 26) Aristotles admonition that people become what they do is consistent with the interactionist position that peoples relationships, knowledge of the world, and sense of self emerge from the intersubjective and corporeal web of mutually focused activity (Strauss 1993). In line with an interactionist motif, the Aristotelian self evolves through active learning and adjustment through social and practical experience (see also Spangler 1998). Aristotle also considers voluntary choices that are nonrational, and center more on appetite (food, drink, sex) or emotion (anger, fear). In sum, people often act in ways that reect involuntary or nonrational habits, appetites, desires, emotions, accidents, compulsions, or instances of ignorance. Indeed, Aristotles model of agency opens the way for social analysts to move beyond simplistic models of the self-aware actor who continuously makes use of a self-maximizing instrumental logic. Aristotle (NE, Book III, iii) states that people do not deliberate about everything but rather over those things over which they have some control that seem attainable, and that are dened as uncertain. Aristotle (NE, Book VI, ii) identies three aspects of the human psyche that are integral to action as well as peoples denitions of the truth. These are sensation, thought, and desire. Aristotle contends that sensations cannot in themselves generate rational action. He also observes that desire may provide direction, but that peoples desires are also inadequate to explain human behavior. The efficient cause of human action is to be found within the deliberative process. Still, for Aristotle, thought in itself moves nothing. Thought is consequential in causal terms only when it is manifested in action. Aristotle states that people engage in deliberative activity by unifying desire and thought to direct or regulate their actions. Equally consequential is Aristotles point that when people consider particular issues important, they are more likely to seek counsel or otherwise involve others in their deliberations. Therefore, Aristotles theory of agency is highly relevant to sociological accounts in that deliberation is not pursued solely on an individual basis, but occurs as a community phenomenon. Aristotles presentation of inuence work and tactical persuasion and resistance illustrates the ways in which deliberation, as an intersubjective process, may inuence the views and decisions of others. Outlining a set of operational tactics for embarking on inuence work, Aristotle is highly attentive to the processual and problematic features of human denitional and choice-making activities. Aristotles Rhetoric also indicates with remarkable clarity and depth how peoples emotions are socially malleable and can be manipulated and reshaped by others. As such, Aristotles consideration of the emotions not only attends to the ways in which peoples emotional sensations affect their decisions but also shows how speakers can tactically inuence (intensify or neutralize) others emotional states. Since peoples emotional states are inextricably linked to their reasoning processes, emotion is seen as both an obstacle and a resource for effective inuence work. More importantly, for Aristotle, emotion is not understood merely as an individually given phenomenon, but is actively mediated and reshaped through the intersubjective process. The direct

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integration of emotion into the tactics of persuasion and inuence work seems to be a much richer version than the model of interpersonal persuasion offered by Erving Goffman (1959). Indeed, Aristotles more integrated notion of emotions as genuine constituents of ongoing activity offers a much more vibrant picture of human group life. In short, Aristotle provides us a model of causality that not only allows for continuity and discontinuity in the unfolding of events but also for the direct involvement of human agents (as passionate, emotive, and biologically appetitive beings) in causal social relations. Finally, Aristotle has a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the fact that by engaging others in inuential terms, people may profoundly shape and reshape the experiences and denitions of reality and actions of others as individuals and collectivities. Thus, Aristotle effectively lays the foundation for a sociological theory that would root causality within the practices and activities of those who constitute the human community, as subgroups and selves evolve through the collectively based and situationally emergent processes of thought and action.

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD: PROCESS AND EMERGENCE

Like Aristotle, Mead locates agency as a prime mover of change not only in the human actors individual psyche but also in the linguistic process of deliberation in the social world. Of course, for Mead (1934), the act of deliberation is a fundamentally social process, in that the self-communication associated with reective thought is a microcosm of the same process seen in the larger community. Conceptualizing agency within collective interchanges rather than individual selves provides researchers many more potential departure points for conceptualizing causal processes as they take shape emergently in social life. As such, we will consider Meads various sources of innovation and spontaneity that could be seen as efficient causes of social change in the interchanges of the community. We hope this will highlight some of the lines of convergence between Meads pragmatist theories of causation and the lineage of the aforementioned Greek thinkers. As well, this may elucidate some of the areas in which Meads contributions help formulate a sharper conceptualization of causality in interactionist research, by identifying various sources of agency within the social process generally. Mead (1932, 1938) locates causality within process. Although many philosophers, most notably David Hume, have problematized the contradictory idea of antecedence and concurrence, Mead adopts a position similar to Aristotle and contends that specic changes can come about only through, and in relation to, a larger set of interconnected processes: the basis of this determination of the future by the past is found in the fact that something is taking place which has a temporal spread that reality cannot be reduced to instants. . . . Furthermore, the study of passage involves the discovery of events. . . . The relation of any event to the conditions under which it occurs is what we term causation (1932: 62). Also consistent with Aristotles insistence on substance (e.g., the silver of the bowl) for the necessity of continuity in explanations

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of change, Mead argues that change cannot be disconnected from the processes leading up to it. Instances of change can only occur within continuous processes or developmental ows: It is the enduring character of the experience that contains in it the continuity of nature, just the connection that Hume denied. There is something that continues. If there is something that continues, that which is there at the present time is responsible for what is going to be there in the future (1938: 647). Drawing inspiration from Darwinian evolutionary theory, Mead argues that forms are always to be explained as emerging from their connections (and continuities with) the various environmental conditions that gave rise to them. Particular events are always constituted by, and to be understood under, the larger processes that led to their creation. Although Mead emphasized the continuity of process and the need to understand instances as part of the larger processes with which they connect, he also placed a great deal of emphasis on emergence (Mead 1932, 1936, 1938). Following the vitalism of Henri Bergson, Mead argued that nature advances in ways that cannot be fully predicted from background conditions. Although science attempts to explain the natural world in abstracted and predictable ways, emergence, uniqueness, and the unpredictable are all parts of reality that cannot be adequately subsumed in a scientic cause and effect logic, except in a post-hoc way to t anomalous occurrences within accepted systems of thought. Thus, the state of nature carries with it this unique tension for Mead. On the one hand, instances are to be understood best within the larger processes and conditions out of which they emerge; yet the emergent event is often unpredictable and not fully reducible to background conditions and developmental processes. It is the advent of emergent anomalies that allows for innovation and creativity in science, technological design, and social life (see Puddephatt 2005). Emergent events that occur in the complex and interdependent sociality of the world (Mead, 1932) allow for the very locus points of change. As Lindesmith (1981: 88) observes, Mead saw discordant evidence and the unexpected to be the very growing points of science; it is in the nature of emergence that the growing points of social life nd their source as well. There is always an element of the unpredictable to emergent, ongoing events, at all levels of society (Chang 2004). As Maines (2001: 50) observes New forms are not found in old forms; they are found in the conditioning of emergent events, which are the adjustments to novelty and which give rise to change. The fact that individuals and groups have the capacity for self-consciousness and self-directed behavior makes emergence a much more central concern for the study of human life than in the natural sciences. As reective entities, individuals and groups are capable of projecting into the future through imaginatively role-taking in the physical and social world (Mead, 1938), and as such, can interject into, and change, would-be chains of events before they unfold in real time. The source of selfdetermination is found in Meads (1934) depiction of the biologic individual and his emphasis on the dialectical relationship between the I and the Me in the actors consciousness. The I refers to the actor operating on a set of prereective organic impulses in the present. Since these impulses are nonsymbolic and prelinguistic, they cannot be socialized and are biologically rooted. As time unfolds, the impulsive I

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moves into the past and is later objectied with language and monitored and assessed as the Me, then responded to by the impulses of the present I (Mead, 1934: 372). Thus, the I enters into the internal dialogue as an impulsive biological response to the learned, socialized, and language-based Me that represents the self as an object (Kolb 1944; Lewis 1979). As such, the I can be seen as an internal emergent within the actor that will respond to conditions and provide spontaneous inclinations within even the most routine and habitual contexts of action.5 Although Meads model stresses the spontaneous, intersubjective, reective, and activity-based nature of the human psyche, some weaknesses are apparent in comparing it with those cast by Plato and Aristotle. In comparison to these thinkers, Meads conception of the self seems to be almost entirely devoid of pleasure or emotional experience. For Mead, minds develop out of a natural tendency to adapt to problematic situations. We are left with a problem-solving social organism that is relatively free from affective concerns or bodily desires. This is where Aristotles notion of the mind as operating within an interfusion of passions, appetites, nonrational desires, and habitual tendencies provides a much richer model of human activity. Both Platos and Aristotles conceptualizations of the psyche as a conuence of reason with passions, emotions, and desires might provide a way to constitute Meads I with more detail, giving it more speciable substance. As suggested by Prus (2005), this opens up a fascinating arena of research in which scholars may begin to investigate the interplay of emotional and bodily states as they serve to inuence reasoning-related processes that go well beyond simplied images of the rational actor. As well as locating the potential for innovative change within the emergent progression of nature and the internal dialogue of creative individuals, Mead also locates a source for agency in the nature of physical and social action. With his colleague John Dewey, George Herbert Mead shares the rejection of a means-ends model of instrumental rationality that forms the basis for most economic as well as many sociological theories of human conduct. For Dewey and Mead, ends are not determined at the outset, such that action is the simple execution of predened and singular ends. Rather, ends are constantly emerging in the development of the act itself (see Mead, 1938). As Joas (1996) has shown, Deweys and Meads pragmatism can be seen as a debunking of microeconomic models of the rational actor. Because of the emergent nature of action, not all information is available before the act proceeds. Further, people have the capacity to monitor, assess, and adjust to their situations even as they are in the process of developing particular lines of action. Within this embodied dialectic the creativity of action (Joas 1996) nds its root; it is in the spontaneous and unpredictable emergence of the new in social action. Mead (1938) argues that the phenomenon of uniqueness and unpredictability is inseparable from ongoing experience. However, the efficient cause of change for Mead requires that we locate individual actors within emergent communities of action. Even when people act with direct intention, they cannot be fully aware of what effect other people or objects may have, nor can people know all of the things that will affect their own participation in the causal process. As objects unto themselves, then, people may monitor, assess, and adjust their activities (and interactions)

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even as they engage in particular lines of activity. By combining Meads recognition of the developmental ow of human consciousness in the specic development of the act with Aristotles insights into the tactical and emotional foundations of rhetorical activity, one can more directly locate the efficient causes of change within ongoing realms of collective interchange.

HERBERT BLUMER: PROVIDING THE METHODOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

[T]he failure of social scientists and psychologists to pay attention to the formation of social action by the acting unit is astonishing in view of the fact that such social action is what actually goes on in empirical social life. . . . The methodological position of symbolic interactionism is that social interaction must be studied in terms of how it is formed; its formation is a very different matter from the antecedent conditions that are taken as the causes of the social action and is not covered by any specication of such causes. (Blumer 1969: 57)

Revisiting Blumers (1969, 1971, 1990) theoretical and methodological emphases, we can see that he shares with Plato a dislike for diffuse, contributory causes as adequate explanations of human conduct. Further, Blumer shares with Aristotle the concern of locating efficient cause within the realm of deliberative practice. Like Mead, Blumer is acutely attentive to the concept of emergence and the human capacity for adjusting thought and activity even as one develops particular lines of action. As such, Blumer stresses the importance of analyzing the social act as the constitutive phenomenon of social life, and provides a theoretical and methodological agenda with which to do so within sociological research. Blumers emphasis on ethnographic inquiry allows for the situated isolation and study of efficient causes within the joint activities of small groups but also within the dynamics of larger organizational settings. This provides interactionists a unique ability to uncover and examine the socialinteractive locus points of the causal linkages found in social life. Mindful of the socially constituted and emergent nature of human group life, Blumer directly opposes psychological and structuralist models of human interaction, and contends that the social act itself is formative in character. Like Mead, Blumer envisions the ongoing interactive, adjustive process of the social act in formulating its outcome; the formative nature of the social act requires that it cannot be reduced to antecedent conditions alone. Thus, Blumer (1969: 71) emphasizes that the essence of society resides in an ongoing process of action not in a posited structure of relations. Without action, any structure of relations between people is meaningless. Thus, the central unit of analysis for sociologists is the social act. Although envisioning all meaningful individual activities as social acts by virtue of their embedded, linguistically meaningful contexts, Blumer stresses that stable structural systems are developed, maintained, and achieve viability only through deliberative action on the part of the people who have aligned themselves with these particular realms of activity. In other words, organizational entities create real effects on human life,

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or generate a more denite realization of action on the part of people, only when these essences are incorporated into the ongoing social process. Blumers methodology does not deter us from studying the effects of institutions and organizations. Rather, as Maines (1977, 1988), Morrione (1988), Strauss (1993), Prus (1999), and Maines and Morrione (2001) contend, Blumers methodology is uniquely suited to the study of organizations and institutions. Blumer does not deny correlations between increased industrialization and certain features that arise in social relations. However, he does argue that, far from being unilateral in direction, notions of causality in these cases are apt to be highly interactive, such that changing social relations may well bring about new forms of industrialization and vice versa. Beyond this, Blumer believes that it is mythical or ctional to claim that industrialization as a homogenous entity inuences social relations as a diffuse effect. No change can occur, Blumer argues, without concrete contact points at which these transformations can take place. These contact points do not have an independent existence but instead are mediated through the social process. Only by focusing on these points of meaningful activity and interchange, Blumer (1990) contends, is it possible to better understand the specic effects of increased industrialization on social relations and vice versa. By locating these contact points of experience, the quality, form, direction, and magnitude of various organizational directives can be examined at the particular points at which they enter into the deliberative processes of individuals or groups. Whereas Blumer recognizes that structural dynamics do occur, they are always achieved through interacting social collectives. Although acting in settings that have been created in various respects by their predecessors, it is people, through their activities, who generate, maintain, extend, readjust, disregard, dismantle, resist, and destroy the objectied features of community life. Distancing himself from presuming the deterministic effects of such antecedent structural or organizational conditions on the realization of human action, Blumer writes: Taking each other into account in this mutual way not only relates the action of each to that of the other but intertwines the actions of both into what I would call, for lack of a better word, a transaction a tting of the developing action of each into that of the other to form a joint or overbridging action. . . . The transaction (which I think is the real form of human interaction) is constructed or built up in the process of occurrence (1969: 109 110). Blumers emphasis on the dynamics of human interchange locates an emergent potentiality of agency, as an efficient cause of change, within the social act. Thus, although people may anticipate certain matters and outcomes before entering particular transactions (and may be correct in many respects), participants are unable to fully envision the actualized outcomes of formative social interchanges. As in Simmels (1978) analysis of exchange, Blumers transitive social act carries with it a creative and sui generis quality that is irreducible to the component parts contributed by individuals. As such, transitive social acts cannot be accurately anticipated through the previous intentions of individual actors alone (psychological reductionism), nor the structural preconditions in place (structural reductionism).

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Placing primary emphasis on the ongoing social process itself as the moving force of social relations, Blumer provides a methodological approach equipped to uncover the causal mechanisms of change as these take place within the assessments, actions, adjustments, deliberations, and interchanges of actors in particular settings. As a social process, change (and causation) takes place within the minded deliberations of individuals, in the deliberative interactions of small assemblies, in the activities that enable organizations to function, and the representative and media-enabled communications that allow people to relate to others at the most extended national and global levels. By focusing on the formative and developmental features of the social process as the central unit of analysis, Blumer has isolated the essential features of causal relations in the human community. Concentrating on the concrete contact points of change in social life, we may begin to examine the ways that the more enduring structural elements, meanings, and ideologies people have created over time enter into the more immediate instances of social process and are engaged by people in the maintenance or adjustment of the social order. By implementing the methodological emphases of exploration and inspection, social researchers can begin to isolate the more consequential elements of causal relations by recourse to their location in human action, thought, or deliberation as it takes place in social life. Only through investigations of the points at which human activity intersects with particular instances of social structure, institutions, and technology can we examine the ways people take part in and actively shape the causal processes that permeate social life and maintain or adjust the social order.

CONCLUSION: CAUSALITY IN PERSPECTIVE

Revisiting the concept of causality, we have examined and compared the approaches to the study of human knowing and acting developed by Plato, Aristotle, Mead, and Blumer, asking how their conceptions of causality might better inform social scientic research. Platos work shows us that the contributory causes of behavior, such as antecedent structural conditions (often measured by survey research) are much less relevant to the explanation of human behavior than the more immediate or nal causes leading to action. Further, Plato emphasizes that human deliberation and implementation are central for comprehending the production of human action. Aristotle enriches this position by stressing the centrality of human activity and, more specically, considering when and how people (deliberatively as well as inadvertantly and nonrationally) enter into the causal process as the efficient causes or prime movers of change. Although not denying the place of antecedent conditions or structural factors, at best these represent the contributory causes of human action. Because they miss or disregard the ways various structural features of organizational entities are actually dened, assessed, and adjusted to by people who actually encounter and deal with these systems, structuralist approaches neglect the efficient causes at work in the maintenance and change of the social order.

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As Blumer (1969, 1990) asserts, the agents of change are to be found not in the structural antecedents of action, but in the ongoing and formative process of social action. Moreover, for Mead and Blumer, as with Plato and Aristotle, the concept of agency as a prime mover of change in social life is found not as a quality held by individual actors, but rather in the emergent interchanges, deliberations, and events that arise in coordinated social activity. Actors often draw on or attend to structural and institutional parameters in constructing their lines of action, but these so-called factors should not be mistaken for primary determinants of behavioral outcomes. Since we stress that humans are able to enter into the causal process as agents of change, we also need to establish a workable model of human agency. Whereas Mead is attentive to people as biological creatures, his more general depiction of the human as a problem-solving agent gives little explicit attention to the role of emotionality. Blumer also distances himself from explanations that reect emotional dispositions, contending that such approaches reduce the social interactive process to pregiven psychological states. Both Plato and Aristotle, in contrast, envision the human psyche not only as an active, linguistically informed essence but also as a biological phenomenon that is deeply emotional, appetitive, and often inuenced by nonrational tendencies. Further, both Plato and Aristotle view actors as struggling for self-control amid their dispositions to act in a multiplicity of ways. In these respects, and mindful of his pronounced emphasis on activity, an Aristotelian model of the human actor has much to offer to a viable model of agency. Indeed, the behavioral predispositions, emotional energies, and appetitive desires claimed by actors in the construction of deliberative activity add considerable conceptual vitality to the Meadian concept of the agent. As a central feature of activity, Meads concept of emergence provides a solid locus point for change at all levels of social life (Chang 2004). As such, emergence ought to be isolated and examined conceptually and methodologically, with awareness of the ways that people as agents enter into this process. However, agency, as a prime mover of change, is found not only in peoples capacities for spontaneity with the reective process but also emerges through activity and in the course of community interchange. Blumer (1969) recognizes that the social act always contains in it the potential for social change in his consideration of the transitive qualities of social interaction; what emerges in discourse between actors is formative and thus impossible to fully predict from previous social conditions. Building on these thinkers, agency is conceptualized as a locus point of change that cannot be comprehended on an individual level but nds its way into the actions and interactions of the social collective. Only by examining and analyzing the specic contact points of structural change in peoples life-worlds through thoroughgoing attentiveness to human group life in the making can we begin to see how people engage or take structural elements into account and how these elements constitute part of the ongoing social process (Maines and Morrione 2001). Even here, these developmental, emergent structural elements ought to be considered contributory causes to the more immediate moving (causal) forces of the deliberative process surrounding social action. Thus, we contend it is deliberative activity, developed within the context of emergent processes of

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human group life, that is most central to notions of causality and related explanatory models in the social sciences. Rather than subscribing to the more simplistic, often ossied notion of structure that one nds in the social sciences, we must remember that structures achieve a consequential existence only insofar as they represent loci of activity. We do not deny the great many arrangements people have developed over the millennia or the potency of these matters for enabling successive generations of people to frame things in predictable ways. However, we need to be much more exact in dening what we mean by terms such as structure, culture, power, and the like. Instead of waving these concepts around like ags that are thought to establish dominion over all human matters, we need to examine how people accomplish activity in all of its known and enacted facets. We need to take activity apart, piece by piece, both in more immediate situated terms and as it is embedded in historical and developmental ows, to see exactly how people enter into the causal process and mediate emergent events in all of the manifestations of human group life. Herbert Blumers legacy reminds us to start with the examination of actual instances of social action, to investigate in more systematic and sustained terms how people encounter, adjust to, and reshape the ongoing ows of community life. Antony J. Puddephatt is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His areas of interest include sociological theory, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of science and technology. Robert Prus is a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo. A symbolic interactionist and pragmatist ethnographer, he intends to connect social theory with the study of human action in a direct, experientially engaged (community life-world) sense. He has written several books on the ways people make sense of and engage the life-worlds in which they nd themselves. These include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. At present, Robert Prus is tracing the developmental ows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c.700 300 BCE) to the present time. This involves a number of areas of western social thought including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, ethnohistory, education, politics, and philosophy.

NOTES
1. It might be noted that Glaser and Strauss (1967) never ignored the quest for causality, as they argued that by using the constant comparative method, variations in the group or dependent variable can be accounted for with recourse to conditional factors. Later work by Strauss and Corbin (1998) considers the causal linkages that occur in the conditional matrix of interactive responses from the group to changing structural conditions as they unfold as elements of the ongoing group process. Dey (1999) builds on Strauss and Corbins formulations,

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and adds that causal conditions might be usefully differentiated as those that are necessary, sufcient, or contingent to behavioral effects. Archer (2003) argues that when social actors encounter elements of social structure directly, they enter into the internal dialogue vis--vis the pragmatist notion of the me. This plays out in the psyches of actors and collectives in the deliberative process and serves to orient further social action that establishes or maintains structural conditions. 2. We do not deny the value of quantitative research for describing broad societal conditions or for providing indications of patterns and variations among categories and groupings. Clearly, survey materials can be useful in a wider array of policy contexts where one tries to describe and anticipate generalized patterns and trends (see Ulmer and Wilson, 2003). Still, we hope to show that the notion of causality is more authentically located within the theoretical and methodological impetus of symbolic interactionism and ethnographic research. 3. Contrary to this, Maines (2003: 11) argues that work by W. I. Thomas (1927), Robert Park (1925), and later, Irwin Deutscher (1973) as well as the Durkheimian aspects of Erving Goffman (1967), demonstrate that the roots of the interactionist paradigm did not ignore the impact of situational structural conditions, nor did Blumer (1990) ignore the importance of structure. Although Maines is correct that the early interactionists did not all ignore structural relations or causality in their analyses, there is no question that Blumer (1969) forged the interactionist paradigm in large measure in opposition to the more dominant structuralist approaches that would attempt to reduce the study of human life to variable analysis and quantitative measures of the presumed effects of social structure to attitudes and values. 4. As stated in Physics, especially book II, 194b196a; and Metaphysics, Book I: 980a983b; Book V: 1013a1014a. 5. It is this more spontaneous element of minded behavior that would provide the Meadian reply to Dennis Wrongs (1961) critique of the oversocialized conception of man in sociology. As fundamentally social as Mead envisions the human self, he recognizes that the human also is a biologic agent. As a result, the human self is never fully socialized, and constantly engages the more impulsive, emotional, active aspects of the psyche or human life-energy.

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Symbolic Interactionism and the Concept of Social Structure

Alex Dennis*
University of Salford

Peter J. Martin
University of Manchester

Although Blumer asserts that to deny the existence of structure in human society is ridiculous, just such a denial has commonly been attributed to him. The more conventional mainstream understanding of structure in sociology, however, is theoretically incoherent, as demonstrated by classic and modern studies of, for example, stratication. Blumers sociology is shown, with particular reference to its bases in the pragmatist tradition, to provide an alternative understanding of structure that is both theoretically coherent and capable of empirical investigation. Furthermore, it is capable of dissolving the dilemma of structure and agency in contemporary sociological theory.

In his remarks on the implications for sociology of the thought of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer emphasizes the point that, although Mead describes the social order as the outcome of collaborative joint action, such a position does not entail a denial of the existence of structure in human society. Such a position would be ridiculous (Blumer 1969: 75). Blumers critics would disagree, arguing that symbolic interactionism prevents the understanding of social structures and their constraining characteristics or of patterns of human organization such as class hierarchies or power constellations (Coser 1976: 157). Even apparently sympathetic commentators are prepared to accept that the perspective suffers from an astructural bias, and displays an unconcern with social structure (Meltzer et al. 1975: 113). More recently, Musolf (1992) has also accepted this criticism, arguing that only new directions in interactionist thought will allow the perspective to address the macrosociological concerns of power, inequality, and social structure. Ridiculous or not, then, the notion that Blumer denied the existence of structure has become widespread, from the publication of Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer 1969) to the present day (see, for example, the discussions in Denzin 1992: 56; Gouldner 1970: 379; Maines 1977: 236; Morrione 2003: xiv; Sauder 2005: 286). Our purpose here is to question the validity of this criticism, not only because it misrepresents Blumers sociological positionalthough many critics do present a

*Communications should be sent to Alex Dennis, School of English, Sociology, Politics, and Contemporary History, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, United Kingdom. We are grateful to participants at the 2005 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction annual meetings for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their criticisms.

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curiously myopic version of this but also because it fails to acknowledge symbolic interactionisms status as a distinct and coherent alternative to more orthodox forms of sociological thought. At the risk of tautology, we will argue that the very conception of social structure is a product of, and embedded in, orthodox structural sociologythe same orthodoxy to which Blumers work stands as a principled objection. This conception cannot be transported from one perspective to another, because its meaning differs between the different theoretical traditions. Moreover, although symbolic interactionism has indeed developed an approach for the analysis of patterned social organization, including hierarchical differentiation and asymmetries of power (see, for example, Hall 2003), interactionists have good reasons to regard social structure as a problematic concept. Just as Mead concluded that metaphysical problems were unnecessary riddles created by dualistic philosophies (Baldwin 1986: 24), Blumers theoretical work aims to overcome various problematic dualisms, among them the fruitless opposition between realism and idealism in sociology. The concept of social structure is an exemplary case of the former in three ways. First, it requires a reication of social processes, so that (as in Durkheim 1982) they become things, external to real people. Second, it facilitates a portrayal of social life as static rather than processual, understood through categories with largely stable relationships instead of through social actors actually doing things. Third, its analytic utility depends on its being seen as the cause of human behavior: it is necessarily deterministic in application. In short, then, the structural conception of sociology takes society to be an external system that is the overall determinant of social action (Blumer 1969: 74). Often neglected in the secondary treatments of Blumer, however, is the fact that Blumer was also concerned to show that an exclusive focus on the individual actor could not form the basis of a theoretically satisfying sociological alternative: his rejections of psychological reductionism, subjectivism, and solipsism were equally forthright (Morrione 2004: xi). Indeed, one of Blumers neatest arguments is that structural sociology is irredeemably subjective, as it inevitably requires analysts to impose their own denitions of reality onto the social world they are investigating (Blumer 1969: 74). Blumer stresses that such a position ignores or denies the obdurate character of the empirical world, which can talk back in the sense of challenging and resisting, or not bending to, our images or conceptions of it (Blumer 1969: 22). Blumers opposition to dualisms, then, should not be mistaken for a desire to show that one side of a dualistic relationship (in this case, a commitment to Durkheimian structural sociology) could be dissolved into the other (here, an individualistic or subjectivist position). Rather, his aim is to develop a sociological perspective that transcends the sterility of the realistidealist or objectivesubjective dualisms. In his own words, Mead was a pragmatist in philosophical stance, and so am I. . . . [F]or pragmatism, reality does not exist in consciousness, nor is the reality eternally real, independent of human experience with it (Blumer quoted in Morrione 2004: xii). What, then, is this reality that Blumer regards as the obdurate character of the social world? Blumers answer cannot be clearer: the empirical world of our discipline is the natural social world of everyday experience (Blumer 1969: 148). As Morrione puts it,

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Blumer located action and the creation of meaning in an ever-emergent situated present that is cognitively, behaviorally, and intersubjectively inseparable from the past and future (Morrione 2004: xii, emphases in original). In these formulations, and in his view of the social order as a situated accomplishment, Blumer echoes the Schutzian phenomenological tradition evident in such contemporaneous works as Berger and Luckmanns (1966) The Social Construction of Reality and Garnkels (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Unlike these approaches, however, Blumers focus on the social world of everyday experience has clear foundations in pragmatist philosophy. It is our intention to show that these foundations provided Blumer with the tools to develop a coherent and distinct mode of sociological thought and inquiry that is incompatible with such notions as social structure and variable analysis as they are conventionally understood (Abbott 1997), and that represents a viable alternative approach to the dominant sociological orthodoxies. We will make this demonstration with particular reference to the concept of social structurea topic, it will be readily recalled, that symbolic interactionism has often been regarded as incapable of addressing.

BLUMER AND THE PRAGMATIST ORIENTATION OF THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

Sociological classics tend to be reread through the lens of contemporary disciplinary developments, and, because of its current theoretical centrality, structure/agency dualism tends to provide the means by which Blumers thought is understood. Commentators overwhelmingly locate symbolic interactionism at the agency end of this dualism (Dennis and Martin 2005). Our aim in this section is to question such an attribution and to offer a preliminary clarication of what we understand symbolic interactionism to be. Blumers thought emerged from a radically different approach to doing sociology (usually glossed as the Chicago School) from that which currently commands mainstream recognition. Fundamentally empiricist in method, this approach stressed the pragmatist arguments of James, Dewey, and (particularly) Mead as epistemological touchstones and methodological foundations. Although notions of structure and agency could be extracted from the Chicago Schools works, such an extraction would represent a redescription of those works in contemporary terms rather than a reasonable reconstruction of their authors own positions. In his exemplary excavation of Meads views on what society might be, then, Athens (2005) is careful to demonstrate that the meaning of institution in Meads thought, common maxims (Athens 2005: 307), is similar but irreducible to the same concept as used by structuralist sociologists. What is distinctive about the Chicago approach is, as Abbott (1997: 1152) puts it, the presumption that one cannot understand social life without understanding the arrangements of particular social actors in particular social times and places. This presumption is most corrosive to those forms of sociology based on the analysis of variables: the idea of context-independent Durkheimian social facts, capable of

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allowing different settings to be compared, contrasted, and organized on continua, is utterly alien to the Chicago tradition. Although facts can be extracted from settings, they remain the products of those settings, and the social property of participants to their productionincluding those facts, like anomie, alienation, astructural bias, or the masculine gaze, generated in the settings of professional sociologists. Settings are not, of course, hermetically sealed off from one another, but their relationships require discovery and are not capable of being specied a priori. But, as Abbott (1997) points out, sociology remains committed to just the kinds of variable analysis Blumer (1956) sought to undermine, his critique producing what has been called one of the most telling 35-year silences in the recent history of academic life (Watson 1995: 317). Blumers critique of variable analysis did not come out of nowhere: it is a contribution to, and development of, the Chicago traditions emphasis on the specicity of situations. Although Blumer was often critical of this traditions orientations and organization (see, in particular, Blumer 1939), the Chicago School provided both an intellectual home and a critical context within which he could pursue his methodological and conceptual arguments. Although much has been written about the divisions between Blumer and other Chicago sociologists (see, for instance, Becker 1999; Abbott and Gaziano 1995), to the extent that there is a Chicago School, it is one that shares many of the same characteristics and concerns of symbolic interactionism. These characteristics might very generally be characterized as a militantly empirical sociological practice informed by pragmatist philosophical underpinnings. For the purposes of our argument, we will focus on three themes that illustrate these characteristics: (1) that institutions are the products of interactions; (2) that sociological studies are descriptions of the formal features of such institutions; and (3) that stability and change are context-dependent. Wirths (1928) The Ghetto will be used to illustrate their application. Institutions Are the Products of Interactions Blumer drew on the Chicago Schools orientation to a ne-grained analysis of everyday activities. Although this did not preclude statistical or other larger-scale forms of analysis, it provided a background where some of the claims subsequently enunciated on their behalf were treated with suspicion: institutions, organizations, classes, religions, and other structural aspects of the social world were treated as the product of peoples activities rather than the unquestioned bases for sociological investigations. This instantiates a key concept of pragmatist philosophy: rather than unquestioningly accepting or peremptorily denying the existence of a phenomenon (in this case contextindependent features of social situations), that phenomenon becomes something to be discovered, located empirically through processes of description and comparison. Thus, in Wirths (1928) work, a particular synagogue was shown to be the product of the elaboration of secular, traditional (usually rst-generation immigrant), and Americanized forms of Judaism. Its relative stability is not taken for granted but is used to say something about the nature of religious institutions at times of social change, and how political negotiations between different ethnic communities resolve

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themselves through negotiation, compromise, and schism. For example, conservative congregations were forced to postpone the Friday evening service from sundown until after supper to accommodate urban American working practices. Although such congregations professed to be orthodox, they were regarded as relatively secular by the strictly orthodox on the one hand and relatively conservative by the reformed congregations on the other. What Wirth brings to our attention is the range of practices that count for members of a community as a congregation: having the status of a synagogue is not something that rests on either adherence to Judaic custom or the ability to maintain a large and active community of believers. Rather, it is something that is constantly worked out between groups of interested parties, more or less to their satisfaction, with new circumstances and interested parties always having to be taken into consideration. Most important of all, it is absolutely not something that can be determined a priori by a sociologist or other disinterested observer. Sociology Is the Description of the Formal Features of Institutions Blumer shared with earlier Chicago scholars an orientation to formalism as a means of organizing and presenting sociological ndings (see Park and Burgess 1921 on the role of Simmel in Chicago sociology). Rather than seeking generalizations that can be applied to larger and larger groups, an emphasis was placed on the ways in which institutional features of one setting might reect those of another. Perhaps the clearest statement of this position is to be found in Hughes (1951: 320): The comparative student of mans work learns about doctors by studying plumbers; and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists. Instead of reducing the study of different jobs to the sociology of work, Hughes evinces the Chicago desire to nd out what different jobs have in common and how they differand, by asking questions of this kind, nding out what the formal features of those different jobs might be in the rst place. This reects the pragmatists rejection of neo-Platonism on the one hand and what Mills (1959) called abstracted empiricism on the other. There is no reason to believe that social phenomena necessarily have essential features in common, that these features could be specied on an a priori basis, or that they could be unproblematically applied in different cases as a theoretical framework for understanding something novel. Social facts cannot be assumed. This, however, does not imply a rejection of the notion that different settings might have features in common, or, indeed, that such features could be used as sensitizing concepts, or spurs to the imagination, in other investigations (Blumer 1954: 7). This focus on empirical investigation furnished the Chicago School with the analytic resources to discover formal features of the social world. In Wirths (1928) account of ghetto life, one such formal feature is community solidarity, mediated by the synagogue. [D]eep bonds of sympathy emerge through colorful ritual, thus providing a place of dignity for an individual who would be a mere Jew in the outside world. The centrality of the synagogue depends crucially on its capacity to provide families and households with the status they deserve, based on their learning, piety, the purity of family life, and services rendered to the community, rather than on the basis of their wealth. In turn, the community as a whole

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acquired a reputation . . . through its outstanding personalities, particularly through its philanthropists and scholars (Wirth 1928: 37). The synagogue is not, then, just an instance of a religious institution, or even an instance of a synagogue like any other. What Wirth emphasizes is the ways in which the institution in this case is used by members of the ghetto community to satisfy certain basic human needs that, given their circumstances, cannot be fullled elsewhere. Their marginal status means that their capacity to be afforded respect by others, and gain a reputation for their actions rather than their ethnic and/or religious identity, cannot be taken for granted in the ways members of other communities might legitimately expect. Formally, then, the synagogue does not represent that which makes Jews Jewish, but rather allows them to maintain their status as human beings as well as Jews and soover timereduce the extent to which they are treated as different. Ironically, the very institution which is at the heart of their religious beliefs becomes the thing that facilitates greater integration with Gentile culture. The formal features of the synagogue, viewed from a pragmatic Chicago School position, prove to almost reverse its institutional features, viewed from the perspective of structuralist sociology. Stability and Change Are Context-Dependent Notions of structural integrity and system maintenance were treated with analytic suspicion by Blumer and his earlier Chicago counterparts: stable and recurrent forms of joint action do not carry on automatically in their xed form but have to be sustained by the meanings that people attach to the type of situation in which the joint action reoccurs (Blumer 1969: 59). Inertia alone will not maintain an orderly social situation, and one cannot treat such a situation as self-maintaining independently of the interpretative work of its members. Thus, just what something isan institution, a class, an ethnic group, a religious movementdepends on the meanings people give it and take from it. For example, an apparently context-independent feature of human life is the nature of intergroup relations. All societies of any great size have in-groups and out-groups; in fact, one of the best ways of describing a society is to consider it a network of smaller and larger in-groups and out-groups. And an ingroup is only one because there are out-groups (Hughes 1962: 8). The formal features of a social institution, then, are the outcome of interactional work that determines what the boundaries of that institution are, who is inside and who is outside, and how individuals can move between the two categories. The pragmatist roots of this approach should by now be evident: rather than treating stable social phenomena as the unquestioned starting points for analysis, or by denying their stability altogether, the ways in which those phenomena are constituted as stable becomes a topic of investigation. Neither stability nor change is assumed to be a natural characteristic of human life or social phenomena, but both are to be regarded as the outcomes of meaningful action. In his careful critique of the concept of industrialization, Blumer (1990) takes this concern to its logical conclusion by demonstrating the radical incoherence of the idea that industrialization or its effects can be treated as consistent or analytically coherent between settingsand, indeed, that the concept of setting is itself one that requires further elaboration to be analytically useful.

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The idea of a stable set of institutions being driven from one form to another by a homogeneous set of social forces is revealed as a myth. For Wirth, these concerns map literally onto the geography of the ghetto area. Individuals social and religious commitments shape where they choose to live and work, and their domestic and vocational situations shape their outlooks. Social types range themselves in constellations, each stellar gure with its little circle of satellites seeking its place in the life of the group and changing its position and character as the culture of the area is transformed (Wirth 1928: 250). But just as the ghetto inhabitants and their beliefs are transformed in the areas of second settlement (those areas inhabited by Americanized Jews), elsewhere they remain static and traditional: the daily routine of the ghetto Jew is conned largely to the narrow area of his immediate vicinity. Even when he drives his wagon through the other sections of the city, he does so with his eyes closed to the life that goes on (Wirth 1928: 251). In short, the institution of Judaism is challenged both by internal differences and by external pressures, and, self-consciously, members of the community locate and maintain themselves in particular, but gradually changing, positions as participants and creators of this institution. Blumers intellectual development is not, therefore, merely reducible to a commitment to ethnographic method or a suspicion of theoryor, indeed, to a continuous reinterpretation and analysis of Meads social behaviorism. Many of the key tropes in his argument are just those of earlier Chicago sociologists, and, we will argue, his work is best understood with this in mind. Central to these arguments are a pragmatic rejection of dualisms, in particular a rejection of the notion that one must either accept or deny the existence of social structure as an a priori theoretical matter, and a commitment to nding out through investigation how orderly social institutions are produced and maintained. One of Blumers great contributions to sociological thought was to demonstrate the dangers of not maintaining such a tentative position with respect to theory: Theoretical positions are held tenaciously, the concepts and beliefs in ones eld are gratuitously accepted as inherently true, and the canons of scientic procedure are sacrosanct. It is not surprising, consequently, that the images that stem from these sources control the inquiry and shape the picture of the sphere of life under study. In place of being tested and modied by rsthand acquaintance with the sphere of life they become a substitute for such acquaintance (Blumer 1969: 37).

STUDIES OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

In accordance with the pragmatist position, then, the Chicago Schools approach to the concept of structure takes it as a possibly useful redescription of the ongoing ow of human activities, rather than an ontological feature of the social world itself. Structure is (sometimes) a useful placeholder, a way of illustrating how the pattern of social organization is perpetuated and reproduced, but not that pattern itselfbecause such a pattern is inevitably a way of facilitating sociological description, not something intrinsic to the setting in its own right. People orientate to different things, move out

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of and into geographical areas and social circles, reinforce and change their institutional affiliations, and so on. In the course of their doing this the structure of a social world changes or remains the samebut that structure is not something that inheres in the social world but is an artifact of the questions we ask of it. It is a part of human activities in just these ways and no othersand to treat it as a real thing, something that can be related to other real things, is to conate a sociological description with the thing being described. In this section we will suggest that this distinction is clearly exemplied by the ways in which conventional sociologists have understood and described social inequality and stratication. In doing so our aim is to substantiate Blumers point that what is claimed to be an objective approach holds the danger of the observer substituting his view of the eld of action for the view held by the actor (Blumer 1969: 74). Sociological descriptions of societies in terms of a hierarchy of strata, or as a structure of classes, derive from an understandable wish to represent societies as wholes, and to present the big picture of class inequalities as institutionalized features of such societies. The problems of such approaches are well documented, from disputes about what classes consist of (Martin 1987) to arguments over the utility of different methodological and measuring techniques (Crompton 1993). From a pragmatist position, however, one would have to argue that such approaches cannot achieve the degrees of neutrality and objectivity to which they aspire. Such approaches inevitably fail to be literal descriptions of the social structure as they are, and have to be selective representations that depend on the particular interestspractical and theoreticalof researchers, and those researchers a priori theoretical and methodological commitments (Scheff 1995). Putting it bluntly, the ways in which the class structure has been represented in most sociological studies is an artifact of those studies theoretical and methodological preconceptions: all class schemes are social constructs, or rather, the constructs of sociologists. Therefore different class schemes, when applied to the same occupational structure, can produce quite different class maps (Crompton 1993: 50). The concept of social class is itself a source of theoretical problems. Indeed, although most European researchers have accepted the validity of the term, the dominant American approach has been to conceptualize social inequalities in terms of status (until challenged by neo-Marxian authors such as Bowles and Gintis, 1976, and Wright 1978). The very existence of such a divergent approach suggests that the definition of social classes, and the assignment of people to them, is not a neutral or objective process, but one in which theoretical perceptions of relevance are actively involved. Even among those theorists who accept the validity of the concept of class, major disputes exist concerning where boundary lines between class strata can be drawn. In the classic Marxian formulation, a tiny bourgeoisie comes to confront a huge proletariat, and some authors (for example Braverman 1974) continued to argue for this view. Others, however, attempted to incorporate an expanding middle class into their models: for Poulantzas (1975), for example, the real working class has been reduced to about a fth of the overall working population, whereas for Wright (1985: 45) those in the middle class occupy a contradictory class position.

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Other sociologists have developed models of class that owe more to Weber than to Marx, regarding the formation of social classes as an empirically open question, and seeking to identify the structural conditions under which real classes actually come into existenceor fail to do so (see, for example, Goldthorpe 1980). In retaining the Marxian priority accorded to economic relations in the class structure, however, and in basing their analyses on the occupations of individual people, such analysts have been accused of neglecting the other factors Weber (1948) thought were important in social straticationin particular ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Additionally, Garnsey (1978) argued that the conventional approach to class analysis is male-centered both because it presupposes that womens class position depends on that of husbands or fathers, and because it assumes that womens domestic labor is marginal to the system of production. By excluding women, the young, and the old, and by its inability to incorporate families, then, research in this tradition yields a picture of social life that is hard to relate to any real, or possible, societies. Similar points could be made about the neglect of, among other things, ethnic or national identication and their effects, or political organizations and culture (Crompton 1993: 77). Inevitably, there have been more recent efforts to incorporate women and ethnic groups into studies of class and social mobility, but none has been successfuland it is hard to see how any could succeed: the idea of producing a multidimensional model of the social structure cannot be realized. Our point here is that class is essentially a commonsense, rather than a scientic, concept (Schutz 1962). As such it cannot simply be taken for granted as the basis of sociological analysis which aspires to be scientic, for the objective research ends up simply reecting the subjective preferences of the researcher (Martin 1987: 95). Attempts to investigate the class structure have encountered equally intractable methodological problems. Many of these concern the validity and reliability of data generated by sample surveys in which individual people are interviewed or sent questionnaires about their occupational experiences. By restricting what counts as class to what happens to people at work, and by treating those people as isolated experiencers of their structural position rather than members of social networks and other groups, such studies tend to reinforce the gap between individual experience and the social structure. Somehow what happens to individuals has to be reconciled with their class positionsbut how this is actually achieved in practice depends on the skillful use of theory to bridge the gap. Because more than one theoretical reconciliation is possible, in each case the researcher has to select among alternative accounts to provide what can be construed as an objective account. Such attempts illustrate the pragmatist view of knowledge as contextualin this case, dependent on the a priori assumptions of the analyst. Such studies are also problematic insofar as they seek to determine the life (or at least employment) experiences of all the members of a particular population. One problem with such an approach is that, if the theoretical justication for the concept of class is correct, a tiny proportion of that population will have a disproportionate effect on the social structure as a whole. More attention, then, should be paid to

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members of powerful and wealthy elitesbut these are precisely the groups that are signicantly underrepresented in such studies: indeed, in the Oxford Mobility Study of the 1970s no data whatsoever could be collected on these sections of the population (Martin 1984: 33). There are also concerns about how occupational positions are, in fact, related to social classes: theorists have been increasingly concerned by people in the routine nonmanual class category (those doing clerical and lower administrative work). Are they members of the new middle class, or are they becoming proletarianized? In fact, the great majority of people in such occupations are female, and so excluded from most studies of class. Moreover, it has been shown that, for men, the signicance of occupying such a position is variable: for those whose origins are in manual work this may represent promotion to an office job, but to younger men it may be only a stepping stone on the way to a more senior managerial post (Stewart et al. 1980). The sample survey thus cannot reveal that the signicance of the same occupational position is very different for the different people occupying it, and thus it cannot be considered to be the same thing as far as class location is concerned. Studies of stratication, then, demonstrate that in order to bridge the gap between theoretical claims and research practice, sociological approaches must deal with large numbers of people, constant uncertainties, and continual change. One response to this problem is to allow the availability of methodological techniques to determine data collection and analysisas in Blau and Duncans (1967) attempt to get the big picture of a social systems stratication. The result, unfortunately, is a description of the American occupational structure that could not possibly describe any imaginable human society, being restricted, as we have suggested, to a sample survey of men between ages twenty and sixty-four. Others have foreclosed the debate by theoretical at (Cicourel 1964). Giddens, for instance, correctly observed that a rigorous Weberian approach, taking all the different factors that could inuence patterns of stratication into account, would lead to the identication of a cumbersome plurality of classes (Giddens 1981: 104). He therefore asserted that there are only a limited number of classes (Giddens 1981: 106) in any society. Just why this is so is unclear. There is surely a cumbersome plurality of chemical components in a complex protein, but a biologist or pharmacologist could not use this fact to decide a priori that they can be divided into discrete categories to simplify analysis. On the contrary, he or she would necessarily have to deal with contingencies, uncertainties, and the impossibility of conventional measurement until the details of the phenomenon under investigation could be adequately described. In some respects things are easier in social life, as Weber (1978: 15) pointed out: We can accomplish something which is never obtainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the actions . . . of individuals. Certainly a wider scope of phenomena is readily observable. There are, of course, patterns of inequalityof wealth, power, prestige, and so onthat are the outcomes of the activities of individuals and groups as they pursue their perceived interests. It is likely that our understanding of the processes of social stratication will be best furthered by the direct investigation of these activities in the

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real world rather than through the heavy-handed imposition of concepts such as the class structure. We will return to this point subsequently.

THE IDEA OF INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

If the concerns raised above are legitimateand, as we mentioned, we are unaware of any coherent responses to themthen a central concern for nonstructural sociologies must be to radically separate description from the things being described: to remain faithful to the phenomena under investigation. Such concerns are elaborated by, and nd a radical expression in, the mature Chicago Schools emphasis on institutional analysis. The concept of institution, of course, is usually seen (certainly in sociology textbooks) as one denoting collectivities basic to the perspective of mainstream structural sociology, as when, for example, the family, the church, the nation-state, armies, or business corporations are described as institutions. Our argument, however, is that a close examination of the concept and its usage reveals not only some (normally ignored) problems for the structural perspective but also the distinctiveness of the alternative vision of sociological work that animates interactionist studies. Alexander and Giesens (1987) characterization of Mead stands as a fairly typical assessment of his ideas and inuence. Although they defend Mead against the (common) misreading that his ideas lead to a microsociology devoid of macroreference, and emphasize the ways in which his analysis is open to more collectivist concerns, they conclude that Mead lacked an institutional theory, and that his followers neglected the possibility of this collective link so that experience, not individually mediated structure . . . became the hallmark of interactionist microanalysis (Alexander and Giesen 1987: 910). This reading presupposes that social life can only be conceptualized in terms of interactional (micro) or institutional (macro) levels, and that the basic theoretical problem for sociology must be to provide a link between both sides of the great divide. In fact, almost a third of Meads most famous work is concerned with society, and an entire section devoted to The Community and the Institution (Mead 1934: 260273). What emerges from Meads account is not an understanding of social life as operating on different levels, butparticularly as a result of the ability to take the role of the other and the ways in which the generalized other enters into the thinking of individuals (Mead 1934: 256)a perspective that sees organized patterns of social life as constituted and reproduced through the regular interactions of real people in particular times and places. In this, Mead emphasizes the importance of the uniquely human capacity to communicate through the medium of language and the innite possibilities for symbolic representation it facilitates. Given this general perspective, and Meads (1934: 262) insistence on the profoundly social sources of the individuals self, it is somewhat perplexing that sociological work in the interactionist tradition has been characterized by some of its critics as subjective and voluntaristic (Lichtman 1970: 77), and as an atheoretical sociological theory [sic] that refuses in principle to transcend the peculiar characteristics

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of social processes in the here and now (Coser 1976: 156). Indeed, there is a certain irony in the fact that Mead has also been criticized for presenting an oversocialized conception of human action, exaggerating the degree to which people are led to conform to the perceived expectation of the (internalized) generalized other (Katovich and Reese 1993). It is hard to reconcile this Mead with the one who has been accused of ignoring social structures and their constraining characteristics (Coser 1976: 157). In fact, Meads analysis is an attempt to transcend a sterile and false subjective-objective dualism, and to propose a genuinely dialectical model of human conduct. Thus, for instance, although institutionalized patterns of activity are essential components of any form of social organization, institutions themselves need not crush or blot out individuality, or discourage any distinctive or original expressions of thought or behavior. . . . On the contrary, they need to dene the social, or socially responsible, patterns of individual conduct only in a very broad sense (Mead 1934: 262). Meads focus, then, is neither on coercion nor unconstrained voluntarism, but on how people dene situations in ways they consider appropriate, and interact with others on that basis. Athens (2005) recent exposition of the relationships between selves, institutions, and maxims in Meads thought is an excellent clarication of these issues. With this in mind, it is clear why, in one specic sense, Alexander and Giesen (1987) are right to suggest that Mead lacks a theory of institutions. For Mead, and for the interactionists who followed him, institutions are not entities existing on a separate level from that of the individual, nor are they ontologically distinct emergent properties of social interaction. Mead does not need a theory of institutions, as they have no privileged place in his theoretical framework. Instead, institutionsas particular instances of all orderly patterns of social organizationare simply complexes of human interaction, chains of self-other relations in which processes of symbolic communication are of fundamental importance. From this perspective, we can develop an empirical approach to what Blumer (1969: 148) called the natural social world of everyday experience. We wish to emphasize that a focus on how the intersubjective world is constituted and sustained leads to an analytical approach in which the familiar concepts of mainstream sociologysuch as structures, systems, classes, organizations, institutions, and so onappear not as objective entities but rather as modes of representing the complexity of human activity. From Blumers perspective, there is no higher level of social life that requires theorizing by sociologists. It makes little sense to argue that Mead lacks a theory of institutions or that interactionists ignore social structures, since their understanding of the social world is based on premises fundamentally different to those of conventional structural sociology. Only if the presuppositions of orthodox sociology are accepted a priori can interactionists be accused of being antitheoretical. Moreover, it may be further argued that modern sociology has gradually (and reluctantly) had to come to terms with the empirical inadequacies of the theoretical postulation of social systems or structures, so that the collective concepts developed by early theorists have been reformulated in ways that recognize the processes through which people actively constitute their social worlds (Martin 2004: 34; see also Jenkins 2002).

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To anticipate a misunderstanding that has become tediously familiar, it should be emphasized that this perspective does not entail a denial of the reality of armies, bureaucracies, nation-states, and so on. Such complexes of human activity constitute the very facticity of the social world, or, as Blumer (1969: 22) had it, its obdurate character. An interactionist approach need not deny the authority of the president, the reality of income differentials, the power of global corporations, and so on, but must seek to explain such phenomena as the results of, and as sustained or challenged by, the activities of real people in particular situations, often over considerably long periods of time. Moreover, a principled refusal to accept the ontological reality of structures or systems, and a corresponding focus on the ways in which they are socially constituted, does not (as some critics would have it) mean that the organized patterns of social life are to be seen as subjective, malleable, or open to arbitrary redenition. As individuals, we are confronted with the social reality of established, organized, normative patterns of activity and a stable environment of symbolic representationsthe fact that the norms and the symbols are ultimately sustained through patterns of interaction does not make them any less resistant. We learn the language of our culture, for example, and although we may modify it in some ways, or use it more or less effectively, we are not at liberty to abandon it or invent a new one. As Maines (1977: 238) has put it, Blumers message should not be lost . . . because these very constraining processes are composed of and expressed through interacting individuals. Putting the matter another way, we could say that although collective concepts may constitute powerful symbols in everyday discourseindeed, they are indispensable in the process of communicationthis does not mean that they should therefore be treated as real for the purposes of sociological analysis. To do so would be to illegitimately reify them, to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1925: 72). It is inconceivable that we could sustain even routine conversations without making reference to such notions as, for example, political parties, churches, or heavy metal fans. Yet as any empirical investigation shows, and as our experience of social participation conrms, no such grouping is a unied entity composed of participants sharing the same ideas and motivationsas our comments on Wirth, above, indicate. As Blumer (2004: 95, emphases in original) points out: Group life exists in what people do. It is not a preestablished organization conceived in terms of the completed acts that it is believed or hoped the people will carry out. However much people may conform in their acts to a preestablished scheme, the scheme is not their action. Nor is group life a kind of product of the acts of the individual participants, such as the articulated arrangement into which one nds the completed acts of the individuals to have fallen. Group life consists of the actual acting of peoplenot a conceived organization that antedates that acting, nor of an articulated product of that acting. . . . Group life . . . has an organized character, but that character exists in it, not before it or after it. Blumer has also made explicit the direct link between this interactionist approach to the empirical analysis of the social world and Meads pragmatist philosophy, pointing out that Mead was primarily a philosopher. He differed from the bulk of philosophers

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in believing that the cardinal problems of philosophy arose in the realm of human group life and not in a separate realm of an individual thinker and his universe (Blumer 1981: 902). This intimate connection between pragmatism and the interactionist approach to sociological study is at the heart of our argument. The manner in which this connection manifests itself in sociological practice therefore requires explication. To achieve this we will consider three areas of sociological concern: the creation and maintenance of the social world, the negotiated nature of that world, and the relationship between peoples values and that worlds constitution.

THE PRAGMATIST BASES OF INTERACTIONIST STUDIES

The Creation and Maintenance of the Social World First, as we have mentioned, the analytical focus of interactionist studies is on the creation and maintenance of a shared social world by real people in particular situations. If successful, such an analysis will make explicit the bases on which such situations are dened by participants, including symbolic representations and the taken-for-granted aspects that inuence their interpretations of what is going on. What it does not aim to produce are decontextualized, objective descriptions that will reveal the intrinsic meanings of cultural objects. An example will make this point in a less abstract way. In what Becker (1982) calls the art world of symphonic music, interactions take place against a background discourse in which such terms as orchestra, composer, score, audience, critic, conductor, and so on are generally unproblematic. Such discourses and their conventionally established concepts may reveal much to the sociologist about the assumptions, interests, and purposes of the various people in different social worlds. It does not follow, though, that these concepts correspond to ontologically real entities that can be ultimately or unambiguously dened. The concept of conductor, for example, is not an objective description of a particular individual, but rather something that tells us about the role such a person is expected to play within the symphonic art world. There are many other ways in which the person could be dened, all of which are (potentially) relevant to other situations, other worlds. The person who in certain times and places is the conductor may also, in other contexts, be a father, the accused, a high coronary risk, a board member, and so on. That is to say, there is no single, privileged, or transcendent way of describing such a personany person in factindependently of the discursive contexts in which particular modes of representation are established. In seeking to understand social activities in such contexts, interactionist analyses reect the pragmatists principled objections to essentialism. The Social World Is a Negotiated World As we argued above, the notion that structural features of society have stable properties independent of the activities of members of that society is deeply problematic. In order to generate a model of those featuresof that societyit is necessary either to systematically reduce the empirical complexity of the phenomena under

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investigation (as in Blau and Duncan 1967) or to make a theoretical decision about how such phenomena must operate (as in Giddens 1981). Both strategies must be adopted as a priori matters as they do not represent analytical claims based on empirical data, but rather specify what is to count as an instance and what each instance might be an instance of. The interactionist alternative to such positions may be exemplied by the concept of a negotiated order (Strauss et al. 1964; Strauss 1978). People in complex organizations operate not on the basis of their role alone, because many such people with different and possibly contradictory roles are required to cooperate to get the work of the organization done. Instead, they negotiate with one another to get work done, partly on the basis of their role, but also on the basis of their personalities and personal preferences, their relationships with other staff members, their extraorganizational networks and affiliations, to whom they owe favors and who owes them favors, and so on. Through these negotiations work gets done. It is not the case, however, that a stable, objective structure preexists those negotiations or is produced by them. Such a structure simply does not exist in the ways Blau and Duncan, or Giddens, might imagine. Rules govern participants activities, but those rules are themselves interpreted and negotiated as part of the ongoing work of the organization. (This does not mean that they are capable of being interpreted however one likesas with any social phenomena they do have an obdurate character.) Finding out what rules might apply and how activities can be shown to be conducted with proper respect to their authority are themselves part of ongoing organizational work. The structured and stable features of any organization are necessarily the products of the webs of interaction undertaken by that organizations members. In accordance with pragmatist ideas, then, what seem to be thingsstable structuresare empirically investigated and found to be activitieshuman interactionsthat maintain and develop the stable operations of the setting under investigation. Values Shape How the Social World Is Constituted In conventional structuralist sociology there is a tendency to treat activities as determined by objective and external social facts. Where norms do appear they do so not as individuals personal, professional, and collective values but as the products of social systems. Thus, classically, Durkheims (2006) analysis of suicide relocates individuals feelings of alienation and hopelessness away from their psychological makeup and toward the normative order of the society they inhabit: these things become functions of religious affiliation, domestic circumstances, economic conditions, and so on. And, as Alexander (1988: 9899) argues, [f ]or Herbert Blumer, George Homans, the early Erving Goffman, the later Garnkel, Ralph Turner, and Aaron Cicourel, the only way to emphasize the importance of individual, contingent action was to neutralize the inuence of values and prior social structure as such. Interactionist sociologists, however, do not reduce the nature of social norms and human values to mere psychological phenomenaindeed, the idea that they must either be located at the level of a prior social structure or inside the heads of social interactants is entirely alien to their perspective. Rather, values are found to be

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things that emerge through, and are modied by, the interactional work of participants to a setting. Thus, in his careful analysis of the relationships between native Canadians and Canadian Somali immigrants, Maines (2001: 158161) shows how each groups attitude to the other is shaped by their culturally specic values. Although most white Canadians orientate to other ethnic groups on the basis of their race, Somali migrants make such in-group/out-group distinctions on the basis of nationality. By being reduced to their racial characteristics, Somalis experience majority Canadian understandings as denigrating and respond with hostility, thus accelerating and worsening divisions between the two groups. The point here is not that these distinctions are structural, but that the structural features of difference emerge from the two groups engaging in social activities with one another: cultural values are elaborated, strengthened, and crystallized through intergroup interactions, rather than predetermining the ways in which those interactions could occur. Just what values will be relevant in any situation is a function of the situation and its participantswithout people doing things the normative order can be no more than an analytical ction. This focus on what Blumer called the natural social world of everyday experience (Blumer 1969: 148) is, we believe, at the heart of interactionist sociology, and allows the analyst to avoid the determinist account of human behavior inherentand inescapablein structural approaches. This was certainly Blumers conclusion: The point of view of symbolic interactionism is that large-scale social organization has to be seen, studied, and explained in terms of the process of interpretation engaged in by the acting participants (Blumer 1969: 58).

CONCLUSION
We have argued that, far from being decient in its ability to deal with macro sociological phenomena, symbolic interactionism is a coherent alternative to structural approaches, and as a consequence the concept of structure (in any of the various ways in which it has been employed in mainstream sociology) cannot simply be imported into, or imposed upon, the interactionist perspective. That is, from the latter point of view the concept of structure is itself problematic; indeed, as Blumer argued, the supposedly objective concepts of macro sociology are themselves ultimately subjective in that they are formulated on the basis of analysts assumptions and presuppositions. We have suggested that the Chicago tradition of researchstrongly inuenced by pragmatist currents of thoughthas been, from the start, concerned with the ways in which social order emerges out of the dynamics of human interaction. In contrast, with reference to efforts to describe the class structure sociologically, we have argued that the (widely varying) results not only betray the theoretical presuppositions of the researchers but also are representations of no conceivable societies. So, following the directions indicated by Mead, the symbolic interactionist tradition has focused on institutional analysis in whichinstead of presupposing that institutions are collective entitiesthe regular, orderly patterns of social life (including inequalities of

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wealth, power, and prestige) are viewed as the outcomes of the collaborative interactions of real people in real situations. Our conclusion, then, is consistent with Blumers wish to differentiate the basic premises of symbolic interactionism from those of the sociology and psychology that have become orthodoxpremises in which the meanings of things for the human beings who are acting are either bypassed or swallowed up in the factors used to account for their behavior (Blumer 1969: 3). Thus, sociological views of human society are, in general, markedly at variance with the premises . . . underlying symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969: 83). By respecting Blumers message and his legacy, we believe, it is possible both to demonstrate the problems inherent in structural thinking and to rescue sociology from its continuing grip. Alex Dennis is Lecturer in the Sociology of Deviance at the University of Salford. His previous publications include Making Decisions about People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Peter J. Martin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. His previous publications include Sounds and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) and Music and the Sociological Gaze (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). The authors are currently working on an edited collection on the problem of structure and agency in contemporary sociology.

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Extending and Broadening Blumers Conceptualization of Fashion: Adding Notions of Generic Social Process and Semiotic Transformation
Phillip Vannini*
Royal Roads University

Herbert Blumers critics and followers have, for the most part, neglected the signicance of his theory of fashion. In this paper I revisit Blumers thesis on fashion by identifying the fashion process as an instance of the generic social process of semiotic transformation. The concept of semiotic transformation refers to the change in meanings of symbolic objects over time. By identifying six elements of the generic social process of semiotic transformation (systemic permeability, systemic freedom, logonomic uidity, logonomic openness, indeterminacy, and logonomic hegemony) and by viewing semiotic transformation as a joint act grounded in emergence, I argue that the meaning of change over time is a process structuring both the denition of the situation and symbolic objects. I conclude the paper with a set of reections on the signicance of Blumers work on fashion for the development of a research agenda of semiotic transformation and for the legacy and reception of Blumerian theory.

Despite the great wealth of both receptive and dismissive criticism that the writings of the late Herbert Blumer have raised over the better part of the twentieth century, few observers have found much of theoretical or methodological value in his writings on fashion (Blumer 1968, 1969a; for a notable exception see Davis 1991, 1994).1 By taking Blumer as a point of departure, and by deriving inspiration from one of his interpreters (Prus 1987, 1994, 1996, 1997), I argue that Blumers critics and followers have missed the relevance of his thesis on fashion for the theoretical development of a generic social process of semiotic transformation. The concept of semiotic transformation refers to the succession of changes that link the meanings of signs and discourses over time. Semiotic transformation, in other words, is the process whereby meanings are produced, exchanged, interpreted, and used in different and changing ways throughout time. A more rened understanding of semiotic transformation holds the key to a better conceptualization of such central sociological phenomena as social change, public opinion change, politico-economic development, historical mutation in values, conduct, and beliefs, resocialization and identity change, and more. Because of interpretive sociologists lack of attention to the complexities of historical processes

*Please address all correspondence to Phillip Vannini, School of Communication and Culture, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria BC V9B 5Y2, Canada. E-mail: phillip.vannini@royalroads.ca.

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(Maines 1988) and because of their general mistrust and poor understanding of semiotic theories (Denzin 1992), interpretive sociologists in general and symbolic interactionists in particular have failed to explore and inspect what semiotic transformations consist of and how they unfold. Drawing from Blumers (1968, 1969a) paper on fashion, Pruss (1987, 1994, 1996, 1997) conceptualization of generic social processes, and from contemporary social semiotics (e.g., Hodge and Kress 1989; Van Leeuwen 2005), in the following pages I extend and broaden the signicance of Blumers writings on fashion not in an attempt to discuss fashion in itself, but with the goal of laying the foundations for a sociological understanding of generic social processes of semiotic transformation. It is important to point out that I am less concerned with exegesis than with proposing a creative addition to Blumerian theory and to its interpretation by Prus, arguably in ways not intended and certainly not envisioned by either of the two. The value of my creation, I hope, lies in opening the way for broad application across sociology, semiotics, and cultural studies. I begin by outlining the uniqueness of some of Blumers arguments contained in his work on fashion. Subsequently, I propose a way of extending Blumers ideas by adding the concepts of generic social process and semiotic transformation. I conclude with a nal set of reections and a brief survey of possible applications.

BLUMERS UNDERSTANDING OF FASHION

Blumers (1969a) Sociological Quarterly paper on fashion begins with his exhortation to sociologists to transcend the usual denotative association of the word fashion with the social world of clothing and elegance, or costume and adornment (Blumer 1969a: 275). Fashion is everywhere for Blumer, as it works as a mechanism operating in many diverse areas of human group life including the realm of the pure and applied arts, the area of entertainment and amusement, and the elds of medicine, industry, mortuary practice, literature, modern philosophy, political doctrine, and science (Blumer 1969a: 275276). Fashion occurs, therefore, across different situations and contexts. In his traditional polemical style, Blumer proceeds to identify and criticize the main currents of social thought on the phenomenon of fashion. Blumer suggests we should treat fashion as a form of collective and agentic selection arising out of the interaction of interested parties, rather than as an effect of the social will to class differentiation (e.g., Simmel 1957), the existential need for novelty, or of psychological motives, feelings, and impulses such as escape from boredom or ennui, spirit of adventure, sexual interests, ego-enhancement, or desires for personal prestige or notoriety (Blumer 1969a: 284285). Daviss (1991) evaluation of the usefulness of Blumers thesis on fashion as collective disposition and selection is particularly effective in drawing attention to the importance of this aspect of Blumers theory. My attention here goes elsewhere, namely to Blumers (1969a: 285) identication of the generic character of fashion.

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Blumer is adamant about the generic social qualities of the fashion process. Fashion is not an aberrant and irrational social happening, akin to a craze or mania (1969a: 276). Instead, from the perspective of the individual, fashion constitutes the working of a system of rules that sets sanctions of what it is to be done (1969a: 276) if the social agent in a calculative manner intends to make sure that he is in style (1969a: 277). Fashion, therefore, works as a regulatory system of negotiable and emergent rules that structure the array of choices social agents have in determining the meaning and value of symbolic objects. Blumer (1969a: 277) suggests that the person who unwittingly follows a fashion does so because of a limitation of choice, namely a limitation in the freedom to act toward an object on the basis of the meanings the object has. What matters, therefore, is not that an individual wills to be in style, but that an individual wills to produce, exchange, or interpret the symbolic meanings of an object in line with the system of rules for interpretation and use in effect within an interpretive community. At the level of collective choice, Blumer (1969a: 277) identies a similar force in play: while people may become excited over a fashion they respond primarily to its character of propriety and social distinction; these are tempering guides. Collective selection and disposition processes then originate the rules by which people make and communicate meaning. The rules of fashion, for Blumer, are primarily lexical and social: they are lexical in that they stipulate what is meant by what symbolic object, and they are social in that they stipulateat least to some extentwho has the authority to dene their meanings and the meanings of the circumstances under which they are produced, exchanged, used, and interpreted. Finally, let us now pay closer attention to the temporal-structural elements of this process and begin by evaluating once again how for Blumer (1969a: 282) the fashion mechanism [is] a continuing process of collective selection. By calling our attention to the temporal movement of fashion as a collective and reexive social process responding to changes in preferences and sensitivity, Blumer effectively identies fashion as a joint act. Thus, whereas other students of fashion might view either innate existential, psychological, or structural forces, or even arbitrary relations, as the origin of transformation (Blumer 1969a: 276280), Blumer views the process of meaning change in fashion as deeply interactional and social. A joint act, Blumers term for the Meadian concept of the social act, is a collective course of action undertaken by interacting individuals or groups (Blumer 1966: 540; 1969b: 16). Joint or collective acts constitute the nature of human action in that they rely on the individuals capacity to make indications to him- or herself, based on interaction with objects and others: Joint or collective action constitutes the domain of sociological concern, as exemplied in the behavior of groups, institutions, organizations, and social classes. Such instances of societal behavior, whatever they may be, consist of individuals tting their lines of action to one another . . . [constituting] societal organization of conduct of different acts of diverse participants. A joint action, while made up of diverse component acts that enter into its formation, is different from any one

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of them and from their mere aggregation. The joint action has a distinctive character in its own right, a character that lies in the articulation or linkage as apart from what may be articulated or linked. (1969b: 1617) Blumers view of fashion as a joint act is based on emergence, a concept that Blumer learned from Meads (1934) philosophy. This view is shared by Davis (1991: 9) who nds that for Blumers theory of fashion nothing is either foreordained or altogether impossible: emergence is everything. Despite the attention Blumer paid to the structural and temporal/historical aspects of social processes in the realm of fashion, industrialization, industrial relations, and other arenas of individual and collective conduct, criticisms of his alleged astructural and ahistorical bias abound (see Maines 1988 for a review). These myths about Blumer are especially vexing in view of the fact that he made explicit and frequent remarks throughout his work over the years in regard to the centrality of joint action for the sociological enterprise. As Maines (1988) pointed out, Blumers statements on the implications of joint action show precisely how the temporality of the process of joint action is at the basis of his theory of structure. Fashion, with its nature of being caught in movementmovement from an outmoded past toward a dim, uncertain, but exploitable immediate future (Blumer 1969a: 289), can work thenas I will argueas a fantastic example of semiotic transformation and of the historical implications of joint action.

EXTENDING BLUMERS IDEAS: GENERIC SOCIAL PROCESSES OF FASHION

In order to understand semiotic transformations, one need not adopt a teleological view of history. Meaning change may have no ultimate directionality; nevertheless, meanings change throughout time. Following Mead (1934), we can understand semiotic transformations as emergent and irregular, and, yet, if semiotic transformations presented no regularity whatsoever, little of any theoretical usefulness could be said about them. The key analytical goal must be that of discovering existing patterns of semiotic transformations, or, more precisely, the links between semiotic transformations across time and the particularities of the contexts in which they occur. Deriving inspiration from Pruss interpretation of Blumerian theory, I argue that in order to do so we can envision semiotic transformations as generic social processes. Generic social processes, according to Prus (1996: 142), refer to the transituational elements of interaction; to the abstracted transcontextual formulations of social behavior. Denoting parallel sequences of activity across diverse contexts, generic social processes highlight the emergent, interpretive features of association. They focus our attention on the activities involved in the doing or accomplishing of human group life. Although one often nds great variability in the symbolic meanings of objects of action over time, it is possible to identify a chain of elements whose presence or absence enables the occurrence of semiotic transformation while, at the same time, informing the very nature of variation of symbolic meaning. Take, for example, the

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semiotic transformation of fashion in clothing over the years. One year may be the year of pink, and the following year, black may be the new pink, only to be followed by the rediscovery of red, and so forth. Then, over the years, a color like pink may be associated with such divergent meanings and values as meekness, overt sexual seductiveness, childish innocence, sassiness, or a conservative gender ideology. Although prediction of future trends may be impossible, it is certain that the process of semiotic transformation in fashion occurs as a result of interacting elements whose interlinkage may be common to such diverse contexts as the social worlds of amusement and entertainment, literature, arts, and even political doctrine (Blumer 1969a: 275). Given Blumers broad understanding of the fashion process, it seems safe to argue that fashion can be studied as a generic social process. As Prus (1997: 88) explained, the study of generic social processes must denote potential realms of inquiry and synthesis in the abstract and therefore it is not until people act and interact that we can speak of the actual diversity and interconnectedness (intersectedness and interwovenness) of the activities that constitute the (mosaic) essence of human group life. Generic social processes, such as semiotic transformation, are then indeed generic, but it is incumbent on social scientists to be attentive to the fundamentally intersubjective essence of every realm of human endeavor they consider, to concentrate their emphasis on people doing things within the context of minded (Mead 1934) enterprise (Prus 1997: 88, italics in the original). With this in mind, let us examine how Blumers thesis on fashion can be broadened as a type of generic social process in order to further our understanding of semiotic transformation. Blumer identies six features or conditions of the fashion process. Social agents are not necessarily aware of the existence of these features (Blumer 1969a: 286), much as they are not necessarily immediately conscious of the existence of the logonomic rules (that is, rules that structure who has the power to produce, change, and consume meaning, under what circumstances, and in what manner) that structure semiotic transformation (Hodge and Kress 1988). Blumer describes these six features but stops short of naming them or expanding upon their signicance; therefore, the six concepts presented below are merely my lexical choices made on the basis of their implicit relatedness to socio-semiotic theory. Throughout the following I useone might even say that I strategically hijack quotations by Blumer to support my argument, and thus ultimately the responsibility for the following argumentation is entirely mine and not Blumers. The rst feature of the fashion process is logonomic uidity. The word logonomic refers to a discursive ordering mechanism (in Greek logos equals thought and the language or discourse used to present that thought; nomos equals control or ordering mechanism). A logonomic system may be solid or uid in relation to the practices and rules prescribing the conditions for production and reception of meanings (Hodge and Kress 1988: 4). Fluidity refers to the existence of a constant movement of change, with people ready to revise or discard old practices, beliefs, and attachments (Blumer 1969a: 286). The absence of logonomic uidity would mean that there is a closure toward change, as may be the case in some radically orthodox

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systems of religious belief, and that people are, therefore, not poised to adopt new social forms (Blumer 1969a: 286). The second feature observed by Blumer is what I call logonomic openness. The social world potentially undergoing semiotic transformation must be open to the recurrent presentation of models or proposals of new social forms (Blumer 1969a: 286). There are similarities between Blumers arguments on uidity and openness, but differences as well. Logonomic uidity, as I conceptualize it, is marked by the existence of a culture or collective disposition that places a premium on being up to date and which implies a readiness to denigrate given older forms of life as being outmoded (Blumer 1969a: 286). Fluidity therefore refers to a mindset, whereas logonomic openness refers to the structural openness of a semiotic system. Sociologists and socio-semioticians interested in understanding how openness works as a condition of the generic social process of semiotic transformation ought to be sensitive to inquiring about resistance to change. Wherever there are vested interests in upholding traditions, or perhaps wherever there are material limitations to change, openness is hampered and semiotic transformation may not take place. The condition of openness, therefore, sensitizes us to pay attention to who can claim to initiate (produce, communicate) or know (receive, understand) meanings about what topics under what circumstances and with what modalities (how, when, why) (Hodge and Kress 1988: 4). The third element is systemic freedomor more simply availability of choice within a structure of signs. Whereas logonomic openness refers to the condition of permeability of the system of rules by which meanings and situations are dened and produced, systemic freedom refers to the condition of choice among available symbolic objects at the level of the user/interpreter. As Blumer (1969a: 286) states: There must be a relatively free opportunity for choice between symbolic objects and semiotic models carrying competing meanings. Systemic freedom bespeaks of both basis of need and want that may be in place within a social world. When social agents have the (relative) freedom to select among symbolic objects in order to achieve their goals, they relate to such objects on the basis of the changing semiotic instrumental potential they containor, in simpler words, on the basis of what symbols can possibly do for them. Symbolic objects, or signs, therefore become resources. Take, for example, the relative systemic freedom of a scholar in choosing competing theoretical models to interpret empirical data, or at least in choosing how to formulate possible hypotheses in preparing a grant proposal. Although it is doubtful that our scholar will select among competing theoretical models exclusively on the basis of their fashionableness, such fashionableness will denitely play a role, as any twenty-rst century criminologist who has considered measuring peoples skulls to determine their propensity to commit crime will attest. In this case, it is evident how symbolic models and objects work just like technical resources among which social agents will select in order to achieve their goals. Different and changing arrays of availability for different people and differing goals will result in systemic change, or semiotic transformation. It is imperative for the student of generic social processes of semiotic transformation to understand agents changing motives for

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their selection as well as the connection between differing motives and changing congurations of choice. Symbolic objects work as resources under circumstances that are highly variable. Furthermore, as previously stated, different people with different goals will select among competing available resources on the basis of the potential they interpret such resources to hold. For this reason, an important condition of the generic social process of semiotic transformation is the indeterminacy of the value of resources. Indeterminacy refers to the lack of an ultimate test of the pretended merit or value of the competing models or resources (Blumer 1969a: 286). Of course, if there were nal and absolute determinacy, there would be no door open to change, or at least no immediately available justication for it. On the point of determinacy and indeterminacy, Blumer seems to contradict himself. At one point Blumer (1969a: 286) states that fashion is not guided by utilitarian or rational considerations. This seems to contradict his earlier statements that the fashion-conscious person is usually quite careful and discerning in his effort to identify the fashion in order to make sure that he is in style (1969a: 277) and that individuals fashion adoptions are done deliberately and not irrationally (1969a: 277). Perhaps by refusing to identify fashion as a rational or utilitarian process, Blumer intends that what I call semiotic transformations have no teleological directions, for they are but emergent from the continuously changing interplay of individual and group action. Notwithstanding this lack of clarity on the matter, the element of indeterminacy ought to sensitize the student of the generic social process of semiotic transformation to the changing methods by which symbolic resources are assessed over time. The fth element of the process of semiotic transformation is logonomic hegemony. Hegemony is intended here as a conguration or alliance of groups and/or individuals and the concerted action they exercise in order to preserve control over the economic, political, cultural, and ideological domains of a logonomic system. For Blumer (1969a: 287), no system of fashion can exist without the shared agreement of prestige gures who espouse one or another of the competing models. Therefore, a condition of hegemony, however partially and temporarily achieved as an unstable equilibrium, must be reached in order for logonomic systems to carry weight as an assurance or endorsement of the superiority or propriety of a given model (Blumer 1969a: 287). Hegemony, as intended here, is not a form of domination of the subordinate, but more simply a form of institutionalization of meaning in the absence of which there would be less likelihood of adoption of the model (Blumer 1969a: 287) or no uniformity in what would otherwise be a markedly fragmented arrangement (1969a: 289). At the collective level, semiotic transformations must be accepted or agreed upon by at least more than one individual, and following Blumers observations of the haute couture social world in Europe, one can safely conclude that certain individuals and groups have more power than others to promote change and dene the situation. Nevertheless, as Blumer found, no hegemonic alliances are strong enough to determine semiotic transformation in any stable manner, as any high prole fashion designer who has failed to introduce an innovation despite great publicity would promptly agree.

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The sixth and nal element identied by Blumer is systemic permeability. Permeability is the property of being penetrable, porous, and open to inuxes. For semiotic transformation to take place, social worlds and their symbolic systems must be permeable to the inux of new interests and dispositions in response to (a) the impact of outside events, (b) the introduction of new participants into the area, and (c) changes in their inner social interaction (Blumer 1969a: 287). Without systemic permeability there are no opportunities for collective tastes or dispositions to shift. Take, for example, the social world of a music subculture. That social world changes in relation to greater cultural and sociopolitical events in the world, in relation to the inux of new followers and the exit of older members, and in relation to changing practices and conventions, or ways of scripting and performing the culture of the group. Together, logonomic hegemony, uidity and openness, systemic freedom and permeability, and resource indeterminacy form the conditions under which semiotic transformationfollowing my reading of Blumers fashion thesiswill occur. Blumer (1969a: 288) explains that scrutiny of these components of the generic social process of semiotic transformation will shed light on how social worlds turn away from old forms that are thought to be out of date; [and on] the introduction of new models which compete for adoption; a selection between them that is made not on the basis of demonstrated merit or utility but in response to an interplay of prestige endorsement and incipient taste; and a course of development in which a given type of model becomes solidied, socially elevated, and imperative in its demands for acceptance for a period of time. I now proceed to discuss in greater depth the temporal properties of semiotic transformation.

FASHION AND SEMIOTIC TRANSFORMATION

Semiotic transformations are of great interest to social semioticians. Social semiotics is not synonymous with general semiotics. Whereas most semioticians derive inspiration from the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), social semioticians are generally highly critical of Saussurean thought and tend to favor an updated version of Peircean theory (Peirce 1940). The differences between the two are signicant and too numerous to be considered here (for a review see Hodge and Kress 1988; Vannini 2006); let it suffice to say that social semiotics rejects the structural determination of meaning and the relative xity of meaning over time theorized by Saussure and later by Levi-Strauss and Chomsky, drawing instead from Peirces conceptualization of semiosis (i.e., the process of constitution of meaning) as a human communicative event unfolding over time (Hodge and Kress 1988; Rochberg-Halton 1982). Much like interactionists, social semioticians also give great consideration to context, and thus to the material, ideological, historical, and sociopolitical relations that contribute to the denition of the situation in which semiosis takes place (see Hodge and Kress 1988). Socio-semioticians then effectively straddle the continuum between semiotic and sociological theory and constructionist theory in particular (Vannini 2004).

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A central interest in social semiotics is the uncovering of ideological forces in relation to semiosis. Because certain groups in our society have a vested interest in dening situations and the meanings of symbolic objects in ways that favor their own economic or political agendas, and because they have relatively more power to do so than others do, semiosis is always shaped by ideology and sociopolitical power. Therefore, although men and women agentically make their own semiotic history to borrow from Marxthey do not necessarily make it under circumstances they have chosen, but instead under circumstances directly shaped by their past and by the social forces active in shaping that past. Fashion in clothing is directly illustrative of this. As Davis (1994) has shown, the semiotic transformation of the meanings of elegance is directly shaped by a historical dialectics of identity ambivalence. The same could be said of fashion in scientic theory, since the succession of paradigms is, by necessity, a response and reaction to previously dominating paradigms and to the social and political conditions that led to the emergence of consensus over them (Kuhn 1962). In both cases, and especially more so in the latter, old conventions and habits are notoriously difficult to transform. Following Peircean terminology, we could loosely dene semiotic transformations as successions of different habits of thought. The succession of habits of thought may then be understood as the emergent variation of logonomic rules for the production and interpretation of meaning over time. Emergence constitutes the basis of temporal structure of semiotic transformation. In fact emergencea processstructures the logonomic rules by which meaning is produced, exchanged, interpreted, and used by social agents involved in joint acts. The emergence of fashion works because it can only build on a symbolically shared past of thoughts, images, and sentiments as these ow into an undened present and uncertain future (Davis 1991: 9), or, in Blumers (1969b: 20) own words, the process of emergence structures collective action in that any instance of joint action, whether newly formed or long established, has necessarily arisen out of a background of previous actions of the participants. A new kind of joint action never comes into existence apart from such a background. The participants involved in the formation of the new joint action always bring to that formation the world of objects, the sets of meanings, and the schemes of interpretation that they already possess. Thus, the new form of joint action emerges out of and is connected with a context of previous joint action. Emergence, therefore, allows at once for innovation and tradition to be part of the temporal process of semiotic transformation. Furthermore, by focusing on the temporal perspective of emergence, the student of semiotic transformation can pay attention to both processual and structural elements. The importance of the principle of emergence in semiotic transformation cannot be stressed enough. Students of semiotic transformation in the Saussurean tradition have either discounted diachrony2 or treated it as a by-product of forces external to semiosis (Rochberg-Halton 1982; Vannini 2004). A theorization of semiotic transformation and social change grounded in pragmatism, instead, can allow us to view diachronic change as a complex dynamic outcome of the habituated and nonhabituated

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sides of life (see Han-Yin Chang 2004; Snow 2001). Understood this way, semiotic transformation depends on the interplay of joint acts that give rise to emergent meanings and the nature of preexisting conditions that make this interaction meaningful and possible. The conceptualization of semiotic transformation as emergent brings us to view Blumers thesis on fashion in a new light. When we understand fashion as a constant movement of reaching out for new models which will answer to as yet indistinct and articulate newer tastes (Blumer 1969a: 282), we can see how for Blumer transformation in meaning arises from the diversity of experience that occurs in social interaction in a complex moving world (1969a: 282). This view of symbolic change parallels Blumers theory of industrialization as an agent of social change (Blumer 1990). In industrialization, much like in semiotic transformation, variation over time does not occur as a result of the determining causal force of specic agents or single structural components, but instead arises out of the tension toward movement typical of the interaction system itself. In sum, therefore, fashion, semiotic transformation, industrialization, and any form of symbolic change occur in this world because of a continuous tension toward becominga central, but somewhat undertheorized philosophical component of Blumerian theory and symbolic interactionism in general. Such tension toward becoming can be traced back to Peircean philosophy (Peirce 1940). For Peirce, semiosis is always a process in tension toward a temporal innite. This is because interpretation always gives rise to a new sign, which gives rise to a new interpretation, and so forth. For Rochberg-Halton (1982) this semiotic tension toward the inevitability of transformation constitutes the very basis of structure in interactionist and pragmatist theory. Indeed, because meaning always tends to its regeneration, it also always tends to the restructuring of the conditions (Peirces habits of thought) upon which it depends, or, in other words, the restructuring of its logonomic rules. This ought to explain precisely why for Blumer (1969a: 283) the history of fashion shows clearly that new fashions are related to, and grow out of, their immediate predecessors with a character of a cultural drift. Therefore, even though transformations may have no line of historical continuity (1969a: 283) they still drift, tend toward movement, or shift in trends woven deeply into the texture of modern life (1969a: 283). Blumers (1969b) famous three premises of symbolic interactionism are also deeply grounded in time. Symbolic interaction unfolds as an emergent process whose uidity is made possible by the vast diversity of individual and group forms of conduct, and by the polysemy3 of the objects toward which symbolic action is directed over time. Because pragmatist philosophy recognizes the variability of meaning over time and the social origin of meaning, semiotic transformation stands as the most fundamental social and semiotic process of all. Semiotic transformation, therefore, is at once a social and semiotic process. Returning to semiotic transformation as a generic social process, the following can be said about the temporal structure of this process. First, semiotic transformation tends toward unanimity and uniformity in what would otherwise be a markedly

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fragmented arrangement (Blumer 1969a: 289). The temporal generic process of semiotic transformation, in other words, tends toward logonomic hegemony; however, because of the continuously changing and vastly diverse arrangement of joint acts, hegemony always remains unstable. Second, fashion serves to detach the grip of the past in a moving world (Blumer 1969a: 289). Therefore, because of its very nature of movement and change, the force of semiotic transformation, much like a will to semiotic becoming, pushes against all restrictions, thus ensuring the conditions of systemic permeability, systemic freedom, logonomic uidity, and logonomic openness. Emergence, therefore, works both as a condition and an outcome of semiotic transformation. Third, by allowing the presentation of new models but by forcing them through the gauntlet of competition and collective selection the fashion mechanism offers a continuous means of adjusting to what is on the horizon (Blumer 1969a: 290). Selection, competition, and instrumental choice, as joint acts emerging out of the differing value of resources, thus ensure the indeterminacy of semiotic value and transformation over time. The importance of this point cannot be overstated. In Blumers (1969a: 290) own words: the value of a pliable and reforming body of common taste to meet a shifting and developing world should be apparent.

CONCLUSION
Throughout this article I have argued that Blumers thesis on fashion can be broadened and extended to guide us through the study of semiotic transformation. The features of the fashion process identied by Blumer, I have suggested, are contiguous with the elements of a generic social process of semiotic transformation. It is important to keep in mind, however, that fashion and semiotic transformation are not synonymous. Fashion represents a case of semiotic transformation, and only one of many possible cases and forms at that. Fashion is unique as a case of semiotic transformation, because it seemingly changes so drastically and so quickly and varies greatly among different groups of users and consumers. Semiotic transformation is liable to occur in less rapid ways in arenas less subject to the forces of fashion, such as language use (then again, if we were to think of teenage slang we might wish to rethink this), or jurisprudential interpretation. Nevertheless, even in those arenas it seems obvious that in order for the process of semiotic transformation to occur, such features as systemic permeability, systemic freedom, logonomic uidity, logonomic openness, indeterminacy, and logonomic hegemony should be present. The process in such arenas less subject to fashionand yet, still subject to itis then likely to differ in terms of intensity of its features, but arguably still likely to occur. Such is the core of my extension of Blumers argument and my application of Pruss concept of generic social process: fashion is a generic social process and a case of the generic social process of semiotic transformation. Obviously, it is not my intention to put words in Blumers mouth. Blumers thesis on fashion was meant, if we are to believe his words, to transcend widely the social world of elegance, but it is my interpretation to suggest that fashion can serve as a sensitizing

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tool for our understanding of semiotic transformation in general. In this sense, my extension of Blumers thesis on fashion is purely strategic and less concerned with purity and exegesis and more with pragmatic applicability. Viewing fashion as a lens for the generic social process of semiotic transformation opens the doors to the diachronic study of the changing meanings of anything that can be conceptualized, envisioned, indicated, pointed to, referenced, talked about, or even thought about (Prus 1997: 93). Symbolic objects whose semiotic change over time could be studied include all environmental and biological phenomena; all tools, appliances, and devices of all sorts; as well as all clothing and other apparel, and all realms of fashion, ideas, concepts, and beliefsin short, all things of human awareness (Prus 1997: 9394). Following Pruss (1997: 9396) lead (and arguably in spite of his intentions for application), it is not difficult to envision how the generic social process of semiotic transformationwhose elements have been identied abovecan be applied to such diachronic semiotic processes as dening and redening the use value, exchange value, sign-exchange value, and symbolic value of objects; the change in development, production, distribution, exchange, and acquisition of objects; the maintenance, repair, recycling, and disposing of objects, and so forth. Despite the limited attention sociologists and semioticians have paid to semiotic transformation, the range of applicability of this concept shows that it is indeed of the utmost importance in the sociological, anthropological, and sociolinguistic enterprise. The importance of Blumers thesis on fashion also transcends the phenomenon of fashion per se in that it contains the genes of Blumerian thought on emergence, and, in particular, on the structuring power of the temporal process of emergence. As Davis (1991, 1994) also noted, Blumers thesis on fashion clearly shows that the apostle of symbolic interactionism has been but wrongly accused of fostering a vision of this perspective marred by lack of attention to structure and history. Following Mead, Blumer found the fashion process interesting precisely because it clearly showed how a seemingly irrational, semidecontextualized, and subjective mechanism is, in reality, contingent on an emergent collective action directly shaped by, and in turn directly shaping, a changing historical structure. Nevertheless, general ignorance of his vast theoretical agenda as well as interactionist complicity in the reception of his theories have resulted in pushing forth an impartial, unaware, and often wrongful understanding of the signicance of Blumerian thought (Maines 1988). It is precisely for this reason that all of his writings, including some of the most seemingly esoteric, such as his work on fashion, contain great potential for the development of interpretive sociological theory and research. Phillip Vannini is assistant professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. Together with Dennis Waskul, he is editor of Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interactionism and the Sociology of the Body (2006 Ashgate) and author of numerous articles in such journals as Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Inquiry, Critical Discourse Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, Journal of Popular Culture, and Studies in Symbolic Interaction.

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NOTES
1. More precisely, Blumers writings on fashion have often been acknowledged by researchers of the fashion (i.e., clothing) industry, but many have missed Blumers (1969a) analytical points on the wide range of operation of fashion. 2. Diachrony, the opposite of synchrony, is a term within semiotic theory that refers to historical unfolding. 3. Polysemy is a concept that refers to the idea that signs have multiple meanings.

REFERENCES
Blumer, Herbert. 1966. Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead. American Journal of Sociology 71: 535548. . 1968. Fashion. Pp. 341345 in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, edited by David Sills and Robert King Merton. New York: Macmillan. . 1969a. Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection. Sociological Quarterly 10: 275291. . 1969b. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1990. Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Davis, Fred. 1991. Herbert Blumer and the Study of Fashion: A Reminiscence and a Critique. Symbolic Interaction 14: 121. . 1994. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1992. Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Han-Yin Chang, Johannes. 2004. Meads Theory of Emergence as a Framework for Multilevel Sociological Inquiry. Symbolic Interaction 27: 405427. Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientic Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maines, David. 1988. Myth, Text, and Interactionist Complicity in the Neglect of Blumers Macrosociology. Symbolic Interaction 11: 4357. Mead, George H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Patzer, Gordon. 1985. The Physical Attractiveness Phenomenon. New York: Plenum Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1940. Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Prus, Robert. 1987. Generic Social Processes: Maximizing Conceptual Development in Ethnographic Research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16: 250291. . 1994. Generic Social Processes: Intersubjectivity and Transcontextuality in the Social Sciences. Pp. 393412 in Doing Everyday Life: Ethnography as Human Lived Experience, edited by Mary Lorenz Dietz, Robert Prus, and William Shaffir. Toronto, ON: Copp Clark/Longman. . 1996. Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. . 1997. Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities: An Ethnographic Research Agenda for Pragmatizing the Social Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Rochberg-Halton, Eugene. 1982. Situation, Structure, and the Context of Meaning. Sociological Quarterly 23: 455476. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1974. Course in General Linguistics. London: Fontana. Simmel, Georg. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology 62: 541558. Snow, David A. 2001. Extending and Broadening Blumers Conceptualization of Symbolic Interactionism. Symbolic Interaction 24: 367377. Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Vannini, Phillip. 2004. Toward an Interpretive Analytics of the Sign: Interactionism, Power, and Semiosis. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 27: 151176. . 2006. Social Semiotics and Fieldwork: Method and Analytics. Qualitative Inquiry 12: 128.

Mind, Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Clinton R. Sanders*
University of Connecticut

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as critical commonsensism, this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationshipsthat between people and companion animals. I rst examine the basis for Blumers (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as authentic social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as minded, in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary self. Here I focus special attention on Irvines discussion of those self experiences that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss joint action as a key element of peoples relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and denitions of object, and t together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.

As constructed by Herbert Blumer on a foundation largely established by George Herbert Mead, symbolic interactionism offers a unique1 and compelling perspective on social life. Central to interactionist thought are Blumers key propositions: human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that things have for them; the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with ones fellows; and meanings are handled in, and modied through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters (Blumer 1969: 2, emphasis mine).2 In these elemental propositions Blumer makes the assumptions that only human beings engage in the construction of meaning; that human being and person are synonymous; and that social interaction based on the communication, cooperative shaping, and utilization of shared meaning is possible only between and among humans. In so doing, Blumer relegates nonhuman animals to the category of physical rather than social objects (Blumer 1969: 10), and excludes

*An earlier version of this paper was presented at the joint Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research and North Central Sociological Association Conferences, Pittsburgh, PA, April 710, 2005. I appreciate the assistance of Steve Carlton-Ford, Scott Grills, and three anonymous reviewers. Please contact the author at the Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut; his email address is clinton.sanders@uconn.edu.

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from consideration one of the most historically long-term, culturally relevant, and contemporarily commonplace forms of associationthat between humans and nonhuman animals. Blumers lack of attention to animals is understandable given the central theoretical place of language in his perspective and the foundational role Meads preexisting discussions played in his theoretical orientation. For Mead, animals, lacking the ability to employ linguistic symbols, acted and interacted solely on the more elemental and limiting basis of gesture. As he put it: Gestures may be either conscious (signicant) or unconscious (nonsignicant). The conversation of gestures is not signicant below the human level, because it is not conscious, that is, not self-conscious (though it is conscious in the sense of involving feelings or sensations). An animal as opposed to a human form, in indicating something to, or bringing out a meaning for, another form, is not at the same time indicating or bringing out the same thing or meaning to or for himself; for the animal has no mind, no thought, and hence there is no meaning here in the signicant or self-conscious sense. A gesture is not signicant when the response of another organism to it does not indicate to the rst organism what the second organism is responding to. (1964: 168) Mead believed that animals were mindless since thought was dependent on the actors ability to say. Consequently, animals lacked a self since they were unable to engage in the processes of dening situations and taking the role of the other that constituted authentic social interactions that gave rise to the actors self denition. For Mead, human-animal exchanges were premised on anthropomorphic delusion. As he maintained: We, of course, tend to endow our domestic animals with personality, but as we get insight into their conditions we see there is no place for this sort of importation of the social process into the conduct of the individual. They do not have the mechanism for itlanguage. So we say that they have no personality; they are not responsible for the social situation in which they nd themselves. . . . We put personalities into the animals, but they do not belong to them. . . . And yet the common attitude is that of giving them just such personalities as our own. We talk to them and in our talking to them we act as if they had the sort of inner world that we have. (1962: 182183)3 Blumers (and Meads) anthropocentric exclusion of animals from the realms of minded action, meaning construction, and authentic interaction has recently been challenged both by interactionist scholars actively engaged in investigating humananimal relationships and by writers not directly associated with human-animal studies. Hammersley (1989: 128129), for example, criticizes Blumer and interactionism for disregarding animal behavior and ignoring its potential for expanding an understanding of human motivation. More recently, Prus (1997: 96) has advocated attention to life form objects and human denitions of and consequent interactions with them. Nonetheless, criticism of attending to human-animal exchanges continues both outside of the symbolic interactionist community (e.g., Perrow 2000) and

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within it. Recently, Meltzer has dismissed attention to the interactional, mental, and behavioral abilities of animals as an exercise in anthropomorphizing since animals engage in behavior, he maintains, that is merely automatic, immediate, and direct reaction of a stimulus-response or conditioned response type (2003: 258). Similarly, Dennis Waskul, in a listserve exchange focused on animal abilities, recently observed: [P]ersonally, I simply cannot accept this notion of animals (other than humans) possessing a mind or self. I nd some of the recently published works on this interesting, but I remain deeply skeptical. It is the human mind that conjures these ctions . . . and THAT is the key difference. Because animals do not, and cannot (I argue), wonder what humans (or any other organism) are thinking, they do not (and cannot) posses a mind or self. If animals could do these things they wouldnt act like they do. . . . I think the classic portrayal of these things as uniquely human is quite central and signicant. Sure we can interact with animals and animals can act backbut so does my computer, my . . . pickup truck, and a whole host of utterly inanimate objects (emphases in the original).4 In the following discussion I take at face value Blumers (1969: 67) position that symbolic interactionism is able to cover the full range of the generic forms of human association and question the linguicentric interactionist orthodoxy that routinely excludes animals and their interactions with human coactors from serious attention. Drawing primarily on the ethnographic work of Janet and Steven Alger, Leslie Irvine, Eugene Myers, and Clinton Sandersanalysts of human-animal relationships who overtly employ an interactionist perspectiveI extend Blumerian interactionism to construct elements of an interactionist sociozoology5 that casts animals as acting units, expands the concept of the person, presents mind and self as not based solely on linguistic capabilities or as uniquely human, and examines forms of joint action that involve intersubjective exchanges between humans and other animals. In so doing, I take to heart what Hammersley (1989: 131135) refers to as Blumers critical commonsensism, which regards commonsense as providing a useful and reliable entry into the world of everyday experience. I maintain that it is through the analytic and methodological valuing of commonsense and the practical ways in which it shapes our understanding of situations and the interactions that take place within them that we can best construct a view of social life that is immediate, comprehensible, and includes all of the associations that constitute it.

ANIMAL MIND
In constructing an understanding of mind and mindedness, Blumerian interactionism rejects both dualism (the analytic separation of the actors body and mind) and individualistic psychologies in which social processes are viewed as produced by mind (Meltzer 2003: 253254). Further, interactionism rejects a computational or information-processing view of mind that focuses on the manipulation of abstract mental representations to the exclusion of emotions, body awareness, and other elements of minded experience (Dutton and Williams 2004: 212, 217). Finally, interactionism

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rejects the separation of mind from self and society in that mindedness presupposes a self that arises out of the social exchanges that constitute society (Blumer 1969: 7889; Meltzer 2003: 254255; Prus 1996: 5254). Nonetheless, Blumer, like Mead before him and most interactionists who followed, largely regards mind as an internal conversation premised on the minded actors ability to employ signicant symbols as the medium of interaction with the self. As Mead (1962: 47) put it: Only in terms of gestures as signicant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are signicant symbols can thinkingwhich is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gesturestake place. For over a decade, a growing number of interactionist sociologists have sought to establish an orientation toward mind that deemphasizes this view of mindedness as a linguistic phenomenon and returns to an understanding of mind as the outcome of social interaction and social experience. Examining the interactional worlds of people with Alzheimers disease (Gubrium 1986), those with severe physical and mental disabilities (Bogdan and Taylor 1989; Goode 1994), infants (Kaye 1982; Stern 1985), and nonhuman animals, researchers have called into question the centrality of language use to mindedness and have emphasized the interactional process of doing mind (Dutton and Williams 2004; Sanders 1993). As Dutton and Williams (2004: 215216) observe: The attribution of meaning or intention to behavior hinges crucially on the extent to which such behavior is considered meaningful within the context of the social relationship. Social relationships actually provide rather clear conditions and parameters for what constitutes mindful behavior in contrast to those behaviors that do not seem to merit an intentional explanation because they seem inappropriate within the context of relationship. . . . To see (doing mind) as simply folk psychology or a useful social heuristic would be to ignore the importance of the social relationship in structuring and scaffolding intersubjective understanding (emphasis in the original). Mind, therefore, as it arises from shared experience, is an element of the meaning structure that those who interact with alingual others devise in understanding and constructing their interactionsan eminently Blumerian position. Caretakers of animals, people with severe disabilities, infants, and Alzheimers patients construct a theory of mind that allows them to understand the thinking, emotions, preferences, desires, and intentions of the other (see Alger and Alger 1997; Myers 1998: 99102; Sanders 1993).6 Once established in the context of an ongoing relationship, these caretakers commonly use their knowledge of the other to give voice to the mental content of their alingual coactors. Arluke and Sanders (1996: 6181) offer a variety of instances of this intersubjective activity, a process they refer to as speaking for.7 Here, for example, is a quote from Sanderss ethnographic observations in a veterinary clinic. A young male shepherd with long hair is brought into the exam room by an older couple. . . . The woman goes on at some length about the dogs long hair and how they hadnt anticipated this when the dog was a puppy. . . . The dog lies down with his head on the womans feet and she says, Oh, Im so tired. I just

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have to lie down here. Later, as the dog is having his nails trimmed, she (again) speaks for the dog in observing, Oh, I have such nice nails. During much of the time she holds the dogs head tenderly and stares into his eyes. (69)8 The skeptic would, most likely, acknowledge that humans attribute mental activities and use these attributions to give voice to the presumed thought of a wide variety of nonhuman objects. Disagreement would revolve around whether animals possess a theory of mind to orient their interactions with human and nonhuman coactors. Cognitive ethologists working with primates have amassed considerable evidence that these border animals do indeed hold representations of the intentions, goals, and perspectives of their colleagues (e.g., Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Povinelli, Nelson, and Boysen 1990). It is difficult to understand how primates, or other highly social beings such as the animals we accept as our companions, could survive very long were they unable, at least at some rudimentary level, to take the role of the other and use this theory of mind to shape action and interaction. Take this simple example. My dogs have learned to ring a bell hanging from the door to their fenced-in yard to indicate that they want to go outside.9 It is not uncommon for me not to be immediately responsive to their signaled demands if I am working at the computer or otherwise immediately occupied. After ringing the bell with increased vigor, they will pad down the hall, look xedly at me as I sit at my desk, and return to the door to ring the bell once again. If this tactic proves ineffective, they commonly come back to my study and poke me with a nose as if to say (speaking for), Are you stupid or deaf? One could, of course, understand this exchange as premised on simple principles of stimulus and response.10 However, if I take Blumer (1969: 153170) at his word and agree that commonsense offers the pragmatic understanding of social experience central to symbolic interactionism, it is entirely sensible for me to see my dogs actions as demonstrating a clear denition of the situation, a minded ability to ascertain and affect the content of my own mind, the recognition that they can affect my action by acting in a particular way, and the capability to devise and act upon a plan of action directed toward achieving an intended outcome.11 In short, from a commonsense perspective, minding animals, to use Bekoff s (2002) multilayered term, involves the cooperative construction of nonhuman mind as an intersubjective accomplishment that is not dependent upon the animals ability to employ human language.12 As the animals wordless mind (Terrace 1987) is produced and understood as an outcome of interaction, both human and animal coactors are able to engage in the practical and elemental social dance that Blumer (1969: 7077) refers to as joint action (a topic upon which I focus in a later section of this discussion).

ANIMAL SELF
In order for minded activity to exist, the minded actor must possess a self-object with whom to communicate. Symbolic interactionism locates the generation of the self, like the construction of mind, in the context of social interaction. Conscious awareness

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entails the actor indicating things to his or her self, devising an understanding of the objects so indicated, and using this understanding to shape lines of action (Blumer 1969: 1213). Even analysts skeptical of the ability of commonsense to provide valid and/or practical representations of experience (e.g., Hilbert 1994) would have a difcult time denying that animals are conscious in this sense and routinely involved in this type of interpretive process (see Damasio 1999; Dawkins 1998). Although the animal self is a focus of attention for most interactionists involved in exploring human-animal relationships (e.g., Alger and Alger 2003: 7689; Sanders 1999: 915, 137140), Irvine (2004a; 2004b) and Myers (1998) offer the most detailed discussions of the issue. Both locate the animal self in the context of the physical body (cf., Cooley 1964: 168200) and emotional experience; see it as emerging from, and displayed through, goal-directed behavior (Irvine 2004b: 8; Myers 1998: 4950); and deemphasize the importance of linguistic ability (Irvine 2004b: 9; Myers 1998: 68). Like mind, the self is presented as a product that emerges through routine interactions within the context of relationships. Using a conceptual foundation provided by William James (1961 [1892]) and following the lead of Stern (1985) and Myers (1998: 7478), Irvine (2003; 2004a: 126146; 2004b) details four self-experiences that are independent of language, arise out of interaction, and generate the core self. As she puts it: In the model of self I am using, in order for animals to [participate in the creation of self ], they must themselves be subjective Others. How can we sense their subjective presence? As with other people, we cannot observe subjectivity directly. We perceive it indirectly, during interaction. . . . [T]he case can be made for the presence of these [self ] experiences among animals, who have the same structures of the brain, nervous system, musculature, and memory [as do humans]. Whereas human development takes us into a stage of language acquisition that adds to these basic experiences, the experiences themselves are preverbal. (2004b: 9, emphasis in the original) Irvines rst self-experience is agency, the actors recognition that he/she/it has control over his/her/its actions. This awareness leads to an understanding that one is differentiated from the other and that, through purposive action, one can have impact on others actions. For example, my Newfoundlands, like most dogs, are fond of routine. An academic schedule allows me on most days to take my dogs for their daily walk between ten and noon. Around this time, the dogs become restive and begin to follow me around as I move about the house, all the while watching closely for indications that I am making walk preparations. As it grows later, the youngest dog will escalate the exchange by occasionally poking me with her nose and whining. The anticipation and attempts to hurry me along persuasively demonstrate that the dogs not only have some sense of time but that they also recognize that their actions can shape my behavior in ways they dene as desirable. In short, they provide evidence that they recognize their own agency and are able to take the role of the (human) other. Irvines second self-experience, coherence, focuses attention on the actors physical self, the entity to which . . . agency belongs (2004a: 133). She emphasizes that

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coherence is demonstrated by the animals ability to recognize, and orient action toward, specic animal and human others and by the activity of self-concealment. Hiding is an indication that an animal is aware of itself as an object in the world separate from the physical environment and from others (Sanders 1999: 137). Within the human-animal relationship, the coherence of the unique animal self is solidied and symbolized through the cultural process of naming (Irvine 2004b: 12; Sanders 2003: 411). Affectivitypossessing feelings/emotions associated with experienceis the third element of the core self discussed by Irvine. Here she distinguishes between categorical affects (self-experiences such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and so forth that we typically think of as emotion) and vitality affects (ways of feeling such as mood and vitality). Based on knowledge of the companion animals common emotional responses to particular situations and the ability to read the bodily gestures associated with these responses, the caretaker is able to understand and behave appropriately toward the animal and, over time, construct an understanding of what the animal is like (Irvine 2004a: 137139). Through interactional experience with the animalothers affective self, caretakers come to see the animal has having a unique and identiable personality. As one of Sanderss (1999: 30) interviewees put it: The only way I can describe the relationship [with my dog] is to use human terms. He certainly has as much personality as any of the people I know. I just use many of the same indicators to know what he is thinking and feeling that I use to understand my wife or other people. Finally, Irvine emphasizes self-history as a central organizing element of the animals core self. Past events and experiences, knowledge of others and places are, she maintains, preserved in nonverbal memory and provide the basis for self-in-relationship. In answering the presumed behaviorist criticism that responses to past experience, such as an animals display of fear when entering the veterinarians office, are simply the result of conditioning, Irvine calls upon Allen and Bekoff s (1997: 5662) distinction between behavior that is stimulus bound (i.e., motivated by external stimuli) and that which is stimulus free (i.e., prompted by internal factors). Despite the seductive simplicity of stimulus-bound explanations of animal behavior, she argues that many of the experiences we have with animals persuasively indicate that their behavior is frequently prompted by memory and evaluation of the immediate situation. As an example, she observes that her cats prefer sleeping on a eece blanket and acknowledges that the comfort they associate with the blanket is, to some degree, the consequence of conditioning. However, were she to lay out the blanket in the veterinary examining room (a setting in which her cats exhibit considerable fear), she doubts that they would respond to it in the same way they do when it rests on the oor in her home (Irvine 2004b: 1415). Shared routines also are a key element of self-history. Routine activitiesespecially feeding and playconstitute temporal high points in the shared ow of events that constitute the regular interactions between caretakers and companion animals. These routines, then, come, over time, to be anticipated, remembered, and ritualized within the relationship. For example, I always feed my own dogs between seven and eight in

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the morning. As in the case of going for walks described above, when this time approaches the dogs begin to watch me carefully and to follow me from place to place. If I am late, they will begin to make impatient noises and look longingly at the metal food bowls kept on the kitchen counter. When I take the bowls into the basement where their food is stored, they wait expectantly at the top of the stairs and then mill about and bark with anticipation as I prepare their meals. Over time, Cynder, the older of my Newfoundlands, has devised a unique postprandial routine. After I put the other dog out to take care of elimination, Cynder takes her bowl over to a place by the couch and waits expectantly. I go to her, rub her ears, and say a few kind words. After this special attention she lies down and chews on her bowl for a few minutes until she falls asleep. I then return her bowl to the counter and let the other dog back into the house. It is clear from her demeanor that this is an enjoyable and expected routine. If I am distracted or busy and do not follow the established pattern, she will continue to sit with the bowl in her mouth and watch me until I realize my failure to meet her expectations. This routine, together with a number of others, is a component of our shared history. We all remember how routines have played out in the past and structure present interactions on the basis of these memories, we anticipate the exchanges in the future, and Cynders personal shaping of the routine is part of my knowledge of her unique selfhood (cf. Shapiro 1990). The animal self, therefore, is constituted by the animal-actors recognizing he or she is distinct from others and can engage in volitional behavior; that moods and feelings are connected to experiences, places, and relationships; and that past events are relevant to the emotional experience of and physical response to current situations. In the context of an ongoing relationship, caretakers construct an understanding of the animals self and use this understanding to interact appropriately and practically. Like human-with-human interaction, exchanges between people and their animal companions is a mutual interplay of discrete selves. Seen in this way, the self is a process with a past, present, and future and an intersubjective accomplishment rather than simply an object that an actor indicates. As Clark (1984: 47) explains: To have . . . a concept [of self ] one must recognize other beings in the world, distinguish what is self and what is not-self, and lay claim to pasts and futures of the single being one is. To have a concept of self is, in part at least, to do these things: to show awareness of the world as being more than ones immediate perception of it, to recognize other beings as being the same as some past acquaintances, to admit responsibility for past action, and to intend some future. (See also Myers 1998: 5861.)

ANIMALS AND JOINT ACTION

For Blumer, society is constituted by interaction (Blumer 1969: 78). Following Mead, Blumer distinguishes between symbolic and nonsymbolic interaction. In the latter type cointeractants engage in a conversation of gestures in which there is shared meaning and mutual role-taking, but interactants respond directly to each

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others behavior in the process of cooperatively constructing joint action. According to Blumer (1969: 9): the gesture has meaning for both the person who makes it and for the person to whom it is directed. When the gesture has the same meaning for both, the two parties understand each other. . . . [The gesture] signies what the person to whom it is directed is to do; it signies what the person who is making the gesture plans to do; and it signies the joint action that is to arise by the articulation of the acts of both. Blumer, like Mead, would maintain that animal-with-animal, human-with-animal, and some simple forms of human-with-human interaction are premised on this communicative foundation. But, for Blumer, most human interaction is symbolic in that it involves interactants subjectively interpreting the meaning of each others behaviors and acting (rather than responding) on the basis of this understanding. The consequence of this symbolic exchange is a more complex form of interlinked action that is repetitive, stable, and grounded on emergent rules (Blumer 1969: 19). This authentic form of joint action is made possible as interactants share basically similar denitions of the situation and possess an understanding of each others goals, plans of action, and denitions of objects within the situational context (Blumer 1969: 62, 9697). In other words, for Blumer joint action is a dance of minded selvesan interpretive tting together of lines of action (Blumer 1969: 7077) operating in the context of shared perspectives (cf. Prus 1997: 68). Again, I maintain that Blumers exclusion of nonhuman animals from the realm of authentic (i.e., human-like) joint action is based simply on anthropocentric and linguicentric articles of faith. Belief in the unique character of human joint action is on shaky ground given the growing body of research-based literature being produced by interactionist scholars concerned with human-animal relationships and interactions. This work clearly demonstrates that, within the context of the ongoing, historically constructed, emotionally rich relationships between people and their animal companions, humans and animals do share perspectives and are routinely involved in joint action. The ability of animals to take the role of the other and act accordingly in order to achieve certain goals is illustrated by a veterinarians description of how his dog deceptively denes a particular denition of the situation for personal gain. I believe that dogs think. My dogs play a game called bone. One of them will get the rawhide bone and take it over to the other one and try to get him to try and get it. Or one will try to get the bone if the other one has it. One day I was watching and the youngest one was trying to get the bone without much luck. So he goes over to the window and begins to bark like someone is coming up the driveway. The other dog drops the bone and runs over to the window and the puppy goes and gets the bone. There wasnt anyone in the driveway, it was just a trick. (Sanders 1999: 24) The ability of dogs and other companion animals to share perspectives and situational denitions in both animal-with-animal (as in the above) and humanwith-animal situations is demonstrated by what Myers (1998: 9395) refers to as interattentionality, the sharing of attention and bodily experience. One indication

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of animals abilities to assume the perspective of the other is seen in the common phenomenon of gaze-following. Researchers have frequently noted this empathetic activity in observations of peoples interactions with dogs. For example, Sanders (1999: 114) notes the importance of gaze in his autoethnographic observations of his experience with his own dogs. When Emma and Isis look at me they usually pay attention to my eyes. I have noticed on walks how important looking is to them. A common way that one will communicate to the other that she wants to play is by staring. During play they have a variety of ways of signaling time out. In addition to stopping and avidly sniffing someplace, a player can effectively suspended the game by staring xedly off into the middle distance. The other dog typically responds to this move by looking to see if there is actually anything important to look at. They do the same with me. If on the walk I stop and look in a particular direction, they will stop, glance at me, and gaze off in the direction I am looking. This seems a fairly clear indication of their elemental ability to put themselves into my perspective. In a literal sense they attempt to assume my point of view. If I look at something they conclude that it is probably something important.13 In addition to the social force (Dutton and Williams 2004: 218) of mutual gaze and shared attention, sociologists involved in human-animal studies have focused on play as the interactional situation in which joint action is readily apparent. Play involves interaction that is apparently purposeless; mutually regarded as separated from everyday, practical, serious endeavors; and pursued in order to achieve intrinsic pleasure instead of being directed toward instrumental ends (see Irvine 2001: 153154; 2004a: 166171).14 Mechling (1989: 313), for example, emphasizes animal-human play as a communicative interaction when he describes playing with his dog Sunshine. The game of fetch was truly interactive. I was not always in control of the game. Sometimes Sunshine would fetch the ball but stop on the way back to me some ten feet away. He would begin a slow retriever stalk, then drop the ball in front of him and assume the familiar canine play bowforepaws extended at on the ground, the body sloping upward toward his erect hindquarters, tail wagging. This is the canine invitation to play. In this case, however, we were already engaged in a game, so his message to me was that he, too, could exert some power and control in the game.15 We can see that within the mutually dened situational frame (Goffman 1974) of playin addition to feeding (Alger and Alger 2003: 5758, 6364; Irvine 2004a: 153155), the solicitation and acceptance of physical contact, and the other routinized exchanges between people and their animal companions show the basic elements of joint action described by Blumer. Here human and animal cointeractants [align their] individual actions . . . by interpreting or taking into account each others actions (Blumer 1969: 82). In so doing, people and animals develop and play out what Collins (1989) calls natural interaction rituals as they share attention, mutual awareness, emotions, and obligations.

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Within the context of this joint action people and animals create, in turn, a private culture (Fine 1981: 267) consisting of established routines, knowledge of and feeling for each other, and expectations about the course of interaction. As Smuts (2001: 302) observes, with . . . prolonged exposure, members of two different species can co-create shared conventions that help to regulate interspecies encounters. What is of central importance to this interactionally constructed culture and the collective action it encompasses is that, although these structures and processes involve symbolic meanings shared by both humans and animals, they exist exclusive of the ability of all interactants to employ linguistic symbols.

CONCLUSION
Based on the basic precepts offered by Blumer, symbolic interactionism offers both an analytic window through which to view social life and methodological guidelines for opening that window. Through direct personal engagement with the social world constituted by interaction (Blumer 1969: 2426), taking the role of acting units (be they human or nonhuman), and attending to personal experiences within interactional situations (Blumer 1969: 39, Prus 1996: 6869), we build a descriptive (albeit tentative) understanding of how social exchanges are structured and played out (Blumer 1969: 18; Prus 1997: 9). Of central importance is the Blumerian principle that everyday (reliable) commonsense (Hammersley 1989: 126), when combined with intimate familiarity with the actors and phenomena of interest, provides an adequate foundation for this understanding.16 Given Blumers faith in what Hammersley (1989: 131135) refers to as critical commonsensism and his belief that symbolic interactionism provides an adequate ground for understanding all forms of social relationships (Blumer 1969: 67), it seems eminently reasonable to conclude that building an interactionist view of human-animal associations is both a viable endeavor and a means by which the interactionist perspective may be developed, enlarged, and changed (Hammersley 1989: 219). Central to this worthy endeavor are the methodological approach and analytic perspective related to Blumerian commonsensism. Interactionists working in human-animal studies consistently advocate and employ what cognitive ethologists call critical or interpretive anthropomorphism (Burghardt 1991). This orientation acknowledges that all systematic understanding of social others ows from the analysts adopting the perspective of those with whom he or she interacts. Through imaginatively taking the role of animalothers and critically employing insights gained from ones personal experience with and knowledge of the intersubjective groundings of everyday (human) social life, we may build a rich and nuanced understanding of how nonhuman minds and selves are constructed and operate within the context of intimate exchanges with their human companions. For, as the ethologist Margaret Nice succinctly puts it: A necessary condition for success . . . is a continuous sympathetic observation of an animal under as natural conditions as possible. To some degree, one must transfer oneself into the animals situation and inwardly partake in its behavior (quoted in Lawrence 1989: 118).17

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Interactionist scholars who focus on human relationships with other animals have, I submit, taken Blumer and his interpreters at their word. Possessing informal and intimate knowledge (Costall 1998) of their own and others everyday experience with animalswhat Cox and Ashford (1998) refer to as epistemic authoritythese scholars are constructing an enlarged understanding of group life within a mixedspecies social world. What has emerged, as demonstrated above, is a portrait of nonhuman animals as minded and self-aware participants in collective action with their human associates. But exploring human interactions with nonhuman animals holds promise for more than simply shedding substantive light on human-animal relationships. Analytic attention to peoples interactions with animals offers a route to expanding the conventional sociological conception of mind as a language-dependent, internalized conversation. Instead, mind may be regarded as an intersubjective accomplishment, the outcome of interaction between intimates (Sanders 2003). Similarly, exploration of human-animal interaction has already reshaped, and will continue to expand, the sociological understanding of the self. The process of constructing a self and the emotionally rich experience of self-awareness can no longer be seen as depending upon a social actors ability to use words. Instead, the self may be understood as arising from the actors recognition of his/her/its ability to control the physical and social world, experience emotions, and realize that purposive action comes from a unique and ongoing entity. In addition, as self aware social actors, nonhuman animals come to act as what Irvine (2004a: 162166) refers to as resources for self construction. Interaction with animals provides people with information and experiences they can use to dene the roles they enact and the situations in which they nd themselves. Seeing animals as minded selvesas participants in the interactional process of doing mind (Dutton and Williams 2004) and as social actors whose personhood is constructed within this process (Sanders 1995)also demands an ethical reevaluation of our relationships with them.18 Knowing animals and their central place in our culture and everyday experiences leads, of necessity, to appreciating their abilities, including them in sociological discussion, and affording them the respect and care we offer to the others with whom we share our lives. Clinton R. Sanders is a professor in the sociology department at the University of Connecticut. He has served as president (20022003) and vice president (19941995) of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Sanders work focuses on cultural production, deviant behavior, ethnographic research, and sociozoology. His most recent books are Understanding Dogs: Living and Working with Canine Companions (Temple University Press 1999) and Regarding Animals (Temple University Press 1996, coauthored with Arnold Aluke), both of which received the Charles Horton Cooley Award given by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Sanders is coeditor of the Temple University Press series on Animals, Culture, and Society and an associate editor of Society and Animals. He was the recipient of the University of Connecticut Provosts Award for Research Excellence in 2004

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and received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Animals and Society section of the American Sociological Association in 2006.

NOTES
1. Maines (2001) persuasively argues that symbolic interactionism is not a unique perspective in the sense that its theoretical precepts are central to sociology. 2. Prus (1997:1117) expands these basic principles. 3. For extended critical discussions of Meads perspective on animals and his single-minded focus on language see Alger and Alger 1997: 6771, 2003: 203206; Irvine 2003, 2004a: 120125, 2004b; Myers 1998: 120125, 2003; Sanders 1999: 117119. 4. Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~achives/SSITALK/ aug04/0276.html. 5. Arluke (2003) prefers the older term ethnozoology. I see sociozoology, anthrozoology, and ethnozoology as equally descriptive and serviceable. 6. The concept of theory of mind was originated by the primatologists Premack and Woodruff (1978). 7. Goffman (1981: 8687) calls this activity say-foring. He recognizes that say-foring is a general feature of relationships between those who are competent and those who are dened as less, or minimally, competent. He uses infants and companion animals as examples. [W]e can with impunity address words in public to a pet, presumably on the grounds that the animal can appreciate the affective element of the talk, if nothing else. We extend the same sort of regard to infants. . . . Moreover, special forms of talk are involved: for example, . . . mimicked babytalk projected as the talk the incompetent would employ were it able to speak [say-foring]. With reference to the relationship between parents and infants, Kaye (1982: 182) refers to this minding interaction as the he says phenomenon. For an extended discussion of the ethical and policy issues involved in speaking for incompetents, see Buchanan and Brock (1989). 8. For examples of this process within the context of adult-infant interaction see Brazelton (1984) and in interactions between caretakers and people with severe disabilities see Pollner and McDonald-Wikler (1985). Myers (1998) provides a variety of examples of children speaking for the animals they encountered in a nursery school. Also see Irvines (2001) recent discussion of this minding phenomenon in the context of human-animal play. 9. Interestingly, for new dogs in my household this knowledge is not the result of my training. Young dogs have learned from observing more experienced animals what the bell means and the typical human activity ringing it produces. 10. But, as Hearne (1987:58) observes: To the extent that the behaviorist manages to deny any belief in the dogs potential for believing, intending, meaning, etc., there will be no ow of intention, meaning, believing, hoping going on. . . .The behaviorists dog will not only seem stupid, she will be stupid. 11. For extended discussions of animal mind, see Crist 1999; Griffin 1992; Hauser 2000; and Rogers 1997. 12. The psychologist and dog trainer Stanley Coren observes that his own dogs have a receptive vocabulary of around sixty-ve words or phrases (Coren 1994:114). On the basis of the

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dog intelligence tests he has devised he nds that, relative to humans, dogs have an IQ somewhere in the 60s. 13. This is related to the gaze-related activity that Irvine (2004a:155158) refers to as checking back. See also Dutton and Williams 2004:214215. 14. Erving Goffman (1997) emphasizes the central role of playing games and having fun in human social life. He describes games as socially sanctioned, nonserious, face-to-face exchanges in which interactants share situational denitions. 15. For additional discussion and examples of human-animal play see Irvine 2004a: 168171; Mitchell and Edmonson 1999; Myers 1998: 117143. Shapiro (1990: 186) emphasizes the interactional complexity and intersubjective nature of human-animal play in his observations of playing with his own dog: At rst glance, this activity hardly seems worth mentioninga simple game of keepaway and chase. However, on reection, the invitation ritual, the play itself, the implicit rules and regulations governing the legitimate play area, permitted and prohibited moves, and the object of the game, as well as the conditions ending it, were all quite intricate and yet easily maintained by both players. Even more subtle were the postures, feints, and deceits, the half-executed moves during what might look, to the uninitiated, like time-outs from the game. 16. Similarly, Silverman (1997) advocates replacing the anthropocentric commonsense of science with ordinary commonsense derived from everyday experience when attempting to understand the perspectives of nonhuman animals and our interactions with them. 17. For discussions of critical anthropormorphism as it is advocated and used within sociological studies of human-animal relationships, see Irvine (2004a:6873) and Sanders (1999: 140141). See also Shapiros (1990) related discussion of kinesthetic empathy. 18. For discussions of the moral and ethical implications of an interactionist understanding of nonhuman animals see Alger and Alger (2003: 199211); Arluke and Sanders (1996: 5257); and Irvine (2004a: 172184).

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. 1984b. Patterns of Drug Use from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: III. Predictors of Progression. American Journal of Public Health 74:673681. Roberts, Les, Pascal Ngoy, Colleen Mone, Charles Lubula, Luc Mwezse, Mariana Zantop, and Michael Despines. 2003. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Results from a Nationwide Survey. International Rescue Committee. Retrieved November 23, 2004 (http://intranet.theirc.org/docs/ drc_mortality_iii_full.pdf ). Greenspan, Stanley L. 1986. Research Strategies to Identify Developmental Vulnerabilities for Drug Abuse. Pp. 136154 in Etiology of Drug Abuse: Implications for Prevention, edited by Carly L. Jones and Robert J. Battjes. Washington, DC: National Institute on Drug Abuse Series. NIDA Research Monograph 56.

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