The interpretive turn in social theory has drawn heavily from symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. It has focused on the construction of social life through everyday experiences and tacit cultures. This has become a counter-point to a highly deterministic way of understanding social forces through meta level structures and forces. Actor-network theory, conversation analysis and several other recent developments have tried to envision this alternative way of theorizing human social existence. The challenge of integrating these micro-level processes with the larger structures has been an important theoretical concern with many political and practical implications. The structure-agency debate has led to more comprehensive and sensitive ways of understanding how people grapple with their problems and try to find solutions for them. Critical realism has been a way of reconciling the social construction of knowledge with a notion of reality that is not just an endless series of mirrors.
Weeks 7,8,9
Core Readings:
Ferris, Kelly, and Jill Stein. 2010. “The Self and Interaction.” In The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, Second, 124–49. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Ritzer, George. 2011. “Ethnomethodology.” In Sociological Theory, 8th ed., 391–415. New York: McGraw-Hill. Please read at least first 10-12 pages.
Archer, Margaret S. “Introduction: Reflexivity as the Unacknowledged Condition of Social Life.” In Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and the Social World, 1–22. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Additional Readings:
Archer, Margaret S., Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, eds. Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1998.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. (1966) 1991. “Internalization and Social Structure.” In The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, 183–92. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1990.
Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press, 1986.
Giddens, A. (1979). Agency, Structure. In Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Theory (pp. 49-95). Palgrave Macmillan
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1st ed. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre, 1956. Chapter 1 "Performances”, pp 10-47.
Mead, George Herbert, and Charles W Morris. Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1934.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. “The ‘I’ and the ‘Me.’” In Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by Charles W Morris, 173–78. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Ritzer, George. "Symbolic Interactionism.” In Sociological Theory, 8th ed., 351-88. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.
Ritzer, George. "Micro-Macro and Agency-Structure Integration.” In Sociological Theory, 8th ed., 499-546. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.
Ritzer, George. "Exchange, Network and Rational Choice Theories.” In Sociological Theory, 8th ed., 416-54. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.