4.3 Symbolic Interaction

Introduction

How does a definition of the situation come to be established in everyday social interaction? Social interaction is in crucial respects symbolic interaction–interaction which is mediated by the exchange and interpretation of symbols. In symbolic interaction, people contrive to reach a mutual understanding of each other and of the tasks at hand through the exchange and interpretation of symbols and gestures. Only on this basis can a coordinated action be accomplished. The process of communication is the central quality of the human social condition. Social interaction depends on communication.

George Herbert Mead (1934) argues that people often act as if an idea they have “in their head” defines who they are and what the situation in front of them is. But ideas are in fact nebulous. They have to be confirmed by the others in the situation before they can become “real” or “actual.” Therefore, communication is central to defining social situations and making them “real.” Moreover, communication operates less on exchanging fully formed ideas and more on indications or gestures of meaning that call out responses in others. One person says “Hello” in the expectation that the other person will say “Hello” in response. The meaning of the exchange of “Hellos” is established when both parties recognize and define the situation as an encounter. If the 1st person then indicates with their body language that they are on their way somewhere, they call out a response in the 2nd person to release them from the encounter. If the 2nd person complies, they mutually define the situation as a “brief encounter.” If the 2nd person lingers, then the situation can become awkward, and further explanations are required to redefine the situation.

Herbert Blumer (1969) clarifies the three parts of this communication processes as follows. The speaker’s own and the other’s actions might be physical but they are also symbolic in that they refer beyond themselves to meanings which call out for the response of the other: (a) they indicate to the other what they are expected to do, (b) they indicate what the speaker plans to do, and (c) on this basis they form a mutual definition of the situation that indicates how a joint action will be agreed upon, carried out, and accomplished. Until each of the “indications” is confirmed by the other, the situation is undefined and no coordinated joint action is possible. A robber tells a victim to put their hands up, which indicates (a) what the victim is supposed to do (i.e., not resist); (b) what the robber intends to do (i.e., take the victim’s money), and (c) what the joint action is going to be (i.e., a robbery). Blumer writes: “If there is confusion or misunderstanding along any one of these three lines of meaning, communication is ineffective, interaction is impeded, and the formation of joint action is blocked” (Blumer, 1969).

In this model of communication, the definition of the situation, or mutual understanding of the context and tasks at hand, arises out of ongoing communicative interaction. Situations are not defined in advance, nor are they defined by the isolated understandings of the individuals involved. They are defined by the ongoing indications of meaning given by participants and the responses by the others. “Such a response is its meaning, or gives it its meaning” (Mead, 1934). Even the most habitualized situations involve a process of symbolic interaction in which a definition of the situation emerges through a mutual interpretation of signs or indications.

Making Connections: Sociological Research: Conversation Analysis

Examine a recent conversation in which you participated. If possible, record it or write it out.

• Did your conversation result in a “joint action” in the sense defined by Mead and Blumer? What was the joint action accomplished in this conversation (e.g., a casual passing of time, a game, a decision, a command, a fight, a work task, an agreement to disagree, etc.)?
• Compare a recent joint action you were involved with at home, at work, or in a recreational setting that failed (i.e., in the manner Blumer describes). Along which of the three “lines of meaning” did it fail? Did you or someone else fail to express their intentions clearly? Did the others fail to interpret the intentions correctly? Was the definition of the situation unclear or ambiguous?
• How did you get from “a” to “b” in the conversation? To what degree did your conversation proceed as a conversation of indications or gestures? Did the conversation unfold according to your initial intention or your initial opinion about things (i.e., according to the “indication” you expressed)? On the other hand, in what way did you have to modify your line of conversation as a result of the responses of the other person, and vice versa? In what way was the course, meaning, or content of the conversation socially determined through the process of conversation itself?
• With respect to any specific statement made in the conversation, is Mead right in saying that it is only the response of the other that “gives it its meaning”? If you said, “it’s a nice day,” does this require confirmation from the other person to make it so? Does the meaning of a statement like that change according to the other person’s response? Maybe they do not think the days is nice. What does this imply for the social nature of conversation and language? Is it ever possible to refer to fixed meanings or already existing definitions of the situation in particular social settings? Or is meaning always unfixed or “emergent,” waiting to be discovered at the outcome of an interaction?
• In light of the concept of communication described by Mead and Blumer, define what is meant by “symbol” and what is meant by “interaction” in the term symbolic interaction. How was your conversation a symbolic interaction?

Roles and Status

People employ many types of behaviours in day-to-day life. From the point of view of micro-level sociology, roles are patterns of behaviour expected of a person who occupies particular social status or position in society. They are held in place by one’s own and others’ expectations of how people in that role are supposed to behave. Currently, while reading this text, readers are playing the role of a student. They are expected to be reading in a certain way, linking ideas together and remembering information. However, the reader also plays other roles in their life, such as daughter, pet owner, boyfriend, neighbour, or employee. Each of these other roles comes with a set of expectations as well.

These various roles are each associated with a different status. Sociologists use the term status to describe the access to resources and benefits a person’s experiences according to the rank or prestige of their role in society. Some statuses are ascribed — those that individuals do not select, such as son, elderly person, racial minority member or female. Others, called achieved statuses, are obtained by personal effort or choice, such as a high school dropout, self-made millionaire, or sociologist. As a daughter or son, one occupies a different status than as a drop out or millionaire. One person can be associated with a multitude of roles and statuses. Even a single status such as “student” has a complex role-set, or array of roles, attached to it: roles in the classroom, in study groups, in interactions with university administrators and student loans officers, in solicitations from credit card companies, in getting bus or movie discounts, in earning tuition, etc. (Merton 1957).

If too much is required of a single role, individuals can experience role strain. Consider the duties of a parent: cooking, cleaning, nursing, driving, problem solving, tears drying, moral counseling—the list goes on and on. Similarly, a person can experience role conflict when one or more roles are contradictory. A parent who also has a full-time career can experience role conflict on a daily basis. When there is a deadline at the office, but a sick child needs to be picked up from school, which comes first? Being a university student can conflict with being an employee, being an athlete, or even being a friend. People’s roles in life have a great effect on their decisions and on who they become.

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Of course, it is impossible to look inside a person’s head and study what role they are playing. All sociologists can observe is behaviour, or role performance. Role performance is how a person expresses their role. Describing it as a “performance” emphasizes that individuals use certain gestures, manners, scripts, and “routines” to act out their roles. But they also seek to influence others in their enactments of specific roles. They perform for audiences of various sorts. In this sense, individuals in social contexts are always performers.

The focus on the importance of role performance in everyday life led Erving Goffman (1922–1982) to develop a framework called dramaturgical analysis. It represents a sociological reflection on the famous line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Goffman used the theater as an analogy for social interaction. Dramaturgy in theater is the art of dramatic composition on stage. He recognized that people played their roles and engaged in interaction theatrically, often following common social scripts and using props and costumes to support their roles.  For example, he notes that simply wearing a white lab coat brings to mind in the observer stock images of cleanliness, scientific modernity, scrupulous exactitude and authoritative knowledge. In England in the 1950s, even chimney sweeps and perfume clerks wore white lab coats as props “to provide the client with the understanding that the delicate tasks performed by these persons [would] be performed in … a standardized, clinical confidential manner” (Goffman, 1959). Whether the perfume clerk was clinically competent or not, the lab coat was used to bolster the impression that they were. Today, even without the lab coats, an analogous repertoire of props, sets and scripts are used to convey the clean, clinical, and confidential tasks of the perfume clerk.

Scripts and props are important in social encounters, because, as noted earlier, individuals are constrained to present a “face” that represents how they want the others to see them. They appear “in-face.” They present themselves to others as they hope to be perceived. “First impressions” and “getting off on the right foot” are therefore crucial for the way the events during a social interaction unfold.  Individuals project an image of themselves that, once proposed, they find themselves committed to for the duration of the encounter. If a person presents themselves as a “know-it-all,” then they have to follow through on knowing it all or else they will end up “shame-faced.”

Their presentation therefore defines the situation but also entails that certain lines of responsive action will be available to them while others will not. It is difficult to change one’s mode of self-presentation midway through a social interaction. The individual’s self-presentation therefore has a promissory character that will either be borne out by the ensuing interactions or discredited. In either case, it commits the performer and the audience to a certain predictable series of events no matter what the specific content of the social encounter is.

The audience of a performance is not passive. The audience also projects a definition of the situation through their responses to the performer. In general, it is normal for the audience of a performance to try to attune their responses as much as possible with the performers self-presentation so that open contradiction in the interaction does not emerge. The rules of tact dictate that the audience accommodates the performer’s claims and agrees to overlook minor flaws in the performance so that the encounter can reach its conclusion without mishap.

Goffman points out that this attunement is not usually a true consensus in which everyone expresses their honest feelings and agrees with one another in an open and candid manner. Rather, it is more like a covert agreement, much like that in a theater performance, to temporarily suspend disbelief. Individuals are expected to suppress their real feelings and project an attitude to the performance that they imagine the others will find acceptable.  They establish a provisional “official ruling” on the performance. In this way social encounters work based on a temporary modus vivendi or “working consensus” with regard to “whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honoured” (Goffman, 1959).

As everyone who has been in an awkward social situation knows, the stakes of mutual accommodation in social interactions are high. Events that contradict, discredit, or throw doubt upon the performer threaten to disrupt the social encounter. When it happens, this results in a kind of micro-level anomie or normlessness, which is characterized by a general uncertainty about what is going to happen and is usually painful for everyone involved.

When these disruptive events occur, the interaction itself may come to a confused and embarrassed halt. Some of the assumptions upon which the responses of the participants had been predicated become untenable, and the participants find themselves lodged in an interaction for which the situation has been wrongly defined and is now no longer defined. At such moments the individual whose presentation has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomie that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down (Goffman, 1959).

As a result, the logic of social situations dictates that individuals are continually obliged to manage the impression they are making on the others. Impression management often involves using the same type of “props” and “lines” as an actor, but also various defensive strategies like avoiding certain topics of conversation that might discredit the actor’s face or status. It is also in the interest of the audience to accommodate the performance, as far as is practicable, through various protective practices (e.g., tact, willful ignorance, etc.). Social interactions are not governed by truth so much as by preventative practices employed to avoid embarrassments.

This led to Goffman’s focus on the ritualized nature of social interaction—the way in which the “scripts” of social encounters become routine, repetitive, and unconscious. They follow predictable forms to avoid social breakdowns. For example, the ritual exchange in passing, “Hi. How are you?” “Fine, how are you?” is an exchange of symbolic tokens, ordinarily empty of actual content, (i.e.,one does not really want to know how the other is in any detail), which indicates sufficient mutual concern for the other that it stands in for a complete social interaction. Nothing is substantially exchanged, but a ritualized acknowledgement of the other is accomplished.

Nevertheless, the emphasis in Goffman’s analysis, as in symbolic interactionism as a whole, is that the social encounter, and social reality itself, is open and unpredictable. It can be unclear what part a person may play in a given situation; they have to improvise their role as the situation unfolds. Each situation is like a new scene in a play, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present. Face to face interaction relies on a continuous process of mutual interpretation, of signs given and signs received. Social reality is not predetermined by structures, functions, roles, or history, even if it often draws on these in the same way actors draw on background knowledge and experience in creating a credible character.

Front Stage and Back Stage

Goffman observes that face-to-face performances usually take place in highly bounded “regions”—both spatially and temporally—which the impressions and understandings fostered by the performances tend to saturate. A work meeting takes place in a board room for a specified period of time and generally provides the single focus for the participants. The same can be said for dinner in a restaurant, a ball hockey game, or a classroom lecture. Following his theatrical metaphor, Goffman (1959) further breaks down the regions of performance into front stage and back stage to examine the different implications they have for behaviour.

The front stage is the place where the performance is given to an audience, including the fixed sign-equipment (props) or setting that supports the performance (the raised podium of the judge’s bench, the family photos of the living room, the bookshelves of the professor’s office, etc.). On the front stage the performer puts on a personal front (or face), which includes elements of appearance–uniforms, insignia, clothing, hairstyle, gender or racial characteristics, body weight, posture, etc.–that convey their claim to status, and elements of manner–aggressiveness or passivity, seriousness or joviality, politeness, or informality, etc.–that foreshadow how they plan to play their role. The front stage is where the performer is on display. They are therefore constrained to maintain expressive control, as a single note off key can disrupt the tone of an entire performance. A server, for example, needs to read the situation table-by-table in walking the tricky line between establishing clear, firm, professional boundaries with the paying clients, (who are generally of higher status than the server), while also being friendly, courteous, and informal so that tips will be forthcoming.

The back stage is generally out of the public eye, the place where the front stage performance is prepared. It is also the place where “the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (Goffman, 1959). The waitress retreats to the kitchen to complain about the customers, the date retreats to the washroom to reassemble crucial make-up or hair details, the lawyer goes to the reference room to look up a matter of law she is not sure about, the neat and proper clerk goes out in the street to have a cigarette, etc. The back stage regions are where props are stored, costumes adjusted and examined for flaws, roles rehearsed and ceremonial equipment hidden–like a good bottle of scotch one is saving for a special occasion–so the audience cannot see how their treatment differs from others. As Goffman says, back stage is where the performer goes to drop the performance and be themselves temporarily: “Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character” (Goffman, 1959).

However, the implications of Goffman’s dramaturgical approach are that one is always playing a role. Even backstage the performer is not necessarily able to be their “true self.” Firstly, role performances are often performed as part of a team “whose intimate cooperation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained”–the restaurant staff, the law office, the husband and wife team, etc. As Goffman describes, this means that team members are involved with each other in a relationship of reciprocal dependence, because any team member of a team has the power to give away the secrets of the show, and reciprocal familiarity, because team members are all “persons in the know” and not a position to maintain their front before each other. This entails that even backstage they are obliged to demonstrate their allegiance to the team project and play their respective “back stage” roles.

Secondly, whether one plays one’s role sincerely–by being fully taken in with one’s own act–or with a degree of cynicism or role distance–aware of acting a role that one is not fully identified with–the self is never truly singular or authentic in Goffman’s view. There is no single, authentic self free of the obligations to perform. The self is just a collection of roles that people play out for others in different situations. Think about the way one behaves around coworkers versus the way one behaves around one’s grandparents versus the way one behaves with a blind date. Even if one does not consciously try to alter their personal performance in each situation, the grandparents, coworkers, and date probably see different sides of one. Back stage or front stage, the self is always an artifact of the ongoing stratagems of accommodation and impression management involved in the social interaction with particular persons.

Goffman concludes that the self is, on one side, “an image pieced together from the expressive implications of the full flow of events in an undertaking,” and on the other, “a kind of player in a ritual game” (Goffman, 1972). The self is essentially a mask: a persona.

It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role… It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves (Park quoted in Goffman, 1959)

Goffman’s point here is not that individuals are completely inauthentic or phony. “In so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be” (Goffman, 1959).