A sociological approach to self and identity begins with the assumption that there is a reciprocal relationship between the self and society. The self influences society through the actions of individuals thereby creating groups, organizations, networks, and institutions. And, reciprocally, society influences the self through its
shared language and meanings that enable a person to take the role of the other, engage in social interaction, and reflect upon oneself as an object. The latter process of reflexivity constitutes the core of selfhood. Because the self emerges in and is reflective of society, the sociological approach to understanding the self and its parts (identities) means that we must also understand the society in which the self is acting, and keep in mind that the self is always acting in a social context in which other selves exist. This chapter focuses primarily on the nature of self and identity from a sociological perspective, thus some discussion of society is warranted. The nature of the self and what individuals do depends to a large extent on the society within which they live.
In general, sociologists are interested in understanding the nature of society or social structure: its forms and patterns, the ways in which it develops and is transformed. The traditional symbolic interactionist perspective known as the situational approach to self and society, sees society as always in the process of being created through the interpretations and definitions of actors in situations. Actors identify the things that need to be taken into account for themselves, act on the basis of those identifications, and attempt to fit their lines of action with others in the situation to accomplish their goals. From this perspective, the inference is made that individuals are free to define the situation in any way they care to, with the consequence that society is always thought to be in a state of flux with no real organization or structure. As experts put it, “[It] tends to dissolve structure in a solvent of subjective definitions, to view definitions as unanchored, open to any possibility, failing to recognize that some possibilities are more probable than others. On the premise that self reflects society, this view leads to seeing self as undifferentiated, unorganized, unstable, and ephemeral.”
Our view of self and society is rooted in the structural approach to the symbolic interactionist perspective. Within this perspective, we do not see society as tentatively shaped. Instead, we assume that society is stable and durable as reflected in the “patterned regularities that characterize most human action”. Patterns of behavior within and between individuals have different levels of analysis, and this is key to understanding the link between self and society. At one level, we can look at the patterns of behavior of one individual over time and come to know that individual. By pooling several such patterns across similar individuals, we can come to know individuals of a certain type. At still another level, we can look at the patterns of behavior across individuals to see how these patterns fit with the patterns of others to create larger patterns of behavior. It is these larger, inter-individual patterns that constitute social structure. We provide an illustration.
In this chapter, we will discuss how people act to verify their conceptions of who they are. A scientist, for example, may act in ways that make it clear to herself, as well as to others, that she is careful, analytical, logical, and experimentally inclined. She may engage in a variety of actions and interactions to convey these images. These are individual patterns of behavior and help us understand the individual scientist. These same patterns of behavior may be part of a larger social structure. We may find, for example, that scientists who are careful, analytical, logical, and experimentally inclined, and who do these things well, are elected to high positions in their scientific organizations. If we take a broader view, we may see that there is a flow of such persons into positions of prominence within their scientific societies, and into positions of eminence in policy and governmental circles. The result is that their pronouncements about being scientists and their activities as scientists help to maintain boundaries between themselves and non-scientists, as well as to keep resources flowing to the groups and organizations to which they belong. The flow of persons into positions of importance through the mechanism of elections and appointments is part of the social structure, as is the flows of resources they control, and the mechanisms that support and sustain these flows.
Individuals act, but those actions exist within the context of the full set of patterns of action, interaction, and resource transfers among all persons all of which constitute the structure of society. Social structures do emerge from individual actions, as those actions are patterned across individuals and over time, but individual actions also occur in the context of the social structure within which the individuals exist. In this way, social structure is a very abstract idea. It is not something we experience directly. We are not directly tuned to these patterns as they occur across persons and over time.
Nevertheless, we can become aware of them and study them. Many of the patterns are well recognized, named, and attended to. They enter our everyday language as things like General Motors, the New York Yankees, the Brown family, Milwaukee. Some are recognized, but harder to point to, such as “the working class” or “the country club set” that do not have a legal status and do not maintain offices or locations. We can only point to individuals who may contribute to the patterns of behavior that constitute the structure. Some structures we tend not to see at all (without special effort or thought) such as the patterns of action that block access of African Americans to the education system or the patterns of actions that create the “glass ceiling” in organizations preventing qualified women from rising to positions of power and authority. Nevertheless, these too are parts of social structure and it is the job of sociologists to discover, attend to, and understand these patterns.
The above implies that the basis for understanding social structure arises from the actions of individuals’, keeping in mind that these agents (individuals) receive feedback from the structures they and others create to change themselves and the way they operate. In this chapter, we direct our attention to understanding selves that are producing actions, the patterns of which constitute social structure. However, as sociological social psychologists, we want the reader to keep in mind that persons are always embedded in the very social structure that is, at the same time, being created by those persons. It is this social context, or societal context, that is central in distinguishing sociological approaches to the study of the self.
