Abstract
Rooted in the philosophic tradition of American pragmatism, symbolic interaction with its emphases on studying group life in the making represents a distinctively sociological approach to organizational dynamics. After establishing both a theoretical and methodological frame for the text that follows, this chapter addresses management as a realm of tactical interchange. This chapter establishes the theoretical foundation upon which our analysis of management activities rests. Although some may be tempted to embark on an analysis of management in more substantively-specific terms, it is vital to establish the interactionist terms of reference for this venture. Correspondingly, the material that follows attends to generic themes within the symbolic interactionist tradition that are essential for framing management activities. By so doing, we begin the work of capturing management in the making as a trans-contextual feature of everyday life.
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Notes
- 1.
This position does not negate Blumer’s (1969) position that the physical world acts back against our ideas of it or his related conceptualization of an obdurate reality . For example, people can create various realities about climate and climate change, however rising ocean levels may challenge those perspectives.
- 2.
- 3.
While the interactionists have long been concerned with ambiguity and the problematics of defining the situation (e.g., Thomas 1923), we have found the works of Plato and Aristotle particularly helpful in formulating this material.
- 4.
Since people’s sense of the unknown reflects limitations of the known, there can be no meaningful unknown without some notion of the (intersubjectively or linguistically) known. Nothing can be meaningful, including the unknown without invoking some comparison point (i.e., a known, even if only vaguely or tentatively identified in some manner). Even here, it is crucial to recognize that doubt is as socially constructed as knowing (Grills and Grills 2008).
- 5.
From this viewpoint, technology does not inhere within some object, but instead denotes a socially constituted process. Things acquire meanings as instances of technology when people envision and act toward things as enabling devices (Prus and Mitchell 2009).
- 6.
For example, social movements may take categories like race and gender to be objectively available categories. To do so denies the socially constructed qualities of these notions. As such, people may ignore or deny their own authorship of the concepts that they champion. The processes of objectification and reification of knowledge are central to Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) understanding of the sociology of knowledge.
- 7.
- 8.
The related implication is that it is an intersubjectively sustained language and the related developments of reflectivity, concepts and other technology as community-based cumulative sets of enabling devices that most directly distinguish humans from non-human animals (Prus and Mitchell 2009).
- 9.
This is not to deny differing individual viewpoints or contrary philosophic positions. Thus, Parmenides and Zeno among the early Greeks observed that it was logically impossible for things to be in process (i.e., for the same thing to occupy two distinct places), even though they seemed fully aware that this was contradicted by their own experiences as participants in the world. As Miller (1969) indicates, Aristotle (Physics, chapters V and VI) resolved this paradox by explicitly acknowledging time and motion as continuums, allowing theoretically infinite divisions rather than viewing time or motion as consisting of discrete, indivisible units. Aristotle also recognized that humanly invoked notions of time, motion, matter and process are relative and are meaningful only when these are cast against some comparison point.
- 10.
Because the role of the researcher is so multifaceted in itself, readers are apt to find helpful the more extended discussions provided by Becker (1970), Bogdan and Taylor (1975), Lofland and Lofland (1995), and Prus (1996, 1997) as well various accounts of people’s research experiences in the field (Grills 1998a; Shaffir and Stebbins 1991; Shaffir et al. 1980).
- 11.
Although Glaser and Strauss (1967) may be best known for their consideration of grounded theory , the emphasis on developing more generic or trans-contextual comparison points also can be found in the works of Blumer (1931, 1969). As a more general analytic procedure, the practice of analytic induction was well established by Aristotle.
- 12.
Given the relatively close connections of influence work (and the ensuing notions of cooperation and resistance) with management related activity, readers may be particularly interested in the analysis of power as socially accomplished activity (Prus 1999).
- 13.
- 14.
By no means is this tendency to focus on formally designated literature limited to those in organizations and management. Indeed, this seems a fairly common practice among scholars working in all substantive fields. For more viable, extended conceptual cross-fertilization to occur, it will be necessary to more explicitly employ generic social processes (or other trans-contextual concepts) of the sort discussed in this text.
- 15.
- 16.
We are not proposing that this position is somehow value neutral. There is a clear and argued-for commitment here to understanding how human group life is accomplished, rather than advancing a particular moralistic view of the way the world in general ought to be (e.g., who people can love, which gods are worth worshiping or preferred ways of establishing political order).
- 17.
As Mead (1934) observes, it is only in adopting the viewpoint of the other (and attaching those terms of reference and modes of acting to specific things) that particular matters begin to assume meanings as objects within the notions of reality now seemingly shared with the other.
- 18.
- 19.
Those who know Durkheim’s (1983) Pragmatism and Sociology will find much correspondence of the emphases of Durkheim and Mead on these matters. Although Durkheim would place greater overall stress on the relevance of historically-achieved precedents (as in institutions, practices, artifacts, language and collectively-achieved truths) in shaping people’s notions of the present, neither Durkheim nor Mead subscribe to structuralist or objectivist notions of reality. Instead, both see human truths and realities as socially constituted, developmental processes.
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Grills, S., Prus, R. (2019). Knowing, Acting and Interacting: The Symbolic Interactionist Tradition. In: Management Motifs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93429-7_3
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