Reasearch Report
on
Symbolic Interactionism

by Jeff Collett

I researched the journal of Symbolic Interaction (Official Journal of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.) I choose a paper written by Gisen Hinkle titled Hambermas, Mead, and Rationality. The paper compares and contrasts Mead and Habermas' theories and related theories to Symbolic Interactionism. Here is a quick background on the two.

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the leading scholar of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1929. George Herbert Mead was a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago for thirty years. He had an applied approach to knowledge. Unfortunately Mead passed away before documenting his theories so many of his students gathered notes and his chief disciple, Herbert Blumer of the University of California-Bexley, wrote the book Mind, Self, and Society. Blumer then coined the term Symbolic Interactionism.

Habermas developed a well-established theory, the Theory of Communicative Action. He also undertook an elegant reconstruction of Mead's theories of gestures, significant symbols, and normatively guided interaction. In doing so, he helped redefine American sociology. American symbolic interaction has always defined human nature, emotion, and sentiments naturalisticly or universalistically. But as times change, so need the theories too. Habermas did not fully achieve clarification and revision of Mead's theories, according to Frank. Frank thought that Habernas' symbolic interaction had two major weaknesses. The theory is too political and micro-oriented at the expense of the macro. That is why he developed three theses in Habernas' theory. The theses have been labeled as imprecise.

There are a few main points made about Mead's Theories such as

The Nature of Attitudes: Attitudes defined behavioristically as initial segments of the social act as essential to the functioning of consciousness and mind.

Types of Attitudes: Mead believes that all social behavior is based on one important impulse of sex and reproduction. This leads to the attitudes of parenting and neighborliness.

Universal: Religious Universal which is the fundamental in orienting relations among individuals. Economical Universal which is based on the needs and surplus. These two combined represent the most highly universal and abstract society

Another point made in the paper was about the label one puts on Mead. He has been labeled as a social scientist and as philosopher. Hinkle feels that it doesn't matter how you read his work, as a social scientist or a philosopher. Mead and Habermas both mix empirical and philosophical ideas and their ideas are labeled as reconstructive theory.

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