Chapter Overview

This chapter deals with classical social theories that describe our engagement with everyday life. In contrast to the efforts of grand theorists to explain great transformations in the social world, theorists of everyday life focus on the kind of things that we engage in on a daily basis. Theorists of everyday life investigate sociological aspects of phenomena such as thought and action, interpersonal relationships, and small group behavior. This chapter provides a review of the way that these ideas have been explored by Max Weber, Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, the early Symbolic Interactionists, Talcott Parsons, and Alfred Schutz.

In the 1930s Talcott Parsons introduced an American audience to Max Weber’s action theory. Action theory describes the subjective factors that influence action and serve as the foundation for society. In developing his theory, Weber distinguished between the concepts of behavior and action. Behavior is an automatic response that occurs with little thought, whereas action is the result of a conscious process in which people give meaning to their actions and the world around them. Weber was concerned only with the study of action and believed that the sociologist could understand the meaningful basis of people's actions through the method of "understanding," or verstehen. He distinguished between four ideal-types of action: affectual action, traditional action, value-rational action, and means-end rational action.

Georg Simmel developed a rich theory of everyday life in which he studied the seemingly trivial forms of association and interactions among people. Simmel argued that because there is so much going on in social life, people regularly simplify the world into a limited number of forms of interaction, and types of interactants. Humans are able to continually develop new forms and types because they are endowed with a creative consciousness. This creative consciousness allows people to overcome limits imposed by external structures, but it can also impose limits on action when it reifies the social world. Simmel was also interested in the way that group size affects everyday interactions. He believed that the most important group differences are observed between two-person (dyad) and three-person (triad) groups. It is with the addition of a third group member that objective social structures can emerge and control individual behavior. Finally, Simmel was interested in the issue of distance. He analyzed the "stranger" as an important social type that is defined by its combination of closeness and distance. As an alternative to Marx’s labor theory of value, Simmel argued that value is a function of an object’s distance from a person. Thus, objects that are further away from a person acquire greater value for that person.

George Herbert Mead is one of the most important theorists of everyday life. He provided the theoretical basis for what was later to become known as symbolic interactionism. Mead drew on behaviorist theory to argue that behavior is based on a pattern of stimulus and response, but added that, in the case of human behavior, the mind intervenes between the stimulus and the response to provide for increasingly complex forms of action. In developing his ideas, Mead distinguished between the act and the gesture. The act refers to interactions with objects, whereas gesture refers to interactions with other people (or animals). Gestures are the movements that serve as stimuli to others. Both humans and animals employ gestures; however, it is only humans that employ significant gestures. These are gestures that involve thought before a response. For Mead, the most important kind of gesture is the significant symbol. This is the kind of significant gesture that elicits the same kind of response in others that it is trying to elicit. Language, a vocal gesture, is the most complex and important type of significant symbol for human beings.

In Mead’s theory, language is especially important to the development of the mind and the self. Mead defines the mind as a conversation that people have with themselves using language. In turn, the self is a special kind of mental process in which a person is able to take oneself as an object. The ability to take oneself as an object develops in childhood through two key stages. In the play stage the child learns to play the role of someone else, and in the game stage the child learns to play the role of everyone involved in a game. The latter stage leads to the child’s ability to take the position of the generalized other, or to see itself from the perspective of a community. When self-development is complete, the child acquires the ability to distinguish between the I and the me. These are two phases in the larger process of the self. The I is an immediate and unthinking response that is also the basis of individual personality. The me is the phase of self that sees itself from the perspective of community values and expectations.

Following Mead, symbolic interactionists believe that the task of sociology is to study the way that mental processes, and in particular the self, shape behaviors and society. In this respect, they argue that it is not the reality of a situation that affects behavior, but rather the individual definition of the situation that affects behavior. Charles Horton Cooley introduced the idea of the looking-glass self. He argued that we use other people as "mirrors" to determine whether we are in fact the kind of selves that we believe ourselves to be. Intimate face-to-face groups that Cooley called primary groups are very important to the development of self. These provide a link between the individual and the social by instilling group values in the self. Cooley also introduced the methodological idea of sympathetic introspection to argue that, in order to understand the operation of mental processes, sociologists needed to place themselves in the minds of those being studied. Robert Park further developed this technique by promoting the method of fieldwork. In fieldwork, the sociologist goes into the field to observe people in their everyday activities.

Parsons extended the ideas of Weber to create a theory of everyday life based on the concept of action. The unit act is the central term in Parsons’s theory. It describes the creative process by which people choose ends within the constraints given by a situation. The unit act is defined by four elements: an actor, an end, a situation, and norms and values. Parsons further analyzed the choices that people make in situations with the concept of pattern variables. These are five dichotomous choices that actors make in every situation: affectivity-affective neutrality, specificity-diffuseness, universalism-particularism, ascription-achievement, and self-collectivity.

The last theorist studied in this chapter is Alfred Schutz. Schutz was a phenomenologist who studied sociological aspects of the mind and consciousness. In his study of everyday life, Schutz introduced the concept of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is the process by which people mutually visualize and act upon what is taking place in the consciousnesses of one another. Intersubjectivity serves as the basis for everyday relations. Schutz believed that intersubjective relations take place in the lifeworld. This is a place in everyday life where people take the world of intersubjective relations and their assumptions about those relations for granted. Schutz referred to this taken-for-grantednesss as the natural attitude.

While many of us share in certain aspects of the lifeworld, we also develop unique forms of relations and attitudes that distinguish individual lifeworlds. The aspects of the lifeworld that we hold in common are generally referred to as typifications and recipes. These are tried and true assumptions about the nature of everyday life that make smooth intersubjective relations possible. As long as the people and situations in everyday life remain consistent and unproblematic, we continue to employ typifications and recipes. It is when unexpected situations arise that people will depart from standardized interpretations of the lifeworld and attempt to creatively develop new typifications and recipes. Schutz divided the social world into four realms, the most important of which are the direct and indirect experience of social reality. Direct experiences of social reality are called we-relations. In we-relations, we experience people in face-to-face intersubjectivity. Indirect experiences of social reality are called they-relations. In they-relations we relate to abstract types of people rather than to people themselves.