Rational Action & Symbolic Interactionist Theories

Broadly speaking, there are two distinct ways to determine the motives of the bahavior of individuals in society. One can look at the individuals, and how they seek to meet their own needs and desires in social encounters, or one can look at how the encounter itself influences the behavior of the individuals taking part in it.

The first of these approaches starts with the assumption that that what people do more often than not makes sense, and that their actions are governed by their desires; that is, by self-interest. This is the essential feature of rational action theory (RAT); as the name implies, it begins from the premise that people act rationally. As Coleman (1990, p. 152) puts it, a social interchange "contains two self-interested, utility-maximizing actors;" both of whom are seeking their own advantage in their mutual involvement.

An alternative premise is that what people do in social encounters grows out of the particular circumstances of the encounter, as each participant plays a role defined by the encounter itself. This is the essential feature of symbolic interactionist theory (SI); according to Blumer (quoted in Wallace and Wolf, 1991, p. 2560, "the meaning of a thing for a person grows out of the ways in which other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing." Individuals' motives, then, do not arise in isolation, but i

. . .
are a whole range of social phenomena which can be demonstrated to hold by direct test, but lie outside the scope of the Verstehen approach. For example, it has been found that laborers spend more per person on food than do white-collar workers, though the latter probably have higher incomes (Merton, 1967, p. 149). This is an empirical observation, based on direct observation. It begs for explanation. The explanation may be simple--manual laborers burn more calories and need more food--or it may at least in part reflect more subtle social behaviors, such as food perhaps having greater significance for laborers, whether or not they are consciously aware of the difference. Logical empiricism is the effort to assemble empirical relationships into pattern which have predictive power; e.g., if we could find a number of differences in the behavior of laborers and white-collar workers, we might be able to construct a hypothesis which would lead to further discoveries. This is the traditional "scientific method," which continues to thrive in spite of proclamations that it is dead, killed for example by T.S. Kuhn's work on scientific revolutions (Reisch, 1994, p. 175). This writer's own subjective reaction leans toward prefere
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Wallace Wolf, Democratic Focus, , Catholic Church, TS Kuhn's, Romans Rational, Sociobiologists Van, Ottoman Turks, Bushmen Eskimos, Max Weber, rational action, wolf 1991, verstehen tradition, action theory, biological determinism, wallace wolf, wallace wolf 1991, rational action theory, social encounters, quoted wallace wolf, quoted wallace, example found, play game, symbolic interactionist theory, explaining social encounters,
Approximate Word count = 1804
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Rational Action & Symbolic Interactionist Theories