dennis e martin_symbolic interactionism and the concept of power

The British Journal of Sociology 2005 Volume 56 Issue 2

Dennis (School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History, University of Salford) and Martin (School of SocialSciences, University of Manchester) (Corresponding author em: [email protected]) London School of Economics and Political Science 2005 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2005.00055.x

Symbolic interactionism and the concept of power

Alex Dennis and Peter J. Martin

Abstract

Symbolic interactionism is often represented as a perspective which is limited byits restriction to micro aspects of social organization. As such, it is allegedlyunable to adequately conceptualize macro phenomena such as social structure,patterns of inequality, and power. Such a view is routinely presented in under-graduate textbooks. This paper contests such a view through a consideration ofthe concept of power. We argue that the interactionist research tradition does showa fundamental concern with power phenomena, and that a reconsideration of theconcept is timely in light of theoretical developments in sociology more generally.An increasing concern with the analysis of culture, the continuing influence of Foucault, the development of feminist perspectives, and the emerging consensusaround neo-Weberian thought have all contributed to a renewal of interest inthemes long ago explored by interactionists. As examples we suggest that inter-actionist studies in the fields of deviance and education have been concernedabove all with the authoritative imposition of consequential identities, i.e., withthe social processes through which power is enacted and institutionalized in realsituations. Such developments have led some to argue that interactionism has nowbeen incorporated into the mainstream of sociology. We conclude, however, byarguing that such a view runs the risk of granting to orthodox sociological thoughta legitimacy which is analytically unwarranted, and which fails to recognize thealternative theoretical and philosophical foundations of symbolic interactionistthought.

Keywords: Power; social theory; symbolic interactionism; micro/macro;structure/agency

Introduction

The impetus to write this paper derives in part from an experience one of ushad while acting as an external examiner for a course on sociological theory.Students were required to write two essays during their examination, and one

of them one of the best, in fact chose to answer questions on symbolicinteractionism (henceforth SI) and Foucault. The first answer made some all-too-familiar points: interactionist work, it was said, had produced some fineethnographic studies and a detailed understanding of the face-to-face, micro-level aspects of social life, but it was ultimately flawed because of its inabilityto deal with macro-level social processes and, in particular, the major ques-tions to do with social structure and power. In the second answer Foucault washailed as a great social theorist, who had not only shown the importance ofculture and the body for sociology, but who had revealed the ways in whichpower and social structure have to be understood as yes, youve guessed it enacted by real individuals in the ongoing processes of everyday life.Foucault even talks of the microphysics (McNay 1994: 3) of power, and wasconcerned with the ways in which power is imbricated in all social relations,discourses and institutions (Westwood 2002: 135). In general, then, much ofFoucaults widespread influence derives from his explorations of the ways inwhich the everyday practices of individuals and groups are co-ordinated so asto produce, perpetuate, and delimit what people can think, do and be (Dreyfus2003: 32; see also Mills 2003: 34).

It would have been quite wrong, however, to blame our student for theinconsistency between his two answers. He was, after all, only reproducing (in a very competent way) ideas which are well-entrenched in sociology textbooks. The best selling British textbook of the 1980s was HaralambosSociology, which described interactionism as an approach that concentratedon particular situations and encounters with little reference to the historicalevents which led up to them or the wider social framework in which theyoccur (Haralambos 1980: 551). There follows approval for the contention that interactionism consistently fails to give an account of social structure(Haralambos 1980: 551). It is further claimed that interactionism fails toexplain the source of social meanings: these are not spontaneously generatedin interaction situations. Instead they are systematically generated by thesocial structure (Haralambos 1980: 552).1 In a similar manner, Giddens, asrecently as 1997, suggests that symbolic interactionism is open to the criticismthat it concentrates too much on the small-scale. Symbolic interactionists havealways found difficulty in dealing with more large-scale structures andprocesses (Giddens 1997: 565). Other authors wish to emphasize this distinc-tion almost invariably treated as unproblematic between small-scale andlarge-scale social processes. For Macionis and Plummer (1997: 22), the dis-tinction between macro and micro is an important one in sociology and itappears in a number of guises. They go on to assess SIs contribution to studiesof education as follows:

Symbolic interactionism highlights how relations between teachers and stu-dents, and between students themselves, both affect and are affected by the

192 Alex Dennis and Peter J. Martin

London School of Economics and Political Science 2005

schooling process. This approach, however, tends to under-emphasize therelations between activities within schools and the functioning of society asa whole. (Macionis and Plummer 1997: 537)

A more recent example, dealing with the sociology of health, is even moreexplicit in its understanding of SI:

In summary, the interactionist approach focuses on power relations in theconstruction and management of health and illness. It draws attention tothe unequal distribution of the resources available to health practitionersand patients, whether in home visits, in the surgery, at the outpatient clinicor on hospital wards. However, interactionism offers neither a theory ofpower nor a theory of patterns of inequality. Rather, it explains power and inequality as functions of the relative strength of the personalities ofthe parties to the medical encounter. We have to turn to other approachesto provide a theoretical explanation of such inequality. (Bilton, et al.2002: 362)

Bilton, et al. provide quite literally a textbook instance of the way in whichSI has generally been presented to students. For these authors:

. . . social structures are neglected. In a typical SI account, social institutionsare acknowledged as a backdrop to interaction, but social systems and theirrelated structures of economic and political power have only a shadowyexistence. Certainly, the claim that social life consists solely of actors defi-nitions is not sustainable. (Bilton, et al. 2002: 504)

Whats more, such widespread and long-recognized misrepresentations of SIcan be found in the sociological literature more generally. During the 1970s,indeed, authors appeared to be queuing up to represent interactionist per-spectives in this way. In retrospect, it is of some interest that the presidents ofboth the American and British Sociological Associations made outspokenattacks on what the former saw as an orgy of subjectivism (Coser 1975: 698)and the latter saw as a denuded version of sociology: symbolic interaction-ists and ethnomethodologists, in particular, have no explicit conceptualizationof the supra-situational, or social structure or culture as societal phenomena(Worsley 1973: 9). Following these sort of leads, Meltzer, Petras and Reynolds(1975: 106 ff ) took the astructural bias of SI to be its most fundamental weak-ness, while Giddens worried that the demise of structural-functionalism as adominant paradigm in the late 1960s had led to a retreat from institutionalanalysis and a preoccupation with the triviata [sic] of everyday life,whereby the individual shapes his [sic] phenomenal experience of socialreality. The result, said Giddens, could rationalize a withdrawal from basicissues involved in the study of macro-structural social forms and socialprocesses (Giddens 1973: 15).

Symbolic interactionism and the concept of power 193


The general theme which emerges from these, and many other, discussionsis that SI cannot adequately take account of the phenomena of power andsocial structure, and that it necessarily leads to a neglect of institutional analy-sis. Neglect of these matters, it was (and is) argued, would amount to nothingless than an abandonment of some of the central themes of sociology. In fact,we share this view: the cultural complexities of power, institutions and socialstructure are indeed fundamental objects of sociological concern. We acknowl-edge, too, that the critics were concerned with a variety of what they took tobe microsociologies, and not only SI. What we wish to reject, though, speci-fically and emphatically, is the characterization of SI as an approach whichdoes not, or cannot, provide an understanding of these phenomena, and withit the misrepresentation and misunderstanding what Maines has called themythic facts and reconstructive legitimacies (2001: 249) concerning SIwhich, for whatever reasons, have become established in the secondary liter-ature. In the remainder of this paper, therefore, it is this general theme whichwe will develop, with particular reference to the concept of power.

Dualistic incorporation

The persistence of these misrepresentations is all the more perplexing sincethere are clear indications that by the 1980s a degree of reorientation wastaking place. By this time (the very same) Giddens was writing about the needto develop an adequate account of the nature of human agents and the waysin which meaning is produced and sustained through the use of methodolo-gical devices in social interaction (Giddens 1987: 2145). Indeed, a number ofdevelopments combined to move the sociological discourse away from aprimary concern with structural phenomena. The Marxism which had beenin vogue in the 1970s was itself in (terminal?) decline, giving way to a growingconsensus around neo-Weberian themes, so bringing the social actor andprocesses of interpretation back into analytical focus. There was also, as wehave mentioned, the remarkable rise of Foucault as a figure of enormous influ-ence, not least for the way in which reactions to his work revived debates aboutmatters of structure and agency. The development of cultural and mediastudies led to renewed interest in the construction of symbolic worlds, andprocesses of representation more generally. Influential, too, were feministthinkers, as they developed themes like the gendered nature of discourses andthe ways in which macro sociological phenomena such as the reproductionof patriarchy had to be understood in terms of everyday activities and expe-riences (e.g., Smith 1988). The various strands of postmodernist thought alsoemphasized themes long established in the interactionist tradition, such as theinadequacies of grand narratives as all-encompassing accounts of history andsocial life, the idea of the social constitution of personal identity, and so on.



In all these and other ways, then, sociological work over the last twenty yearsor so has increasingly involved an engagement with themes that were centralto the SI tradition. Yet, as we have seen, that tradition itself has simultane-ously been subject to persistent misrepresentation in both sociology textbooksand the professional arena, leading to the situation which David Maines hasdescribed as the faultline of consciousness the paradox that in America:

. . . sociologists over the years have learned a way of talking about them-selves and their discipline . . . that has compartmentalized interactionistwork and relegated it to the margins of scholarly consideration while simul-taneously and unknowingly becoming more interactionist in their work.(Maines 2001: xv)

Similarly, Gary Alan Fine (1993) has written of interactionisms simultaneoussad demise, mysterious disappearance and glorious triumph in the sense that,while the central themes and core concepts of interactionism have now beenaccepted by much mainstream sociology, the perspective itself, as a scholarlymovement, is fragmented and often invisible.

For both Maines and Fine, then, the accommodation between interaction-ism and mainstream sociology has come about largely through the absorptionof the former by the latter, and we would argue further that the various the-oretical movements mentioned above have been instrumental in bringingabout significant reorientations in sociological thought. However, there is analternative account of the relations between interactionism and general soci-ology, which places more emphasis on some of the ways in which the interac-tionist tradition has itself been reconstituted in recent years and, in particular,has begun to confront some of the sociological big issues of inequality, socialstructure, power, and so on.

This was certainly the view of Musolf (1992), who discussed the new direc-tions which he took to be emerging in SI work in relation to British culturalstudies, and the converging concerns of both with structure, institutions, powerand ideology. For Musolf (and others), interactionism itself was changing emancipating itself from a preoccupation with interpersonal encounters andsituations, and beginning to explore the links between such microsociologicalcommunication processes and macrosociological community structures(Musolf 1992: 172). In so doing, new interactionist work has responded posi-tively to the charge that the perspective suffers from an astructural bias, uti-lizing an expanded view of power and ideology to develop a new critical SIperspective (Musolf 1992: 173).

Yet there is an ambivalence in this way of representing the interactionisttradition for, in rightly drawing attention to the wider sociological significanceof some interactionist work, Musolf appears to accept the charge of astructuralbias in interactionism and its alleged inability to deal with macro issues ofpower and so on (Musolf 1992: 185). Once again, it should be clear that our



purpose in this paper is to resist this implication. We will suggest, firstly, thatfar from neglecting such matters as power and social structure, studies in theinteractionist tradition have in fact investigated them, but in ways which reflectthe fundamental premises of that tradition, and in particular its pragmatist ori-entation to the analysis of social life.2 Secondly, and following on from this, wecontend that much misunderstanding and misrepresentation of interactionismarises from the fact that the very concepts invoked in the debate power,social structure, and so on are themselves drawn from, and are constitutiveof, a macrosociological discourse which is incompatible with the underlyingpremises of interactionism. Thus, the incorporation or assimilation of interac-tionism into mainstream sociology is inherently problematic potentially fur-nishing conventional sociology with an unwarranted analytical legitimacy, andobscuring the basic philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of classicalSI research.

To validate their status as sociologists, interactionists have all to often beenexpected to demonstrate their ability to contribute to sociological work where the nature of the sociological is something constituted outside theirown theoretical schema. Just what counts as sociological is something thathas rarely been defined by interactionists in their own terms, but presupposedor presented from outside as a fait accompli. The implications of this for thestudy of power, as we will see, are enormous. Any studys academic relevancedepends on its disciplinary location: ideally, it should address a theoreticaldebate or problem but, regardless of whether it does this or not, its rationalemust, at least, be derived from disciplinary issues. Recent attempts to demon-strate the relevance of and rationale for undertaking interactionist studies ofpower, however, seem increasingly detached from what we take to be a speci-fically interactionist theoretical account of the nature of power relations. Therationale for studying power is, at best, derived from mainstream approaches(which are, as we will see, often alien to the interactionist perspective) or, wor-ryingly, based simply on the notion that power is what sociologists study.

Interactionists, then, face a dilemma. Power, apparently, has to be treated asa thing, a topic in its own right, for studies to deal with it in ways acceptableto mainstream sociology. But in order to do this, they must downplay theirown traditions approach to what power might be and how it might be inves-tigated: interactionist studies of power dont look like conventional studies ofpower, so they cant be studies of power and so they must change, or at leastdemonstrate their relevance to the mainstream (see, for instance, Prus 1999,on this point). Power, here, is something more than such cognate concepts andphenomena as legitimation and interpersonal influence and, so, cannot beaddressed adequately through their analysis alone.

If finding a mainstream warrant for interactionist studies is the issue at hand,we believe, this problem emerges as a result of existing dualisms within themainstream rather than from the supposed dialectic between mainstream



and interactionist. This latter opposition is something that comes after.The terms of reference are set by the mainstream, and working out interac-tionist positions in the field of enquiry is a problem to be solved after main-stream sociologys theoretical debates have been resolved (or at least madeto go away). Sociologys theoretical perspectives and positions are defined onthe basis of their location on continua of micromacro, structureagency,voluntarismdeterminism, individualismcollectivism and so on as a functionof their mainstream status: where interactionism fits in with the discipline is seldom treated as something independent of these pre-existing positions.

This has two effects: firstly, it makes interactionist studies out to be atheo-retical collections of stuff that happens things that people do (at best) orbehaviours (in an unfortunately more behaviourist idiom). The relevance ofinteractionist studies, therefore, depends crucially on who is being studied andwhat their role in the social structure is. Furthermore, the legitimizing rationalefor interactionist studies becomes the way in which they may be taken to com-plement mainstream work, and to ground existing ways of theorizing moreeffectively. Thus, again, Prus (1999: chapter 7) argues that ethnographic andinteractionist studies of the specific arenas in which power relations inhere andare elaborated (such as government agencies, the military, the media, etc.) arelegitimate as studies of power as a thing and in relation to the groundingsand empirical fleshing out of mainstream understandings of how those settingsrelate to others as parts of the social structure. Prus is forced into thisdilemma of seeing power as both a thing and a characteristic aspect ofdiverse human relationships by his desire to reconcile interactionist andmainstream sociology. It is difficult to see how such a dilemma can be avoidedwhen taking this as the rationale for theoretical work.

In an ironic contrast to the Foucauldian approach to power which con-strues it as a ubiquitous feature of human activities a tendency is develop-ing to use interactionist empirical work to shore up a macrosociological viewof power being something that stably inheres in particular structural settings.The interactionist study of power becomes a programme for conducting ethno-graphic studies of those settings the places where power inheres. Interac-tionism can study those people and so ensure that the statements made (byothers) about power are empirically grounded and not merely the outcomesof abstract theorizing. This, however, of course, still presupposes that power issomething capable of being studied in its own right as a thing. Just whereit resides and how it manifests itself are not to be ascertained through empi-rical investigation, but rather theoretically presupposed providing investi-gations with an unquestioned (and unquestionable) agenda.

Within the limitations of this paper, it is impossible to present an accountof the whole range of SI studies in all their variety and richness. To provide asubstantial grounding for the basic argument that far from neglecting thephenomena of power, much interactionist work is actually about power



relations and their enactment would require a much more extensive treat-ment. In the present context, we will simply present some material from twoof the central areas of interactionist research, deviance and education, whichserves to illustrate this theme.

Studies in the sociology of deviance

Research on deviance is perhaps the best-known area of interactionist work,particularly following the enormous success of Beckers Outsiders after itsoriginal publication in 1963. Much of this work has been influential, leadingto a greater appreciation of the perspective of the deviant, the marginalized,the stigmatized, the excluded and disadvantaged, and from time to time suchstudies have contributed to political and institutional reforms. Becker himselfhas written of the underdog orientation of much of these studies (Becker1967). Yet the focus on the responses both individual and collective ofthose who are labelled in various ways has all too often served to obscurethe primary, and we would argue more fundamental, concern of interactioniststudies with the authoritative processes through which individuals are ren-dered subordinate through legally sanctioned and institutionally establishedprocedures.

Indeed, the interactionist approach to deviance develops, in a more socio-logically satisfying way, Durkheims ideas about the ways in which laws andnormative patterns are culturally variable (Durkheim 1984). WhereasDurkheim saw crime in terms of those acts which offend the basic values orcollective sentiments of a society or group, however, the interactionistssought to avoid the reification of society which is inevitable in this kind offormulation. Their focus, instead, was on the ways in which actual rules areestablished, enforced, challenged and broken, usually in situations where cul-tural consensus cannot be assumed. Thus, for example, Lemert examined theessentially political process through which laws were enacted in an urban,stratified and culturally diverse setting, concluding that where those conditionsobtain:

laws and rules represent no groups values nor values of any portion of asociety. Instead they are artefacts of compromise between the values ofmutually opposed, but very strongly organized, associations. (Lemert 1972:57)

The implications are clear: the classification of conduct as, for example, legalor illegal is (as Durkheim would surely have agreed) a matter of definition,but such definitions emerge through processes of conflict or negotiationamong contending parties. On this point the interactionist perspective hasmuch in common with Webers image of the social order emerging out of a



perpetual process of conflict (Hughes, Sharrock and Martin 2003: 106; Collins1975: 43); what we wish to emphasize here, however, is the interactionist focuson rule-making as the actual work of real people, whether they be govern-ments, pressure groups, businesses, moral entrepreneurs (Becker 1963: 147ff ), informal primary groups, or whatever.

It is this approach that characterized interactionist studies of, for example,the enactment of legislation concerning alcohol and marijuana use (e.g.,Gusfield 1963; Becker 1963), or Blumers perspective on the relations betweenraces (for a recent discussion, see Esposito and Murphy (1999)). In each caserules, whether formal or informal, were established which demonstrated thepower of some group to establish an authoritative definition of the situation,and thus to criminalize certain activities, or stigmatize whole groups of people.Inevitably, such rules were and are resisted and challenged; moreover theirvery existence entails a redefinition of the situation by those who have beenrendered deviant, often with significant consequences for their sense of iden-tity, and sometimes an increase, rather than the intended decrease, in deviantactivities (Lemert 1972). Yet to place an undue emphasis on these reactionsor responses, or to consider them subjective matters outside the remit of soci-ological analysis, is to misunderstand and distort the premises of interaction-ism.3 As ever, Becker made the essential point with great clarity, starting withthe Durkheimian theme that social groups create deviance by making the ruleswhose infraction constitutes deviance (Becker 1963: 9, emphasis in original),then making explicit the sociological corollary that deviance is not a qualityof the act that the person commits, but rather a consequence of the applica-tion by others of rules and sanctions to an offender (Becker 1963: 9, empha-sis in original).

These extracts from Beckers introductory chapter in Outsiders have regu-larly appeared in sociology textbooks for nearly forty years now yet theyhave rarely (if ever?) been followed by Beckers elaboration of his position,so in the present context it is worth quoting from his subsequent remarks:

Who can, in fact, force others to accept their rules and what are the causesof their success? This is, of course, a question of political and economicpower . . . Rules are made for young people by their elders . . . Men makethe rules for women in our society . . . Negroes find themselves subject torules made for them by whites. The foreign-born and those otherwise eth-nically peculiar often have their rules made for them by the ProtestantAnglo-Saxon minority. The middle class makes rules the lower class mustobey in the schools, the courts, and elsewhere.

Differences in the ability to make rules and apply them to other peopleare essentially power differentials (either legal or extralegal). Those groupswhose social position gives them weapons and power are best able toenforce their rules. Distinctions of age, sex, ethnicity, and class are all related



to differences in power, which accounts for differences in the degree towhich groups so distinguished can make rules for others. (Becker 1963:178)

These remarks were made with reference to some of Beckers earliest work.So it is significant, and entirely consistent with our argument, that a concernwith the analysis of power relations remains evident, although usually unno-ticed, in his most recent writing. In explaining why interactionists (in this caseGoffman) are particularly concerned to explicate the vocabularies and per-spectives of those they study, Becker argues that:

What things are called always reflects relations of power. People in powercall things what they want to, and others have to adjust to that, perhaps usingother words of their own in private, but accepting in public that they cannotescape. Whatever my friends and I may think, marijuana is called a narcoticdrug by people who can make that name and the perspective associated withit stick. (Becker 2003: 661)

We think it is reasonable to suggest that there is little evidence in theseremarks of a neglect of power (or, for that matter, of a subjective preoccu-pation, or of a neglect of social structure or the macro features of the widersociety). Nor do they offer much support to the contention that until the 1970sor so the interactionist tradition was limited by its astructural bias (e.g.,Musolf 1992: 173; Meltzer, Petras and Reynolds 1975: 106 ff ). On the contrary,it is our contention that remarks such as these provide an indication of thecontext in which the more specific studies are to be read this certainlyappears to have been Beckers intention, by placing them right at the begin-ning of the essays on aspects of deviance in Outsiders. In keeping with theirpragmatist orientation, theoretical disputes concerning the definition of powerare here deliberately eschewed. Power is not some kind of entity whoseessence can be revealed or abstracted from its situations of use, let aloneabstractly defined or measured. Instead, these authors are interested, like prac-tical sociologists, in investigating how some people are able to do certain thingsto other people sometimes little things (as in a close personal relationship),and sometimes things of great societal import (like enacting laws, or relocat-ing a business to a low-wage economy) in other words, with collective ac-tivities in the real world, and all their uncertainties, contingencies, andunanticipated consequences (see also the argument of Hargreaves 1978).

Similarly, while interactionist work on deviant identities can indeed providesympathetic accounts of underdogs (and gratify ethnographic curiosity aboutthe subjective state of weirdos), its much more fundamental significance liesin the demonstration of the often routine ways in which the formal processesof institutions ensure the authoritative categorization of individuals, or wholegroups, as subordinate or morally unacceptable in some way. Critical to this is



the detailed examination of police, court, or prison procedures, and with thetypifications of people and their actions which inform the perspectives of thosein authority. These concerns underlie many of the now-canonical studies in thesociology of deviance. An influential example is Cicourels (1967) study of thesocial organization of juvenile justice, which demonstrates in detail the waysin which police procedures, and assumptions about the kind of people beingdealt with, play a crucial part in determining the different ways in which youngmen are treated in the criminal justice system, and thus how the familiar socialclass differences in rates of deviant behaviour come to be produced (seeEglin 1987, for a discussion of these issues). It should be clear that in exam-ining such processes and others, such as the ways in which police officersmay seek to maintain order rather than enforce the law (Bittner 1967), or the ways in which prison culture reflects criminal values (Becker 1968: 80) interactionist sociologists have focused specifically on the analysis of powerrelationships in real-life settings. By examining the authoritative imposition ofdeviant identities, and responses to these, both individual and collective, wemay obtain some understanding of the ways in which cultural patterns andinstitutional constraints exert their influence on individuals, without reifyingthe concept of social structure or the idea of power. Many other examplescould be given, including studies of the marginalization and classification ofmentally ill people such as the classic essays of Goffman (1959) or Lemert(1962). Our main aim here, however, is simply to support the contention thatfar from neglecting power relationships, many of the interactionist studies ofdeviance are concerned precisely to examine and understand the ways in whichthese are enacted in real institutional contexts.

Studies in the sociology of education

The themes of rules, identities and authority also emerge in interactioniststudies of the processes of formal education. Moreover, as with deviance, it issimply not the case that these studies have been carried out in a theoreticalvacuum, and with an astructural bias. The point can again be documentedwith reference to Becker, whose early work was undertaken in the context ofan established programme of educational research at the University ofChicago, and one which by the early 1950s had already generated a theoreti-cal framework which in many ways anticipated the later work of Bourdieu andPasseron (1990 [1970]). For example, a recurring theme in Beckers early workwas that schools, organized in terms of one of the subcultures of a heteroge-neous society, tend to operate in such a way that members of subordinategroups of differing culture do not get their fair share of educational opportu-nity, and thus of opportunity for social mobility (Becker 1955: 103). Drawingon earlier Chicago studies which had documented the links between social



class and educational attainment (e.g., Lloyd Warner, Havighurst and Loab1944; Hollingshead 1949; Davis 1950), Beckers study of teachers was con-cerned less to describe this relationship once more than to develop an expla-nation of how it was a consistent outcome of the everyday processes of theschool how routine, everyday activities in classrooms reproduced class-based, society-wide inequalities in educational attainment levels. Moreover,Becker was quite explicit in taking as his target the discrimination of our edu-cational system against the lower-class child (Becker 1952: 452).

Again, we suggest that there is little evidence here of a withdrawal frominstitutional analysis or a neglect of macrosociological processes. On thecontrary, the full force and pervasiveness of the latter is acknowledged from the start, and the aim of analysing school practices and procedures is tounderstand more about them. Although we can only mention a few, subse-quent studies maintain and develop this orientation. Rist (1970), for example,like Becker, emphasized the importance of teacher expectations in influenc-ing childrens performance, focusing on the ways in which interpersonalprocesses in schools have major effects in reproducing a class-stratified society. Yet Rist also argued against a too rigid application of labelling theory(1977: 299): the outcome of classroom interactions (like any interactions) isconditional and to an extent open-ended. These comments were consistentwith a move away from the notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy (e.g.,Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968) as an explanation of educational attainment,towards a view that conceives of the differentiation of students as a conse-quence of the administrative organization and decisions of personnel in thehigh school (Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963: 6). This was a major theme in Cicoureland Kitsuses study of decision-making by high school personnel (and thecommon sense concepts which informed it), and in Laceys (1970) analysisof the effects of streaming on pupils identification with formal and informalcultures. In general, then, these studies display a concern to explicate the waysin which class, race and later gender factors enter into the process of socialstratification. Rist made the point explicitly, arguing that while influentiallarge-scale social surveys had identified significant academic differencesamong various groups of children, such studies gave no hint as to how thesedifferences come to manifest themselves. What is left unexamined is theprocess by which there come to be winners and losers (Rist 1973: 18, empha-sis in original).

Were it not for the ways in which interactionist studies have so often beenportrayed, it would surely be unnecessary to emphasize the point that schools(literal) classification of students, their assessment of achievement and abili-ties, and their decisions about appropriate educational career trajectories, areauthoritative and usually unchallengeable. Teachers and educational profes-sionals are in a position of power to define the situation for their students,and to impose irrevocable identities on them. Whereas, for example,



discrimination on the grounds of gender, ethnicity or religion is illegal in theUSA and EU, discrimination on the grounds of educational attainment is not.It is hardly surprising, then, that the conferring of educational identities is gen-erally regarded as an important aspect of the process of social stratification,or that, as various studies have shown (and as Meads perspective on the selfsuggests), over time students do internalize the ways in which they aredefined in formal educational contexts. In the extreme cases, those who aretreated as academically bright are able to see themselves as intelligentpeople, while those deemed failures in the school may seek alternative sourcesof positive identification, often finding it in anti-school subcultures (e.g.,Lacey 1970).

Moreover, other studies generated an accumulation of research evidencewhich suggests that the perception of educational ability depends on schoolpupils and students willingness and ability to accept the teachers definitionof the situation, and the validity of his or her discourse, rather than displayacademic talent (e.g., Keddie 1971; Hammersley 1974). Once again, it is thosechildren whose subculture is closest to that of the school, notably middle-classchildren, who find it easiest to subordinate themselves to the demands of thisdiscourse, while it is those from culturally divergent backgrounds who mayhave the greatest difficulty in accepting its relevance. Clearly, such results haveimportant implications for understanding the relationship between social classand educational attainment. Of course, this is not a simple matter otherstudies have examined the dynamics of classroom situations, the limits toteachers power, and the strategies employed by pupils (see, for instance,Barton and Meighan 1978; Woods 1983; Hammersley and Woods 1984). Ourpurpose here, however, is simply to emphasize, once again, the various waysin which school processes involve the enactment of power relationships whichcan be of great consequence for the fate of individuals.

In general, then, we contend that far from displaying a microsociologicalpreoccupation or a concern with subjective responses, interactionist studies ofschools and classroom interaction are derived from a research agenda con-cerned above all to understand the processes through which educational classifications are highly consequential for individuals careers. There is,indeed, a considerable similarity between this agenda and Foucaults investi-gations into institutionalized practices, their accompanying discourses, andtheir disciplinary effects. We will return to this below. At this point, however,we wish only to emphasize, firstly, that the interactionist studies have con-tributed much to our understanding of the ways in which educational (andcriminal justice) institutions are involved in the allocation of authoritative and highly consequential identities (which may be internalized by individ-uals), and secondly that such investigations allow for the development ofexplanations of the social facts which are the basis of any kind of macroso-ciological approach.



Power as a pragmatist and pragmatic issue

This summary of studies and, of course, we have only scratched the surfacehere may not be enough to overcome the objection that we started out with,that SI is good at generating empirical materials to support (or refute) socio-logical theory, but is incapable of generating or modifying theory itself. Itmight be argued that, while interactionist studies of deviance and educationhave deepened macrosociological analyses of power and inequality byshowing how they are generated and reproduced interactionally such analy-ses are still parasitical on mainstream, structured concerns to provide themwith an agenda or disciplinary relevance. Indeed, the notion that SI has pro-vided sociology with some useful and relevant empirical material is nothingnew: as we have argued, this is just the point that mainstream sociologists areprepared to concede. Our argument, however, is that SI as a perspective doesfar more than this. It is not just an amendment or addition to mainstreamapproaches, but represents a coherent theoretical alternative to thoseapproaches. The relationship that obtains between them, therefore, should beaddressed.

Here it is useful to return to Blumers (1969) account of the fundamentalpremises underlying SI, which emphasizes the making and managing ofmeaning in everyday life. Blumer immediately goes on to point out that, whilethey seem straightforward, these premises are ignored or played down inalmost all contemporary sociology and psychology. Although he goes to greatpains to show their philosophical groundings and methodological implications,such premises are often treated as if they were self-contained theoreticalpropositions in their own right, and which collectively constitute the SI positionas a whole. Thus, for instance, Craib (1992) reproduces these premises asassumptions, treated as the bases of varieties of interactionism from Turnersrole theory to Goffmans dramaturgical approach which can be differen-tiated to the extent that they emphasize one or two of the assumptions overthe remainder. The Chicago School as a whole is thus difficult to assimilateto structural-functionalism, even though it shares the same presuppositions(Craib 1992: 86), and is:

. . . also closer to its social basis in American life, with its emphasis on egali-tarianism, individual liberty and social mobility. How close it is to the fullreality of social life is, of course, another matter.

Craib, like many others, conflates premises with propositions. These propo-sitions are found wanting they are just truisms and can be fleshed out onlywith proper macrosociological theory (cf. Rock 1979: 10). The sense in whichthese premises are the basis of a methodology, and are rooted in a philo-sophical tradition which emphasizes methodology over theories that take apropositional form, is lost. With Menand (2001), it is our contention that these



pragmatist ideas have been retrospectively located as products of their time,and abandoned as a result. And, again with Menand, we wish to argue that aresurgence of interest in them is a product of both changes in historical rele-vance and an intellectual trend (the belated recognition that hard struc-turalism is incapable without supplement of accounting for socialactivities). Finally, and most importantly, we wish to argue that the reconcili-ation of interactionist themes and mainstream sociological theory takes thekind of dualistic form reconciling structure and agency, or macro and micro which is precisely the form that pragmatist philosophy aims to address and(dis)solve.

As far as power is concerned, this dualistic form is fundamentally flawed inso far as it treats the issue at hand as one of reconciling two opposing theo-ries: one which construes power as a patterned structural inequality ofresources and another which construes it as an interpersonal phenomenon.While the two could be shown to complement one another as Beckers work,inter alia, shows there is no theoretical reason why this should be the case.What would happen, for instance, if interactionist studies consistently showedgreater tolerance of races and religions at the same time that macrosocio-logical surveys demonstrated systematic increases in patterned inequality onthe basis of ethnicity? The two could be reconciled in any particular case but such an apparently ad hoc reconciliation is sociologically unsatisfying andtheoretically inelegant. Our argument, above, is that interactionist studies ofpower relations cannot be construed as opposed to structural counterpartswithout misrepresenting the former. But the problem, at least in principle,seems to remain: there are two ways of approaching the problem of power (soit seems), and these could come up with different accounts of any given situ-ation. The theoretical issue, then, is to decide which approach makes mostsense as a coherent way of doing sociology.

The reason, we feel, that SI in particular is well placed to serve as that approach rather than as one half of the problem underpinning itsrequirement is precisely its pragmatist roots and orientation, those elementsof Blumers (1969) account that are most commonly overlooked. Pragmatismis cognate with neither voluntarism nor relativism, but rather with a princi-pled commitment to dissolving philosophical (and other) dualisms through theexamination of real-worldly situations of human activity and understanding. Inother words, a perspective which seeks to empirically overcome dualisms including, we would argue, the structureagency and macromicro dilemmasthat currently obstruct the sociological analysis of power. Such dualisms areenumerated in James (1907) classic account of the pragmatist movement, andinclude the rationalistic/empiricist, principled/factual, idealistic/materialistic,free-willist/fatalistic, monistic/pluralistic and dogmatic/sceptical. Some ofthese dualisms appear in the discipline of sociology, often presented terms ofthe structureagency or macromicro debates.



Most pertinent to our argument is James discussion of the relationshipsbetween determinism and free will. Even the most cursory reflection will showthat each perspective makes sense in its own terms, but that arbitratingbetween the two as contending explanations is fruitless. Any phenomenon canbe explained using either as a guiding principle. So, for instance, one can usethe same facts to demonstrate that ethnic inequality is the result of individ-uals discriminatory attitudes or that those attitudes are the products of beingsocialized in a society based on structural ethnic inequalities. To decide whichexplanation is better cannot be done on the basis of the facts and so mustbe done theoretically, philosophically. This is, of course, the structure-agencydualism in full force!

But James seeks to move beyond this apparent dilemma to consider theterms in a more rigorous light. To be sure, we can construe situations deter-ministically or voluntaristically, but the question James wishes to raise is justwhat is at stake here? If both positions are logically consistent, and they areincompatible with one another, what practical difference does it make whichis chosen and used? The truth of a philosophical or theoretical propositionthus resides in its compatibility with other philosophical or theoretical com-mitments: ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become truejust in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts ofour experience (James 1907: 29, emphasis in original). The truth of a theoret-ical construal of the nature of power can be ascertained by finding out whatdifference that view would make compared with others in real-worldly situa-tions of human life:

No particular results, then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is whatthe pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things,principles, categories, supposed necessities; and of looking towards lastthings, fruits, consequences, facts. (James 1907: 29)

The implications of this for the sociological study of power are that oneshould not determine a priori anything more than is required to facilitate theempirical study of human activities that will, in and of themselves, provideanswers to theoretical questions. Deweys argument develops and clarifies thisview:

What is already known, what is accepted as truth, is of immense importance;enquiry could not proceed a step without it. But it is held subject to use,and is at the mercy of the discoveries which it makes possible. It has to beadjusted to the latter and not the latter to it. When things are defined asinstruments, their value and validity reside in what proceeds from them; con-sequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity. (Dewey 1929: 154)

Philosophy, for the pragmatists, is based on disputes about propositions thatcannot be resolved. By shifting the truth-value of a proposition from its



consistency with empirical facts something which makes no sense if com-peting propositions can be equally compatible to the relative merits of itsconsequences, it is possible at least to arbitrate between these approaches.Pragmatism, again, is a method, not a system.

In the light of this, Blumers premises take on a different light. They facili-tate studies, allow empirical investigations to take place, with a minimal theo-retical apparatus designed to minimize a priori assumptions and maximize thecapacity of empirical materials to address theoretical problems in sociology.By explicitly not assuming a fixed relationship between micro and macro,structure and agency indeed, by disavowing the legitimacy of such distinc-tions it is possible to show how power as manifested in real situations gen-erates and shapes both the individual and his or her social context. By startingwith a method, rather than with a theory, one can come to the same conclu-sion as Foucault that power is ubiquitous and that it shapes both the actorand the structures of society.

Rather than construing SI as one half of a dualism, therefore, and accept-ing its findings as supports for (or arguments against) established theoreticalpositions, we wish to advance the proposal that its way of doing things,its philosophical and methodological rationale, is a more effective means of solving sociologys disciplinary dilemmas than any alternatives currentlyavailable.

Conclusion

We have argued that SI studies, far from neglecting the phenomena of powerin social life, have in fact focused for example in the fields of deviance andeducation precisely on the ways in which authoritative and consequentialpower relations are enacted and sustained by real people in ways which con-tribute to the structuring of societies. They are not, therefore, to be seen as subjective or micro in orientation and scope, as so many textbooks (andtheorists!) have claimed. Nor are they a kind of defective or denuded versionof sociology, which needs to be supplemented with conventional structural ormacro analysis. On the contrary, our contention is that the SI perspective,and the studies which it has generated, is derived from a fundamentally dif-ferent (if often implicit) set of premises indeed, one of the reasons why G.H.Mead retains his theoretical significance is that his work provides a linkbetween early American pragmatism and sociological thought. As Blumeronce put it, Mead was:

. . . primarily a philosopher. He differed from the bulk of philosophers inbelieving that the cardinal problems of philosophy arose in the realm ofhuman group life and not in a separate realm of an individual thinker andhis [sic] universe. (Blumer 1981: 902)



It is, of course, this realm of human group life which is of paramount impor-tance for SI: the focus is on society as an ongoing accomplishment, and not asa hypostatized aggregate of structures, institutions or universal processeswhich can be unambiguously defined, or even measured, from some objec-tive standpoint. From this point of view, SI has sought to avoid what White-head (1925: 52) called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, mistaking suchidealist abstractions as beauty, freedom, justice, democracy or power forconcepts which identify specific entities or conditions, and which could, more-over, somehow be disengaged from the ongoing flux of social life.

Though the theme cannot be developed here, it remains to make explicitthe way in which this alternative perspective leads to a different approach tounderstanding power in social life. As the above remarks have suggested, apragmatist orientation implies that there is no such thing or entity as powerin a universal, transcendental, sense; moreover (and as Foucault concurs) allsocial relationships can be described in terms of their power dimensions. Thisdoes not, however, lead to the absurdity of claiming that there are not enor-mous and enduring differentials in the capacity of some people to do thingsto others. Such differentials, however, must be understood as the outcomes,over time, of social processes often quite prosaic which ultimately producepatterns of decisive advantages and disadvantages, often involving the accu-mulation (or loss) of significant resources money, land, military might, pres-tige, and so on. To understand how these patterns come about, how they areperpetuated and challenged, and so on, is for us an important opportunity inthe exercise of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959). It would be wrong,of course, to suggest that there have not been sociologists interactionist orotherwise who have not made significant contributions in this respect. Hall,for example, has explicitly made use of interactionist premises in his analysisof the political domain (Hall 2003: 36), as well as drawing on the work ofEdelman (1964; 1977), who emphasized the importance of symbolism and lan-guage in the creation of political discourse. Another instance would beWaddingtons (1998) detailed analyses of police work, demonstrating how the effectiveness of police officers is a consequence of the symbolic repre-sentation of relevant authority, and how their decision-making depends on processes of interpretation and situational definition.

There are many such studies, and we can only give a handful of exampleshere. Our contention, however, is that such studies enable us to understandthe how and why of power relationships without illegitimately reifying theconcept of Power. Indeed, however attractive it might seem, or however polit-ically expedient it might be, we submit that doing this is an analytical evasion,and ultimately a futile one. As the examples of deviance and education studiesshould have suggested, consequential power relationships, and gross inequal-ities of income, can be seen to be sustained by networks of reasonable people



all doing perfectly normal and routine things, sustained by a symbolic dis-course which legitimates some actions and denigrates or prohibits others (andis ultimately anchored by legal sanctions). All of these activities, as the SIstudies have shown, are amenable to empirical investigation.

An analogous, and highly consequential, set of processes is that which sus-tains the differential power of money. Everyone knows that a hundred-dollarbill confers more spending power than a dime, but, as Simmel pointed out acentury ago, this has nothing to do with the intrinsic characteristics of the ban-knote or the coin. On the contrary, it has everything to do with their legiti-mation by public power (Simmel 1997 [1900]: 237): the symbolic meaningsattached to them, and the ways in which real people in everyday situationsorient their activities in relation to them. In a similar fashion, we can see howthe power of, for example, a king or prime minister or chief executive officerdepends, as Weber (1922: 213) showed, on the symbolic legitimation of theirroles through a discourse of authority, an appropriate legal framework, andthe acceptance of these by whole networks of others in subordinate positions.Such considerations also lead to an understanding of the ways in which thepower of such top people is rarely absolute, but is often contested, resistedand, from time to time, challenged (see also King 2004). In this context, wecan agree with Worsley that decisive authority . . . lies in the hands of a smallset of men (1973: 10), while rejecting the conclusion that a theory of poweror an analysis of its distribution would lead to some ultimate understandingof how this comes about (let alone contributing to any significant politicalchange).

Such considerations also lead us to question the familiar assertion that weknow little about these top people mainly men in positions of significantpower. On the contrary, countless thousands of books of biography and auto-biography have been written about and by such people: indeed in recent timesit has been customary for historians to react against the tendency to writehistory as a narrative of Great Men. None of these works has led to the for-mulation of an accepted definition, let alone a theory, of power, and nor couldthey ever do so. Such accounts tend to support the contention that people inpositions of power tend to operate very much like other ordinary humanbeings in more familiar social contexts.

So we are led back to our point of departure, and Foucaults notion of theomnipresence of power. He uses this term:

. . . not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under itsinvincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next,at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Poweris everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comesfrom everywhere. And Power, insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert,



and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all thesemobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turnto arrest their movement. (Foucault 1976: 93)

While there are all sorts of differences in the genealogies of Foucaults ideasand those of SI, their convergence on common ground is, we suggest, undeni-able. Both rejected the formulation of an explicit theory of power (Szakol-czai 1998: 14023); both focus on institutional processes in contemporarysocieties; both take the struggle among social groups and their competing def-initions of reality as the dynamic which underlies social organization; and bothhave a particular concern for what, for Foucault, was the genealogy of sub-jectivity (Szakolczai 1998: 1407) and for SI the social genesis of the self.4 Thereis, too, a rich irony in the ways that both Foucault and SI not only reject thecharge of subjectivism so often made by orthodox social scientists, but throwit back at them:

For Foucault, the discursive field of formal academic theorizing about powerprimarily derives from notions of sovereignty. In this context sovereigntyrefers to an originating subject whose will is power. (Clegg 1998: 31)

While, for Blumer, the social theorists a priori imposition of a set of categorieson the social world is itself a form of subjectivism:

. . . the objective approach holds the danger of the observer substitutinghis [sic] view of the field of action for the view held by the actor. (1969: 74)

Like the pragmatists from whom its initial inspiration was drawn, SI rests ona principled refusal to deal in the supposedly universal, objective, and meta-physical categories and concepts which have produced little more than con-fusion in philosophy and sociology:

It answered metaphysical questions by urging a return to the social world.It is thus patently at odds with the tenor of most academic discourse. In turn,it cannot satisfy the demands that are created by that discourse. (Rock 1979:233)

SI is fundamentally and inescapably concerned with the realm of humangroup life and, to the extent that this realm is ignored by conventional soci-ology, cannot easily be integrated with, or incorporated into, it. We are, finallyand appropriately, reminded of the words of a neo-pragmatist philosopher,Richard Rorty:

We must repudiate the vocabulary our opponents use, and not let themimpose it upon us . . . our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradualinculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than of straightforward argumentwithin old ways of speaking. (Rorty 1999: xviiixix)

(Date accepted: February 2005)





Notes

1. Haralambos continues by suggestingthat SI is a distinctly American branch ofsociology and to some this partly explains itsshortcomings but we will refrain frompursuing this. For present purposes we wishto focus on the claim that interactionismexamines human interaction in a vacuumand that structural norms are ignored orneglected (Haralambos 1980: 551).

2. Although it may be conceded thatthese premises have often remained

implicit. See Rock (1979: 5 ff, and his dis-cussion of the oral tradition of SI).

3. The standard criticisms of an SIapproach to deviance all revolve aroundfundamental misunderstandings of SI(Rock 1979: 240, n. 19).

4. Burns (1992, especially 1636) andMisztal (2001, especially 3189) deal morecomprehensively with the detailed issues of convergence between Foucault andGoffman.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Russell Kelly, Greg Smith, Rod Watson and participants inthe 2004 SSSI Annual Meetings for their comments on earlier drafts of thispaper.



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