SOCY1002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Labeling Theory, Essentialism, Social Order
[Lecture Four]
The Self and Everyday Sociology
Key Questions:
• How have sociologists contributed to understandings of the self?
• Why is the self an important site of social relations?
• What types of methods have they used to develop their conceptions?
• What is the value of studying everyday?
Major focus of sociologists: the design and maintenance of social order
• How processes of governance are historically invented vis-à-vis specific problems, how they
operate and with what implications and affects
- What is their precise nature and arrangement?
- What are they trying to achieve (what objects and issues are focused on), and through
what means and how/do they attain legitimacy
- Who is included in their design and who is simultaneously excluded
- What inadvertent knowledges/realities do they construct and colonise?
- How are they experienced (and responded to) by the administrators and the
administrated?
The Order of Things and Ordering Things
• “Social structure is the patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from
and determinant of the actions of the individuals” (Oxford Dictionary)
• Key social structures that produce relatively orderly bodies and subjects
• POWER – they collectively operate to invent norms, transfer knowledge, instill accepted
values/desires (socialisation), cultivate and correct problem bodies and behaviours
• Much debate about how/whether they intersect and conflict
Key Idea
• Selves as fluid and unstable: techniques of government ‘generate’ different ideal(ised)
models of the self
- E.g. The ‘disciplined self’ of the 19th century to the contemporary ‘responsibilised self’
• These don’t necessarily succeed of prevail: obedience is far from inevitable, there is always
resistance, failures and unintended consequences
- They are but distinct diagrams of conduct for how we should think, act and live, albeit
diagrams with powerful incentives and sanctions attached/incorporated
Definitions of self
• ‘A person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the
objet of introspection or reflexive action’
• ‘(One’s self) one’s particular nature or personality; the qualities that make one individual or
unique’ (Source: Oxford English Dictionary)
• Self as singular, fixed, essentialist and innate
- The site where the subject is located and authored
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• Popular western perspective that there is a ‘core self’ that is coherent and determinant of a
person’s character, desires and sense of purpose
- Comprised of Id, ego and super-ego
• The self embodies distinctive traits and explains behavioural patterns
- Idea that you can continually improve and refine yourself through adopting measures
- Notions and descriptions of self underpinned by moral judgments about character
The sociology of the self
• Long history in the discipline
• The (inter)relationship between self and society
• The transforming self: the self in pre-modernity and modernity
The looking glass ‘self’ (Charles Horton Cooley, 1902)
• We don’t have an innate biological self: it is socially produced and mediated
• We understand ourselves only in relation to our understandings of how we are viewed
- Note this allows for changes to self-identity as well as competing versions
• How we appear to others is perceived and internalized and acted on NB link to labeling
theory
• Example of falling over: the physical act of tripping is not by and of itself embarrassing, it is
the social definition of the situation which makes it such
- Falling is construed an act of stupidity, carelessness and inattentiveness
The performance of self
• The dramaturgical metaphor/perspective: ‘putting on a show’
- Social order less enforced than consensually enacted
- Social grammars which pattern interaction orders
• Social interaction is heavily scripted and staged
- Underpinned by desire to protect and project the (sacred) self
- Impression management
• Performers, teams and audiences
- Performers stage presentations and frame acceptable self-image
- Teams share and keep secrets and reinforce presentation
- Audiences only receive a façade that conveys particular impression of status and
authenticity
• ‘Frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ regions
- Preparation and performance
- Although constant potential for ‘disruption’ and ‘dissonance’ to occur in performance
of roles NB importance of ‘information control’
- Face-saving tactics (via ‘avoidance’ and ‘correction’)
Reflexive modernity and the self
• Processes of modernization has changed how and what we know about the world: intensified
self-knowledge, complexity and unpredictability – (see Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994)
Reflexive Modernisation, Cambridge: Polity Press)
• Identities no longer attributed from family, religion and work
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Major focus of sociologists: the design and maintenance of social order: how processes of governance are historically invented vis- -vis specific problems, how they operate and with what implications and affects. What are they trying to achieve (what objects and issues are focused on), and through what means and how/do they attain legitimacy. Who is included in their design and who is simultaneously excluded. Key idea: selves as fluid and unstable: techniques of government generate" different ideal(ised) models of the self. The disciplined self" of the 19th century to the contemporary responsibilised self": these don"t necessarily succeed of prevail: obedience is far from inevitable, there is always resistance, failures and unintended consequences. They are but distinct diagrams of conduct for how we should think, act and live, albeit diagrams with powerful incentives and sanctions attached/incorporated. A person"s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the objet of introspection or reflexive action".
