1. Self and Society
Symbolic Interactionism

2. Objective
• To get you think about your own ‘authentic
identity’ as a community development worker
• To get you to ‘imagine inside’ your roleplayed
MI client, and the processes that led you to
select that persons ‘identity’
• To see ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about
identity, that form the basis of ‘prejudice’

3. • Masks
• Stage
• Scripts
– Discursive
– Performative
• 'symbolic communication’
• ‘authentic self’
• ‘deviant’ ‘otherness’

4. Who am I?
• How do ‘I’ get
constituted, on a daily
basis?
• What is the ‘I’ that I
refer to?
• When am I being ‘me’?
• Who are ‘you’?
• Which you am I
perceiving?

5. Mead: The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’
• ‘I’ is the spontaneous unpredictable element of the self
• 'I' memory is a store of creativity, adaptability and novelty in
the social process.
• Where our most important values are located
• Constitutes the realisation of the self - i.e. reveals a definite
personality
• Seen as an evolutionary process
• 'Me' is the conformist aspect of the self, and the
reflexive, organised aspect of the self (Mead 1934: 197).

6. Erving Goffman
• Stigma (1963) Interaction Ritual (1967), Forms of Talk (1981)
• Presentation of the Self in Everyday life (1956),
• Dramaturgy - with human social behaviour seen as more or
less well scripted and with humans as role-taking actors.
– Role-taking is a key mechanism of interaction > reflexive awareness of
self and others
– Role-making a key mechanism of interaction in unaccustomed
situations
• improvisational quality of roles, with human social behaviour
seen as poorly scripted and with humans as role-making
improvisers.

7. Blumer ‘meaning’
• meaning states that humans act toward
people and things based upon the meanings
that they have given to those people or things.
• Language gives humans a means by which to
negotiate meaning through symbols.
• Thought, based on language, is a mental
conversation or dialogue that requires role
taking, or imagining different points of view

8. “Minding”
• Minding is the two-second delay where individuals
rehearse the next move and anticipate how others
will react.
George Herbert Mead

9. ‘I’ looking at ‘you’

10. Others
Johari
Like Me
STAGE
Deviant
Others

13. Learning/socialisation
• From a period of imitation without meaning for
infants, through the play-acting world of children
• Through such play, one develops and internalizes a
group of perspective on the self that Mead termed the
"generalized other.“ (society? community? policy?)
• the "inner voice" of the generalize other continues to
whisper the complex requirements of being "human.“
• (links to Foucault’s panopticism)

14. Michel Foucault Panopticism
• Surveillance & Spectacle
• The silent power of editing what you do
because you are being watched, or think you
are being surveilled.

15. Deviance & labelling
• Howard Becker
• Outsiders: Studies in the
sociology of
deviance(1969)
• Studies of group values
among ‘delinquents’ and
emergence of shared
codes, values contra
‘mainstream’ values

16. Becker, labelling
• Becker and labelling – ‘social groups create
(socially construct) deviance by making the
rules whose infraction constitutes
deviance, and by applying those rules to
particular people and labelling them as
outsiders.
• From this point of view, deviance is not a
quality, of the act the person commits,
• but rather a consequence of the
application by others of rules and
sanctions to an ‘offender’.
• The deviant is one to whom that label has
successfully been applied; deviant
behaviour is behaviour that people so
label.

17. Taking the Role of the Other
• This is seeing the world through another’s
eyes.
• Walking in someone else’s shoes
• Grown up version of having imaginary friends
and talking to yourself.