Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25

STUDTES IN SYMBOLIC I~E~ACTION VOLUME 25

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY

NORMAN K. DENZIN Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA M~AG~G

EDITOR

RUOYUN BAI Institute of Communications Research, University of IZlinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

JACK BRATICH HEIDI BRUSH MARK NIMKOFF Institute of Co~~m~nicat~o~s Research, U~iversi~ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

2002

JAI An Imprint of Elsevier Science Amsterdam - London - New York - Oxford - Paris - Shannon - Tokyo

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS David L. Altheide

School of Justice Studies Arizona State University, USA

Sylvia J. Ansay

Department of Sociology University of Florida, USA

Arthur P. Bochner

Department of Communication University of South Florida, USA

James W. Carey

School of Journalism Columbia University, USA

Shing-Ling S. Chen

Department of Communication Studies University of Northern Iowa, USA

Clifford G. Christians

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Norman K. Denzin

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Carolyn Ellis

Department of Communication University of South Florida, USA

Luigi Esposito

Department of Sociology University of Miami, USA

Kate Follett

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Elizabeth Gill

Department of Sociology Randolph-Macon College, USA

Todd A. Hechtman

Department of Sociology Eastern Washington University, USA ix

X

Robert A. Hintz

Foundation II, Inc.

Mark D. Johns

Department of Communication/Linguistics Luther College, Iowa, USA

CaYenne Kaha

Department of Rhetoric and Communication Hamilton College, NY, USA

Michael A. Katovich

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice Texas Christian University, USA

Boyd Littrell

Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

Stephen Lyng

Department of Sociology and Anthropology Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

Dan E. Miller

Department of Sociology University of Dayton, USA

John W. Murphy

Department of Sociology University of Miami, USA

Ken Plummer

Department of Sociology University of Essex, U.K.

Gideon Sjoberg

Department of Sociology University of Texas at Austin, USA

Mary E. Weems

Cleveland State University, USA

Norma Williams

Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Texas at Arlington, USA

Joel D. Wolfe

Department of Political Science University of Cincinnati, USA

Margaret Young

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois, USA

LIST OF REFEREES

Fay Yokomizo Akindes

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn

Thomas M. Alexander

Peter J. Kivisto

Art Bochner

Cheris Kramarae

Diem-My Bui

Ralph LaRossa

Spencer Cahill

Boyd Littrell

Leonard Cain

David R. Maines

Norman K. Denzin

E. Doyle McCarthy

David R. Dickens

James B. McKee

Dwight Fee

Joshua Meyrowitz

Alice Filmer

Ronald J. Pelias

Susan Finley

Joy Pierce

Michael Flaherty

Miles Richardson

Andrea Fontana

Andree F. Sjoberg

David S. Fott

Louise Spence

David D. Franks

Charles Springwood

Jaber Gubrium

Lance Strate

Peter M. Hall

Jules Wanderer

Jean Halley

S. Craig Watkins

Todd A. Hechtman

Mary Weems

Emily Noelle Ignacio

Norbert Wiley

Michael A. Katovich

xi

RENEWING THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTION IN THE N E W MILLENNIUM Shing-Ling S. Chen

The word, "renewing," in the title should not suggest that the New Iowa School, represented by the works of Carl Couch and his students is in a stage of decline, as a matter of fact, members of the School remain active in conference presentation (Miller, 2001; Katovich & Bums, 2001) and academic publication (Miller, Katovich & Saxton, 1997). However, several recent situations have occurred that call for a consideration and reflection of the past achievement and future development of the School. One situation was the loss of key members of the New Iowa School in recent years - Carl Couch in 1994, and Stanley Saxton in 1999 - which caused many to wonder about the continuation and future development of the school. Another situation is the context of the millennium. As a historical milestone, the millennium naturally calls for a reflection on the past and a projection for the future. The third situation that prompted the discussion was the establishment of Carl Couch Center for Social and Intemet Research (CCCSIR) on September 15, 2000. The establishment of the Carl Couch Center, a non-profit organization promoting the scholarship that is inspired by Carl Couch's works, also presents a need to examine the development of the School and plan future projects. Based on these three situations, scholars in communication and sociology gathered at the annual convention of National Communication Association in Seattle in November, 2000, in a panel entitled, "Renewing the New Iowa School Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 3--4. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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SHING-LING S. CHEN

of Symbolic Interaction in the New Millennium: A n Engaged Dialogue of Communication and Sociology," to discuss the past achievement and future development of the School. Panel participants included Bruce E. Gronbeck, Norman K. Denzin, Laurel T. Hetherington, Michael Katovich, Dan Miller, Mary E. Rohlfing, Carlos G. Aleman, Melissa W. Aleman, and Randall Reese. The following two articles serve to capture some of the nuances presented in the discussion, and elaborate on the insights discussed in the panel.

REFERENCES Katovich, M., & Burns, R. (2001). "Let's take a vote": Another time through "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" and the myth of democratic participation. Paper presented in the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Anaheim, California, August 19-20. Miller, D. (2001). Time, work, agency, and self-actualization: Customizing temporal experience. Paper presented in the Couch Stone Symposium, University of Miami, February 23-25. Miller, D., Katovich, M., & Saxton, S. (1997). Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (ed.), Supplement 3. London, England: JAI Press Inc.

EMPIRICISM ON THE PRAIRIE: FOUR WAVES OF THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL Michael A. Katovich, Dan E. Miller and Robert A. Hintz

INTRODUCTION In this paper we describe Carl Couch's new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction as consisting of four distinct waves of empiricist studies of social interaction. The succession of waves suggest an evolution of empiricism on the Iowa prairie - waves of grain rather than waves of water. We characterize the first wave, beginning in the late 1960s, as a trial and error period that incorporated andio-visual technology and changed the empiricist program of the new Iowa School. During this time, a new Iowa School distanced itself from the preceding School established by Manford Knhn (see Kuhn & McPartland, 1954). During the mid- to late-1970s a second wave emerged that called for conceptual precision, and provided a method to generate and articulate basic generic processes that defined the social act. At this time, the new Iowa School further distanced itself from the ethnographic tradition established within Chicago School circles. By the late 1970s and early 1980s a third wave emerged that politicized the new Iowa School's efforts to connect micro social processes with macrosociological forms of association. We conclude by suggesting that a fourth wave, established in the late 1980s and 1990s and continuing on after Couch's Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 5-23. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

death, has re-integrated the mission of the new Iowa School with the honored legacy established by Blumer and his Chicago School. While each wave marks distinct themes in regard to generating and analyzing data, each characteristically connects Couch's empiricism with G. H. Mead's (1929, 1932) theory of emergence and temporality. Taking all waves together, the new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction maintains that all coordinated social behavior occur in, over, across, and even "through" time. That is, the new Iowa School interactionists view social action as having direction, that interactors can interpret and share, and as having direction that can be referenced in terms of what has occurred and what might occur based on what is happening now. The foundations of this orientation to time and temporality exist in conjunction with a commitment to observing how two or more people begin, maintain, and complete any act in any social context; and how the acts created can be comparable to other acts that are begun, maintained, and ended in varieties of social contexts (see Hintz & Couch, 1975).

THE FIRST WAVE: ESTABLISHING A SENSE OF TIME AND PLACE Manford Kuhn's Iowa School of symbolic interactionism became a pragmatic and empiricist-based science of the self that involved shared understandings between researchers. The researchers would understand the specific and general intentions of any study in particular, and the new Iowa School mission as a whole. After he returned to the University of Iowa in the 1960s, Couch wished to re-build the community established by Kuhn and create a new Iowa School. As did Kuhn, Couch attempted to provide a recipe for data generation and analysis techniques. Also, Couch wanted to retain one of the key methodological premises of Kuhn's legacy - the study of universal variables from a stable standpoint (Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). He and Kuhn agreed with Mead's (1936) version of modem science as a research science that required a stable standpoint in regard to the production, observation, and responses to interaction that other researchers could corroborate (see McPhail, 1979). During the first wave, Blumer's (1969) version of symbolic interactionism had become, for all practical purposes, the going concern within symbolic interactionism. Much more in tune with the idealism and romanticism of the 1960s, Blumer's vision provided a social science of opportunity, keying in on the resourcefulness of everyday interactors who knew their ways around the universes they inhabited. Blnmer's romanticism was a direct extension of the pragmatic vision of human actors who could indeed be useful

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7

informants in regard to their own actions and behaviors. His rhetoric appealed to a variety of thinkers who had become disillusioned with the conventional wisdom of structural functionalism, which held that human beings are the least likely to be able to indicate anything but the surface structural meaning of their acts. Blumer regarded the interactors as not only self indicating and reflexive, but self analytical and cognizant of the deeper structures of their talk, activity, and intentions. Despite Couch's great admiration for Kuhn he saw in Blumer's writings a way to distance himself from the Twenty Statements Test (TST) that Kuhn used to measure the self. Although such measures provided point-in-space stability, the point-in-time quality of the data was too static for Couch. In line with Blumer, Couch accorded humans with substantial powers of determinacy, especially in regard to how social actors used social pasts to create and project shared futures (e.g. Maines et al., 1983). Couch agreed with Blumer that human selves should be studied in the process of becoming, but Couch did not see this as an idealistic or romantic enterprise. Instead, he sought to understand audio-visual technologies in order to record and analyze precise interactional processes. Such technologies would maintain Kuhn's point-in-space standpoint, but would also incorporate Blumer's call to study human life across time enough to make the new Iowa School distinct. Couch also appreciated Blumer's emphasis on the study of social processes rather than on the study of the self, per se. By studying processes, researchers could observe the consequences that interactors created as they organized "lines" of action so as to form joint acts (Blumer, 1969, p. 5). Blumer's emphasis on processes brought to bear Mead' s view of temporality, which included an understanding of the social act as encased by interactors within a specious present. Using audio-visual technologies, Couch envisioned a social behaviorism that would provide a refined view of temporality in the context of emergence and uncertainty. Utilizing a point-in-space, across time approach the first wave of the new Iowa School envisioned a science of interpersonal discourse that could explain human interaction across varieties of social settings. For Blumer, understanding discourse meant studying social processes, especially those experienced by the human being in situ. One of the key departures that Blumer and Chicago School interactionists made from structural-functionalist sociology involved using across-time and across-space methodologies (Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). Chicago School interactionists stressed getting involved in the lived experiences of subjects, documenting their day-to-day encounters as constructed in real time and places (see Becker & Geer, 1957). Providing vivid accounts of how individuals navigated their circumstances and how they created

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

and interpreted the circumstances within which they navigated provided a rich legacy of interacfional drama in thickly peopled and thickly described environments (Geertz, 1974; Strauss, 1978). Drawing on Blumer for inspiration, Couch took on the role of a critic during the first wave. For one thing, he attempted to persuade other interacfionists that the famous division between Iowa and Chicago schools (as articulated by Meltzer & Petras, 1970) was passe, and even wrongheaded (see Buban, 1986). He emphasized that controlled conditions in the laboratory, used to make step-by-step observations of people who solved problems together, could allow for the very same empirical approach supported by devotees of Blumer, especially those advocating analytical induction (see Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). Also, analogous to Blumer's criticisms of sociological formulations that did not take the interactive dimension of social life into account, Couch saw most social psychology as a promise unkept. Most publications in outlets such as Sociometry (later renamed Social Psychology Quarterly), failed to treat human behavior as complex and variable; attenuated the creative powers of human interpretation; did not recognize how reality changes when two or more people adjust to present and forthcoming lines of action; and did not provide a cybernetic explanation of how human beings engage in self corrective action that can enable social objectives (see Couch, Katovich & Miller, 1988, pp. 263-267). Couch drew on Blumer's famous criticism of how many static minded sociologists misconstrued the variable (as ungrounded in interaction) and instead saw the quest for universal variables as grounded in social interaction and social relationships. Couch described these variables as metaphorical dimensions of human association, in terms of what people need to do in conjunction with each other if they are going to accomplish a social objective. Couch respected Blumer's staunch criticism of sociology in general, but he saw the necessity of different vocabularies to study social processes (Couch, 1987). Couch appreciated across time and space methodologies and used many Chicago School-based interactional concepts to identify the elements and dimensions of basic interaction processes (Couch, 1970). Couch's reluctance to adopt the Chicago way, however, was based on what he considered to be an over-appreciation of the uniqueness of situational life (Couch, 1995). He decided to distance the first wave from Blumer by challenging this anthropological standard of unique human variability and set out to "quest for universals" (see Turner, 1956). This first wave of empiricism could be geared toward detecting, isolating, and articulating universal properties of social processes. Such universality required attention to how the on-going present emerged on the basis of past experiences and shared anticipation of forthcoming experiences.

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Couch's search for generic, universal variables became correlated with an empiricist-based science in the age of electronic technologies. He viewed the interactionist legacy as the foundation for the discovery of law-like processes, generated by humans, and analyzed by knowledgeable pragmatists who understood human selves in accord with how Mead (1934) and Cooley (1902, 1918) defined it. Taking Mead's outlook on science as the means to understanding human complexity, Couch attempted to create an empiricist-based symbolic interaction that originated from the organized conduct of human beings who interpreted, anticipated, and adjusted to each other's overt behavior. Providing detail about across-time data served a necessary purpose for empiricism, but Couch deemed that selecting a static place to observe temporal alignments was the only way to observe how present centered experiences become fused with past and future experiences (Couch, 1989). His insistence on adopting stable places to observe ongoing temporal processes involved three rationalizations. First, systematic inquiry requires consistent situated observations. Second, consistency of observations necessitates a stable place for observations of generic processes that can reflect "conceptually dense, and integrated theory of social life" (Couch, 1995, p. 231). Third, consistency of observations and stability of place allow researchers to generate re-searchable data via andio-visual recordings. The recordings enable physically stable observations of "across time" social processes. Couch insisted that the discovery of generic processes could not be made unless researchers fixed the camera on interactors who constructed ongoing temporal transactions. The fire that burned in Couch and that others recognized whenever he spoke or wrote stayed alive because of his commitment to studying human action from a point of view that remained the same. Researchers either stand still, or provide an extension of themselves that stands still (e.g. the andiovisual camera) in order to observe a real interacting group. Further, and drawing again upon Mead's view of the social act as a root metaphor of human life, Couch viewed the laboratory as a legitimate place to study human activity as processual, systematic, and pragmatic. By turning to the laboratory, Couch relied on Kuhn's view (1964) that an innovative social psychology begins with the generation and analysis of universal variables. Any such generation and analysis requires systematic attention to data that human beings help produce in controlled environments. Researchers acquire such data while occupying a stable standpoint and dedicating themselves to methodical, thorough, and standardized observations. In effect, Couch set out to create both a physical place for research and a metaphorical community of pragmatists who believed in Mead's notion that scientific understandings of human action could liberate researchers and everyday interactors (Katovich, 1998; McPhail & Rexroat, 1981; Molseed, 1995).

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

Beginning with some trial and error laboratory studies (the Crib 101 studies), Couch and his early students, most notably Stan Saxton, "pretty much groped around in the dark," as Couch later recalled. But such groping became rationalized as an attempt to create a bridge between what social actors did on the spot (emergent, constructed interaction) and how they could maintain the relationships created for them by researchers (social structure). The fusion of acting on the spot in conjunction with loosely defined scripts and general descriptions of how to relate served as the grounds for analyzing how people in relationships could adapt to and change such relationships over time (see Miller & Hintz, 1997). Couch's first wave called for a reappraisal of Mead's (1938) layered definition of the social act that could be documented, re-searched, and examined in precise detail. He predicted that bringing Mead into the electronic audio-visual age would establish the new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction as a paradigm of thought that would influence any researcher interested in Mead's perspective. Just as Kuhn believed in the 1950s that a systematic study of the self would replace speculation of the human potential to define and analyze the extent to which it is anchored in institutions (see Hickman & Kuhn, 1956), so Couch believed that a systematic study of the act would enable researchers and interactors to theorize about all behavior in social contexts. Couch's vision to fuse across-time and point-in-space measures and methods did not resonate well in the social scientific community. Most point-in-space sociologists seemed content with survey research and establishing increasingly sophisticated quantitative techniques to manage data. Most interactionists remained content with Blumer's processual view of human life and proud of the subsequent and various studies of real people in real situations engaging in real processes that talented observers described in great detail. In this context, Couch's efforts to convince his interactionist colleagues that the laboratory was a legitimate place for testing Mead's theories of social action were largely ignored. The bias against the laboratory as a place void of "real action" remained strong within interactionist circles. In retrospect, given the popularity of Chicago School observers such as Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss, and Norman Denzin to name a few, and of course, owing to the vast admiration of Erving Goffman throughout sociology, Couch's timing could not be considered auspicious. Interactionists during the late 1960s could ask two reasonable rhetorical questions in regard to Couch's efforts: Why reduce a richly textured life going on in the real world to a manufactured world in the laboratory; and how would observation of contrived social action be a better alternative than observation of the real thing in real

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time? Despite Couch's eagerness to answer these questions, the first wave of empiricism on the prairie did not produce much of lasting value, especially in regard to laboratory studies. One of the obstacles Couch confronted had to do with his own past and the reputation he acquired as one of Kuhn's students and as a student of collective behavior. His most notable contributions at this time either involved his assessment of dimensions of association (see Couch, 1970) or his appreciation of Kuhn's (TST) (see Spitzer, Couch & Stratton, 1971). Often, at regional and national meetings, Couch would tell students that the TST was a "dead end" and "a waste of time." While speaking from the heart, Couch did not seem to be a true player among interactionists. Severed from his past, and unable to persuade other interactionists of his future vision, Couch was temporarily a man without a program.

ENTER THE YOUNG: THE SECOND W A V E OF THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL During the 1970s a critical mass of graduate students entered the Graduate Program at the University of Iowa and began to challenge existing paradigms of thought in quantitative and qualitative methods, and in micro and macro studies of societal and social patterns. Drawing from a wide range of research results and theoretical standpoints, including interactionism, ethnomethodology, Goffman's (1963, 1971) dramaturgy, and pragmatics of communication (Watzlawic, Beavin & Jackson, 1967), Iowa graduate students ushered in a new form of empiricism that challenged the traditionally inductive and deductive orientations, the positivistic and humanistic standpoints, and the ethnographic/processual and survey/static views of how society was possible. Couch heralded the second wave of empiricism as a new paradigm of thought within sociology (Couch, Saxton & Katovich, 1986). The wave entailed the precise coding and examination of specific generic concepts that would become the building blocks of all situated social action. Drawing from the aforementioned postulates, Couch and his students replicated some of the features of classic helping behavior studies to observe how two or more people, as Couch always liked to say, "moved through the door together." The study of "Openings" (see Miller, Hintz & Couch, 1975) emerged as the "breakthrough" upon which his paradigm of thought would be built. The "Openings" research became the centerpiece for an edited book of various studies written by Couch and his students (see Couch & Hintz, 1975). The studies ranged from opening an act, to creating solidarity among role-playing groups, to establishing emergent norms in problem-solving situations, to closing acts. The book, written in a hard boiled prose, and stripping down interaction

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

to basic behaviors and response sequences, departed from the romantic and idealistic tone established by Herbert Blumer. However plain, and void of the clarion-like call that characterized Blumer's prose, the book established the new Iowa School as part of "an age of Inquiry" (Kuhn, 1964). Couch viewed the study of openings as emblematic of how empiricism on the prairie would be conducted. Specifically, Miller, Hintz and Couch employed point-in-space technologies in order to detect, describe, and define (technically) across-time concepts generated by interactors who fit together lines of action. Characterized as "elements," the generic concepts identified by the authors provided a foundation for all subsequent new Iowa School studies of interactional sequences. The openings study also became an occasion to conceptualize social processes as structured (Buban, 1986; Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). This conceptualization grounded the study of interaction in specific concePts that treated the social act as a cybernetic enterprise. It also created a narrative for the social act, with beginnings, middles, and ends that interactors created, maintained, and experienced. While the symbolism of the act remained important, the structure of the interaction, rather than the multiplicity of possible meanings, became the central focus within the second wave of new Iowa School studies. Couch was not timid in his descriptions of his own and his students' accomplishments. Some interactionists applauded Couch's pioneer spirit. Even so, other sociologists, including some interactionists, responded with skepticism and hostility. Despite a few other journal publications in The Sociological Quarterly and Symbolic Interaction the new Iowa School of symbolic interaction was seen either as a misguided effort to incorporate across-time observations in a laboratory or as a betrayal of the interactionist ethos to study real people doing "unscripted things" in real places. Despite a lack of full acceptance, Couch became convinced that he had founded a brand of empiricism that would be useful and that was not being practiced anywhere but on the prairie. Spurred on by his faith in his self-defined paradigm, he and his second wave of graduate students began to grapple with issues of ontology. The second wave of empiricists were aware of Weber's view of orientation and Durkheim's insistence on systematic inquiry. They appreciated these ancestors but diverged from their programs. Another founding father, August Comte, became instrumental for another reason. Couch viewed Blumer's (1969) "society is symbolic interaction" metaphor as based on Comte's principle of complexity. As Giddens (1977) has noted, Comte viewed human structures to become more complex as they became more specific in purpose. The more vague the purpose, the simpler the activities taking place in regard to the purpose. Couch took this a step further to note that as individuals move

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from acting independently (vaguely social) to interdependently (sharply defined social), social complexity emerges. How interactors manage such social complexity becomes the basis for answering how is society possible. As with most interactionists, Couch and his second wave students were unsatisfied with the structural-functional answer to the possibility of society. Couch even expressed dissatisfaction with Blumer's answer. To Couch, Blumer's focus on self indication and understanding another's orientation, corresponded to Weber's perspective. While it did point attention to symbolic processes, or what objects individuals conceptualized as relevant to time and space and how they go about conceptualizing such objects, Blumer seemed content to leave interactors with their symbolic processes, taking for granted that they will unite their lines of action and get things done. To Couch, analysis of the social act, as mead described it, necessitates the full examination of interaction processes as problematic. Couch intended to break through the vast forest of sensitizing concepts to identify definitive concepts that had universal application to dyads and triads. Rejecting Max Weber's famous notion of orientation and the capacity to understand an orientation, Couch and his students decided that the key to establishing a unique brand of interaction would be to interpret Mead's formulation of the social act as essentially dyadic. Reality, as understood within the new Iowa School, pertained to a dyad as a whole, rather than to two distinct individuals oriented to each other. As Goffman (1983) would later ask sociologists to do, the second wave of new Iowa School interactionists set about to create a moving picture of human order, born from emergent human conduct. Couch in effect replaced the postulates of Kuhn's interest in a science of the self (see Zurcher, 1979) with his own postulates concerning the science of a social act. First, Couch argued that the social act emerges in symbolic interaction with others, and makes up its own unique context for forthcoming activity. Second, Couch maintained that all human associations involve the construction of an act that can help humans maintain these associations. Third, Couch insisted that two or more people must be engaged in symbolic interaction order for social conduct to occur. Fourth, social acts performed by two or more people can be systematically coded. The directness and literal insistence on "two or more" to constitute that which is social allowed new Iowa School interactionists to avoid psychologistic explanations (what motivates, what are the attitudes, and what are the personalities). But it also allowed Couch to challenge one of Blumer's linchpins that defined the Chicago School of symbolic interaction. Just as a dyad is real, so is the social object real. The reality of an object is not confined to how an individual perceives and acts toward it, but as how two people, in concert, act toward and define it as they complete a social act.

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The second wave of the new Iowa School integrated Blumer and Kuhn (Couch, Saxton & Katovich, 1986) in order to specify complex interactional processes that could be viewed and re-viewed second, third, fourth, and fifth times through - and even more, if necessary. Maintaining a metaphorical singular place to view and re-view allowed the new Iowa School researchers to conceptualize the social act as a hierarchical structure, but also as a hierarchical structure that moves across time.

GETTING GLOBAL: THE F O R M A T I O N OF A THIRD W A V E By the late 1970s, most of Couch's second wave of graduate students had moved on to other Colleges and Universities. Most went into Departments where they were the only symbolic interactionists, and where they were asked to teach traditional sociological courses. Changing politics at the University of Iowa itself had led to the dominance of perspectives that were not compatible with interacfionism in general, and Couch's prairie empiricism in particular. Once again, Carl Couch appeared to be a man without a program. Even though Couch felt isolated he still set out to make clear that the new Iowa School was not one that contradicted the Chicago School interactionists' self as dynamic agent nor the mission of sociology to examine human action against the backdrop of social, political, and institutionalized patterns (Mills, 1959). As mentioned, during the second wave Couch began to engage in focused inquiry into varieties of situated acts - ranging from the highly specific acts of opening and closing interactions (see Hintz & Miller, 1997), to the more general relationships between representatives and constituents. By the late 1970s, with a legacy of studies to draw from, Couch would enter a third wave of empiricism that would merge the study of specific processes with dynamics involving political relationships. Starting with equal cooperation, the third wave of the new Iowa School would eventually attempt to explore more asymmetrical and unequal forms involving conflict, authority, and negotiations. With regard to equal relationships the third wave new Iowa School recognized social acts as meaningful in the response to them. Coding the social became governed by the simple premise that any initiation needed to be followed by a response in order for an act to be considered analyzable. The initiation-response sequences became the methodological basis of the new Iowa School and the theoretical basis of a key assumption of this school - the complexity of human coordination is the foundation upon which any society is built and maintained.

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However, with regard to unequal and potentially conflictual relationships, the third wave dramatized the unfairness of social life. Influenced by Chicago School interactionists and dramaturgists, Couch paid attention to how representatives of institutions rationalized their so called social systems and, by doing so, created a duaiity between those having institutional leverage and those who have not. Drawing on Howard Becker's distinction between the societal labeled and unlabeled and Goffman's dramaturgical view of deviants as lacking the power to activate and validate identities alternative to those that stigmatize them, Couch incorporated the processes associated with symmetrical and asymmetrical interactions. In so doing, he oversaw the new Iowa School as creating provocative stages (Katovich, 1984) whereby participants created sequences of interactional moments that either facilitated equilateral transactions or dramatized the tensions underlaying superordinate-subordinate exchanges. The third wave did not replace the first two waves, but built on the legacies that each of the previous waves established. Couch's reliance on audio-visual technology, his insistence on occupying a stable location to observe across-time data, and his adherence to a group (vs. individualistic) centered ontology allowed him to merge Mead's emphasis on process with Simmel's (1950) emphasis on f o r m s o f social interaction. The significance of this merger opened the laboratory to a variety of studies that worked as metaphors for broader social concerns. Interactors would assume identities of interviewer and interviewee and create a negotiated order; they would build "tinker toy" models and participate in the construction of authority relationships; they would elect representatives who would negotiate with role-playing Deans' of Colleges and participate in democratic and autocratic decision making. All specific social processes could be generalized to resemble the social forms that provide structure to our everyday lives. During the third wave, Couch and a new cadre of students who had arrived during the late 1970s created studies that adhered to principle of complexity (Holland, 1998). This principle holds that from basic social forms (symmetrical or asymmetrical) unlimited and emergent content emerge. In turn, the content of interactors' talk and activities creates emergent social structures (Hintz & Miller, 1997). Such structures appear as conditions by which past action becomes useful and future action becomes imagined. In the context of an interview, for instance, a future boss and a prospective worker rely on the basic asymmetric form of the encounter to project real and imagined possibilities for their shared future. In so doing, while the form becomes validated, a structure of interrelating emerges. The boss and worker are free to create various agreements as to how boundaries will be maintained,

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

how tasks will be completed, and what outcomes or rewards will be available. They do so in a step-by-step sequence. While other bosses and workers may differ in terms of establishing boundaries, rewards, and tasks, the sequences that resemble each other become the basis on which analysis proceeds. Couch predicted that given the same general conditions, sequences of past and forthcoming activity would be patterned, even if the exact content associated with the sequences varied. The third wave of the new Iowa School began to systematically assess a theory of Iowa School methodology, and specifically, to make statements about the importance of the researcher-subject relationships (see Katovich, 1984). Many interactionists criticized Couch for his insistence on watching and analyzing subjects in the laboratory. The interactionists claimed that laboratory role-playing studies would stifle creativity and transform spontaneous behavior into scripted responses to instructions. By setting out to answer these criticisms, the third wave students discovered that broad parameters and general instructions of role enactments actually freed interactors to "role their own," as it were. Researchers, acting as producers, created just enough structure and left enough "free space" for subjects to act in accordance with general instructions and to improvise specific initiationresponse sequences. One instructive role-playing scenario established during the second wave, became the basis for how the third wave of new Iowa School researchers would view the laboratory and its connection to external interaction processes and patterns. The Representative-Constituent Study (heretofore referred to as RCS) involved three person groups of subjects who agreed to take on partisan interests and elect a representative to negotiate with a shill, posing as a Dean of Students. By electing a representative, the partisan group divided itself into representative-constituent components, with one person being the representative and two taking on the identities of constituents. The study had several built-in conditions, but the most useful one, as far as the second wave of students were concerned, involved constituent access to a source of information independent of a representative versus no such access whereby constituents were entirely dependent on the representative in regard to the representative's negotiation with the Dean of Students. Another built-in condition "stacked the deck" against the representative. The Dean was thoroughly coached by a positioned skill and was put in a position to bargain and negotiate in a much more sophisticated manner than any on the spot representative would be in. The typical end result was that the representative did not get what he (all males were used in this study) or his constituents hoped for or expected.

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One of the main questions guiding analysis of the study was how would the solidarity of the partisan triad be maintained in the face of defeat? The key study that third wave students found useful in conjunction with this question, and that had yet to be analyzed, involved friends who played the roles of partisan group members (Katovich, Weiland & Couch, 1981). Friends, having shared histories outside of the laboratory experiences, could draw upon such histories to produce complex talk and meanings that were not easily detectable, even with repeated re-viewing on audio-visual tape. But the analysis of partisan groups composed of friends provided an oppomanity for third wave new Iowa School interactionists to view and re-view how people with shared histories could incorporate their own agendas in conjunction with the agendas suggested to them by the researchers and positioners. The study had obvious risks. Most notably a "reverse demand characteristic" dynamic loomed as a distinct possibility. Whereas Orne (1962) predicted compliance to researchers' agendas in order to make themselves into "good subjects," friends could build off each others' playfulness to disrupt the study, or transform it from a serious laboratory study into a "theater of the absurd." But instead of absurdity, the friends combined informal talk, playfulness, candor, and comfortable exchanges (apparently disregarding the microphone and camera) to create lively and dramatic open awareness contexts (see Glaser & Strauss, 1964). Four noteworthy processes associated with this study served as a basis for subsequent third wave research and for making such research global in its appeal to non-Iowa interactionists. First, this RCS study of friends showed that the laboratory could indeed be a provocative stage for the construction and maintenance of volatile, yet purposive political acts (Sehested & Couch, 1986). The partisan friends, playing the roles of underdogs, created plans of action that allowed them to imagine themselves in opposition to a person occupying a legitimate place in the institution. In this light, as Fine (1992) noted later, the recognition by Iowa and Chicago school interactionists that institutional interaction could be seen as a dynamic process rather than as static outcomes provided interactionists with clues as to how people constructed and maintained asymmetric transactions. Second, the friends' interaction contradicted a key interactionist assumption that interaction in a laboratory environment denied emergence - or at least, denied emergent transactions as valid specimens to be analyzed. Termed "naturalism in the lab" (see Katovich, Saxton & Powell, 1986; Molseed, 1994), the new Iowa School created its own version of "Reality TV" by allowing subjects to act in ways that they see fit and to produce emergent outcomes. The RCS friends participated in their planning with a combination of joie de vivre

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

and competitive fire. They created plans of attack that the researchers and positioners did not anticipate, and they set out to, as one put it, "beat those bastards!" The friends infused resolute discourse and fantasy in their plans to elect a representative and to instruct the representative how to behave with the shill. Their creativity allowed for emergent variables to be coded and incorporated into the analysis of forthcoming sequences. They created the conditions for emergent stimuli and emergent consequences of this stimuli. One of the key emergent variables, the belief in their invincibility and underestimating the shill, became a key theme in regard to subsequent attempts to restore solidarity after experiencing unexpected defeat. Third, this particular RCS study became linked to a post Marxist orientation, drawing on Michels study of oligarchy and linking it to observable interaction processes generated in the laboratory. By demonstrating that representatives and constituents could better reconstruct solidary relations when constituents had access to an independent source of information, the third wave keyed on issues of democratic unity and the fate of open awareness contexts in political organizations (see Pestello & Saxton, 2000). This issue would serve as the groundwork for subsequent statements about autocratic relationships (Miller, Weiland & Couch, 1978), negotiations (Sink & Couch, 1986), and accountable relationships between superordinates and subordinates (Lutfiyya & Miller, 1986). Fourth, this particular RCS established discourse on the micro-macro connection, which had become a popular buzz phrase in the 1980s. The third wave fused the methodology of analytic induction (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) with a value added theory of elemental interaction (Loftand, 1970; Collins, 1981) to connect face-to-face talk with social forms of cooperation, conflict, competition, negotiated realities, and solidarity. In effect, the third wave of the new Iowa School set about to describe a mesostructure in the laboratory (Maines, 1985) that linked across-time microsocial acts with point-in-space macrosocial forms. The new Iowa School's version of the micro-macro connection provided analysis of obdurate worlds in controlled settings with attention to how people put hypothetical plans of action into pragmatic lines of action. CONCLUSION:

TAKING

IT TO THE STREETS

We have described three waves of empiricism on the prairie. One last fourth wave of the new Iowa School focuses on an ethnographic dimension of systematic research. Concepts and standpoints refined in the lab find application to the real life in real time worlds so esteemed by members of the Chicago School. This wave keyed on dramatic and everyday acts from taking leave of others (Leichty, 1986) to establishing moods in therapeutic encounters (Hardesty,

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1986) to falling in love (Katovich, 1997). It maintained its social and political consciousness to describe selling tactics as a systematic form of con artistry (Katovich & Diamond, 1986), democratic participation in bars where assignments of regular and non-regular identities become everyday and negotiated realities (Katovich & Reese, 1987), risk-taking behavior among working class employees in "dead-end" occupations (Kinkade & Katovich, 1997), and reintegration into a community after the experience of a traumatic event (Katovich & Hintz, 1997). The fourth wave also explored evocative discourse and being in time, again infusing political and social consciousness with emotional relationships. Seckman and Couch (1989) used the format of laboratory derived concepts to describe the elements and structure of sarcasm constructed by bosses and workers. Diekema (1991) employed new Iowa School concepts to distinguish being alone from loneliness as Simmelian social forms. Saxton and Katovich (1984) described how rich and healthy relationships can be maintained in everyday life, drawing ion the concepts of accountability and democratic planning in open awareness contexts from the third wave of studies. Another notable development occurred when researchers outside of the new Iowa School incorporated concepts and perspectives to inform their own writing. Descriptions of how social pasts become used in criminal courts (Ulmer, 1995) and in foster care (Power & Eheart, 2000) relied explicitly on third wave empiricist views of temporality and social pasts. Similarly, Maines and McCallion (2000) used the new Iowa School's emphasis on democratic planning and participation to discuss the impact of Church closings in urban neighborhoods. The aforementioned not only showed the utility of the new Iowa School's perspective, but also extended the fusion of micro processes and macro social structures. In closing, we propose an agenda that can carry on this fourth wave. When making sense of social worlds and providing abstract descriptions of their generic processes, what can new Iowa School interactionists accomplish as they study everyday life? Three things stand out from others. First, interactionists have taken Mead's revolutionary theory of time and temporality most seriously, and remain in the unique position to discuss social change and stability from a dynamic and cybernetic perspective. Explicit interactionist statements related to time and temporality provide the discipline with a greater range and depth of understanding of how emergent social processes relate to extant social contexts than the more conventional and functionalist interpretations have. Second, interactionists' have also found clear applications for Mead's cybernetic theory of action, ranging from the examinations of how dyads and triads interact in particular settings to how collectivities interact across settings.

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

With profound transformations related to political overhauls to interpersonal dynamics emerging across the world, interactionists occupy a privileged position to begin the "quest for universals" that apply to micro and macro sociological domains. Indeed, the ongoing quest to bridge micro and macro can be accomplished by and through the systematic examination of the social act, and how social acts become enveloped in other social acts. Third, the familiar interactionist focus on how selves and identities become activated and validated within social contexts can contribute to age old considerations of authentic identities and real selves. In this light, interactionism can locate itself between relevant psychological, dramaturgical, philosophical, anthropological, and political standpoints as it develops a key to understanding the universal processes of presenting selves and announcing identities - or getting socially and politically situated. Bringing the new Iowa School's formidable arsenal of concepts and sensibilities into issues of what constitutes authentic interaction and what constitutes a good opening as well as a good closing, can allow interactionists to take on moral questions as well as social and political ones.

REFERENCES Becker, H. S., & Geer. B. (1957). ParticipantObservationand Interviewing.Human Organization 16: 28-32. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Buban, S. L. (1986). Studying Social Processes: The Chicago and Iowa Schools Revisited. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 25--40). Greenwich,CT: JAI Press. Collins, R. (1981). On the Microfoundationsof Macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology, 86, 894-1014. Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and Social Order. New York: Schribner's. Cooley, C. H. (1918). Social Process. New York: Schribner's. Couch, C. J. (1995). Oh What Webs Those Phantoms Spin. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 229-245. Couch, C. J. (1987). Researching Social Processes in the Laboratory. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. J. (1970). Dimensionsof Associationin CollectiveBehavior Episodes. Sociometry, 33, 457-471. Couch, C. J., Katovich M. A., & Buban. V. S. (1994). Beyond Blumer and Kuhn: Researching and StudyingAcross-TimeData Through the use of Point-in-SpaceLaboratory Procedures. In: L. Reynolds & B. Herrman (Eds), Symbolic Interaction: An Introduction to Social Psychology (pp. 121-140). Dix Hills, NJ: General Hall Press. Conch, C. J., KatovichM. A., &. Miller, V. (1988). The SorrowfulTale of Small Groups Research. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 10: 258-279. Conch, C. J., Saxton, S. L., & Katovich. M. A. (1986). Introduction.In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. xvi-xxv). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

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Couch, C. J., & ttintz, R. A. (Eds) (1975). Constructing Social Life. Champaign, IL: Stipes. Diekema, D. (1991). Televangelism and the Mediated Charismatic Relationship. The Social Science Journal, 28, 143-162. Fine, G. A. (1992). Agency, Structure, and Comparative Contexts: Toward a Symbolic Interactionism. Symbolic Interaction, 15, 367-374. Geertz, C. (1974). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Harper & Row. Giddens, A. (1977). Studies in Social and Political Theory. New York: Basic Books. Glaser, B. J., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Glaser, B. J., & Strauss, A. L. (1964). Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction. American Sociological Review, 29, 669~679. Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places. New York: The Free Press. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Harper & Row. Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1-17. Hardesty, M. (1986). Plans and Mood: A Study in Therapeutic Relationships. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 209-229). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Hickman, C. A., & Kuhn, M. H. (1956). Individuals, Groups, and Economic Behavior. New York: Dryden Press. Hintz, R. A., Jr., & Miller. D. E. (1995). Openings Revisited: The Foundations of Social Interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 355-369. Hintz, R., & Couch, C. J. (1975). Time, Intention, and Social Behavior. In: C. J. Couch & R. Hintz (Eds), Constructing Social Life (pp. 26-45). Champaign, IL: Stipes. Holland, J. H. (1998). Emergence: From Chaos To Order. Reading, MA: Perseus. Katovich, M. A. (1997). Extending Couch's View of Romance: Intimacy, Social Relationships, and Social Forms. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. 149-164). Greenwich, CT: JAI Katovich, M. A. (1984). Symbolic Interactionism and Experimentation: the Laboratory as Provocative Stage. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 5, 49~7. Katovich, M. A., & Hintz, R. A., Jr. (1997). Responding to a Traumatic Event: Restoring Shared Pasts Within a Small Community. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 275-290. Katovich, M. A., & Reese, W. A. III. (1987). The Regular: Full Time Identities and Memberships in an Urban Bar. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16, 308-343. Katovich, M. A., & Diamond, R. (1986). Selling Time: Situated Transactions in a Non Institutional Environment. The Sociological Quarterly, 27, 253-271. Katovich, M. A., Saxton S. L., & Powell, J. (1986). Natttralism in the Laboratory. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 79-88). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Katovich, M. A., Weiland, M., & Couch, C. J. (1981). Access to Information and Internal Structures of Partisan Groups: Some Notes on the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The Sociological Quarterly, 22, 431-455. Kinkade, P. T., & Katovich, M. A. (1997). The Driver: Adaptations and Identities in the Urban Worlds of Pizza Delivery Employees. The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 25(4), 421-448. Kuhn, M. H. (1964). Major Trends in Symbolic Interaction in the Past Twenty-Five Years. The Sociological Quarterly, 5, 61-84. Kuhn, M. H., & McPartland, T. S. (1954). An Empirical Investigation of Self-attitudes. American Sociological Review, 19, 68-76.

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Leichty, M. (1986). Social Closings. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 231-248). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Lofland, J. (1970). Interactionist Imagery and Analytic Interruptus. In: T. Shibutani (Ed.), Human Nature and Collective Behavior (pp. 35-45). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Lutfiyya, M. N., & Miller, D. E. (1986). Disjunctures and the Process oflnterpersonal Accounting. In: C. J. Couch, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 131-147). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Maines, D. R. (1985). In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 267-279. Maines, D. R., Sugrue, N., & Katovich, M. A. (1983). The Sociological Import of George Herbert Mead's Theory of the Past. American Sociological Review, 48, 161-173. Maines, D. R., & McCallion, M. (2000). Urban Inequalityand the Possibilities of Church Based Intervention. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 23, 41-52. Mead, G. H. (1929). The Nature of the Past. In: J. Coss (Ed.), Essays in Honor of J. Dewey (pp. 235-242). New York: Henry Holt. Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1936). Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1938). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McPhail, C. (1979). Experimental Research is Convergent With Symbolic Interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 2, 89-94. McPhail, C., & Rexroat, C. (1980). Mead vs. Blumer: The Divergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism. American Sociological Review, 44, 449-467. Meltzer, B. M., & Petras, J. (1970). The Chicago and Iowa Schools of Symbolic Interactionism. In: T. Shibntani (Ed.), Human Nature and Collective Behavior (pp. 3-17). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Miller, D. E., & Hintz, R. A., Jr. (1997). The Structure of Social Interaction. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. 87-108). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Miller, D. E., Katovich, M. A., & Saxton, S. L (1997). Introduction. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. ix-xii). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Miller, D. E., Weiland. M. W., & Couch, C. J. (1978). Tyranny. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1, 267-288. Miller, D. E., Hintz. R. A., Jr., & Couch, C. J. (1975). The Elements and Structure of Openings. The Sociological Quarterly, 16, 479-499. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford. Molseed, M. J. (1994). Naturalistic Observation in the Laboratory. Symbolic Interaction, 17, 239-252. Molseed, M. J. (1995). In: Loco Parentis: An Elaboration of the Parental Relationship Form. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 341-354. Orne, M. T. (1962). On the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications. American Psychologist, 17, 776-783. Pestello, F., & Saxton, S. L. (2000). Renewing the Promise of Pragmatism: Toward a Sociology of Difference. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 23, 9-29. Power, M. B., & Eheart, B. K. (2000). From Foster Care to Fostering Care: The Need For Community. The Sociological Quarterly, 41, 85-102.

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Saxton, S. L., & Katovich, M. A. (1984). Rich and Healthy Relationships: A Sociological Essay. In: P. Voyandoff, S. L. Saxton & A. Lukowski (Eds), The Changing Family (pp. 81-94). Chicago: Loyola University Press. Seckman, M., & Couch, C. J. (1989). Jocularity, Sarcasm, and Relationships: An Empirical Study. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18, 327-344. Sehested, G., & Couch, C. J. (1986). The Problem of Authoritarianism in Laboratory Research. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxt0n & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 61-78). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. K. Wolff (trans.). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Sink, B. B., & Couch, C. J. (1986). The Construction of Interpersonal Negotiations. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 149-165). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Spitzer, S. P., Couch C. J., & Stratton, J. (1971). The Assessment of Self. Iowa City, IA: Sernoll Press. Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Josey Press. Turner, R. (1953). The Quest for Universals in Sociological Research. American Sociological Review, 24, 605-611. Ulmer, J. T. (1995). The Organization and Consequences of Social Pasts in Criminal Courts. The Sociological Quarterly, 36, 5874i05. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J., & Jackson, D. D. (1967). The Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: W. W. Norton. Zurcher, L. (1977). The Mutable Self. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage.

EMPIRICISM IN CYBERSPACE: THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL GOES ONLINE Shing-Ling S. Chen and Mark D. Johns

INTRODUCTION One of the significant contributions of Carl Couch's scholarship, aside from the qualitative laboratory approach that established Couch and his students as the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction, is Couch's research of information technologies in which he formulated a formal approach to examine media of communication. To reflect on the past achievement and forecast the future development of the New Iowa School, in this discussion the authors will demonstrate the importance of Couch's formal sociology of communication media in the context of the evolution of mass communication research. By considering the pitfalls of past mass communication research, the insights of Couch's formal approach are illuminated, and the validity of applying Couch's approach in studying the new media is confirmed. To further extrapolate on the validity of Couch's formal approach to study social interaction and relationships in cyberspace, an examination of the connections between Couch's principles of laboratory research and the environments for research in cyberspace is conducted. In addition, to illustrate the application of Couch's formal approach in studying social relationships in cyberspace, two studies are reported. A study of cyberspace as public spheres (Johns, 2001) serves to demonstrate study of the impacts of the Intemet on social relationships, whereas

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a study of eBay as a virtual marketplace (Goto Chang &Chen, 2000) serves to illustrate the social molding of Internet technology. Directions for future research on cyberspace are suggested at the end of the discussion. FORMAL

SOCIOLOGY

OF COMMUNICATION

MEDIA Carl Couch successfully incorporated Georg Simmel's (1964) formal sociology, George Mead's (1934) discussion of social processes, and Harold Innis' (1951) and Marshall McLuhan's (1964) Medium Theory to formulate a formal approach for the study of information technologies (Couch, 1984, 1989a; Chen, 1997). Couch's formal approach has yielded significant scholarship in the study of media of communication (Couch, 1989b, 1996; Couch & Chen, 1988; SI, 1995). Couch adopted Simmel's belief that the central focus of investigation is social interaction, and not individuals. Couch maintained that researchers should focus their attention on describing and articulating the forms of social interaction, not on the behavior of individuals. In addition, influenced by Innis' and McLuhan's writings, Couch also emphasized the examination of technological formats and how they impact social relationships. Innis, for example, held that every medium of communication carries with it inherent "biases" which make it more suited either for transmitting information over space or preserving information across time. McLuhan, on the other hand, asserted the impact of technological properties on medium users' perceptual experience. However, unlike other researchers who adopted Innis' and McLuhan's approach that centralized the medium of communication and were often characterized as "technological determinists," Couch saw the mutual interface between technological formats and social forms. Couch indicated that "media per se do not produce or maintain social relationships" (Couch, 1990, p. 112). Rather, Couch insightfully articulated the interactive relationship between technological properties and social structures, as he delineated in several analyses of how information technologies shaped, and were shaped by, social structures (Couch, 1990, 1996). What enabled Couch to detect the reciprocal relationships between social forms and technological formats was Mead's processual view of communication. Mead's processual view dictates the observation of communication across time, not taking a static one-point-in time standpoint. That is, the uses and impacts of a medium need to be examined in the process of social interaction in order to see the interface between a medium and the social s~ucture. Taking a processual view, Couch was able to examine how social forms molded the technological formats,

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and in turn, how social forms were structured by technological properties (Chen, 1997). Couch's formal approach is critical to media researchers, as it offers a tool to centralize the technological formats in the examination of the impact of media of communication on human interaction. His approach offered a more comprehensive means than what Innis and McLuhan had provided, as Couch inserted a human agency in the formulation which repelled the "technological determinism" criticism (Chen, 1995). Couch's comprehensive approach, that takes into account both technological formats and human agency, is crucial to mass communication research, as most communication researchers still do not recognize the importance of studying technological formats, and often quickly dismiss the analysis of technological formats as technologically deterministic. Uninformed by Couch's formal approach, communication researchers are dominated by an interest in studying media content, rather than media format. However, as the following discussion will show, the study of media content often generates a tentative and superficial outcome that does not address what is unique to the medium and audience experience. Studying the Electronic Media as Print

Although the study of media content does have its merit, the failure to consider the media format has been a critical flaw in communication research. Researchers cast the same questions that have been used to study the print media in their examination of the electronic media, and pose the same inqueries that have been used to study the electronic media to study the Internet. Being "medium blind," media researchers fail to see the impact of technological formats in the phenomena studied. By studying the television in the same way newspapers are studied, researchers failed to see what was intrinsic to the audience experience when using the television. Early television research examined the referential effect of the technology without knowing the full potential of television was in its evocative function. During the 1920s the motion picture industry thrust into the lives of the people in the United States. From 1929 to 1932 the Payne Fund Studies, a series of thirteen studies on various aspects of the influence of the movies on children, examined the effects of the exposure to the themes and messages of the films, the acquisition of information, and attitude and behavioral change (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The questions asked exhibited an emphasis on studying the films as print, in terms of the concern with the themes and messages, learning referential information, and the anticipated changes in attitudes and behavior. Instead researchers would have learned more by

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viewing the films as a form of electronic media having the emotive properties (Couch, 1996). In the 1940s, the U.S. Army, in an effort t o prepare the new recruits for World War II, made a series of seven films which was titled Why We Fight (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). These films were seen by thousands of Americans as they trained for war. A series of experiments were also conducted, aimed at assessing the degree to which exposure to the films resulted in changes in the recruits. The changes that the researchers were looking for were mainly the acquisition of factual information about the war, and modification in recruits' opinions. Again, the research questions cast with regard to the films were associated with the referential function more appropriate to the print media (Meyrowitz, 1985; Couch, 1996). The referential bias of studying the electronic media continued in the study of the effects of the television. In 1972, the Surgeon General released a report on the effects of televised violence on children, based on the findings of 23 research projects (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The focus of attention was the perceived causal relationship between TV and adolescent aggression. Researchers were concerned with the referential content of TV violence on learning and modeling on the part of the young audience. A tentative conclusion drawn was that the viewing of violent entertainment increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Researchers tried to make causal inference from data gathered in experimental and survey research. However, not all social scientists agreed with the conclusion. The studies on which the report was based were severely criticized. One of the criticisms was aimed at how the research question was cast, namely, studying the immediate learning effect of TV violence: Does exposure to violence lead children to specific acts of aggression? Some questioned whether TV may have indirect or long-term impact. In 1982, another report by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was published in which the question of TV violence and audience aggression was revisited. The report was published with an assumption that there was a positive relationship between televised violence and aggression, however, not all of the analyses on which this report was based supported the assumption (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The TV violence controversy continued. As one examines the TV violence controversy, obvious questions are: Are we asking the right questions? Are we missing something when the TV is studied in the same way (using the same research questions) as the study of newspapers (Shaw & McCombs, 1977), comic books (Thrasher, 1949), or leaflets (DeFleur & Larsen, 1948)? One of the reasons why the study of TV violence is often inconclusive can be attributed to the invalid research questions addressed. It seems that TV researchers were still guided by the

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concerns of the researchers of the print media - that is, the acquisition of referential information as a guide for subsequent behavior. Studies of the uses of newspapers established that the use of the medium assisted the acquisition of information about one's environment (the weather, domestic affairs, entertainment and consumer information), and how readers would often structure their behavior in accordance with the information gathered from reading the newspapers. The same referential concern dominated the TV research - how the audience acquired information from violent TV programs to structure their subsequent violent acts, regardless of the distinction of formal features between the newspaper and the television. TV researchers seemed to be long asking print based questions of an electronic medium. An invalid question contributes to the fact that TV violence research is often inconclusive, and TV violence remains a controversy. To properly address questions that are intrinsic to the formal properties of the electronic media, Couch argued that we need to attend to the evocative feature of the recording and broadcasting systems of the electronic media. Couch (1996) noted how audiovisual recordings are more evocative than written descriptions, and how films and videos are produced to intensify the emotive experiences of the audience. Couch brought our attention to the study of recordings and how they provide sensations that require little effort from listeners and viewers. In addition, Couch also called attention to study the broadcast media and how they favor the dissemination of evocative, ephemeral and dynamic symbols. "Increases in the prevalence of those types of symbols is conducive to the development of emotionality, change, and fluidity and the dilution of rationality, tradition, and rigidity" (Couch, 1996, p. 192). Although Couch did not advocate the split between the form and the content or the elimination of studying media content, he insisted on studying technological formats and how they have altered the formats of media content. A lesson learned from the era of early electronic media research is that researchers need to ask new questions when studying a new medium, and to fully recognize the distinct formal features of the medium. To do so, researchers need to move away from concentration on the content of the media, and take into account the formal properties that make a medium unique. Researching the Internet as TV

There seems to be a tendency among Internet researchers to study the Internet like the television - using questions investigating the impact of television on their study of the Internet. The tendency is evident, for example, in the works by researchers who study the uses and gratification of the Internet (Kaye, 1998;

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Stafford & Stafford, 1998). Uses and gratification research (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974) was deeply rooted in the research of the television effects. More specifically, this line of research grew out of a theoretical perspective that recognized the categorical differences in the media experiences of various audiences. Uses and Gratification (U&G) as an area of research made a major contribution to the field of mass communication by discovering the different audience experiences in using the television and radio. Challenging the mechanistic view that television and radio generate a uniform and powerful impact on the audience, U&G research provided needed insights into the different experiences of various groups of "couch potatoes." Nevertheless, questions which are suitable for studying "passive media" the television and radio - may not be fruitful for investigating an "interactive medium" - such as the Internet. Casting the same questions (used in TV research) for the Internet, we run the risk of missing the substance of Internet users' experience. When researchers study the Internet as the TV, the formal features that make the Internet unique from the TV are overlooked, and their impacts are unknown. What we gain as a result is an incomplete understanding of Internet use. U&G researchers (Kaye, 1998; Stafford & Stafford, 1998) informed us that learning is a salient benefit of Internet use, followed by passing time, and entertainment with the use of entertainment and sports web sites. E-mail correspondence is also another feature of the experience of the Internet. Although the U&G research contributed to our understanding of the different uses of the Internet, it fell short of taking into account the fact that the Internet, as an interactive medium, contributed to changes in social relationships due to this interactivity. All we seem to know is what a user does when he/she goes online, however, what happens after one goes online, the substantive changes of social relationships, is unknown. The picture provided by U&G research is "a user and a computer," which is incomplete in that it does not take into account interactivity. The picture of "a user and a medium" is valid with research of television and radio, but with research of the Internet a more accurate pictorial depiction should be "a user, a computer, and another user/institution/group," and the question to ask is "what are they doing with their computers?" instead of "what is one user doing with a computer?" Questions used to study the "couch potatoes" are simply inadequate to capture the activities and experiences of "online surfers." Therefore, Couch's focus on the formal examination of social interactions, and his simultaneous sensitivity to the environment for interaction which shapes, and is in turn shaped by various media technologies, offers a fresh approach

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to the study of mediated communication (Couch, 1989a, 1990, 1996). This approach overcomes the limitations of previous research orientations because it allows the formal features of each medium to be considered as integral to the communication process. The above discussion serves to pinpoint a common practice among communication researchers to study a new medium in the way an old medium was studied, the consequences of failing to recognize the formal features of a new medium, and studying a new medium using questions which were germane to the old medium. The authors would argue for the use of Couch's formal approach in studying the media of communication. Only by recognizing the formal characteristics that are intrinsic to the medium, can a researcher cast valid questions and capture the opportunities to provide an accurate and thorough understanding of the impact of any given medium. To echo Marshall McLuhan's well known statement, "the medium is the message," the authors would argue that "the medium is the research question."

L A B O R A T O R Y AND C Y B E R S P A C E To study social processes and relationships in a laboratory setting utilizing audiovisual recording is not only an approach that distinguishes the New Iowa School from other academic perspectives, but also a set-up that embodies all the sociological principles that Carl Couch advocated. In many ways, cyberspace presents a similar environment for the employment of those sociological principles which Couch believed to be fundamental to construct a sound understanding of social relationships. In this section, the authors will articulate the similarities of the laboratory setting and the online environment in terms of applying sociological principles to study social relationships. Magnified Setting and Filtered Environment

Couch (1987) advocated the use of the laboratory as it eliminates extraneous factors, and brings the research phenomena into focus. The laboratory as a controlled setting eliminates the interferences of unrelated factors that complicate the phenomena under examination. "The removal of extraneous factors facilitates the systematic examination of those events deemed critical for acquiring greater understanding of phenomena under examination" (Couch, 1987, p. 4). The laboratory setting "magnifies selected features of social life" (Katovich, 1984, p. 55), and highlights the phenomena under investigation. "When properly used, the laboratory is a provocative stage that elicits vibrant social processes" (Couch, 1987, p. 4).

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Cyberspace, although not a laboratory, offers a filtered environment where users focus their attention on certain topics. The topics (which include issues or events) serve as the shared foci for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dispersed users. Generally only topic-related issues are discussed. Users are "flamed" (i.e. receiving e-mail containing severe criticism or personal attack) when they ask questions unrelated to the ongoing "threads" (topics of discussions) or the purpose of the groups. It is noted that users of an actor's fan club flamed a user who posed a question about the presidential election (Petonito, 2001). Netiquette suggests that one should always "lurk" (reading without posting) before casting questions to an online discussion group, to ensure the adequacy of one's question. Therefore, efforts are made and safeguards are established to ensure having focused discussions online. The focused discussions, or the threads, are similar to the highlighted interaction featured in the laboratory, where the researchers see the interaction/communication in which they are interested brought to focus, and other extraneous factors are eliminated. While the controlled setting of the laboratory is imposed by the researcher, the filtered online environment is constructed among users themselves.

Artificial and Virtual Contexts An important principle that Couch advocated in his laboratory approach is to treat participants as intelligent agents who are able to anticipate, access each other's intention, and act with intentionality. This emphasis on the reflexive thinking and willful acts of participants distinguishes Couch's approach from traditional laboratory research where human subjects were only allowed to respond to stimuli, and not to interact. Based on this conception of participants, Couch instructed laboratory researchers to establish a context, assign identities, and provide a social objective for participants to interact in the laboratory. The context established is artificial in the way that it is created by the researcher to elicit the kind of social relationship under examination, and constructed using verbal instructions. The context created is the one that participants would accept at least for the duration of the laboratory research as authentic, and would use it to organize their action. "The subjects are asked to suspend their disbelief and consider the researcher's environment on his terms" (Katovich, 1984, p. 51). Internet users also suspend their disbelief when interacting with other users online. First of all, Internet users exercise reflexive thinking and willful acts when going online. Unlike some mass media of communication - television or radio - that call for passive consumption, Interuet usage requires active

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selection and participation. Therefore, online activities, even just browsing websites, requires constant reflexive decision making. Online users are similar to laboratory participants in the way that they are given the opportunity to anticipate (when expecting a response to one's post), access each other's intention (when reading others' posts), and act with intentionality (when composing their messages). In addition, cyberspace chat rooms, newsgroups, and mailing lists, aside from their textual presentation on the computer screen, really do not have a physical form in the corporeal environment. They are virtual environments for interaction. When interacting online, users accept the virtual environments as real and authentic, and produce social interaction that exhibits genuine emotions and substantive human experiences. Although the communication online produces genuine emotions and substantive experiences, the environment and process of communication is virtual in the sense that users are dispersed mad composing their communication in solitude (in case of textual presentations). Therefore, the context of participating in an online forum of discussion requires users to suspend their disbelief, accepting typing on the computer in solitude as a communal act. Assigned and Assumed Identities

In the laboratory, Couch instructed researchers to assign participants identities congruent to the context established. Couch also advised that it is desirable to assign identities that are consistent or compatible with participants' everyday identities. Individuals who align themselves with the management are assigned to play the managers, whereas people who are sympathetic to labor are assigned to play union leaders, in a research of workplace negotiation. The advantages of doing so include allowing participants to become more firmly situated in the context created, and also to have a better vocabulary for the enactment of identities assigned (Couch, 1987). In cyberspace, users do not have identities assigned to them, rather, they are free to assume any identity or identities as they wish. There is abundant literature discussing the freedom of assuming multiple identities online (Rheingold, 1993; Baym, 1995). When assuming a pseudo identity online, one organizes one's act based on one's conception of how that identity would act, and, in turn, experiences how others act toward that pseudo identity that one assumes. It is noted that a man can assume the identity of a woman, act toward others as a woman, and feel the experience of being a woman when others act toward him as a woman. It is also noted that a man who acts as a woman tends to be more feminine than other women online, as he organizes his act based

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on an understanding of stereotypical female characters often found in the popular culture (Kendall, 1998). Therefore, in the laboratory, the identities of participants are assigned, and usually are one identity per context, whereas in the online environment, participants are free to assume identities of choice and may assume multiple identities in one context. Whether the identities are assigned or freely assumed, laboratory participants and online users alike organize their exchanges with others based on their understanding of the identities and the context where they were situated. In the laboratory setting, a social objective, which is congruent to the context and identities assigned, is specified by the researcher that serves as the goal for the participants as they coordinate their interaction. Although the social objective serves as a focus of interaction, it does not guarantee a successful accomplishment of the goal at the end of a laboratory session. The open-ended outcome is also apparent in online interaction where the topic of discussion may serve as the shared focus, and users engage in exchanges with an assumption to reach a consensus. That consensus may not always be established at the end of the exchanges.

Processes and Sequences A distinct advantage of using audio-visual recording to study social interaction in the laboratory, according to Couch, is the ability of researchers to study social processes with precision. To study social processes requires researchers to describe the sequence of social acts. "At the minimum, it requires noting the sequential order of social events and specifying their formal qualities as well as their quantity" (Couch, 1987, p. 137). Couch also noted the importance of making across time observations of social phenomena in order to specify their sequential order. It is understood that field research, unaided by audio-visual technologies, can produce descriptions of social relationships. However, Couch observed that field notes, although rich in details, may lack the comprehensiveness and the precision that are captured in the laboratory research reports. Couch stated that there is a general lack of attention to sequential order by naturalistic observers in their reports. "Such [field] observations seldom are complete and accurate enough to allow for the precise specification of the sequential order of the construction of the elements of sociation that constitute various forms of social action and social relationships" (Couch, 1987, p. 153). The recording and play-back capacities of the video recording allow laboratory researchers to obtain a complete record of data, and examine the data over and over again to specify the sequences of social acts with precision.

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To be able to specify the sequential order of social acts requires the researchers to prepare the data for analysis-transcribing the video recordings. "Audio-visual recordings of social encounters contain so much data that it is usually impossible to complete an analysis of them by simply viewing and listening to the recordings" (Couch, 1987, p. 73). Couch noted that it is necessary to make transcriptions from the recordings before an analysis can be performed. "Transcribing the tapes is time consuming, but allows for a more complete and thorough analysis of the data" (Couch, 1987, p. 73). While laboratory researchers labor themselves to transcribe the video recordings for analysis, researchers of cyber-interaction already have their data prepared for analysis. After some ethical considerations are addressed (Shaft, 2000), online researchers could easily download the online correspondencewhich resembles a complete set of transcribed data - for analysis, no hassle of transcribing. The logs of online correspondence thus lend themselves to be analyzed for social processes with precision of sequential order. By pointing out the similarities between the laboratory setting and the online environment, the above discussion attempts to establish that cyberspace exhibits characteristics to generate fruitful analyses of social processes and relationships utilizing Couch's principles of formal sociology which he specified in his laboratory research. It is thus believed that Couch's approach, which has yielded a significant amount of scholarship in studying social processes and relationships offline both in the laboratory (Miller, Hintz & Couch, 1975) and in the field (Leichty, 1986; Hardesty, 1986), also demonstrates great utilities to study online processes and relationships. To further demonstrate the application of Couch's formal approach of media of communication, and his sociological principles in studying online interaction, two studies will be reported. To illustrate the study of technological shaping of social relationships, a study of newsgroup interaction (Johns, 2001) is reported, and another study of online bidding (Goto, Chang &Chen, 2000) is reported to demonstrate the study of social shaping of technology. These two studies serve to advance Couch's argument of studying the interactive relationship between social forms and technological formats.

CYBERSPACE AS PUBLIC SPHERES? In a study to investigate the formal features of social relationships in cyberspace Mark Johns examined the correspondence in three newsgroups over a period of five years (Johns, 2001). The entry of the research was an examination of the formal characteristics of computer-mediated communication

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(CMC). According to Johns, CMC is participatory, different from its mass mediated predecessors which prescribed a passive role for their users. Also, Internet users generally act alone and can freely participate or leave an online conversation. In addition, CMC offers the opportunity to take on multiple identities due to the lack of visual cues. The text-based communication on CMC also allows users to be more thoughtful and articulate when presenting their views than impromptu speech in the face-to-face situation. The above mentioned formal features of CMC impact on the forms of communication taking place and the social relationships online. First of all, Johns reported that the formal features of CMC generated a form of communication that is unique to lntemet users, for which he coined the term, "secondary literacy." This term is inspired by Walter Ong's term, "secondary orality," which denotes the form of oral communication prevalent in the electronic media. According to Ong (1982), secondary orality differentiates from "primary orality" which was utilized in the pre-literate era. Primary orality is an oral technology used in a face-to-face context. Secondary orality is an oral form that is utilized in a post-literacy/print era, that bears the imprints of literacy/print. Secondary orality, such as the dialogues in a television show, although delivered orally in a seemingly face-to-face situation, bears the characteristics of precision and standardization common to literacy and print. Secondary literacy, on the other hand, characterizes the textual form of communication online. It is a form of literate/textual communication, and yet, bears the imprints of the oral form. The text found in the online correspondence shows that text was used to mainly represent oral speech, as if the writer was "speaking" discursively. Online writers write for the ear, not for the eye, although the messages are received through the eye. Secondary literacy is evident in the use of emoticons, acronyms, informal words, and colloquial sentences in CMC. Secondly, the formal features of CMC also foster the establishment of shared foci and shared pasts among the users. When a message that has been previously posted in a newsgroup is responded to, a thread of communication is created. The threads demonstrate the presence of shared foci in cyberspace. Individuals who participate in thread construction thus have shared pasts. According to Johns, most of the threads are relatively short-lived, lasting only two or three days, involving two or three users. Some threads are long-winded and complicated, lasting over a long period of time (e.g. several weeks or months), involving many users. The threads represent a delayed conversation. However, users who are separated by space and time are able to construct a shared past with the use of CMC. The shared focus or the shared past created in online correspondence bears the precision associated with the use of print. The responding, quoting, and dissecting features of online correspondence make

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it possible for individuals to be precise about the point made, as well as accountable of their statements. In addition, the freedom of "surfing" the environment and the opportunities to take on multiple identities provide a sense of anonymity and impact on the social relationships generated online. For one thing, users generally are suspicious of others' claimed identities. In addition, anonymity allows for an egalitarian participation in online discussions. Traditional social distinctions and economic classes have much less significance to the relationships constructed online. Anonymity also prompts users to be honest and straightforward in stating their views. Users feel free to make statements which they would not make in a face-to-face context, without any concern of consequences. An outcome of honest and straightforward expression is that many users are often obscene and emotional. The ability to freely participate and withdraw from online discussions and the anonymity provided foster an online social organization that has a limited future. Although users may frequent some sites or newsgroups, there is no guarantee that they will come back the next day. Without knowing a user's identity in the corporeal environment, there is no assurance that users are what they claim, or that users will do what they say they will. The online relationships always remain fluid without any offline communication where identities can be confirmed and accountability of action can be established. The above discussion serves to demonstrate the use of Carl Couch's formal analysis in studying social relationships in cyberspace by showing the utility of centralizing the formal features of online technologies as an entry to investigating online relationships. Couch's formal approach helps capture the nuances of online relationships, and identify the forms of relatedness made possible by the use of a technology.

eBAY AS A VIRTUAL M A R K E T P L A C E To illustrate the social shaping of a communication technology, the following report details how Internet technology is used to facilitate auction and bidding online. Online auction and bidding embody two social forms-exchange and competition. The discussion serves to demonstrate that the uses and impacts of a technology are shaped by the social relationships, exchange and competition, that encase the technology. In a study of how the Internet was used to facilitate and advance auction and bidding (Goto, Chang & C h e n , 2000), the authors examined the activities that took place on eBay, an online auction site that allows individuals who have items for sale to put them up for bidding, and individual buyers to participate

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in bidding. In the study, the authors show how auction and bidding activities were pervasive and intensified by the use of the Internet technology. Data of the study were generated from in-depth interviews of veteran eBay users. The study shows that users utilize the online technology to construct eBay as a variety shop, a discount store, as well as a competitive arena. First of all, eBay users utilized various Interuet features and constructed eBay as a variety shop that provides a wide variety of goods, as well as a convenient and informed shopping experience. The capacities of the Internet to itemize, categorize, and search were utilized to provide an inventory of items for sale, which can be accessed by typing in a keyword search. In addition, the discursive feature of the textual presentation on CMC, accompanied by capacities to link with other online sites and to have visual presentations, were used to provide both textual information, visual demonstration, and other online links to assist in informed decision making. Indexing and itemization were created to make it easy for potential shoppers to look for items in which they were interested in a speedy fashion, simply by typing in the names of the items. The computer search would quickly present a list of the items that the users were searching for and show how many were for sale, what the current highest bids were, and how many bids had been placed. The information presented is systematic, which resembles the inventory list in traditional stores. Furthermore, text-based computer mediated communication is used to allow sellers to present descriptive information about their items for sale. By reading these descriptions, buyers are informed about the details of the products. Some sellers even provide links to other online information sources that have more in-depth discussions or evaluations of the items for sale. To facilitate buyers' understanding and enhance their trust in the descriptions provided, many sellers provide pictures of the items for sale. A visitor to eBay would often be stunned by the variety of items that others have placed for sale. The experience of browsing through the list of items for sale is a pleasant journey for many. One respondent stated, "You can find anything, it was captivating and it keeps you looking for little hidden things from your past." Another stated, "Sometimes I just go on there (eBay), just to see what's on there, but I have to tell myself that I don't need anything on there. Otherwise, I will get caught up in it, and that's not good." Respondents enjoy eBay not only for the variety of goods offered, but also for the low prices and great savings. The participatory and interactive features of CMC were fully utilized to allow anyone who had an item for sale to be able to post their item on eBay, and allow anyone who was interested in

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the item to place a bid. Dispersed buyers and sellers utilize the Internet to extend their interest in exchange as they congregate, post items for sale, make bids, and complete transactions via the Internet. Posting items for sale and bidding are all accomplished in the comfort of one's own home. Computer networks are used to create convenient home selling and shopping experiences. Items for sale are generally pre-owned products with a price lower than the retail price. The perceived remarkable savings induces buyers to visit eBay. One stated, "It saves the hassle of shopping around looking for the best deal in town. On eBay, you know you will always get the best deal, you are not ever going to pay the wholesale even, or retail for that matter." Another stated, "The least amount I saved by shopping on eBay is 50%, I usually saved 50% or more, which is awesome." Many echoed the savings and low prices, especially for electronics on eBay. As one said, "The first thing that I bid on was a Nintendo 64 game, because Nintendo games were so outrageously priced in the stores as high as $50 a piece. The starting bidding price was $5 or $10, so I was like Geeeeese!!" Bidding on eBay is a complex reflexive act. The bidder has to take into account the item, and his/her own budget. Adding to that complex reflexive act is the competition against other bidders. Bidders across the country utilize the Internet to have three shared foci (the item for sale, the current highest bid, and his/her own budget), and engage in the competition of bidding. A competitive mode generates hatred and aggression toward other bidders. A respondent reported, "Especially if you have one person bidding against you, you sort of get this hatred for them - Oh, that jerk, he is trying to outbid me. I will show him, I will go up $50, instead of $25, this time." Another respondent stated, "It sounds stupid, but I wasn't going to let just one bid get me. I am a competitive person anyway, so, I didn't want somebody whom I had never seen get that product. I want to win. I want to get the product, I don't care, I just want this." Features of the Internet were utilized by eBay users to engage in the competition of bidding, eBay users utilize the instant update of the computer technology to check the current standing of the competition, and respond with higher bids if necessary. As the time approaches the closing of the bidding, the intensity of emotions and frequency of checking increase. One respondent reported, "I had to rearrange my schedule for that day when the sale was ending so that I could make sure that I was by my e-mail, just in case anything changed, I could quickly go to the site and re-bid." One complained that the instant update simply was not fast enough due to the intensity of the competition, as he stated,

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One time I was winning an auction. At the ending moment of the auction, I counted it down from three minutes. It didn't have a continuous clock, you have to reload your page to see how much time left, so, I keep reloading my page so it kept updating the time as the count down would go, I would do it every five seconds. Sometimes the computer screen did not update as fast as an anxious person would like it to. The Internet is utilized by dispersed bidders across the country to focus their attention on the same bid at the same time and to compete with one another in real time. The fact that there is someone out there (i.e. outside of one's immediate corporeal environment) engaging in competition with oneself via the Intemet is a fascinating phenomenon to some eBay users, as one reported, "One time I made a bid five minutes before it was over, and I was sure that nobody was going to be on the computer that was going to outbid me. But, somebody was. Somebody somewhere else in this country or world was on there at the same time. It was weird." With the use of the Internet, eBay users engage in bidding competition with one another. The experience of winning a bid is victorious. One respondent stated, When I won the bid, I kind of had a sense of victory because your user name goes on the screen as who the highest bidder is. Your name goes there. It's exciting. It shows that you are triumphant, and you got what you wanted there. It is a good feeling that you can out-smart your competitors, and now you can get the product. It's a sense of success. In sum, the above study of eBay demonstrates how social relationships of exchange and competition structure how the Internet technology is used. Various features of the Internet technology are utilized to extend the exchange between buyers and sellers, and the competition among bidders online. The report illustrates that the Internet does not have pre-determined uses or impacts, rather, is structured by the social relationships that encase the technology. CONCLUSION Clearly, the thinking of Carl Couch provides the foundation for a fruitful approach to the study of mediated interactions, particularly as new media for communication emerge. Not only does the theoretical basis of the New Iowa School provide a conceptual grounding for understanding the relationships between media technologies and those who utilize them for communication, but further, Couch's methodological approach is easily translatable to the virtual laboratory of cyberspace.

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By fusing Simmel's insistence that sociologists must focus on the forms of sociation, with Mead's discussion of temporality, and adding Innis' and McLuhan's sensitivity to the biases of various technological formats, Carl Couch has provided researchers with a conceptual framework which adequately encompasses the full range of variables encountered in mediated communication. This combination of foci centralizes social interaction in the analysis of communication behaviors while acknowledging the role of technological formats in the interaction. Couch's framework maintains the primacy of human agency and avoids the trap of technological determinism, yet fully recognizes and accounts for the influence of the medium of communication in the communicative process. By recognizing technological formats as a constituent element of the process of mediated communication, Couch has overcome the limitations of previous conceptual systems which tie themselves to the biases and characteristics of a particular medium. In addition, Carl Couch has contributed powerfully to the repertoire of available research methodologies for studying mediated communication by delineating the specific attributes of the laboratory as an environment for the study of interaction. Because these attributes of context, identity, and sequential analysis are transferable to a variety of settings - given the appropriate technology - Couch's methodological approach opens the door to a range of possible laboratory environments not previously considered. Not inconsequential among these is the virtual laboratory presented to researchers in the various forms of Computer Mediated Communication. While only two brief examples of the employment of CMC as a laboratory environment are reviewed here - one illustrating the impact of the medium on social interaction, and another demonstrating the shaping of the technological format to fulfill the demands of the interactions taking place - they hopefully serve to point the reader toward additional possibilities for research of this type. As this line of research continues develop, it will become clear that both the conceptual and methodological nucleus of the New Iowa School provides a most excellent foundation on which to build understanding of the new media environment of the twenty-first century.

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Shaw, D., & McCombs, M. (1977). The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agendasetting Function of the Press. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company. Simmel, G. (1964). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: The Fress Press. Stafford, T., & Stafford, M. (1998). Uses and gratification of the World Wide Web. In: D. Muehling (Ed.), The Proceedings of the 1998 Conference of the American Academy of Advertising (pp. 174--182). Pullman, WA: American Academy of Advertising. Symbolic Interaction, 1995, 18(3)(Fall), Special Issue: Essays in Honor of C. J. Couch. Thrasher, F. (1949). The comics and delinquency: Cause or scapegoat. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 23(1), 195-205.

COCKROACH CULTURE Dan E. Miller

I ' v e had lots of summer jobs. Once I had a one-day gig in a foundry working on the shakeout crew. I got burned twice. As an Iowa Boy I stacked hay seven bales high and I dug postholes. The oddest job came while I was in college when I served as a professional audience in a social psychology study. My undergraduate career was typical for a male in the late 1960s. My life was mostly concerned with peripheral involvements; most required money. I was continually short on cash. Good fortune shone on me one day when a friend who was a graduate student in psychology told me over cheap beers that I could make two dollars an hour for three or four hours of work a day. For this easy money all I had to do was be an audience in a study being conducted in the psychology labs. My job was to be the "social" in a social psychology experiment. This was fine with me. It was steady work for three months and a hell of a lot easier than digging postholes. The next day I met with my friend Rick and the psychologist running the study. Just by being a twenty-one year old male I was qualified for the job. They wanted me to shave and wear a coat and tie - to look professional. I had to be prompt and reliable. They gave me a tour of the laboratory building and the rooms in which the study was being conducted. They ran through the experiment and my role in it. For my part I had little to do and nothing to say. I was a graduate student observer - a "Professional Audience." I wasn't sure how this would look on my resume', but the job was easy. My "presence" in the study was needed only for short periods of time. ! would go into Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 45-48. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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the room, be introduced, and sit there "observing" the subject while he (only undergraduate males in this study) copied random numbers in order as quickly as possible. The psychologists were interested in how a professional audience might facilitate such behavior. With the exception of a few mechanical difficulties the study and my summer went smoothly. I didn't make enough money to move up to premium beer, but I did make enough to pay the rent, buy groceries, and go out on the occasional date. Two years later I was a graduate student in sociology - studying social psychology. One afternoon early in the term I was chatting with some other students and a couple of faculty members about undergraduate research experiences when one of the professors e x c l a i m e d - "Social facilitation! I ' v e got a new book on it. It's really great." He ran to his office, got the book, pointed out a chapter and suggested that we meet in a day or two - to discuss it. I was trapped. How could I refuse? I couldn't, so I read the chapter on Social Facilitation by Robert Zajonc. In this chapter Zajonc reports on the replication of a classic study using cockroaches as research subjects. Already I regretted agreeing to read this chapter. It was dreadful. In the chapter Zajonc discusses how cockroaches have a dominant behavioral trait - they run from the light to darkness. Most students are familiar with this trait - witnessing it every evening when they turn on the kitchen light. In the study the cockroach behavior was measured in a T-maze - a T-shaped box with a light attached t o the single end. One at a time, cockroaches were placed in the maze and then the light was turned on. The cockroaches were timed on how long it took them to move from light to darkness. Once these base-line measurements were made the researchers added complexity. Two cockroaches at a time were studied - to see if the presence of another affected the speed of the dominant response. Then the researchers constructed a sort of peanut gallery populated by a number of cockroaches who were present as on-lookers, but not in the maze itself. Thinking it may not be the actual presence of the cockroaches that affect behavior the researChers boiled down some cockroaches into a paste - a sort of eau d'cockroach - and spread it in the maze. Finally, the researchers put up a metallic tape - to reflect the light and act like a mirror. In each condition the researchers measured the time it took the cockroaches to get into darkness. Something odd and unexpected happened, though. As the researchers progressed through the conditions, they began to discuss the cockroaches as if they were human. The second cockroach was "the other." The cockroaches in the peanut gallery were called an "audience." This tendency was most pronounced in the metallic tape condition. Here, the cockroaches apparently went to the tape and lingered. They were described as self-absorbed, vain, and

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narcissistic. I thought that at any minute one of them would be caught combing his hair. I was having a little difficulty grasping the concept of cockroach vanity, but I kept at it and finished the article. In the conclusion the author generalized from his findings to similar patterns of behavior in humans. Unfortunately, the replication was not altogether successful. A number of results were not replicated. The author suggested that a different species of cockroach used might be a reason for the failure. I was uneasy with the prospect of a study that could not be replicated, but could then be generalized. Still, I was determined to see it through. Heading off to meet with the professor, I grabbed the book and my notes. Fearing a career in cockroach research I took a deep breath and decided to challenge the study. I laid it all out, the T-maze, the peanut gallery, the eau d'cockroach, the vanity, and the fact that while the researcher could not generalize across species of cockroach he had no qualms about generalizing across the entire animal kingdom. At the end of my presentation I blurted out, "As Hemingway suggested, I have developed a shit detector, and this is shit! !" By that time the professor was laughing out loud. Out in the hallway I heard more laughter. Two other professors entered the office chuckling. "I told you he would take it seriously and that he would get it." Apparently, I had passed a test. As we all stood in that office laughing at my feeble attempt at being the earnest graduate student I realized that my experience in the psychology experiment was similar to that of the cockroaches. That study two years earlier had set up a Kafkaesque environment where humanity was brutally assaulted by bureaucratic and professional constraints. As a professional audience I had actually played the role of cockroach. As a cockroach, but unlike Zajonc's cockroaches, I had no vanity, no goals, and no intelligent response. I was ean d'other - the boiled-down essence of social in accordance with the principles of social facilitation theory. As an audience I did not move, talk, show interest, or display emotion. I was detached to the point that my only involvement in the situation was a non-responsive physical presence. I was present but not available. In the world of these social psychologists, social situations are only marginally social. The manifold dimensions of social situations are not incorporated. Others don't talk, think, or act. Rather, they are reduced to the absurdity of mere presence. There is no true co-presence, no mutuality, no sociability, no conflict, no cooperation, no parallel and no reciprocal alignment in these worlds. Interaction is too messy; it must be minimized. These are not the worlds occupied by most humans. The worlds of social facilitation theorists can be found in prisons, psychology research laboratories,

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and mental hospitals - places where humans are reduced to their mere presence. This was not how it was to be at the Center for Research in Interpersonal Behavior (the CRIB Lab) at the University of Iowa. Here in 1969 the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction was transformed from one constrained by paper and pencil tests and measures of self to one dedicated to isolating and understanding elementary social processes. Carl Couch, his associates, and his students developed a laboratory that allowed for the systematic study of social interaction. Incorporated into the laboratory was video-recording technology that was used to record and analyze the forms of interaction under scrutiny. Over the years the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction would conduct dozens of these studies in all the ways ignored by the social facilitation theorists. Never were the data compromised or collapsed. The participants in the studies were never reduced to primary traits or mere presence. For me in those few days Carl Couch and Frank Kohout had initiated a sequence in a learning act - an act far more complex than receiving positive reinforcement for a proper response. I was given a prop, a role, and a purpose in a social act. How I chose to use the prop, develop the role, and what perspective I chose in relation to the purpose of the act was up to me. The act called for the association of two related experiences - as a professional audience and as a cockroach in a social psychology experiment. Also, in projecting the completion of the learning act the professors anticipated knowledge of Kafka, a predilection to challenging perceived authority, an incipient reinterpretation of my own history, and a critical reading of the study from an interactionist perspective. The collective laughter at my expense cemented an act of solidarity that still holds today. That afternoon the four of us went out to drink some beer. It was premium beer.

EXPANDING THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRAGMATISM AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: A TRIBUTE TO GIDEON SJOBERG Elizabeth Gill

In January of 1998 I was approached by the late Stanley Saxton who suggested that a session honoring Gideon Sjoberg and his relationship to symbolic interactionism would be a timely addition to the program of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in San Francisco later that year, He invited me to join him in organizing the session which came to be titled "Gideon Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No." However, it should be noted that several significant alterations have since been made in the agenda of the 1998 session. First, after realizing .that Gideon's general scholarly agenda with respect to pragmatism and symbolic interactionism had never been surveyed in one place, Stan and I decided to invite him to outline his views. He generously agreed. The resultant biographical account also provides a social context within which to interpret the essays included herein. Sadly, with Stan's unexpected death, further changes were required. Stan had intended to elaborate upon his introductory comments at San Francisco in which he would portray Gideon as Simmel's "stranger." Finally, it became evident that the papers do considerably more than address the question whether Gideon is a symbolic interactionist. "Expanding the Possibilities of Pragmatism and Symbolic Interaction" reflects the intentions of the authors and the contents of this collection.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 51-53. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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I will comment briefly on some of the common themes that run through Gideon's work and are echoed, expanded upon, and modified in the following essays. First is the theme of the social mind, which is the foundation of Gideon's intellectual agenda and is touched upon in every item in the collection. Gideon has been one of the few sociologists to emphasize the importance of the social mind rather than the social self. His focus on the social mind serves to animate the human actor by acknowledging reflectivity in the process of activity. The advantages that arise by focusing on the social mind, rather than the social self, are articulated in the contributions of Norma Williams, Elizabeth Gill, and Boyd LittreU. Williams argues that the social mind, with its reflective consciousness, is central to the process of taking the roles of multiple others and the need to engage in the making of new inclusionary roles, thus improving understanding among persons from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Ultimately, her reliance on Mead and Dewey opens up the possibility of an elaboration of a social order based on cultural diversity. My own contribution examines the centrality of the social mind in creatively carving out space within large-scale organizations and in reshaping the constraints placed upon their activities. Sjoberg's proactive agent, who is bound by the constraints within the organizational context but capable of reflectively interpreting and reinterpreting the rules, provides the basis for my analysis of the volunteer within the medical setting. LittreU' s piece touches on the centrality of the social mind for Sjoberg's distinctive methodological position - a matter to which I return below. Another recurrent theme throughout Gideon's work, elaborated in the essays herein, is the need for incorporating the issue of organizations into the interactionist agenda. Gideon's emphasis on the social mind enables him to sketch out an alternative orientation regarding the relationship between large-scale organizations and human agents, one that acknowledges the complex relationship between the two. As for my own research, I find the hospice volunteer to be more proactive with respect to structure than Weber and symbolic interactionists have acknowledged, but, by the same token, more influenced by the constraining and creative possibilities of organizations than the pragmatists and Jurgen Habermas wish to concede. Gideon's alternative Meadian framework allows for the capability of the human agent to reflectively use and manipulate the social structure. In a methodological vein, Lyng's analysis of counterinductive methods, growing out of Sjoberg's emphasis on countersystem analysis, allows us to examine structural patterns that lie beyond traditional SI inquiry. The third theme played out in these essays, and the driving force behind Gideon's body of work, is the importance of the "moral dimension" as a

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sociological issue. Gideon argues that a pragmatist conception of human nature, based on the reflectivity of the social mind, is an essential feature of humanness and central to the human rights project. Williams's call for the recognition of difference through the process of role taking and the need to construct new inclusionary roles specifies some of Gideon's agenda with regard to similarities and differences among participants in a democratic social order. Lyng examines the use of the logic of counterinductive analysis in order to gain a greater understanding of the self, thus lending support to Sjoberg's belief that countersystem analysis is implicit in the search for new moral categories that are part of the human fights project. The final theme focuses on methodology, which is intimately related to the other three. This finds expression in all four papers but most explicitly in the contributions of Lyng and Littrell. Littrell defines Gideon as a methodologist a student of methods - who has resisted the standardization of the positivist orientation and fashioned a conception of objectivity that calls for comparing dissimilar perspectives and experiences. Littrell's analysis emphasizes Gideon's search for a form of objectivity that acknowledges a "multiplicity of standpoints" within the context of sustaining intellectual pluralism. Lyng elaborates on the concept of countersystem analysis and advocates the use of what he terms counterinductive analysis for the explication of the self. Ultimately the use of countersystem analysis can add a critical and emancipatory component to symbolic interactionist reasoning. Taken as a whole, the essays set forth a set of theoretical and methodological principles that expand upon the creative possibilities of the pragmatist and symbolic interactionist tradition with regard to such issues as democracy, social justice, and human fights and provide new clues for explicating the complex interrelationship between proactive human agents and organizations. In conclusion, it was the wish of the late Stan Saxton and the session contributors that a "home" be found for the papers that emerged from the session. We are grateful to Studies in Symbolic Interaction for generously providing such a forum.

MY MOVE INTO SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND PRAGMATISM Gideon Sjoberg

Two main themes anchor this adumbrated autobiographical account of how I came to incorporate key tenets of symbolic interaction and pragmatism into my sociological worldview. First, in recent years I have been asked on several occasions: "How did you come to adopt core elements of symbolic interaction and pragmatism?" Second, there is a related matter: How have symbolic interactionism and pragmatism come to fit into my own scholarly pursuits? My commitment to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism can not be culled from my early training at the University of New Mexico and Washington State University, nor is this perspective reflected in my early writings. In effect, I am a latecomer to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism, and this has had considerable bearing on my particular intellectual activities. It is true that my early publications on the city involved a direct engagement with the Chicago School, and my early publications on methods and methodology incorporated selected concepts of the Chicago School. Moreover, when I arrived at Texas over a half-century ago, I often heard it said that the University was an outpost of Chicago (and its pragmatism). In a sense this was the case, since David Miller, a philosopher and premier student of George Herbert Mead, was a presence on campus, and the economist Clarence Ayres, a Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 55-73. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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Deweyan instrumentalist of sorts, was highly influential. Moreover, sociologists such as Warner E. Gettys and Carl Rosenquist identified with the Chicago School, although neither espoused, in any explicit way, a symbolic interactionist or pragmatist perspective. Although this setting perhaps indirectly affected me, my encounters with selected individuals can be more readily remembered and documented. For me the turning point was the arrival in Texas of Richard Colvard in the late 1950s. He was completing his doctoral dissertation at UC (Berkeley), and was seeking to bridge the gap between the organizational theorizing of Philip Selznick and the symbolic interactionism advanced by Herbert Blumer; both scholars served on his dissertation committee. The problem with which Colvard grappled - the interrelationship of agency and social organization - became my own a number of years later. It was my extended conversations with him that led me to delve seriously into works associated with symbolic interactiouism, and through these conversations I became more consciously reflective about employing my everyday experiences as a foundation for my larger sociological endeavors. This move into symbolic interaction, initiated by my interaction with Dick, was reinforced by the arrival of Ted Vaughan as a graduate student in the early 1960s. He had developed, largely on his own, a commitment to Mead. We had countless discussions about the state of sociology and then collaborated on various projects for a number of years. (It should be noted that Ted never took a course from me, nor could I serve on his dissertation committee, a situation briefly explained below.) In addition to Colvard and Vanghan, Buford Farris and Richard Brymer, with whom I worked as a consultant at the Wesley Community Centers in San Antonio, pulled me in the direction of SI, for Brymer, as a result of his doctoral training at Michigan State, was steeped in Mead. Much later such distinguished scholars as Louis Zurcher and David Snow were my colleagues at Texas, and they reinforced my commitment to SI and to pragmatism. Still, my personal encounters and my readings were part of a larger social context at the University of Texas. In the late 1950s I began a period of "political exile" which resulted from the replacement of the old guard, who were in the process of retiring, by a new guard brought in from the outside. For about five or six years I was pointedly excluded from offering any graduate courses or serving on theses or dissertation committees, and my salary was essentially frozen. I could not then and can not now interpret my own interaction with other members of the department and students without taking account of the larger organizational context in which my activities were embedded and shaped. Overlapping in time with this exile was the rise of the student movement at Texas. My own longstanding proclivity to question the

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social and cultural order was propelled forward by these students and their challenge to formal authority systems as well as to deeply ingrained life styles. Although I never participated directly in their activities and protests, I talked with them at length in the student union, and a number attended my classes. They called upon me to re-examine some of my sociological presuppositions. Although I do not glamorize the 1960s, it was nonetheless a period of social ferment that significantly affected my sociological worldview in that it made me keenly aware of human agency on the one hand and powerful organizations on the other. For a few years in the late sixties I taught at the City University of New York, and upon returning to UT, I wanted to address a set of problems that differed somewhat from my wide-ranging historical and cross-cultural research on the city and my writings on methodology (or the logic of inquiry). Having edited the book Ethics, Politics, and Social Research (1967) I was committed, in general terms, to doing more in the realm of the sociology of ethics. My emerging premise was that if sociologists are expected to be ethical in their research efforts they should be able to articulate the more general moral principles that guide their actions. In fact, I had by the late sixties come to delve into the sociological implications of genocide, co-authoring an essay (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1970) on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. One of Eichmann's justifications for his actions with regard to genocide was that he was simply obeying superior orders. A few years earlier, I had written (Sjoberg, Brymer & Farris, 1966) on how bureaucracy (or formal organizations) serves to keep the lower class in their place. This research emerged as a spin-off of an NIMH-funded project, for which I was a working consultant, on the nature of gangs among poor Mexican Americans in San Antonio. While I was aware that organizations have a moral component, I was still some intellectual distance from being able to articulate this in a sociologically informed manner. It was within this intellectual mix that symbolic interactionism and pragmatism would emerge as central. What bears repeating is that I was well along in my sociological career before turning to symbolic interactionism and to pragmatism in order to resolve a particular set of sociological problems. Although most SI persons I have known adopted a considerable part of their framework during the course of their graduate studies, that was not my life experience. As my stumbling intellectual activities have unfolded, at least four interrelated facets to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism have come to loom large. One is the concept of the "social mind," a second is the relationship of human agents to organizations, a third is a concern with the sociology of social justice and human rights, and a fourth is an effort to

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grapple with the matter of alternative futures. In elaborating upon these issues, one comes to perceive how they are intertwined with one another. First on the matter of the social mind: although sociologists such as Charles Smith (1982) have explicitly stressed the centrality of this concept, most symbolic interactionists continue to emphasize the social self and downplay the social mind. Yet Mead's best-known work was titled Mind, Self and Society (1934), and Dewey emphasized the role of intelligence among human agents. While readily acknowledging the saliency of the self, I find the social mind to be a more compelling notion. It is the capacity of human beings, in the context of social interaction with others, to become reflective about themselves and the ongoing interaction process - in effect to think about thinking in the process of carrying out action - that is the singularly most defining feature of what it means to be human. A number of advantages accrue from placing priority on the social mind rather than upon the social self. In my studied view, it is through the social mind that the social self comes to be defined. It is through the social mind that human agents reflect upon themselves and engage in dialogues with themselves and with others. It is through the social mind that they come to take the roles of others within various social situations. In the process one's self-concept is reinforced or redefined. It is this reflectivity that distinguishes the social mind from the social self. Additionally, it is through the social mind that social memory comes into play. What we forget and what we remember, both having emerged within interaction contexts, are also shaped by the nature of reflectivity (a process that still awaits careful explication). And it is through the social mind that one can begin to contemplate the manner in which human agents respond to both opportunities and constraints. Although one wing of symbolic interactionism has grappled with societal reactions toward deviance (thereby focusing some attention on the constraints with respect to human action), symbolic interactionists have yet to appreciate how reflectivity can offer human agents, within everyday interaction settings, opportunities to overcome, to by-pass, or to reshape the social constraints upon their activities. In so far as human agents remain rather oblivious to the nature of these constraints it often becomes more difficult to modify or to overcome them. Efforts to cope with social constraints are intertwined with the construction of alternative courses of action, for human agents do more than merely adapt to social situations. By emphasizing the social mind we can focus upon the activities that human agents employ in constructing (or deconstructing) social relationships. For example, for some years I have sought to come to terms with the logics (abduction, classification, analogy, dialectical reasoning, and

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parts/whole reasoning) which are employed in everyday life. With the social mind as paramount we come to appreciate more fully the creative nature of human agents, of how in Deweyan terms human agents manage to link the known to the unknown. In practice Dewey was concerned with the creation of alternative futures (a perspective clarified below) (see Sjoberg, Gill, Littrell & Williams, 1997). In my view, it has been the emphasis upon the social mind that made it possible for Vaughan and myself to begin sketching out an alternative orientation regarding the relationship between organizations and human agents. This problem is one that has haunted sociology since its formation. In general the symbolic interactionists and the pragmatists have sought to resolve the problem through an emphasis on human agents within the context of social interaction. This time-honored response, while meritorious, nonetheless sidesteps, in my judgment, difficult empirical issues, notably the relationship of human agency to organizations, especially large-scale ones. My analysis attempts to meet head on the astructural bias of symbolic interactionism raised by Reynolds and Reynolds (1973) almost three decades ago. Admittedly, since that time various symbolic interactionists (e.g. Denzin, 1978; Farberman, 1975; Hall, 1997) have ventured, at one time or another, into the study of large-scale organizations, but this problem area continues to be marginal to the overall endeavor. In order to clarify my own perspective, I articulate my views regarding Dewey and organizations. Dewey, who among the great pragmatist scholars took account of the larger social setting, seems, in the main, to have intellectually shied away from analyzing the enormous growth of large-scale organizations (such as Standard Oil) at the turn of the last century and how these corporations came to shape the lives of persons in, for instance, a host of communities at that time. Dewey must have been aware of muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell, but his inclination was not to grapple directly with the emergence of large-scale organizations during that era. He did, however, address these issues indirectly when he articulated an alternative response to the New Deal's effort to overcome the Great Depression through the expansion of Federal governmental intervention into wide-ranging spheres of social life. He was intent on sustaining not only participatory democracy, which he associated with the early town meetings in the U.S., but also workers' control over their economic activities within community settings. It is within these decentralized situations that he envisaged citizens as exerting more direct control over their everyday lives. In actuality Dewey had an aversion to any form of "state socialism," and he was intent upon creating an alternative solution to the problems posed by the vast unemployment and social deprivation of the Depression era. In the

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process he came to articulate a "utopia" of sorts (though he would have strongly objected to such a categorization), and he sought to realize his ideal by striving to create a viable third political party in the United States. Admittedly, Dewey seems to have stopped short of explicitly analyzing the emerging arrangements associated with the New Deal - both corporate and state - in so far as these stood at odds with his own vision of how to overcome the deleterious effects of the Great Depression. What sociologists should recognize is that Dewey was advancing a form of "countersystem analysis" (Sjoberg & Cain, 1971). He employed this countersystem to critically evaluate the existing order and was actively engaged in efforts to construct (through the formation of a third party) an alternative to what was being created by the New Deal. Dewey was, in my view, committed to the creation of an "alternative future" in that human agents do more than accommodate or adapt to existing circumstances: they seek to modify or to change them. Indeed, this is an extension of his reasoning regarding the fact that human agents manage to relate, as part of the creative act, the known to the unknown. In keeping with this argument sociologists can be expected not only to describe and analyze the nature of social and cultural life but also to point the way toward the creation of alternative arrangements that are more socially just. It is only by emphasizing the social mind - its reflectivity and its complex social calculations - that we can formulate a strong version of human agency that seeks not only to adapt to the future but also to shape the nature of that future. Although Dewey, Mead, and other pragmatists laid an enduring intellectual foundation on which to build, I find the intellectual turn taken by C. Wright Mills and Jtirgen Habermas to be more compelling in that they draw heavily upon the pragmatist heritage, all the while incorporating into their agenda Weber's preoccupation with the power of large-scale organizations. With respect to Mills (e.g. 1956, 1959), he began his intellectual journey steeped in pragmatism, and then encountered Weber. As I interpret Mills, his writings of the 1950s reflected a tension between his early pragmatist training and some of the central problems posed by Weber, including those of the iron cage. As for Habermas (1987) he seems clearly to have turned to Mead as means of demonstrating how we can transcend Weber's pessimism regarding the inevitability of the iron cage. It is the writings of Mead (along with those of Alfred Schutz) that permit Habermas to distinguish between the system and the life world, and to perceive the relative autonomy of the latter from the former. This leads me to consider, in simplified form, some of my own views regarding the relationship of human agents and organizations, made all the more problematic with the emergence of large-scale organizations on the one hand and

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growing individuation (or individualism) on the other. The topic of large-scale organizations is a decidedly unpopular one in contemporary sociology, as many scholars contend that these organizations have lost their historical significance in the so-called post-Fordist society. However, sociologists must somehow come to terms with the growing centralization of power and control in the corporate sector as a result of massive mergers on a worldwide scale in financial organizations, the mass media, and the systems related to the distribution of social and economic services, all the while recognizing that the decentralization processes associated with outsourcing and the like are essential ingredients of this overall process. Although local activities remain the backbone of any social order (a global one being no exception), there is mounting evidence that the mergers and acquisitions of recent decades have been deeply impacting the daily lives of people on "Main Street." Persons in local settings may not know who dropped them from the payroll of the local branch of a large corporation, and they may be only dimly aware of the officials at corporate headquarters who closed down local operations with no input from the local citizenry. Concomitantly, the local remains of compelling importance, all the while reconstituting itself in light of the larger context which is undergoing fundamental change. Vaughan and I (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1984) began our analysis with human agents and the salience of the social mind and reflectivity. Yet, we were led to the conclusion that organizations have a reality apart from human agents, and while organizations can not exist without human agents, neither can one examine the activities of human agents without comprehending the nature of modem organizations with their hierarchy of authority and division of labor as well as their "social resources." Human agents often come to define their interaction with organizations differently than from interpersonal interaction. The hierarchy of authority and the complex division of labor that characterize modern organizations serve as definers of the social context in which human agents carry out their activities, and the remaking of the context may reshape the nature of particular types of social interaction (see Hall, 1997). My own life history can serve as a rough guide for understanding how organizations have shaped the lived experience of myself and my colleagues at the University of Texas. By way of illustration, my interaction with other faculty members during my five decades at the University has been channeled in complex ways not only by the dramatic expansion in the size of the institution but also by the heightened specialization of knowledge within and among departments, programs, and colleges (a pattern leading to spatial differentiation of activities as well). Whereas I once interacted rather freely with philosophers, economists, historians, and political scientists who were housed in the same building, today the spatial separation of the disciplines and the burgeoning of

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subspecialties within traditional disciplines provide the social and cultural context within which I interact (or am unable to interact) with colleagues. Today, there are major departments such as linguistics that did not exist fifty years ago, and centers that are devoted to the study of racial and ethnic minorities and women were once beyond the pale of what was imaginable in an academic environment. In particular the heightened role of women and race and ethnic minority faculty members has created a university setting that is not only more complex but vastly more informative and challenging. Moreover, the vastly increased communication and mobility in the larger social realm means that some faculty members come to forge closer personal and intellectual links with like-minded colleagues on other campuses than with those down the hall or in adjacent buildings. Looking back over five decades, we can also perceive the growth of a multilayered administrative apparatus (I am unaware of any research university whose organizational structure has been simplified rather than becoming more complex and hierarchical). While sympathetic to Giddens's (1984) thesis that organizations both enable and constrain human action, I am also persuaded that all too little attention has been given to how hierarchical relationships shape everyday interaction experiences within the broader social order, more particularly in university settings. Based on my experience, I would surmise that these new organizational arrangements at large public universities have fostered greater social distance between faculty and, say, undergraduate students, and that members of the faculty, in general, take for granted the manner in which organizational controls (particularly budgetary processes constructed by administrators within and outside the university) shape their workaday interaction with their colleagues. While seeking to reshape these budgetary constraints, faculty members have only limited say in the process. My own participation in faculty politics for almost two decades heightened my awareness of various administrative controls and of how faculty maneuver to by-pass or reconstitute existing hierarchical constraints. While I observed how negotiations between faculty and administrators brought about new organizational arrangements, my experiences also led me to conclude that in a variety of negotiations between administrators and faculty the results are shaped by the asymmetry of power between the two groups. I have also had occasion to observe how faculty respond to rules imposed externally upon the University. For instance, in the 1970s the Texas Coordinating Board, reacting to public clamor for accountability of professors, imposed a complex workload formula upon the faculty. These rules have shaped, directly and indirectly, the interaction of faculty with one another and with students, and they have privileged the University (and Texas A&M) with respect

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to smaller institutions in the State (the University having a more favorable teaching load than its sister institutions). At this point I shift my focus somewhat, for, as noted above, another problem area that I have addressed and that draws upon the pragmatist vantage point is the sociology of morals. While morals are seldom commented upon by symbolic interactionists, we find a brief fragment on ethics at the end of Mind, Self and Society (1934). Dewey, too, was avowedly concerned with moral matters. My interest in the sociology of morals has been closely intertwined with my analysis of organizations. Over time this interrelationship has come into sharper focus in, for example, the analysis of "Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue" (Sjoberg, Vaughan & Williams, 1984). Thus, by my lights, it is not enough to consider the moral accountability of human agents, although the moral obligations of human agents are not to be brushed aside. Empirically we find that organizations themselves pose moral dilemmas which require special consideration. Several illustrations may clarify my reasoning. It is difficult to imagine that, had the Gestapo not been dissolved, democracy in Germany would have been feasible. So too we continue to witness the moral fallout of the Holocaust: recently Swiss banks have had to account for the profits they gained from the gold confiscated by Nazis from Jews during World War II. The very nature of the banking system has been held up to critical scrutiny, and the banks are in a sense paying reparations for what their officials did over a half-century ago. Also, it seems apparent that eliminating the apartheid system in South Africa required the dismantling of a vast organizational (governmental) structure that supported the pattern of rigid racial segregation. So too, in the U.S. the efforts to end the formal discrimination patterns in the South via the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education required the reconstitution of organizational arrangements that were buttressed by a complex legal apparatus. As to the contemporary scene, we might consider issues relating to the activities of tobacco companies in the United States. Over the course of recent decades there have been efforts to address the public health problems resulting from the products sold by tobacco companies. Only recently, however, has any serious headway been made, as rather staggering fines have been levied against these companies. The aforementioned illustrations suggest that in everyday life organizations, not just individuals, are, from time to time, held morally accountable. At the same time, it seems unlikely that fining tobacco corporations, for example, can overcome the problems they pose, for the managers of these corporations have simply turned their attention to cultivating new consumers within the U.S. and, especially, to expanding markets overseas. The moral dilemmas posed by the big tobacco companies have been merely papered over, not resolved. Yet the

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vitality and expansion of democracy rests upon holding these large-scale organizations morally accountable for their practices. The issues have been further heightened by the emergence of multinational corporations whose reach is global in nature, and of transnational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, to note only some of the more prominent of these organizational forms (e.g. Sjoberg, 1999). The moral disciplining of large-scale organizations is no small feat. For one thing, those who command social power in organizations such as these reason and act in ways that are likely to jar the sensibilities of many sociologists, symbolic interactionists included. During the spate of downsizing in the 1970s and afterwards, corporate managers argued that by eliminating entire divisions and the workers associated with them these corporate entities would become more efficient and competitive. This social logic is in keeping with that of military commanders who traditionally have been willing to sacrifice entire divisions so that the broader army can remain relatively "intact," and thus capable of fighting another day. Without doubt, the leaders of contemporary corporate organizations, like military commanders, come to define organizations as more than the sum of their individuals and their interpersonal interactions. These leaders act in accordance with this social logic which, by giving priority to the whole, makes it possible for them to disregard the persons who have been most immediately affected by their decisions. Sociologists committed to pragmatism and symbolic interactionism will need to directly confront this mode of reasoning, as well as the actions and justifications interwoven with this logic, if they are to understand the management of contemporary organizations. They must be prepared to investigate not only what the leaders of these organizations say but also what they do and how, in turn, they employ their logics to justify their decisions. The logics relied upon by the organizational leadership provide us with a foundation for understanding how organizations such as the army or corporations are defined - the whole is defined as having a reality rather distinct from the selected parts (while keeping in mind that some parts are more expendable than others, given the leadership's definition of how these organizations are to be "managed"). In no way am 1 suggesting that particular human agents should not be held morally accountable. Yet holding them accountable does not necessarily lead to the reconstitution of organizational structures. We must at times, so a variety of data indicate, restructure the organizational framework so as to reconstitute the interactions among human agents. To grapple with issues such as genocide and grinding poverty, we must seek to examine the moral foundations on which modern organizations rest and how human agents come to support, and are

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supported by, the organizational apparatus, as well as the social consequences of the activities that result. My sociological commitment to excavating the moral foundations of modem social orders (to formulate the issue in the largest sense possible) encompasses more than organizations in any narrow sense. It is evident, for instance, that Dewey was highly critical of utilitarianism, which he perceived to be a pervasive moral logic in U.S. society. I find it somewhat perplexing that sociologists, in their everyday practices, frequently and uncritically, accept utilitarian logic, with its cost/benefit analysis and its moral imperative of the greatest good for the greatest number. It is a logic that managers in both the corporate and the state sectors rely upon to justify many of their core decisions, and it is a logic that becomes intertwined with the idea of organizational maintenance itself (discussed above). One reason the utilitarian moral orientation is taken for granted is that moral issues are often shunted aside in mainstream sociology. Thus, the Weberians and the positivists, for instance, have forged an unusual alliance with regard to adherence to value neutrality. Talcott Parsons, for instance, acknowledged that moral issues may serve to frame the sociologist's particular realm of inquiry, but after that they are to be set aside. In turn, the positivists, or advocates of the natural science model, assert that social science is to be limited to the investigation of empirical data, and moral or ethical problems are not to be the province of scientific inquiry. There are, admittedly, many variations with regard to the facts versus morals debate, including the perspective of a number of Marxists who typically regard morals as a bourgeois problem. According to them, overthrowing the capitalist system and instituting a socialist system would overcome the concerns being addressed by a bourgeoisie based morality. In the 1960s, I entered the study of morals through an analysis of the place of ethics in social research. Although my approach was largely descriptive in nature, it served to bring to the fore various competing ethical claims in social research. Most sociological researchers have claimed to be ethical in their research endeavors (in the process breaking from the orthodoxy of value neutrality), but they have been reluctant to look closely at the normative premises undergirding their everyday activities. In keeping with this orientation, symbolic interactionists such as Herbert Blumer (and his adherents), for instance, have had little to say, at least directly, about the moral fabric of modem society. Nonetheless, there have been counter currents within the discipline - from Mills to Habermas as well as Pitirim Sorokin, Barrington Moore, and Pierre Bourdieu (the last three scholars falling outside the pragmatist heritage). In recent years, communitarians such as Philip Selznick (who acknowledges his deep and abiding commitment to Dewey) and

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Robert Bellah and feminists such as Dorothy Smith have opened up new-found social space wherein moral issues can be examined sociologically. Although contemporary symbolic interactionists have typically skirted the analysis of moral issues, one wing of the pragmatist heritage has been committed to analyzing the moral dimension of social life. Dewey, in particular, articulates the problem well. As I interpret his reasoning, he recognized a relational bond between facts and morals: they are not the same but are bound to one another through a relational logic. As for my own efforts, I have struggled, during the past three decades, to sustain the moral dimension as an integral feature of sociological inquiry. At the core of my particular efforts lies the role of powerful large-scale organizations in shaping a number of the major moral dilemmas of our time. That is one reason for finding common cause with Mills and Habermas who, in very different ways, have been intent upon salvaging the democratic ideal in face of the organizational onslaught. Democracy is predicated upon moral principles and can only be attained through the active participation of citizens. The problems that Mills and Habermas have articulated - though not their proposed solutions - I have adopted as my own. Although Habermas advances our understanding of democracy by, for instance, contrasting patterns within the lifeworld with those of the system, he has failed, it seems to me, to recognize the fundamental difficulties confronting the lifeworld (and the system) posed by moderu-day social and cultural diversity. While Habermas (1996) has slowly but surely been incorporating the issue of gender into his framework, he has been unable to cope with race and ethnicity and class in his analysis of communicative discourse in the public sphere of the lifeworld. His analysis presupposes a type of homogeneity that is out of step with the realities that characterize contemporary democratic orders such as the United States. Moreover, while Habermas, building upon Mead, recognizes the tensions between the lifeworld and the system, his analysis is less than satisfactory in articulating how in effect communicative rationality comes to be articulated within the ideal speech community (which characterizes the lifewofld). His simplification of the process of communicative rationality bypasses fundamental issues regarding social and cultural diversity. As for Mills, he, too, fails to address the question of social and cultural diversity as this relates to race and ethnicity and gender. And we must go further than he did in addressing problems of organizational accountability, although he clearly championed the need for a democratic critique of large-scale organizations. But to return to outlining more fully my intellectual trajectory. It would perhaps be advantageous to clarify my own usage of the concept of morals. I distinguish between two types of moral systems - that of ethics (with its emphasis upon duties, obligations, and responsibilities) and that of rights (or

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social claims upon the larger community). Ethical systems, as I define them, are those that exist within the community (whether local or national), whereas the rights tradition is characterized by two overlapping strands. The first is the idea of rights as these have emerged within societies (for instance, the Bill of Rights in the U.S.), and the second is the global human fights perspective, which calls for moral claims that transcend particular communities and nation states. More generally, ethical discourse has typically been the province of philosophers, whereas rights discourse, especially human rights discourse, has been elaborated upon by legal and political theorists. Although human rights discourse has a complex historical foundation, it came to the fore after World War II as a result of the Nuremberg trials and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The Nuremberg trials, held immediately after World War II, resulted in the construction of a radically new moral category: "crimes against humanity." This contentious (even heterodox) notion has transcultural or transnational significance that remains to be explored by sociologists. In turn the UN Declaration of Human Rights, however critical one might be of this document, has provided the foundation for a worldwide dialogue regarding human rights and has served as a catalyst for the formation of a body of international law which is not to be ignored. In effect, we have been witnesses to the efforts to construct a new kind of moral doctrine that would be applicable to persons in diverse cultures or societies around the world, although the application of this doctrine would be shaped by local social and cultural circumstances. That this movement to create a more universal moral doctrine may not succeed should be acknowledged, but the foundations of human rights reasoning is nonetheless worthy of careful attention (e.g. Sjoberg, Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1984; Sjoberg, 1996; Sjoberg, Gill & Williams, 2001). Nor should the human fights perspective necessarily be viewed as a threat to many aspects of the ethical systems that exist within communities or societies (although the potential for tensions between the two is ever present). Indeed, the efforts to construct a universal system of human rights can serve as a countersystem - in this instance as a universal set of moral standards that can be employed to evaluate the ethical orientations which emerge within communities or societies. Thus, at the Beijing Conference one group of women came to define women's rights as human rights, a view that has wide-ranging implications for sociology. Moreover, a case can be made that the human rights, rather than the civil rights, doctrine could provide a more enduring foundation for addressing racial and ethnic disparities in U.S. society. The human fights perspective provides a moral grounding for protecting the rights of racial and ethnic minorities that is superior to the doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number, which

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provides little or no protection for minority vantage points. Also, the human rights perspective, unlike the ethicist one, has the potential for overcoming some of the deeply ingrained barriers between the "us" and the "them" or "divergent others." If we are to live with difference, the notion of divergent others must be incorporated into human reflectivity in ways too infrequently addressed by sociologists. Actually, there are two interrelated facets to my more concrete moral stance: one concerns democracy, the second concerns universal human rights. I appear to belong to a small band of sociologists who have sought to address the issue of human rights on a global scale. Although my contributions are very limited, they nonetheless signal a major problem that sociologists must address if they are to deal seriously with the processes of globalization. But how is pragmatism (or symbolic interactionism) relevant for investigating these moral concerns? To the extent that Dewey (and others) have articulated the interface between pragmatism and democracy, this relationship is rather readily grasped. On the other hand, the link between the human rights endeavor and pragmatism (and symbolic interactionism) is likely to seem far more problematic to most sociologists. Thus, I should like to suggest how pragmatism can cast light on the current debate regarding human rights principles. One significant wing of human rights theorizing is concerned with the protection of human dignity (or human status), or what might be termed equal concern and respect for human beings. Efforts since World War II to construct a human rights doctrine have been propelled forward by a perceived need to protect individuals (and groups) from actions by the organizational apparatus of states to obliterate, through genocide and other forms of wanton mass destruction, individuals and groups. What seems required is a moral code that challenges the arbitrary use of not only state but also corporate power if we are attain minimal standards of human dignity within and among societies. It is well to remember that Mead (1964) grappled, in his essay "National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness," with matters relating to eliminating warfare among nations. Within this context Mead (1964, p. 363) wrote, "We must think ourselves in terms of the great community to which we belong." In a general sense, we might regard Mead's essay as a precursor of sorts to the current efforts to construct a morality founded on human rights. Pragmatism is relevant to explicating and justifying the human rights doctrine in several different ways. Thus, if we are to protect human dignity (or human beings as human beings) we are called upon to articulate what it means to be human within a cross-cultural or cross-national framework. In my view, the pragmatist conception of human nature provides the foundation for advancing

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our understanding of human rights. To cast this matter in oversimplified terms, I find social reflectivity to be an essential feature of humanness, and practices that destroy reflecfivity serve to undermine the equal concern and respect that are grounded in a human rights framework. Moreover, and of considerable import, if we expand upon the pragmatist reasoning, we also can direct attention to an alternative conception of "rationality." Such an alternative orientation can be grounded in an extension or modification of some of Mead's (and Dewey's) core arguments. One can, so I contend, conceive of rationality as taking account of an ever increasing variety of perspectives and in the process coming to terms with the similarities and differences among them. This conception of rationality stands at odds with the means-end reasoning on which much of current sociology is grounded. We must be prepared to challenge that taken-for-granted view of social life. This essay is not, however, the venue in which to elaborate upon the principles associated with human rights. In this context I have only hinted as to why a pragmatist conception of human nature opens up new avenues for explicating, as well as serving to justify, a moral foundation grounded in human rights. Now, I have arrived at a point in my discussion where I shall comment briefy upon the essays by Norma Williams, Stephen Lyng, Elizabeth Gill, and Boyd Littrell. Before proceeding, however, I wish to thank the late Stanley Saxton and Elizabeth Gill for organizing the session at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction out of which these papers have emerged. Also, I greatly appreciate Saxton's introductory comments at San Francisco in which he portrayed me as Simmel's "stranger." I regret that his death at a rather early age prevented him from crafting his proposed introduction to these essays. I am deeply gratified that each of the participants has constructed a paper that stands on its own merits. Each paper bears directly upon, yet is independent of, the symposium. The essay by Norma Williams calls to our attention the pressing need to take the role of multiple others if the ideals of democratic participation are to be more fully realized. As a Chicana she has attempted to put into practice the ideals she articulates. Her call for a recognition of difference, while simultaneously seeking through reflective self-consciousness to take the role of those who are different, poses a fundamental challenge for democracy in the 21st century. Of compelling importance is her contention that participants in a democratic social order will need to construct new roles for themselves if they are to learn to act in terms of inclusionary, rather than exclusionary, practices. Second, there is Stephen Lyng's use of countersystem analysis in his discussion of the social self. Lyng has a longstanding interest in this mode of reasoning (a version of the dialectic), and he has pushed it in directions that

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Cain and I never envisaged. In his paper Lyng trains his sociological eye on how we interpret ourselves more clearly, and perhaps more fundamentally, within a framework that emphasizes taking account of divergent others. One extension of his reasoning is that persons gain a more fundamental understanding of self within the social context of difference than they would in a situation of homogeneity. Third is the work of Elizabeth Gill, who has been investigating the activities of hospice volunteers. Her analysis is of far-reaching import as she pushes out the boundaries of the relationship between the lifeworld and the system (or the interrelationship of interpersonal interaction to organizations). It is evident that sociologists studying everyday life have devoted little attention to Habermas's system/lifeworld framework, or more generally the relationship between organizations and interpersonal interaction. Gill's analysis documents how in everyday life hospice volunteers are keenly aware of the organizational setting as they interact not only with the dying patient but with organizational personnel. Indeed, to effectively interact with dying persons, hospice volunteers must proactively and creatively carve out social space for themselves. They seem to have some kind of rough "mental map" or "model" of how the organization functions, one built up from their everyday life experiences. Consequently, they maneuver around, negotiate with, or otherwise circumvent the formally trained personnel who are subject to a variety organizational constraints (in their temporal and spatial activities, their patterns of deference and demeanor, and so on.). By using the pragmatist Hans Joas's idea of creativity as a strategic point of departure, we discover how human agents are capable of reconstituting Weber's iron cage - and in ways that extend well beyond the activities of hospice volunteers. As for the fourth paper, by Boyd Littrell, I am deeply flattered by what he has written about me as a methodologist. Reading about my own work through his eyes, I find my methodological objectives have been defined in a new light: they are far more integrated into my cross-cultural (comparative) investigations and my commitment to a human rights orientation than I had ever imagined. What is worth emphasizing is that Littrell, using my work as a point of departure, has advanced his own distinctive view of methodology. At the same time I agree with Littrell's contention that, as a methodologist, I have sought to salvage some form of "objectivity" (which is not that of the positivists) while championing intellectual pluralism or diversity within sociology and the larger society. In the process I have strongly resisted the social, intellectual, and cultural standardization that "scientism" would impose upon us. Looking at my intellectual endeavors I find that my earlier writings on methodology, based as these were on a revision of Karl Mannheim's

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sociology of knowledge, were not self-consciously anchored in pragmatism. In recent years, however, I have sought to correct this by making it clear that Dewey and Mead permit one to explicate a "reflective methodology" (Sjoberg, 1997). Viewed more generally, I find these papers share some general themes. Although each contributor has her or his own agenda, Williams, Lyng, Gill and Littrell are expanding upon, or elaborating upon, the pragmatist (or symbolic interactionist) heritage. In practice pragmatism has been open to a rather wide range of interpretations, a number of which have not seeped into sociology. With regard to sociology, we find that many members of the early Chicago School linked pragmatism with the work of Georg Simmel. In more recent decades efforts have been undertaken to connect pragmatism with Marx and, even more recently, there has been a concerted effort to integrate postmodemism with pragmatism. While each of these of these endeavors has expanded our understanding of the complex social web in which we live, we will also need to build a bridge, as have Mills and Habermas, in differing ways, between pragmatism and the investigation of large-scale organizations. I remain convinced that pragmatism and symbolic interactionism have a contribution to make to our sociological grasp of the large-scale transnational organizations which are increasingly becoming "visible" to a variety of human agents within national and international communities. Finally, in light of the symposium on "Gideon Sjoberg as Symbolic Interactionist: Yes and No," the question arises as to how I define myself. It is evident that I have been committed (for several decades) to the Mead-Dewey conception of human nature and human agency that is associated with this perspective. Because of this, I view myself as a pragmatist and symbolic interactionist - by no means a typical one, but one nonetheless. At its core pragmatism provides us with a thoroughgoing view of the social nature of human nature, and the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead, more than any other sociological tradition, brings a proactive human agency to the fore. In the process the pragmatists have assuredly emphasized the need to explicate the social practice of everyday life, and they thus have provided us with highly innovative ways of thinking about democracy, social justice, as well as the yetto-be developed, but urgently needed, realm of morals relating to human rights. Nonetheless, we must of necessity face up to the complexities of the interrelationship between individuals and organizations, if for no other reason than that we must devise ways in which to hold powerful organizations socially and morally accountable. A modified form of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism could contribute much to addressing the staggering social and moral issues which confront us all.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Leonard Cain and Boyd Littrell commented upon a much earlier version of this paper. Also, Andree F. Sjoberg provided me with detailed editorial criticisms, thereby helping me to clarify what I intended to say.

REFERENCES Denzin, N. K. (1978). Crime and the American Liquor Industry. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 87-118). Greenwich: JAI Press. Farberman, H. (1975). A Criminogenic Market Structure: The Automobile Industry. Sociological Quarterly, 16, 438-457. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (1987). A Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reasoning. Vol. II. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hall, P. (1997). Meta-Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 397-418. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Mead, G. H. (1964). National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness. In: N. J. Reck (Ed.), Selected Writings of Mead (pp. 355-370). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, J., & Reynolds, L. (1973). Interactionism, Complicity, and the Astructural Bias. Catalyst, 7(Winter), 76-85, Sjoberg, G., Brymer R. A., & Farris, B. (1966). Bureaucracy and the Lower Class. Sociology and Social Research, 50, 325-337. Sjoberg, G. (1967). Ethics, Politics, and Social Research. Cambridge: Schenkman. Sjoberg, G., & Cain, L D. (1971). Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and the Analysis of Social Systems. In: H. Turk & R. L. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Change: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Williams, N. (1984). Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 441-453. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, A. F. (Eds) (1984). Ethics, Values, and Human Rights: 1984 (special issue). Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 311-489. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Littrell, B., & Williams. N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Devey and American Pragmatism. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 73-92). Greenwich: JAI Press. Sjoberg, G. (1996). The Human Rights Challenge to Communitarianism: Formal Organizations and Race and Ethnicity. In: D. Sciulli (Ed.), Macro Socio-Economics From Theory to Activism (pp. 273-297). Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Sjoberg, G. (1997). Reflective Methodology: Foundations of Social Inquiry. In: G. Sjoberg & R. Nett, A Methodology for Social Research: With a New Introductory Essay (pp. i-xliv). Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press.

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Sjoberg, G. (1999). Some Observations on Bureaucratic Capitalism: Knowledge About What and Why? In: J. L. Abu-Lughod (Ed.), Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges (pp. 43-64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., & Williams, N. (2001). A Sociology of Human Rights. Social Problems, 48, 11-47.

Smith, C. (1982). On the Sociology of the Mind. In: P. Secord (Ed.), Explaining Human Behavior. Beverly Hills: Sage. Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, G. (1970). The Social Construction of Legal Doctrine: The Case of Adolf Eichmann. In: J. Douglas (Ed.), Deviance and Respectability (pp. 160-191). New York: Basic Books. Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, G. (1984). The Individual and Bureaucracy: An Alternative Meadian Interpretation. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 57-69.

TAKING THE ROLES OF MULTIPLE OTHERS Norma Williams

INTRODUCTION Although symbolic interactionists have greatly advanced our understanding of role taking, they rarely examine the problems of taking the roles of multiple others within diverse cultural settings. Because their focus has been on role taking within rather homogeneous groups, they have tended to neglect the processes of role taking and role making that emerge among race and ethnic groups. Yet, racial and ethnic divisions within the U.S. are increasing in complexity and developing in ways that are not well understood. In this paper I consider some of the issues related to taking the roles of multiple others. In doing so I build on Gideon Sjoberg's emphasis on the social mind rather than the social self. More than any other symbolic interactionist of whom I am aware, he has stressed the importance of the social mind and its reflective consciousness. Earlier I built on Sjoberg's insights in my analysis of role making (Williams, 1990). Now, I seek to broaden my analysis so as to discuss taking the roles of multiple others. Sjoberg's influence appears in other ways as well. For years he has insisted that sociologists should consider problems associated with issues such as human rights and social justice) For me these issues are central to symbolic interactionism. In outlining a range of issues associated with taking the roles of multiple others (especially racial and ethnic minorities), I draw upon my own teaching, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 75-90. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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research, and administrative experience. I have carried out fieldwork on Mexican Americans in Austin, Corpus Christi, and Dallas, and I have taught at a number of colleges and universities in Texas. Moreover, I served as Assistant Vice President for Multicultural Affairs at the University of North Texas. As an administrator, one of my tasks was to create the Center for Cultural Diversity, and I was its first director. As it happened, I carried out these activities at a time when there was considerable racial and ethnic unrest on campus. The problems I encountered are part of my lived experience and relate directly to taking the roles of multiple others. I view Texas as a fortunate research site. Large states such as California and Texas have experienced increasing racial and ethnic diversity, and the Anglo majority, in terms of population, is in the process of becoming a minority. This seems likely to bring about a reconsideration of certain racial and ethnic issues.

ROLE TAKING AND ROLE MAKING In exploring the issue of taking the role of the other, symbolic interactionists often seem to assume that the person with whom one is interacting is like oneself. They therefore assume that the gestures, words, or activities of the participants can be interpreted in somewhat similar ways. However, in many interaction settings problems arise. We know, for instance, that men and women who interact within the same cultural setting tend to experience difficulties in taking one another's roles. Yet, conflicts between middle class women and men are more manageable than the interaction processes that cut across racial and ethnic lines in situations where gender differences are also present. When we consider stratification or social inequality in terms of economic well-being, the problems regarding role taking become even more complex. One of the difficulties facing symbolic interactionists is that Mead's (1934) original work is limited by an emphasis on homogeneity. For example, Mead employed the baseball game as a basis for interpreting how human agents learn to take the roles of others, as well as of the generalized other. However, this illustration oversimplified the community setting in Mead's time, and it does not help us analyze today's complex multicultural interactions. We must give serious attention to the processes relating to prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion, and to situations where minorities experience difficulties gaining access to economic, political, and educational institutions controlled by Anglos. Although concepts such as the generalized other, emphasized by Mead, are relevant for understanding multicultural relations, we

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must look more carefully at the heterogeneity and complexity of relations in contemporary communities when examining social interaction patterns among members of a community. In interpreting multicultural relations I find Sjoberg's interpretation of Mead a good place to begin. Mead (1934, p. 133) defined the mind in social terms, contending that "we must regard m i n d . . , as arising and developing within the social process, within the empirical matrix of social interaction." Also, he described the mind in terms of its reflective intelligence. For me this means that not only can persons carry out inner dialogues with themselves but they can reflect critically upon their own experiences. Human agents can observe both opportunities and constraints within various social situations and also recognize differences between what people say and what they do (Deutscher, 1973), which often is translated into a comparison of ideals with actual experience. Human agents reflect upon these discrepancies, and they can respond so as to remake their roles (role making) and thus more readily achieve some of their ideals. Although some readers may view my emphasis on the social constraints placed on minorities or women (or both) as a move away from symbolic interaction, I believe that would be incorrect. Role making, as I employ the concept, often involves efforts to reconstitute one's social situation and in the process overcome some of the social constraints persons encounter. Many of these constraints result from the fact that discrimination against minorities and women is still widespread in the United States. For instance, Mexican American women do, at times, through their reflectivity, take steps to redefine some of the traditional expectations held by others. In my field research I found that a number of Mexican American women were in the process of creating new roles for themselves within the family and the community, for they were reshaping their more traditional roles within the context of new social circumstances. These women were aware that they were doing things differently than their mothers. However, it was not always possible for all the women to remake their roles; some of them lacked the social resources or experienced severe social constraints by their husbands and members of the community. As far as I can determine, I was the first researcher to employ Ralph Turner's (1962) concept of role making in an effort to interpret actual fieldwork data. It is surprising to see how little attention has been given by scholars to role making, especially in light of the women's movement. One of the main effects of this movement has been the effort by numerous women to remake their roles. In the process they have called on men to do the same so as to achieve greater fairness and equity in the family setting and in the workplace. I see myself as expanding upon the argument of certain feminists. I view role making as

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necessary if persons who differ along class, racial and ethnic, and gender lines are able to interact with one another in ways that are fairer and more egalitarian. RACE

AND ETHNICITY,

GENDER,

AND

CLASS

Symbolic interactionists have had a long tradition of studying race and ethnic relations, from Robert Park to Stanford Lyman and others. However, in my view, Herbert Blumer contributed most substantially to the theory of race relations. I will attempt to build upon this and in the process modify some of his ideas. 2 In his more influential essay on the subject of race relations, Blumer (1958) argued that race relations are founded on an assumption of superiority by members of the dominant group with respect to members of a subordinate group. Blumer (1958, p. 4) stated that one aspect of a "group definition is that it is necessarily concerned with an abstract image of the subordinate group. The subordinate social group is defined as if it were an entity or a whole." He emphasized that racial prejudice (which, when acted upon, results in racial discrimination) is a product of historical circumstances. It seems to me that Blumer was calling upon sociologists to examine the relationship between dominant/subordinate groups (or majority/minority groups) in order to understand the social context within which social interaction among racial and ethnic groups occurs. Yet, instead of simply analyzing Black/white relationships as did Blumer, we need to expand our analysis to include Asian and Hispanics. Both of these groupings, however, include important subdivisions. Furthermore, the dominant and the subordinate groups are divided by class differences, and these should be taken into account when viewing social interaction among racial and ethnic groupings in a community setting. For example, my observations indicate that privileged Anglos tend to interact with privileged Blacks or Hispanics rather differently than they do with economically disadvantaged Anglos and disadvantaged minorities. Nor can we ignore the complex gender divisions within the context of racial and ethnic settings. During the past few decades we have learned about the difficulties that persons encounter when they attempt to take the roles of persons of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds. A common theme is that stereotypes (or false simplifications) shape the interaction between the dominant group (Anglos) and various subordinate racial and ethnic entities. 3 It is reasonable to assume that the dominant group often defines subordinate ones in terms of stereotypes (one aspect of Blumer's abstract image), even though these are defined and redefined in a variety of ways within specific interaction situations.

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In the U.S. racial and ethnic divisions are often associated with cultural differences that create obstacles to meaningful social interaction among members of racial and ethnic groups. In the process various forms of discrimination have emerged that have historically excluded members of certain racial and ethnic groups from participation in community activities. In recent decades, major changes have reduced considerably the more well-defined kinds of exclusion. However, various forms of discrimination persist, not only with respect to Blacks but also with respect to other minority groups such as Hispanics and Asians. Some of the processes of exclusion are indirect and often not readily apparent to persons engaged in social interaction. For example, busing was a few decades ago a widely discussed means for overcoming racial and ethnic divisions among schools in urban settings. However, the efforts to bring racial and ethnic groups into more direct interaction with one another in school settings was blocked by a series of Supreme Court decisions that permitted suburban communities to exclude themselves from participation in busing programs within the city proper. Thus privileged whites could, by moving to the suburbs, avoid busing their children yet deny that they were engaged in may overt form of discrimination. My theme is that the immediate lived experiences of members of different racial and ethnic groups need to be observed within a broader social and cultural context. If we do this, we can more fully understand the nature of majority/ minority social interaction in schools and in the larger community. While emphasizing race and ethnicity when discussing role taking among multiple others, I am aware of the social and economic inequalities within both the majority and the minority sectors. Gender differences are also an important aspect of majority and minority group life. Thus the Mexican American women I have studied have encountered problems that differ from those of Anglo women. It is at times difficult for social scientists to distinguish between the effects of class and the effects of race and ethnicity upon interaction patterns. Members of the privileged sector of society discriminate against the poor, especially economically disadvantaged minorities who are highly segregated within the barrios and ghettos of large urban centers. One of the tasks of symbolic interactionists is to sort out these various patterns in fieldwork situations. With this brief background as a guide, we shall consider changes in the nature of racial and ethnic groupings within the United States in recent decades. THE

CHANGING

NATURE ETHNICITY

OF RACE

AND

As suggested above, race and ethnic relations have been undergoing major changes in the U.S. during recent decades (e.g. Waldinger & Bozorgmehr, 1996),

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and these need to be understood. Sociologists have historically focused upon Black-white relationships. For a number of reasons they must expand their perspective to encompass Hispanics and Asians as well as other groupings. This is not to suggest that the race problem with respect to Blacks has been resolved. But Hispanics and Asians have become increasingly visible, and sometime in this century Hispanics will outnumber Blacks in the United States and thus come to be defined as the nation's largest minority. One of the difficulties in discussing minority groups is that they are often very diverse. Asians include persons of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Iranian heritage, among others. Some came to the U.S. decades ago, whereas others are more recent immigrants. These groups speak languages that are mutually unintelligible, and their different cultural and historical backgrounds mean that they can not be treated as a homogeneous entity when we seek to take the roles of multiple others. As for Hispanics (or Latinos), this social category includes persons who are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Central and South American in origin. The members of these groups have had very diverse historical and cultural experiences. The Cubans, especially those who came during the 1960s, were relatively highly educated, while many Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic group, have been more economically disadvantaged. The dominant group in U.S. society, the Anglos, often have reacted toward these diverse minorities by treating them in a simplistic and standardized manner. Thus, for administrative reasons government agencies typically classify persons as Asian or Hispanic and ignore the significant cultural differences among them. It is not only government agencies that blur the differences among minorities; some social scientists do also. My personal experience serves to illustrate this problem. During the 1980s, after I began discussing my findings on the Mexican American family in Texas, a number of social scientists, both orally and in writing, suggested that I should compare the patterns I found with those in Mexico. Apparently they had no understanding of the fact that the Mexican American ethnic group came into being as a result of military conquest and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and that most Mexican Americans do not identify with Mexico. They have a separate social identity as Mexican Americans. Moreover, a number of the Mexican Americans I studied had ancestors who were in the region prior to the conquest, and they had become socialized, for instance, while attending school in the U.S., into a historical heritage that differs considerably from that acquired by persons who grow up in Mexico. Students acquire different images of who they are. Given this situation, we should not be surprised to learn that some social scientists have little understanding of Mexican Americans.

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INTERACTION BETWEEN MEMBERS OF THE MAJORITY AND MINORITY GROUPS Having outlined some of the changes that have occurred with respect to racial and ethnic groups, I now consider the interaction between the members of majority and minority groups. A good starting point is Judith Rollins's (1985) informative book Between Women. Rollins conducted a field study of the interaction between Black domestics and their white women employers in which she found that the Black domestics had a better understanding of their employers than the latter did of their employees. Rollins uses Goffman's analysis of deference and demeanor to analyze in some detail the asymmetrical patterns of the relationship between women employers and domestics. Rollins (1985, p. 194) writes, "The use of domestics' first names, calling domestics of all ages 'girls,' the encouragement of performance of subservience, demands of spatial d e f e r e n c e . . , all these conventions of domestic servitude have in common the quality of affirming the employer's superiority." Domestics learn to perform, for they are dependent upon their employers for their livelihood. The ability of women employers to hire and fire places domestics in a subservient position, which encourages the latter to express deference through gestures and linguistic cues. In turn, the employer often treats domestics as non-persons. If we examine dominant/subordinate relationships with respect to race and ethnicity in the community setting, we find that a number of the patterns relating to social interaction that Rollins describes are prevalent not only in the workplace but also in public places where persons interact. In addition, when examining majority/minority interactions within the community we must take account of other social patterns that emerge between the members of dominant and subordinate groups. One of these relates to processes of racial and ethnic discrimination and the use of stereotypes (discussed earlier) by members of the dominant group to define social interaction with members of minority groups. These stereotypes not only simplify, in a negative manner, many features and activities of minorities but are also used to justify the reactions of the dominant Anglo group toward racial and ethnic minorities. We should keep in mind Blumer's views that prejudice is defined by the group. Consider certain patterns with respect to schools. Within schools standardized testing has become an important basis for evaluating the performance of students. These standardized tests reflect the dominant Anglo standards (e.g. the vocabulary they employ), and minorities are expected to measure up to them. The inability of minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics to do so is

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then used to justify their exclusion from the ranks of higher education. That standardized tests can be poor predictors of who will succeed or fail in college tends to be ignored, because these tests are defined by members of the more privileged group as measuring "intelligence" in a supposedly objective and scientific manner. Moreover, such persons have the resources to provide their own children with tutors or special classes that help them do well on standardized tests. The fact that this exclusionary process is administrated by testing agencies that are far removed from the lived experience of the minorities means that the latter often find it difficult to understand how this exclusion is being carried out. Given these patterns, it is essential to expand upon Blumer's argument by clarifying the manner in which the dominant group seeks to control social interaction with subordinate groups. By indirectly excluding subordinate groups from universities and colleges, the dominant group creates part of the context in which interaction occurs. Another aspect of exclusion relates to spatial distribution in the community. Where people live affects social interaction. If a family is able to move into a "good" neighborhood the children will not only be able to attend better schools but can interact with persons of privilege in various informal settings. These children thereby acquire through informal interaction linguistic and social skills that will help them succeed within the schools and later in the workplace. Patterns of discrimination and exclusion seem to reinforce class and gender divisions among subordinate racial and ethnic groups. For example, as a result of legislation in the 1990s, welfare mothers are expected to find work. However, some data suggest that white welfare mothers are more likely to get jobs than poor Black women or Latinas. If this pattern continues, poor minority women will be among the most marginalized and excluded members of U.S. society. These women will be the truly disadvantaged. What do these pattems mean? They suggest that the more privileged members of U.S. society construct social arrangements which help to distance them from racial and ethnic minorities. Therefore, in many social situations the privileged are able to avoid direct interaction with minorities, and the processes of exclusion that are created become more difficult for minorities to understand and challenge. In my judgment, symbolic interactionists need to examine these more indirect modes of exclusion if they are to understand the everyday interaction of members of the dominant and subordinate groups. INTERACTION

AMONG

MINORITIES

Symbolic interactionists also need to examine the ongoing interaction patterns among members of different minority groups. This latter realm of study raises

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a number of difficult issues. When studying the interaction of minorities with one another it is easy for social scientists to overlook the fact that how these minorities interact is at least to some degree shaped by the actions of the dominant group. We learned from the riots a few years ago in Los Angeles that significant tensions exist among minority groups. Thus, Blacks reportedly have looted stores owned or managed by Koreans. Earlier in New York City conflicts among minorities surfaced. In a less dramatic way, we find growing tensions between Mexican Americans and Blacks in such cities as Dallas and Houston. One reason for this is the fact that Mexican Americans and Blacks are competing with each other for the limited economic and educational opportunities which are mainly controlled by the privileged white community. The tensions between minorities regarding the schools are not only about the education of children but also about who will occupy some of the higher paying positions. Also, in some instances, certain minority businesses have a stake in the school system, for they have contracts with the schools for construction and maintenance of the school property as well as for the provision of food and services. The schools and their subsidiary services afford elements in the minority communities with economic and social opportunities to gain social and economic advantages. Most of the research conducted on the schools fails to give sufficient attention to the extent to which some minority groups depend upon schools for their economic well-being. As discussed earlier, many members of racial and ethnic minorities are economically disadvantaged and live in the ghettos and barrios of U.S. cities. These are the areas that many privileged researchers tend to avoid. However, we must understand how these minority groups interact with one another from a bottom-up as well as from a top-down point of view. Bourgeois (1996), an anthropologist, has been critical of researchers for their failure to study the lived experience of the truly disadvantaged members of the community. He notes the paucity of ethnographic studies of life in the inner city. His own experience among Puerto Rican youth in New York City suggests that a researcher will encounter physical dangers when studying certain urban subgroups. This makes it more difficult for researchers to take the roles of others whose actions may be at odds with their own middle-class expectations of how people should live. Symbolic interactionists should look carefully at the responses of privileged Anglos to the everyday life of minorities in the inner cities. Although the reactions of the dominant group vary considerably, the actions of some Anglos deserve special attention. It is apparent that a number of privileged whites have been withdrawing farther and farther from contact with minorities. They seem to be abandoning large sectors of the inner city to poor minorities.

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Also, nowadays an important segment of the white community is denying the significance of race and ethnicity and some go so far as to argue that the U.S. is color blind. This seems to be one basis for the Hopwood decision, which undermined affirmative action programs in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and whose impact with respect to other states has been considerable. As noted earlier, Blacks and Hispanics generally score lower on standardized tests than do whites, and if these standardized tests measure intelligence, as the privileged sector claims they do, then economically disadvantaged minorities should not be admitted to college. The privileged sector of the dominant group thus attempts to restrict entry into the educational and occupational systems. At the same time it is increasingly isolating itself from minorities in the central city. In recent decades a rather large number of economically privileged persons in U.S. cities have moved into gated communities thereby cutting themselves off from economically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. DEVELOPING

A CULTURALLY

DIVERSE

SOCIAL O R D E R I have emphasized dominant/subordinate relations among racial and ethnic groups as a prelude for considering cultural diversity (or multiculturalism). 4 In my view, we need to consider the social barriers and constraints upon role making within the context of race and ethnic relations, while taking account of issues of class and gender as well. It is in this context that we need to address the matter of cultural diversity or multiculturalism. How might multicultural ideals become a reality in a society like the United States, which includes so many minority groups? One important step toward achieving a fairer social order will involve persons learning to take the roles of multiple others so as to develop a democratic dialogue and mutual understandings. To accomplish this requires that one engage in some form of role making so as to learn how to take the roles of others who are different from themselves. Many of the critics of a multicultural perspective contend that if democracy is to be maintained we must emphasize common cultural values and beliefs. These scholars and politicians are, however, advocating a version of the assimilationist model in which minorities are expected to adopt the core cultural beliefs of the dominant group, the Anglos (Williams et al., 1995). One of the difficulties with the assimilationist perspective in the U.S. is that it has historically excluded persons such as Blacks, Indians, and Mexican Americans, thus making it more difficult for these groups to adopt the cultural ideals of

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the majority. Therefore, in a number of ways the cultural diversity or multicultural model is more realistic than the assimilationist one. This should become clearer in the 21st century, when Anglos become a minority in actual numbers in large states such as California and Texas. Symbolic interactionists, especially those who emphasize the importance of democracy, should be thinking about alternatives to the assimilationist model, in particular a multicultural one. In this brief essay I can only outline some elements of what a social order based on cultural diversity or multiculturalism might mean and how it might possibly be achieved. One issue needs to be addressed directly. This relates to the current emphasis upon excluding persons who are different. How does one challenge this? One step is to recognize that cultural diversity sustains democratic ideals. Also, some evidence is beginning to accumulate indicating that persons may be better able to further their own social and personal development within a context of cultural diversity. If we partially accept Zurcher's (1997) analysis of the mutable self, we find that individuals who are able to interact with a wide range of persons in a multicultural setting and thus engage in diverse experiences can enhance their conceptions of themselves (and others). Zurcher's perspective suggests that human beings need not be threatened by social and cultural diversity. However, this requires that they be willing and able to recast their roles somewhat so as to more readily take the roles of others who are different. However, learning to live with difference and learning to take the roles of multiple others requires social and cultural support. As we consider various alternative ways to enhance multiculturalism, it is useful to fall back on Dewey and Mead's emphasis on public education. But this kind of education must focus not just on technical knowledge but also on creating a dialogue among all sectors of society. To expand upon the democratic ideal we shall need to create school arrangements that help to sustain cultural diversity. People will need to learn at an early age to celebrate or respect the differences that inhere in a culturally diverse society. They will need to learn, as a result of interaction with others within and outside the classroom, to take the roles of persons who are different from themselves. Inasmuch as Dewey and Mead viewed the mind as social in nature, they came to stress the potential for persons to learn to cope with new circumstances. One can learn from experience, from interacting with multiple others in everyday life. To break down group stereotypes and to come to realize that diverse types of persons exist within racial and ethnic groups, one will need to interact with others in culturally diverse settings. Although neither Dewey nor Mead appears to have discussed cultural diversity or multiculturalism, their theoretical analysis permits us to consider this type of community as a realistic possibility.

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Another element in furthering a democratic order is engagement in critical reflection. To be able to take the roles of multiple others, people need to learn to expect others to challenge them if they believe they are misunderstood. One response would be a critical inner dialogue with oneself in order to align one's own actions with those of others. As we noted, in order to take the roles of persons who are different one must expect to encounter some criticism; this, however, should serve as a reality check as to whether one is imposing one's social and cultural views on others. The patterns of democratic dialogue will need to be reflected within immediate interaction situations. But it may be necessary to remake one's own role if one is to effectively take the roles of others who are different. Another aspect of constructing a more democratic multicultural order concerns the issue of social justice. Sjoberg, for example, has sought in various essays to emphasize the importance of human rights. For me, this means that when we interact with others we must recognize first and foremost that they are fellow human beings. Only then can we begin to think about creating a meaningful democratic order. Respect and concern for persons lie at the heart of a democratically based social order. The most serious forms of social injustice seem to occur when persons lose sight of the principle that others need to be respected for who they are: fellow human beings. Only by respecting others can democratic discussions develop and effective action be taken in behalf of disadvantaged members of a social order. In such a social setting considerable cultural diversity can prevail. FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION IN A COMPLEX CULTURALLY DIVERSE SETTING

AND

I emphasized general principles regarding a multicultural society. I elaborate upon these by considering the place of face-to-face interaction in a culturally diverse social setting. One of my themes is that face-to-face interaction may actually be increasing in social and cultural import, even as secondary groups expand. Public school settings are, once again, my main point of departure, for they are one of the few places in which persons from diverse social backgrounds within a community can be brought together in face-to-face interaction. Although not all interaction in the school setting is of this nature, a good deal is. Relatively small classrooms where learning is most effective have a face-to-face quality to them. Although they are not like family or intimate friendship groups, they call for the recognition of others in the immediate lived experience. Today there is a great deal of discussion about distance learning, and modern technologies are viewed by some politicians and educators as eventually

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replacing the school and the classroom. But what is not understood is that it is through face-to-face interaction, first within the family or family-like groups, and then in other small group settings, that a great deal of social and cultural learning takes place. Certain kinds of learning require intensive social interaction. This is especially true at the early stages of socialization in childhood. It is important, for example, that persons conveying information be able to observe first hand whether children can understand what is being taught and what effect this has in everyday practice. They need to be able to observe practices which reflect the information being disseminated. As children grow older they ask numerous questions, often in the context of face-to-face interaction. At times dialogues emerge in this kind of situation. Although Dewey emphasized the importance of intelligence, few interactionists consider the manner in which persons acquire not only social skills but also the ability to think. Face-to-face interaction permits the focused sort of attention that is necessary for many kinds of learning and for acquiring particular kinds of knowledge and social skills even in the adult years. It is through face-to-face interaction that one learns to cope with others on both a cognitive and an emotional basis. Through this kind of interaction a conception of self comes to be created. Although persons tend to associate with others who are like themselves, that is all the more reason to encourage activities that will bring diverse racial and ethnic groups together in the schools so that they can learn how to interact. This kind of social setting would make it possible for people to come to recognize that racial and ethnic groups are composed of a diverse range of individuals. In these kinds of situations one is likely to develop a notion of a generalized other that is very different from that developed within the context of homogeneity. Furthermore, it is in face-to-face interaction that one can learn to read the wide range of cues that are essential for interaction with persons who are different. Relatively integrated schools provide a setting for sustained face-to-face interaction. The school is one of the few public places in contemporary urban communities in which people who are relatively equal (at least in terms of age) come to interact over a period of time. Although some social segregation will occur within almost any school, we also find that it is within and outside the classroom that one is likely to confront others who are different. It then becomes necessary to develop the social skills to interact with them. Although Goffman (Lemert & Branaman, 1997) emphasized the importance of face-to-face encounters in modem settings, he did not consider how one learns - i.e. by engaging in an inner dialogue - to realign one's views with those of others. Nor did Goffman examine situations in which one learns how to take the roles of others and to cope with these differences in a reasonably democratic and fair manner.

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It is the immediacy of face-to-face interaction that requires some resolution of personal issues; in these situations the emotional aspects of social interaction are also likely to be confronted. Although human agents may often seek to manage face-to-face encounters to their advantage, some features of the "authentic other" will be difficult to ignore, if this interaction is ongoing over time. Certainly, engaging in face-to-face interaction with persons who are different can create tensions and ambiguities that are not typical of more homogeneous situations. However, it seems realistic to assume that most people will learn to cope with these ambiguities, and that some will find in the process a higher degree of social stimulation and self-fulfillment than can be gained elsewhere. CONCLUSIONS

AND IMPLICATIONS

In discussing taking the roles of multiple others, I have, following Sjoberg, given special attention to the importance of the social mind, without excluding an analysis of the self. Also, following Sjoberg, sociologists will need to consider normative as well as empirical issues and thus address such issues as democracy, social justice, and human rights. The increased racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. calls for rethinking our views regarding democracy. In this situation, the principles of symbolic interaction take on special significance, for if a diverse social order is to exist, people will need to learn to interact with one another and take the roles of multiple others. I do not underestimate the problems of moving toward a new form of democracy, one which, however, will be more realistic than any based on an assimilationist model. Taking the role of multiple others poses serious challenges. Ambiguities and tensions often result from complex social interaction situations, but people can learn to manage the resulting difficulties. Thus, I have encountered persons in the course of my teaching, research, and community service who have learned, through their interaction with others who are different, just how to relate to them. In considering how we might improve our understanding among persons from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds, we should not lose sight of the place of the social mind and the human potential for innovation. Because human beings possess a social mind, they have the potential for reaching out so as to achieve much greater inclusiveness than is often assumed. Yet, in seeking to take the roles of others, one often needs to engage in role making. The roles that emerge within one's own group may not be those needed to

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interact in a meaningful way with persons who are different. In addition, some persons need to become active "social brokers" who interpret the meaning of discourse and actions among cultural groups, thereby ensuring that the definition of the situation by minorities is understood by members of the majority. In the process of coping with increased social and cultural complexity, we can not forget the significance of face-to-face interaction. Here one learns how to function within the context of social and cultural diversity. I have emphasized that schools are one of the few settings within communities where persons can learn to interact on a face-to-face basis with persons who differ with respect to their race and ethnic identities. Even if the objective I have outlined is only achieved in part, we will increase the possibility of improving the social circumstances of racial and ethnic minorities. NOTES 1. Sjoberg's views regarding democracy can be found in such essays as Sjoberg (1998) and Sjoberg et al. (1997). Sjoberg has strongly encouraged me to work on race and ethnic relations and symbolic interactionism. 2. For some of Blumer's other essays on racial and ethnic relations, see Lyman and Vidich (1988). 3. While subordinate groups may under some circumstances develop stereotypes of the dominant group, the dominant group can act in terms of the stereotypes they hold of subordinate groups. The latter can not do the same. 4. The concepts of cultural diversity or multiculturalism (terms I use synonymously) stand in contrast to the assimilationist model. The concept of multiculturalism has in particular been highly contested. See e.g. Gordon and Newfield (1996).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Andr6e F. Sjoberg for her detailed editorial suggestions. Also, ! wish to thank the reviewers of this manuscript for their constructive criticisms.

REFERENCES Blumer, H. (1958). Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review, /(Spring), 3-7. Bourgeois, P. (1996). Confronting Anthropology, Education, and Inner-City American Apartheid. Anthropologist, 98(Jane), 249-259. Deutscher, I. (1973). What We Say~What We Do: Sentiments. and Acts. Glenview IL: Scott, Foresman.

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Gordon, A., & Newfield, C. (Eds) (1996). Mapping Multicultaralism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (Eds) (1997). The Goffman Reader. Malden MA: Blackwell. Lyman, S., & Viditch, A. (1988). Social Order and Public Philosophy: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Work of Herbert Blumer. Fayetteville AK: University of Arkansas Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rollins, J. (1985). Between Women. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Littrell, B., & Williams, N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Vol. 21, pp. 73-92). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Sjoberg, G. (1998). Democracy, Science, and Institutionalized Dissent: Toward a Social Justification for Academic Tenure. Sociological Perspectives, 41, 687-721. Turner, R. (1962). Role-Taking: Process Versus Conformity. In: A. M. Rose (Ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes (pp. 20-40). Boston MA: Houghton-Mifflin. Waldinger, R., & Boznrgmehr, M. (Eds) (1996). Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Williams, N. (1990). The Mexican American Family: Tradition and Change. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall. Williams, N. Himmel, K. F., Sjoberg, A. F., & Torrez, D. J. (1995). The Assimilation Model, Family Life, and Race and Ethnicity in the United States: The Case of Minority Welfare Mothers. Journal of Family Issues, 16, 380-405. Zurcher, L. A. (1977). The Mutable Self. Beverly Hills: Sage.

GIDEON SJOBERG AND THE COUNTERSYSTEM METHOD Stephen Lyng

INTRODUCTION In 1971, Gideon Sjoberg and Leonard Cain published a book chapter entitled "Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and the Analysis of Social Systems." I first learned of this chapter as a graduate student at the University of Texas in the late 1970s from a fellow student who knew of my growing interest in dialectical analysis. I had been engaged in an intensive reading of Hegel's key works, as a member of an informal study group, while also exploring Marxian sociology and anarchist thought with another graduate student group. Other more contemporary sources for dialectical approaches at that time included neo-Marxian works such as Bertell Ollman's Alienation and a spate of journal articles on the subject that came and went without much notice in the late 1970s. The work that had the greatest impact on me, however, was a treatise with no explicit connections to the dialectical tradition. This was Paul Feyerabend's outrageous and provocative outline for an anarchist epistemology, introduced in his 1975 book entitled Against Method. Feyerabend's case for epistemological anarchism inspired a group of us who had read and discussed his work to assume new identifies as "radical epistemologists." We used Feyerabend's ideas in many different ways but, for me, the crucial task was to find a way to connect the principle of counterinduction to my dialectical ontology and translate it into a workable method for sociological analysis. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 91-107. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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I first read Sjoberg and Cain's chapter with these concerns in mind. What I found in this work was a conceptual vocabulary and a set of ideas that seemed to offer a way to achieve my goals. This was the pathway that led me to Gideon Sjoberg and a research program that culminated in my own version of the countersystem approach (Lyng, 1990a). I will focus on the idea of countersystem analysis in this paper because I believe that this idea is an important theme in much of Sjoberg's work and a key to understanding his encounter with the symbolic interactionist project. I will begin by discussing the precursors of the 1971 article in Sjoberg's early scholarship and then focus on the ways in which the countersystem idea relates to his more recent research.

THE E V O L U T I O N OF THE C O N C E P T In looking back at Sjoberg's early writings, one first sees evidence of a countersystem strategy at work in his research on the pre-industrial city. What made this work revolutionary is the way it challenged accepted assumptions about the nature of the urban environment. The dominant twentieth century urbanists, Redfield, Wirth, Burgess, Park, and others had constructed theories of urban structure and development based on the key presupposition that the cities of industrial society defined the archetype of all cities. Sjoberg identified the fundamental flaw in this theoretical program by describing the wide-ranging differences between industrial and pre-industrial urban centers. While this move yielded many important insights relevant to the study of cities, it also addressed a more fundamental problem of theory development in general, a common problem related to the reflexive character of the sociological enterprise. As social actors seeking to understand structural patterns that shape our own thought processes, how can we transcend the very "schemata" that render things intelligible to us? Positivist sociology is largely unconcerned with this problem. But Sjoberg had a solution. His strategy in the Preindustrial City was to rely on "analysis through contrast" by locating a reference point outside of his own cultural system for deriving insights about the nature of industrial urban centers. Sjoberg makes explicit reference to this goal when, in the introduction of the Preindustrial City, he argues for the value of the "comparative approach": [K]nowledge of the preindustrial city and of the society that enfolds it - standing as they do in dramatic c o n t r a s t to the modern industrial-urban community and society - illumines these latter, not only in areas where industrial-urbanization is well advanced, but where it is just now emerging (1960, p. 1, emphasis mine).

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And later, he states: Granted that much cross-cultural comparison necessitates 'loose' theories or hypotheses, it has the major advantage of imparting meaning to a complex set of data and serving as a corrective against the ethnocentric bias that inheres in so much intrasocietal research . . . . Nowhere is the need for comparative analysis more apparent than in the study of the city. Many propositions, once widely accepted as true, are coming to be recognized as excessively culture-bound (1960, p. 2).

While Sjoberg made implicit use of the countersystem strategy in the Preindustrial City, we see the first attempt to relate this strategy to problems of theory and methods in his next major work. In a volume co-anthored with Roger Nett entitled A Methodology for Social Research (1968/1997), further development of the countersystem idea can be discerned in discussions of cultural bias in social research. Whether addressing the logic of inquiry, the theory construction process, or the problems of observation, Sjoberg and Nett remain sensitive to how the social scientist's own cultural pre-suppositions impact on the research process. Although they were certainly not original in seeing this as a serious problem for the social sciences, they were among the very few to suggest how we may actually come to terms with it. Drawing on the implicit strategy employed in the Preindustrial City, Sjoberg and Nett explore the possibilities suggested by various dialectical traditions for exploiting the analytical power of contrast: [IJt is by no means easy to become reflectively conscious of one's actions and observations. In addition to carrying on some kind of critical dialogue, a researcher must often be able to remove himself intellectually and emotionally from the immediate social situation, to step back and examine his activities in broader perspective. It is through exposure to a variety of subgroups or cultures that one acquires sensitivity to the nuances of human experience, including one's own political and ethical commitments (1997, p. 172).

Thus, we see in this early stage of Sjoberg's scholarship evidence of his careerlong preoccupation with problems of theory and methods and his first steps towards formulating the idea of countersystem analysis. This idea would be formally introduced ten years after the Preindustrial City in the chapter that Sjoberg wrote with Leonard Cain. As we shall see, this article anticipated many of the insights of Feyerabend and other self-professed "radical epistemologists" he inspired in the middle to late 1970s. The 197l article introduced a methodological/theoretical technique that, in my view, has yet to be fully exploited by symbolic interactionists and sociologists of other theoretical persuasions.

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NATURE

OF COUNTERSYSTEM

ANALYSIS

It is noteworthy that the idea of countersystem analysis was formally introduced as part of a critique of Parsonian sociology. In a critical evaluation of the consensus model, Sjoberg and Cain score Parsons for his inattention to the constraining influence of "negative values" and his neglect of the negation process as a force in social change. The latter issue is the context for their discussion of countersystem analysis. If social change derives, in part, from the ability of social actors to envision alternatives to the existing system, social scientists can support social change agendas by constructing alternative models through the method of analytical negation. In their words, the countersystem, represents the analytical negation of, and logical alternative to, the systemor type of system under examination. It differs from the antisystemmodel in that countersystemis a tool for analysis rather than a weapon for attacking the system. Because actors can adopt an antisystem orientation without necessarilyrecognizingviable alternatives,the conntersystem model invites social scientists to cope rationally and systematicallywith alternatives to existing systems (1971, p. 224). Sjoberg and Cain see several uses for the countersystem model in sociological analysis. First, in a return to the methodological theme of the Preindustrial City, the countersystem can be employed as "an external standard by which to examine a social order" so that cultural bias can be avoided in formulating analytical categories. This use of the countersystem is particularly relevant to the critique of Parsonian theory because the latter employs an analytical strategy that is, in one respect, the direct antithesis of the countersystem approach. Asserting that "Parsons all too frequently in his empirical papers takes the categories of the dominant American system for granted" (1971, p. 225), Sjoberg and Cain point to numerous instances in which Parsons legitimizes existing institutional arrangements by constructing sociological versions of dominant interest group perspectives. It should be added that this result is a consequence of methodological strategy rather than a failure of analytical insight. Parsons' method of "analytical realism" involves the explicit use of dominant cultural categories as a foundation for theoretical concepts. Secondly, countersystems can be used as heuristic devices for predicting and analyzing future social trends, especially trends fueled by dynamic tensions and contradictions within the social order. Elaborating on this theme a quarter century later, Sjoberg (1997, p. xlvii) notes that social scientists all too often miss the mark in predicting the future because they assume that present trends will continue unabated. "Countersystem analysis has the distinct advantage in alerting social scientists to the fact that what exists may not define what will be." By negating aspects of the existing order, the

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countersystem approach highlights potential contradictions within the present system and allows the analyst to identify a range of theoretical possibilities for the future. Perhaps the most important use that Sjoberg and Cain see for countersystem analysis is in the search for alternative solutions to persistent social problems. In fact, most of the original discussion of the countersystem method is devoted to this issue. Parsons' approach to social problems, and most mainstream sociological analyses for that matter, find the solutions to persistent problems in existing institutional arrangements. In addition to legitimizing these arrangements, such an approach ignores the structural basis of many social problems that resist amelioration by prevailing political-economic strategies. Moreover, traditional social problems analysis offers no way to anticipate "new and emergent needs" in a highly dynamic and constantly evolving system. Attention to this latter issue became much more pronounced in later Sjobergian scholarship, especially in his work on human rights (Sjoberg et al., 1984; Sjoberg et al., 1995; Sjoberg, 1996; Sjoberg & Vaughan, 1997). With the brief introduction to the countersystem method in the 1971 chapter, Sjoberg and Cain anticipated some of the most innovative ideas on theory construction to emerge in the last quarter century, although the debate stimulated by these ideas has been largely ignored by sociologists. As noted earlier, Paul Feyerabend's call for epistemological anarchism in the mid-1970s developed a similar countersystem theme by demonstrating how "counterinductive" strategies contribute to paradigmatic shifts in science. Challenging the positivist distinction between abstract theory and the world of empirical "facts," Feyerabend argues that scientists' perceptions of empirical patterns are culturally determined structured by overlapping conceptual systems that arise in earlier historical times and become embedded in the existing culture. He asserts that standard procedures of empirical verification in science serve only to validate theoretical explanations supporting established ideologies and cosmologies. To get beyond the mere validation of institutionalized cosmologies, Feyerabend advocates an approach to theory development that employs the countersystem strategy: How can we analyze the terms in which we habitually express our most simple and straightforward observations, and reveal their p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s ? . . . The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside. W e need an external standard of criticism, we need a set of alternative assumptions or, as these assumptions will be quite general, constituting, as it were, an entire alternative w o r l d . . . (1978, pp. 31-32).

Feyerabend is all-inclusive in designating alternative models that can be used for counterinductive purposes. Virtually any conceptual system can potentially serve as an "external standard of criticism," whether it be invented from whole

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cloth or imported from outside of science, "from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen" (1978, p. 68). Feyerabend offers a radical version of the countersystem strategy but his advocacy of this approach stems from the same epistemological and theoretical concerns that preoccupied Sjoberg and Cain. Thus, the basic problem identified in the 1971 chapter on countersystem analysis is also a core issue for Feyerabend: How can we penetrate the veil of culturally-based perceptions of reality in search of theoretical insights when this involves reflecting back on the very structures and processes that make reflection possible? Each of these theorists recognizes that the interpenetration of theory and facts creates the need for a special method of intellectual discovery, a way to identify the constitutive elements of the culturally determined, and thus culturally relative, world of "objective facts." In both programs, the use of an outside standard to transcend one's own culturebound sense of reality is a critical component of the analytical process. While Sjoberg's views on epistemological and theoretical matters has much in common with some notable intellectual figures in the postwar era, an equally important dimension of his work involves putting the countersystem strategy to work in empirically oriented studies. In an eclectic mix of studies focusing on both structural and interactional issues, Sjoberg has relied on a countersystem logic (sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly) that has given him a rather unique vantage point from which to examine a wide range of problems. I will now discuss some of the important results of Sjoberg's countersystem program.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE BUREAUCRATIC PROCESS Sjoberg managed to combine the pragmatic and analytical uses of countersystem analysis in a number of creative ways in his later work, but the countersystem initiative that I think has been closest to his heart is the effort to introduce a sociological voice into the intellectual discourse on human rights. Seeking, as always, to avoid deep-rooted biases that undermine theory development, Sjoberg adopts a countersystem approach to the problem of moral agency. What emerges from this effort is an outline of a sociologically based theory of human rights - the first such theory ever proposed. Sjoberg and Vaughn (1993, p. 151) state that "For us a morality based on human rights is a countersystem to existing ethicist perspectives. As a counterperspective, a human rights orientation becomes a standard by which we can critically evaluate the limitations of existing ethical traditions, and it provides us with a more viable moral foundation for humankind" (Sjoberg & Vanghn, 1993, p. 151).

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Moral philosophies within the Western tradition, founded in the culture of individualism, assume that only individuals can be moral agents. Sjoberg and Vaughn challenge the individualist assumptions of the dominant moral paradigm by applying the concept of moral agency at both the individual and collective levels. They ask the simple question, "What do we learn about human rights in the modern context if we think of large scale organizations, and not just individuals, as moral agents?" At a point in human history when almost every aspect of economic and social life is dominated by powerful bureaucratic organizations, they invite us to consider whether these organizations should be held morally accountable for their actions? Numerous theoretical implications flow from this countersystem shift in assumptions about human rights and Gideon has devoted much attention to exploring these implications in recent years. His theory of human rights brings into focus moral issues that could not be recognized and addressed by existing moral theories rooted in the individualist paradigm. So, for example, it is possible within this framework to consider organizational decisions leading to the destruction of the environment by toxic wastes, the mass marketing of defective products that take human lives, or the unleashing of nuclear holocaust and biological warfare as moral issues. The shift to organizational accountability for human rights abuses also leads Sjoberg and Vaughn to consider the moral implications of internal bureaucratic structures and processes. While the utilitarian foundations of the dominant ethical perspectives limit our ability to assess the moral consequences of bureaucratic rationalization processes, Sjoberg and Vaughn's sociological framework allows us to see common bureaucratic practices like "social triage" as a moral problem (Sjoberg & Vaughn, 1993, pp. 144-149). Similarly, their approach heightens our moral sensitivity to such issues as bureaucratic hierarchy and blamability, organizational secrecy systems, and problems of intellectual dissent. In the same way that, four decades ago, Gideon highlighted important aspects of the industrial urban environment by contrasting it with the preindustrial city, he has called our attention more recently to previously unexplored moral issues in postindustrial society by contrasting dominant ethical systems with his sociologically based countersystem. In both instances, he has demonstrated the great potential that resides in this unique approach to sociological analysis for dealing with broad structural patterns like the urban environment and bureaucracy. However, the countersystem logic can also be detected in other areas of his work dealing with micro-level processes rather than macro-level structures. I focus now on how the countersystem method articulates with the symbolic interactionist tradition by discussing important connections Gideon has already made in his own work.

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AND THE SOCIAL OF MEANING

In my view, one of the principle strengths of symbolic interactionism is the way in which it informs our understanding of methodological issues in sociological research. For one thing, symbolic interactionism offers a theory of meaning that functions as powerful theoretical justification for the methodological approach preferred by its practitioners - the participant observation method. This method is rooted in the Meadian proposition that meaning is created through symbolically mediated interaction between copresent actors, which is the basis of validity claims for participant observational data. No comparable theory of meaning justifies the validity of survey data. This is certainly a major strength of the participant observation approach and the broader symbolic interactionist project to which it belongs, despite the fact that both of these traditions remain subordinate to survey methods and multivariate modeling in modem sociology. However, while acknowledging this strength, it must also be noted that full potential of symbolic interactionism and participant observation method is, with small exception (Katz, 1999), unrealized in research protocols typically used by its practitioners. What the standard protocols - and even those that advance beyond this standard - lack is a countersystem component. This argument is anticipated in an article that Gideon co-authored with David Snow and Lou Zurcher in 1982 entitled "Interviewing by Comment." While formally dealing with interview methods, Snow, Zurcher and Sjoberg also offer an implicit critique of the standard participant observation and field research approaches. They refer to several forms of distortion that arise in interview situations, ranging from the most overt case of the interviewer's questions "framing" the possible responses by the interviewee, to more subtle forms related to "face saving" efforts by interviewees. The strategy that Snow, Zurcher and Sjoberg endorse for transcending these distorting influences - the "interview by comment" technique - often involves a type of countersystem logic. By offering commentary on shared experiences in the field, researchers can elicit responses from subjects that cannot be explored through the question-and-answer format. This technique can take the researcher beyond empirical "distortions" to an even higher level "discovery process" in theory development when the researcher employs a type of commentary that Snow, Zurcher, and Sjoberg designate as "outrageous statements." Here, the researcher makes comments that, in many cases, purposefully negate the subject's assumed beliefs and values. In responding to this kind of commentary, subjects may

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offer more refined statements of prevailing beliefs and values or they may lead the researcher into areas of implicit or tacit knowledge crucial to the maintenance of group activities. In some instances, outrageous commentary calls forth responses that help to identify taken-for-granted cultural assumptions shared by both subjects and researchers. In discussing the methodological uses of the outrageous comment, Snow, Zurcher, and Sjoberg note the parallel between this strategy and the "breeching" experiments conducted by ethnomethodologists. With the breeching method, the countersytem logic involved in verbally negating cognitive and normative conventions is extended to the behavioral realm. Confronting social actors with verbal and behavioral challenges to the social order highlights the hidden normative structures of everyday interaction. The crucial feature of this method is the contrast the researcher creates between culturally determined patterns of thought and action and alternatives to these structures. The subjects' reaction to these contrasts directs the researcher to cultural conventions that would otherwise remain inaccessible. In this interpretation, ethnomethodology is a research program that shares basic paradigmatic assumptions with symbolic interactionism but differs from the latter in the use of a logic similar to that of counterinductive analysis. Such an approach leads to critical insights in ethnomethodology that are not fostered by most qualitative research conducted under the symbolic interactionist banner. While it is critically important to accurately ascertain the perspective of the actor, researchers must also remain aware of the limitations of the actor' s perspective. We must be careful not to assume that what social actors "know" and can report to researchers must be entirely cognitive in nature. As ethnomethodology clearly reveals and as scholars in other subfields have recently argued, the maintenance of the social order may owe as much to the precognitive dimension as it does to conscious interpretations shared by social actors (Katz, 1999). On another level, researchers must also be concern about the potential ideological biases built into the frames of representation employed by members of the groups they study. The inattention of many symbolic interactionists to how the distribution of power shapes the subject's perspective has been a long-standing criticism of this tradition. The logic of counterinduction can be pushed even further in the quest to transcend deeply embedded cultural constructions that shape the consciousness of actors and researchers alike. In the remaining section of this paper, I will discuss some of the promising developments I see in the use of the countersystem strategy for analyzing the social construction of meaning. What we see in these developments is that Gideon Sjoberg has anticipated, once again, some of the most exciting possibilities.

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We have seen how the "interview-by-comment" and the breeching method reveals the potential of countersystem strategies for getting at deep-rooted presuppositions and normative principles involved in the social construction of meaning. The effectiveness of these techniques for discovering levels of meaning and interaction processes not visible to commonsense consciousness is reflected in the typical emotional and psychological reaction of subjects to these techniques. Ethnomethodologists have described the significant psychological discomfort that breeching experiments cause subjects and have cautioned against indiscriminate use of this technique (Garfinkle, 1963, p. 198; Mehan & Wood, 1975, p. 27). It is often the case that subjects and researchers participating in a breeching experiment experience "anomic terror" - t h e profound sense of anxiety that accompanies social actors' confrontation with the normative or cognitive boundaries of socially constructed reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). This brings us to a body of work and method of inquiry that shares certain affinities with cognitive sociology and the breeching technique. I refer to the poststructuralist perspective of Michel Foucault and his use of the "limit experience." In many respects, Foucault is the social theorist who has been most successful in achieving Sjoberg and Cain's counterinductive goal of "remov[ing] himself intellectually and emotionally from the immediate social situation, to step back and examine his activities in broader perspective" (1997, p. 172, emphasis mine). In a recent book on Foucault, James Miller (1993) explains the methodological significance of "transcendent experiences" in the development of Foucault's ideas. Based on information gathered in interviews with his close associates and an analysis of his writings, Miller documents Foucault's fascination with limit experiences. These involve deliberate efforts to "push mind and body to the break point, hazarding an actual sacrifice of life . .. a voluntary obliteration" (Miller, 1993, p. xx). Drawing on my own conceptualization of this experience as "edgework" (Lyng, 1990b), I would define the "limit" or "edge" in terms of the line between life and death, sanity and insanity, consciousness and unconsciousness, or similar boundary conditions. What is clearly revealed in ethnographic descriptions of a wide range of limit experiences or edgework situations (Lyng, 1990b) is that they are experienced as a counter-reality - an "experiential counter-system," so to speak. Pushing the counterinductive logic to this extreme position may bring instructive issues into relief. For example, in Miller's account, Foucault believed that the only way to truly remove oneself emotionally and intellectually from one's cultural frame

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of experience is by entering the transcendent, counter-reality generated by the limit condition. Foucault looked to the limit experience as an epistemological tool that could, in Miller's (1993, p. xx) words, reveal "how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent." In an extension of the countersystem logic, he sought to discover the cultural imperatives most deeply imbedded in the body and soul of social actors through his own extreme violations of cultural proscriptions and assumptions. He was inspired in this approach by the French biologist and philosopher Georges Canguilhem, who noted that "Norms are recognized.., through infractions. Functions are revealed only by their breakdown. Life arises to the consciousness.., only through maladaptation, failure, and pain" (quoted in Miller, 1993, p. 60). The limit experience thus offered Foucanlt an alternative framework from which to reflect on aspects of cultural system he wished to understand. An explicit reference to the countersystem strategy appears in his opus The Order of Things (1966). Foucanlt calls for a "form of reflection far removed from both Cartesianism and Kantian analysis" that reveals "the being of man in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it"; an "ontology of the unthought" that facilitates the exploration of "somber mechanisms, faceless determinations, [and] a whole landscape of shadow" (quoted in Miller, 1993, p. 50). Such an approach is clearly counterinductive in nature, providing a contrast to cultural formations found at all levels of human experience (the biological, sensory, emotional, and cognitive domains). Foucault's intellectual and personal project involved a life-long attempt to transcend the social reality of a unique time and space in order to see what is normally hidden from the socially determined subject. His limit experience represents a form of countersystem analysis that bridges the gap between micro and macro levels of inquiry. Foucault's work is clearly macro-structural in focus, as reflected in the poststructualist designation often applied to it. But Foucault was also preoccupied with the problem of how the solitary observer can discover the fundamental cultural imperatives that reside in basic desires and emotions, and define the terms of subjective sensation and perception. Thus, for Foucault, to know oneself is to also know the character of macro-structural forces operating in one's social and cultural environment. The centrality of this issue in Foucanlt's work leads Miller to question the "death of the author" thesis that many commentators attribute to Foucanlt. To counter this interpretation of his work, Miller carefully documents how all of Foucault's structural analyses grew out of his fascination with personal experience. Among Foucault's many statements on this subject cited by Miller, perhaps the most explicit reference appears in the last interview before his death.

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Foucault explained that each of his books represented " 'a kind of fragment of an autobiography' that could be approached as a 'field of experience to be studied, mapped out and organized,' by reinserting the previously occluded dimension - of the author putting his 'nature,' and his knowledge, to the test in his 'very existence' " (1993, p. 31). The dialectic of self and society introduces the need for a transcendent method of intellectual discovery, a way for theorists to identify the elements of individual experience they share with others in the culturally constructed space of the "natural" or uniquely "personal." I have suggested that the limit experience, just like the breech, may illuminate ways to get at this taken-for-granted social reality. By moving beyond realms of culturally prescribed knowledge, rules of conduct, sensation, and desire to explore various domains of "alterity," we are confronted with a contrast to what is normally tacitly accepted. As Foucault argues so persuasively, these glossed elements of our experience may serve to maintain the social order more effectively than any other constraining force in human existence. In discussing the limit experience in Foucault's social-cultural studies and its similarity to the breeching and interview-by-comment techniques in interactional studies, it is clear the counterinduction strategy can contribute a deep analytical dimension to the study of socially constructed realities. While most social theorists would not want to embrace Foucault's method and risk their sanity or their lives to achieve deep insights about social reality, the extremity of his approach reflects the difficulty of the problems he wished to address. However, as powerful as this approach and the similar interactional techniques are for penetrating the surface appearances of shared realities, they do not realize the full potential of countersystem analysis. A significant limitation of these counterinductive strategies is that the "contrasting points of reference" in both approaches are limited in scope. They consist of very specific normative infractions in the case of the breech and generalized action patterns in the case of limit experiences or edgework. Thus, the extreme approaches described here illustrate the limitations of a method that does not include "countersystem" analysis, per se, because the breech and limit experience are not models of alternative social systems (although they may derive from alternative systems). In light of these limitations, it must be asked at this point if we've reached a dead end in the search for ways to incorporate countersystem analysis into programs of study tied to symbolic interactionism and cognitive sociology. It appears that some well known scholars affiliated with symbolic interactionism have looked favorably on postmodernism and cultural studies in recent years (Denzin, 1992), perhaps as a way to bring a degree of critical

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awareness to their work that is missing in approaches that privilege the actor's perspective. However, it also appears that many other symbolic interactonists who may be attracted to the critical potential of postmodernist studies are also uncomfortable with other aspects of postmodernism's radical form of constructionism. Another faction has found possibilities for transcending the limitations of symbolic interactionism in returning to the forerunner of this perspective the American pragmatist tradition. Gideon Sjoberg is a member of this latter faction (see Sjoberg et al., 1997), which I believe reflects his understanding of pragmatism's affinity with the countersystem approach. While, at this point, neither Sjoberg nor anyone else has succeeded in connecting countersystem analysis to pragmatist thought in any systematic way, it is possible to briefly sketch how this could be done. Linking the countersystem method with pragmatist ontological and theoretical principles will, in my view, yield a powerful alternative to existing interactionist and post-modernist approaches. A key principle of pragmatism is its focus on breaking down the dualistic oppositions of rationalism. Employing a transactional conception of the relationship between subject and object, pragmatists such as Dewey, Peirce and Mead found little value in the one-sided focus of either the nominalist or objectivist theories of their era. For Mead (1938/1972, p. 65), the unit of existence is the act and human action brings together subject and object in a mutually constitutive process. Reality emerges through collective signifying practices and therefore has human thought and symbols already embedded in it (Shalin, 1993, p. 316). As human agents transact with tile physical and social environment, they construct the objective conditions of their existence. Thus, environmental objects can be understood as "those features that answer to or sustain the particular capacities of the individual to act toward them" (Franks, 1987, p. 13). By rejecting dualism in favor of a transactional conception of the subjectobject relation, pragmatism offers an ontological framework for conceiving of social problems as products of collective signifying practices but products that are objective in nature. This objectivity is manifested as a certain resistance that an obdurate reality offers to human cognition and action (Franks, 1989, p. 169). Perhaps the most significant pragmatist challenge to dualistic thought can be found in the perspective's approach to issues of validity and explanation. A succinct expression of this approach is the pragmatist assertion that truth is "a practically accomplished unity of knowledge and reality" (Shalin, 1992, p. 266). This statement is full of implications for various matters important to sociology but in the space that remains, I will restrict the discussion to one key problem. I will focus on what the pragmatist definition of truth implies about the relationship between "basic" and "applied" research in sociology.

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One of the most enduring features of the division of labor in post-war American sociology is the separation between the development and verification of theoretical models (the domain of "basic research") and the application of this knowledge to the resolution of practical problems (the domain of "applied research"). This separation has been made possible, in part, by the institutionalization of verification procedures that are disconnected from the application of sociological knowledge to the resolution of real world problems. But such a separation was an anathema to the early pragmatists who argued that the verification of ideas can be achieved only through transaction in the material world. Valid ideas are those that lead to efficacious action in the external environment. And when ideas directing action produce unexpected results, the validity of these ideas must be questioned and a reformulation is in order (Lyng & Franks, forthcoming). Hence, in the pragmatist framework, separating basic research from the activities associated with the application of research findings cannot be justified - valid knowledge is produced through the use of systematic procedures for implementing ideas in a practical context. Pragmatism provides a strong theoretical rationale for connecting basic and applied research; but deriving concrete methodological strategies for unifying theory and praxis from this highly abstract system of thought is difficult. Thus, the pragmatist framework offers no guidance for how ideas can be implemented in pragmatic reality-testing and contribute to structural changes in the social order. It is also unclear how ideas and conceptual systems used in pragmatic problem solving are precisely related to the analysis of existing social conditions. These issues can be addressed by identifying a method of analysis that establishes a more detailed logic and procedure for linking basic and applied research - the method of countersystem analysis. The countersystem method pulls together the various strands of theoretical thought discussed here by logically connecting deconstruction and reconstruction as components of a continuous research process. In this framework, the reconstructive dimension serves multiple purposes. First, the construction of alternative social arrangements (reconstructing existing conditions) can be oriented to the goals that typically guide pragmatically-oriented researchers, running the gamut from critical theorists and postmodernists to applied researchers. This part of the research agenda is dedicated to identifying solutions to social problems but it accomplishes this task in a novel way. In order to avoid defining problems and their potential solutions in an ideologically-determined way, a model of alternative social arrangements (a countersystem) is constructed and used as a reference point for identifying social problems within the existing system. This strategy draws on Jurgen Habermas's (1973, p. 22) insight about the use of hypothetical models to ensure the

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objectivity of one's analysis of the existing social order. By defining social problems from the standpoint of a hypothetical system, i.e. identifying the ways in which existing conditions diverge from ideal arrangements, one can negate the influence of the prevailing interest structure in determining what constitutes a social problem. The countersystem also serves as a general template for constructing solutions to the problems identified. In confronting the broad range of alternatives for dealing with a problem, priority can be given to approaches that contribute to social change in the direction of the countersystem ideal. Conducting applied research in this way creates the need for a strong analytical component insofar as social problems are defined through comparative, structural analysis. This is the place where the applied program logically connects to the program for basic research and it is here that we find a second major purpose of the reconstructive dimension. The construction of alternative social models can also fulfill an important function in the development of basic theory. By serving as a systematic contrast to the existing social system, the countersystem can be used as a reference point from which to critically analyze the current system. A (re)constructed social model serves as an essential resource for a deconstructive analysis of prevailing structural imperatives hence, reconstruction and deconstruction are linked as inseparable parts of the research process. CONCLUSIONS This brief and broadly sketched outline of a countersystem approach rooted in the pragmatist ideas of Dewey and Mead falls far short of anything resembling a blueprint for a new theoretical/methodological framework. Moreover, in presenting these ideas here, I do not mean to imply that Sjoberg would necessarily endorse the approach I've outlined. My goal has been to demonstrate one way that countersystem analysis can be connected to ideas associated with the symbolic interactionist and pragmatist traditions, a general goal that I think Gideon has pursued in various ways throughout his career. My hope is that the ideas I ' v e presented here will stimulate others to consider how connecting countersystem analysis to pragmatist thought could provide new ways to resolve some of the enduring problems that have plagued symbolic interacfionism in the past. For example, it is possible that the study of interpretive processes, interaction, self, and society from the standpoint of a true countersystem could help to dissolve the unfortunate division between the micro and macro level analysis. At the same time, employing countersystem models in the analysis of interpretive processes could add an emancipatory and critical component to symbolic interacfionism that has been largely absent in this tradi-

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tion. Addressing these problems is imperative if symbolic interactionism is to remain viable as a research paradigm in the future. In closing, I want to comment on the original organizing theme for this collection of papers: "Gideon Sjoberg as a Symbolic Interactionist: Yes and No." As a scholar who developed a keen appreciation for the power of counterinductive methods early in his career, Gideon has been pushed by the logic of countersystem analysis to work on the margins of established theoretical or methodological traditions. This is because Gideon's dialectical consciousness could never leave him comfortable with any thesis that does not also incorporate its antithesis. So, while his scholarship reflects a long-standing affinity with symbolic interactionism, it also reveals his preoccupation with the broad-based structural imperatives that unfortunately have been of little concern to many members of this field of study. In this sense, his work is a model to all who have the courage to abandon the safety of established traditions in pursuit of the anomic, and sometimes exhilarating, challenges of intellectual edgework. Does his work potentially expand symbolic interactionism? I say yes. Is his work confined by extant symbolic interactionist boundaries? I say no. But should this be the case with any of us? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, in San Francisco, August, 1998. The author gratefully acknowledges David D. Franks for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

REFERENCES Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Denzin, N. (1992). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. Feyerabend, P. (1978). Against method: Outline of and anarchistic theory of knowledge. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1966). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage. Franks, D. D. (1987). Thoughts and Deeds: Toward a Typology of Action for G.H. Mead's Social Behaviorism. Unpublished manuscript. Franks, D. D. (1989). Power and role-taking: a social behaviorist's synthesis of Kemper's power and status model. In: D. D. Franks & E. D. McCarthy (Eds), The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers (pp. 153-177). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, Inc. Garfinlde, H. (1963). A conception of and experiments with "trust" as a condition of concerted

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stable actions. In: O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Motivation and Social Interaction. New York: The Ronald Press Company. Habermas, J. (1973). Theory and Practice. Boston: Beacon. Katz, J. (1999). How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyng, S. (1990a). Holistic Health and Biomedical medicine: A Countersystem Analysis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lyng, S. (1990b). Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4), 851-886. Lyng, S., & Franks, D. D. (Forthcoming). Sociology and the Real World. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Mead, G. H. (1938/1972). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mehan, H., & Wood, H. (1975). The Reality of Ethnomethodology. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Miller, J. (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shalin, D. N. (1992). Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge. American Journal of Sociology, 98(2), 237-279. Shalin, D. N. (1993). Modernity, Postmodemism, and Pragmatist Inquiry: An Introduction. Symbolic Interaction, •6(4), 30-32. Sjoberg, G. (1960). The Preindustrial City. New York: The Free Press. Sjoberg, G. (1996). The Human Rights Challenge to Communitrianism: Formal organizations and race and ethnicity. In: D. Sciulli (Ed.), Macro Socio-Economics: From Theory to Activism (pp. 273-297). New York: M. E. Sharpe. Sjoberg, G. & Cain, L. D. (1971). Negative values, countersystem models, and the analysis of social systems. In: H. Turk & R. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Sjoberg, G., Gill E., Littrell, B., & Williams, N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 13, 78-92. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Williams, N., & Kuhn, K. E. (1995). Ethics, Human Rights and Sociological Inquiry: Genocide, Politicide and Other Issues of Organizational Power. American Sociologist, 26(1), 8-19. Sjoberg, G., & Nett, R. (1997). A methodology for social research. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (reissued ed.). Sjoberg, G., & Vaughan, T. R. (1993). The ethical foundations of sociology and the necessity for a human rights perspective. In: T. R. Vaughn, G. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (pp. 114-159). Dix Hills: General Hall. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Williams, N. (1984). Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20(4), 441-453. Snow, D. A., Zurcher, L. A., & Sjoberg, G. (1982). Interviewing by Comment: An Adjunct to the Direct Question. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 285-311.

UNLOCKING THE IRON CAGE: H U M A N AGENCY A N D SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 1 Elizabeth Gill

INTRODUCTION I came to know Gideon Sjoberg and his scholarship by way of my interest in the certainty of death and the uncertainty of dying. It is Sjoberg's underlying concern with the active, reflective human agent that became the basis for my empirical and theoretical attempts to understand the interface between the human agent and large-scale bureaucratic organizations - among dying individuals and families under hospice care, and hospice volunteers embedded within health care organizations. Woven throughout Sjoberg's scholarship is a deep, abiding concern with the salience of bureaucratic organizations and their direct and indirect impact on individuals' life-worlds in particular, and social life in general. His preoccupation with the problems and possibilities associated with Weber's "iron cage of bureaucracy", as articulated in Habermas' distinction between "life-world" and "system," not only inspires his musings about the relationship between the human agent and structure but also pervades a great deal of contemporary sociological inquiry and is the focus of this essay.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 109-128. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Supplementing Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework with Joas' Theory of Creativity, it is my intent to address Habermas' concern with the tension between the social system and the life-world of individuals by empirically specifying the complex relationship between human agency and social organizations. 2 During the course of my investigation of hospice volunteers, I have examined the ability of active, reflective human agents, within the bureaucratic system of hierarchy and complex division of labor, to, both formally and informally, reflectively carve-out space within these organizations, space that allows them to shape the course of events and find substantive meaning. More specifically, I am concerned how hospice volunteers reflectively and creatively "use" and manipulate the medical structure to achieve objectives that are often counter to the expressed goals of the health care organization. Employing Joas' concept of "situated creativity," I focus on the unexpected and novel ways that volunteers may respond to a particular situation by considering the physical possibilities, normative expectations and institutional arrangements that structure the field in which the action takes place (Joas, 1998). 3 Thus, for the purposes of my analysis, creativity becomes a form of action employed by volunteers in response to structural constraints. By considering creativity as an activity, and by empirically specifying the processes by which human agents carve-out communicative space within the organizational context, I hope to develop a modified Habermasian framework that further clarifies Giddens' position on the enabling and constraining possibilities for human agents within large-scale organizations, thereby bridging the gap between the pragmatist tradition and the Weberian heritage. NATURE

OF THE DATA

Through use of Sjoberg and Cain's (1971) countersystem methodology to compare and contrast the hospice way of death to that of the medical model's, I was able to delineate systematically the structural features of the health care system that profoundly impact the dying process. It is precisely these structural realities that the hospice organization seeks to address. The hospice philosophy of care attempts to preserve the dying individual's life-world from system control by carving out a niche for the dying to achieve "a decent and fulfilling human life" until death. My research examines how hospice volunteers, responding reflectively, challenge the taken-for-granted day-to-day routines within health care facilities by devising means to protect and sustain the

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life-worlds of their clients and their associates as well as the life-worlds of themselves, within the structured medical environment. The two primary sources of data for this project were a series of in-depth interviews and participant observation. In addition, I supplemented these materials with a set of open-ended questionnaires. Data for the study were collected over a seven year period from 1992 to 1999. I conducted in-depth interviews with 40 hospice volunteers in two large metropolitan areas in Texas and Virginia. The volunteers I interviewed were disproportionately female (96%) with 88% over age 50. My respondents reflect the composition of the hospice volunteers in these areas. While I asked certain basic questions of all volunteers, the interview guide provided only the general topics for initiating a dialogue with the respondents. I asked questions and made comments so as to engage the respondent in a conversation with respect to how she (or he) adapted to the dying person, family and the medical organizational setting (cf. Snow, Zurcher & Sjoberg, 1982). Concomitantly, prior to and during the formulation of this research project, I became an active hospice volunteer and used these experiences as a cornerstone for my analysis. I found the volunteers to be actively involved not only in patient and family care but also with one another. Volunteers are required to meet on a regular basis every month or two, and they also attend seminars, luncheons and fundraisers. My experience as a patient/family caregiver enabled me to participate as a member of the hospice team consisting of a chaplain, nurse, home-health aide, social worker and occupational therapist. As an active volunteer I was involved in direct care and interaction with the patient and family and with the staff of the medical organization in which these activities are embedded. My participant observation served three distinct functions. First, I gained first-hand experience and knowledge of hospice practice. 1 was able to achieve "empathy" with the volunteers whom I interviewed as well as a better understanding of their responses, and I was able to acquire, through my own observation, an understanding of the demands placed upon the role of the volunteer. It is only through this direct observation that I could come to terms with the vagueness of the role expectations of the volunteer. The inexplicable nature of the role made my participation in the volunteer role invaluable. Second, I gained an understanding of the hospice experience that allowed me to contrast my role (i.e. the volunteer role) with that of other hospice professionals. Third, through my participation in the activities of the hospice organization - e.g. training sessions, conferences and fundraisers - I learned about the activities of volunteers whom I did not interview. I discussed various issues with them at considerable length which added depth to my analysis.

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In addition to my participant observation and in-depth interviews, I also mailed out a set of questionnaires. The questionnaire, which, aside from a few background questions, was open-ended in form, was sent to volunteers chosen randomly from a list of volunteers in the two areas. This enabled me to supplement my original interviews and add depth and diversity to the pool of respondents. I mailed 40 questionnaires to volunteers of which I received 23 completed surveys. The creativity of hospice volunteers served not only to highlight the importance of human agency, but also to dramatize the importance of the bureaucratic structure in shaping their responses to the dying individual. This volunteer perspective proved invaluable primarily due to the fact that volunteers are "in but not o f ' the hospice organization. In order to understand the relationship between the hospice volunteer and the dying individuall it is important to understand the contradictory nature of the volunteer role compared to the roles of medical personnel. Volunteers are not subject to the same professional mandate as the professionals and staff associated with hospice. The nature of each role is defined, to some extent, by the organizational setting with which the caregiver is associated and operates. More specifically, the time and provision of care of a health care provider is generally regulated by routinized procedures based on the needs of the organization rather than the needs of the patient. The volunteer role, unlike the roles of medical and hospice personnel, is not predicated on efficiency. The volunteer is able to address the needs of the patient that are not fulfilled by paid professionals as a result of the specifications mandated by their professional affiliation with medical organizations. Their actions are not constrained by prescribed rules associated with professional caregiving; thus, they typically hold a unique position within the hospice team in relation to the dying individual, the family/caregivers, and the medical organization. Inasmuch as the volunteer role is loosely defined and subject to very few specifications, the volunteer is able to bring to bear certain "tools" that are unavailable to health care professionals within the confines of a medical environment. The tools of listening and touching, luxuries often not afforded to paid professionals, enable the volunteers to bring a unique perspective to bear on the dying process. As a result, my research indicates that the volunteers are self-reflective about the rules and authority that characterize these health care organizations. This reflectivity enables the volunteer to develop a stock of knowledge and set of skills to carve-out space within the organizational context. In order to develop a framework in which to interpret the complex relationship between the human agent and structure, I will outline several key themes, some of which overlap with Sjoberg's concerns with bureaucracy and

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human agency. First, I will briefly describe the "iron cage" and explore several keys that have been tried to liberate human agents from its constraints: namely the pragmatism approach as expressed in Habermas' Theory of Communicative Rationality. Then, selectively drawing upon Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework and Joas' Theory of Creativity, I will explore the possibility of a "marriage of sorts" between the pragmatism tradition and the Weberian heritage - or a modified Habermasian framework - which recognizes the constraining and creative possibilities for human agency within these large-scale organizations. Finally, relying upon my research involving hospice volunteer interpretations of the dying process, I will examine what Hans Joas refers to as "situated creativity" as one possible key to unlocking the iron cage of bureaucracy and articulating the relationship between agency and structure.

WEBER'S "IRON CAGE" AND HABERMAS' ESCAPE As Max Weber (1946) observed, the more the nature of bureaucracy is perfectly developed the more bureaucracy is dehumanized. The more it succeeds in eradicating personal and emotional elements from its daily operations, the closer bureaucracy comes to perfection. Weber coined the phrase "the iron cage of bureaucracy" to describe the loss of freedom, meaning, and respect for human life associated with the success of bureaucratization within a society. The movement away from ritual and community to bureaucratic management and medical treatment of dying patients is logically consistent with broader patterns of social living. Thus the modern image of a dying person connected by tubes and wires to life-sustaining equipment is a logical derivative of America's bureaucratic and technological orientations (Moller, 1996). This image, reflective of an ever increasing percentage of deaths within formal institutional settings, embodies the loss of human dignity and autonomy associated with the powerful large-scale bureaucratic organizations and Weber's "iron cage." These organizations, characterized by a hierarchy of authority, division of labor, and emphasis on standardization and efficiency, have restructured peoples' lives and deaths. Although Weber considered the human actor to be central to much of his work, when it came to his formulation and analysis of the "ideal type" of bureaucracy and bureaucratic organizations, he gave little or no consideration to the human agent. Weber's agent was destined to become enmeshed in the bureaucratic constraints of the "iron cage." His lack of attention to the possibility of agency within bureaucratic organizations runs counter to my findings about the hospice volunteers' actions within large-scale bureaucratic

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organizations. My data indicate that a complete understanding of the interaction order and human agency, without denying the significance and influence of large-scale organizations, requires an examination of the overlapping, yet somewhat independent, spheres of human agency and the organizational structure. Thus, in order to escape the inevitability of the "iron cage," I sought a theoretical framework that could liberate the human agent within the bureaucratic organization while acknowledging the structural realities of the formal organizational context.

SEPARATION OF THE SYSTEM AND THE LIFE-WORLD The major response to Weber's lack of attention to agency has come from Jurgen Habermas. Habermas' objective has been to confront Weber's fear of bureaucracy run amok and provide an escape from Weber's "iron cage" by relying on the pragmatist heritage. 4 Combining a highly abstract interpretation of Weber with the theorizing of George Herbert Mead, Habermas distinguishes between the public/private spheres of an individual's life-world (comprised of both civil society and the family) and the public sphere of the system. The crux of Habermas' worldview is the maintenance of a life-world that is somewhat independent of the processes of bureaucratization or rationalization associated with the system. His conceptualization of society as both a social system and a life-world reduces the pessimism inherent in the Weberian paradox of modernization. Habermas emphasizes that a central characteristic of the life-world is the ideal speech community wherein reasoned argumentation is the basis for achieving consensus. But his formulations break down in such instances as the issue of death and family. For instance, many members of American society die in hospitals under the care of hospice workers. That the concept of argumentation and the ideal speech community should apply to the interaction between a hospice worker and a dying person dramatically reveals Habermas' failure to come to terms with a number of facets of the life-world. More specifically, despite his acknowledgment of the duality of society comprised of both the system and the life-world, Habermas' analysis falls short of acknowledging the interaction that occurs between the two spheres. Habermas seems to assume symmetry in power between the system and the life-world by suggesting that norms, developed and maintained within the life-world, are the link between the life-world and the system. Thus the life-world becomes not only the embodiment of liberation and communicative rationality apart from the system, but also of the development and maintenance of norms. But,

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Habermas' dual conceptualization of society proves to be impractical when applied to the empirical world. He typically views interaction between the two as unidirectional, with the life-world normatively informing the system. He seems to imply that in order to preserve and protect the integrity of the life-world, the system must not intrude upon the normative and communicative boundaries of the life-world. Any such intrusion is viewed by Habermas as pathological resulting in the colonization of life-world structures; thus, like the pragmatists, he never addresses the negotiations that occur between the communicative structures of the system and the life-world and the possibility of system maintenance of the life-world. EFFECTS

OF THE

ORGANIZATION

CONTEXT

UPON

THE L I F E - W O R L D Although the distinction between the life-world and system proves to be invaluable when trying to come to terms with the effects of organizations on human agency, it seems that Habermas is overly optimistic about the integrity of the life-world apart from the system. 5 My data indicate that Habermas' attempts to merge symbolic interactionism and functionalism results in a false dichotomy between the life-world and the institution/system levels of society (Joas, 1993, p. 141). I have found that the system, particularly in relation to death and dying, does have a profound impact upon individual life-worlds. My examination of hospice as an alternative to the systemic management of death and illness illustrates the possibility of negotiation between the system and the life-world that is not necessarily "pathological" in nature. Contrary to what one might expect, if one accepted the Habermasian frame of reference, my research indicates that one of the latent functions of hospice is to mediate between the broader medical system and the individual and family/caregivers. The volunteer role provides a bridge between the system and the life-world. In a sense, the volunteer straddles the boundaries between the two worlds, becoming the link between the long-term facility and/or hospital (i.e. system) and the life-worlds of the dying individual and caregivers. Without this link, hospice principles would not be viable within bureaucratically structured medical settings. The volunteer, if he or she is 'to be effective, often needs to act in the capacity of mediator or arbiter not only between the family and the system but also between the hospice organization and the health care system. Thus, even for analytical purposes, the system cannot be artificially separated from human activities; we must come to recognize the constraining and creative possibilities for human agency within these large-scale organizations. The social constraints imposed by the system must be understood in a dual sense as both

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constituent features of people's reasons and motives as well as part of the "external" set of cultural resources and obstacles to the fulfillment or achievement of objectives (Layder, 1997). Recognizing the fallibility of the system/life-world distinction, Sjoberg has argued that Weber's analysis of bureaucracy, Habermas' system/life-world distinction, and symbolic interactionists' analysis of agency must be modified in order to understand how large-scale organizations function by taking into account the relationship of human agents to bureaucratic organizations. My analysis of hospice volunteers' interpretations of the dying process depends upon the elaboration of this relationship in order to expand the concept of human agency in relation to large-scale organizations.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN AGENCY AND STRUCTURE: THE PRAGMATIST HERITAGE In dealing with the problem of understanding the interaction patterns of hospice workers with the dying persons within the context of the organizational structure of hospitals, I draw upon Gideon Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framwork which has emerged in a set of essays on bureaucracy stretching over more than three decades. My interpretation of these becomes the foundation for my own analysis. In my view, he makes two moves that are important. One, he has for years contended the concept, "social mind," which Mead recognized as emerging in interaction situations, and Dewey's concept, "intelligence," should be given special attention. Sjoberg (1999, p. 49) states: With respect to the nature of human agency, Mead's (and Dewey's) conceptions are far superior to those of Weber. Mead talked not only about the social self but about the social mind (or Dewey's social intelligence); both the self and the mind are products of social interaction. It is because of the social mind that we can think about thinking and carry on conversations with ourselves. The social mind makes possible complex social calculations as well as social memory. Viewed in this manner the human agent comes to be more proactive than generally understood. Second, we find in Sjoberg's writings specifics about the nature of organizational life that one can uncover in Habermas's abstract theorizing. In many ways Sjoberg's concerns with the tensions that exist between human agents and formal bureaucratic organizations parallel Habermas' focus on tensions between the system and the life-world. 6 According to Sjoberg, in order to comprehend the intersection of human agents and bureaucratic organizations, we must understand the ability of human beings, within the organizational context, to use and manipulate social

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structures. 7 Dewey (1985) also recognized the "indispensability of context" for thinking and acting. However, his understanding that action is conditional on the agent's judgment of the situation is limited. By emphasizing experimentation in response to novel situations, the pragmatist tradition denies the structured nature of situations (i.e. institutional arrangements/relations) that are already named and their profound impact on an agent's response to a situation. Sjoberg (1999, p. 50), too, is critical of the pragmatist tradition's lack of attention to the effects of organizations on social behavior: When we place active human agents within a formal organizational context, we find that they interpret and reinterpret rules (or norms). Yet, concomitantly, they are unable to do so in the free-wheeling manner suggested by Mead, Dewey or Blumer? One's position in the organizational hierarchy and in the web of the division of labor structures one's interactions with others and sets boundaries upon the kinds of interpretation that are possible (or even permissible), the kinds of information at one's disposal, and one's knowledge base in general.

A comparison between Dewey's "experimentation" and Sjoberg's "manipulation" suggests that Dewey's agent works outside, or beside, the system; whereas, Sjoberg's agent works within the confines of the system, but often uses it to overcome the system's restrictions. We find that human agents, in this case, hospice volunteers, come to have generalized "mental pictures" or "mental images" of organizations and that these mental constructs guide their interaction with the staff members of the hospital organization. This stock of knowledge is acquired not through professional training but through their experiences outside the hospital setting, and they bring this stock of knowledge to bear as they interact with dying patients, families, nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators. 9 In point of fact, the need to attract and retain a large number of volunteers, coupled with the lack of funding to support in-depth training, means that hospice volunteers are not subject to extensive training. Respondents found the hospice training program to be useful on one level, but as one volunteer stated, "training should be viewed with a measure of common sense." This guarded view of hospice training was reflected in an article authored by an active volunteer grappling with the nature of the volunteer role: . . . (Training programs) do not nor should they be expected to be a cookbook course on how to be the perfect volunteer. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as the perfect volunteer, training courses are designed to introduce volunteers to the hospice concept, give some examples as to what we might do, and help the trainees acquire useful skills. Volunteers who admit that they leave these courses not knowing exactly what it is to be a volunteer are being honest. We draw upon what we learned in our training as we deal with our families so that a volunteer really begins to appreciate the training course only after he or she begins to visit families. As far as I am concerned, it is volunteers' gut level reactions as

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caring and resourcefulhuman begins that make them good volunteers;training, continuing education, and experiencewith hospicefamilies sharpen and mold these reactionsover time (Rich, 1985, p. 41). In order to be an effective member of the hospice team, volunteers must bring their own "stock of knowledge" (Schutz, 1970) to bear on resolving issues. The "gut reaction" mentioned above parallels Sjoberg' s concept of the "social mind." Thus volunteers are informally socialized through experientially and socially acquired knowledge, as well as contact with other volunteers, to be reflective about their position within the bureaucratic structure. For example, volunteers would attend monthly "sharing sessions" to discuss issues and caring strategies. These instances of socialized reflectivity provide the knowledge required by the volunteer to challenge the taken-for-granted practices within the health-care setting and uphold the principles of hospice care. I have found, in the context of my research, that once a terminal patient is institutionalized, the dying patient and family/caregivers abdicate some responsibilities and control to the medical organization. The personalized care that is characteristic of the hospice organization is supplemented and replaced to a certain degree by the staff of the long-term care facility or hospital. The standardization of everyday practices within health care organizations is often taken-for-granted - but it is virtually impossible for the hospice volunteer to ignore the organizational constraints that come to define their activities. The structured medical environment poses several systemic barriers that challenge the volunteers' role performance, constantly reminding them of their marginality and lack of legitimacy within the structured medical setting. Although formal hospice training rarely stresses the potential obstacles volunteers face within a health care setting, experienced volunteers are very much aware of the constraints placed upon them within the organizational structure.

CONSTRAINTS AND CREATIVITY Since most hospice patients, at some point in theft illness while under hospice care, will be placed in a medical facility, the volunteers must be able to operate within an organizational environment that is not designed to accommodate the inefficient, non-professional and unspecified nature of their role. According to the basic standards of hospice care, one of the primary objectives of hospice is to shield the dying individual and family from the routinization and segmentation associated with large-scale bureaucratic organizations such as hospitals and extended care facilities. Thus the greatest challenge facing the volunteer operating within a medical setting is the maintenance of the hospice philosophy of care.

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In order to explain social action within the health care setting, social theorists must develop a conceptual framework that accounts for the complex interaction between the human agent and the structure. Toward this end, Sjoberg's writing can be usefully supplemented with the theorizing of Giddens, who perceives of human agents encountering organizational rules as both enabling and constraining from the perspective of a proactive human agent. While Giddens' analysis alerts us to the enabling/constraining feature of organizational rules, his conceptualizations are too generalized to be helpful in specifying how human agents come to define the enabling and constraining aspects of social structure. We must also incorporate the recent work of Hans Joas, who, writing within a symbolic interactionist, or pragmatist, orientation, emphasizes the creativity of human agents. Joas' concept of "situated creativity" calls upon us to focus on the novel ways in which a human agent may respond to a particular situation, acknowledging the physical possibilities, normative expectations, and institutional arrangements that structure the field in which the action occurs. Joas specifically addresses Habermas' oversight with respect to agents by objecting to the systems side of Habermas and the dualism of what Habermas calls "the uncoupling of system and life-world" (Joas, 1998, pp. 216-220). The concept of situated creativity is akin to Dewey's terms of "reconstruction," and "intelligence," which refer to the process by which an embedded agent redefines a situation in response to obstacles. It also serves as a useful supplement to Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework by highlighting creativity as a form of reflective action: "Anchoring creativity in action allows the pragmatist to conceive of creativity precisely as the liberation of the capacity for new action" (Joas, 1998, p. 133). In my view, Joas' concept of creativity is a product of the social mind (a concept he does not address in a direct manner) and comes sharply to the fore as hospice workers seek to carve-out "social space" (or an aspect of the life-world) for themselves within the hospital setting so that they can meaningfully interact with a dying person. And we find, as we proceed to analyze the data on hospice workers, that the reshaping of organizational contexts may vary considerably from situation to situation and from volunteer to volunteer. I have found that volunteers employ structure creatively by: (1) carving-out social space, (2) combining resources of the organizations in creative ways by soliciting the help of other organizational actors (i.e. sympathetic professionals), and (3) using selective elements of the structure to achieve their objectives. Not only are volunteers creative with respect to the elements of the structure of the facility, but they are also creative in terms of their interaction with the dying individual and their families that are rooted in their understanding and grasp

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of the organizational structure. Based on their image of the organization and their position within it, the strategies employed by volunteers enabled them to operate effectively within the structured medical environment by circumventing certain systemic barriers and constraints. Knowledge of the workings of the health care bureaucracy is so salient that the tenure of those volunteers who do not have some common sense grasp of the organizational arrangements is short-lived. CARVING-OUT

"SOCIAL

SPACE"

The volunteer has no clearly defined role within the health care setting. Even within the hospice organization itself, volunteers are considered to be "gap-fillers" when it comes to caring for a dying individual and the family/ caregivers. In my research, the lack of role specificity associated with the hospice volunteer role dramatizes the slippage between the agency and structurally defined expectations. The volunteer role itself is unique in that it is not characterized and defined by strict guidelines mandated by professional affiliation. In fact, hospice training stresses the tenuousness of role constraints. Each situation is evaluated on its own merit; thus, the volunteer must adapt to a myriad of possibilities and constraints within a given situation. Volunteer responses reflect how the fluidity of the situation affected their role performance within the medical setting: Case 1: My role is a reflection of the situation I am in. Some patients are physically able to do more things than others. Some family members need me and others simply tolerate me. Some facilities are more flexible in the kinds of things that I can do. Case 2: I go slowly into each new situation. I try to be very observant and I listen to assess what my role will be. Now I realize that it will never be the same as any other time. I help in whatever way I can and do what must be done. A majority of the respondents enjoyed the freedom involved in assessing the needs of the patient and family caregivers and bringing the appropriate behavior, as defined by the volunteer, patient, and family caregivers, to bear in a given situation. They had a considerable amount of license or agency in the determination of the behavior with respect to the dying individual, family/ caregivers and health care setting. Despite the fact that there is a considerable amount of freedom and flexibility involved in the volunteer role, there are still certain societal and organizational restrictions that delimit the boundaries of agency. In order to operate effectively within the health care setting volunteers must use their knowledge about constraints to create a buffer, or a "social space," between those in power and those who seek the "good death" for individuals struggling

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to find meaning within the bureaucratic setting. Organizations typically do not spell out rules in a specific sense, and thus leave "spaces" for persons to act on their own. The social space available to the volunteer within the medical setting is space that has been sanctioned by the medical establishment because of its lack of desire to deal with issues of death and dying. Volunteers, aware of the constraints placed upon them and those in their care by the health care organization, must actively acquire this space and make it their own. More specifically, the volunteer must mediate between actors with formalized roles as well as the broader organizational structure in order to carve-out this sanctioned space. In the words of one respondent, "the difference between simply being a volunteer and being a good volunteer is one's ability to make the facility work for, not against, the patient and the family/caregivers."

SYMPATHETIC PROFESSIONALS The volunteer respondents recognized the importance of engaging those within the system in order to preserve the hospice philosophy of care within the health care facility. One strategy utilized by the respondents involved working within the complex division of labor which characterizes the medical setting in order to further interest the staff of these facilities in the care of their patient. Efforts were made by the volunteers to interest key caregivers within these facilities by personalizing their patient/family and elevating them above the "business as usual" or "simply another terminal case" attitudes in the eyes of the staff. Toward this end, respondents stated that they would seek out professionals within these health care facilities (i.e. nursing homes and hospitals) who were sympathetic toward their cause. These "sympathetic professionals" can best be characterized as health care professionals who either have not been well socialized to system rules or who have chosen to challenge these rules in the course of their duties. The volunteer respondents indicated that they would cultivate these relationships by employing such strategies as: (1) professional admiration and/or sympathy for the health care staff and their occupations; (2) individualization and personalization of the patient/family by telling their "story;" or (3) via threats and innuendo about the quality of care that their patient was receiving. The following cases illustrate how the use of these "sympathetic professionals" by the volunteers enabled them to carve-out the "space" required for themselves and the patient/family: One volunteer recalled a frantic mother's reaction to the "atrocious" conditions of a nursing home in which her son had been placed: The woman clung to me like a life preserver. I was a familiar face in a sea of strangers, She was almost inconsolable: "They don't care about my son. They are all on deathwatch

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waiting for him to die. No one here knew him before he was sick. They don't care if he is clean or comfortable, all they want is for him to die. I am terrified that he will die alone, with no one around him that cares." All I could do was promise her (the mother) that I would sit with him while she rested and ate. I assured her that I cared about her son, and that he would not be alone when he died. I also talked to the nursing home staff and persuaded them (i.e. through flattery and empathy for their working conditions) to spend some quality time with mother and son. Some of them were very accommodating, and the mother noticed the difference immediately. This particular case is indicative of m a n y o f the respondents' experiences, particularly in l o n g - t e r m care facilities. A c t i n g in this capacity, the v o l u n t e e r w o u l d attempt, not to change the system, but reach a c o m m o n m i d d l e - g r o u n d b e t w e e n the system and hospice ideals. Respondents typically v i e w e d these situations in terms o f " p e a c e m a k i n g efforts" in the face o f a crisis (death). This often m e a n t extra effort on the part o f the v o l u n t e e r to fill in the gaps of care d e l i v e r e d by the hospital or e x t e n d e d care facility, as w e l l as efforts to further interest the staff in the care of the dying individual: In order to accommodate patient/family wishes, I get to know one or two staff members who are helpful and are willing to often go against nursing home policies in order to fulfill certain patient needs. One case involved taking a patient to a local mail. It was against home policy to remove a patient without a family member's signature. His wife was the designated caregiver, but she was in a mental institution at this time. With a lot of wrangling (i.e. under the pretense of being his daughter in conjunction with a couple of aides who were especially fond of the patient), I was able to take this man to the mall. It was his last outing. T h e s e "sympathetic professionals" enabled the volunteers to c a r v e - o u t a " s p a c e " for t h e m s e l v e s and the patient/family. The a f o r e m e n t i o n e d cases highlight, first, the a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t o f the system by the volunteer; and secondly, the ability of the v o l u n t e e r to e n g a g e those representing the system on their o w n terms, with the v o l u n t e e r ultimately c a r v i n g - o u t space within the organizational structure and shaping the dying process.

KNOWLEDGE/EXPERIENCE A n almost universal difficulty e x p e r i e n c e d by respondents in the institutional setting was one o f legitimacy. S e v e r a l respondents expressed frustration at their inability to c o m m a n d respect within the f o r m a l health care environment. O n e respondent in particular w e n t to great lengths to use her k n o w l e d g e o f the structure to carve-out a " n i c h e " for herself and her patient within an e x t e n d e d care facility:

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From day one, I was treated with suspicion. Almost every time I visited my patient, I had to explain who I was and why I was there. Because of my lack of professional credentials, questions were raised by the staff as to my competency. It became clear that my patient was not receiving the proper care and was in constant pain. I felt like the very principle of hospice care, a pain-free death, was being shunned by the staff. I called in the hospice nurse, who once again explained the concept of administering unscheduled pain killers before pain was experienced. I was then taken to the administrator's office, by the nurse, and introduced as a vital member of the hospice staff. Outwardly, my standing within the organization improved, but I was still regarded as suspect by the staff. A n o t h e r r e s p o n d e n t r e c o u n t e d h e r l i t e r a l a d o p t i o n b y t h e f a m i l y in o r d e r to o p e r a t e e f f e c t i v e l y w i t h i n t h e e x t e n d e d c a r e facility: Every time I visited my patient I spent more time explaining myself and my duties to the staff than I spent actually caring for my patient. Nursing home staffs have a high rate of turnover, as well as flexible shifts; thus I hardly ever visited when there wasn't one or two new nurses' aides, nurses or staff that I did not have to validate my presence to. Eventually I adopted the role of daughter to my patient. Despite the fact that my patient really believed that I was his daughter and his wife also considered me as a family member, I was finally able to spend quality time with my patient. A n o t h e r s t r a t e g y u t i l i z e d b y t h e v o l u n t e e r s w a s to i n d i c a t e to m e d i c a l p e r s o n n e l a certain degree of medical knowledge or experience beyond the volunteer role. S e v e r a l v o l u n t e e r s h a d b e e n h e a l t h c a r e p r o f e s s i o n a l s a n d u t i l i z e d this e x p e r i e n c e to attain a c e r t a i n a m o u n t o f r e s p e c t f r o m m e d i c a l p e r s o n n e l a n d s t a f f within medical settings: This particular nursing home is probably one of the worst in the area. The facility is filthy and the staff treat the patients like animals. Volunteers are generally treated as a nuisance and ignored. One day I walked in and saw the aides throwing my patient around like a sack of potatoes under the auspices of changing his bed. That was the last straw. I informed them that I had been a nurse and that I would report their activities to the proper authorities. Suddenly, I was transformed from nuisance to threat. After that, my patient received special care and respect (at least as far as I knew) and so did I. I have since used this strategy from the outset of my relationship with a particular facility. It is nice to be taken seriously. V o l u n t e e r s s t r e s s e d t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f n o t b e i n g " d u m b " in s i t u a t i o n s in w h i c h y o u a r e a l r e a d y at a d i s a d v a n t a g e as f a r as p r o f e s s i o n a l status. O n e v o l u n t e e r l e a r n s as m u c h a b o u t t h e i l l n e s s o f h e r p a t i e n t s as s h e c a n in o r d e r to p a s s h e r s e l f o f f as a n " e x p e r t " a n d r e c e i v e t h e r e s p e c t a n d p o w e r that g o e s a l o n g w i t h it: Case One: It makes no sense to walk into a situation unprepared. Nurses and doctors already view volunteers as sweet, well-meaning people who probably are unable to do anything else with their lives. Why make the situation worse by playing into that stereotype... I always try to volunteer "smart." I want to have as much information as I can before I walk into a particular setting to meet a particular patient/family and medical personnel. I feel that this

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gives me an advantage with the medical staff... I have already broken their conceptualization of the typical volunteer. Case Two: I read everything I can about my patient's illness ... I have found that this not only helps me deal with my patient, it also allows me to appear to be pretty savvy to the nurses and doctors I have to deal with. I think they are never really sure if I have had medical training or not ... I keep that kind of vague. They respect my knowledge; I like that; it also gives me the opportunity to oversee the care of my patient. In most cases if I complain about the care of one of my patients, I get results. The aforementioned cases dramatize the importance of knowledge, feigned or otherwise, in establishing legitimacy within the health care environment. The hospice nurse as a bridge between the volunteer, health care staff, and dying individual; the mimicking of status as a family member or health care professional; and the use of the inferred knowledge of a retired nurse are illustrative of the volunteers' ability to creatively manipulate the health care professionals and system. On the basis o f m y empirical studies, I do not feel that the traditions of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, or the Habermasian Theory of C o m m u nicative Rationality, have gone far enough in explaining the impact of organizations on interaction. The volunteer experience cannot possibly be explained simply in terms of process or negotiation, for oftentimes the volunteer will simply act without negotiation. Moreover, the volunteers interviewed were very much aware of the constraints they face within the organizational context and where they stand in the pecking order of the bureaucracy in terms o f status and knowledge. Thus the volunteers, because of their unique relationship and marginality to the system and the patient/family life-worlds, were able to develop a reflective stance toward the constraints of the health care setting and use this insight to carve-out communicative space within the organization. This communicative space provides an opportunity for the dying to live out their final days unencumbered by the "iron cage."

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS M y attempt to articulate the relationship between agency and structure expands upon S j o b e r g ' s efforts to understand the ability of human beings to reflectively use and manipulate social structures. By supplementing S j o b e r g ' s Alternative Meadian Framework with Joas' Theory of Creativity, I have sought to bridge the gap between the pragmatist tradition and the W e b e r i a n heritage. The result has been a modified Habermasian framework that recognizes the constraining and creative possibilities for human agents within large-scale organizations.

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I found the hospice volunteer to be more proactive with respect to structure than Weber and the symbolic interactionists have acknowledged; but, by the same token, the volunteer is also more influenced by the constraining and creative possibilities of the organization than the pragmatists and Habermas wish to concede. Sjoberg's acknowledgment of the proactive agent, who is bound by the constraints within the organizational context but capable of reflectively interpreting and reinterpreting the rules, has provided the basis for my analysis of the volunteer within the medical setting. His Alternative Meadian Framework animates the actor with respect to the organizational structure and allows for the possibility of the human agent capable of reflectively using and manipulating the social structure. My research data suggest that hospice stands as a buffer between the family and civil society with hospice as a broker, mediating between the family, and the civil society and broader system. The role of the volunteer challenges some of Habermas' basic principles concerning the relationship between the system and the life-world. As indicated above, the volunteer role often demands that the volunteer act in the capacity of mediator or arbiter not only between the family and the medical system, but also between the hospice organization and the medical system. In Habermasian terms, the volunteer attempts to maintain and buttress up the boundaries of the life-world within a system that threatens to "pathologically" intrude and destroy the life-worlds of the patient and family/caregivers. Respondents often acted to alter either the medical or hospice organization in a way that was more true to the original hospice ideals. Joas' (1998) concept of "situated creativity" enabled me to address the shortcoming of Habermas' system/life-world distinction by examining the human agent's creativity with respect to particular situations, defined by the physical possibilities, normative expectations, and institutional arrangements that structure the dying process. This research provides an empirical illustration of a perennial theoretical problem inherent in Habermas' conceptualization of the life-world and the system. Inasmuch as Habermas' analysis is highly abstract and subject to somewhat differing interpretations, it nonetheless seems evident that he does not grapple with the complex interpenetrations of the system and the life-world and how, if the life-world is to be viable, it is necessary for human agents to actively carve out social space for themselves within the context of organizational structures. My research indicates that hospice workers have to accommodate complex organizational smactures in order to cope with dying patients. And it is reasonable to assume that many spheres of the life-world (or of civil society) require similar creative efforts. The life-world does not simply manifest itself to human agents as a given but requires the active participation by human agents

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in carving out social space for themselves within the context of organizations, be these corporate or state. It is within this "creatively fabricated" sphere of society that human agents are able to sustain communicative rationality and counter the dominant orientation toward instrumental rationality on which organizations are founded. A n d it is through this communicative rationality that human agents can achieve freedom to cope with not only issues such as death, but also with other basic life- world concerns as well. In conclusion, my data indicate that refusal to acknowledge the organizational context sells human agency short. In a sense we discredit the agent's ability to manipulate or challenge the structure based on his/her reflective evaluation of the organizational context. 1° A modified Habermasian framework that incorporates Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework and Joas' concept of Situated Creativity liberates the human agent from the "iron cage." By recognizing the ability of human agents to reflectively evaluate the social constraints placed upon them within the organizational context we open up the possibility for creative activity and unencumbered discourse.

NOTES 1. A form of this paper was presented at the August, 1998, Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, in San Francisco. The late Stanley Saxton and I organized a special session entitled "Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No." 2. Although others have used Habermas extensively in their examination of the life-world (i.e. family and civil society), no one, including Habermas himself, has acknowledged the actual practices used by human agents to develop and sustain social space within the private spheres of family and civil society. 3. Despite the strengths of Joas' position, my research indicates that he is not as clear as he could be that situated creativity assumes agents capable of monitoring the world and then reflexively processing the information received. 4. Symbolic Interaction (1992) had a special issue devoted to Habermas, but his views have not, in my judgment, been incorporated into subsequent SI discourse. Although, as will become evident, I have reservations about some of Habermas' formulations of the life-world, his overall concern with unlocking the iron cage is a major advancement over previous theorizing. 5. Habermas is not alone in his determination to separate out the life-world f r o m the broader system. Bellah explicitly, and other Communitarians, implicitly, reassert the value of an autonomous life-world, but, even Bellah et al. (1991), in their book The Good Society, are reluctant to invoke Habermasian terminology, which acknowledges little if any possibility of system change in response to the life-world. Although Bellah relies heavily on the Habermasian framework in his analysis of the family, he is unwilling to ignore the possibility that, despite the fact that the system is very powerful in relation to the life-world, it cannot be changed.

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6. Sjoberg's views regarding organizational structures differ from those of Strauss and Malnes but seem congruent with the recent wIitings of Peter Hall. Hall (1997) has argued that social organization has strong effects in shaping social action through the creation, construction, and alterations of social situations. 7. Relying on Mead's (1934) concept of the "social mind," Sjoberg conceptualizes a human agent within the formal organizational context who is capable of reflectively interpreting and reacting to the rules of the organization. 8. Blumer (1969) acknowledged the effects of social organizations only so far as they shaped the situation by stressing the stable, orderly, and standardized context of social organizations. Modern-day interactionists who turn their attention to social organizations focus on the dynamic and contingent contexts of social organizations without highlighting the reflexive nature of human agency within these organizations. For example, many symbolic interactionists have studied the negotiative processes within organizations considering the structural conditions as one of a myriad of factors affecting the negotiation process but fail to specify the concrete strategies employed by individuals in response to the boundaries and potential barriers of the structural context (Strauss, 1978, 1982, 1993, 1998; Maines, 1982; Hall, 1987; Fine, 1984; Hall & Spencer-Hall, 1982; Kleinman, 1982; Levy, 1982). 9. A majority of the volunteers in this study joined hospice after the death (or successive deaths) of a loved one. Volunteerism became a result of either frustration over the type of death they had witnessed or in response to having come into contact with hospice during the course of their loved one's terminal illness and death. 10. Leon Warshay (1962) argued that the greater the actors' "breadth of perspective" (which he defined as experience, knowledge and contact with others), the larger their repertoire for action and the greater their ability to be effective problem solvers and role-takers. I would extend Warshay's insights to symbolic interactionism and include the caveat that the breadth of perspective in symbolic interactionism should encompass an understanding of the impact of large-scale organizations on social life and human agency.

REFERENCES Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, R., & Tipton, S. M. (1991). The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dewey, J. (1985). The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 6. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Fine, G. A. (1984). Negotiated Orders and Organizational Cultures: Qualitative Approaches to Organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 10. Flabermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reason, Vol. II. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hall, P. (1997). Meta-Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action. Symbolic Interaction, 20(4), 397-418.

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Hall, P. (1987). Interactionism and the Study of Social Organization. Sociological Quarterly, 28, 1-22. Hall, P., & Spencer-Hall, D. A. (1982). The Social Conditions of Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 328-349. Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleinman, S. (1982). Actors' Conflicting Theories of Negotiation: The Case of a Holistic Health Center. Urban Life, 11, 312-327. Layder, D. (1997). Modern Social Theory: Key Debates and New Directions. London England: UCL Press Limited. Levy, J. (1982). The Staging of Negotiations between Hospice and Medical Institutions. Urban Life, 11,293-311. Maines, D. (1982). In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 267-279. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moller, D. W. (1996). Confronting Death: Values, Institutions & Human Mortality. New York: Oxford University Press. Rich, M. (1985). A Personal View of the Volunteer's Role: Expectations and Realities of Hospice Work. American Journal of Hospice Care, (May/June), 41-46. Schutz, A. 1970. Alfred Schutz: On Phenomenology and Social Relations. H. Wagner (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snow, D. A., Zurcher, L. A., & Sjoberg, G. (1982). Interviewing by Comment: An Adjunct to the Direction Question. Qualitative Sociology, 5, 285-411. Strauss, A. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, A. (1982). Interorganizational Negotiations. Urban Life, 11, 350-367. Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sjoberg, G. (1999). Some observations on bureaucratic capitalism: Knowledge about what and why? In: J. L. Abu-Lughod (Ed.), Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges (pp, 43-64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G., & Cain, L. D. (1971). Negative Values, counter system models, and the analysis of social systems. In: H. Turk & R. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Williams, N., & Littrell, B. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 13, 73-92. Sjoberg, G., & Miller, P. J. (1973). Social Research on Bureaucracy: Limitations and Opportunities. Social Problems, 21, 129-143. Sjoberg, G., & Vaughan, T. R. (1993). The bureaucratization of sociology: Its impact on theory and research. In: T. R. Vaughan, G. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (pp. 54-113). Dix Hills: General Hall. Warshay, L. (1962). Breadth of perspective. In: A. M. Rose (Ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach (pp. 148-176). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds). New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1949). The Methodology of the Social Sciences. E. A. Shils & H. A. Finch (Eds). New York: Free Press. Zurcher, L. (1983). Social Roles: Conformity, Conflict, and Creativity. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

GIDEON SJOBERG, METHODOLOGY AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Boyd Littrell

INTRODUCTION This article addresses the nature and importance of Gideon Sjoberg's methodological writing, with an eye to symbolic interaction (SI). His surprisingly large body of methodological work offers food for thought for proponents of other perspectives as well. But the occasion 1 for which part of this paper was originally written, together with the growing importance of pragmatism in Sjoberg's more recent writing makes SI the natural focus of attention. Two main sections follow an initial introduction to Sjoberg's methodological work, which spans nearly fifty years. The first takes up theoretical matters, beginning with what Sjoberg often calls his "'strange' sociology of knowledge perspective." That perspective, crucial for Sjoberg's methodological position, forces him to address the problems of historicism and relativism, which, in turn, drive him to rethink the nature of objectivity in the social sciences. These themes, in my view, drive his methodological concerns. The second main section addresses five recurrent themes of Sjoberg's methodology, which taken together, outline a distinctive approach for sociologists who strive to retain a conception of objectivity while honoring multiple realities or perspectives. The five recurrent themes are: the role of the Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 129-150. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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researcher in a world of multiple realities; the importance of counter-system analyses; the difficulty of selecting units of data and of analysis in a world of multiple realities; the historical importance of the rise of bureaucratic domination; and the importance of moral/political solutions for the problem of facts and values. A concluding section, "Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No" takes up the importance of these issues for both Sjoberg and for SI.

GIDEON SJOBERG AS METHODOLOGIST To my knowledge, no one has written an overview of Sjoberg's methodological writing, though he has written a substantial body of work on the subject. His first article on "descriptive sociology" appeared in 1951. His edited volume Ethics, Politics and Social Research (1967) addressed important methodological concerns, and several prominent sociologists of the time contributed to that volume. Even more directly, a year later, Sjoberg and Nett, (1968) devoted a monograph/textbook to sociological methodology, which Sjoberg re-issued in 1997, with a new and lengthy introduction. Sjoberg joined Feagin and Orum (1991) in an edited volume entitled A Case for the Case Study, to which Sjoberg et al. contributed a 50 page chapter, and part of the 27 page introduction. Between the first and last of these books Sjoberg produced a substantial number of articles with important methodological themes. All in all, Sjoberg has written and/or edited about 25 articles and books that are directly concerned with methodology. In addition, he inserts methodological reflections into other books and articles. And finally, he has taught about methods in one or another seminar at The University of Texas at Austin, since 1950. 2 The amount of written material on methodology and his long history of courses on the subject prompt two related questions. First, if Sjoberg is a methodologist with an extensive list of publications on the subject, why has recognition of his methodological work been slow in coming? And second, in what sense is Sjoberg a methodologist? While answers to these questions have both conceptual and social and historical elements, space limitations preclude a discussion of the social and historical components. Part of the answer to the question about delayed recognition as a methodologist has an ironic twist. Put simply, Sjoberg was famous for The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (Sjoberg, 1960). That volume brought notoriety for its author from several disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, and history. Sjoberg's professional stature benefited from this concern about cities, and his recognition came as an urbanist, not as a methodologist. The second question, "What kind of a methodologist is Sjoberg?" requires more detailed discussion.

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PERSPECTIVE Sjoberg often prefaces presentations and conversations by referring to his "strange" sociology of knowledge perspective. The "strangeness" to which he refers both acknowledges a debt to Karl Mannheim, and tips off his departure from Mannheim's views. Although diverse sociologists have contributed to the sociology of knowledge, 3 I have begun this section with Mannheim, because Sjoberg (1968, p. 10) himself began by distinguishing his view from Mannheim' s. Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) developed his sociology of knowledge from diverse strands of thought. But the most important of these was Marx's view that knowledge of the everyday world belonged to super-structural features of social and economic life. Because the super-structure, in turn, depended upon a specific mode of production, Mannheim concluded that knowledge was rooted in social and economic life.4 Mannheim took much from Marx, but not everything. For example, in his essay "The Problem of Generations," Mannheim explained that human experience and knowledge was located in time, as well as in class position. Because the youngest living generation experienced very different social and historical conditions from the oldest living generation, they had different perspectives, quite apart from class position. For Mannheim, this guaranteed the existence of a "multiplicity of standpoints" including, but not limited to social class. As did Mannheim, Sjoberg's methodology emphasizes the importance of "multiple standpoints" and realities that are "socially located." Unlike Mannheim, Sjoberg (1968, p. 10), insists that knowledge must be located in relation to diverse social and historical conditions. Initially, this appears to reflect Sjoberg's historical and comparative "bias." But this apparent "bias" is in fact a technique for addressing the problem that bedevils all sociology of knowledge perspectives: relativism. If knowledge can be reduced to its social location or social roots, all knowledge, including that of sociologists, is relative. No single standpoint can claim authority for knowledge. And an inquiry that cannot claim authority, becomes "just another opinion." One can best understand Sjoberg's methodology, by contrasting his solution to the problem of relativism with Mannheim's. Mannheim's solution was °'historicist." One branch of historicism argues that history moves by its own laws. Comte's positivism, Marx's materialism and Hegel's idealism differ in many respects, but they all share the view that the laws of history could be discerned. Mannheim preferred Marx's materialist history, which, for him, plugged the hole of relativism. Mannheim reasoned this way. The

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transformation of modem capitalism, had, as Marx concluded, produced two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. But it had also produced intellectuals who were members of neither class: they were "free" or "unattached." Such a group was caught amid multiple and contradictory concerns. As a practical matter, Mannheim thought, an "unattached" intelligentsia faced one of two resolutions to its experience of multiple contradictions. It could adopt the standpoint of either of the two classes and develop the intellectual problems facing that class. Or they could (Mannheim, 1936, p. 158, my italics) scrutinize "their own social moorings and the quest for fulfillment of their mission as the predestined

advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole." Mannheim plugged the hole of relativism by adopting the latter alternative, and thus he rescued a form of objectivity. He argued that intellectuals, who were partially freed from either antagonistic class, were positioned to examine the situations of both classes. They were, therefore, able to "advocate the intellectual interests of the whole." Objectivity, for Mannheim, consisted in grasping the place of both classes within the larger movement of history. Sjoberg also solves the problem of relativity by reconciling multiple standpoints with objectivity. And Sjoberg, like Mannheim, plugs the hole of relativity with history. But Sjoberg appeals to a very different conception of history. He rejects the determinist interpretation (there are others) of Marx's history, and appeals to a sense of history much nearer to Dewey's pragmatism. In his biography of Dewey, Alan Ryan (1995, p. 39) summarizes Dewey's attitude toward the relationship between knowledge and history: 5 Every philosophical system expressed a particular personality and a particular culture located in a particular time and place. Philosophyanswered to the needs and interests and talents of the author and to the needs and interests and resources of the society in which that author lived .... To see it as the product of a particular culture ... and temperament was not to belittle it... But how can one solve the problem of relativism by, on some views, accepting it? Sjoberg announced his answer (1968, p. 10): We shall use [the sociology of knowledge] ... as a methodological device . .. with this tool the scientist can move beyond his own system to a degree, provided he employs the sociology of knowledge as a mirror in which to examine himself in cultural perspective. He added, "By examining the social forces that impinge upon the social researcher, we can at the very least objectify them and thus bring them to the level of consciousness." I shall return to the metaphor of the mirror below. Sjoberg and Nett, here, redefine the problem of objectivity very differently from Marxism and from positivism. This redefinition of objectivity follows a nearly identical move by Dewey who wrote about philosophical

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systems rather than sociological methodology. Ryan (1995, p. 39) quotes Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy concerning the consequences of this shift: "Instead of disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we have the scene of human clash of social purpose and aspirations." But how does this Deweyian 6 view of history save objectivity from relativity? The answer lies in Sjoberg and Nett's remark that cross-cultural, historical and comparative study serves as a "mirror in which the sociologist can examine himself" (my italics). The metaphor of a cross-cultural mirror provides an important clue. The problem of objectivity does not lie in getting one's observations properly matched up with fixed nature or lawful history. The problem of objectivity lies in gaining clarity and a practical certainty about one's own views, conclusions and claims. If I understand Sjoberg's view, objectivity in this sense can be achieved only by laying one's views down beside the views of others in the cross-cultural mirror, thus gaining an impression of him/herself. Researchers' accomplish objectivity and certainty about their own work only by comparing it with perspectives unlike their own. Here Sjoberg advances a perspective that can be fitted into Mead's (1927) discussion of the "objective reality of perspectives." Mead's discussion has roots in his study of psychology and in philosophical underpinnings that Sjoberg's does not explicitly address. The individualism of Mead's social psychology, and the abstractions of Mead's metaphysics, would, I think, trouble Sjoberg. But a strong similarity between Mead and Sjoberg's conceptions of objectivity must be highlighted. Mead (p. 307) argued, as did Merleau-Ponty (1962), and I think for the same reasons, that "communication, thinking, and substantive meanings" are inextricably "planted" or embodied in nature. Nature, in so far as it can be known, can only be known from some standpoint; and the standpoint is itself part of nature because it exists in a body, at a particular place and at a particular time. Nature, in turn, becomes a fixed reality only in relation to a particular standpoint. On this view the only way to think of "all of nature" is to think of all possible standpoints. As a practical matter, no one can think of all possible standpoints. The practical question to which Mead repeatedly turned was: "How do we become confident of our own standpoint?" His answer was that we take must first take the standpoint of others; from that standpoint we can identify our own. This logical necessity lies at the core of Mead's theory of socialization, but is found elsewhere, as well. In the essay to which I am referring (p. 312). Mead writes simply, "In the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self. It is in addressing himself in the role of an other that his self arises in experience."

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Sjoberg, as did Mead, recognizes that one's own standpoint is rooted in a particular place and time. Like Mead, Sjoberg's methodology seeks objectivity, as clarity and practical certainty, by analyzing the standpoint of the sociological researcher in relation to others. Sjoberg saves objectivity from relativism by throwing the researcher's position into question, and by making the researcher's role in relation to others a matter for analysis. Importantly, Sjoberg does not invoke consensus or scientific convention as the solution to objectivity. As did Mead, Sjoberg recognizes that the researcher's standpoint has equal standing with other standpoints. Researchers see themselves clearly or objectively, by sustaining multiple standpoints and by counterpoising other standpoints with their own. To be sure, objectivity understood in this way, always remains open to revision. But this openness of scientific thought, is the very principle that makes science "science," rather than, for example, "tradition." Science is always open to revision. One should note here that Sjoberg's methodological orientation requires that standpoints of the powerless, the poor and the oppressed must, in principle, be included in order to achieve an objective account of society and social relations. While Dewey and Mead were on the right side of such issues, they did not make them central intellectual concerns. Cornel West (1988), for example, takes the pragmatists to task for ignoring race as a central intellectual problem in America. And Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996) makes a similar point with respect to feminism in her discussion of missing perspectives. In their different ways, West and Seigfried note that Dewey and Mead may have articulated a pluralist and inclusive view of science and history, but they did not make race and gender central intellectual issues. Those are fair criticisms; criticisms that Sjoberg's conception of objectivity insists must be addressed. To summarize: Sjoberg's sociology of knowledge is "strange" if one takes Mannheim's sociology of knowledge as the standard. Sjoberg's begins, as did Mannheim, with the idea of multiple realities or standpoints. But Sjoberg rejects the idea that the relativism threatened multiple realities can be thwarted by the laws of an external and objective history. And Sjoberg surely rejects Mannheim's view that intellectuals are "free" or unattached. Indeed, as intellectuals have become increasingly institutionalized in universities they are not only "attached" to corporations on the law and business side of the campus, and to governmental agencies and contracts everywhere else, they have become the very creatures of these organizations and their interests (Sjoberg & Vaughan, 1993, pp. 59-75). Sjoberg agrees with Mannheim on the central point, that objectivity can be achieved only by describing a multiplicity of standpoints. Sjoberg's sociology of knowledge is strange because he parts company with Mannheim's view of history. Sjoberg's departure ends with a move to Dewey and Mead's

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conception of history as a shifting arrangement of standpoints, in which a, and perhaps the basic methodological problem involves understanding the effects of the researcher's role on research, and in turn, upon knowledge itself. Curiously, The Preindustrial City illustrates the logic of the perspective. A historical and comparative look at cities imposes limits on the kinds of generalizations American, urban sociologists can make. That does not deny, falsify, nor disqualify the importance of the Chicago sociologists. But it forces limits to their claims of generality. The payoff for this limited claim to generality, lies in opening a door to a broader class of generalizations about urban structures and processes. In brief, only by laying the modern industrial city against the pre-industrial city is it possible to isolate the distinctive features of either type. Further, recognition of two distinct types of cities issues an invitation to yet further reflection and broader generalization: what dimensions are presupposed in this typology? Are their others? Such a process of inquiry opens the way to what has been called the "limited universal," which for our purposes has the form, "All of the types of cities we know . . . " and to systems of classification that take the form "Cities may be distinguished on the basis of . . . " To be sure, such science has open horizons, but it nevertheless permits useful generalizations. This is exactly how both Sjoherg and Dewey conceive of science. Dewey (1927, p. 175) argued that the positivist conception of science (one adopted by mid-twentieth century sociologists) had distorted the meaning of science: The glorificationof 'pure' science.., is a rationalization of an escape; it marks a conslruction of an asylumof refuge, a shirking of responsibility.The true purity of knowledgeexists not when it is uncontaminatedby contact with use and service. It is wholly a moral matter, an affair of honesty, impartialityand generous breadth of intent in search and communication. With that observation, Dewey draws this section to a close, and introduces the next one, which takes up five recurrent themes in Sjoberg's methodology. Sjoberg's "strange" sociology of knowledge perspective resolves the problem of relativism by redefining both the meaning of history and the nature of science. These themes fill out his revision of the idea of objectivity, and serve to guide social researchers' inquiries. Other themes might be identified; but these five are crucial to his re-conception of objectivity against a background of the problems of relativism and historicism just discussed.

SJOBERG'S METHODOLOGICAL THEMES Sjoberg's central methodological problem should now be clear. He seeks to devise a conception of objectivity for a world of multiple realities, without

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resorting to historicism or relativism. This problem has given rise to five persistent themes, 7 that address questions about how to achieve such a conception of objectivity. They are: (1) the role of the researcher, (2) the idea of countersystem analysis, (3) the problem of units of data and units of analysis, (4) the historical problem of bureaucratic domination, and (5) the moral and political dimensions of science. Each of these themes is important in its own right. Taken together, however, they elaborate a framework for a kind of objective knowledge that consists of multiple realities. His conception of objectivity, we have seen, involves developing certainty about one's own perspective.

1. Multiple Standpoints, the Role of the Researcher and Objectivity Since at least the mid-1950s Sjoberg (1954-1955) has analyzed the role of the researcher within the research process. Because both the researcher and the object of study are rooted in a specific social situation, inquiry must address the question "What is the position of the researcher with respect to that situation?" This question requires both a conceptual and an empirical answer. The theme appears in several places, but Sjoberg's (1967) edited volume Ethics, Politics and Social Research provides an important example. To the contemporary ear, tuned by diverse bureaucratic controls over research, that title may suggest a volume devoted to political circumspection, the intrusions of review boards, and the like. But that is not the volume's purpose. It offers, instead, an analysis of the role of the researcher. A careful look at the table of contents reveals that contributors are divided into two distinctive roles: "Insiders" and "Outsiders." Contributors in the first category wrote of their own experiences in contested settings of social research; contributors in the latter group commented on the experiences and reports of researchers in contested settings. This organizing division of the book sets up an analysis of the researchers' roles. The analyses presented in each chapter explore the effect of researchers' roles on the kinds of understanding and conclusions they reach. A comparison of contributions by the two categories of researchers reveals quite different concerns. Writing as an insider, Irving Louis Horowitz, for example, reviews his own motives about research that was published as Revolution in Brazil (1964). He is confessional as he observes that the "revolution" he studied was much less democratic than he had originally supposed, and that and his research had been used much differently than he intended. Leonard Cain, an "outsider" examines a research project organized by two sociologists, who recruited others to administer a questionnaire about health-

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related matters. The original two provided instructions that favored healthy respondents from upper income groups. Questions guided respondents toward conservative answers about insurance issues. These biases were not reported in the authors' paper nor in a report they published. The report drew conclusions that supported the American Medical Association's position against federally supported health insurance, and was picked up by The Wall Street Journal. Cain called attention to the shortcomings of the research and its misuses, which had been reported as objective research. One might fairly ask if the organization of this book represents a methodological principle, or if it simply deploys a convenient editorial device? The recurrence of the theme in Sjoberg's work makes clear that he views it as a central methodological problem. In the reissued Methodology, Sjoherg (1997, p. xviii) reflects on Merton's 1972 essay, "Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge," which was published five years after Sjoberg's Ethics book. He includes a chapter written by Williams and (Andree F.) Sjoberg (1993) who revise and modify Merton's ideas, relating them to white feminists and women of color. What about Sjoberg's "mirror" of cross-cultural perspective? Sjoberg (1967, p. xiv) explains that he "hoped to include two additional chapters on the ethical and political problems of research in other societies, but the authors w e r e . . , unable to complete these." Nevertheless, four of the fourteen chapters address research in cross-cultural settings. Sjoberg and Nett (1968) devoted the fourth chapter of the Methodology to "The Researcher and the Social System." Then Sjoberg (1997, p. xxii) reiterates the theme in the reissued edition of that book. Good evidence suggests that the inside/outside distinction illustrates Sjoberg's reflection on the role of the researcher as a methodological principle: a principle that seeks objectivity by looking at different perspectives. Sjoberg's perspective reverses the conception of objectivity set out in standard methods texts. In those texts, objectivity is gained by attempts to remove researchers from the settings of their research by means of standardized stimuli, randomization of respondents, and conventional standards of analysis. No thoughtful researcher would deny the value of such techniques for specific purposes. But Sjoberg denies that one can rest claims of objectivity for sociological research upon such techniques.

2. Countersystem Analysis and Objectivity Sjoberg's second theme is "countersystem analysis." Countersystem analysis also examines the researcher's role. But where the role of the researcher focused the need for multiple standpoints to gain certainty about the researcher's own

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situation, counter system analysis attempts to get outside the researcher's situation or social system. The effort is, ultimately, impossible; but the effort to do so sensitizes researchers to constraints of which they were unaware. "Countersystem models" and "countersystem analysis," thus contribute to objectivity. Sjoberg and Cain's (1971) chapter "Negative Values and Countersystem Models" provides a point of departure. Sjoberg and Cain take up the central theoretical problem of Talcott Parsons' work, the integrative function of values. Sjoberg and Cain (p. 214) observe, "that for any positive value a negative counterpart not only logically exists but is frequently empirically manifested." They argued that Parsons had neglected the importance of such "negative" values for social integration itself. After scuffling with Parsons on his own turf (the problem of order and system integration) Sjoberg and Cain examined the importance of negative values for analyzing social change. They wrote (p. 218) "If the perspective of the actor is accepted as relevant to sociological analysis, then we see no way to analyze change within systems without explicit recognition of negative values." They (p. 219) continue: "Emergent negative values are an essential precondition for undermining faith in traditional action patterns or more generally in the legitimacy of the existing structure. Negative values are thus the mechanism by which doubts about the normative order are raised and the supportive value system are raised and resocialization initiated ... Throughout the chapter, the authors illustrate their analysis of negative values with specific historical illustrations ranging from New Deal programs, to McCarthyism and revolutions. Then, in the concluding section of the article, they (p. 224) reflect on the methodological importance of their work. The countersystemrepresents the analyticalnegationof, and logicalalternative to, the system or type of system under examination. It differs from the antisystem model in that countersystem is a tool for analysis rather than a weapon for attacking the system ... the countersystem model invites social scientists to cope rationally and systematically with alternatives to existing systems. (italics in the original) These remarks illuminate another problem of objectivity. One threat to a sense of certainty about one's findings lies in the recognition that researchers' standpoints form one reality amid multiple realities. But the problem of getting "outside" the standpoints of one's own society is even more difficult than identifying multiple realities within it. How, does one gain a sense of certainty about one's findings while recognizing one's own standpoint is socially and culturally circumscribed?

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Sjoberg and Cain's countersystem analysis serves a specific purpose in shedding light on this question. It helps researchers, who are rooted in the societies they study, to make a partial escape from their own societal categories. "Negative values" and "countersystem models" offer analytical tools to generate alternative perspectives from within one's own social world. By analyzing negative values and by imagining opposite arrangements, or at least by negating existing arrangements within their own society, researchers can take a short step outside their own society. Consider, as an example, Davis and Moore's famous thesis that inequality was functional for a society, though it inflicted pain on some individuals. This pain, in turn overwhelmed some and spurred others to highly skilled positions. In their conclusion, they grasped a truth about modern economies, but not the truth. When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to slow the U.S. economy, it hopes to trade increased unemployment for lowered inflation. When the IMF forces devaluation of world currencies, it does much the same thing. In one respect, the evidence is strong that the world works like this; and this is doubly true from the standpoint of a central banker. But countersystem analysis invites at least two "negative" questions about the central banker's (and Davis and Moore's) standpoint, and it does so from within the same society. First, can one find conditions within one's own society where their thesis does not hold? For example, some people become members of the clergy, professors, nurses or police officers because they care about serving others; and at least some of them devote great effort, imagination, and energy to that end. Or again, can one identify groups of highly paid persons who contribute generously to larger social arrangements? Yet again, do the incomes of professional athletes, movie stars and pop-music celebrities support or undermine Davis and Moore's thesis? The second question asks whether one can imagine societies, or institutions, where Davis and Moore's functional thesis does not operate. Returning to Sjoberg's cross-cultural mirror, can one find different historical examples that run counter to the generalization proposed by Davis and Moore? If one cannot imagine alternative arrangements, and if no such historical examples can be found, one must accept Davis and Moore's thesis, at least until further evidence is in. On the other hand, if counter examples, from within one's society, or if examples from other societies come readily to mind, then Davis and Moore's generalization must be revised. Countersystem analysis includes elements of mental experiments, of social description and of reflection that helps researchers evaluate their own situation. It opens a route of escape from the tyranny of one's own standpoint, and in doing so, offers another possibility for increasing confidence and certainty in

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one's findings. Countersystem analysis thus serves the aim of objectivity by opening a "possible" reality with which to compare the researcher's own findings.

3. Units of Data and of Analysis The need to define and justify units of data and analysis forms a third theme to which Sjoberg repeatedly returns. This theme addresses the fact that social science data are as socially and culturally embedded as are social researchers. The chapter Sjoberg et al. (1991, pp. 36-39) wrote about the basic methodology of case studies offers a point of entry into this discussion. The authors argue that a case study may form a unit of analysis, but that this unit of analysis must itself be analyzed and specified as part of the research process. This requirement, however, cannot rely on conventions, such as a Standard Metropolitan Area.. Such conventional units may specify a unit of analysis, but they can do so only if specific social, historical and cultural boundaries, are specified with respect to different dimensions of research. Sjoberg's commitment to the importance of multiple standpoints forces him to look at units of data and analysis. These units too are embedded in standpoints, and they too must be understood as such. For example, I have always suspected social scientists' easy use of offense-specific crime data. Offense-specific data are "standardized" only if one accepts the legal definition of charged offenses as descriptive of the methods by which those charges are produced. Yet it is hard to imagine a more socially and culturally embedded institution than criminal law and its administration. In cases such as murder, robbery, and rape a more or less standardized definition may be widely agreed upon, even cross-culturally. But recent DNA evidence very strongly suggests that even cases involving the death penalty in the U.S., are far less settled than crime control authorities and politicians want to admit. Death penalty cases seem to reflect culturally-held racial and ethnic biases, among others. But for the vast majority of crimes, even a tenuous agreement is doubtful. For example, U.S. crime control agents think that eating certain mushrooms is a crime. But at least some Native Americans think eating mushrooms is a longstanding part of religious ceremonies. Drug control agents believe that people should be imprisoned for marijuana use. But many physicians and others believe marijuana is a valuable medication for glaucoma and for easing anxiety and nausea in connection with chemotherapy, among other medicinal uses. To assume that convictions for murder, peyote use, or marijuana use reflect a standardized unit of analysis, is possible only after the offense is charged.

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The point is conceptual: what constitutes a conventional unit of analysis risks suppressing all other standpoints that are included in the situation associated with some offense. The problem becomes even worse with crimes that lack particular victims, for example fraudulent medical billing, SEC fraud, or even simple loitering. Very often these crimes can be defined by authorities, only after suspected behavior has occurred. Criminologists who tease theories about offenders' attributes related to infractions, face difficult methodological problems. How does one identify predisposing characteristics of individual offenders, from units of analysis that are defined, often post facto, by interested authorities? Although the example is mine, it illustrates Sjoberg's point: that units of analysis are, "loaded." They are shaped by one's own standpoint, and by the standpoints involved in their production. Sjoberg returns to this theme in1997 (p. xxiii). Following Goulder, he refers to the "loading" of units of analysis as reflecting the "domain assumptions" of the standpoint of the researcher. And he calls (1997, p. xxxiv) for the development of "a theory of data," based on an analysis of assumptions about what constitutes units of data, and the manifestations of data in the real world. Importantly, Sjoberg does not try to rule out particular units of data, including MSA's or offense-specific crime data. His point is just the opposite: that researchers must make explicit the criteria by which any unit of analysis can be "ruled in." One may trace this theme from 1968 to 1997 in the following sources (Sjoberg & Nett, 1968; Vaughan & Sjoberg, pp. 129-159; Vaughan, Sjoberg & Reynolds, p. 23; Feagin, Ornm & Sjoberg, pp. 36-39; Sjoberg, 1997, pp. xxxiv-xxxix, xxxv). Data are "objective" only against a particular horizon of domain assumptions, which are, in turn, embedded in rich social and cultural contexts. Researchers, must recognize this and provide an account of the units of analysis they employ. That, I believe, is what Sjoberg intends when he calls for a theory of data. The three themes just discussed form a set of analytical concerns. In each instance, the role of the researcher, countersystem analysis, units of data and analysis are responses to a tension generated by Sjoberg's two basic methodological commitments: a methodology that recognizes and honors multiple realities or standpoints; and one that remains committed to objectivity. The last two themes are no less prominent in his work, but they are of a different order. They are not analytically implied in his methodology, but that are nevertheless central to it. The first of these involves a particular historical context: the rise of bureaucratic domination and its threat to objectivity. The last of the five themes addresses the importance of moral integrity in science as a feature of objectivity.

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4. Bureaucratic Domination and Social Research The theme of power, especially in the form of bureaucratic domination, has been one of Sjoberg's central concerns since the 1960s. In Ethics, Politics (1967) he examined the effects of bureaucratic power or social research by asking how universities, research institutes, granting agencies and government shaped social research. The chapter submitted by Harold Orlans, writing as an "outsider," from the perspective of one who provides research funds. He warns that "money does not come free"; and he warns about the dangers of "small grants and large purposes." He asks when one should refuse to accept funds from certain programs, and how adjustments arise to cope with the different concerns emanating from the providers of funds those and those who engage in research. Sjoberg thinks of politics in terms of the decisions about power in bureaucratic contexts, more than in terms of conventional state politics, electoral or otherwise. By the next year, in the first edition of Methodology, "bureaucracy" appears in the index with eight sub-topics, and the entry "bureaucratization of research" follows it. Concern with bureaucracy and the bureaucratization of research received half a dozen pages of discussion in the original volume. Bureaucracy serves as a main point in the introduction to the reissued edition. There, he acknowledges that bureaucracy may both facilitate and hinder research. But either way large organizations form a crucial reality for the research process, and, therefore, they form a source of methodological concern. By 1993, Sjoberg and Vaughan (1993, p. 54) devote a chapter to the theme of the bureaucratization and its impact on social research. The importance of the theme is central, as this quotation makes clear. Sociologists, so our reasoning goes, holds a relatively tenuous position in the bureaucratic structures of the United States (and the global context). This has led them to seek legitimacy through increased reliance on techniques, and methods at the expense of theoretical analysis and ideas. But the emphasis on techniques and methods seems destined to undermine the foundations of sociologicalinquiry. The chapter discusses issues for sociological knowledge associated with bureaucratic power at local, societal and global levels. The chapter focuses the methodological problems imposed on sociologists in societies dominated by bureaucratic capitalism. By 1997 (p. xxxviii), Sjoberg poses the problem in a concise form: "contemporary bureaucratic capitalism demands information about a wide array of political and economic activities." He notes the difficulties of access to these data. But, be adds that highly technical data emerge from these organizations, sometimes willy-nilly, sometimes in purposeful ways. The organizational context from which the data emerge have methodological importance. The methodological problem they present lies in determining the

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meaning of the data from the standpoint of their construction, and the uses that are made of them. Bureaucratic power then, shapes researchers' access to data and the nature of the data, itseff. Some data are readily, if not obviously, standardized: for example, the number of full-time employees is straightforward, granting an error term. But other organizational data are not. For example, "profit" is constructed in diverse ways for particular purposes and audiences. Methodologically speaking, the possibility of an objective use of the data requires researchers to interpret data in accord with the domain assumptions that produced them. As I have argued, Sjoberg's methodology is preoccupied with the conception of objectivity. At this juncture in history, bureaucratic domination is the overriding organizational and cultural form of power in modern societies. Because this is true, bureaucracy gives a special cast to the problem of objectivity and for each of the preceding themes. The final theme in Sjoberg's effort to define an idea of objectivity that is consistent with multiple realities runs through all of his work: it is the theme of moral responsibility and this too has to do with objectivity.

5. The Moral Integrity of Science, Objectivity and Methodology Sociology in the mold of a natural science philosophy counterpoises objectivity with moral values. One "measures" objectivity, in part, by the degree to which researchers' work remains free of moral considerations. For Sjoberg, too, values may conflict with objectivity. He is aware, for example, that scientific racism and sexism have long histories. In this example, as in others, the tension between objectivity and value-commitments pose a problem for objectivity that requires investigation and analysis. Values cannot simply be ignored. To acknowledge that value commitments may conflict with objectivity, does not mean that values per se conflict with objectivity. Sjoberg's idea of objectivity recognizes that moral and value issues are bound up in all social situations. Any objective analysis of social situations must therefore, seek to understand its moral and value commitments. But the moral issues are not merely "attributes" of a situation. Moral issues form the links among standpoints, including the standpoint of the researcher. For example, survey researchers must believe that people answer questionnaires in more or less honest ways, even if opinions are fleeting. They must believe that respondents, in turn, believe social researchers deserve to be treated seriously. This moral bond between researchers and the respondents is essential to survey researchers' conceptions of objectivity. Sjoberg (2001) announced this theme in 1967. More recently (1993, p. 114), he returned to it, and in a forthcoming article on human rights, he brings moral issues to a place of central importance.

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A discussion of the sense in which Sjoberg's moral themes are methodological ones will bring this section to a close. One may trace his concern with the moral significance of methodology through three kinds of reflection. The first was articulated in Ethics, Politics and Research, where he challenged positivism on legal and ethical grounds. Sjoberg's point was not that positivism failed to be value-free, after all. His point was that it is impossible for researchers ever to extricate themselves from their own social context and that of others, including the moral and political aspects of it. The only route to objectively characterizing this solution is to have researchers analyze their own moral situations in relation to the subject matter they are studying. Sjoberg's volume makes clear that this is not only a matter for individual researchers, but a matter for the discipline, collectively. Sjoberg and Vaughan's chapter (1993) on "The Ethical Foundations of Sociology," marks his second look at the importance of moral issues. Here Sjoberg begins to rethink different moral traditions, particularly the ethics traditions rooted in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tends to gloss over the problem of persons who do not fit various utilitarian formulae. That tradition may offer some guidance, but it founders on the question of the poor, the powerless, and others who have been sacrificed or marginalized in the name of some larger social good. But if social science is to be objective in Sjoberg's sense, it cannot simply "drop oft" minority standpoints, as the "price of progress" or in the name of optimal utility. Sjoberg and his co-authors, therefore, began to discuss human rights, and his most recent work on the subject (2001) marks a significant shift of attention to this subject. Third, and finally, Sjoberg turned to pragmatism,first to George Herbert Mead, and then to John Dewey as a means for considering the moral implications of sociological thought. One can trace this moral theme in Sjoberg's (1997) call for a "reflective" methodology. For him, reflective methodology grows from the social nature of human existence. This third move closes the circle of his methodology. In the introduction (1997, p. xvii) to the reissued edition of Methodology Sjoberg explained that "reflective" methodology "arises from a modified Median frame of reference." He borrowed from Mead the idea that the human mind is social rather than private. This idea can be found elsewhere, but Sjoberg found it in Mead. The crucial sentences are these: "The social mind's most salient characteristic is the ability to think about thinking. It is[this] conscious selfreflection that sets humans off from other animals." This is taken directly from Mead, and, I think, provides the basis for Sjoberg's belief that objectivity, itself, requires a moral basis: at bottom, researchers must respect the possibility of

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reflection in social interaction. Because the mind is social, all individuality presuppose a wider web of interrelated social life through which consciousness is shaped. Thus, the existence of human consciousness itself presupposes the respect for the interaction and interrelations of diverse standpoints. And if the possibility of consciousness itself rests on social interaction, then methodologies and methods that deny this foundation, or limit it or, worse, threaten its possibility deny humanity itself. For Sjoberg's this moral base serves as the foundation for his conception of objectivity: in principle objectivity means that all social standpoints contribute objective social knowledge. And any social science that undermines or denies this denies its own subject matter. This sense of morality does not enter sociology from a set of pre-conceived or external moral principles. Rather the moral principle depends upon what it means to be human. In this way, Sjoberg's methodology stands on a firm commitment to multiple realities as a precondition to objectivity. Such a sociology would welcome both quantitative and qualitative data so long as they preserved the diverse standpoints of multiple realities. It would make a concerted effort to include the perspectives of minorities, women, and other powerless groups. But not only these. Perhaps even more difficult and urgent at this time is the need for genuine knowledge about the standpoints of powerful people and the organizations they control. A sociology built on Sjoberg's methodological concerns would place description, classification and generalization at the forefront. It would be °'progressive" in the sense that the collective work would build upon itself over time, would be revised, and would accurately portray the change and diversity of human experience. It would be pluralistic, a sociology with ragged edges, in need of constant revision by ever wider inclusion of outsiders. Of course, no one sociologist can carry out such a task. Sociology must be done collectively. And thus Sjoberg's vision of objectivity requires a collective, which is to say a moral community to comprehend the multiplicity of human standpoints. In these ways, sociology must reshape its understanding of the relation between facts and values.

SJOBERG AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: YES AND NO Finally, what about Sjoberg and SI? The title of this section reflects ambivalence, which I expect Sjoberg and some interactionists might share. But "ambivalence," a word drawn from chemistry, refers to the combinatory possibilities of elements. "Ambi-valence" suggests shifting or changing valences. That is a fair characterization of Sjoberg's relation to SI. His early work on cities has little likelihood of bearing directly upon most interactionists. But his methodology has become

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increasingly rooted in pragmatism and in the work of Mead in particular. My purpose here is to outline some areas where Sjoberg's methodology might be "valent" for SI. 1. Pragmatism, Science and Sociology Preceding pages have already linked Sjoberg fundamental concepts about methodology