Until the twentieth century, most theorizing in sociology was macro—emphasizing big structures, big historical trends, and big changes in human organization at the societal level. Among the early founders of sociol­ogy, only Spencer examined “ceremonial institutions” and actively addressed the issue of the “subinstitutional,” by which he meant the face-to-face processes of interaction. His insights were lost, however, and others carried the analysis of interaction into the twentieth century. Mead in America and Durkheim in France provided much of the conceptual base for a wide variety of micro sociologists—that is, analyses concerned with face-to-face interac­tions among individuals.

Durkheim’s turn to the analysis of rituals and the origins of religion in his later works also in?uenced conceptualizations of interaction processes, although the signi?cance of Durkheim’s writings became evident in the mid-decades of the century as others, especially Erving Goffman,33 extended his basic insights in creative ways. Simmel also exerted some in?uence on theorizing about interaction, but his in?uence was over­shadowed by Mead’s great synthesis. Weber was, surprisingly if one actually looks at his typology of action, to exert in?uence indirectly, via another German sociologist, Alfred Schutz,34 who began with a critical analysis of Weber’s views on action and turned them into a more phenomenological version of interac­tionist theory. Pareto’s approach to micro processes, however, never gained a strong foothold in micro sociology, although it did exert some in?uence on some mid-century theorizing about group processes.

Even though the big breakthroughs in theorizing about interaction processes had occurred by 1935, theorizing about micro social processes did not develop rapidly until the mid-century. Early conceptualizations about micro processes tended to be somewhat de?nitional, deciding how to conceptualize status, role, relationships, norms, and other properties of interaction in what were seen as “small group” processes. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, how­ever, distinct brands of interactionist theorizing were evident. One was role the­ory where concern was on understanding how role processes organize interactions and structure situations.36 Another was symbolic interactionism, which, following Mead, emphasized the social self as the compass guiding a great deal of interaction, although this school of thought has over the years splin­tered into a variety of distinct fault lines. At one extreme are those who have followed Herbert Blumer’s advocacy: Interaction is a socially constructed process whereby self, others, norms, and virtually any feature of the situation can be used as an object toward which individuals develop meanings; these meanings can change, and indeed, they often do and thereby make interaction and social structure highly ?uid. At the other extreme from Blumer’s advocacy was a more structural argument: Self is a structure guiding behavior and inter­action; roles organized into status systems evidence a structure composed of interconnections among status positions and normative expectations associated with these positions; and although social interaction and structure can be changed, there is considerable continuity of, and constraint on, an individual’s behavior and interaction.The most enduring features of this “in house”debate within symbolic interactionism are the ongoing efforts of all symbolic interac­tionists to develop new theories of self.

Aside from symbolic interactionism, whose core ideas come from Mead and perhaps Simmel as well, a distinctly Durkheimian microsociology also emerged at mid-century. The key ?gure was Goffman, who showed that rit­ual is the basis of the solidarity produced in every interaction.41 Although this solidarity was not as intense as seen in Durkheim’s portrayal of Australian aboriginals worshiping the power of society through rituals directed at totems, Goffman revealed how the ritual quality of interaction keeps face-to-face encounters among individuals on track. The presentation of a self,42 the interpersonal boundaries maintained by individuals in an encounter, the norms and cultural script being followed, the sanctioning of deviant acts and their repair, and just about all aspects of micro encounters are guided by rit­uals, or stereotyped sequences of gestures. Later, Randall Collins43 elaborated Goffman’s insights into a more general theory on emotional energy, but Goffman made the critical breakthrough, and his insight now inspires an entire line of micro theorizing.

About the time that Mead’s lectures were being posthumously published, German sociologist Schutz,44 brought a philosophical tradition—often termed phenomenology—into theories of interaction. Schutz began with a critique of Weber’s conceptualization of action as ideal types, but Schutz’s real contribu­tion lay in making phenomenology sociological. In essence, he uncovered an important set of processes in face-to-face interaction: Much of what individ­uals signal through their gestures is respect for a taken-for-granted world. In contrast with Mead’s very active conceptualization of interaction revolving around constant role-taking, thinking, choosing, and adapting, Schutz argued that individuals often do just the opposite: They avoid questioning, penetrating, and otherwise “getting inside” of each other; rather, much interaction involves gestures that, in essence, signal not to question or that seek to place individu­als in categories and, thereby, allow them to interact “on automatic” pilot. This basic insight was picked up by a school of theorizing that became known as ethnomethodology,45 founded by Harold Gar?nkel and carried forward by sev­eral generations of students and followers.

For ethnomethodology, people use implicit “folk methods” (or, “ethno” “methods”) to communicate the taken-for-granted, and to convince each other that they share, for the purposes at hand, a common world. Ethnomethodologists attacked symbolic interactionists and, in the beginning, just about all sociological theories for not understanding that the ethnometh­ods used by individuals are the only reality of the social universe. As the harsh critique wore thin, some ethnomethodologists merged into more mainstream micro-level theorizing,46 whereas others went off into the study of language or conversations,47 because it was believed that many of the ethnomethods that people employ to sustain their sense of reality reside in how speech is used. At the beginning of a new century, however, this conversation analysis has become a somewhat isolated sub?eld of sociology, but when ethnomethodology ?rst challenged traditional micro approaches in the 1960s, it profoundly affected all subsequent theorizing about interaction.48 Thus, from completely outside the writings of the ?rst masters, except for Schutz’s critique of Weber and Gar?nkel’s attack on Parsons (whose work had a Weberian slant) as a critical foil,49 a very important set of insights about the process of interaction emerged during the second half of this century.

One of the most striking aspects of early sociological theorizing, even macro-level theories of revolutionary and other con?ict-producing forces, is that individuals acted, but without much emotion. Durkheim’s analysis of the “effervescence” among aboriginal peoples of north Australia was perhaps as close as the early masters came to examining the emotional dynamics of face-to-face contact among individuals, although one could make a case that Marx’s analysis of alienation and the emotions behind class con?ict also captured some of the dynamics of interpersonal emotions. But Goffman, more than any other, helped stimulate a microsociology concerned with emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and other “softer” affective states that emerge when individuals have breached what is normal and expected in a situation.50 Thus, the great Freudian and psychoanalytic revolution missed much of sociology and, surpris­ingly, was most prominent in functional theories developed by Parsons.51 Only slowly at the century’s midpoint did theory turn to the emotional processes operating in face-to-face interactions. Some of this work was done within sym­bolic interactionism, emphasizing individuals’ efforts to sustain their self-conceptions as a source of potential emotions; other theorists adopted a more psychoanalytic slant emphasizing repression as it works on emotions; still oth­ers brought biology into consideration and examined the evolution of the neu­roanatomy behind emotions; and even rational choice theories with their conception of the utility-maximizing actor began to address the problem of emotion.Thus, probably the leading edge of the legacy inherited from the early masters is now in a very broad interactionist ?eld that, for the lack of a more de?nitive title, is termed the sociology of emotions.

Indeed, in retrospect, Mead's (1934, p. 165) claim that "language ... makes possible the existence or the appearance of ... situation(s) or object(s)" could be seen as an originary statement in the twentieth-century linguistic revolution leading to the outpouring of textualist-oriented structuralist and poststructuralist studies in our time. But the common philosophical premise that thought, meaning, and action are constituted in and by language is only one of many suggestive parallels between Meadian theory and the poststructuralists' arguments. Both theoretical positions strongly emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of signification and meaning and the processual, tentative, and contingent character of human communication and action. While I would hesitate to call Mead a postmodernist and even less a poststructuralist, his writings nevertheless contain suggestive prefigurations of postmodernist and poststructuralist themes.

At the same time, these theoretical traditions adhere to substantially different sets of beliefs about the functions and status of language, the determinants of human behavior, and the nature and sources of subjectivity and identity. A derivation of structuralism, which attends to the formal systems of cultural relations that make meaning possible (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery, and Fiske 1994), poststructuralism tends to "upwardly" reduce meaning and behavior to the cultural effects of linguistic or "textual" practices (Wiley 1994). In contrast, Mead and his interpreters have located the problems of meaning and behavior inside the concept of a social self, regarded as an agent of interpretation, definition, and action within a social field or "relational matrix" (Rosenthal 1968), or more specifically within what Mead (1932) called "sociality." Also, while outlining the rudiments of a theory of language, Mead differed from the more recent poststructuralists by retaining a dialectical conception of subject and object that took the form of an intersubjective field of communicative action. This entailed a theory of the self that incorporated subject and object within a symbolic environment of social relations. Thus, while poststructuralists have privileged discursive relations at the expense of subjectivity, Mead attempted to situate language and meaning in processes of social interaction, transforming the Hegelian-derived philosophical orthodoxy of subject/object relations into an intersubjective community of actors.

This contrast has obvious and important implications for the study of culture, the interdisciplinary focal point of trends in contemporary theory. But there is more at stake in a comparison of Meadian thought and poststructuralism. Trained mostly in the humanities, poststructuralists have taken a strong interest in the social, cultural, and political relations of meaning. This is an important shift from the earlier structuralist preoccupation with the formal structures of meaning toward an emphasis on its active and dynamic character--its manifestations in "practice"--a development marked by the terminological replacement of "language" by "discourse." This shift gives poststructuralism strong leverage on social relations, inviting comparison to the Meadian social conception of language and meaning. In this respect, poststructuralism represents a development worthy of the attention of social theorists, particularly those within the symbolic interactionist tradition. At the same time, a contrast of the two theories reveals important limitations in the poststructuralist perspective--namely, its inadequate view of social relations and its abolition of self.

While the challenges of postmodernism have elicited some sympathetic as well as critical responses from sociologists (Dickens and Fontana 1994; Rosenau 1992; Seidman and Wagner 1992), there have been few serious studies of the implications of poststructuralism for social theory, specifically, the striking parallels between this body of ideas and aspects of symbolic interactionism (Aboulafia 1994; Lembo 1991).

In what follows, I present an overview and critique of poststructuralism that appreciatively challenges this line of theoretical argumentation from a Meadian perspective. As a background to this critique, I begin by briefly comparing and contrasting key intellectual premises of these theories. I next outline the main contours of poststructuralism in considering its contributions to contemporary social theory. I illustrate some of the more original and provocative claims and insights of poststructuralism through the work of Judith Butler, whose version of the theory reiterates and deviates in interesting ways from the central tenets of Meadian thought. I use Butler both to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of poststructuralism and to indicate the relative advantages of a Meadian approach to issues of discourse, self, identity, and difference. Finally, I re-present basic Meadian concepts and arguments, indicating how these redress major gaps in the poststructuralist account of these issues and how Meadian ideas can be deployed in retheorizing the poststructuralist theme of instability, specifically with regard to the problems of "identity" and "difference."

• Mead is widely regarded as the philosophical source of symbolic interactionism in sociology, and the more recent humanities-based development known as "poststructuralism"
• Mead’s interest in instincts stemmed from the desire to create a unified, non-dualistic theory of evolution, physiology, psychology and sociology. Not only did Mead include evolution, physiology, and instincts in his unified theory, the closely integrated these biological elements with psychological and sociological variables to crate a unified, non-dualistic model.
• George Herbert Mead's contributions to social theory are legion. The most important was his theory of socialization, or humanization (also known as The Generalized Other theory of personality development). Those of you with a familiar reading of Piaget will find Mead interesting. Like Piaget, Mead asserts that socialization occurs through a maturational process. Through interaction with others we pass through three stages of social and personal development
• Mead’s conceptualization of interaction as a process of mutual reading and interpreting of gestures, self awareness by virtue of role-taking with varieties of others, including generalized others, minded deliberations about alternative lines of conduct in light of role-taking and self awareness, and coordination among mutually role-taking individuals possessing the behavioral capacities for mind and self consolidated a variety of approaches in both the United States and Europe into a coherent framework.
• Perhaps Mead's principal influence in philosophical circles occurred as a result of his friendship with John Dewey. This theory has in recent years played a central role in the work of Jürgen Habermas

Critical analysis

Mead has been consistently praised for his contribution to social psychology and philosophy. His theories of mind, self, and society have supported a wide variety of interests, from linguistics through experimental psychology to metaphysics and educational theory and practice.

Yet some critics have deemed aspects of Mead's philosophy as dense, muddled, and sometimes ambiguous. His work has therefore inspired many critical studies that interpret and explore these areas of his doctrine. Many commentators have discussed the influence of Mead's ideas on a number of prominent psychologists and sociologists, such as Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton. The central doctrine of his work, the concept of self, has been contrasted with Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of man and critics have found similarities between Mead's scientific method and that of B. F. Skinner. Yet many scholars continue to note that despite the scope and influence of his work, he is still relatively unknown compared to other important early twentieth-century pragmatists—such as John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce.

The notion of emergence self is considered useless, as particular state of self will differ from individual to individual and thus is individual centric. However, Mead's qualitative or experiential pluralism, which he shares with Dewey and James, would view this criticism as failing to address genuine novelty and the “objective reality of perspectives.”