Updating Charles H. Cooley: Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic
Abstract
This book explores the contemporary relevance of Charles H. Cooley’s thought, bringing together scholars from the US, Europe and Australia to reflect on Cooley’s theory and legacy. Offering an up-to-date analysis of Cooley’s reception in the history of the social sciences, an examination of epistemological and methodological advances on his work, critical assessments and novel articulations of his major ideas, and a consideration of new directions in scholarship that draws on Cooley’s thought, Updating Charles H. Cooley will appeal to sociologists with interests in social theory, interactionism, the history of sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of emotions.
Qualitative interviewing is a widely applied method of data collection in social sciences. Over time, continual diversification of this method led to more multi-modal and participant-centered qualitative research paradigms. This methodological article examines the role of qualitative interviews within the context of the psychosocial approach and its application in understanding interview experiences in
critical life situations. Accounting for research ethics and embracing existential questions, qualitative interviewing gains added value in understanding and responding to interviewees who face crises. Drawing on various methodological approaches, including oral history, biographical, feminist, phenomenological, and cross-cultural, this study explores how interviewing evolves into a complex research practice. It shows that existential philosophy offers valuable insights into conducting qualitative interviews in multidimensional disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ecological and economic crises, conflicts, and wars. By utilizing existential questioning as an interviewing technique, interviewers engage with
interviewees as they make sense of critical life conditions. Outlining the sensitive boundaries between the critical contexts and personal reflections in interviews, the article signifies the interactionist nature of interviewing, emphasizing moments where existential questions enhance the symbolic interaction between an interviewer and an interviewee. Ultimately, this methodological study demonstrates how specific existential questions - either standalone or as probes and prompts - lead to the emergence of new meanings during interviews, enabling the researchers and research participants to make sense of crises and critical life situations.
In this chapter, we examine the intersection between Interactionism and Methodological Individualism (MI). In the first part of the chapter, we discuss the affinity between MI and Interactionism by outlining the connection existing between the two frameworks; in particular, we show the similarities between the theories of two major founders of MI—Max Weber and Georg Simmel—and Interactionism. In addition to these similarities, Interactionism and Methodological Individualism also share a common criticism; they both have been charged with being microsociological reductionists. We begin to address this major controversy affecting both MI and Interactionism, by outlining how it applies to Interactionism. In doing so, we present the perspective we call “Pragmatic Interactionism,” which expands the interactionist tradition by adding three core ideas. The three core ideas of this analytic approach are problem-solving activity; human agency as creative constraint; and multidimensional sociality. These core ideas respond to recent developments in interactionist theorizing, as well as the pursuit of a greater emphasis on Pragmatism in the larger discipline of sociology. In introducing each of these core ideas, we provide empirical illustrations for those interested in how to apply this approach. In sum, our chapter shows confluence and divergence between Interactionism and MI, and addresses a controversy that affects both Interactionism and MI.
The sociological study of intellectual recognition has tended to focus on highly cited and highly acclaimed authors and perspectives, while reserving some interest for those who are “forgotten.” We know much less about the liminal cases: authors who are in-between fame and oblivion. This paper proposes a way to study intellectual recognition, by examining the liminal case of sociologist Charles H. Cooley. Based on a multilayered (quantitative and qualitative) citation analysis of Cooley’s classic work, Human Nature and the Social Order (HNSO), we study the role of intellectual deference in accounting for this liminality. Specifically, we identify two distinct deference processes: acknowledgment and involvement. We argue that Cooley has survived intellectual oblivion by standing on the shoulders of citers, as he has received substantial acknowledgment but decreasing involvement. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our paper for the understanding of the making of sociological theory.
A longitudinal study with 95 newlywed couples examined the power of the Oral History Interview to predict stable marital relationships and divorce. A principal-components analysis of the interview with the couples (Time 1) identified a latent variable, perceived marital bond, that was significant in predicting which couples would remain married or divorce within the first 5 years of their marriage. A discriminant function analysis of the newlywed oral history data predicted, with 87.4% accuracy, those couples whose marriages remained intact or broke up at the Time 2 data collection point. The oral history data predicted with 81% accuracy those couples who remained married or divorced at the Time 3 data collection point. This study offers support for causal linkages between perceptual biases and selective attention on the path of marriage.
From the 1980’s onwards, neoliberal governance in the US, Canada, and the UK has emphasized competitive individualism and people have seemingly responded, in kind, by agitating to perfect themselves and their lifestyles. In this study, we examine whether cultural changes have coincided with an increase in multidimensional perfectionism in college students over the last 27 years. Our analyses are based on 164 samples and 41,641 American, Canadian, and British college students, who completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Hewitt & Flett, 1991) between 1989 and 2016 (70.92% female, Mage = 20.66). Cross-temporal meta-analysis revealed that levels of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have linearly increased. These trends remained when controlling for gender and between-country differences in perfectionism scores. Overall, in order of magnitude of the observed increase, our findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.
Empathy is an increasingly popular term in the public sphere and in academia. Although the common belief is that empathy is a “psychological” topic, sociologists have made important contributions to this conversation. The goal of this article is to provide a theoretical effort in advancing the sociology of empathy. In the first part of the paper, I review classical and contemporary statements on empathy. I identify Charles H. Cooley as an important precursor of the sociology of empathy, and discuss how contemporary interactionists have further developed this notion. Based on these previous insights, I next propose a preliminary framework for the study of the social construction of empathy. This framework is presented in two steps. First, I introduce a vocabulary based on interpretivist concepts: empathy frames, empathy rules, and empathy performances. Next, I coin the idea of empathy paths. I theorize three ideal-typical empathy paths: self-transcendent, therapeutic, and instrumental. Throughout this presentation, I use empirical cases to illustrate the applicability of this framework. In the conclusion, I show how sociologists can inform public understandings of the meaning of empathy. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/symb.306/abstract
I show how Bakhtin's dialogical theory can be applied to Cooley's looking glass self
In this essay, I show how arbitrary the disciplinary boundary is between psychoanalysis and sociology, how psychoanalysis can complement sociology, how structural analysis in one discipline needs the other to explain its causal efficacy, how symbolic interaction relates to psychoanalysis, and how many psychoanalytic concepts—including the analytic situation—can be expressed in sociological language. My analysis is a form of deconstruction of social fact versus the social subject: searching for the “psyche” in the discourse of “social” is the idea of deconstruction. Deconstruction exposes the conceptual tension between the arbitrary categories of individual versus society, personal troubles and public issues, or psychoanalytic versions of the individual mind and the individual life.
Although many sociologists have written about the development of the sociological perspective, known as “interactionism,” two relatively important questions for understanding its emergence remain scarcely examined. (1) Why did George Herbert Mead become known as its progenitor rather than Robert E. Park ? (2) Why did “radical interactionism,” which was inspired by Park, fail to appear on the sociological landscape until the first decade of the 21st century, almost a century after the appearance of the “symbolic interactionism” that Mead inspired? To oversimplify, Mead became anointed as the progenitor of interactionism instead of Park primarily because Herbert Blumer proved to be a far more effective champion of Mead’s thought than Everett Hughes proved to be of Park’s ideas in sociology. Blumer’s greater effectiveness in performing this role was primarily due to a stronger desire to carry the banner for a new sociological perspective, more personal charisma and verbal adroitness, and much closer connection to Chicago School of Sociology during its golden era than Hughes had. Thus, the delayed emergence of a radical interactionism based on Park’s work cannot be attributed solely to the failure of Park and his heir apparent, Hughes, to fully grasp the radical implications of Park’s work. Even if these implications of Park’s work had been crystal clear to Hughes, however, it is highly doubtful that he would have ever considered promoting a radical version of interactionism. His lack of lack of desire to carry the banner for a sociological perspective, absence of personal charisma and verbal adroitness, as well as his want of closer ties to the original Chicago school of sociology, not to mention tepid liberalism, would have made him a very unlikely figure in American sociology to play this historic role.
Building on an emic conception of the self that William James articulated in his seminal chapter on the "Consciousness of Self" (1890/1950), this article defines the self as an object that the individual takes to be him- or herself. This object, which is subjectively identified by the individual, has an empirical dimension that constrains the subjective identification of the individual. As an emic object, the self is neither synonymous with the individual nor the equivalent of the individual's self-concept; rather, it is the unity of the empirical existence of the individual and the individual's perception of that existence. The self is an individual's own person viewed from the standpoint of that individual, which may differ from what others perceive from their distinct standpoints. The implications of this new formulation for research and self-understanding are also discussed.
Life and the Student (1927), with a new introduction by Jonathan B. Imber, is a compilation of reflections, commentaries, and letters from other scholars that Charles Horton Cooley, accumulated throughout his life. The book includes personal passages on various topics within the realms of reading and writing, thinking, art, science, sociology, academia, religion, and human nature.There is no formal structure to the book, except the literary sense that organizes these thoughts and observations about life. It is impossible to categorize these widely ranging commentaries. They include discussions of the automobile, the impressionable nature of young people, the claim that the question of racial superiority is still unresolved, his belief that eugenists are inconsistent in their views, and more.Cooley’s work sought to emphasize the connection between society and the individual. He believed that the two could only be understood in relationship to each other. While researching the effects of social responses and social participation, he created the concept of the “looking-glass self,” which is the theory that a person’s sense of self grows out of interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley also showed that social life and the relationship between groups and communities stems from mental phenomena.
Building on earlier work in the production of culture, reception aesthetics, and cultural capital, sociology of literature research during the past few years has concentrated on readers' construction of meaning and on networks within literary systems. New directions include studying the relationship between literature and group identities; connecting institutional and reader-response analyses; reintroducing the role of authorial intentionality; and developing a clearer understanding of how literature is and is not like other media.
This chapter assesses the power focus in contemporary interactionist theory, and advances several premises about power based on recent research and theory. I first examine the main assumptions of the view of power that emerged in the wake of the astructural bias debate, which became an implicit standard for assessments of power in the tradition. Next, I explore the criticisms of the astructural bias thesis and related conceptualization. My argument is that while the debate correctly spotlighted the power deficit of interactionism, it had theoretical implications that distracted us from the task of fully conceptualizing power. In the second part of this chapter, I examine recent interactionist work in order to build general premises that can advance interactionist theory of power. Based on this analysis, I elaborate four premises that interactionists can use, regardless of theoretical orientation. Drawing on examples from my ethnographic research, I illustrate how researchers can benefit from the use of these premises.
This article reconstructs a writing theory on which Fred Newton Scott and John Dewey collaborated in the 1890s. Drawing on technology theorists’ discussions of “technological determinism,” this article critiques the deterministic aspects of Scott’s and Dewey’s thinking, and it suggests that their errors can illuminate determinism’s dangers for contemporary writing theory. The article also discusses some questions that Scott’s and Dewey’s theory raise for study of their later ideas.
Existing definitions of the self can be lumped into three groups: self as self-reflectivity, self as self-concept, and self as the individual. This article traces current disagreements over the definition of the self to a crucial ambiguity in William James's original delineation of the “Me.” Implicit in James's delineation was a distinction between first-order objects and second-order objects: while first-order objects are things as they are, independent of the perception of a knowing subject, second-order objects are things as perceived by a knowing subject. This article makes this distinction explicit and argues that the self is a second-order object associated with the first-person or “emic” perspective. Defined as the empirical existence of the individual (first order) perceived by the individual as “me” or “mine” (second order), the self is distinguished from the “I” which is the mental capacity for self-reflection; the self-concept which is the mental representation of the individual's existence; and the individual which is the empirical referent of the self-concept. As a second-order object, the “Me,” i.e., the self, is the unity of the existence and perception of the individual.
In the early nineteen sixties a happy chorus began to chant adulations around the work of Erving Goffman. The litany included such endearments as ‘remarkable’, ‘brilliant’, ‘insightful’, ‘meaningful’, ‘trenchant’, ‘landmarking’, ‘fascinating’, and ‘masterful’.1 I want in this chapter to ask: About what was there suddenly so much enthusiasm? My answer takes the form of delineating what appear to be the main features of Erving Goffman’s early sociological work, the work he published in the fifties and early sixties.2
A central question of social theory is: How do society's objective features influence its members to reproduce or transform society through their actions? This volume examines how objective social conditioning is mediated by the subjective reflexivity of individuals. On the basis of a series of in-depth interviews, Margaret S., Archer identifies the mediatory mechanism as "internal conversations" that are expressed in forms governing agents’ responses to social conditioning, their individual patterns of social mobility, and whether or not they contribute to social stability or change.
Between 1880 and 1930, the art of painter-etching rose to a degree of popularity unmatched before or since. When the tide went out, most of the etchers once acclaimed were forgotten along with their prints - but some were more forgotten than others. "Etched in Memory" seeks to understand the process whereby some producers of culture but not others come to be considered worth remembering. Through a combination of masterful sleuthing and analytical rigor, Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang bring to light the lives and artistic careers of 126 British and 160 American etchers, equally divided between men and women. They explore the links between popular taste and artistic choices and consider what artists did or could have done to increase their chances of being remembered - and why "lady-etchers" in particular were likely to disappear from the artistic register. Now available in paperback and enhanced with a new introduction by the authors, Etched in Memory offers a penetrating and provocative look at the dangers of letting one's art speak for itself.
