Continual Permutations of Action

by Anselm L. Strauss (Editor)

Overview

Richard Bernstein expressed the view that pragmatism was ahead of its time; the same has been true of symbolic interactionism. These two closely related perspectives, one philosophical and the other sociological, place human action at the center of their explanatory schemes. It has not mattered what aspect of social or psychological behavior was under scrutiny. Whether selves, minds, or emotions, or institutions, social structures, or social change, all have been conceptualized as forms of human activity. This view is the simple genius of these perspectives. Anselm Strauss always took ideas pertaining to action and process seriously. Here he makes explicit the theory of action that implicitly guided his research for roughly forty years. It is understood that Strauss accepts the proposition that acting (or even better, interacting) causes social structure. He lays the basis for this idea in the nineteen assumptions he articulates early in the book—assumptions that elaborate and make clearer Herbert Blumer's famous premises of symbolic interactionism.

The task Strauss put before himself is how to keep the complexity of human group life in front of the researcher/theorist and simultaneously articulate an analytical scheme that clarifies and reveals that complexity. With these two imperfectly related issues before him, Strauss outlines an analytical scheme of society in action. It is a scheme that rests not on logical necessity but on research and observation, and the concepts he uses are proposed because they do a certain amount of analytical work. One would be well advised to take Continual Permutations of Action very seriously.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780202362458
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/15/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	1370L (what's this?)

About the Author

David R. Maines is professor and chair of sociology and anthropology at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses on urban sociology and social stratification. He was one of the founding members of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and in 1999 received the SSSI George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contributions to scholarship.

Anselm Strauss (1916-1996) was an American medical sociologist and professor at the University of Chicago. He was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1980.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I; 1: Assumptions of a Theory of Action; 2: An Interactionist Theory of Action; Part II; 3: Work and the Intersection of Forms of Action; 4: Body, Body Processes, and Interaction 1; 5: Interaction, Thought Processes, and Biography; 6: Interacting and Symbolizing; 7: Representation and Misrepresentation in Interaction; 8: The Interplay of Routine and Nonroutine Action; 9: Social Worlds and Society; 10: Social Worlds and Interaction in Arenas; 11: Negotiated Order and Structural Ordering

Editorial Reviews

Perhaps no sociologist of the past half century—with the possible exceptions of Erving Goffman and Robert Merton—has been as generous in creating a string of provocative middle-range concepts, given freely to the sociological community, as has Anselm Strauss… [This volume] represents Anselm Strauss at his theoretical prime: the master of the sensitizing concept.” —Gary Alan Fine, Social Forces “Although this book is promoted as a theory of action, Strauss remains essentially a researcher and methodologist. Substantively, his contributions to sociology have stemmed from sustained research undertakings and, methologically, from the alignment of his epistemology with his ontology… Strauss believes that an empirical science of social phenomena is possible and desirable and has brilliantly contributed to that objective. He deserves the sustained attention of his fellow sociologists.” —Carl J. Couch, Contemporary Sociology “Continual Permutations of Action… does put you adrift among innumerable concepts, leaving you at pains, as Strauss found himself, to reckon how such ideas are interrelated.” —Thomas Spence Smith, American Journal of Sociology

From the Publisher