Reference Groups and the Theory of Revolution (Routledge Revivals)

John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136721007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1973, this is a reissue of John Urry's important and influential study of the theory of revolution.

• Part 1 offers a detailed discussion of the concept of the reference group, tracing its development from the symbolic interactionist tradition and then showing how it came to be used in ways which emasculated some of the suppositions of that tradition.
• Part 2 sets out a theory of revolutionary dissent, in which Dr Urry emphasizes the interconnection between analyses on the level of the social structure and the social actor.
• The final section demonstrates the value of this theory by using it to account for the varying patterns of action and revolutionary thought and action in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of this century.

part one

Symbolic interactionism and the reference group concept

The significance of the dialectical relationship between man and society is rarely grasped within sociology which is a study conventionally premised upon the rigid conceptual dichotomies of individual and society and subject and object. The one tradition which places this dialectic at the centre of its sociological concern is one towards which Durkheim was moving (see Stone and Farber-man, 1967) and is one implicit within Weber's focus upon action. The first chapter is, initially, an outline of the symbolic inter-actionist perspective; it is, second, an exposition of what I take to be certain critical lacunae of argument and an indication of the relationship of this perspective to other sociological traditions. I will argue that contemporary sociology should have followed the presuppositions inherent within this tradition. And although it has derived the concepts of role, self and reference group from symbolic interactionism, it has in their more precise specification, emasculated the originally dialectical presuppositions.

In chapters 2, 3 and 4 I try to show this with particular respect to the concept of the reference group. This discussion reveals both an unfortunate lack of specification in some places in the inter-actionist tradition, as well as the imperatives within American sociology to render the actor's dependence upon each group as precise, quantifiable and determinate. In parts 2 and 3 I attempt to elaborate and apply an explanation of mass revolutionary consciousness and action which focuses on how different actors come to develop differing conceptions of what sorts of social arrangements are and are not just. A more dialectical formulation of the reference group concept is, I argue, an essential element in such an explanation.

1 Of symbolic interactionism

An outline

The inadequacy of conventional dichotomies is pointed out by Baldwin¹ when he says of man that: ‘He does not have two lives, two sets of interests, two selves; one personal and the other social. He has but one self, which is personal and social in one, by right of the essential and normal movement of his growth.’ William James, even earlier, both distinguished between the self as known and the self as knower, and emphasized that they were not separate but simply aspects of the one person.² Although Mead claimed in 1930 (p. 700) that James's significant contribution was to show the nature of the self's spread over his social environment, his importance has, in fact, been largely in showing how the self as known, that is, the social ‘me’, grows out of the recognition that men receive from other men (James, 1892, p. 179). But since different men respond differently to the same person there must be as many social selves as there are distinct groups of men about whose opinion one cares. James importantly anticipates reference group analysis when he argues that it is a man's image in the eyes of his own ‘set’ which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of him elsewhere.³ Dewey (1925, ch. 5) indicates something of the process by which the actor comes to act in accordance with the expectations of his particular ‘set’, that is, how through language and communication the self and the meaning of actions arise. He maintains that because of language the individual is compelled to take the standpoint of other individuals and to live out his life from a standpoint common to them as co-operative participants in a joint enterprise. But like James, he indicates that because of multiple membership the individual may be divided within himself, have conflicting selves, or be relatively disintegrated.⁴ Also like James, his writings have been largely used to show how meaning and communication exercise control over the individual actor. There are two major attempts to depart from such mechanistic interpretations. They are both derived from these early writers and they have importantly influenced contemporary reference group formulations. I will consider first Charles Horton Cooley; and then George Herbert Mead.

Cooley criticizes the merely precise study of details, advocates the constant use of ‘instructed imagination’, and asserts that statistical uniformities ‘do not show that it is possible to predict numerically the working of intelligence in new situations, and of course that it is the decisive test’.⁵ In seeing society and self as dialectically related temporal processes, Cooley (1966, p. 396) argues against the Cartesian postulate of the primacy of self-consciousness. This is because the consciousness of T is not part of all consciousness since it belongs to an advanced stage of development, and because of the individualistic assertion of the T to the exclusion of the social or ‘we’ aspect (1956b, pp. 5–6). Rather, society and self are phases of the common and evolving totality which Cooley terms ‘Human Life’ (ibid., pp. 8–9; 1956a, pp. 35–7). ‘Society’ and the ‘individual’ are not separate phenomena but simply the collective and distributive aspects of the same ongoing reality. Society is both made up solely of individuals, and is more than their sum since there is an organization in the whole which cannot be found in the parts (ibid., pp. 48–50). Thus it is not an error to claim that the individual is the product of society, since everything human about him has a history in the social past and the individual can only in an external sense be separated from society. But at the same time the individual is free in an organic sense which is worked out co-operatively with others. There is no freedom in the sense of a complete absence of restraint (see ibid., pp. 422–3). Man has no existence apart from social life and thus the freedom of any single individual depends upon the nature of that life. The perception of this as ‘a creative process’ (ibid., p. 50) of which both men and society constitute an organic whole, emphasizes how man's freedom depends upon the existential possibilities available to him within that society.⁶

Thus Cooley says that the quality of human life in any society is dependent upon the relationship between its social and individual aspects. That in turn depends upon the processes of communication, processes which are not so much a consequence of thought as an inseparable part of it.⁷ Thought and mind only develop through communication, since without it, a truly human nature cannot emerge (see 1956b, p. 62). And, importantly, this communication may realize itself not only on the level of society, but also within various groups of which the actor may or may not be a member, but within which the individual develops by means of its common thought (see ibid., ch. 3). Mead (1930, p. 699) summarizes Cooley's recognition:

that the self is not an immediate character of the mind but arises through the imagination of the ideas which others entertain of the individual, which has its counterpart in the organisation of our ideas of others into their selves. It is out of this bi-polar process that social individuals appear. We do not discover others as individuals like ourselves. The mind is not first individual and then social. The mind itself in the individual arises through communication.

But over and beyond the argument for the social genesis of mind and self there is a further implication of Mead's statement; that is to say, for Cooley, the self arises out of the imagination of the ideas which others entertain of the given individual. Thus, through imagination one perceives in the mind of another or others, their thoughts as to the nature of one's appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends and so on, and one is, to a varying extent, affected by it. As Cooley (1956a, p. 184) says:

Each to each a looking-glass

Reflects the other that doth pass.

Cooley (1956a, pp. 183–5) stresses three elements in this process: the imagination of an individual's appearance to the other person, the imagination of his evaluation of that appearance, and a consequential sense of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. He concludes (ibid., p. 203) that the imagination of how one appears to others is a controlling force in all normal minds.

This derivation of an individual's self-conception from his imagination of how he appears to others is a crucial consideration: what is inadequate is the conclusion that Cooley draws from it (ibid., p. 119). He says: ‘My association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea of you and the rest of my mind. … The immediate social reality is the personal idea … Society, then … is a relation among personal ideas.⁹ But although one might acknowledge that the personal idea is the immediate social reality, this idealism cannot accommodate an objective reality out there comprised not of these personal ideas held of each other, but of other social selves who are realizing themselves within concrete patterns of social interaction, albeit mediated by conceptions of the self mirrored in the minds of various others. Perhaps Mead (1930, p. 704) should be allowed the final word on Cooley:

In the process of communication there appears a social world of selves standing on the same level of immediate reality as that of the physical world that surrounds us. It is out of this social world that the inner experiences arise which we term psychical, and they serve largely in interpretation of this social world as psychical sensations and percepts serve to interpret the physical objects of our environment. If this is true, social groups are not psychical but are immediately given, though inner experiences are essential for their interpretation. The locus of society is not in the mind.⁸

Mead is thus important in maintaining that mind, consciousness and the self all result from the concrete patterns of interaction between these individuals. They are all premised upon human group life.⁹ But to claim that is for Mead to reject psychological associa-tionism (1934, pp. 18–19), the parellelist thesis (ibid., pp. 40–1) and individual behaviourism (ibid., passim and pp. 10–11, 104–5). He does call himself a social behaviourist, but maintains that this indicates that the study of social psychology must commence with observable activity, that it must not ignore the inner experience of the individual, that it must not fail to locate the individual's acts within implicating social processes, and that it must be dynamic (ibid., pp. 6–11 and 24).

Mead emphasizes the temporal and logical pre-existence of the social process to the self-conscious individual that arises within it (for example, see ibid., pp. 186 and 233). Thus, like Cooley, he objects to any social contract model since society exists prior to the individual. The self, as we shall see later, is not there at birth but arises in the process of social experience.¹⁰ But this is a dialectical rather than a determinate relationship because ‘the individual is no thrall of society. He constitutes society as genuinely as society constitutes the individual’ (quoted in Morris, 1934, p. xxv). Action originates and is built up in coping with processes within the social and natural world. It is not released simply by the individual as a consequence of factors playing externally upon him (see Blumer, 1966, p. 537).

The construction of such conduct arises within and through communication with others. Thus, instead of commencing with individual minds and working outwards to society, Mead begins with the ongoing social processes and works inwards through the importation of processes of communication into the individual by means of the vocal gesture (see Morris, 1934, p. xxiii). Human society is thus dependent upon the development of language for its own distinctive form of organization. Human rather than animal beings do not only interact within a world of conditioning stimuli (non-symbolic interaction where there is direct response to another's gestures or actions); also they inhabit a world of objects meaningfully significant in terms of shared symbols (see Mead, 1934, pp. 43–9, 89 and 122; 1912). Language thus emerges out of particular social processes rather than being the result of simple inter-individual imitation (Mead, 1934, pp. 59–61). Two related criticisms of Mead should be noted: first, in his conflation of the notion of mind with language-symbols of a social-vocal origin, there is a failure to consider certain individual aspects of man resulting from non-linguistic and thus non-social signs and gestures (see Morris, 1934, pp. xiv-xv). And second, on occasions, Mead appears to suggest that language is important not only in conceptualizing order, but in determining the very nature of that order.¹¹ Both of these seem erroneous intrusions of an idealism reminiscent of Cooley where social reality for each actor is the set of socially acquired symbols.

The importance of communication follows from the fact that certain gestures arouse the same response in the individual as they do in the other to whom they are directed. In addressing himself in this way, the individual's self is developed - in his social conduct he becomes an object, or an other, to himself. Mead (1938, p. 428) says: ‘it is primarily in social conduct that we stimulate ourselves to act toward ourselves as others act toward us and thus identify ourselves with others and become objects to ourselves’. It is the vocal gesture which enables this to occur. Internalization and a shared consciousness of the meanings of such gestures result from the fact that they arouse the same attitudes in the individuals making them that they arouse in the individuals responding to them (1934, pp. 47 and 109). But Mead points out that the social relationships upon which this process is based are directed to different individuals and groups with the result that different selves develop in relation to these varying social encounters (ibid., p. 142). But the self does not exist apart from such social experience.

The development of the self, in the sense of an agent being the object of his own activity, is a two-part process. First of all, there are the mechanisms through which the individual internalizes the attitudes of various others by placing himself in the role(s) that they are playing; second, through the capacity for role-taking, the individual comes to look at himself through the eyes of these various others and thus to be an object of his own consciousness. He stands outside himself and evaluates himself in various ways. Thus Mead points out that the development of the self is dependent upon the presence of other objects with which the individual can identify himself. During play, the child plays a succession of roles with various role-partners as significant others. There is no stable organization of the child; he is unpredictable, he has no definite character or personality. The individual's self at the play stage is constituted solely by an organization of the particular attitudes of particular individuals in the specific social acts in which he participates with them. The game, on the other hand, is a social activity based on the assumption that each individual takes the attitudes of the social group of which he is a member towards the organized co-operative social activity or set of such activities in which that group as such is engaged (ibid., pp. 152–64). Thus the self as an object becomes a part of the individual through its having assumed the generalized attitude of the group to which that self belongs (see Mead, 1938, p. 375). Mead argues that the self reaches full development by organizing the individual attitudes of others into the organized social or group attitudes; he puts himself in the place of the generalized other, which represents the organized responses of all the members of the group. For Mead then, for the development of the self, the individual needs to be a member of a group or community, since it is only in the acquisition of such generalized attitudes that a definite character or personality develops.

This is a crucial and difficult argument. In the way in which Mind, Self and Society is normally interpreted it leads to the thesis that the beliefs and actions of individuals are determined by the organized social group in which that individual is implicated. This, I think, is too simple since in the same work (p. 210) Mead claims that ‘Social control is the expression of the “me” over against the expression of the “I”. It sets the limits, it gives the determination that enables the “I”, so to speak, to use the “me” as the means of carrying out what is the undertaking that all are interested in.’ In other words, although the self arises out of the assumption of the attitudes of the generalized other, in doing so it begins to be able to look at itself and to act in specific ways. That the internalization of the other is simply one moment in the dialectic can be seen from the following (Mead, 1936, p. 163):

That reflexive experience in which the individual realizes himself in so far as, in some sense, he sees himself, hears himself. It is the sort of situation in which the individual is both subject and object. But in order to be both subject and object, he has to pass from one phase to another. The self involves a process that is going on, that takes on now one form and now another - a subject-object relationship which is dynamic, not static; a subject-object relationship which has a process behind it, one which can appear now in this phase, now in that.

Thus, in acting as a subject, he acts with reference to himself as an object; he turns back and directs himself just as he influences others. The human actor thus is put not merely within the world but is set over and against it; he is required to meet and handle his world through a defining process instead of merely responding to it, and this forces him to construct his action rather than simply to release it. Thus, for Mead, ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• part one Symbolic interactionism and the reference group concept
• part two Reference groups in the study of dissent
• part three The sociology of Indonesian dissent
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index