George Herbert Mead Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Despite being a professor of philosophy, sociologists have come to appreciate George H. Mead’s ideas far more than philosophers have. Today, he is recognized not only as one of the most important early sociological figures in the USA, but also in the entire world. Mead analyzes three ideas of significance to sociologists: (1) the social act, (2) the self, and (3) society. The starting point for understanding Mead’s sociological views is not the self, as many sociologists have long mistakenly thought, but the social act. Without engaging in social acts, people could never have developed selves, and without selves, societies as we know them could have never arisen.

Mead defines a social act as any activity that requires at least one other person to complete. According to him, social acts are comprised of five basic components: (1) roles, (2) attitudes, (3) significant speech, (4) attitudinal assumption, and (5) social objects. For Mead, roles are the basic building blocks from which all social acts are assembled. More specifically, they are the individual acts that each participant must carry out to insure a social act’s completion. Roles operate hand in hand with attitudes. Mead defines attitudes as the preparation or readiness to perform our specific roles within a larger unfolding social act. Because attitudes originate from vague bodily impulses, they unite our corporal and social existences. Mead uses his term significant speech” as a synonym for language. It refers to our use of vocal or written gestures that have a similar meaning to us as they have to the other participants in a social act. For Mead, attitudinal assumption, which significant speech makes possible, refers to our assuming the attitudes of others so that we can anticipate the roles that they will perform in the social acts in which we are participants. Finally, according to Mead, a social object” is the common attitude that participants assume toward the construction of a prospective social act. Thus, when participants form a social object of a social act, they simultaneously form what Mead called a common plan of action” for its subsequent execution.

Mead speaks of the self, which for him inserts itself inside the social act, in two alternative ways. The most poetic way in which he speaks of it is as a conversation between an “I” and a “me.” The “I” represents the impulse that excites our attitudes or preparation to perform our roles in a social act, as well as the later expression of that attitude in the actual performance of our role. Conversely, the “me” represents the attitudes of the other participants or society at large that we assume during the performance of our particular role in a social act. The “me” affects the expression of our “I” and thereby how we perform our roles in a social act, but not always in the same way. It can outright endorse, veto, or make major or minor alterations in our “I’s” expression. On rare occasions, the “I” can simply ignore the “me” altogether.

Mead also speaks of the self more mundanely as an attitudinal assumption process. People assume each others’ attitudes by telling each other what they plan to do and how and when they plan to do it. To have a self, he argues, we must not only assume the attitudes of the other participants in a social act. Our assumption of their attitudes must also affect our attitude and, thereby, how we actually perform our role in the social act. Whether viewed as a conversation between I” and me,” or as an attitudinal assumption” process, Mead views the key ingredient of the self as ”reflexivity” – the ability to adjust your attitude toward the performance of your role in a social act on the basis of your assumption of the other participants’ attitudes toward the performance of their roles in it. Thus, for Mead, reflexivity and, in turn, selfhood, require more than our merely being conscious or aware of others’ attitudes; it also requires that this awareness change, however slightly, our attitudes toward our roles and, thereby, the subsequent performance of them in a social act.

According to Mead, the self not only inserts itself into the social act but, by its insertion, it makes society possible. He views society as a community organized on the basis of institutions and an institution as only a special form of social action. Institutionalized social acts are launched to satisfy recurrent socio-physiological impulses, such as communication, sex, parenting, bartering, etc. The recurrent impulses that launch institutional social acts stir in us attitudes to perform complementary roles in these acts, such as speaker and hearer, mother and father, and seller and buyer.

Mead believes that during institutionalized social acts, we always draw on common maxims to help us form a common social object of the unfolding social act and, in turn, construct a congruent plan of action for carrying out our particular roles in it. However, we cannot do this without assuming the attitude of our society which, in turn, requires that we must have selves. Institutionalized social acts are necessarily repetitive. Although our successful execution of a plan of action for the completion of an institutional social act satisfies the socio-physiological impulse that launched it, we will later need to satisfy this same impulse over and over again in future institutional social acts. Finally, for Mead, our social institutions are not immutable. Once made, they can be reinvented through individual ingenuity. The “I” can sometimes jump over the “me.” We can invent new maxims to form novel social objects of our social acts and new congruent plans of action for their execution.

Without institutions, Mead believes that we would still be living in a disorganized mass. Mead explicitly identified only six basic societal institutions: (1) language, (2) family, (3) economy, (4) religion, (5) polity, and (6) science. Although he believes that all six of these institutions are of great importance not only to the development of human society, but also for its on-going operation, he believes that language is the single most important one. Because language makes it possible for human beings to assume the attitude of their society and, in turn, its common maxims of action, it is a requirement for the creation and subsequent operation of all the other institutions in society.

Bibliography:

Mead, G. (1934) Mind. In: Self and Society, ed. C. Morris. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Mead, G. (1964) Mead: Selected Writings, ed. A. Reck. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN.