G・H・ミードとシンボリック・インタラクショニズム

抄録

Today sociology, which as originally founded as a science of social crises in the early nineteenth century Europe, seems to have been too much institutionalized. In the second half of 1960s many young American sociologists began to question the basic assumptions of so called “established sociology”, particularly that of Parsonian “Grand Theory” of structural-functional analysis and “Abstracted Empiricism” in terms of the late C. W. Mills. Thus there is no doubt that the critical traditions of the discipline have found its new partisans in recent years.
In spite of this growing split between “establishment sociology” and “radical sociology”, the mainstream of the discipline is still in the safe and shallow waters of academic empricism. Nonetheless there is a new trend which seems to be of great importance for the future of sociology; the rise of a new interest in the symbolic interactionism of George Herbert Mead.
The growing interest in details of social interaction, in the structure of the worlds of our everyday life, is likely to take us back to Mead again. With the recent decline of functionalism, Mead's thought has begun to attract deep concern of younger sociologists.
In 1966 Herbert Blumer, the foremost sociological student of Mead, tried to suggest “the freshness, the fecundity, and the revolutionary implications” of Mead's point of view. In the essay, which developed into a serial of polemics, Blumer stressed that Mead had seen the self as a dynamic process of interaction between “I” and “Me”.
However, Mead's treatment of the self as a process was transformed into something much more static and his “generalized other” became just another way of talking about reference group.
In this article the author makes some critical appraisals of the key concepts of Mead's self theory and then he considers if symbolic interactionism could be a more appropriate methodology for the study of human behavior than the positivistic methods which were borrowed from the natural sciences.