Social Interaction & Performance – Social Relationships
Social Interaction – When the teacher calls on you to answer a question, you are daydreaming in class. You urgently search the room for assistance since you are unsure of the solution.
Finally, a fellow student whispers it in your ear. You respond, and the terrifying moment is over.
Everyone is content as you return to daydreaming and the instructor resumes her duties as a teacher.
There was a lot of activity just then. Things that make a lot of questions.
Like, why do you care if you provide the appropriate response?
Why are you even concerned about responding to the question?
And given that it might get them in trouble, why does your classmate assist you?
We must discuss social interaction if you want the correct responses to these queries.
We also need to discuss reality.
Because, in accordance with some sociological ideas, your social reality, both inside and outside of the classroom, is essentially one enormous, life-long stage production.
The act of acting and responding in respect to other individuals is known as social interaction.
People engage socially whenever they talk, shout, fight, or play sports.
Social structure may be found everywhere there is social interaction.
Relationships between individuals and groups make up the social structure.
And this framework directs our conduct and places boundaries on it.
Because, based on the societal context, our partnerships impose specific expectations on everyone involved.
In a classroom, it is very clear that the instructor teaches and the pupils learn since that is what is expected of them in that situation.
However, if you see a teacher, let’s say, in the mall, you both react differently – and most likely uncomfortably – as a result of the altered social norms.
This still leaves us wondering why these linkages function the way they do.
However, it does indicate where to look.
If expectations underlie our interactions, we must comprehend how they are formed, which necessitates a discussion of social standing.
A person’s status determines their place in a community or social group.
Their connections with other people are defined by it, and it is a component of their identity.
Therefore, a teacher’s relationship with their students is determined by their standing as a “teacher.”
Statuses, however, go beyond only occupations; they also include things like gender, color, and sexual orientation, as well as things like being a parent, a kid, or a citizen.
A person’s status set is made up of all the statuses that person currently has.
Because statuses are valued differently depending on their position in a hierarchy, they may reveal a lot about a person. As a result, if I tell you that someone is a white, middle-aged, male CEO, you may infer a lot about his education, fortune, and social status.
Additionally, you’ve certainly observed that different statuses have distinct characteristics. For instance, the statuses “white,” “middle-aged,” and “male” are very unlike from the status “CEO.”
The first three have been given specific statuses.
Ascribed statuses are those in which a person has no option; they may be allocated involuntarily later in life or assigned at birth.
For example, the attributed status of “race” is determined at birth, whereas the ascribed status of “middle age” is determined later in life.
The position of CEO, on the other hand, is one that a person has gained after putting up at least some effort.
Therefore, careers are acquired statuses.
It’s also true to be a parent or a student.
In addition to this distinction, certain statuses are more significant than others.
The status that other people are most likely to use to recognize you is a master status.
This might be acquired, such as “professor,” or attributable, such as “cancer patient.”
And as that illustration demonstrates, a master rank need not be advantageous or desired.
You could think that’s all very fascinating, but we haven’t really spoken that much about social interaction.
You’re correct that status gives us a head start, but if we want to go deeper into how individuals act, we must discuss roles. Roles are the sets of behaviors, commitments, and privileges that come with a certain status, if status is a social position.
Consequently, a person has a status yet plays a function.
Perform is the word to keep in mind.
Now that a person may have several statuses, they can also have different jobs.
However, a single rank frequently comes with a number of functions.
For instance, a teacher’s responsibility in the classroom is to guide and instruct the students.
To act as a colleague to other teachers or as an employee to the administration in the faculty lounge, however, requires a completely different set of behaviors than those required in the classroom.
However, the entire collection of roles associated with the single status “teacher” constitutes that status.
Role sets exist for every status.
And different role sets may occasionally require conflicting actions from the individual who occupies that set.
Role conflict occurs when the expectations placed by the responsibilities associated with certain statuses conflict.
Role conflict can occur when parents who work frequently have to choose between the needs of their families and their careers.
In what we refer to as “role tension,” even the responsibilities within a single status might be in conflict with one another.
A student who is involved in school, basketball, music, the yearbook committee, and other activities faces role strain as they attempt to reconcile the conflicting demands of each function while still maintaining their identity as a student.
Role departure is the process by which someone just leaves a role, perhaps as a result of disagreement, pressure, or other factors.
Both voluntary and involuntary actions can be taken under this situation, such as leaving your work.
In either case, because roles are a part of who we are, it’s rarely as easy as just walking out the door.
Therefore, leaving a position can be upsetting, especially if you didn’t prepare for it or if you didn’t choose to go.
Currently, we’ve been discussing roles as if they were prescriptive or wholly determined our conduct.
However, they don’t!
The expectations we have of ourselves and of others are reflected in our roles.
We might or might not internalize such expectations, but even if we do, we still don’t have full control over our conduct.
But why do roles and statuses ever combine in the first place?
Why can’t I simply decline to play my part?
The solution is nuanced, but one of the factors is that, well, reality is socially created.
Nothing in the principles of physics mandates that certain individuals are instructors, and that these individuals may pose questions, to which pupils must respond.
However, this does not imply that the functions associated with these statuses are not genuine.
The Thomas Theorem, which was devised by American sociologists William Thomas and Dorothy Thomas in the early 20th century, is a useful method of thinking about this.
“If individuals interpret circumstances as real, they are real in their effects,” the statement reads.
In other words, jobs and statuses are important because we claim they are.
The world is shaped by perspective.
Therefore, even though you don’t believe it matters, everyone else does, which is why you can’t just refuse to do your part.
Therefore, the instructor who chooses to not teach and instead lounges about sipping wine with their feet up on the desk is dismissed, but the student who refuses to respond to a question gets in trouble.
People require that you do the duties associated with being a teacher if you hold that status.
Your feelings on your standing are not actually relevant.
On the basis of our experiences, our prior beliefs, and the socialization that teaches us about standards in various settings, we also know who is a teacher and who is a pupil.
This is how your reality is socially created since you and those around you base what is real on presumptions and experiences.
You really build the social reality that shapes such encounters by engaging with individuals around you and anticipating particular behaviors in the framework of roles.
Because your social reality is not just about you, it is really crucial that this occurs in interaction.
It concerns each person you are engaging with as well as their expectations.
It has to do with continuing a performance.
And this notion of performance is very crucial to understanding how individuals interact from a sociological perspective.
The dramaturgical examination of social interaction is based on this concept.
This method of understanding social interaction treats it like a play being played in front of an audience, and it was developed by Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman.
People physically play parts for one another, according to Goffman’s theory, and the goal of social contact is always to maintain a successful connection that is consistent with expectations.
To gratify the audience, in other words.
People must carefully manage the information others learn about them in order to do this, which is a process known as impression management.
For instance, you wouldn’t discuss how your last relationship ended if you were out on a first date since you didn’t want to give the wrong impression.
However, managing your impressions involves more than just what you say and don’t say.
It also depends on your actions and what you wear.
In other words, it has to do with what Goffman called “props” and “nonverbal communication.”
You already know that actors utilize props to assist them convey a specific message, so if you want to appear professional, wear a suit.
Make sure you’re reading a book if you want to come across as studious.
A prop can also be the environment: It takes about 50% of what it takes to seem like a teacher to be the person seated at the front of the room.
Additionally, nonverbal communication includes gestures like waving hello to a buddy as well as body language like standing up straight to appear respectable and keeping or avoiding eye contact.
Props and nonverbal communication are two types of sign vehicles, which Goffman defined as objects we employ to assist communicate impressions to individuals we deal with.
The distinction between what is part of the performance and what isn’t, or what the audience sees and what they don’t, is actually the most essential one. Those vehicles are significant components of the performance.
This was known as frontstage and backstage by Goffman.
Backstage is where the artist may prepare and drop the show while frontstage is where the audience is present.
The performances we strive to keep front of stage are sometimes completely ruined by the things we do behind.
Backstage is where crucial instructional preparation takes place, yet if any of the students, or the audience, witnessed the instructor cursing profanely while marking papers, it would completely sabotage the performance since it goes against expectations of how teachers should behave.
Additionally, not every performance is a one-person show.
The kids, for instance, are all members of what Goffman refers to as a team; they are cooperating to perform as a group for the teacher.
This does not imply that they are close or even that they like one another.
Simply said, it implies that everyone must cooperate in order to put up a decent, focused class.
Because they are functioning as a teammate, they are helping you maintain the class’s performance of attention by whispering the solution to you.
And the instructor keeps on instructing.
It’s crucial to realize that, according to Goffman’s research, the constant performances that everyone puts on aren’t always antagonistic:
Everyone involved wants the performance to go smoothly, whether they are performing for the teacher or the children.
You might never be an Oscar winner.
Dramaturgical analysis, however, contends that it is via your social interactions that your statuses, roles, and all of the expectations they involve come together to allow you to actually put on the play of your life.
And that performance is what social reality is made of.
We studied social interaction today.
We discussed statuses, how one acquires them, and how they might clash.
Then we discussed how roles determine your status, which affects how you behave.
We discussed how reality is socially created in order to examine why certain roles are important.
The idea of dramaturgical analysis was the last thing we learnt, and it explains how we might think of social interaction as a kind of theatrical performance.
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