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Contingency, Biography, and Structure: On the History of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction 1

1997; Wiley; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/si.1997.20.2.107

1533-8665

Norman K. Denzin,

Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Here I offer one version of the telling of the origins of The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI). This telling, like all tellings, is part fact and part fiction; it is based on memory and the archival files of the Society, dating from 1975 to 1977.2 My telling focuses on a single time and place: the 1973 annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 17 and 18, in the worn-down, shoddy Radisson Hotel. The players in this little drama include myself, Peter M. Hall, Gregory P. and Gladys Stone, Carl J. Couch, Harvey Farberman, David R. Maines, Bill Yoels, Robert Perinbanayagam, Jim Cain, Joan Huber, Nicholas C. Mullins, Herbert Blumer, Manford Kuhn, and a host of others, whose names and presences have faded with the passage of time. A simple argument organizes my story: the origins of this society lie in the interactions that occurred over this two day period; all of the conditions necessary for its formation were in place on April 17, 1973. However, my telling must begin in the present, and then move back to this date. I begin with the end of my story. The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction is 21 years old. The first annual business meeting of the society was held on 28 August, 1975, in the Cabrillo Room of the San Francisco Hilton. The first issue of SSSI Notes, edited by Richard Travisano, was distributed on March 1, 1975, to 196 members and 119 nonmembers. On 16 January, 1976, in Urbana, Illinois, the Constitution and By-Laws for this new society were drafted to be approved by a vote of the membership, now totalling 400, on 28 April of the same year. In March of 1977, the fourth annual symposium of SSSI was convened in Urbana, Illinois. Gregory P. Stone, Carl J. Couch, and Peter M. Hall organized the first three symposia in 1974, 1975, and 1976, on their respective campuses.3 Proceedings from the Minnesota Symposium were published in the Autumn issue of The Sociological Quarterly. The first issue of a new journal, Symbolic Interaction, was published in 1977, and, in the following year, Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Annual started publication. The society now had a council, an advisory board, a publications committee, and would soon establish its annual awards named after Mead, Blumer, and Cooley. Its election procedures would be unique among scholarly societies—based on a lottery and a draw, not popularity and block voting. Thus in three short years this society came into existence and established its presence in the sociological community. Its birth came quickly, a product of many factors, and many individuals played central parts in its formation. The names are legion: Stone, Couch, Hall, Maines, Farberman, McPhail, Smith, Blumer, Olesen, Irwin, Becker, Gladys Stone, Lopata, Hutter, Travisano, Yoels, Cain, Perinbanayagam, Lyn and John Lofland, Gerson, Orbach, Herb Johnson, Haidos, Hughes, Talcott Parsons, Braroe, Robinson, Spector, Greer, Stebbins, Turner, Saxton, Groves, Moore, Fine, Wieder, Leuschen, and on and on. And soon others would lend their names and efforts to this new social structure, which in 1993 has an international membership of nearly 400, a quarterly journal, and an annual spring symposium named after Gregory P. Stone.4 Now my story. But I hesitate. Sartre (1981, pp. 48–51) reminds us that biography, fate, contingency, and chance play important parts in everyday life. Each individual is the consequence, the product of chance occurrences, the meeting of a certain body with the body of another, the merger of these bodies with a certain social milieu, a certain mother, father, peer group, and social world. So it is with this social structure called the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. A product of chance occurrences, meetings of particular bodies in particular social moments, distant mother and father figures (Mead, Blumer) hovering in the background, charismatic figures haunted by the achievements of others, their peers. Disillusioned, damaged, disenfranchised souls, dreaming selves, fluttering like moths against an evening porch light, seeking recognition and a safe harbor to be who they dreamed of being. This structure, like the individuals who made and make it up, is the product of contingency, fate, and history. And in such structures there are no beginnings, only different starting points for telling the story, and no single telling can tell all that could be told. Everything came together on the night of April 17, 1973. And so in the beginning, this telling of the beginning, there were two: Gregory Stone, the great white whale of a man, pot-bellied, close cropped white hair, greying, carefully trimmed Fu Manchu mustache, dark rimmed glasses in front of burning brown eyes, right hand holding a triple gin on the rocks, and in the left, an always burning Kent cigarette. The embodiment of good and evil, haunted by his own past, loved and hated by a group of loyal students, the master of several languages, a man driven to be what symbolic interactionism was all about. And the other “other,” Carl J. Couch, white-haired, gruff-voiced, given to profanity, a mountain man of few adverbs and adjectives, midwestern pragmatist, a student of Kuhn, Mead, and Simmel, confirmed symbolic interactionist, charismatic, hard drinking, loved by a group of loyal students, a believer in science, truth, and humanity.5 It is 6: 30 p.m. in the Radisson basement lounge and cafe. Stone and Couch have not yet arrived. Peter M. Hall has come early. We have all agreed to meet here. A dapper, solitary man at a table, a Jack Daniels on the rocks and a steak dinner in front of him, Hall greets Denzin, who, wet from the rain and weary from the drive from Urbana, joins him for a drink. “Have you read Nick Mullins' new book?” Hall asks. “He predicts the end of symbolic interactionism as a major theory group in American sociology. He says we are being absorbed into mainstream social theory.” Denzin replies, “Mullins is an idiot.” The conversation moves back and forth over Mullins' new book. Hall adds fuel to the fire. “Did you know Sociometry has declared a moratorium on submissions. It has a backlog of one year. Did you know there is no interactionist on the editorial board of that God damned journal!?” The drinks continue to flow. It is now 9: 30. Stone and his entourage arrive, to be followed by Couch and his group from Iowa. I meet David Maines for the first time. We share a room, one of several that Stone has reserved for his group. Drinks are ordered all around. We debate whether or not the huge round table in front of us is really a table, or a small version of Lake Michigan. Denzin argues for the constructionist position, and Maines assumes a position à la Blumer on obdurate realities. Hall summarizes the previous conversation with Denzin. Farberman says, “Mullins is full of shit.” Stone asks if we've seen the new ASR. “That xxxx Joan Huber has an article on us. She says we can't do science right!” Maines jumps in. “Somebody should educate her. We should write a response.” Couch screams, “Yeah, and we aren't even on the Program of the 1973 ASA meetings. That xxx Blau kept us out. And Wince didn't give us any place on the 1973 Midwest Program. We can't get into the ASR. We can't get into Sociometry. We have no place to publish our work.” So the stage is set. All of the issues are on the table. More people join the conversation at the table. Drinks continue to flow. Couch and Stone spar back and forth. Farberman suggests we call Nick Mullins and tell him that symbolic interactionism is alive and well in Milwaukee. Denzin and Farberman leave the table and place a call to Mullins. It is 2: 30 a.m. in Bloomington, Indiana, when Mullins takes our call. Harvey opens, “Hello, Nick, good morning. This is Harvey Farberman. Norman Denzin is on the line with me.” Denzin says, “Hi Nick.” Nick replies, “Hello.” Harvey continues, “Nick, we are calling to tell you that your book is dead wrong. A group of us symbolic interactionists are meeting here in Milwaukee. We've been talking about what you have to say about our group. We felt we needed to call you. We are alive and well. Have a nice day.” Nick, who is quite gracious, thanks us for the telephone call. Farberman and Denzin will make this same call in succeeding years, usually at the same time. At 2: 40 a.m., Denzin and Farberman report back to the group. Cheers go up. A final round of drinks is ordered. The group promises to reconvene the next evening. Several agreements have been reached. Petitions and letters will be written to the ASA and Midwest Program Committees, and the ASA Publications Committee, protesting the apparent boycott of interactionists from the annual meetings and journals of these two associations. Denzin and Stone will attempt to secure typewriters from the Hotel so that three petitions can be drafted and signatures obtained. Couch drafts the letter to the ASA Publications Committee. Stone and Denzin draft the petitions to the ASA and Midwest Program Committees. Copies of the petitions are made and circulated throughout the day. Many people sign them. In the meantime, Maines is working on the response to the Huber article.6 The group reconvenes the night of April 18 in the same bar. The petitions are passed around. We clap each other on the back and order another round of drinks. Discussion led by Stone and Couch soon turns to the concept of an organization, a society of symbolic interactionists with their own journal. Maines and Cain begin discussion of the ASA small grants program focused on Problems of the Discipline. Just initiated, this program awarded money to small groups of scholars for conferences or symposiums. Stone proposes a symposium at Minnesota the following spring, June of 1974. Maines and Cain make a commitment to draft a grant application to the ASA. The proposal is funded, and the first annual Symposium of this nascent society was held at the home of the Stones on the banks of the St. Croix river in Wisconsin on June 14–17, 1974. Participants included Blumer, Couch, Denzin, Farberman, Hall, Maines, Orbach, Perinbanayagam, the Stones, and Yoels. Stone's personal photographer took pictures. The aim of the Symposium was twofold. Harvey Farberman described it in the following words: “to bring together, into an extended, face-to-face dialogue, working scholars of diverse conceptual, procedural and topical proclivities within symbolic interaction … so as to encourage theoretical, methodological and technical advances in the field. This twofold aim indirectly responds to both organizational and intellectual challenges recently leveled at the perspective of symbolic interation” (Faberman 1975, p. 435). Farberman continued, “The practitioners of symbolic interaction … may well be on the road to overcoming their institutional disadvantage by generating a focused, conveyable dialogue without ‘benefit’ of a specific geographic center” (p. 435). And with these prescient words, what would come to be called the Annual Symbolic Interaction Symposium was launched, an event to be repeated every year since 1974. As indicated above, slightly over one year later the first business meeting of this new society was held, and in two years the society had a constitution and a membership of over 400 persons, with a journal to follow the next year. How did all of this happen? Return to the Radisson Hotel. Recall Sartre's words on fate, history, and contingency. Fate and prior commitments brought these actors together at this particular moment in history. Four key processes—turning on the political economy of intellectual ideas, a previously existing informal interactionist network, fate, and contingency—were operating. In the spring of 1973 interactionism was in the air and it was being attacked. The Stone and Farberman (1970) and Manis and Meltzer (1972) readers (Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interactionism; Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology) had both appeared within the previous two years. Larry and Janice Reynolds (1973) were in print attacking the perspective for its astructural bias. Alvin Gouldner (1970) had just attacked Howard Becker and Erving Goffman for their failures to consider macro issues in their interactionist work. Huber (1973) was in the ASR charging the perspective with a set of emergent biases. Nick Mullins (1973) said the theory group was dead. John Lofland had already launched Urban Life. Barry Glassner was soon to start Qualitative Sociology, and the major journals were seen as excluding the perspective from their pages. The “Chicago School” was being reborn in California, ethnomethodology was everywhere, and Jack Douglas and his students were articulating an interactionist-like existential sociology. Attacks on the perspective as being unscientific, allegedly conservative, ignorant of deep structural processes, and inattentive to the dark, demonic, and subterranean side of life (Farberman 1975, p. 435) served, as Simmel would predict, to solidify the group. They organized around the belief that their perspective was being unfairly represented by other scholars. Predictions about the group's demise intensified interactional commitments, and furnished the basis for the commitments to begin holding annual symposia, and to seek a journal of their own. Each of the key players brought to this fateful, two-day drama a shared history, in some instances histories embedded in the instructor-student relationship, in others the colleague-colleague relationship. Friendships criss-crossed these structures. Each individual was also identified as a major participant in that discursive system known as symbolic interactionism. This identification went below surface commitments to a point of view. These individuals, in Travisano's framework (1981), had undergone major emotional and intellectual conversions, almost religious-like, to the interactionist point of view. They lived and breathed interactionism, read deeply in the works of its founders (Mead, Simmel, Cooley), idolized its heroes and heroines, and modeled themselves after these individuals. A rich folklore held the group together. Many traced themselves back to the Arnold Rose (1962) reader, Human Behavior and Social Processes, and had been trained at the major post-World War II Midwestern interactionist sites: Chicago, Minnesota, or Iowa. They were organized against the other major theory groupings of the day, especially functionalism and exchange theory, probably misunderstood ethnomethodology, and were surely not students of Marxism, but felt comfortable with Simmel's version of conflict theory. It was their mission to carry interactionism forward, building on the shoulders of Blumer, Kuhn, and Mead. Sartre (1981) also tells us that nothing occurs completely by chance. It was no accident that this group of individuals met in Milwaukee on this fateful evening. Prior commitments had been made to do so. Criticisms of the perspective had been in print for some time. Nothing new was really being said. But on this night these criticisms stung with a force, with an intensity of the first order. The force was perceived at the personal, not the structural, or the institutional level. The personal moved outward from the members' biographies, to the persons doing the attack. This interpretation then connected the attacks to the individual's commitment to the perspective. This commitment was then localized in terms of the individual's academic department and the department's attitudes toward the interactionist point of view. Living their own version of the personal being political, these interactionists felt they were fighting for their own intellectual lives. Stone read Huber's attack as a continuation of Bill Form's attempts to belittle interactionism, and connected this back to his long, acrimonious relationship with Form. Denzin was soon to live under Huber's headship at Illinois, where interactionism was criticized for being journalism. Couch was training a new cohort of students in the “New” Iowa tradition. He and his students (Couch and Hintz 1975) were on the verge of a series of major discoveries involving invariant social processes, but his department was becoming hostile to his work. Stone was seeking to solidify his place in interactionist history. Maines, Perinbanayagam, and Farberman were continuing Stone's tradition at Stony Brook, Columbia, and Hunter College. Hall was carrying on the interactionist tradition at Missouri. Thus the attacks were woven and stitched into the inner fabrics of each interactionist's professional and personal self-conception. Their social identities were at stake. The attacks solidified these identities, which merged into a collective consciousness. A sense of higher moral purpose was at issue. And so was the stage set for the birth of this social structure. Five other elements came into play. First, there were others, some as yet unnamed, who also wanted to be part of this project. Within two years 400 people had signed on. Thus the project answered to a need; it invoked an identity also shared by others. Second, people were willing to put up their own money for this project. They were willing to pay to be publicly identified as members of this new organization. Third, this money allowed the group to seek out and find not one, but several publishers who wanted to publish the new journal. There was money in interactionism. Fourth, all but a few of the key players were tenured, or soon to be. Nobody was risking tenure by committing to this project. Furthermore, those with tenure had access to local resources which helped fund the first round of symposia. Fifth, all of the key members were productive scholars, contributing to the interactionist literature. Their work was defining the very perspective they were attempting to save. And so in three swift years, the SSSI came alive. In those three years there would be many battles and fights: How would our officers be elected? Who would be on the publications committee? Who would be our first president? Who would edit the journal? Should we become a section of the ASA? And so on. In these early days some threatened to leave. Members embarrassed other members publicly. Personal lives fell apart. Stone died in Costa Rica on the site of the never-built Herbert Blumer Institute. And the SSSI went on. Out of the intensely personalized and charismatic interactions that occurred in Milwaukee in April of 1973, a structure was built, a structure that today confronts the self-same problems identified by Farberman 21 years ago. So the message, somewhat self-serving, framed as a question and a challenge is clear. Do we today, collectively and individually, feel that intensity of the first order that burned so deeply into the long night of April 17, 1973, in Milwaukee?