Action in Society: Reflexively Conceptualizing Activities

Abstract

The main argument of this chapter is that discussions about action concepts in the social sciences are still far too much presented as letters of faith pitching various necessarily partial theoretical approaches against each other in a totalizing fashion. This modality of engagement with human action for sociological purposes falls short of a number of criteria that I will develop in Part 2 of this chapter. In particular I will show that the very common narrow focus of the activity concepts discussed in Part 3 (rational choice, habit, practice, interaction, social action, and performance) overlooks not only the constitutive role of emic understandings of activities in everyday life, their plurality in use, and their historicity, but also the socio-political and thus historical responsiveness of scholarly activity concepts themselves. Moreover, many activity concepts make it difficult to comprehend how diverse aspects of social life are connected with each other. This does not mean, however, that these concepts would not be useful in particular kinds of circumstances. It only means their totalizing claims are misleading. To help crafting situationally and historically specific concepts of action I propose in Part 4 a consequently processualist metatheoretical framework focusing on action-reaction effect webs. A secondary argument of this chapter addresses another unfortunate feature of contemporary sociological work. In spite of the fact that there is near universal agreement among sociologists today that social configurations exists in the interconnected activities of people, activity concepts play only a subordinate or perfunctory role in major parts of sociology. The reasons for this highly problematic and unnecessary state of affairs lie in the history of how the social sciences have developed in response to political, economic, and social revolutions out of individualistic Enlightenment political philosophy and ethics. I therefore open this chapter in Part 1 by very briefly tracing the historical roots of action concepts in the Europeanoid tradition including the idea that social configurations can (or even must) be studied without recourse to the activities of their constituent people. This historical snapshot will also shed light on the question why action concepts are, in the social sciences, discussed as articles of faith.