Taken as a quartet, Mead (1925), Blumer (1966), Cooley (1922), and Goffman (1959) seem to suggest that relationships are constructed from three underlying interpersonal actions: a perception of the other person, a projection of self to the other, and a perception of the reflected self from the other. Is this trio of 'actions' generally assumed to be symmetrical?
It is what Goffmann and Simmel consider the perspectives reciprocity.
Symbolic Interactionism is a micro-level perspective which focuses on how daily interactions create and maintain social order. This view studies how people use symbols and language to develop their views of the world and communicate with one another. It cannot possibly be symmetrical due to the nature of the co-creation of meaning in corollary combination of the three. Social interaction generates the order that changes adaptively to internal and external constraints, resources, and power. Complex Adaptive Transformation focuses on the self-organizational behavior of complex, dynamic systems, and the interaction of such systems with each other. “Complex systems have a self-organizational process that emerges out of the nature of the properties of their component parts” (Siegel, 2003, p. 4). The parts are not symmetrical. The very nature of the varying parts in a complex system is to work together to create a greater whole. A city is made of various parts belonging to diverse individuals responsible to patrons who collectively utilize public order, safety, flows of traffic, commerce, distribution of goods, provision of resources, employment, housing, information, and entertainment all in conjunction with each other. Therefore, unique individual people use available resources, while creatively removing obstacles to organize and construct a distinct community or culture (Barton & Tusting, 2005, p. 2). They create the society’s personality, and many people use these parts cooperatively to further organize, sustain, and develop a more predictable, complex organization (Cooper, 2005; Kuhn, 2007). In Complexity Theory, systems move back and forth from states of chaos to organization to chaos in order to strive for maximum organization (e.g. people doing home remodels experience chaos before they ever regain order). It is often in a creative balance between recursion and constraint that either change occurs or stability is maintained (Griffin, 2002; Kuhn, 2007; Richardson, 2004). The integrated whole is greater than the sum of its parts, producing unique outcomes. When a system’s parts work together, those parts create a synergistic outcome that exceeds an observer’s understanding of the whole from the view of just one or a few parts.
Very interesting analyses Charles! As far as symbolic interaction is concerned, Goffman explained the the ritual order which is blurring with day-to-day life and make people interact as they stage power on social scene.
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