Richard Bernstein expressed the view that pragmatism was ahead of its time; the same has been true of symbolic interactionism. These two closely related perspectives, one philosophical and the other sociological, place human action at the center of their explanatory schemes. It has not mattered what aspect of social or psychological behavior was under scrutiny. Whether selves, minds, or emotions, or institutions, social structures, or social change, all have been conceptualized as forms of human activity. Th is view is the simple genius of these perspectives. Anselm Strauss always took ideas pertaining to action and process seriously. Here he makes explicit the theory of action that implicitly guided his research for roughly forty years. It is understood that Strauss accepts the proposition that acting (or even better, interacting) causes social structure. He lays the basis for this idea in the nineteen assumptions he articulates early in the bookâ"assumptions that elaborate and make clearer Herbert Blumerâs famous premises of symbolic interactionism. The task Strauss put before himself is how to keep the complexity of human group life in front of the researcher/theorist and simultaneously articulate an analytical scheme that clari?es and reveals that complexity. With these two imperfectly related issues before him, Strauss outlines an analytical scheme of society in action. It is a scheme that rests not on logical necessity but on research and observation, and the concepts he uses are proposed because they do a certain amount of analytical work. One would be well advised to take Continual Permutations of Action very seriously.
Industry Reviews
-Outstanding Title!... Strauss expands the pragmatist/interactionist orientation to social behavior of John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Herbert Blumer into a full-blown theory of action. In its theoretic fruitfulness, its descriptive sophistication, and in its -respect [for] the empirical world- Strauss's effort renders previous attempts at such formulations (notably Parsons's) redundant. Strauss begins by suggesting some 19 assumptions of an effective action theory that, among other things, can minimize the danger of sociologists -becoming captive to overly simple explanatory models or doctrines [claiming to explain] human life and behavior.- His fundamental idea of trajectory and related subconcepts--notably matrix and path analysis of conditions relative to orders of behavior and the arenas in which such behavior is performed--are elaborated into a treatment of the complex interplay between symbolic worlds, social orders, and structures shaped by and through those symbolic sets. The role of the body, of emotions, and of motives within this action theory are set forth as aspects of and conditions for action. This book must be regarded as a magisterial analysis, sociology at its finest. All levels.- --L. Braude, Choice
