George Herbert Mead

For a man who published relatively little during his lifetime (1863-1931), George Herbert Mead's prominence and influence is quite astonishing. A little more than 30 articles and some book reviews and miscellaneous pieces were all that he had to show for a lifetime's research and teaching. No other figure prominent in the social sciences has been celebrated for work which in its most influential form was culled by lecture notes taken by others - cf Mind, Self and Society (1934) - or assembled from fragments of unfinished manuscripts and papers after his death. After Mead's death a virtual school' of Meadian sociology - baptised symbolic interactionism by some of its adherents, and social behaviourism by others - developed, and has remained influential in American sociology ever since. At the same time Mead's approach to central issues of socialisation, identity and role-taking has constituted the starting point for all later attempts to construct a micro-sociology'. This collection of papers provides a wide range of evaluations in Mead's work, tracing its importance for the development of certain key areas of sociology, such as symbolic interactionism and social behaviourism, and assessing his influence on current sociological interests. Mead is treated as one of the founding fathers' of sociology. Whereas Marx, Weber or Durkheim provide a set of central questions and concepts for understanding the social structure of modernity, Mead's perspective is firmly focused on the modern individual, and on the processes by which he or she becomes a social being. Mead's role as a founding father' is undoubtedly partly due to the fact that he worked at Chicago, that sociology in Chicago provided a very influential approach to the discipline at a critical stage in its professionalization in the USA, and that he supplied not merely a conceptual foundation for studies of the individual and society, but a comprehensive philosophical underpinning for the methodology of what was coming to be known as the Chicago School' of sociology. The articles are arranged in four coherent sections covering Mead's life and the intellectual context of his work; his relationship to symbolic interactionism; his influence in social behaviourism and his work on the theory of the mind. This Critical Assessment consists of the best scholarly writings on Mead's work. It has been designed to help in the general process of enabling a richer and more complete image of Mead to emerge.