Talk in institutional settings:

The final blog post hoorah! Also my week for group presentation!

In this week’s lecture Andrew made a rather outlandish claim that “this is the part which kind of like gave rise to microsociology” and after studying it for the purpose of this week’s presentation, I kind of ‘like’ get what he means! 

Institutions whether of social, financial, sporting or whatever background all share one thing in common, people. Regardless of whether they have a headquarters in a big office building or are more or less social constructions such as gender roles, without the people within the institutions and their actions and interactions, the institutions are nothing. It is extremely difficult to argue against microsociology when institutions are thought of as merely a product of everyday interaction.

“Humans do not sense their environment directly; instead, humans define the situation they are in.”

This quote from Charon (2009) presented an interesting concept to me when I was working on my presentation this week. Whilst it’s on the central ideas of symbolic interactionism, it links to institutional talk and really helped me adopt a sociologists perspective for thinking about the topic. It’s about perspective, interpretation and action and ultimately these ideas underpin micro sociology. It also really hammers home the point made above that institutions are products of people. If people didn’t perceive them, they wouldn’t be. If not for microsociology, macro couldn’t be.

And on that note,  that is me.

Xoxo Gossip Mitch.

P.S still have comment to do though whoops. Bye

Charon, J. M. (2009). Symbolic Interactionism: An Introduction, an Interpretation, an Integration. Northwestern University: Prentice Hall.