ABSENCE

In semiotics, a term is absent from a meaningful sequence of signs if it could potentially occupy a position in the sequence, and if its exclusion affects the meaning of the signs which are present.

In social theory, a distinction is usually made between action and behaviour. While behaviour is purely physical (or instinctual) movement on the part of the agent, action is intentional and meaningful, and more precisely, social action is oriented to the behaviour and action of others. Weber (1978) distinguishes four ideal types of action. Traditional actions are performed because they have always been performed so, and thus provide a limiting case of action, being little better than behaviour. Affectual actions are expressive of an emotion. More significantly, zweckrational (goal rational or instrumental) action entails the choice of that which is perceived to be the most instrumentally efficient means to the achievement of a goal. (The goal itself may be assessed in terms of the desirability of the consequences of pursuing and achieving it.) An instrumental action is comprehensible in so far as one recognises or shares the agent’s view of instrumental or causal relationships in the world. In wertrational (value rational) action, the action is oriented to the achievement of a positively valued, and thus taken for granted, goal. Such actions are understood through recognising the importance of the appropriate values to the agent. Two broad responses to Weber’s account may be identified. On the

one hand, emphasis may be placed upon the meaningfulness of the action, and the generation of meaning within the community and within the process of social interaction. For Schutz (1962, 1964), the attributing of motivations to actions (and thus the explication of goals, means or values) is the exception rather than the rule. Mundane social interaction is grounded in taken-for-granted responses to the actions of others, and of others’ responses to one’s own actions. (In effect, most action is unreflective, habitual behaviour.) Should this taken-for-granted life-world breakdown, motivation can be attributed, either retrospectively (with ‘because motives’, explicating the immediate motives of past actions), or prospectively (with ‘in-order-to motives’, that work effectively to explicate the goals of a forthcoming

action), for example, in order to defend one’s actions, or orient the actions of others. The meaning of an action ultimately rests upon its negotiation by all participating agents, rather than by an unproblematic appeal to the intentions of the original agent. This approach was developed, to something of an extreme, by ethnomethodology. On the other hand, within a positivist tradition, the actions of

individual agents are subordinated to an overarching social order. Thus, for Parsons (1937, 1951), the complexity of social interaction, in which there is such a range of interpretations (in terms of intentions, motives or goals) that one will never be able to predict with any certainty how another may react, entails that some prior social mechanism must exist in order to reduce complexity and increase predictability. Thus, interacting agents appeal to norms that are institutionalised in society, and internalised by individual agents in the process of socialisation. Norms do not merely codify the rules pursued by each agent and their evaluation of potential goals, but rather serve to direct their actions. In Parsons’s system, the social action of the individual is thereby integrated into the social system as a whole. While Schutz’s agents actively draw upon cultural resources to make sense of action as necessary, Parsons’s agents more or less passively follow determining rules of conduct.