ABSTRACT
The current trend in theories of social action is towards an intersubjective or communicative approach (Crossley 1996). This model takes social interaction to be the most basic and fundamental unit of action analysis and understands its structure to be irreducible to the sum of its parts. The earliest pioneer of this approach was George Herbert Mead (1967). Mead formulated the basic notion of the irreducibility of interaction. The major exponent in current theory is Jürgen Habermas (1987, 1991) (cf. also Turner 1988). Habermas adds many insights and innovations to Mead’s model and he draws out the implications of the model for more general issues in social theory and philosophy. Two innovations in particular are important. First, Habermas uses the communicative model to replace the Parsonian idea that action is the most basic unit of social analysis and is the mechanism of social integration (Parsons 1951). Interaction is the most basic unit of analysis, he argues, and interaction is the means through which social integration is achieved. Selves, personalities and culture are also said to be reproduced through this mechanism. Secondly, he identifies and investigates the normative framework of interaction and the validity claims that are raised by all of our ordinary speech acts. All speech acts are oriented towards mutual understanding, according to this model, and all can be contested on the basis of 1) their propositional content, 2) the social and moral right of the speaker to say what he or she has said, and 3) the sincerity of the speaker (these are the aforementioned validity claims). This point is important because it stresses the potential defeasibility of social actions and allows us to consider such actions from a normative as well as an analytic position. We can consider the extent to which particular social arenas are regulated by rational agreement1 and the extent to which the potential for agreement is overridden by, for example, economic and political power.
