Social Interaction in the Emerging Society: Challenges and Opportunities

Posted on Sep 1, 2024 in Social sciences

The Meaning of Our Actions

We react to situations depending on the meaning we attach to our actions, the environment, and the actions of others. Each object can have infinite meanings, depending on the direction that each person has in their relationship.

Joint Action

The joint action of individuals is based on previous performance frameworks that are shared and derived from the past. These frameworks are historical and transformed into a complex process through practice.

Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Perspective

Erving Goffman, a student of Blumer, developed his dramaturgical perspective based on the tension between what people want to do and what others expect them to do. People act for social audiences. He adopted a perspective of social life as a series of dramatic performances similar to those presented on stage. Goffman focuses on analyzing the processes that enable their construction or destruction. He became interested in meetings, face-to-face interactions where people are always physically present. His perspective was not deterministic. He is the author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

People also seek to influence audiences. Actions are defined as “any individual act that serves to influence the audience to participate in that meeting.” Unlike Blumer, Goffman’s work is characterized by its systematic refusal to create a grand theory.

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodologists focus on studying the “body of common sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations (methods) through which members of society make sense of the circumstances they are under, how they continue in those circumstances, and act accordingly.” The analysis of intersubjectivity and the budgets that guide it and make it possible is essential to understanding the social order and how it plays out. The main representative is Harold Garfinkel, author of Studies in Ethnomethodology.

Ethnomethodology has a triple object of study:

• The tacit knowledge that people use to make sense of reality, influence it, and direct their actions (the meaning of objects, social practices, and concepts depends on the context in which they arise and are used).
• Social order as the result of shared procedures (it is a realization of the interaction of people working together, based on the capacity to interpret and forecast the actions of other subjects).
• Action based on a person’s ability to predict responses.

Objective-structural approaches and subjective-symbolic approaches refer to the two major methodological orientations of social work with groups in the twentieth century.

Social Interaction and the Challenges of the Emerging Society

A Society of Technological Innovation

We are immersed in a society characterized by technological innovation and the transformation and adaptation of forms of social interaction to a new context. This new society requires greater social skills, adaptability, and resilience, while simultaneously experiencing increasing work and family instability. This is particularly true in the context of individualization, where social bonds are weakened.

Social work with groups aims to retrieve or strengthen our capacity for social interaction. Two theoretical proposals examine this emerging new society. We will then address the new working environment that citizens have to join in the twenty-first century and the crucial factor of social inclusion or exclusion that integration, or lack thereof, in the labor market represents.

Social Interaction in a New Model of Society: Risk and Network

Ulrich Beck and the Risk Society

According to Ulrich Beck, it is necessary to address emerging problems with new categories, as the classic strategies of nineteenth-century societies are obsolete. The central question is, “…require either a policy of massive and directed contrary interpretation, or a rethinking and reprogramming of the valid paradigm of modernization.”

To address this new social problem, Beck develops the notion of the “risk society” (a society in which the logic of risk production dominates the logic of industrial production).

The analysis of the changes we are experiencing, and the future trends emerging in today’s society, must consider the social structures of power and distribution, bureaucracies, rules, and dominant rationality. It must be based on the content and real consequences entailed by the completion of industrial society and the risks that arise after its completion.

Technological Development and Its Impact on Employment

The development of new technologies, microelectronics, and advanced automation can replace jobs at an increasing rate, resulting in the decline of traditional industrial, secure, and paid employment. The deregulation of labor markets generates a set of underemployment and unstable employment that Beck called “the Brazilianization of the West.”

Prospective Analysis and Risk Assessment

Prospective analysis is a necessity. The assessment of new technologies and their social impacts should be based on the production of risks and the transformation of the basic structures of modern societies: “The issues of development and implementation of technologies are replaced by issues of ‘management’ of scientific and political risks of the technologies applied.”

Risk analysis questions the normative horizon of lost security and addresses the conflicts that arise between scientific and social rationality.

The analysis of the future becomes a key issue for survival and viability. The logic of wealth production eventually leads to the risk society.

Restructuring Capitalism and the Information Technology Revolution

For Beck, the key is to analyze future trends and uncover the patterns governing technological development, capturing a dynamic that momentary physical progress in various parts of the globe can obscure.

The starting point is the restructuring of capitalism, the organizational revolution, and the information technology revolution. His theoretical position is based on a double negation:

• The denial of postmodern theory and its discourse on culture. His theory is proposed to swim against this current of destruction and opposes various forms of intellectual nihilism, social skepticism, and political cynicism. “Despite a long tradition of intellectual mistakes, observing, analyzing, and theorizing is a way to help build a different and better world.”
• The denial of technological determinism. Technology is a social product, and the interaction between technology and society determines the fate of both. Given the emergence of a new model of society based on the information technology revolution and the restructuring of capitalism, one must bear in mind the history, culture, and institutions of each specific society. Scientific analysis must begin with the possibility of different social and technological trajectories.

Manuel Castells and the Network Society

For Castells, new historical forms of interaction, control, and social change will emerge from the new information development model. The factor that molds and shapes information technology is the process of capitalist restructuring. The combination of both variables, technological revolution and capitalist restructuring, gives rise to a new techno-economic system: informational capitalism. Along with these two variables, a third must be emphasized: organizational change focused on flexibility and adaptability. The interaction of these three variables, with the cultural, historical, and institutional characteristics of each particular society, gives rise to various types of informational societies that can be seen in our historical context.

We are facing a new, undetermined sociotechnical paradigm at the crossroads between two relatively autonomous trends: the development of new information technologies and the attempt to retool the old society by using the power of technology to serve the power of technology.

Castells states: “In this new society, we face a new dominant social structure: the network society, a new economy: the informational/global economy, and a new culture: the culture of real virtuality.”

Social Interaction and the Labor Market

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The professional work of social workers with groups whose primary objective to enhance the interaction capabilities of individuals through group dynamics. They must make a correct diagnosis of the situation being addressed, and the skills required in the situation being addressed, and required in each social context to overcome challenges and problems.

Teamwork, social skills are reinforced in group dynamics, is increasingly becoming a requirement for access to employment, and social workers should know some basic features of the labor market in contemporary societies.

The uncertainty due to accelerated innovation and the expiry also accelerated technological and organizational solutions that apply, puts us in a new medium. It redefines the strengths and weaknesses of the companies, while presenting new opportunities and pose new threats in the environment. Social Work with groups in this area has a wide field of action: many training courses in business use group dynamics to strengthen in each worker the basic requirements of a system of organization based on teamwork. We must ask, first, for what has changed, and then address the opportunities and uncertainties that open in the near future.

We highlight two features of the transformations under way: the acceleration of innovation and convergence of technologies. Both result in greater integration of systems design, communication and production and sales. In this new environment, business organizations adapt and, as knowledge becomes the main source of competitive advantage, learning ability, innovation and adaptation that results in what is called the “learning organization” means an organization that learning, innovating and adapting to a changing context.

The worker must have a set of basic social skills to work as a team.

Major trends in the economy and the labor market, and new abilities that suit, and opened a field of specialization for the social worker groups are: