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"Mead, George Herbert, 1863-1931."
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The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle
George Herbert Mead, one of America's most important and influential philosophers, a founder of pragmatism, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism, was also a keen observer of American culture and early modernism. In the period from the 1870s to 1895, Henry Northrup Castle maintained a correspondence with family members and with Mead-his best friend at Oberlin College and brother-in-law-that reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought in that complex era. Close friends of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and other leading Chicago Progressives, the author of these often intimate letters comments frankly on pivotal events affecting higher education, developments at Oberlin College, Hawaii (where the Castles lived), progressivism, and the general angst that many young intellectuals were experiencing in early modern America. The letters, drawn from the Mead-Castle collection at the University of Chicago, were collected and edited by Mead after the tragic death of Henry Castle in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Working with his wife Helen Castle (one of Henry's sisters), he privately published fifty copies of the letters to record an important relationship and as an intellectual history of two progressive thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. American historians, such as Robert Crunden and Gary Cook, have noted the importance of the letters to historians of the late nineteenth century. The letters are made available here using the basic Mead text of 1902. Additional insights into the connection between Mead, John Dewey, Henry and Harriet Castle, and Hawaii's progressive kindergarten system are provided by the foundation's executive director Alfred L. Castle. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, has added additional comments on the importance of the letters to understanding the intellectual relationship that flourished at Oberlin College. Published with the support of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation.
eBook
A Dependent Structure of Interdependence: Structure and Agency in Relational Perspective
In this article I argue for a relational approach to the agency–structure problem. Structure has three dimensions from this perspective but, at its most fundamental, it is a network comprising social actors (human and corporate) and the relations connecting them. Defined thus structure has measurable properties which generate both opportunities and constraints for actors and which shape processes, such as diffusion, which affect and implicate them. Agency is integral to this model. Actors are the nodes of the network and their relations are built, maintained, modified and broken by way of their interactions. However, I argue that the human organism only fully becomes a social actor by way of interaction. In effect, both agency and structure are emergent properties of social interactions/relations which act back upon and shape those interactions/relations. In addition to resolving theoretical problems this approach has the advantage of facilitating empirical analysis of structure.
Journal Article
Mead and modernity
Filipe Carreira da Silva addresses the basic questions 'How should we read Mead?' and 'Why should we read Mead today' by showing that the history of ideas and theory-building are closely-related endeavors. Following a contextualist approach in exploring the meaning of Mead's writings, Carreira da Silva reads the entire corpus of Mead's published and unpublished writings in light of the context in which they were originally produced, from concrete events like the American involvement in World War I to more general debates like that of the nature of modernity. Mead and Modernity attests to the relevance of Mead's ideas by assessing the relative merits of his responses to three fundamental modern problematics: science, selfhood, and democratic politics. The outcome is an innovative intellectual portrait of Mead as a seminal thinker whose contributions extend beyond his well-known social theory of the self and include important insights into the philosophy of science and radical democratic theory.
eBook
Playing With Knives: The Socialization of Self-Initiated Learners
Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as \"self-initiated learners.\" In this article, the ethnographic literature that shows why children are encouraged to learn without prompting or guidance and how that happens is reviewed.
Journal Article
Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Business Ethics: Converging Lines
There is a \"Pragmatist turn\" visible in the field of organization science today, resulting from a renewed interest in the work of Pragmatist philosophers like Dewey, Mead, Peirce, James and others, and in its implications for the study of organizations. Following Wicks and Freeman (1998), in the past decade Pragmatism has also entered the field of business ethics, which, however, has not been uniformly applauded in that field. Some (Critical) scholars fear that Pragmatism may enhance already existing positivist and managerialist tendencies in current business ethics, while others see more emancipatory potential in Pragmatism, arguing that it complements and supports stakeholder theory. In this paper, a comparison of the philosophical underpinnings of Pragmatist and Critical conceptions of business ethics is offered, concentrating on the Pragmatism of John Dewey and the Critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular of Axel Honneth. It is argued that these two developed along two converging lines. Along the first line, Dewey was far more skeptical and critical of capitalism than is often thought. Along the second line, the reactions to Pragmatism of Frankfurt School Critical theorists developed over time from generally hostile (Horkheimer, Marcuse), to partially inclusive (Habermas), to more fully integrative (Honneth). At the crossroads of these converging lines a Pragmatist Critical perspective is developed and exemplified, and its implications for business ethics are outlined.
Journal Article
From Mead to a Structural Symbolic Interactionism and Beyond
This review discusses the continuing value of and problems in G.H. Mead's contributions to sociology from the standpoint of the contemporary discipline. It argues that the value is considerable and the problems largely avoidable with modifications to Mead's framework; it also offers necessary modifications via structural symbolic interactionism. Permitting the development of testable theories such as identity theory is a major criterion in evaluating a frame, and capacity to bridge to other frames and theories inside and outside sociology is another. The review examines bridges from the structural symbolic interactionist frame and identity theory to other symbolic interactionist theories, to other social psychological frames and theories in sociology, to cognitive social psychology, and to structural sociology.
Journal Article
The Making of White Water Citizens in Australia and the Western United States: Racialization as a Transnational Project of Irrigation Governance
This article examines the role of settler irrigation systems and water governance in establishing and reinforcing tenacious imperial geographies of whiteness. Through an analysis of the lives and work of two powerful men who made foundational contributions to establishing irrigation economies and water governance systems in Australia and the Western United States, we investigate the racialized sociospatial processes that bound whiteness to water. Alfred Deakin (1856-1919) and Elwood Mead (1858-1936) were men of science, technology, and politics who actively circulated in and shaped transnational flows of knowledge about whiteness and racial hierarchies. As Deakin and Mead vigorously promoted particular social and political systems associated with irrigation, steering water flows toward uses regarded as modern and productive according to taken-for-granted norms, they imagined, naturalized, and privileged a white water citizenry. In the process, they contributed to the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples as well as marginalizing Other water users, most notably Asian migrants. These men's hydro-imaginaries, which were endorsed and enacted by their respective governments, served to motivate a form of state protection of family farms, inculcate civic self-reliance and local organization, and establish the white water citizen, a baseline against which others were expected to conform. By examining the making of white water citizens, we hope to contribute to Indigenous geographies and studies of racialization in rural places, as well as the effects of irrigation in settler nations.
Journal Article