Kathy Charmaz. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 2, Sage Reference, 2005.
Anselm L. Strauss (1916-1996) was an American symbolic interactionist and cofounder of the grounded theory method. Strauss advocated developing middle-range theories from systematic analysis of qualitative data. His noted works span his career from his major coauthored textbook with Alfred Lindesmith, Social Psychology, in 1949 to his culminating volume, Continuous Permutations of Actions in 1993. Among Strauss’s principal contributions are his coauthored works, Awareness of Dying (1965) and The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) as well as numerous theoretical analyses of empirical research that reconceptualized ideas in their respective substantive fields. Strauss received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Virginia, where the writings of Robert Park awakened his sociological consciousness. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, the works of pragmatists George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, and Charles Peirce influenced him, and numerous conversations with Herbert Blumer inspired his quest to integrate theory and research. His involvement in the vibrant intellectual climate at Chicago among faculty and graduate students made Strauss a vital part of the “second Chicago school” (Fine 1995).
Strauss brought the freshness and fluidity of pragmatist thought to his studies and integrated pragmatist concerns with action throughout his lengthy career. Agency and acts—and their meanings to the actors themselves—were fundamental to Strauss’s sociological research and theorizing. This stance distinguished his work from midcentury structural-functionalists who discounted firsthand studies of research participants’ views, endeavors, and accounts and distrusted theorizing that began with them. Strauss’s work provided a major source of continuity and development of Chicago school sociology during the latter half of the twentieth century. He began theorizing by challenging deterministic views with a social psychology that was open-ended, emergent, and thus, somewhat indeterminate. The originality of his thought is evident in his early essay, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (1959) in which he treats identity as a way to organize ideas and to permit new theoretical insights to emerge that take into account social processes and their symbolic underpinnings. Strauss argues that language plays a crucial role in human behavior and in the complex weaving of subjective and social identities. Through naming, individuals locate, evaluate, and understand self and others as well as objects and events and subsequently direct their actions.
Although first known as a social psychologist, Strauss developed the concept of negotiated order in his 1978 publication of Negotiations: Varieties, Processes, Contexts, and Social Order. This treatise brought symbolic interactionism to the mesolevel of analysis and recast conceptualizations of how organizations work. By looking at the mesolevel, Strauss addressed the collective life of social worlds and organizations that lie between micro-interactions and macrosocietal structure. Rather than assuming order as a given in social life, Strauss showed that people negotiated and renegotiated order as they interacted individually and collectively. However, Strauss’s explicit constructionist statement did not deny the existence of social structural constraints. Instead, it fostered seeing how interacting individuals acted toward, contested, or reproduced them through taken-for-granted understandings and routines.
Consistent with Strauss’s interest in action and organization, his coauthored study with Barney G. Glaser, Awareness of Dying (1965), provided a theoretical explication of the organization of information about the dying patient’s status, including who knew the patient was dying, when they knew, and what, if anything, they said or did about it. The temporal features of the patient’s dying also intersect with work, careers, and earlier predictions—all of which affect information control. Glaser and Strauss’s types of awareness contexts had wide applicability in situations in which vital information is withheld from certain central participants.
Glaser and Strauss attempted to delineate their methods of conceptual development in their study of dying in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967). This book advanced both theory construction and methodological rigor by offering a flexible set of systematic guidelines to develop inductive middle-range theories from empirical data that, in turn, explain those data. The authors combined the Chicago school emphases on symbolic interactionism and qualitative research with codified methods of theory construction. Glaser and Strauss’s book challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of the day, legitimated conducting qualitative research in its own right, and ultimately advanced theory development in many substantive fields, disciplines, and professions.
Grounded theory involves simultaneous data collection and analytic procedures in which the emerging analysis shapes further data collection. Coding is aimed to identify processes and their categories and to define the properties of categories theoretically. Grounded theory is an inherently comparative method. Grounded theorists compare data with data, data with category, and category to category. They use each level of comparison to illuminate properties and to specify conditions under which their categories are germane. As grounded theorists’ categories become more conceptual, they engage in theoretical sampling. This type of sampling means seeking data to fill out, refine, and test their theoretical categories. Grounded theorists work across substantive fields to develop generic theoretical categories with broad explanatory power. The resulting grounded theories fit the data they explain, provide useful, dense, and integrated explanations, offer insights to research participants, and are modifiable through further research.
The Discovery book laid out the logic and justifications for building middle-range theory from qualitative research. Strauss developed his position and explicated how to construct grounded theories in two important qualitative analysis textbooks, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (1987) and Basics of Qualitative Research (1998), coauthored with Juliet Corbin. In these books, he moved toward technical advancement of grounded theory methodology and verification, although he maintained the earlier emphasis on comparative methods and theoretical sampling.
Strauss’s contributions cut across several substantive areas. He gave a new depth to urban sociology through studying symbolic imagery in Images of the American City, published in 1961. The images that people hold of cities influence their actions and moral stance toward them. Strauss brought a processural view to occupations and professions by looking at differentiation and interaction between sectors of professions and how they advanced their positions. His work made conceptual advances in medical sociology that informed the entire discipline when this subfield might have otherwise developed only as an applied area. Strauss’s numerous studies in medical sociology move from managing information and illness to larger theoretical questions of body and identity and biographical disruption. In addition, his interest in the organization of medical work sparked generic organizational concepts. Strauss proposed a concept of social worlds as a new unit of theoretical analysis in organizational studies. The concept assumes permeable group boundaries, individual and collective commitments, the temporality of social structures, and viewed process and change as routine. This perspective takes how people organize themselves into account—despite structural constraints and actual or potential conflict.
The concerns with which Strauss began his career resound in his final theoretical statement, Continual Permutations of Action (1993): the theoretical significance of meaning and action, dynamic—and open-ended—relations between individuals and social structures, the integration of social psychology and social organization, tensions between negotiated orders and habitual routines, and the explication of a pragmatist theory of action. Strauss (1) articulates anew the significance of language, fluidity of complex relations, the emergence of contingencies, and the blurred collective boundaries that he implied decades before in Mirrors and Masks; (2) extends his theoretical insights about relations between body, self, time, and symbols that informed his medical sociology; (3) argues against the presumed objective consequences of status variables; and (4) develops his statement of action as interactions between and among group members. In the introduction to the book, Strauss describes himself as someone who has devoted himself to working out the sociological implications of the pragmatist/interactionist traditions. His opus stands as testimony to the significance of this effort.