Interactionism In Sociology

This year in sociology we have learned a lot about different topics. Throughout the course, we have watched several films. The films that we have watched are: The Harvest, Wetback, The Real Slumdog, World’s Most Dangerous Gang, Libby Montana, China’s Lost Girls, and Food Inc. All of these films showed different sociologic perspectives. The three sociologic terms that I am going to cover for every film are symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, and functionalism. Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with one another. Conflict theory is a theoretical framework in which society is viewed
as composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources. Functionalism is the theory that all aspects of a society serve a function and are necessary for the survival of that society. Throughout this paper, I will string these terms together with every video that we watched to make you get a better understanding of the terms. The first film that I am going to use these terms for is the video the Harvest.
The first term that I am going to use for this is symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with one another. In the film the Harvest these migrant workers struggled every day to earn a living and provide for their families know matter what they had to do. Symbolic interactionism ties well together with this because all of these families were going through a struggle and they knew it was hard. In this film they all showed me symbolic interactionism by the way they presented themselves. Yes they were tired and dragging at times, but there hard work and courage really stood out to me. They didn’t want their families to suffer so everyone was on board with helping anyway that they could. Courage is great with symbolic interactionism because once one person shows courage it moves to other people and soon everyone will begin to look up to the next person and that makes the process a lot
easier. Conflict theory is the next word that I will tie into this film. Conflict theory is a theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources. Like I said these migrant workers in this film struggled every day. Sometimes they didn’t know if they were going to eat that night. They were all competing for jobs in the fields. If they could not get a job they would have to go to another state at time s to find work. These migrants did not care though because they needed the money to support their families. The one family had to go all the way to Michigan from down south to find work. These workers would go out into the fields at the break of dawn and work all the way until the sun went down. They did this for very low pay, they weren’t even making minimal wage. They had to deal with the heat, bugs, and pesticides. Some children didn’t even get the opportunity to go to school because everyone in the family needs to work in order to stay afloat. The next word to tie into this is functionalism.
Functionalism is the theory that all aspects of a society serve a function and are necessary for the survival of that society. For these migrant workers working was all they knew from the time they were just little kids. They work very hard for everything that want even if we may think that is so small. These people work and get payed on how well they do in the fields on that particular day. If you have a bad day and don’t get your work done you simply do not get payed, so that is why these people go to work very early and stay very late. The average farmer gets payed less than 17,000 dollars a year, and they work in some of the most brutal conditions. They suffer from pesticide poisoning, heat, and constant bugs biting at
them.