Page 67 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

44 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

ability of humans to create symbols (language and gestures, etc.) distin-
guishes the human species from all others. Bugs, animals, and fish (even
dolphins) do not communicate to understand, gain and restore knowledge, or
act. Understanding and explaining everyday actions, however, is the extension
and essence of human interactions.
Blumer refined Mead’s theories into a practical and straightforward
approach to understanding how people act and interact in everyday life.
Blumer assumes that since humans think, they must reflect before they act. In
short, humans create and take action in various situations through the thinking
process based on their reflective ideas and thoughts. To theorize as to how this
is done, Blumer used Mead’s concept of the “generalized other” or the fact that
people think and reflect to themselves before they take action.
Human behavior is unpredictable, full of uncertainty, and therefore not
rational. When scientists study and theorize about normative behavior, they
have focused on some set of elements that compose human behavior. Because
people are human beings, their everyday lives are made up of uncertainties and
nonlinear actions. Human beings have an infinite set of behaviors and possible
patterns to follow. Everyday life may be composed of sets and regular routines,
but these are neither normal nor indicative of the creative potential of indi-
vidual actors. They simply signify what people follow for convenience or
expediency sake. They certainly are not the situations from which to draw
significant conclusions about actors, situations, groups, or collective behavior.
In short, human interaction is by definition “abnormal.” The essence of
abnormal behavior, however, is that it constitutes its own processes and
orderliness for individual actors and groups. The understanding of “abnormal”
behavior is really the knowledge of what is “normal” for actors. And can best
be seen in conflictual situations in which actors will display underlying
emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus everyday life in business is not pre-
dictable or even normal. It is more often than not composed of change and
irregularities. In short, the abnormal is the normal from which rules can be
constructed.
Key to collecting data on actors, situations, groups, and collective behavior
are the methodologies employed. Here the qualitative methods 2 from
anthropology and sociology play a significant role. For decades, anthropolo-
gists and sociologists have conducted research studies using qualitative
methods. The results of these studies are often case studies that describe the
“static state” of a culture or a group of people. As described in this volume,
one of the basic methods used in qualitative economics is “participant
observation.”

2. That is, field work, participant observation, action research, interaction and dialogue analyses, etc.