Definition of the situation: History of the Concept

Rainer Egloff, Ludwik Fleck Center at Collegium Helveticum, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; and Swiss
Reinsurance Company Ltd, Zurich, Switzerland
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Coined by W.I. Thomas in the early twentieth century in the context of sociological studies on education, deviance, migration
and race, the denition of the situation referred to the interactive social psychological process of dening reality as a basis to
determine individual and group behavior, particularly in new, unfamiliar, conictive, or crisis situations. Dening a situation
also involved actualization and modication of habits learned behavior patterns, social values, and individual attitudes.
Subsequently, the concept became an integral part of social research in the classical Chicago School of Sociology and later
with its inheritors, particularly in symbolic interactionism and in the microtheories of Erving Goffman. Since the Second
World War, the concept had also been adopted by functionalist sociology, most importantly through Robert K. Merton who
explicitly based his own concept of the self-fullling prophecy on Thomas concept, forging it into a middle-range theory.
Subsequently, the concept has been used and differentiated in elds as diverse as ethnography of face-to-face interaction and
rational choice theory. The original attempt to generalize and model human action in an overarching and integrative way still
serves to bridge the various uses.

The concept of denition of the situation refers to the inter-
active mental process of determining meaning and subse-
quently behavior by and for individuals and groups in a given
situation. An individual denition of the situation refers to the
way in which an individual interprets a situation so that she or
he can act (Blumer, 1939: 26). The concept emphasizes the
actors perspective, which in return is shaped by social and
other factors. The denition of the situation thus integrates
objective and subjective factors. The denition of situation
mirrors the diverse motivations and restrictions, behavior
patterns and personalities, habits, crises and readjustments,
whereby people make sense of their environment and their
interaction with one another. The factors to be involved range
from biological aspects to biographical and spontaneous
experiences, they include individual attitudes, cultural values
and group norms, institutional settings and authorities.
The concept has now a history of almost a hundred years
in the social sciences, and particularly in sociology. The
concept of the denition of the situation was developed
in the context of the pragmatist movement in American
social science, and it became most inuential in the classical
Chicago School of Sociology, providing an analytical
framework for understanding human behavior in general,
and particularly in grasping adjustment difculties of indi-
viduals and groups along their life histories and regarding
new environments.
After the Second World War (WWII), functionalist strands
within American sociology integrated the denition of the
situation, and the concept of the denition of the situation
became adopted in mainstream sociology, whereas proponents
of microscopic social theory and qualitative research (ethnog-
raphy, case study, interview, biographical research, etc.) also
further developed the concept. Later, the concept was used to
bridge and integrate micro- and macrotheoretical approaches.
Interdisciplinary at the very outset, the concept has been widely
used in sociology and in related disciplines like political science,
anthropology, psychology, pedagogy, criminology, and social
work. While the concept is still intensely discussed, it has also
become adapted so widely, that historical indebtedness to the
concept has become less obvious in many cases.
W.I. Thomas and the Situational Approach
in the Chicago School of Sociology
William Isaac Thomas (18631947), pioneer US sociologist
and founding gure of the Chicago School of Sociology, is
acknowledged to rst have given expression to the concept of
the denition of the situation (Perinbanayagam, 1974: 521).
Florian Znaniecki, who coauthored the Polish Peasant in Europe
and America (191822) with Thomas, and also Dorothy Swaine
Thomas, Thomass second wife, who wrote The Child in America
(1928) together with him, are occasionally referenced as
cofounders of the concept (Wolff, 1964; Merton, 1995).
Thomas developed the concept of denition of the situation
in the mid 1910s, in the context of immigration studies
and reform pedagogy. It highlighted the interactions between
individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures to understand the
rationale behind human decisions, actions, and their sanctions.
The concept also represents a strong statement for the cultural
and social relativity of rationality, values and norms.
The concept of denition of the situation appeared in print
in 1917, in a collection of Suggestions of Modern Science
Concerning Education, which was organized and edited by
Thomas. Apart from Thomas own contribution, the volume
comprised essays by behaviorist psychologist J.B. Watson,
zoologist and geneticist Herbert S. Jennings, and psychiatrist
Adolf Meyer. With reference to Watsons treatment of emotional
reactions, Thomas opened his chapter (Thomas, 1917) by
stating four wishes fundamental interests or desires to
represent human behavior. According to Thomas, the wishes for
new experience, mastery, recognition, and safety were eventually
reducible to food-hunger and sex-hunger, and their expression
limited by human society through the formation of a code
of behavior, which itself was produced and reproduced by
an interactive process Thomas called the denition of the

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03076-2 19
20 Definition of the situation: History of the Concept
situation: The code therefore represents the judgment of
society on the activities of its members, it dictates the limits
within which the desires may nd expression, and it is devel-
oped by a method which we may call the denition of the
situation (Thomas, 1917: 167f.). Thomas saw the dening of
the situation begun by the parents, who order and forbid and
inform, . continued in the community by means of gossip,
with its and praise and blame, and [.] formally represented by
the school, the law, the church (Thomas, 1917: 168). Thomas
emphasized the social relativity of morality and immorality, and
organization and disorganization, concluding: In short, any
denition, however arbitrary, that is embodied in the habits of
the people is regarded as right (Thomas, 1917: 169).
The role of the denition of the situation to capture
potential tensions between differing perceptions and value
orientations was further elaborated in The Polish Peasant in
Europe and America (Thomas and Znaniecki, 191821). In this
classic of empirical social research the adjustment process of an
immigrant group was documented, mostly through life history
documents such as hundreds of letters and a book-long
autobiography. The study assessed the ethnic groups poten-
tial for resolution of crisis arising from migration and social
change through communicative interaction and subsequent
reorientation. In the methodological note to the ve volumes,
Thomas and Znaniecki introduced a model of activity to inte-
grate social values socially sanctioned objects of activity on
the one hand, and individual attitudes the individuals
tendencies or potentialities to act. The situation was concep-
tualized as the interacting set of values and attitudes, and every
concrete activity was understood as the solution of a situation
(Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918: 68). While the total situation
involved (1) the totality of values equaled with objective
conditions under which the individual or society has to act,
and (2) the preexisting attitudes of the individual or the group
which at the given moment have an actual inuence upon his
behavior, the denition of the situation (3) represented the
more or less clear conception of the conditions (1) and
consciousness of the attitudes (2): (.) the denition of the the denition of the situation was adopted by Robert Park,
situation is necessary preliminary to any act of the will, for in
given conditions and with a given set of attitudes an indenite
plurality of actions is possible, and one denite action can
appear only if these conditions are selected, interpreted, and
combined in a determined way and if a certain systematization
of these attitudes is reached, so that one of them becomes
predominant and subordinates the others (Thomas and
Znaniecki, 1918: 68).
The concept of denition of the situation embodied
a perspective of social psychology, understood as the general
science of the subjective side of culture, and it was to be
complemented by sociology understood as theory of social
organization (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918: 33). While the
denition of situation represented the individual and social
regulation of behavior and behavior reaction, it was particu-
larly focused at processes of adjusting an attitude, a behavioral
code or a value, after former habits had been disturbed and
questioned by a crisis demanding a new denition of the
situation. The ve volumes of the Polish Peasant documented
migration from one cultural setting to another as representing
such crises on individual and group level. Thomas and
Znaniecki applied the concept of the denition of the situation
to analyze how well the immigrants adjusted their behavior
from the traditional norms of rural Poland to the social values
of the modern American metropolis.
Throughout Thomass subsequent work the denition of
the situation remained a core concept, whether applied to
studies on child development and youth deviance (Thomas,
1923; Thomas and Thomas, 1928) or in comparative
ethnology of culture (Thomas, 1937). The concept reected
Thomass interest in behavior patterns conceived of in terms of
stimulus and response, of habit and crisis, in developmental
directions and personalities of individuals, groups, societies
and cultures. Its dialectics of subjectivism and naturalism
points to the roots of the concept in pragmatist philosophy
(Joas, 1993) and to a desire to make social science an objective
empirical science.
Thomas had originally been a college professor for language
and literature, and he was well versed in philological and
hermeneutic methods (Abbott and Egloff, 2008). But with his
rst steps into the new eld of social science in the early 1890s,
he also adopted theory and research attitudes from natural
sciences to study human behavior and psychologies of cultures,
groups, and individuals. An admirer of William James and
inuenced not only by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead,
but also by anthropologist Franz Boas, he gradually moved
away from an early emphasis on biological factors. Race and
sex as prime categories of his research were soon replaced by
a preference for the individual in his biography and person-
ality, and he developed his culturalist social psychology
embodied in the concept of the denition of the situation.
Thomass situational approach translated the pragmatist
stances that reality is always mediated and identities achieved
through social interaction into empirical social science. Some
tension and ambivalence between hermeneutic foundations
and scientic ambitions remained with Thomass conceptual-
ization, leaving it rather undecided and vague (Blumer, 1939).
Thomas exerted a dominant inuence on the Chicago
School of Sociology of the 1920s and 1930s, and his concept of
Ernest Burgess, and their colleagues and students, who partly
had also been students with Thomas himself. In their seminal
Chicago School textbook, Park and Burgess stated that every
single act, and eventually all moral life, is dependent upon the
denition of the situation (Park and Burgess, 1921: 764). They
highlighted that the plurality of universes of discourse modern
life was characterized by, representing diverging denitions of
situation differences in language, meanings and values indi-
viduals attach to objects and behavior. They also maintained
that common participation in common activities implies a
common, denition of the situation, pointing to the assimi-
lation of immigrants into American society, and to the role of
education on the one hand, and propaganda on the other. Park
and Burgess were most interested in the adjustment and change
of denitions of the situation, and this was always conceived as
an interactive or mutual process: A denition of the situation
precedes and limits any possible action, and a redenition of
the situation changes the character of the action. An abusive
person, for example, provokes anger and possibly violence,
but if we realize that the man is insane this redenition of
the situation results in totally different behavior (Park and
Burgess, 1921: 764).

Immigration studies, educational questions, and crimi-
nology remained preferred elds for the Chicago school
students use of the concept of the denition of the situation.
The concept of the denition of the situation was highlighted
in the educational sociology of Willard Waller, which analyzed
interaction in school, and differentiated elements, modes, and
closures in the process of dening the situation (Waller, 1932:
292317). Studies on delinquency by Clifford Shaw and others
were centered around case studies, often single autobiographies
the delinquents own story providing subjective life effecting conrming behaviors (Merton, 1948, 1995: 384f.).
histories and following the format from Thomas and Zna-
nieckis Polish Peasant (Shaw, 1930). Frederic M. Thrasher and
others related the development of individuals and groups (e.g.,
youth gangs) to the structures and characters of institutions,
communities, and metropolitan areas, advocating the study of
the total situation (Thrasher, 1928). Later, Edwin H. Suther-
lands differential association theory asserted that a person
learned to become delinquent due to social interaction and
dominant exposition to denitions favorable to violation of
law (Sutherland, 1947). The classic Chicago Schools emphasis
on the communicative and particularly verbal aspect of the
concept is exemplied in Kimball Youngs essay Language,
Thought and Social Reality (Young, 1931) part of a festschrift
for Thomas by former students of Thomas on the topic of social
attitudes and edited by Young in 1931. Youngs article under-
lined the function of language to convey meaning and thus
both the objective and the subjective types of anticipation
(Young, 1931: 205). The symmetric structure of autistic fantasy
associations and reality was underlined by an introductory
motto to the essay taken from Thomas: If men dene situa-
tions as real, they are real in their consequences (Young, 1931:
100; Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 572).
Mertons Definition of the Situation
While Thomass denition of the situation was more a meth-
odological standpoint than a theoretical concept and in its
complexity and openness not easy to grasp, it was Robert K.
Merton, in his seminal 1948 article The Self-Fullling
Prophecy, who forged it into a distinct theoretical proposi-
tion: the Thomas theorem. If men dene a situation as real, it
becomes real in its consequence, quoted Merton obviously
inspired by Kimball Young from Thomas and Thomas
(1928), and made it the core of his own concept of the self-
fullling prophecy. The more famous the latter became, the
more Mertons take also shaped further reception of the
concept of the denition of the situation itself.
Whereas the denition of the situation had been an inte-
gral part of Thomass whole approach, Merton singled it out as
the centerpiece of Thomas s work. Mertons Thomas theorem
captured the denition of the situation in a most comprehen-
sive way, making it easily understood and communicated.
Mertons adoption made the concept famous, but in a peculiar
version. This limited and distinctly shaped version became an
asset in Mertons search for middle range theory.
Merton adopted the concept in the context of his research on
propaganda and mass persuasion, and the self-fullling prophecy
(opposite to suicidal prophecy) came to exemplify a funda-
mental social problem: ethnic hostility. Formalized in relation
Definition of the situation: History of the Concept 21
with several other concepts, particularly in-group and out-group,
Merton emphasizes the predominant role of the in-group in
dening the situation (Merton, 1948: 208). While putting
Thomas on a pedestal for his seminal contribution, Merton saw
the concept mirroring a long tradition, and he identied the
Thomas theorem with positions set forth by Marx, Freud, and
others. By equalizing it with ideology, neurosis, and paranoid
behavior, Merton reduced the concept to prejudice and
pathology, i.e., to a awed perception, which conrms itself by
Thomas had treated true and false denitions methodologi-
cally equally. Mertons programmatic reception of Thomass
concept was thus selective, implicating that the subjective de-
nition of situation was false or systemically dysfunctional:
The self-fullling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false denition
of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the origi-
nally false conception come true. The specious validity of
the self-fullling prophecy perpetuates a rein of error. For the
prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was
right from the very beginning (Merton, 1948: 195).
Merton understood the self-fullling prophecy as a basic
process of society, which stabilized and reproduced power
asymmetries between societal groups. While Mertons concept
was explicitly anchored in Thomass, the earlier emphasis on
social change in the concept of the denition of the situation
was moved to the background in the Mertonian approach.
Qualitative Research and Microtheory after WWII
After WWII, a revived Chicago School Tradition with exponents
like Herbert Blumer, Tamotsu Shibutani, and Anselm Strauss
and theoretical programs such as symbolic interactionism
stood in opposition to structural functionalism and
reemphasized the individual person and its interaction with
smaller groups. Individual interpretation of perception was
highlighted as a necessary ingredient to everyday behavior. The
so to speak neoclassical reception of the concept of the
denition of the situation could not ignore the paramount
impact of Mertons interpretation, but it took its chance to
reintroduce, rene, and further elaborate some of Thomass
and Parks avors. A strong interest was dedicated to the
organization of change in the denition of the situation, which
was analyzed as a phenomenon in time and in physical and
social space. Strauss and others elaborated on professional and
other reference group related organization of denitive
processes. All these attempts put communicative aspects to the
core of conceptualization and empirical research.
Most strongly, Erving Goffman (192282) emphasized the
bodily aspects of the denition of situation. He investigated
face-to-face interactions social situations dened by physical
copresence, and which were therefore also limited regarding
extension of space and time. Goffman advocated and practiced
an ethnography of communication, which researched the
cultural rules of individual conduct in social situations
(Goffman, 1964). Innovatively, his approach included the
senses and emotions as objects of research, and the nonverbal
aspects of communicative interaction were taken most
seriously. Like Thomas, Goffman worked genuinely
interdisciplinary and blended biological methods (ethology)
22 Definition of the situation: History of the Concept
with linguistic, literature, and arts studies. His argument for the
use of theatrical and dramaturgical frameworks to analyze
everyday social interactions was directly tied to the concept of
the denition of the situation: A character staged in a theater
is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of
real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character
performed by a condence man; but the successful staging of
either of these types of false gures involves use of real
techniquesdthe same techniques by which everyday persons
sustain their real social situations. Those who conduct face
to face interactions on a theaters stage must meet the key
requirement of real situations; they must expressively sustain
a denition of the situation: but this they do in circumstances
that have facilitated their developing an apt terminology for
the interactional tasks that all of us share (Goffman, 1959:
254f.). Goffmans theory sought to generalize the framing
of situations, and he opened his book Frame Analysis: An Essay
on the Organization of Experience (Goffman, 1974) with a
discussion of the Thomas theorem insisting that people
nding themselves in a situation possibly affected by a crisis
would normally not create a denition but rather state
what the situation was supposed to be to them. They rely on
frames of interaction, reecting social expectations
and identities. Goffman identied the framing with a
quasisyntactical structure, which offers stabilizing order.
This evoked interpretation of Goffmans approach as rather
structuralist than interactionist (Gonos, 1977). The deeper
problem revealed was that the focus on instantaneous,
actual situations and denitions, microscopic both in terms
of space and time, had (again) gained a concentration of the
denition of the situation only with limitations of the
concepts reach, and with many methodological questions
surfacing subsequently. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s
programs similar to that of Goffman were upheld by
the ethnomethodologists, who derived their theoretical
foundation not from Thomas or G. H. Mead, but referred
to European authors like Wittgenstein and Schtz. Scholarly
feuds developed between the ethnomethodologists and the
dramaturgists (McHugh, 1968; Perinbanayagam, 1974: 521).
Debates and attempts also centered on operationalizations of
the concept to make it more feasible for empirical research.
Modes and phases of the process of dening were differentiated
(Stebbins, 1967, 1969; Ball, 1972).
Experimentalization and Transdisciplinary Adaptation
In the late twentieth and early twenty-rst century, the contexts
of psychiatry, educational studies, psychology and interethnic
studies, where the concept of the denition of the situation
originated, remain important elds for its use. For its
constructivist virtues, also political science and science and
technology studies have adopted it. But the concept has
spread much wider across the social sciences and beyond.
Several factors played together to make the concept of the
denition of the situation most pervasive and almost
ubiquitous today. One is its original vagueness, subsequently
provoking and allowing diverse and highly debated
differentiations. These continuing debates gave the concept
its classical status. Two other closely related factors are the
concepts emphasis on the individual and the small group,
and its afnity or applicability to experimental settings. Both
factors allowed for direct, questionnaire-based and even
scientically measureable observation in narrowly dened
settings. Experimentally induced situational crises and
research on resolution was applied by ethnomethodologists
and interactionists alike. The concept even made it into
pharmaceutical and medical research, where it was found
useful to investigate placebo effects (Glass and Barber, 1961).
Two further again closely linked factors for the
proliferation of the concept can be listed here: the integration
of objectively given and subjectively perceived structures to
dene a situation and limit possible action, and its linkage of
micro- and macrolevels of the social. These motives have
found much interest for situational analysis in the disciplines
concerned with decision, from philosophy to economy
(Hedstrm et al., 1998). Conspicuously, rational choice
theory has adapted the concept of the denition of the
situation. In such reading, actors rationality is scaled for
the denition of the situation, and individual choice of
frames provides a particular developmental path and action
according to subjectively expected utility. Finally, collective
intentions, decisions and actions can be aggregated (Esser,
1996). The use of the concept to bridge social micro- and
macrolevels points back to its very origins.
See also: Goffman, Erving (19221982); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, Queer: Bear and Leather Subcultures; Wundt,
Wilhelm Maximilian (18321920).
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