Strauss, Anselm

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 [Page 800]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.

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