Sociology of human consciousness

In making this inversion, they do not totally reject reductionist approaches—nor deny their value in identifying the "hardware" through which collective and social psychological processes operate.

However, they would reject the idea that a complete explanation can be formulated on the basis of either purely sociological mechanisms or underlying physical, chemical, neurological, hormonal, or psychological factors and processes.

The theory suggests that the problem of consciousness can be approached fruitfully by beginning with the human group and collective phenomena: community, language, language-based communication, institutional, and cultural arrangements.

It monitors its activities, its achievements and failures, and also to a greater or lesser extent, analyzes and discusses itself as a defined and developing collective agent.

Thus, an individual learns (in line with George Herbert Mead's earlier formulations) a naming and classification of themself (self-description and identity) and a characterization of their judgments, actions, and predispositions.

This plays an essential role in human communities (as well as individual beings) in the face of systematic or highly risky performance failures or new types of problems.

Through self-reflection, agents may manage in the course of directed problem-solving to develop more effective institutional arrangements, for instance, large-scale means of social coordination such as administration, democratic association, or markets.

Collective representations and reflectivity and directed problem-solving based on them may prevent human groups from experiencing or discovering the un-represented and the unnamed; unrecognized or poorly defined problems cannot be dealt with (as discussed elsewhere,[9] for instance, in the case of failures of accounting systems to recognize or take into account important social and environmental conditions and developments).

Reflective and problem-solving powers may then be distorted, the generation of alternatives and varieties narrow and largely ineffective, and social innovation and transformation misdirected and possibly self-destructive.

In sum, recent research, building on the work of George Herbert Mead, suggests that a sociological and social psychological perspective can be a point of departure with which to define and analyze certain forms of human consciousness, or more precisely, one class of consciousness phenomena, namely verbalized reflectivity: monitoring, discussing, judging and re-orienting and re-organizing self; representing and analyzing what characterizes the self, what self perceives, judges, could do, should do (or should not do).