Transactionalism
Transactionalism is a philosophical approach within pragmatism where inquiry replaces traditional notions of truth. It focuses on what is happening in the constant push-and-pull between people and their ecologies, whether in classrooms, families, music and art, scientific experiments, or companies. The term "transactional" often suggests narrow, self-interested bargaining, especially in business or politics. Transactional-ism re-examines activities like teaching and learning, relationships, buying and selling, and leader-follower dynamics as parts of a complex web of mutually dependent influences shaping the intended and unintended consequences of life.
Philosophers John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, in their foundational work Knowing and the Known, described transaction as inquiry where "existing descriptions are tentative and preliminary, allowing new descriptions of events at any stage." Transactionalism rejects simple dualisms and fixed explanations. Instead, it views inquiry as "un-fractured observation"—observer, observing process, and observed are inseparable. Outcomes arise from whole situations, not isolated intentions.
In the late 1920s, Dewey used 'interaction' to reveal the inherent interconnectedness of organism and environment, illustrated vividly:
Humans do not merely breathe: they breathe air. They do not merely digest, but digest food. The interaction is one of dynamic exchange between and across the several aspects of the situation. It is, in fact, trans-action.Transactionalist thought avoids rigid doctrines about learning and progress. Educational philosopher Trevor J. Phillips quotes pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce's view that genuine learning occurs from questioning our current beliefs and staying open to new hypotheses. If so, every situation is both a starting point and a moving target for inquiry. To transact is not just exchange but to be shaped by—and in turn shape—evolving conditions.
The focus on "un-fractured observation" and critical reflection rejects inherited assumptions or static labels. Peirce wrote: "Do not block the way of inquiry." Value arises not only from individual or social goals but from the cumulative, iterative adjustments of individuals and communities responding to emergent conditions like the weather or the economy.
Some scholars have drawn parallels between this orientation and Hannah Arendt's conception of the human as a "political animal", in which labor, work, play, and action are embedded in shared conditions of life and not reducible to abstract aspiration or isolated goals. Within this framework, consequences and outcomes regarding living life are part of a process of creating and structuring one's environment in any human endeavor or activity.
Transactionalism offers a way to engage with and manage the complexity of social life, context-dependent behavior, knowledge creation, and ethical decision-making. It offers a framework to understand the co-evolving realities shaping complex human conditions, including health, relationships, career, business, politics, and spirituality. Dewey and Bentley describe the philosophy as a method of "controlled inquiry" into the complex interplay of conditions within any situation that shape the experience as well as expectations of living in an ever-changing body and external environment.
Background
The term “transaction,” derived from the Latin transigere, goes beyond its common association with financial exchanges like buying and selling. It refers to a broader range of interactions, including social exchanges such as verbal communication, eye contact, or touch. In psychological transactional analysis, a “stroke,” such as a touch or gesture, is seen as an act of recognition within a transaction.Transactions can involve any exchange between people or objects, including borrowing, lending, buying, selling, reading, writing, or relationships like parent-child and partnerships. A transaction is thus a collaborative act in which all participants—whether human or part of the environment—are influenced and changed through their involvement.
In their 1949 book Knowing and the Known, transactionalists John Dewey and Arthur Bentley explained that they were "willing under hypothesis to treat all behavings, including most advanced knowings, as activities not of self alone, nor even as primarily , but as processes of the full situation of organism-environment."
John Dewey used the term "trans-action" to "describe the process of knowing as something that involves the full situation of organism-environment, not a mere inter-action between two independent entities, e.g., the observer and the object observed." A "trans-action" rests upon the recognition that subject and object are inseparable; "Instead, observer and observed are held in close organization. Nor is there any radical separation between that which is named and the naming." A knower and what they know are inseparable and must be understood as inseparable to live a truly satisfying life.
Dewey and Bentley distinguished the "trans-actional" point of view in their preface:
The metaphysics and epistemology of living a satisfactory life begins with the hypothesis that man is an "organism-environment" solving problems in and, through a necessary exchange with others. Therefore, attention must always be paid to organizing acts as aspects or entities within a reciprocal, co-constitutive, and ethical exchange, whether it be in co-operative buying and selling; teaching and learning; marital trans-actions; or in any social situation where human beings engage one another.
Contributors
Initially framed as a pattern of inquiry by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, the antecedents of transactionalism date back to Polybius and Galileo. While John Dewey is viewed as its principal architect, social anthropologist Fredrik Barth was among the first to articulate the concept as it is understood in contemporary study.In 1949, Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley offered that their sophisticated pragmatic approach starts from the perception of "man" as an organism that is always transacting within its environment; that it is sensible to think of our selves as an organism-environment seeking to fulfill multiple necessary conditions of life "together-at-once". It is a philosophy purposefully designed to correct the "fragmentation of experience." Compare with subjectivism, constructivism, objectivism, and skepticism. Each of these approaches are aspects of problem-solving used by the transactionalist to examine the invention, construction of a narrative presentation, the objective work or activity that must happen, and the deconstruction of a transaction to fully observe and assess the consequences and outcomes of any transaction—from simply to complex—in the process of living a good and satisfying life.
Dewey asserted that human life is not actually organized into separate entities, as if the mind and the world outside it are irreconcilable, leading to the question "How does the mind know the world?"
Transactionalist analysis is a core paradigm advanced by social psychiatrist Eric Berne in his 1964 best-selling book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, in which he proposes understanding an individual client as "embedded and integrated" in an ever-evolving world of situations, actors, and exchange.
The situational orientation of transactionalist problem-solving has been applied to a vast array of academic and professional discourses including educational philosophy in the humanities; social psychology, political science, and political anthropology in the social sciences; and occupational science in the health sciences; cognitive science, zoology, and quantum mechanics in the natural sciences; as well as the development of transactional leadership-as-practice in organizational behavior and business management.
Historical antecedents
The evolution of philosophy from aristotelian thought to galilean thinking shifts the focus from behavior to the context of the behavior in problem-solving. The writing of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in Knowing and the Known offers a dense primer into transactionalism, but its historical antecedents date back to Polybius and Galileo.Trevor J. Phillips, American professor emeritus in educational foundations and inquiry at Bowling Green State University from 1963 to 1996, wrote a comprehensive thesis documenting the historical, philosophical, psychological, and educational development of transactionalism in his 1967 dissertation "Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study" published in 2013 by business education called Influence Ecology. Phillips traced transactionalism's philosophical roots to Greek historians such as Polybius and Plato as well as 17th century polymath Galileo and René Descartes.
Galileo's contributions to the scientific revolution rested on a transactionalist understanding from which he argued Aristotelian physics was in error, as he wrote in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems :
Transactionalism abandons self-actional and inter-actional beliefs or suppositions that lead to incomplete problem-solving. In a world of subjective and objective information, co-operative exchange creates value in learning and becomes the foundation of a transactional competence based on recurrent inquiry into how objects behave as situations constantly evolve.
Galileo deviated from the then-current Aristotelian thinking, which was defined by mere interactions rather than co-constitutive transacting among persons with different interests or among persons who may be solving competing intentions or conditions of life.
Modern antecedents
Trevor Phillips also outlined the philosophy's more recent developments found in the American philosophical works of Charles Sanders Peirce, sociologist George Herbert Mead, pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey, and political scientist Arthur Bentley.Several sources credit anthropologist Fredrik Barth as the scholar first to apply the term 'transactionalism" in 1959. In a critique of structural functionalism, Barth offered a new interpretation of culture that did not portray an overly cohesive picture of society without attending to the "roles, relationships, decisions, and innovations of the individual." Humans are transacting with one another at the multiple levels of individual, group, and environment. Barth's study appears to not fully articulate how this is happening all-at-once as opposed to as-if they were separate entities interacting independently :
Using examples from the people of the Swat district of North Pakistan and, later, in 1966, organization taking place among Norwegian fishermen, Barth set out to demonstrate that social forms like kinship groups, economic institutions, and political alliances are generated by the actions and strategies of the individuals who deploy organized acts against a context of social constraints. "By observing how people interact with each other , an insight could be gained into the nature of the competition, values and principles that govern individuals' choices."
Utilized as a "theoretical orientation" in Norwegian anthropology, transactionalism is described as "process analysis" and categorized as a sociological theory or method. Though criticized for paying insufficient attention to cultural constraints on individualism, Barth's orientation influenced the qualitative method of symbolic interactionism applied throughout the social sciences.
Process analysis considers the gradual unfolding of the course of interactions and events as key to understanding social situations. In other words, the transactional whole of a situation is not readily apparent at the level of individuals.