Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism (SI) is a sociological and social-psychological perspective grounded in the [Page 849]study of the meanings that people learn and assign to the objects and actions that surround their everyday experiences. It is a theoretical perspective that was originally developed in the early half of the 20th century by scholars at the University of Chicago. SI is the most sociological of a range of social psychology traditions (others include cognitive sociology, discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, and rational choice-exchange theory) and was originally conceptualized by the philosopher George Herbert Mead, although he never used the term. The perspective was first given coherence by Mead's students from Chicago, who collected and, in 1934, published their notes from his social psychology courses in a book titled Mind, Self, and Society. In 1937, Herbert Blumer, one of Mead's students, coined the term symbolic interactionism and subsequently consolidated much of Mead's work into a distinct sociological perspective. Blumer's 1969 book, Symbolic Interactionism, is a collection of his own essays and is still widely acknowledged as a major statement on the perspective.

The term symbolic interactionism is comprised of two concepts: symbol and interaction. Symbol refers to any social object (e.g., a physical object, a gesture, or a word) that stands in place of or represents something else. Symbols are a uniquely human creation. No other animal has the ability to arbitrarily assign meaning; that is, make something into a social object. Interaction highlights the significance of interpersonal communication in transmitting the meaning of symbols. Through interaction, culture arises. Interactionists understand culture to be the ideas, objects, and practices that constitute everyday life. Howard Becker has noted that, on the one hand, culture preexists individuals' births and therefore, structures their lives. On the other hand, people are autonomous, interpretive beings who have the ability to negotiate, modify, or reject the meanings they learn, thus actively shaping culture. From a symbolic interactionist perspective then, human beings are active creators of symbols and culture. As one example, consider the symbolic meaning of communism. The word means very different things to different people in different places at different times. As a symbol, communism signifies an emancipatory political-economic model to some people, while to others it represents repression, collective poverty, and aggression. Each of these meanings, and many more, is learned by people through their interactions with other people, various media, and so on. Communism is not a tangible thing—it cannot be seen or touched—yet it is a social object because it refers to a set of processes (ideological, political, economic) that occur in the world. Through symbolic interaction, human beings construct, share, resist, modify, or reject various aspects of the social world.

SI offered a radical conceptualization of sociological theory compared to the macro, structural, positivist sociology that dominated American sociology at its emergence in the 1930s. Rather than rely on quantitatively derived data that were collected through representative survey research and analyzed using statistics, symbolic interactionists primarily collect and analyze qualitative data from people's experiences in naturalistic settings (though some practitioners of the perspective, often called structural interactionists, use quantitative methods and experimental designs). SI has tended to be labeled as distinctly micro-oriented, rather than macro-oriented, although this label has changed in recent decades with the explicit push among some SI scholars toward meso-level theorizing. Another difference between SI and dominant sociology relates to epistemology. Dominant mid-century sociology was aligned with positivism, the epistemological assumption that the social sciences could be modeled after the biological and physical sciences to produce verifiable “facts” that explain social behavior and predict future behavior. SI, in contrast, is an interpretive perspective that allows for the agency inherent in human behavior and supports a methodology to study social behavior without demanding that it be definitively explained or predicted. One final contrast relates to the role of the researcher. Whereas positivist sociology believed in a value-neutral perspective—the social scientist's ability to separate values, beliefs, and interests from data collection and analysis—SI rejects the idea of a disembodied researcher and instead supports the idea that all science is done from a particular standpoint. The interactionist's job is to identity how bias, values, interests, and other inter-subjective phenomena impact the research process and to acknowledge (if not highlight) that impact in her or his research questions, data collection and analysis techniques, and writing.

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