Symbolic Interaction

Symbolic interaction is a perspective in sociology that places meaning, interaction, and human agency at the center of understanding social life. This perspective grew out of the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, an approach developed in the late nineteenth century by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Challenging the assumptions of classical rationalism, these thinkers regarded people as actors rather than reactors, treated “reality” as dynamic and pluralistic, linked meanings to social acts and perspectives, and viewed knowledge as a key resource for problem solving and reorganizing the world.

George Herbert Mead brought pragmatist philosophy to sociology, working its assumptions into a theory and method for the social sciences. Drawing on the ideas of the pragmatist founders, as well as the theories of Charles Horton Cooley, Charles Darwin, and Wilhelm Wundt, Mead developed a distinctly sociological account of human consciousness, selfhood, and action. He presented this perspective in a series of social psychology lectures that became the basis for his best-known book, Mind, Self, and Society (1934). Mead's insights impressed many of his students, notably Herbert Blumer, who later became a distinguished sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and president of the American Sociological Association. Blumer's compilation of writings, Symbolic Interactionism (1969), is still widely acknowledged as the major statement of the symbolic interactionist perspective. Mead and Blumer belonged to a group of other early sociologists, including Robert Park, W. I. Thomas, and Everett Hughes, who studied related topics such as roles, selves, social definitions, and socialization. Because most of these scholars were affiliated with the University of Chicago, symbolic interactionism is often referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology, even though another variant of the perspective emerged later at the University of Iowa.

Blumer coined the label “symbolic interactionism” in 1937 while writing an essay on social psychology for a social science textbook. In that essay, Blumer emphasized how Mead's work could provide the basis for a new social psychological approach that would transcend the deterministic theories of the time. Mead is usually credited as the originator of symbolic interactionism, even though Blumer's analysis drew heavily on the ideas of other theorists and, according to some critics, differed in important respects from Mead's writings.

Blumer, along with Everett Hughes, influenced cohorts of graduate students he taught at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and early 1950s. These students, including Howard Becker, Fred Davis, Elliot Friedson, Erving Goffman, Joseph Gusfield, Helena Lopata, Tamotsu Shibutani, Gregory Stone, Anselm Strauss, and Ralph Turner, further developed the symbolic interactionist perspective and shaped a number of its subfields, such as deviance, social problems, self and identity, and collective behavior. They have since become recognized as the Second Chicago School.