Symbolic Interactionism

12 Key excerpts on "Symbolic Interactionism"

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  Symbolic Interactionism in the Gospel according to John

  A Contextual Study on the Symbolism of Water

  • Mligo(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  1950 s in Chicago, and then in California where he was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. While Holton and Cohen argue that Blumer took only certain ideas from Mead, it was the specific aspects developed by Blumer that formed the basis for later symbolic interactionist approaches. Blumer thus notes:

  The term “symbolic interaction” refers, of course, to the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it takes place between human beings. The peculiarity consists in the fact that human beings interpret or “define” each other’s actions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions. Their “response” is not made directly to the actions of one another but instead is based on the meaning which they attach to such actions. Thus, human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another’s actions. This mediation is equivalent to inserting a process of interpretation between stimulus and response in the case of human behavior.16

  This definition describes why the perspective is called Symbolic Interactionism. It is stated that the major component that characterizes human interaction is the use of symbols, which are interpreted by the interacting individuals in order to enhance communication. Joel M. Charon makes Blumer’s above definition more clear. He writes that Symbolic Interactionism is “the study of human beings interacting symbolically with one another and with themselves, and in the process of that symbolic interaction making decisions and directing their streams of action. ”17 Charon further notes: “When we say that social interaction is symbolic, we mean that the acts of each actor have meaning to the actor doing them and are acts normally interpreted by those with whom the actor acts toward.”18 However, this does not deny the fact that the actor first acts inwardly (covert action) before acting to others, and this does not guarantee the actor’s meaning will be interpreted as intended. This means that actions as symbols are free of interpretation and carry with them abundant meaning.

  Three Main Premises of This Perspective

  Every perspective has its philosophical standpoints that characterize its major claims for truth. This is also the case for Symbolic Interactionism. According to Blumer, the characteristics of this approach are the following: (1 ) human interaction, (2 ) interpretation or definition rather than mere reaction, (3 ) response based on meaning, (4 ) use of symbols, (5 ) and interpretation between stimulus and response.19

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  Handbook of Social Theory

  • George Ritzer, Barry Smart, George Ritzer, Barry Smart(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  5 Human society consists of people engaging in symbolic interaction . Interactionists differ from other sociologists in their view of the relationship between society and the indivi-dual. Following Blumer, interactionists con-ceive of society as a fluid but structured process . This process is grounded in indivi-duals’ abilities to assume each other’s perspectives, adjust and coordinate their unfolding acts, and symbolically communi-cate and interpret these acts. In emphasizing that society consists of people acting and interacting symbolically, interactionists dis-agree with psychologistic theories that see society as existing primarily ‘in our heads’, either in the form of reward histories or socially shaped cognitions. Interactionists also depart from those structuralist perspec-tives that reify society, suggesting that it exists independently of us as individuals and that it dictates our actions through the rules, roles, statuses, or structures it imposes upon us. While acknowledging that we are born into a society that sets the framework for our actions through the patterns of meaning and rewards it provides, interactionists stress that we actively shape our identities and beha-viors as we make plans, seek goals and interact with others in specific situations. Society and its structures are human pro-ducts; they are rooted in the joint acts we engage in with other people. 6 To understand people’s social acts, we need to use methods that enable us to discern the meanings they attribute to these acts . Inter-actionists emphasize the significance of the fact that people act on the basis of the meanings they give to things in their world. In turn, interactionists believe it is essential to understand those worlds of meaning and to see them as the individuals or groups under investigation see them. To develop this insider’s view, researchers must empathize with – or ‘take the role of’ – the individuals or groups they are studying (Blumer, 1969b).

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  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Communication

  • Brent D. Ruben(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It does not regard meaning as emanating from the intrinsic makeup of the thing that has meaning, nor does it see meaning as arising through a coalescence of psychological elements in the person. Instead, it sees meaning as arising in the process of interaction between people. The meaning of a thing for a person grows out of the ways in which other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing. Their actions operate to define the thing for the person. Thus, Symbolic Interactionism sees meanings as social products, as creations that are formed in and through the defining activities of people as they interact. This point of view gives Symbolic Interactionism a very distinctive position, with profound implications that will be discussed later. The third premise mentioned above further differentiates Symbolic Interactionism. While the meaning of things is formed in the context of social interaction and is derived by the person from that interaction, it is a mistake to think that the use of meaning by a person is but an application of the meaning so derived. This mistake seriously mars the work of many scholars who otherwise follow the symbolic-interactionist approach. They fail to see that the use of meanings by a person in his action involves an interpretative process. In this respect they are similar to the adherents of the two dominant views spoken of above—to those who lodge meaning in the objective makeup of the thing that has it and those who regard it as an expression of psychological elements. All three are alike in viewing the use of meaning by the human being in his action as being no more than an arousing and application of already established meanings. As a result, all three fail to see that the use of meanings by the actor occurs through a process of interpretation. This process has two distinct steps. First, the actor indicates to himself the things toward which he is acting; he has to point out to himself the things that have meaning

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  Identity in Modern Society

  A Social Psychological Perspective

  • Bernd Simon(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  However, we need not concern ourselves with this heterogeneity any further. I shall rather review the core of interrelated basic concepts that is essential to most current sym-bolic interactionist theorizing (Stryker & Statham, 1985). Like other social animals, people do not and could not exist as isolated individuals. Reproduction of human life as well as production of the means of life depends on coordinated, and often cooperative, human action. Accord-ingly, social interactionists emphasize that human action is often, if not always, social interaction. That is, people act with reference to other individuals who are also actors. The different actors thus take each other into account. In order to be able to do this, people need to understand each other and the meanings of their respective acts. An act is meaningful when it includes a gesture which is indicative of other parts of the act yet to occur in the sequence of social interactions. When the gesture is understood in the same way by the people involved in the interaction, the gesture has become a significant symbol. Significant symbols emerge from social interaction and organize social inter-action. From the perspective of Symbolic Interactionism, language is probably the most important system of significant symbols. It serves as the primary vehicle of communication, which is virtually synonymous with social inter-action for many symbolic interactionists. The Social Psychology of Identity 21 Meanings, significant symbols and social interaction are interdependent. Meanings and significant symbols emerge from social interaction, but they are also necessary for successful social interaction. Without meanings and significant symbols, social interaction breaks down. The interactive situation must be defined through the assignment of meanings and significant symbols.

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  Contemporary Sociological Theory

  • Bert N Adams, R A Sydie(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The two parts—symbol and interaction—produce meaningful interaction. That is, interaction involves giving social objects symbolic value. Social objects can be anything—physical objects, animals, history, language, ideas, emotions—as well 166 S E C T I O N I I I | Transitions and Challenges as self and other people. According to Blumer (1969:80), the individual in all of his or her everyday acts “is designating different objects to himself, giving them meaning, judging their suitability to his action, and making decisions on the ba-sis of the judgment.” People interpret and act on the basis of symbols. Symbols are abstract meanings attached to things, people, and behavior so that they can have different meanings for different individuals. The important point is that individuals consciously and creatively evaluate, make decisions, and act. Whether the evaluation, decision, and action are “functional” or even ethi-cally commendable is not necessarily an issue. However, given the legacy of George Herbert Mead, there is an assumption that individuals will progress to-ward a more democratic society and that this progress will be helped by sociology. Interaction involves the self engaged in communicating with self: selecting, checking, suspending, regrouping, and transforming meanings in terms of the social context and the individual’s intentions and interests (Blumer, 1969:5). But for Blumer, the most significant feature of all “human association is that the participants take each other into account” as a basis of conduct (1969:194). Society is a “complex of ongoing activity” involving collectively initiated “joint actions” (Blumer, 1969:85). Joint actions are “constituted by the fitting together of the lines of behavior of separate participants” as, for example, in a trading transac-tion, family dinner, wedding, games, or war (1969:70).

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  Institutions, Interaction and Social Theory

  • Will Gibson, Dirk vom Lehn(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  To put it another way, symbolic interactionist approaches involve turning away from this more abstract description towards a concern with the meanings that a system may have for people, and the kinds of negotiations that may need to happen in order to achieve an idealized model. The aim is to understand what these typologies mean to and for the people in the context, otherwise the ideal-ized theoretical concept remains just that – a non-contextualised ideal that does not capture the implications of that structure for the people who ultimately comprise it. To achieve this alternative analysis, we need a level of ethnographic understanding of what this particular place is, who its peoples are, how they have got to where they are, and what these changes will mean for them. Methodological and theoretical contributions and limitations Interactionist research produced by sociologists at Chicago and elsewhere since the 1930s was methodologically revolutionary at the time, in that scholars did not align with the contemporary tendency to rely on quantitative methods, but continued the development of (although by no means exclusive) qualita-tive research methods, notably fieldwork and, by extension, interviews, and documentary analysis. The basic point of fieldwork of course is to be there – to participate , not necessarily in the sense of ‘doing what the participants do’ but in the sense of being a witness to the lives of those being studied. As Hughes put it, this involves leaving the statistical reports and other documents behind and getting involved in the world so that the real business of theory creation can start. Once this ‘lived participation’ begins, the small details that make up the lives of people will start to emerge, ‘[t]he small observations which, accu-mulated, are the evidence on which theories of culture and society are built’ (1971: 497).

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  Cartographies of Knowledge

  Exploring Qualitative Epistemologies

  • Celine-Marie Pascale(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  129). 2 From these philosophical roots, symbolic interaction began with the premise that the individual and society are interdependent and inseparable— both are constituted through shared meanings. Symbolic interaction emerged as an effort to understand social life through something other than laboratory research and behaviorist conceptions of stimulus–response. Consequently, it shifted the goal of social research from an objective study of an empirical reality to a deep understanding of the symbolic practices that make a shared reality possible. This chapter begins by offering some key linkages between pragmatist philosophy and contributions to social research by Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Herbert Blumer. It then offers a brief glance at the varied landscape of symbolic interaction today and offers a general summary of the framework. From this foundation, it moves into analyses of data and corresponding analyses of symbolic interaction before concluding with discussion about the implications for social research and relevance for social justice. SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: A BRIEF HISTORY American pragmatists John Dewey and William James were particularly influential among scholars who were thinking about symbolic processes and social interaction (Reynolds, 2003b). Dewey distrusted the theoretical premise of what he called “spectator knowledge”—the idea that knowledge is based on the accurate observation and representation of existing realities. He, like other pragmatists, conceptualized knowledge production as an active process. Pragmatists argued that truth is not the property of an idea or thing; rather, truth is a process of becoming: truth is made true. “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them” (James, 1948, pp. 163–164)

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  Studies in Symbolic Interaction

  • Norman K. Denzin(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  6 Pragmatism and early interaction-ism developed in a social context; those processes have been enumerated above. Contemporary interactionism is richly nourished by other perspec-tives, including semiotics, hermeneutics, existentialism, phenomenology, feminism, dramaturgy, structuration, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, postmodernism, poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, queer theory, narrative and discourse studies, and cultural studies (see also Sandstrom & Fine, 2003 ). ARGUMENT AND CONTROVERSY The main argument of SI is that, for nonhuman animals, behavior is a direct, learned – although noninterpretive – response to natural (envir-onmentally embedded) signs or communicative gestures; for humans, it is an interpretive reply to iconic, nonverbal, and, primarily, linguistic symbols (speech and text). Symbols are constituted by humans interactively assigning arbitrary and consensual meanings to things. Unlike natural signs that refer solely to concrete objects and events in the present, symbols instead refer and allude to past, present, future, and nonesuch concrete and abstract referents ( White, 1940 ; Langer, 1963 ; Hewitt, 2003 ). An apple is a sign of food for both humans and chimpanzees, but only for humans is it a symbol of the certainty of death and the brevity of earthly pleasures when present in a vanitas painting. For Mead, human interaction was a conversation of significant symbols, significant in the sense that the symbol means the same to all actors involved in the situation – hence, symbolic interaction or communication. The Essentials of Symbolic Interactionism 309 Childhood socialization endows actors with the unique human capacity both to symbolize nonverbal and linguistic referents and to empathize with others. Humans also display nonsymbolic habitual behavior, that is, behavior in which the self is uninvolved.

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  The Interactionist Imagination

  Studying Meaning, Situation and Micro-Social Order

  • Michael Hviid Jacobsen(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  I am sure that this unique spirit of inquiry will survive and remain strong also in the years to come. About This Book The perspective of interactionism, to which I have introduced pre- viously, can be found across many different social science disciplines, but it has been particularly prominent within sociology, and 24 M.H. Jacobsen interactionist ideas have also been and continue to be an important source for the development of social psychology – in fact, some have even regarded interactionism as synonymous with social psychology, because interactionism, just as social psychology, is concerned with looking at the intimate interplay between individual and society as it is mediated through symbolic interaction (see, e.g., Lauer & Handel 1977; Lindesmith, Strauss & Denzin 1991; Manis & Meltzer 1978; Musolf 2003; Sandstrom, Martin & Fine 2003). Even though there are no academic boundaries to the potential spreading or utility of interaction- ism, the perspective was predominantly born within a sociological con- text based on insights, as we saw earlier, from philosophy, psychology and the newly established discipline of sociology towards the end of the nineteenth century. This book is an invitation to sociological interactionism – that type of sociological thinking and researching that takes human interaction as its empirical and analytical starting-point, which regards human beings as meaning-making and meaning-seeking creatures and which sees people as active co-creators of that which we conventionally call ‘society’. The book covers some large chunks of the interactionist landscape through- out the past century. However, for obvious reasons it cannot aspire to cover everything.

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  Contemporary Sociological Theory

  • Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk, Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part I Symbolic Action Introduction to Part I 1 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 2 Symbolic Interactionism 3 Interaction Ritual Chains Contemporary Sociological Theory , Fourth Edition. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, and Indermohan Virk. Editorial material and organization © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Introduction to Part I Social life is part of every individual and every interaction – not only of the large-scale affairs of governments, economies, and complex organizations. Sociology that focuses primarily on persons and interpersonal relations is called “micro-sociology.” This can be relevant on a large scale: for example, how members of a corporation’s board of directors interact can determine whether 10,000 people lose their jobs or an entire country experiences an economic crisis. Micro-level decisions are the basis for many macro-sociological phenomena; individual decisions – each small in themselves – can also be aggregated to have huge effects. Consider how decisions to have children, to migrate, to invest in education, or about what and how much to buy combine to produce population crises, “brain drains,” burgeoning of college enrollments, or recession, respectively. Even without attention to their large-scale effects, micro-sociological phenomena matter because their effects can be seen on people involved in everyday life. Indeed, it is often easiest for us to see ourselves in the “micro” part of sociology where symbolic action occurs. In other words, these everyday micro-sociological interactions through the use of commonly shared symbols or language allow us to make sense of the actions of others and to be part of society. There are many different approaches to micro-sociological analysis.

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  Methodological Individualism

  Background, History and Meaning

  • Lars Udehn(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  One obvious way to read this quotation is as a statement of an individualist alternative to Durkheim’s and Parsons’s holistic theory of society. But even if this reading is wrong, there is abundant evidence to show that ethnomethodology comprises a view of society, which is, in the main, radically individualistic, at least implicitly (see Collin, 1997, ch. 1). From phenomenology, it inherited an intersubjectivist view of society, but like symbolic interactionists, ‘the ethnomethodologists emphasize the interactional activities that constitute the social facts’ (Coulon, 1995: 50, see also 71ff). In my opinion, ethnomethodology is even more focused on action, or practices, than is Symbolic Interactionism and, therefore, an even more radical form of micro-sociology (cf. Collins, 1981b: 81–3).

  Figure 5.3 Society according to ethnomethodology

  Social constructionism

  A recent vogue in the human sciences is called social ‘constructionism’, or ‘constructivism’. In a broad sense, ‘social constructionism’ means simply that social phenomena are human creations, rather than natural phenomena, or ‘essences’. In this somewhat trivial sense, virtually all human sciences, and sociology, in particular, are forms of social constructionism. It has always been a fundamental thesis of the human sciences that society is made up of ‘conventions’, or ‘customs’, or social ‘institutions’, words that imply that society is human-made. What distinguishes recent social constructionism from this broader contructionism of all human sciences, with the possible exception of economics, is that it sees social phenomena as cultural; cognitive and/or linguistic, constructions. Social phenomena are constituted by our thinking and our discourse about them.47

  Social constructionism, in the above sense, is not the same type of rationalist constructionism that Hayek objects to in his writings. The latter type is based on the belief that it is possible to construct society intentionally and rationally according to a preconceived plan. This is not at all the belief of recent social constructionists, who agree with Hayek that most social phenomena are unintended consequences of human actions. Actually Hayek, himself, was a ‘social’ constructionist in the recent sense of this term. His phenomenological view that social phenomena are constituted by people’s beliefs about them is the central pillar of, at least, one form of social constructionism.

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  Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science

  • Hayes, Steven C., Wilson, David Sloan(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Context Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Symbolic Thought and Communication from a Contextual Behavioral Science Perspective Dermot Barnes-Holmes Yvonne Barnes-Holmes Ciara McEnteggart Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium I n the current chapter, we present a brief summary of how contextual behavioral science has approached the topic of symbolic thought and communication. We begin by considering how behavioral psychology defined and studied symbolic relations prior to the seminal research of Murray Sidman (1994) and his col- leagues on stimulus equivalence in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, up until that time, behavioral psychology more or less assumed that symbolic thought and communication functioned in broadly similar ways for both human and nonhu- man species (Skinner, 1957), and that all behavior involved the same behavioral processes (e.g., classical and operant conditioning). Skinner himself appeared to break with this view in the 1960s when he proposed the concept of instructional control in explaining human problem solving, but the symbolic nature of instruc- tions remained poorly defined. Sidman’s work in the 1970s helped bring some clarity to the symbolic nature of instructional control, and this was further devel- oped and elaborated by the work of Steven C. Hayes in the 1980s under the rubric of relational frame theory (RFT). The evolution of the ability to engage in rela- tional framing was very much understated in the seminal volume in this area (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001), but more recent conceptual analyses have developed the account in this area. The current chapter aims to provide an Evolution & Contextual Behavioral Science 56 overview of the behavior-analytic approach to human symbolic thought and com- munication, and its evolution, as viewed predominantly through the lens of RFT.

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