Symbolic interactionism

Bibliographic Data

ID20060283
AuthorsJames Rupert Fletcher (0000-0001-9198-4321, corresponding author)
Year2023
Pages320-325
Publication date2023-12-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueEncyclopedia of Health Research in the Social Sciences (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdward Elgar Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4337/9781800885691.ch58
OpenAlexW4390121929
ISBN9781800885691
LanguageEN
Citations received11

Symbolic interactionism emerged in the early-twentieth century amidst fast-paced American urbanisation. Diverse and rapidly transforming cities such as Chicago, coupled with values of individual agency, were difficult to reconcile with the monolithic abstractions and structural determinism of traditional social theory. In contrast, interactionists offered a type of social thought that centred on people’s everyday actions and interpretations, their minds and their selves. Drawing on behaviourism and American pragmatist philosophy, an account of society was developed that incrementally grew out of individual action, all under the structuring influence of symbolism. While a useful reassertion of the person in sociological thought, its attentiveness to the individual means that interactionism has traditionally struggled to account for social structure, and has repeatedly been critiqued as such. Ultimately, interactionist thought has been largely subsumed into contemporary sociology, so that it is simultaneously obscure as a major theoretical tradition, and yet present throughout much social scholarship

Epistemology · History of sociology · Interactionism · Political science · Politics · Pragmatism · Scholarship · Social science · Social structure · Social theory · Sociological theory · Sociology · Structure and agency · Symbolic interactionism · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics