What is the active process of creating definition by selecting organizing interpreting people objects events and situations other phenomena?

Symbolic interactionism as a social theoretical framework starts from the presupposition that our social world is constructed through the mundane acts of everyday social interaction. Through the repetitive act of interaction, individuals as actors in relation to social groups constitute symbolic and shared meanings. Importantly, symbolic interactionism does not deny the unique; it is directly concerned with how distinctive meanings are adapted and interpreted through social practice. Methodologically, symbolic interactions are generally investigated through various qualitative approaches, such as ethnography or participant observation. Geographers’ interest in symbolic interactions developed in parallel to their growing interest in humanistic philosophies, as well as cultural and social theory. Post-positivist geographies, in particular, have been influenced by social interactionist approaches, which continue to investigate the complex relationships between individuals and societies, peoples and places. More generally, geography's interest in symbolic interactions stems from the larger concern with symbolic social practices, particularly as the ‘symbolic’ informs understandings of and meanings found in various social spaces.

Abstract

Symbolic interactionism as a social theoretical framework starts from the presupposition that our social world is constructed through the mundane acts of everyday social interaction. Through the repetitive act of interaction, individuals as actors in relation to social groups constitute symbolic and shared meanings. Importantly, symbolic interactionism does not deny the unique; it is directly concerned with how distinctive meanings are adapted and interpreted through social practice. Methodologically, symbolic interactions are generally investigated through various qualitative approaches, such as ethnography or participant observation. Geographers' interest in symbolic interactions developed in parallel to their growing interest in humanistic philosophies, as well as cultural and social theory. Post-positivist geographies, in particular, have been influenced by social interactionist approaches, which continue to investigate the complex relationships between individuals and societies, peoples and places. More generally, geography's interest in symbolic interactions stems from the larger concern with symbolic social practices, particularly as the “symbolic” informs understandings of and meanings found in various social spaces.

Developments

SI was always a tradition more varied than Blumer's guiding statements suggested. Not all symbolic interactionists subscribed to Blumer's views. An early division was identified between the Iowa School and the Chicago School of SI: the former emphasizing structure and conventional social scientific precepts, the latter stressing process and negotiation and preferring qualitative methods. The Iowa group used self-report measures such as the Twenty Statements Test and favored an approach that did not place SI in opposition to standard scientific conceptions. Its leading proponents, including Manford Kuhn and Carl Couch, accepted more of the ‘facts of social structure’ (Stryker, 1980: 1) than the Chicago-oriented group. While the Chicago version of SI has predominated, there were disputes around the precise character of Mead's legacy. In particular, it was contended that Blumer's advocacy of qualitative methods at the expense of conventional social scientific procedures could not be legitimated by Mead's views. The dominance of the Chicagoan version of SI led some commentary to elide the notions of Chicago sociology, ethnographic research, and SI. Against this, it is important to remember that SI was not the only theoretical stream in Chicago's famed sociology department.

More recently SI addressed debates originating from cultural studies and postmodern and poststructuralist trends about how culture can be most adequately represented. Again, generalizing somewhat, there are differences between those who favor some form of realism, with an emphasis on fieldwork traditions of cultural description, and those who seek to pursue constructionist arguments to the point where questions about inscription – the deskwork ethnographers do to produce to their ethnographic analyses – precede all others. On both sides the question of representation, the sense that readers make of the texts that mediate culture to an audience, becomes salient (Van Maanen, 2011).

The development of the SI spawned a rich and diverse range of studies connected by an analytic commitment to articulate people's ordinary experience of the world. It long stood as a productive alternative to functionalist and structural sociologies. Interactionist ideas have significantly impacted upon a number of established sociological fields, such as crime and deviance, education, health and illness, organizations and work (see Atkinson and Housley, 2003; Fine, 1993; Reynolds and Herman-Kinney, 2003 for reviews).

SI has illuminated public issues. Interaction is central to understanding how some social condition comes to be defined as a social problem. This is an often contested matter where groups advancing competing claims (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977) about the characteristics of the problem use a range of resources – material, symbolic, and political – to persuade publics and legislators of the legitimacy of their definitions (Holstein and Miller, 2003). Here Goffman's (1974) frame metaphor has proved enormously influential in analyses of how issues and problems are defined as such.

SI played a major part in opening up new fields, notably the sociology of emotion (Hochschild, 1983) and the sociology of public places (Lofland, 1998). People's experienced emotions are intimately connected to situated interaction. Emotions are not simply biological and psychological phenomena; they are socially organized by ‘feeling rules’ enacted in contexts of everyday interaction. Similarly, the investigation of public places has shown that the conduct there is far from asocial. Goffman's (1983) work on the ‘interaction order’ demonstrated how public places are delicately ordered by local rules that regulate territoriality, civil inattention, forms of regard for the other, the expression of information about the self, and the like. W.I. Thomas's famed apothegm that if people define things as real, they are real in their consequences, justified the close study of subjectivities and catalyzed a series of interactionist-inspired studies of ordinary action. Goffman's (1974) frame analysis offered a systematic and admittedly formalistic answer to the fundamental practical problem, “what is it that is going on here?”

Ethnographic research addressed the same question more discursively and with attention to the empirical details of situated symbolism and the emergent meanings arising in natural social settings. Directly or indirectly, ethnographic studies have drawn upon the SI tradition, seeking new ways to uncover and represent the ‘actor's point of view’ – the experience of people as they go about their daily lives. New standards of the intensity and extensiveness of ethnographic investigations have been set, clearly marking out such work from jibes about ‘tenured journalism’ (Fine, 1993). Observation of people's activities over extended periods of time is one feature of interactionist-inspired ethnographies of Black American inner-city street life – Anderson (1990) was the result of 14 years' research. Anderson's (1999) subsequent book also drew on that fieldwork and another 4 years of ethnographic research in poor and well-to-do neighborhoods. Duneier's (1999) ethnography of street vendors was based on more than 3 years' fieldwork. Duneier's study was also notable for his close collaboration with his key informant and a noted photojournalist, for its pioneering audio recording of street encounters, the quasi-legalistic standards of evidence and proof applied to analytic inferences drawn, and the sharing of the financial proceeds of the book with the research participants. Similarly, Alice Goffman's (2014) study of young black parolees was based on 6 years of immersive fieldwork. Studies such as these exemplify the sustained commitment of ethnographers to depict accurately the viewpoints of research participants and to entertain seriously inconvenient facts.

Over the past quarter of a century SI has proved a tradition remarkably open to postmodern and post structuralist critiques and developments in the social sciences and humanities, including cultural studies (Becker and McCall, 1990). Several aspects of these intellectual shifts are incorporated into SI by Denzin's (2001) ‘interpretive interactionism,’ which explores new ways of making people's problematic experience available to the reader by artistic and social scientific methods. The examination of people's reflections about these problematic experiences (‘epiphanies’) was also pursued by autoethnography, a method where the ethnographer explores their own personal experience (see Ellis et al., 2010 for a review of controversies about the method). Autoethnography has proved especially effective in conveying the personal and cultural meanings encountered in challenging situations, such as facing life-threatening illnesses (Frank, 1991) or learning to become a competition-standard boxer (Wacquant, 2004).

Appraisals of SI's future (Fine, 1993; Maines, 2001) have noted its distinguished past but, prudently, have been ambivalent about its future. The SI tradition has expanded, diversified, and become internationalized. There is an important sense in which it has become mainstream and is no longer a ‘loyal opposition.’ As Atkinson and Housley (2003) put it, “we are all interactionists now.” Well, perhaps. SI's abiding appeal is likely to continue to be its resolutely empirical approach to the social organization of people's experiences.

Scholarly Association

The traditions of SI are now celebrated and refined by members of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI). This association is an international organization of scholars and practitioners interested in the study of a wide range of issues from the interactionist perspective. The society holds an annual meeting that includes paper presentations, distinguished lectures, business gatherings, and an awards ceremony. The journal, Symbolic Interaction, and the research annual, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, are the major vehicles for the dissemination of reports on research, theory, and practice.

This article provides an overview of symbolic interactionisms, historical roots and development, its central principals, and its criticisms and theoretical and research variations. Symbolic interactionism is a major theoretical perspective and research tradition in sociology. It is rooted in the philosophy of American pragmatism and the development of the Chicago School of Sociology, and it is associated with the work of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, Everett Hughes, Anselem Strauss, Ralph Turner, Howard Becker, and Erving Goffman, among others. Symbolic interactionism analyzes human social behavior primarily in terms of its situated, interactive, and interpretative character. These analytic foci derive from the following orienting observations: that human behavior is partly contingent on what the object of orientation symbolizes or means; that the meanings of objects and events are not intrinsic to them but are assigned or imputed through interpretive processes that are activated during the course of interaction in concrete social situations; that meanings are not static or fixed but are subject to change as the situation or social context changes; and that the self, because of its reflexive capacity, is the central mechanism through which interpretation occurs. These principles paint a picture of the human actor as an active rather than responsive organism and thus accent the importance of human agency in understanding social life. Topics and processes analyzed from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism include but are not limited to: collective behavior, deviance, work and occupations, social problems, face-to-face interaction, socialization, roles, self-concept, identity, and emotion.

The criticisms made from symbolic interactionism added a whole new dimension to the analysis of position and role. Although some critics of mainstream views saw this as a complete alternative to the orthodoxy, others saw it as complementing the structural account. These differences persist and have been compounded by a more radical line of argument from phenomenology and ethnomethodology. Aaron Cicourel has produced the most systematic statement of this critique.

Cicourel asked the fundamental question: How is role-taking possible? His answer was that the taking and making of roles rests on a set of cognitive processes through which actors give meaning to the world and so sustain a ‘sense of social structure’ (Cicourel, 1972: 11). People do carry role information in their heads, but they also must be able to recognize when one particular position or role is relevant, and they must be able to infer what expectations others have of their behavior. They cannot make sense of their social world simply by drawing on the role and positional knowledge that they have learned during their socialization. Before they can apply norms in particular situations, they must arrive at an understanding of what kind of situation it is. This means that “members of a society must acquire the competence to assign meaning to their environment so that surface rules and their articulation with particular cases can be made” (Cicourel, 1968: 52). This ability to infer and to impute meaning to situations is a practical skill that is an essential condition for any social life at all. Cicourel saw this skill as an interactional competence, making explicit parallels with Chomsky's concept of linguistic competence. Although he did not adopt Chomsky's own rationalist theory of the mind, Cicourel did take over his stress on the generative capacities that are provided by human competences. It is their practical, meaning-making skills that allow people to use their knowledge of social norms to generate appropriate role behavior. The structural aspects of positions and roles, therefore, were seen by Cicourel as resting on the possession of a complex set of cognitive procedures (also termed inductive, interpretive, or inference procedures) that operate in the same way as the deep structure grammatical rules of a language.

Cicourel illustrated these cognitive procedures by drawing on Alfred Schutz's discussion of the assumptions that people must make for social interaction to be possible. Schutz held that individuals must assume a reciprocity of perspectives between themselves and their potential partners, they must fill in the gaps in their knowledge through the et cetera principle, and they must assume that things occur as ‘normal form.’ These and similar cognitive procedures constitute the mental module that makes it possible for actors to generate appropriate but innovative responses in changing circumstances, despite the fact that they have only fragmentary and uncertain evidence available to them. They allow people to assign meaning and relevance to the objects in their environment and to construct definitions of the situation that allow them to infer which of the norms stored in their memories are relevant. People build a sense of social structure that allows them to orient themselves appropriately in the various situations that they encounter. Once the meaning of a situation has been decided, norms can be invoked on the assumption that there is a consensus among those with whom they interact and that these are, indeed, the appropriate norms. Normative order and role behavior, therefore, are negotiated and constructed on the basis of the underlying sense of social structure that interactional competence makes possible.

Symbolic Interactionist Theories

Drawn from Cooley and Mead, symbolic interactionism now emphasizes the significance of self and identity processes. Self is increasingly conceptualized as a series of identities that individuals seek to verify in interactions with others; and depending upon whether or not verification occurs, persons will experience either positive or negative emotions (Burke and Stets, 2009). There are many variants of these identities theories, but most emphasize that there are several levels of identity, including core or person identities, social identities, group identities, and role identities. These are often conceptualized as a hierarchy with a persons' core feelings and cognitions about self being the most general, social identities attached to membership in categories (gender, ethnicity, age, etc.) as the next most general, group identities or attachments to corporate units being the next most general, and finally, role identities being the least general. To some extent, these various levels of identity are interconnected, with verification of an identity at one level having effects on confirming an identity at another level.

Some symbolic interactionist theories (e.g., Scheff, 1997; Turner, 2002, 2007) introduce psychoanalytic dynamics, emphasizing that individuals will often repress negative emotions like shame and guilt when their identities are not verified. With repression, the dynamics of emotion often disrupt interpersonal processes, while having potentially large effects on people's commitments to macrostructures in a society.

3 A PHILOSOPHICAL DETOUR

The principles of the pragmatist philosophy are to observe the world and to focus on its practical matters. This pragmatic principle is not only reserved for the focus of observation, but also to the desired end results. Pragmatic philosophy should respect and build on prior knowledge whenever possible (James, 1995, p. 56). The observations that prompted the search for the definition and concept of co-experience were of children enjoying using devices together more than alone, and coming up with more divergent and creative uses together than alone (see Mäkelä et al., 2000). Making sense of the experience was a fun social thing for them, and tied to the meanings and opportunities they discovered through the products. These observations prompted first a search through the growing body of user experience literature, and then a search for a way to learn, describe and communicate the significance of the observation. Several other field studies later, it was clear that using and exploring together had very different qualities than using alone, and not only for children. Finding out what a device is good for is something that is quite crucial to many design research activities, especially when involved with actual design and product development work.

The solution was to look for a theory that makes sense of meaning-making by individuals in social interaction and is based on observations in natural settings. Blumer's symbolic interactionism is a theory in sociology that focused in the 1930s on the study of interaction between people and brought in field studies as the data collection method of choice (Blumer, 1968). Symbolic interactions are intentional and convey meaning – Blumer leaves out unintentional, unsymbolic ones such as reflexes. For example, a sneeze itself would not be included, but the behaviors of politeness and hygiene associated with sneezing are definitely symbolic, and used to convey meanings to others.

According to Blumer, the basic principles of symbolic interactionism are:

That people act towards things (such as physical objects, people as well as abstract ideas) on the basis of meanings they ascribe to them. That is, for one person a chair is for sitting, while for someone else the same chair is a treasured part of a collection of Le Corbusier pieces.

These meanings are created in interaction with other people. When a guest informs the unknowing host that the chair is an original Le Corbusier, the host's perception of the chair changes.

These meanings are handled in and modified through an interpretive process with things people encounter. When the proud host tells other visitors that the chair is a Le Corbusier, and gets compliments and hears stories about its value, he learns to appreciate the chair more. However, if another visitor points out a detail in the materials that reveals that the chair is merely a beautiful copy, the host now has to find a way to deal with the new situation and the types of disappointment – both with the chair itself and with all the people who have been part of the real versus copy experience.

To interpret Blumer in terms of user experiences, there are two stages of processing an experience. One is the internal senses and feelings, and the other is deciding what they mean and how to relate to them. For example, to be able to interact with others successfully, ambiguous emotions are observed, regulated and shaped through social reflection processes that focus on the self (Rosenberg, 1990). Then, consciously or not, emotions are expressed through sentic modulation through culturally and personally determined gestures and behaviors (Picard, 1997, p. 25). In addition to the inner emotions, any message that people communicate to others comes accompanied by a host of supporting clues and behaviors that aim to direct others to understand the person in the intended way (Manning, 1992). Thus, through our behavior and by observing the meaning-rich behaviors of others, we quickly learn about the do's and dont's of the world. This is not to say that the end result is a consensus. Rather, the importance of this model is that although prior meanings exist, these are open to reinterpretation by anyone at any time in a continuing negotiation process. Any significant change in the situation, environment or activity prompts a re-evaluation of the meanings that people entertain.

Blumer's symbolic interactionism makes use of sensitizing concepts, which act as a scaffold for constructing understanding but, like a scaffold, are not a part of the final structure and are taken down before construction is complete. A sensitizing concept orients and supports observation and interpretation activities without dictating the end result. Co-experience is offered as such a sensitizing concept. Using the concept of co-experience can help to set up observations and identify interpretations in findings, especially when the focus is broad and fuzzy, as in the early stages of product design.

Other Methods Based on Mead

While Blumer's adaptation of Mead's theories is the methodological mainstay of SI, there are other methodologies based on SI, and these will be mentioned next. Analytic induction was first discussed by Znaniecki (1928). It was later used, with minor variations by Lindesmith (1937, 1968) (he was a graduate student of Blumer), Cressey (1950) (a student of Lindesmith), Becker (1963) (see Hammersley, 1989), and others. Analytic induction, according to Znaniecki, recognizes the fact that objects in the world are open to an infinite number of description and, thus, our account of them must be selective; this selectivity will be based on the interest at hand, which for sociologists is primarily social and cultural systems; commonly used sociological methods relying on preidentification (deductive) or superficial description (inductive) will not work, only analytic induction will accomplish the task. The researcher will select a small number of cases (10–12, usually) and study them in depth, continually defining and redefining the event and formulating and reformulating theoretical propositions until they will fit all cases. Negative cases must also be examined (this was Lindesmith's idea).

Another student of Blumer, Strauss, together with Glaser, developed another SI method, grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Closely related both to Blumer's methodology and to analytic induction, grounded theory placed more emphasis on the generation and development of theory. Relying on the inductive method, grounded theory is akin to Blumer's inspection, only much more elaborate. Rather than relying on a priori population, in analytic theorizing one continues to study new cases until the point of saturation, generating theoretical categories.

Not all SI methods followed the constructionist approaches outlined above. A notable exception came from the Iowa School of Sociology. Kuhn (1964) adopted a much more deterministic approach to Mead's discussion of the self and the nature of the ‘me,’ the various roles and images we have of ourselves. The methodology he adopted to discover the nature of the self was called the Twenty Statements Test (TST), a series of open-ended questions about the self. Kuhn felt that rather than use the oblique method of observing people one ought to ask them directly about the nature of their inner feelings and they would honestly disclose them to the researcher. The results of TST would be used, by Kuhn, to outline generic laws that would apply to human beings in different situations. Other positivistic oriented symbolic interactionists are Sheldon Stryker, described as a ‘structural role theorist,’ who influenced numerous students at the University of Indiana and Carl Couch, who was a stalwart of the discipline, with his ‘Behavioral Sociology’ at the University of Iowa (cf Reynolds, 1993).

In the 1960s and 1970s, a plethora of theoretical approaches, largely based on the naturalistic method, appeared. Some were based on basic Meadian tenets, such as dramaturgy (Goffman, 1959), and labeling (Becker, 1963). Others based their constructionist approach not only on the ideas of Mead but on those of the phenomenologists (Husserl, Schutz, Heidegger, Dilthey) and the existentialists (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), and ordinary language philosophers (Wittgenstein). They are phenomenological sociology, existential sociology, ethnomethodology, and the sociology of emotions (see Douglas et al. (1980) for a survey of these sociologies and a list of references to them; also, see Adler et al. (1987), Moran (2002), and Grossman (2013)).

Symbolic Interactionism

A different form of follow-up can be seen in the case of symbolic interactionism, embodied by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. Mead and Blumer, both connected to the Chicago Schools of Sociology and Psychology, developed a theory of human interaction that was later called symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969). In general, Mead's and Blumer's interest was in the forms of human interaction within a given environment, a topic not far from the research interests of human ecologists. According to symbolic interactionism, an individual's personality is formed within society, i.e., a human community. A central characteristic of human communities is interaction, among other things with the help of symbols. By constantly acting and interacting, social norms and values are created. Mead understands gestures as the initials of acting and is with this argument critically referring to, among others, Charles Darwin. Thus, both human ecology and symbolic interactionism share Darwin as intellectual predecessor and a general interest in the interrelation of human individuals in a community and a given environment.