INTRODUCTION
The term “symbolic interactionism” has come into use
as a label for a relatively distinctive approach to the study of human group life
and human conduct. The scholars who have used the approach or contributed to
its intellectual foundation are many, and include such notable American figures
as George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, William
James, Charles Horton Cooley, Florian Znaniecki, James Mark Baldwin, Robert Redfield,
and Louis Wirth. Despite significant differences in the thought of such
scholars, there is a great similarity in the general way in which they viewed
and studied human group life. The concept of symbolic interactionism is built
around this strand of general similarity. There has been no clear formulation
of the position of symbolic interactionism, and above all, a reasoned statement
of the methodological position of this approach is lacking. This essay is an effort
to develop such a statement.
THE NATURE OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Symbolic interactionism rests in the last analysis
on three simple premises.
a) The
human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things
have for them. Such things include everything that the human being may note in
his world—
i. Physical
objects, such as trees or chairs;
ii. Other
human beings, such as a mother or a store clerk;
iii. Categories
of human beings, such as friends or enemies;
institutions, as a school or a government;
iv. Guiding
ideals, such as individual independence or
honesty;
v. Activities
of others, such as their commands or requests;
and such situations as an individual encounters in his daily life.
b) The
second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises
out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows.
c) The
third premise is that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an
interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he
encounters.
Symbolic interactionism is grounded on a number of
basic ideas, or “root images.” these root images represent the way in which
symbolic interactionism views human society and conduct. They constitute the
framework of study and analysis. Let’s describe briefly each of these root
images.
a) Nature of human society or human
group life. Human groups are seen as consisting of
human beings who are engaging in action. The action consists of the
multitudinous activities that the individuals perform in their life as they
encounter one another and as they deal with the succession of situations
confronting them. The individuals may act singly, they may act collectively,
and they may act on behalf of, or as representatives of, some organization or
group of others. The activities belong to the acting individuals and are carried
on by them always with regard to the situations in which they have to act. The
import of this simple and essentially redundant characterization is that
fundamentally human groups or society exists in action and must be seen
in terms of action. This picture of human society as action must be the
starting point (and the point of return) for any scheme that purports to treat
and analyze human society empirically.
b) Nature of social interaction.
Group life necessarily presupposes interaction between the group members; or,
put otherwise, a society consists of individuals interacting with one another.
The activities of the members occur predominantly in response to one another or
in relation to one another. Even though this is recognized almost universally in
definitions of human society, social interaction is usually taken for granted
and treated as having little, if any, significance in its own right. This is
evident in typical sociological and psychological schemes—they treat social
interaction as merely a medium through which the determinants of behavior pass
to produce the behavior. Thus, the typical sociological scheme ascribes
behavior to such factors as status position, cultural prescriptions, norms,
values, sanctions, role demands, and social system requirements; explanation in
terms of such factors suffices without paying attention to the social
interaction that their play necessarily presupposes.
c) Nature of objects.
The position of symbolic interactionism is that the “worlds” that exist for
human beings and for their groups are composed of “objects” and that these
objects are the product of symbolic interaction. An object is anything that can
be indicated, anything that is pointed to or referred to—a cloud, a book, a
legislature, a banker, a religious doctrine, a ghost, and so forth. For
purposes of convenience one can classify objects in three categories:
i. physical objects, such as chairs,
trees, or bicycles;
ii. social objects, such as students,
priests, a president, a mother, or a friend; and
iii. abstract objects, such as moral
principles, philosophical doctrines, or ideas such as justice, exploitation, or
compassion.
The
nature of an object—of any and every object—consists of the meaning that it has
for the person for whom it is an object. This meaning sets the way in which he sees
the object, the way in which he is prepared to act toward it, and the way
in which he is ready to talk about it. An object may have a different meaning
for different individuals: a tree will be a different object to a botanist, a
lumberman, a poet, and a home gardener; the President of the United States can
be a very different object to a devoted member of his political party than to a
member of the opposition; the members of an ethnic group may be seen as a
different kind of object by members of other groups. The meaning of objects for
a person arises fundamentally out of the way they are defined to him by others
with whom he interacts. Thus, we come to learn through the indications of
others that a chair is a chair, that doctors are a certain kind of
professional, that the United States Constitution is a given kind of legal
document, and so forth. Out of a process of mutual indications common objects
emerge—objects that have the same meaning for a given set of people and are seen
in the same manner by them.
d) The human being as an acting
organism. Symbolic interactionism recognizes that
human beings must have a makeup that fits the nature of social interaction. The
human being is seen as an organism that not only responds to others on the
non-symbolic level but as one that makes indications to others and interprets
their indications. He can do this, as Mead has shown so emphatically, only by
virtue of possessing a “self.” Nothing esoteric is meant by this expression. It
means merely that a human being can be an object of his own action. Thus, he
can recognize himself, for instance, as being a man, young in age, a student,
in debt, trying to become a doctor, coming from an undistinguished family and
so forth. In all such instances he is an object to himself; and he acts toward
himself and guides himself in his actions toward others on the basis of the
kind of object he is to himself. This notion of oneself as an object fits into
the earlier discussion of objects. Like other objects, the self object emerges
from the process of social interaction in which other people are defining a
person to himself.
e)
Nature
of human action. The capacity of the human being
to make indications to himself gives a distinctive character to human action.
It means that the human individual confronts a world that he must interpret in
order to act instead of an environment to which he responds because of his
organization. He has to cope with the situations in which he is called on to
act, ascertaining the meaning of the actions of others and mapping out his own
line of action in the light of such interpretation. He has to construct and
guide his action instead of merely releasing it in response to factors playing
on him or operating through him. He may do a miserable job in constructing his
action, but he has to construct it.
f)
Interlinkace
of action. As stated earlier, human group life
consists of, and exists in, the fitting of lines of action to each other by the members of the group. Such articulation
of lines of action gives rise to and constitutes “joint action”—a societal
organization of conduct of different acts of diverse participants. A joint
action, while made up of diverse component acts that enter into its formation,
is different from any one of them and from their mere aggregation. The joint
action has a distinctive character in its own right, a character that lies in
the articulation or linkage as apart from what may be articulated or linked.
Thus, the joint action may be identified as such and may be spoken of and
handled without having to break it down into the separate acts that comprise
it.
The general perspective of symbolic interactionism should
be clear from its root images. This approach sees a human society as people
engaged in living. Such living is a process of ongoing activity in which
participants are developing lines of action in the multitudinous situations
they encounter. They are caught up in a vast process of interaction in which
they have to fit their developing actions to one another. This process of
interaction consists in making indications to others of what to do and in
interpreting the indications as made by others. They live in worlds of objects
and are guided in their orientation and action by the meaning of these objects.
Their objects, including objects of themselves, are formed, sustained,
weakened, and transformed in their interaction with one another. This general
process should be seen, of course, in the differentiated character which it necessarily
has by virtue of the fact that people cluster in different groups, belong to
different associations, and occupy different positions. They accordingly
approach each other differently, live in different worlds, and guide themselves
by different sets of meanings. Nevertheless, whether one is dealing with a
family, a boy’s gang, an industrial corporation, or a political party, one must
see the activities of the collectivity as being formed through a process of
designation and interpretation.
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