Symbolic Interactionism - Central Interactionist Themes

Central Interactionist Themes

To Herbert Blumer’s conceptual perspective, he put them in three core principles: that people act toward things, including each other, on the basis of the meanings they have for them; that these meanings are derived through social interaction with others; and that these meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretive process that people use to make sense of and handle the objects that constitute their social worlds. Keeping in mind of Blumer’s earlier work, David A. Snow, distinguished professor of Sociology at the University of California, suggests four broader and even more basic orienting principles: human agency, interactive determination, symbolization, and emergence. Snow uses these four principles as the thematic bases for identifying and discussing contributions to the study of social movements.

Human Agency

Human agency emphasizes the active, willful, goal seeking character of human actors. The emphasis on agency focuses attention on those actions, events, and moments in social life in which agentic action is especially palpable.

Interactive Determination

Interactive determination specifies that understanding of focal objects of analysis, whether they are self-concepts, identities, roles, practices, or even social movements. Basically this means, neither individual, society, self, or others exist only in relation to each other and therefore can be fully understood only in terms of their interaction.

Symbolization

Symbolization highlights the processes through which events and conditions, artifacts, people, and other environmental features that take on particular meanings, becoming nearly only objects of orientation. Human behavior is partly contingent on what the object of orientation symbolizes or means.

Emergence

Emergence focuses on attention on the processual and nonhabituated side of social life, focusing not only on organization and texture of social life, but also associated meaning and feelings. The principal of emergence tells us not only to possibility of new forms of social life and system meaning but also to transformations in existing forms of social organization.(Herman-Kinney Reynolds 812-824).