On "Interactionism"
On Interactionism: The Microsociology of Meaning and Social Practice
Interactionism, as a major strand of sociological thought, centers on the study of how people produce and interpret meaning in everyday social interactions. Rooted in American pragmatism and phenomenological traditions, it has blossomed into a rich field of inquiry encompassing symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, institutional ethnography, and conversation analysis. These approaches share a focus on the micro-level processes through which individuals construct social realities, and together they form the foundation of contemporary social psychology and qualitative inquiry.
Roots in American Pragmatism
The philosophical foundations of interactionism lie in American pragmatism, particularly the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Pragmatism emphasized process, contingency, and the emergent nature of reality. Knowledge was not seen as a static reflection of a pre-given world, but as a product of interaction with the environment.
Mead, in particular, laid the groundwork for symbolic interactionism. His concept of the "self" as an emergent product of social interaction, developed through the internalization of the "generalized other," reoriented sociological theory around communication and interpretation. As Mead (1934) argued, mind and self arise through symbolic communication within a community, marking a radical departure from structural determinism.
Symbolic Interactionism: Classical and Contemporary Variants
Herbert Blumer, Mead's student, formalized symbolic interactionism (SI) as a distinct theoretical approach. In his classic statement, Blumer (1969) proposed three foundational principles:
Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them.
These meanings are derived from social interaction.
Meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things they encounter.
Blumer's formulation emphasized the centrality of meaning-making and interpretation. He was deeply critical of positivism, calling instead for research that captures the lived experience of actors.
Over time, SI has developed into several schools. The Chicago School, typified by scholars such as Anselm Strauss and Norman Denzin, emphasized fieldwork, grounded theory, and an ethnographic orientation. Denzin introduced the concept of the "interpretive interactionist," one who unpacks the symbolic structures underlying social life. Strauss, in turn, extended interactionism into organizational settings and co-developed grounded theory with Barney Glaser, a methodology grounded in emergent conceptualization.
The Iowa School, sometimes called the "structural" version of SI, introduced more quantitative and experimentally grounded methods to test interactionist hypotheses. Manford Kuhn and his colleagues developed empirical tools, such as the Twenty Statements Test, to capture aspects of self-concept and role identity. Later scholars from this tradition have adopted mixed-methods approaches to examine identity salience, self-schema, and role performance.
Ethnomethodology: From Meaning to Method
Emerging in the 1960s, ethnomethodology offered a radically empirical alternative to both SI and structural-functionalism. Founded by Harold Garfinkel (1967), ethnomethodology investigates how social order is achieved through the competent practices of ordinary actors. Garfinkel saw members as actively producing the very social facts sociologists claimed to discover. He insisted that sociologists must bracket their own assumptions and adopt the "ethnomethod" of the participants themselves.
Garfinkel's influence extended through Harvey Sacks, who developed conversation analysis (CA). Sacks envisioned a "natural observational science of social interaction" that would rigorously analyze talk-in-interaction using audio recordings and fine-grained transcription. Rather than studying meaning as a mental process, CA reveals how meaning is made sequentially and publicly in interaction.
Ethnomethodology splinters into several strands:
Classical ethnomethodology: concerned with members' methods for achieving accountability.
CA (Conversation Analysis): focused on the structural properties of talk.
Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA): rooted in Sacks's work on how categories like "mother" or "addict" are used in context to organize actions.
Critical ethnomethodology: integrates issues of power, gender, and race, often drawing from Garfinkel's later writings.
Phenomenology and Thick Description
Phenomenology, especially in the work of Alfred Schutz, shaped both ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. Schutz emphasized the taken-for-granted nature of everyday life, the stock of knowledge actors rely upon, and the temporality of lived experience. His concept of "typifications" laid a bridge between subjective meaning and shared cultural frameworks.
This influence also informs Clifford Geertz's notion of "thick description" in anthropology, which advocates detailed ethnographic accounts that embed social actions within their webs of meaning. Thick description, combined with grounded theory, is now central to qualitative research in social psychology.
Goffman, Scheff, and the Emotional Dynamics of Interaction
Erving Goffman stands as a towering figure in interactionist sociology. Though he resisted theoretical labels, his work represents a convergence of SI, ethnomethodology, and dramaturgical analysis. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman argued that social life is theatrical: individuals perform roles for audiences, engaging in impression management to uphold desired identities.
In Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981), Goffman expanded on the microstructures of social encounters. He introduced concepts like "face work," "front stage/back stage," and the "interaction order" (1983), insisting that social order is produced in the fragile, moral realm of co-present interaction.
Thomas Scheff (1990) extended Goffman’s insights into the domain of emotion. His theory of the shame/rage spiral posits that social bonds are maintained through the recognition of emotions such as shame, which can be adaptive if acknowledged but destructive if denied. In this way, Scheff integrates microsociology with affect theory and symbolic meaning.
Randall Collins (2004), in Interaction Ritual Chains, built on Durkheim and Goffman to argue that successful social encounters generate emotional energy, solidarity, and symbolic capital. These micro-level rituals accumulate across time, forming the basis for macro-level institutions.
Dorothy Smith and Institutional Ethnography
Feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith developed Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a critique of male-centered epistemologies. Building on both Marxist and interactionist insights, Smith (1987) insisted that everyday experience be treated as a starting point for investigating the social relations that organize it. IE traces how ruling institutions shape local settings through texts, policies, and bureaucratic routines. It is an interactionist method in the deepest sense, foregrounding the material and discursive organization of everyday life.
Methods: Ethnography, Autoethnography, and Qualitative Inquiry
Interactionism has championed the use of qualitative methods: participant observation, life histories, and in-depth interviewing. Ethnography remains the gold standard for capturing the complexity of lived experience, while autoethnography brings the researcher's own experience into reflexive dialogue with broader cultural narratives.
Qualitative researchers aim for theoretical saturation and conceptual richness, not generalizability. Their goal is to illuminate meaning, context, and practice through immersive fieldwork and dialogic interpretation. The "interpretive turn" in social psychology has brought attention to narrative, affect, embodiment, and intersubjectivity—all key concerns for interactionist research.
A Sackian Natural Science of Social Interaction
Harvey Sacks's vision of a natural observational science of social interaction remains a provocative alternative to both positivist and constructivist paradigms. A Sackian approach emphasizes empirical grounding, fine-grained analysis, and the uncovering of order in naturally occurring data. It seeks to identify recurring patterns of interaction that are observable, reproducible, and accountable to participants themselves.
Rather than abstract theorizing, Sacks's approach valorizes the "next turn proof procedure": a speaker’s utterance is intelligible by examining how the next speaker responds. Meaning is thus public and sequential, not private or mentalistic. For interactionist social psychologists, this approach demands rigor, attention to detail, and fidelity to the lived realities of social actors.
Conclusion
Interactionism, in all its variations, provides a rich and evolving toolkit for understanding the self, society, and the structures of everyday life. From Blumer’s interpretive principles to Garfinkel’s radical empiricism, from Goffman’s dramaturgy to Smith’s feminist ethnography, this tradition reveals how meaning, identity, and power are enacted in micro-settings. Its methods, rooted in thick description and naturalistic observation, challenge us to see the mundane as meaningful and the ordinary as the ground of transformation. As we move further into the complexities of digital life, translocal institutions, and globalized encounters, interactionism remains vital to the sociological imagination.
References
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. University of California Press.
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press.
Denzin, N. (2001). Interpretive Interactionism. Sage.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press.
Rawls, A. (2002). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Blackwell.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Blackwell.
Scheff, T. (1990). Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. University of Chicago Press.
Schutz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press.
Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic. Northeastern University Press.
Strauss, A. & Glaser, B. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Aldine.
Throughout "Doing modernity" I have sought to advance a critical interactionist perspective. It is my contention that in order to eliminate domination and oppression we need to understand how they are accomplished in and through everyday situations and everyday cultural artifacts. We also need to understand acts of resistance and the practices that are used to accomplish liberation, social justice and equality.
I have used the term "interactionism" broadly to describe approaches to understanding society that focus on social interaction--the stuff we do in everyday encounters with others.
Chatting with our friends at a coffee shop, giving directions for the copy machine to a co-worker, telling our child not to walk out into the street, we engage in talk-in-interaction. Talk makes things happen. And not just talk--our bodies, facial expressions, eye contact and other non-vocal activities accompany, amplify and articulate the messages we are trying to get across. It is activities and practices that people use to do stuff that is my concern.
In American sociology, "symbolic interactionism" has a long and esteemed history and I have learned much from the hugely insightful writings of Mead, Cooley, Blumer, Denzin, Becker, Shibutani, Scheff and others, and I seek in incorporate these insights into my work.
My Initial training was in Ethnomethodology, and Garfinkel and his allies centrally shaped my understanding of the world and sociology. Ethnomethodologists turn the "problem of order" on its head. rather than asking how people respond to an order already "out there", Ethnomethodologists seek to comprehend how that order is "constituted" through the situated activities of ordinary people in concrete instances of social life.
A lot of research in sociology approaches the orderliness of the social world only through elaborate theoretical constructions or through aggregates of social phenomenon (usually quantified). And while much is learned doing this, ethnomethodology wants to locate that orderliness in the lived details of (even) single instances of social life.
I have also been greatly inspired by Erving Goffman's notion of the "interaction order" and have continually returned to his masterful studies of face-to-face encounters. A brilliant writer with keen observational skills and theoretical sophistication, Goffman continues to be worth re-reading. Within the last decade, we have been blessed with several new books on Goffman, including those of Thomas Scheff, Gregory Smith, Javier Trevino and others.
I greatly appreciate the "ecumenical" spirit of British sociologist Paul Atkinson, whose book with William Housley, "Interactionism: An Essay in Sociological Amnesia" is filled with insight. They state that the term "interactionism":
"can be used more broadly and inclusively to refer to the sociological study of social interaction and social encounters, the investigation of micro-sociological phenomenon such as face-to-face interaction, the social construction of selves and identities, the structure of everyday knowledge, and the ordinary realities of mundane activities in social groups and institutions" (p. 37).
As a definition of interactionism, I could not do better. Atkinson and Housley acknowledge that ethnomethodological investigations have greatly informed and enriched the interactionist perspective. Of course, this is coming from a couple of "Brits" on the other side of the atlantic. Our American symbolic interactionist brethren often seem less willing to concede the insights of Garfinkel and his "bastard" gang (as Garfinkel referred to us).
"Critical interactionism" seeks to radically renew our sensitivity to power and oppression in all forms and modes of social organization. The emergent properties of domination-as-it-happens occur at diverse levels of order which all need to be subject to sociological scrutiny.
Critical interactionism is sensitive to how power works in indigenous orders of action, meaning and representation, and provides a reflexive and complex means to investigate social organization and the fluidity of late modernity. The formal methods and formal analysis used by Conversation Analysts to describe the observable details of actual events is, to me, the "Gold Standard" of micro-ethnographic and observational social science.
It is to this type of science of social life that I want to graft an explicitly "critical" concern. In a society filled with so many ills, describing the social world as it happens is not enough! We must figure out how so many get held down and how they might lift themselves up.
The point of these Critical Interactionist studies is to discover the oppressive and liberatory things that people do in real-world situations, and the methods they use to produce the hierarchical orderliness of everyday social life, as well as how the hierarchical order is resisted and overturned. Societies "structured in dominance "(Stuart Hall) are the practical accomplishment of people in everyday situations.
Inspired by Harvey Sacks, I argue that a science of social life must be able to deal with the concrete details of actual events. Sacks advocated a natural observational science of human behavior. I appreciate that sentiment greatly. I believe that we need to extend that observational practice and focus it explicitly on injustice, inequality and domination.
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