George Herbert Mead and the Making of Symbolic Interactionism: Expanding the Analysis and Contrasting with Critical Interactionism/EMCA

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Part I: Why Mead Still Matters

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was a foundational figure in American sociology and philosophy whose ideas laid the groundwork for the school of thought known today as symbolic interactionism. Though Mead never published a book in his lifetime, his posthumously compiled lectures, most notably Mind, Self, and Society (1934), shaped the intellectual trajectory of social psychology, microsociology, and interactionist theory. Rooted in the pragmatist tradition and deeply influenced by developments in psychology, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary theory, Mead's work continues to animate contemporary discussions about the social construction of self, meaning, and society.

Why This Text Matters for Critical Interactionism

For scholars working within Critical Interactionism, Mead represents both an indispensable foundation and a crucial departure point. His insistence that mind, self, and society are socially constituted rather than naturally given or pre-social established the terrain upon which all subsequent interactionist work—including ethnomethodology and conversation analysis—would build. Without Mead's radical claim that consciousness itself emerges from social interaction, there would be no intellectual space for studying how social order, identity, and meaning are accomplished in and through situated practice.

Yet Mead's framework also contains fundamental limitations that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis were designed to overcome. His theory of the self, while revolutionary for its time, remains mentalistic and idealistic—locating the action primarily in internal cognitive processes (role-taking, internal conversation) rather than in the observable, accountable details of actual interaction. This creates a profound methodological problem: How do we study what happens "inside" people's heads when they take the role of the other? How do we observe the "I" encountering the "me"? How do we inspect the "generalized other"?

Critical Interactionism must honor Mead's insights while transcending his limitations. We must preserve his vision of the social constitution of self and meaning while respecifying these phenomena as locally produced, naturally accountable, inspectable achievements—precisely what Garfinkel's 1988 essay insists upon. This essay therefore expands the original Mead post to show both what Mead gives us and what ethnomethodology/conversation analysis must add to make his insights empirically tractable and politically consequential.

Part II: Mead's Core Contributions

Pragmatism and the Social Origins of Mind

Mead was a leading voice in the American pragmatist movement, alongside thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism emphasized that knowledge and truth are not static but arise through practical engagement with the world. From this perspective, meaning is not inherent in objects but emerges through active interpretation.

This pragmatic stance led Mead to propose that the human mind is not a pre-social faculty but emerges from the process of social interaction. Thought itself, he argued, arises out of communication. In place of Cartesian dualism or nativist theories of mind, Mead advanced a social behaviorist account of cognition, suggesting that consciousness is fundamentally dialogical and interactive.

The Revolutionary Claim: Mead's most radical proposition was that there is no "mind" prior to society. Consciousness is not a biological given that then enters into social relations; rather, consciousness is constituted through social relations. The very capacity for reflexive thought—the ability to take oneself as an object—emerges only through participation in communicative interaction.

This represented a profound break with both philosophical rationalism (which located reason in transcendent universal structures) and psychological behaviorism (which reduced human action to stimulus-response mechanisms). Mead carved out a third space: a social psychology that was neither individualistic nor deterministic, but that understood human agency as emerging from—and exercised through—participation in symbolic interaction.

The Emergence of the Self

One of Mead's most enduring contributions is his theory of the self. Rather than treating the self as an innate or fixed entity, Mead viewed it as a social product that arises through communicative interaction. He famously divided the self into two components: the "I" and the "me."

The "I" represents the spontaneous, creative, and unstructured aspect of the self. It is the source of novelty in action, the unpredictable response to social situations.
The "me" is the internalized set of social expectations—the organized set of attitudes of others that the individual takes upon themselves. It is the self as social object.

According to Mead, the self emerges when an individual is able to take the role of the "generalized other"—that is, when they learn to see themselves from the standpoint of the wider community or social group. This ability is cultivated through a developmental process that moves from play (where children mimic others) to games (where they must consider multiple roles simultaneously), culminating in the capacity for reflexive self-awareness.

Why This Matters: Mead's theory of the self offered a profound alternative to both essentialist notions of identity (the self as fixed essence) and purely situational accounts (the self as mere role performance). Instead, Mead showed how selfhood is a dialectical achievement—neither purely individual nor purely social, but constituted through the ongoing dialogue between the "I" (agency, spontaneity) and the "me" (sociality, accountability).

This framework anticipated much of what would later be developed in symbolic interactionism (particularly in the work of Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman) and provided conceptual resources for understanding identity as processual, multiple, and contextually negotiated.

Language and the Symbolic Basis of Interaction

For Mead, language is the key medium through which mind and self develop. Language consists of significant symbols—gestures that carry shared meanings. When individuals communicate using language, they engage in role-taking, which allows them to anticipate how others will interpret their actions.

Mead distinguished between simple gestures and significant symbols. While animals may respond to one another's gestures instinctively, humans use language in a way that allows for shared meaning and mutual understanding. In this way, social acts become coordinated through symbolic communication.

Language, then, is not merely a tool of expression but the very mechanism through which meaning is constructed. It allows individuals to take the attitude of the other and to engage in internal conversations that make self-consciousness possible.

The Deep Insight: Mead recognized that language operates on two levels simultaneously:

Externally - as a medium of coordination between actors
Internally - as the medium through which thought itself occurs

When I speak to you, I simultaneously hear myself speaking. This reflexive capacity—being both speaker and audience to one's own utterances—is what makes self-consciousness possible. Language is not just about communication between people; it is the mechanism through which the self becomes an object to itself.

Society as Ongoing Process

Mead viewed society as an emergent and dynamic system, continuously constructed and reconstructed through human interaction. He rejected static or structural models of society in favor of a processual approach. Social institutions, from families to legal systems, are sustained through ongoing patterns of interaction that are themselves symbolic and interpretive in nature.

This processual view aligns Mead with the tradition of microsociology and anticipates later developments in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and dramaturgical sociology. His emphasis on the emergent nature of social order would prove to be a key influence on the symbolic interactionist tradition.

Against Social Facts: Where Durkheim insisted that "social facts" have an objective, thing-like existence external to individuals, Mead countered that society exists only as process—only as the ongoing accomplishment of actors coordinating their conduct through symbolic interaction. There are no social structures "out there" independent of the interpretive work through which people produce, recognize, and orient to them.

This processual ontology became foundational for all subsequent interactionist work and established the terrain upon which ethnomethodology would later make its own radical intervention.

Part III: The Intellectual Legacy - From Mead to Blumer

Herbert Blumer, one of Mead's students at the University of Chicago, is credited with formalizing symbolic interactionism as a coherent sociological paradigm. In his 1969 book Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Blumer distilled Mead's insights into three core premises:

People act toward things based on the meanings those things have for them.
These meanings arise out of social interaction.
Meaning is modified through an interpretive process.

Blumer emphasized that symbolic interactionism is both a theoretical perspective and a methodological orientation. He argued against positivist approaches that sought to explain behavior through external variables alone, insisting instead on the necessity of understanding actors' definitions of the situation.

Symbolic interactionism thus diverged sharply from the structural functionalism and behaviorism that dominated mid-twentieth century sociology and psychology. Instead of focusing on institutions or stimulus-response mechanisms, interactionists placed meaning, interpretation, and agency at the center of analysis.

Blumer's Methodological Radicalism: What is often underappreciated about Blumer is that he insisted symbolic interactionism required a distinctive research methodology. One could not study meaning and interpretation using the standardized instruments and protocols of positivist social science. Instead, researchers needed to develop "sensitizing concepts" that would guide observation without predetermining what would be found. They needed to engage in "naturalistic inquiry" that respected the situated, contextual, emergent nature of social life.

This methodological commitment would later resonate strongly with ethnomethodology's insistence on studying naturally occurring activities in their own terms.

Part IV: Mead's Ongoing Influence

In Social Psychology and Identity Theory

Mead's work continues to exert influence across multiple disciplines, including psychology, education, anthropology, and communication studies. His conception of the self as socially embedded laid the groundwork for contemporary identity theory, narrative psychology, and relational approaches to therapy.

In sociology, his ideas were extended by scholars such as:

Anselm Strauss, who explored interactionist perspectives on illness, dying, and organizational life
Norman Denzin, who brought Mead's insights into the realm of interpretive and autoethnographic methodologies
Sheldon Stryker, who developed identity theory as a more structurally-oriented version of symbolic interactionism

Mead's emphasis on role-taking and perspective-taking has also informed educational philosophy, especially constructivist approaches that view learning as an interactive and social process.

In the Digital Age

In our contemporary moment, Mead's insights into the social construction of self and mind are more relevant than ever. Social media platforms function as arenas for symbolic interaction where individuals present and perform selves, take the role of the other, and experience feedback loops that influence their sense of identity.

The "me" - the self as social object - is now continuously constructed and reconstructed through likes, comments, shares, and algorithmic feedback. The capacity to take the role of an increasingly fragmented and multiply-positioned "generalized other" becomes both more essential and more fraught in conditions of digital plurality.

Moreover, in a globalized and increasingly pluralistic world, the capacity to take the perspective of the other—to recognize shared symbols and meanings across difference—remains a crucial element of social cohesion and democratic dialogue.

Part V: The Critical Turn - What Mead Couldn't See

While Mead's framework was revolutionary, it contained crucial blind spots that limit its utility for Critical Interactionism:

1. The Problem of Power

Mead's theory of the self is remarkably democratic and egalitarian in its assumptions. The "generalized other" appears as a relatively benign, consensual social order into which individuals are socialized. But what happens when the "generalized other" is itself structured by domination? What happens when the attitudes one internalizes are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive?

Mead provides no systematic account of how power shapes the social constitution of selfhood. He does not theorize how some groups have more power to define the "generalized other" than others, or how internalization of dominant norms can produce damaged, diminished, or colonized selves.

2. The Problem of Conflict

Related to the power problem is Mead's relatively harmonious vision of social life. While he acknowledges the "I" as a source of novelty and spontaneity, he doesn't develop a robust account of social conflict, resistance, or collective struggle. His theory is better at explaining social reproduction than social transformation.

3. The Problem of Embodiment

Mead's self is curiously disembodied. While he occasionally mentions gesture and the physical body, his primary focus is on symbolic communication and internal conversation. But selves are not just symbolic constructs—they are lived through bodies that are raced, gendered, aged, and differently abled. The body is not just a vehicle for symbolic interaction but a site where power is inscribed and resistance is enacted.

4. The Problem of Empirical Access

Most fundamentally, Mead's framework creates a profound methodological problem: How do we study role-taking, internal conversation, or the encounter between the "I" and the "me"? These are internal, cognitive processes that are not directly observable. Mead gives us brilliant conceptual tools but no clear empirical methodology for inspecting the phenomena he describes.

This is where ethnomethodology and conversation analysis make their decisive intervention.

Part VI: The EMCA Respecification - Mead Without Mentalism

Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Harvey Sacks's conversation analysis offer a way to preserve Mead's core insights while overcoming his limitations. They do this through a fundamental respecification of Meadian concepts from internal mental processes to locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order.

From Role-Taking to Sequential Organization

Mead's Version: Role-taking is an internal cognitive process where individuals imaginatively take on the perspective of others, anticipating their responses and adjusting their own conduct accordingly.

EMCA Respecification: What Mead called "role-taking" is observable in the sequential organization of talk. We don't need to speculate about internal mental processes; we can inspect how speakers design their utterances to display understanding of prior turns, how they project what kind of response they're making relevant next, and how recipients demonstrate (or fail to demonstrate) that they've grasped what was intended.

Example: When I ask you a question, I'm not internally imagining your possible responses. Rather, I'm producing a first pair part (the question) that makes relevant a second pair part (an answer). If you produce an answer, you thereby demonstrate that you recognized what I did as a question. If you don't answer, the absence becomes accountable—you may need to explain why you're not answering. This is not role-taking in the head; it's the locally produced, naturally accountable achievement of coordinated action.

Turn-taking in conversation—the systematic way speakers take turns without much overlap or gap—is accomplishment that displays participants' ongoing orientation to each other's conduct. We can see role-taking happening in how people time their entries, how they construct their utterances to be fitted to prior talk, how they repair misunderstandings. This is "taking the role of the other" as an inspectable phenomenon, not a hypothetical mental process.

From Internal Conversation to Talk-in-Interaction

Mead's Version: Thought is internalized conversation—a dialogue between the "I" and the "me" that occurs within consciousness.

EMCA Respecification: Rather than treating thought as internal conversation that we must infer, EMCA studies actual conversation as the primary site where thinking, reasoning, and sense-making occur. Thinking is not primarily a private mental activity that occasionally gets expressed in talk; rather, talk IS thinking made public, collaborative, and accountable.

Example: When people "think aloud" while solving a problem, when they ask each other "what do you think?", when they collaboratively formulate what something means, they're not expressing pre-formed internal thoughts—they're doing thinking as a joint activity. Reasoning is not located in individual minds but is accomplished in and through interaction.

This shifts the focus from hypothetical internal dialogue to actual, recordable, transcribable dialogue where we can inspect how sense-making happens turn-by-turn. We can see how people propose interpretations, how others accept or resist those interpretations, how shared understanding (or misunderstanding) gets produced.

From the Generalized Other to Members' Methods

Mead's Version: The "generalized other" is an internalized representation of society's norms and expectations that individuals carry with them and use to monitor their own conduct.

EMCA Respecification: What Mead called the "generalized other" appears in ethnomethodology as members' methods—the practical procedures that competent members of society use to produce and recognize orderly conduct. Rather than asking "what norms have people internalized?", EMCA asks "what methods are people using to accomplish this particular activity on this particular occasion?"

Example: Consider "politeness." For Mead, politeness norms would be part of the generalized other—internalized rules about proper conduct. For EMCA, politeness is something people do—they select from among various ways of formulating a request (direct command vs. question vs. hint), they use forms of address that display particular relationships, they produce accounts when their requests might be heard as imposing.

We can study how politeness is done without needing to speculate about what norms people have internalized. We inspect the actual methods they use to construct utterances as more or less polite, and how recipients treat those utterances as requiring particular kinds of responses.

From the "I" and "Me" to Agency-in-Action

Mead's Version: The "I" is the spontaneous, unpredictable, creative moment of response, while the "me" is the organized set of internalized social attitudes. The self emerges from their dialogue.

EMCA Respecification: Rather than locating agency in an internal "I" that responds to an internalized "me," EMCA shows how agency is produced as an observable feature of interaction. People display agency—initiative, creativity, resistance—in how they design their actions in real time.

Example: When someone interrupts a developing trajectory of action (refusing a request, challenging an assertion, proposing an alternative), they're not accessing an internal "I" that spontaneously responds. They're deploying specific interactional resources—disagreement markers, accounts, alternative proposals—that make their resistance recognizable and accountable. Agency is not inside; it's in the details of how actions are constructed and deployed.

Similarly, accountability to social norms (what Mead would attribute to the "me") is displayed in how people design their conduct to be recognizable as instances of particular actions (greetings, requests, refusals) and how they orient to potential normative consequences (producing accounts when violating expectations, repairing when things go wrong).

From Symbolic Meaning to Practical Action

Mead's Version: Symbols carry meanings that people interpret through role-taking and internal conversation.

EMCA Respecification: Rather than treating meaning as something symbols "have" that individuals interpret, EMCA shows how meaning is a practical achievement accomplished through the ways actions are produced, responded to, and elaborated in interaction.

Example: The "meaning" of an utterance is not determined by the speaker's intention or by shared symbolic codes, but is progressively established through:

How the utterance is designed (its position, construction, prosody)
How recipients respond to it (treating it as a question, complaint, joke, etc.)
How the original speaker responds to that response (accepting the interpretation, correcting it, etc.)

Meaning is not a mental content or a property of symbols but an interactional achievement that can be inspected in how sequences of action unfold.

Part VII: Critical Interactionism's Synthesis - Honoring Mead While Transcending Him

Critical Interactionism must perform a delicate operation: preserving Mead's revolutionary insights about the social constitution of mind, self, and meaning while adopting EMCA's empirical rigor and ethnomethodological commitment to studying locally produced order.

What We Keep from Mead:

Anti-essentialism about selfhood - The self is not a pre-social given but emerges through social process
The primacy of interaction - Mind and meaning are constituted through communicative interaction
Processual ontology - Society is not structure but ongoing accomplishment
Agency within sociality - People are neither purely determined nor purely free, but exercise creativity within social constraints
The importance of taking perspective - Understanding requires seeing from others' standpoints

What We Add from EMCA:

Empirical tractability - Studying actual, recordable, transcribable interaction rather than hypothetical internal processes
Sequential analysis - Examining how actions are produced and understood turn-by-turn
Naturally accountable phenomena - Showing how order, meaning, and selfhood are achieved as inspectable features of interaction
Members' methods - Specifying the practical procedures through which orderly conduct is produced
Ethnomethodological indifference - Studying how people accomplish social order without imposing our own normative judgments

What We Add from Critical Theory:

Power analysis - Systematically examining how interaction produces and reproduces domination
Structural context - Showing how local interactions are embedded in broader systems of inequality
Emancipatory intent - Making visible how oppression is accomplished so it can be resisted
Intersectionality - Attending to how multiple systems of domination (race, class, gender, sexuality) operate simultaneously
Political commitment - Doing sociology in service of justice rather than detached observation

The Synthesis:

Critical Interactionism studies how power, inequality, and oppression are accomplished as locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order in and through situated interaction.

This means we:

Study actual interactions using EMCA methods (recording, transcription, sequential analysis)
Attend to how participants themselves orient to and accomplish matters of power, identity, and accountability
Connect these micro-processes to broader structures of domination (the "layered moral economy of oppression")
Make findings available to those engaged in struggles for justice

We honor Mead by maintaining his commitment to the social constitution of self and meaning. We transcend Mead by respecifying these phenomena as inspectable achievements rather than internal mental processes. We extend both Mead and EMCA by explicitly foregrounding questions of power, domination, and resistance.

Part VIII: Implications for Research and Practice

What This Means for Empirical Work:

If we take seriously both Mead's insights and EMCA's respecifications, our empirical work must:

Record and transcribe actual interactions - Not interviews about interaction, not surveys about attitudes, but actual occasions where people coordinate conduct
Attend to sequential organization - How does each action respond to what came before and set up what comes next?
Identify members' methods - What procedures are participants using to accomplish this activity?
Show power in action - How is domination/resistance produced turn-by-turn?
Connect micro and macro - How does this local accomplishment connect to broader patterns of inequality?

Concrete Examples:

A police stop: Rather than asking what officers and citizens believe about each other (Meadian role-taking), we record actual stops and examine:

How racial categories are made relevant (or not) in the interaction
How authority is asserted and challenged
How accounts are demanded and provided
How the stop is constructed as routine or suspicious
How broader structures of racialized policing are locally enacted

A welfare office interview: Rather than theorizing about the "generalized other" of welfare bureaucracy, we examine:

How eligibility is established turn-by-turn
How applicants display deservingness or have it questioned
How institutional categories are applied to particular cases
How moral judgments about poverty are embedded in questioning practices
How the layered moral economy of class, race, and gender shapes the encounter

A harm reduction space: Rather than asking about internalized norms about drug use, we examine:

How safety and care are accomplished through interaction
How participants navigate stigma and recognition
How alternative moral orders are locally produced
How resistance to punitive drug policy is enacted in practice

Conclusion: Mead's Ghost in the Machine of Critical Interactionism

George Herbert Mead haunts Critical Interactionism in productive ways. He established the foundational insight that mind, self, and society are socially constituted—an insight we cannot abandon without losing what makes interactionism distinctive. But his mentalistic framework and egalitarian assumptions require fundamental transformation if we're to develop an empirically rigorous and politically consequential microsociology.

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis give us the tools to respecify Meadian concepts as locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena. Critical theory gives us the mandate to foreground power, inequality, and oppression. Critical Interactionism synthesizes these traditions: we study how domination is accomplished as an inspectable, accountable feature of interaction while maintaining EMCA's empirical rigor and Mead's commitment to understanding the social constitution of meaning and selfhood.

The work continues—not by choosing between Mead and EMCA, but by showing how EMCA completes what Mead began: making visible the actual methods through which people produce the social world, including the oppressive structures that constrain them and the resistant practices through which they might transform those structures.

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Doing Modernity Blog 2025

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George Herbert Mead and the Making of Symbolic Interactionism (Revised)