Interactionism: Meaning and Self as Process
5.4 So Where Does This All Leave Us?
Once upon a time, when fi rst year students walked into an intro class in sociology, they learned that there were three paradigms in sociol- ogy—confl ict paradigm (Marx was the hero, or villain, depending on instructor), structural func- tionalism (with Parsons taking the lead), and interactionism. These days are no more. It is questionable if this was ever the true lay of the land, but even if it was, as sociology developed it has fractured into multiple parties, and the battles lines are not as intensely drawn. Interactionism, as others have observed (Fine 1993 ) has enriched the imagination of sociologists throughout the discipline, but became less and less of a well- defi ned paradigm.
Interactionism is also not alone in focusing on the realm of everyday life. As other chapters in this volume show, other research traditions have mined these grounds. Erving Goffman was cru- cially infl uenced by early interactionism, but went on to craft a more dramaturgical perspective that focused on actors’ ongoing performance in social settings; exchange theorists have looked at the interactional situations through the lenses of rational choice; ethnomethodologists and conver- sation analysts have been theorizing and observ- ing the ongoing emergence of taken for granted social structures in everyday life.
Still, interactionism remains an important the- oretical locus. By focusing on the situation, on the collective act and on the malleability of meaning in interaction, interactionists were able to think about both creativity and the patterning of the social world in ways that other theorists simply
could not. Rather than assuming that actors acted rationally, they could see how actors practically made sense of their world within the situation;
rather than focusing on actors’ performances, they looked to the way meaning interactionally emerged. And by remaining with the concreteness of the social, interactionism was able to show the dizzying possibilities of everyday life, as well as its predictable patterns.
Like all important theoretical accounts of the social, interactionism also attracted quite a bit of criticism. These ranged from arguing that it was blind to power and to macro-structures, not being attentive enough to the body, or pointing out that it was insensitive to the workings of culture. As this chapter makes clear, some of these criticisms were based on a misreading of the interactionist project, but others did point to important prob- lems in early interactionists’ approach to the social world.
In response, interactionists over the past two decades developed different ways to think about the social world in ways that acknowledged the place of shared meaning and of temporality in a fuller way. They did so, however, without letting go of the crucial importance of concrete social situation, and the ways that actors make their worlds together in them. It is this promise of interactionism that still makes it so exciting and radical as a theoretical perspective.
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Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_6