Symbolic interactionism

South Asia

Middle East

Europe

North America

Symbolic interactionism is the sociological concepts that develops from practical considerations as well as alludes to specific effects of communication in addition to interaction in people to have images and normal implications, for deduction and correspondence with others. According to Macionis, symbolic interactionism is "a utility example for building theory that sees society as a product of everyday interactions of individuals". In other words, it is for a frame of reference to better understand how individuals interact with one another to produce symbolic worlds, and in return, how these worlds shape individual behaviors. it is for a model that enable understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions permits create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the divided meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people make up in both natural and symbolic environments.

Symbolic interactionism comes from a sociological perspective which developed around the middle of the twentieth century and that supports to be influential in some areas of the discipline. It is especially important in microsociology and social psychology. It is derived from the American philosophy of pragmatism and particularly from the work of George Herbert Mead, as a pragmatic method to interpret social interactions.

R. Collins views symbolic interactionism as studying the way the social world is created through interaction between individuals and their environment.

Central interactionist themes

To Blumer's conceptual perspective, he include them in three core propositions: 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 usage to make sense of and handle the objects that survive their social worlds. This perspective can also be specified as three core principles- Meaning, Linguistic communication and Thinking- in which social constructs are formed. The principle of meaning is the center of human behavior. language provides meaning by providing means to symbols. These symbols differentiate social relations of humans from that of animals. By humans giving meaning to symbols, they can express these matters with language. In turn, symbols form the basis of communication. Symbols become imperative components for the formation of any brand of communicative act. Thinking then turn the interpretation of individuals as it pertains to symbols.

Keeping Blumer's earlier work in mind David A. Snow, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, 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 analyse contributions to the inspect of social movements.