Abstract
Symbolic interactionism is an unusual sociology whose vision, style, methods and accompanying social organisation display common qualities. It is unusual because it suppresses those arguments and conventions which would make it systematic and readily communicable. Instead of clearly announcing its principles and techniques, it resorts to understatement and covert argument. By orthodox sociological standards it lacks many of the features which characterise a substantial and serious approach. It is commonly regarded as a disordered and incoherent posture. Such understatement and incoherence are assumed to signify a want of discipline and rigour. The general theme of this book will be that interactionism is the outcome of a scholarly rejection of ordinary scholarly pursuits. There is a reasoned refusal to entertain certain forms of intellectual practice. The particular theme of this chapter is the nature and effects of the peculiar social organisation which promotes that rejection. Attention will be directed at the integrated world which engendered the sociology and at the culture which that world supported. It will be argued that there has been an interplay between the community of interactionists and the ideas of interactionism itself. Flowing from an intimate association between sociologists, interactionism is framed by an unstated context of meanings and intentions. In its turn, that unstated context requires an intimate association for its survival.
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Notes
For commentaries on that oligopoly, and for claims which have been made for its members, see: A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory ( Cambridge University Press, London, 1971 )
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Cf. E. Lemert, Human Deviance, Social Problems and Social Control, 2nd ed. ( Prentice-Hall, 1972 ) Ch. I.
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Cf. K. Mannheim, ‘A Sociological Theory of Culture and its Knowability: Conjunctive and Communicative Thought’, in P. Kecskemeti (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (O. U. P., New York, 1952 ).
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Cf. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962 ).
Cf. P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality ( Doubleday, Garden City, 1966 ).
Thus Rose asserts ‘perhaps half the sociologists of the United States were nurtured, directly or indirectly, on its conceptions and approaches to research’. A. Rose, preface to A. Rose (ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1962) p. vii. However, it is important to add that few European sociologists would have been nurtured on interactionism.
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Cf. N. Denzin, ‘Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnomethodology: A Proposed Synthesis’, American Sociological Review, xxxiv 6 (Dec. 1969).
Cf. P. Singelmann; ‘Exchange as Symbolic Interaction’, American Sociological Review, xxxvii (Aug. 1972), pp. 414–24.
Cf. I. Taylor, P. Walton and J. Young, The New Criminology ( Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973 )
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M. Dalton, Men Who Manage (John Wiley, New York, 1959 ). ( Significantly, perhaps, the book’s subtitle is ‘Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration’. )
M. Dalton, ‘Preconceptions and Methods in Men Who Manage’, in P. Hammond (ed.), Sociologists at Work: Essays on the Craft of Social Research ( Basic Books, New York, 1964 ) p. 56.
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© 1979 Paul Rock
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Rock, P. (1979). Symbolic Interactionism as an Understated Sociology. In: The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04084-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04084-1_1
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