(1980) for a survey of these sociologies and a list of references to them; also, see Adler et al. While it might seem like a big name, symbolic interactionism is how your experiences add subjective meanings to symbols and letters. The researcher examines human behavior on the basis of the meaning individuals give to their environment; as they interpret significant symbols in their worlds. Symbolic interactionism as a theory to understand the micro-level phenomenon of the society was given by George Herbert Mead, though he did not do much work on this. The basis of thought is language. Jürgen Habermas, in hisTheory of Communicative Action, identified Mead as one of the crucial inspirers of the paradigm shift ‘from purposive to communicative action.’ By this time at the latest, Mead was not just considered the originator of one sociological approach among many but as a classical theorist of the whole discipline. Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach to understanding the relationship between humans and society. Reynolds 1993). Subdivisions. Relies on the symbolic meaning that people develop and rely upon in the process of social interaction. After Mead's death, the school of ‘symbolic interactionism’ played a decisive role in assuring his influence in sociology. They believe that people are not a product of their environment; rather the environment is a product of people. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. Not all SI methods followed the constructionist approaches outlined above. Rather, the importance of this model is that although prior meanings exist, these are open to reinterpretation by anyone at any time in a continuing negotiation process. The observations that prompted the search for the definition and concept of co-experience were of children enjoying using devices together more than alone, and coming up with more divergent and creative uses together than alone (see Mäkelä et al., 2000). This same achievement enabled him, in the age of classical sociological theory, to clear a way for it to escape fruitless oppositions such as that between individualism and collectivism. The empirical world becomes the world of everyday experiences, and social reality and human behavior in symbolic interaction is conceptualized as symbolic, communicated, and subjective in both structure and content. Glaser and Strauss's arguments found receptive audiences. D.A. (1987)). Symbolic interactionism is a microsociological perspective. Generally, a number of environmental variables may be influential. Making sense of the experience was a fun social thing for them, and tied to the meanings and opportunities they discovered through the products. Symbolic interactionists demonstrate differences in respect of their points of view. Mead came to be seen as the school's progenitor and classical reference, although his work was consulted only fragmentarily. To interpret Blumer in terms of user experiences, there are two stages of processing an experience. It focuses on a small scale perspective of the interactions between individuals, like when you hang out with a friend, instead of looking at large scale structures, like education or law. Symbolic interaction theory, or symbolic interactionism, is one of the most important perspectives in the field of sociology, providing a key theoretical foundation for much of the research conducted by sociologists.. 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