Sociology of Mass and New Media through an Interactionist Lens

This chapter explores symbolic interactionist insights and perspectives on both mass media and new media, with a concentration on the ways in which different forms of media influence meaning-making through social interaction while also being influenced by those interpretive processes. It also examines the relations between various media and the construction and interpretation of social reality, the ways that media shape the development and presentation of self, and the uses and interpretations of media within and between communities. Although it clearly distinguishes between mass media and new media, the chapter also discusses the variety of ways in which they intersect throughout social life.

Deviant Selves, Transgressive Acts, and Moral Narratives

This chapter on crime, transgression, and justice focuses on interactional meaning-making processes that shape the moral narratives of a range of actors such as perpetrators, police, and judges. These narratives include processes such as labeling, stigmatization, and criminalization. These processes are about (1) degrading, dominating, and excluding, and (2) their narrative counterparts, which focus on resisting the othering claims of moral narratives. This chapter focuses on two fundamental contributions of symbolic interaction to this field: the labeling perspective, and the ethnographic approach studying the social construction of moral meanings in everyday interactions. I will also describe two themes: (1) violence, the perspective of the “badass,” and (2) the criminal-justice system as a labeling machine. This chapter shows that because of its theoretical and methodological tools, symbolic-interactionist studies are well equipped to listen to voices of marginalized groups and show their agency in their fight for justice.

Culture, or the Meaning of Meaning Making

The exploration and investigation of culture is nothing short of complex since the term itself is used in many ways by both academics and lay publics. Symbolic interactionists and “fellow travelers” tend to approach the study of culture from the position of those who experience and practice it. That is, they focus on the cultural context of practices and interaction and often do so by illuminating the activities of individuals and groups in everyday life. The meanings that people give to their actions and interactions are of utmost importance for scholars interested in the culture as a social forces and a shared collection of beliefs and practices.

Disasters

The chapter’s objective is to summarize various theoretical and substantive contributions that researchers working in the tradition of Symbolic Interactionism have brought to disaster studies. We begin by discussing the advantages of conceptualizing disasters from a social constructionist perspective in public and political discourse. Next, we continue our review by turning to constructionist and interactionist thinking (or lack thereof) with regard to disaster perception at the micro level. In a third step, we consider the importance of examining culture, a traditional stronghold of interpretive social research, when studying disasters. Lastly, we conclude our review by assessing constructionist framings of vulnerability and resilience, two current key concepts in the field of disaster studies. Overall, we strive to show that the symbolic-interactionist perspective can help disaster scholars formulate and answer important research questions, as well as solve problems in the real world.

Power and Interaction

In this chapter we draw on G. H. Mead to formulate a definition of power as an organism’s capacity to modify its environment to satisfy its needs and desires. We argue that in the social world this capacity is exercised by individuals and groups through forms of action that elicit the cooperation of others. This fundamentally symbolic interactionist approach to power helps us see how power operates on both situational and structural levels. Our argument highlights five forms of action through which the cooperation of others is elicited: (1) crafting virtual selves; (2) using normative and procedural rules; (3) establishing frames and definitions of reality; (4) managing emotions; and (5) invoking extra-situational relationships or “nets of accountability.” An advantage of this approach is that it can illuminate the processes through which power is nurtured, undermined, and resisted. Introduction

Sex and Sexuality

Symbolic interactionist approaches to sexuality state that human beings become sexual as they become whatever else and learn sexual definitions and sexual meanings just like they learn any other kind of meaning. Therefore, interactionist analysis shifts the focus of inquiry into sex from being sexual towards becoming sexual, which takes into account how sexualities are produced, organized, and negotiated, rather than tracing their sources in an immutable (conception of) nature. Sociosexual meanings give people the chance to define themselves and others sexually, to construct their sexual self and doing sexual things together in the shaping of more complex sexual choreographies and performance.

The Narrative Study of Self and Society

Stories and storytelling are found everywhere, from an overall cultural presence to the narrative study of self and society. Within a tradition of sociological research stemming from the 1920s, this chapter discusses the narrative study of self and society in the context of social interaction. Three forms of narrative study and aims are distinguished—ethnographic, strategic, and conversational. Substantive topics include the interactionist research tradition, Erving Goffman’s preeminent contribution, the narrative construction of selves, society as a complex narrative environment, and narrative power and practice. We end with cautionary words about methodological, conceptual, and ethical limitations of narrative form and analysis.

Interactionist Tools for Assessing Community Resilience

This chapter contends that classic and contemporary research by symbolic interactionists, and those in closely related theoretical traditions, can provide an effective toolkit for enriching assessments of how resilience unfolds in practice. This is especially important if we hope to develop and implement policies and programs that have a greater potential for enhancing communities' abilities to effectively respond to socio-ecological disruptions. The chapter discusses resilience theory before addressing how interactionist work on institutions as well as interactions between humans and nonhumans—what can be referred to as (non)human interactions—can enrich considerations of resilience. Socio-ecological resilience theory has increasingly been utilized by scholars, development officials, and policy makers to assess whether and how communities can be sustained in response to disruptions related to a range of socio-ecological processes such as floods, epidemics, climate change, and economic downturns. Paralleling others who advocate employing multiple theoretical traditions to better assess the intricate complexities of resilience, instead of arguing that symbolic interaction should supplant other approaches to studying resilience, the chapter emphasizes that symbolic interactionism can complement and extend existing research on resilience.

Racial Socialization and Racism

This chapter illustrates key connections between the traditional field of symbolic interactionism and the study of racial socialization and racism. When researching and writing about racial socialization and racism from a micro-level perspective, it is important to not lose sight of the mutually sustaining relationship between the shared meaning making processes that unfold in everyday life and the big, broad structures that shape and reinforce those meanings. This is particularly true when thinking about theories of how the newest members of a society, through an interpretive process, come to understand the concept of race. Understanding how children learn about race requires taking into account how this learning process is shaped by both micro-level meaning making and macro-level structures. And this is a key theoretical principle of symbolic interactionism. The chapter then explores how race as a concept develops for young people through processes of social interaction within particular contexts.

Toward A Concept-Driven Sociology

This chapter argues for a Concept-Driven sociology. Concept-Driven research defies the seemingly binary choice conventionally made between the acts of “describing” (as in inductive empiricism) and “explaining” (as in deductive positivism), instead highlighting the acts of identifying patterns and analyzing, which are neither descriptive nor explanatory but, rather, analytical. When conducting such research, one’s goal is indeed identifying and analyzing socially-patterned phenomena in an effort to reveal their fundamental features. Such intellectual endeavor can be called social pattern analysis. As one might expect, in Concept-Driven scholarship, concepts constitute the metaphorical “lenses” through which researchers access the empirical world, their role defined primarily in terms of attentional sensitization. Ultimately, Concept-Driven sociology presupposes certain cognitive skills that anyone can cultivate. In fact, it involves several such skills — namely focusing, generalizing, “exampling,” and analogizing — that have actually been tacitly utilized by various sociologists yet never explicitly analyzed from a strictly methodological standpoint.