Symbolic interactionism and critical perspective: divergent or synergistic?

Complex human conditions are best understood by a multifaceted perspective that considers underlying factors at the individual, organisational, cultural and societal level. The theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism focuses on meaning and understanding primarily at the individual level with limited ability to consider larger organisational and societal level systems. Symbolic interactionism is not usually applied to explanations of power and social inequality. The lens of critical social theory, however, does view social inequalities and power imbalances within larger organisations and societal systems. Critical social theory often utilises a macro perspective with limited attention to the individual level. The two approaches of symbolic interactionism and critical social theory are combined to create ‘critical interactionism’ to increase understanding and explanation of complex human conditions. Concepts of meaning from symbolic interactionism and emancipation from critical perspective move across system levels to address complex human conditions and social inequalities among individuals, organisations and societies. This provides a powerful approach for addressing complex human issues, moving back and forth between the micro and macro levels. Critical interactionism can be used both to understand phenomena and to guide research across systems levels. This chapter reviews the historical and philosophical origins of symbolic interactionism and critical social theory, and analyses areas of divergence and synergism. Examples from the older incarcerated population and people without housing illustrate application of the critical interactionist perspective.

Blood donation is crucial to healthcare systems worldwide; nevertheless, voluntary participation is inadequate, especially in developing countries like Bangladesh. This study seeks to explore the attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of university students regarding blood donation in Bangladesh. A mixed-methods approach was used to gather both quantitative and qualitative data from 40 students at a leading private university in Bangladesh through surveys, in-depth interviews (IDI), and focus group discussions (FGD). The study results reveal several factors affecting students' propensity to donate blood, including moral obligations, spiritual beliefs, and social responsibility. Misperceptions about health concerns and practical obstacles, such as needle fear and the inconvenient locations of donation centers, were identified as deterrents to participation. Although most students view blood donation as a moral obligation and a means of enhancing community welfare, hesitation often arises from apprehension over physical pain and misconceptions. In this regard, students may be classified into three behavioural categories: regular donors, reluctant non-donors, and occasional donors, reflecting the varied motives behind their behaviours. The theories of 'Symbolic Interactionism' and the 'Looking Glass Self' are pertinent here as they highlight the impact of social interactions and self-perception on students' choices to participate in blood donation. This study indicates that raising awareness, addressing misunderstandings, and improving access to donation centers could substantially boost voluntary blood donation among university students. The study findings enhance comprehension of the factors influencing blood donation behaviors and provide valuable insights for fostering a more sustainable blood donation culture in Bangladesh, and hence contribute academically to the fields of medical sociology, medical anthropology, public health and medical science.

BackgroundLaw enforcement traffic stops are one of the most common entryways to the US justice system. Conventional frameworks suggest traffic stops promote public safety by reducing dangerous driving practices and non-vehicular crime with little to no collateral damage to individuals and communities. Critical frameworks interrogate these assumptions, identifying significant individual and community harms that disparately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income communities.MethodsThe Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) and multi-level frameworks from community anti-racist training were combined into a structured diagram to guide intervention and research teams in contrasting conventional and critical perspectives on traffic stops. The diagram divides law enforcement and drivers/residents as two separate agent types that interact during traffic stops. These two agent types have different conventional and critical histories, priorities, and perspectives at multiple levels, including individual, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. Conventional solutions (identifying explicitly racist officers, “meet-a-cop” programs, police interaction training for drivers) are born from conventional frameworks (rewarding crime prevention regardless of cost, the war on drugs saves lives, driver behavior perfectionism). While conventional perspectives focus on individual and interpersonal levels, critical perspectives more deeply acknowledge dynamics at institutional and cultural levels. Critical solutions may be hard to discover without critical frameworks, including that law enforcement creates measurable collateral damage and disparate social control effects; neighborhood patrol priorities can be set without community self-determination or accountability and may trump individual and interpersonal dynamics; and the war on drugs is highly racialized and disproportionally enforced through traffic stop programs.ConclusionsTraffic stop enforcement and crash prevention programs that do not deeply and critically consider these dynamics at multiple levels, not just law enforcement-driver interactions at the individual and interpersonal levels, may be at increased risk of propagating histories of BIPOC discrimination. In contrast, public health and transportation researchers and practitioners engaged in crash and injury prevention strategies that employ law enforcement should critically consider disparate history and impacts of law enforcement in BIPOC communities. PHCRP, anti-racism frameworks, and the included diagram may assist them in organizing critical thinking about research studies, interventions, and impacts.

Most shared decision-making (SDM) models within healthcare have been limited to the patient–physician dyad. As a first step towards promoting an interprofessional approach to SDM in primary care, this article reports how an interprofessional and interdisciplinary group developed and achieved consensus on a new interprofessional SDM model. The key concepts within published reviews of SDM models and interprofessionalism were identified, analysed, and discussed by the group in order to reach consensus on the new interprofessional SDM (IP-SDM) model. The IP-SDM model comprises three levels: the individual (micro) level and two healthcare system (meso and macro) levels. At the individual level, the patient presents with a health condition that requires decision-making and follows a structured process to make an informed, value-based decision in concert with a team of healthcare professionals. The model acknowledges (at the meso level) the influence of individual team members' professional roles including the decision coach and organizational routines. At the macro level it acknowledges the influence of system level factors (i.e. health policies, professional organisations, and social context) on the meso and individual levels. Subsequently, the IP-SDM model will be validated with other stakeholders.

Family Physicians' Experiences With Community Mental Health Centers: A Multilevel Analysis

Social virtual spaces proliferate on the contemporary Internet and some 80% of Internet users may now be regularly visiting them (Daniel). In the following discussion, I shall discuss one such social space—a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) called Second Life (SL as it is referred to by residents)—and argue that complex and dialogic links exist between the offline user and her/his online representative, the avatar.I shall begin by presenting a brief overview of relevant theoretical concepts drawn largely from symbolic interactionist theorists. I shall then discuss where we might situate the avatar within the wider context of persona studies and explore the complexity involved in developing a sense of self via an avatar (or persona). Finally, I shall draw on my own experience in SL to illustrate the two-way nature of the processes under discussion.Mirrors and SelvesWhen one looks into a mirror, the mirror’s silver backing (the tain) allows a view of self and surroundings reflected back. Yet even in this case, our reflection has subtle and fascinating differences, it is not quite exactly “us.” Explanations for the effect this has on us come from various theoretical perspectives. For example, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes that very young children experience in play the relation “between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates” (2). The word “virtual” suggests a gap between the child’s performance and the exhibition of that performance in the mirror. Lacan contends that the child itself does not perceive this gap, but rather mistakes the image for the thing itself—a méconnaissance that ensures we accept the mirror image as “us.” The tain is thus simultaneously restrictive, because it has a limited field of view, and enabling, because it provides one of our first experiences of our self as other.From a symbolic interaction perspective, C. H. Cooley develops the mirror analogy in his Looking Glass Self concept. For Cooley, the self develops in relation to how we imagine we look to others and we learn to see others as our “mirror.” Our reflection in their perceptions requires us to imagine how we appear to others and then how they judge our appearance. Finally, we develop a sense of ourselves based on that judgement. Thus, others with whom we interact reflect us back to ourselves and we view our self from the viewpoint of others whose signs we learn to interpret. Two consequences arise. First, we could receive different reflections back from different individuals. Second, we become habituated to a gap between performance of self, its reception, and the reflection of that performance back to us.Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation and interaction rituals offers further dimensions to understanding this process, stressing the importance of impression management to monitor inconsistencies in performance of the self as it appears to others. For Goffman, this management occurs both before the performance as we prepare ourselves in the back stage, and on the front stage as we perform for our audience. Social interaction is thus a performance, governed by social rules and rituals understood by both audience and performer. The dialectic relationship between performance and its reception introduces an element of intentionality to the performance itself. When the performance is not well received, for example, its reflection back to the performer may lead to adjustments in the performance to correct flaws brought about by failure to appropriately follow the rules of interaction. Through interaction with others, therefore, we learn dramaturgically appropriate roles and performances and we come to understand the nuances involved in successful enactment. The “audience” for whom we perform may be either internalised or actual. In either case, the image that we see in the mirror, and the image we imagine reflected back is both “us” and something more. But it is unhelpful to think of the internalised and actual as dichotomous.All three models so far discussed intuit a space between performance and reflection, suggesting that we experience our self through “symbols, language, social structures, and situated variables of social interaction” (Waskul and Lust 338-39) rather than directly. Even our image in an actual mirror extends, then, beyond the tain by which the glass is backed because we overlay what we see in the mirror with social nuances arising outside of the image-reflection dyad. Rather than consider this image a reflection of “us,” it is helpful to think of it as a persona—the personality (or presence) that a person adopts and presents to other people. It may be “our” persona in that it is linked to a physical person, but, as noted above, it may also be contextually multiple and variously mediated through social interaction and symbols such as dress.To explore more fully the interplay between person and persona I shall now introduce online contexts as sites of reflection, beginning with a brief discussion of the avatar as persona.Online MirrorsMarshall argues that contemporary culture exhibits an expansive world of online persona creation with individuals increasingly engaging in self-branding (Personifying). Although Marshall does not discuss MUVEs, his observation is equally applicable to such environments. In MUVEs, as in the online contexts Barbour and Marshall discuss, persona creation is a process of strategic intentionality whereby we present a chosen aspect from among the many to be found in us all. In MUVES the vehicle for that creation is the avatar. The avatar is an individual’s embodiment in virtual space, an extension of self through which the user experiences the virtual world (Behm-Morawitz). Just as the persona permits us “to explore the masks of identity” (Marshall, Personifying 380), the avatar offers opportunities for exploration and experimentation. For Marshall the persona in the public on-line world is constructed by media and communication systems and enacted through individual intention and agency (Personifying). The avatar is similarly constructed and enacted. Both persona and avatar are mutable and, as Marshall suggests in relation to persona, part of a specular economy manifesting an increasing consciousness of self-presentation and others’ perceptions (Specular). I do not think it overstated to indicate these similarities with the composite term “avatar-persona.”The graphical object-body is the vehicle whereby MUVE users experience interacting with others and with their environment (Messinger et al.). They experience their avatar self as if it were their actual self (Behm-Morawitz). Our virtual experiences are grounded in, and inextricably linked to, our physicality. One’s “presence” with one’s avatar may facilitate and be uniquely linked to avatar influence on the offline self (Behm-Morawitz). In this sense “presence”—the sense of being actually present and being recognised as present by others there—may bridge both sides of the screen. This two-way transfer is analogous to the person’s capacity to move others into action noted by Marshall (Personifying). Further, as some research has shown, the representation of self through an avatar not only effects online behaviour but actually may also have continued effects on offline behaviour and avatars may come to change who we are in both online and offline environments (Yee and Bailenson).Marshall (Specular) argues that the online and mobile media screen as mirror produces persona and that the mirror as a surface reflects and allows one to be seen and to interrelate or communicate with others. The MUVE also acts as a virtual mirror screen within which the avatar-persona operates. The avatar-persona is the virtual analogue of the mirror persona discussed in relation to Lacan and symbolic interaction formulations. I turn now to how these processes and interconnections manifest in SL in order to explore the complexities inherent in the interplay of self, avatar-persona and other.SL is a three dimensional virtual world where “everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you” (http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US). SL “residents” (as they refer to themselves) engage in role-playing games in-world, co-create content with other residents, and indulge in a huge variety of social activities including sexual and/or affective relationships with other residents. SL is an immersive social environment offering sophisticated graphical building tools, avatar appearance modification potentials, and both synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (delayed) avatar-to-avatar communication for residents who are geographically located in all parts of the offline world.In MUVEs, one sees the avatar-persona as a third person. In SL this is due to the potential for 360-degree camera views of the avatar, ensuring that our avatar becomes the object of our view, placing us in a position both of an active I controlling an avatar and a distanced other watching that self move and speak (Zhao). These dynamics raise interesting questions about interaction, self-presentation, and self-construction (Gottschalk), the answers to which represent a continuum between two far from mutually exclusive poles. On the one hand, research based on SL (see for example work by Messinger et al., or Martey and Consalvo) has shown that, despite an almost limitless potential for modification, most avatars are idealised representations of their creator’s offline selves. Given this correlation between online and offline manifestations, I suggest that the avatar operates more like a mirror that is not wholly restricted by the tain.On the other hand, writers such as Sherry Turkle have argued (before the existence of MUVEs) that the Internet permits multiplicity and mutability in subjectivity. In a contemporary context social virtual worlds pro

This study evaluates a multilevel theory of community social organization and its structural antecedents. The main hypothesis derived from a systemic conceptualization of community is that the effect of residential stability on social cohesion is mediated by the density of friendship and acquaintanceship networks. This hypothesis is tested in two stages using data bases constructed from a 1984 national sample of 11,030 residents of over 500 localities in Great Britain. First, the community-level results show that the positive effect of residential stability on a measure of social cohesion is accounted for by the increased level of friendship/acquaintanceship ties and the decreased level of anonymity among residents, regardless of urbanization and other sociodemographic controls. Second, the individual-level analysis indicates that residential stability has both individual and contextual effects on local social ties, which in turn promote individual attachment to community. Social cohesion is also directly related to community satisfaction at both levels of analysis. Overall, the results support and extend a systemic theory that bridges the micro- and macrolevel dimensions of community social bonds.

Communication is a way in which humans make sense of the world around them. Communication takes place as an interactive two-way process or interaction, involving two or more people and can occur by nonverbal, verbal, face-to-face or non-face-to-face methods. Effective communication is described to occur when the sender of a message sends their message in a way that conveys the intent of their message and then is understood by the receiver of the message. As a result of the communication from both the sender and the receiver of the message a shared meaning is created between both parties.Communication can therefore be viewed as a reciprocal process. In the health care literature the terms communication and interaction are used interchangeably.Communication failures between clinicians are the most common primary cause of errors and adverse events in health care. Communication is a significant factor in patient satisfaction and complaints about care. Communication plays an integral role in service quality in all service professions including health care professions.Within healthcare, quality care has been defined by the Institute of Medicine as 'care that is safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable and patient-centred'. Patient-centered care is defined as 'care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values, and ensuring that patient's values guide all clinical decisions. Patient centered-care encompasses the 'individual experiences of a patient, the clinical service, the organizational and the regulatory levels of health care'. At the individual patient level, patient-centered care is care that is 'provided in a respectful manner, assures open and ongoing sharing of useful information in an ongoing manner and supports and encourages the participation of patients and their families'. Healthcare organizations that are patient-centered engage patients as partners and hold human interactions as a pillar of their service.The deepening evidence base for principles and practice of patient-centered care has resulted in increasing recognition of, and greater focus on, the engagement of patients, and the value and benefit of patient engagement. Contemporary healthcare policy across the globe increasingly supports the engagement of patients as partners in all aspects of their own health care and also in systemic quality improvement. In 2005, the World Health Organization's (WHO) World Alliance for Patient Safety established the Patients for Patient Safety program, to improve patient safety globally in collaboration with patient advocates across the world. As a global initiative, Patients for Patient Safety 'believes that safety will be improved if patients are placed at the center of care and included as full partners'.In 2011 the United States of America Department of Health and Human Services announced its commitment of one billion US dollars of federal funding under The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 and launched the Partnership for Patients initiative. The Partnership for Patients public-private consortium, which focuses on patient safety improvements and draws membership from federal government agencies and over 8000 health care providing organizations and individuals, views patients 'as essential partners in improving safety and quality' and 'their participation as active members of their own healthcare team is an essential component of making healthcare safer and reducing readmission'.In Australia, as part of national health care reforms to improve access to care, the efficiency of care and public transparency of the performance and funding of health services, the Australian Health Ministers endorsed the 10 National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (NSQHSS) in 2011 and the Australian Safety and Quality Goals for Health Care (The Goals) in 2012. The NSQHSS focus on partnerships with health consumers in their own care and treatment and also in health service planning, the design of care and service monitoring and evaluation. Standard 1 - Governance for Safety and Quality, and Standard 2 - Partnering with Consumers, are required to be integrated within all of the other eight Standards.With patient safety and quality being core to the delivery of care the Safety of Care, Appropriateness of Care and Partnering with Consumers goals have been identified as the three areas that will make up the goals over the next five years until 2017. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, in providing further justification for the focus on these three areas, states:The third priority area of The Goals, Partnering with Consumers, reflects patient-centered care practice by ensuring 'that there are effective partnerships between consumers and healthcare providers and organizations at all levels of healthcare provision, planning and evaluation'. Specifically, 'Consumers and healthcare providers understand each other when communicating about care and treatment and health care organizations are health literate organizations''.As healthcare focuses on providing services that are patient-centered and methods to ensure this occurs, patients' voice and experience of health care provision is increasingly being sought from an organizational quality improvement perspective. Patients are being surveyed on their healthcare experience across interpersonal areas such as being provided the opportunity by their health professional to ask questions, the level of involvement in their own care and whether they were shown courtesy, treated with respect and listened to carefully by their health professional.Surveys of patients' satisfaction with their care are now being superseded by surveys of patient experiences of care. However, current methods used to collect and use information from patients about their care is often retrospective, provides inadequate real time data and is not effective in creating action to produce change at the individual patient level. Methods which focus on including the patient and their information in real-time are considered by many to be crucial to the advancement of improved health outcomes and the reduced costs that are required of health care to be sustainable. One such method is patient-centered communication.The nurse-patient interaction is a core component of nursing science and high quality nursing care. Fleisher et al. contend that 'the main intention of communication and interaction, in the health setting, is to influence the patient's health status or state of well-being'. As a profession, nursing predominately requires communicating with, and relating to, patients at the individual level. In the hospital setting nurses undertake many of their patient related duties in a face-to-face manner with the patient at the bedside and these moments can facilitate effective interaction to occur between the nurse and the patient, which is patient-centered. McCabe et al. state that patient-centered communication as "defined by Langewitz et al. as 'communication that invites and encourages the patient to participate and negotiate in decision-making regarding their own care'.''However, qualitative studies by McCabe and Wellard et al, highlighted that nurses interact with patients only when performing administrative or functional activities and nursing 'practice was predominately task-orientated'. The outcome of these studies are supported by Maurer et al. in their report on the tools and strategies available to support patient and family engagement in the hospital setting. Maurer et al. identified that current strategies 'are not attuned to patient and family member experiences of hospitalization' and that most tools and strategies were 'more reflective of health professional and hospital views and the organization of their work'. The report identified a gap in the initiation of engagement, which is not driven by the patients and families' needs and preferences as they occur but by the 'opportunities that the hospital makes available'.McCabe et al. also argue that nurses' attending behavior, that is their 'accessibility and readiness to listen to patients through the use of non-verbal communication' requires that they have the underpinning elements of 'genuineness, warmth and empathy' all of which are components of patient-centered communication. McCabe et al. observed that 'that nurses do not always communicate in a patient-centered way'.According to Fleischer et al. 'The listening behavior in the way of listening and asking actually is the beginning of the nurse-patient communication relationship' McCabe et al. state that the lack of recognition and support by healthcare organizations of the connection and subsequent importance of patient-centered communication in the provision of high quality care has promulgated a culture averse to patient centered communication and is a significant factor in reducing the value that nurses place on providing patient-centered communication to patients.It is apparent that tensions exist between service quality and patient-centered care principles and practice. The impact of this tension on care and the patient as an individual is reflected in the literature. McCabe et al. claim that the use of non-patient-centered types of communication can negatively affect a patient's sense of well-being and security. Horvey et al. detail patient and family member experiences of not being listened to by their health care providers and describe the resulting consequences to be as severe as the death of the patient during their hospital stay. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

The fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics developed in the 1960s, at a time when generative linguistics was prominent and linguistic research tended to conceptualise language in a formulaic way. Juxtaposed to this view, research in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics regards language as part and parcel of social life and accordingly has drawn on cognate work in the social sciences, including in particular sociology, anthropology, psychology and education studies. Research in applied linguistics was driven by the goal of finding solutions to real world problems in which language was considered to be a central issue (perceived or real) (Brumfit 1995); initially this focused largely on language policy and planning, second and foreign language education and language in the workplace. In this way, applied linguistics was cast as complementary to theoretical linguistics. With the boom in identity studies in the 1970s and 80s, work in applied linguistics sought to explore the interface between language and identity and the scope of applied linguistic research broadened. In the 1990s, this research increasingly took on a critical orientation that drew upon social theory and sociological insights (e.g. Pennycook 2001; Tollefson 2001; Block 2003), thus dovetailing even more closely with the field of sociolinguistics (Coupland et al. 2001). This research raised the issues of power, access and (in)equality. The subsequent focus on the interface between language, identity and power in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics has served as an impetus for researchers to grapple with links between micro and macro levels of language use, which are often cast respectively as interactional patterns or language choice and regulatory mechanisms or language policy. In this vein, reference to the micro-macro continuum in applied linguistics has the potential to serve as an analytical device, in that it can orient the focus of research towards interactional discourse, individual actions and speech-events on the one hand, or towards institutions and social structures on the other (Wortham 2012: 129). In other social sciences, the micro and macro levels of social life are similarly conceptualised as an analytical continuum consisting of a range of small to large-scale phenomena. Definitions vary according to the theory, approach and outlook. In the simplest and most fundamental terms in sociology, the micro level is considered to be that which relates to the individual, whereasthe macro level concerns structured organisations. These group dynamics, which are essential to understanding the construction and negotiation of identities, are located between the two end points of the micro-macro continuum. Tickameyer and Li (2000: 1703) state that micro-level research focuses on ‘individual thought, action, and interaction, often coinciding with socialpsychological theories and models’, while macro-level research deals with ‘social structures and those forces that organize as well as divide individuals into political, social or religious organizations, ethnic populations, communities, and nation-states’. In terms of approaches, there are two key sociological paradigms: ‘symbolic interactionism’ and ‘structural functionalism’; the former is generally considered to be more micro-oriented, while the latter is regarded as macro-oriented. The issue of how to conduct comprehensive research that bridges the micro and macro levels of social life has been flagged up as a key concern in the social sciences, in particular over the last three decades. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the relevance and usefulness in applying a micro-macro framework to research on language and identity, with a focus on sociological, social theoretical and sociolinguistic trends that have shaped these debates. Particular consideration will be given to the fact that the predominantly discourse-based approaches to identity research go beyond strict compartmentalisation into one or the other conceptual sphere, ultimately leading to the issue of whether a micro-macro dichotomy is a suitable analytical device for research in applied linguistics that specifically focuses on the interface between language and identity. In light of the aforementioned influence of social theory and sociology on research in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the following section will present an overview of leading approaches to this issue in sociology, including parallel discussions on agency and structure, and how they have been applied explicitly to research on language and identity. Following this, there will be a discussion of selected studies in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics that have grappled with the relationship between the micro and macro, in particular those that examine in some detail the relationship between language practices and policies; language and context; and/or agency and structure. The final section will sum up key points and highlight points for future language and identity research in applied linguistics.

What Is Qualitative Research? PART ONE: THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION Addressing 'Lived Experience' Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnography Varieties of Symbolic Interactionism Grounded Theory and Dramaturgical Analysis Investigating Practices Ethnomethodological Ethnography Researching Language Conversation Analysis PART TWO: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES From Description to Critique Feminism and Qualitative Research Postmodern Ethnography PART THREE: CONCLUSION The Craft of Qualitative Research

Social change is understood as a more or less rapid and comprehensive change of societal structures and institutions, including changes to the economic, technological, and cultural frameworks of a society (Calhoun, 1992). A case in point is the breakup or transformation of the former communist countries in Europe in the 1980s. The political transition to representative democracy included a profound change of the economic system to market capitalism, which was soon overlaid by the negative effects of globalization. Today, some 20 years after the event, we have a huge variation of political and economic transformations around the world. These transformations also include countries such as the United Kingdom or China that have undergone economic reforms without changes in the basics of the political system. Given that social change is evident at the macro level, it is also plausible to assume that such changes have an impact on individuals’ behavior and development. Until recently, however, such issues did not rank very high on the research agenda, at least not for psychology. This is the background to this Special Section, which brings together papers that investigate the effect of social change on the lives of individuals.

This paper aims at comprehending the specific nature of Habermas' critical perspective on modernization, defined through the concept of systemic colonization of the lifeworld. The comprehension should be reached through a relatively detailed analysis of the fundamental elements and insights of the theory of communicative action. The first to be analyzed should be the conceptual apparatus that Habermas develops on the basis of synthesizing Mead's symbolic interactionism and Durkheim's concept of social development. Then the paper focuses on the complex concept of lifeworld, that Habermas formulates on the grounds of this conceptual apparatus. The focus of the paper is on understanding Habermas' concept of colonization as a specific communicative-theoretic reinterpretation of the analysis of reification. In the final part, the weaknesses of Habermas' approach to the phenomenon of colonization are considered, such as neglecting the question of contemporary forms of colonization, as well as the overall defensive nature and rationalistic reductionism of his theory.

Herbert Blumer was a key figure in what came to be identified as the Chicago School of Sociology. He invented the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ as a label for a theoretical approach that derived primarily from the work of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. But his most influential work was methodological in character, and he is generally viewed today as a prominent critic of positivism, and of the growing dominance of quantitative method within US sociology. While this picture is broadly accurate, it neglects an important strand in his methodological thinking. He was committed to the goal of a science of social life, while at the same time he was uncertain whether such a science is possible. In his Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, he identified a serious dilemma facing this project: the problem of how a scientific approach can be made compatible with the distinctive nature of human social life. In the first chapter of his most influential book, Symbolic Interactionism, he advocates a naturalistic approach to case study, and seems to treat this as avoiding the dilemma. However, there is evidence to suggest that, even towards the end of his life, he regarded the problem as still unresolved. In this article, I examine both sides of Blumer’s dilemma, and whether his attitude towards it changed. However, my interest here is not only historiographical. I evaluate Blumer’s arguments and show that his intellectual struggle with this issue remains relevant today, despite the shifts that have taken place in social science methodology and the philosophy of science since his death.

Medical care in Japan, which has achieved one of the world's longest life expectancies, is highly regarded globally, but national medical expenses continue to increase yearly. In the past, physicians focused mainly on doing what is best for the patient without considering any budget impact. However, physicians are now required to take into consideration health economic evaluations as well. As a result, physicians now consider medications not only from the standpoint of individual patients (micro perspective), but also from that of the public/society (macro perspective). This has led to a situation in which these two perspectives on the allocation of medical resources are easily confused. The purpose of this paper is to describe the situation outlined above, taking into account the current state of medical practice as well as key concepts in research ethics and medical economics. First, in terms of medical practice, as seen in the “Minds Manual for Clinical Practice Guideline Development 2020,” the introduction of health economic evaluation has forced healthcare professionals to think from a macro perspective when considering patient treatment. Second, in terms of the distinction between research and treatment, an important topic in research ethics, medical researchers need to think from a macro perspective when planning and conducting research, because they are required to consider the social benefits of the research. Consequently, the social benefit sought in research and the clinical benefit to individual patients/subjects, as well as the macro and micro perspectives relating to the allocation of medical resources, are intertwined in the eyes of researchers, placing them in a situation where conceptual confusion can readily occur. Finally, in terms of medical economics, the efficiency of production (micro level perspective) and efficiency of allocation (macro level perspective) are easily confused in medical practice when considering the cost-effectiveness of treatment. In view of the above, this paper discusses the importance of recognizing, as a preliminary step to further discussions on the issue of allocation of limited healthcare resources, that the decision-making body at the macro level must be the government rather than individual medical personnel, and that the decision-making body at the micro level must be individual medical personnel (and individual patients) rather than the government.

The virtual universe always has its role in getting a massive response from society. This research elaborates on thepresence of the @/kampus.cantik account on Instagram media and its relation to self-concept and its construction insociety based on the theory of Symbolic Interaction according to Charles Horton Cooley's view. The research method inthis paper uses a qualitative approach with literature study methods referring to various related literature. This studyuses data collection techniques in the form of analyzing and collecting various literature review materials throughbooks, journals, articles, news websites and other credible sources. The results of the study show that there is relevancebetween Cooley's symbolic interaction theory regarding the Looking Glass Self and self-concept resulting from theappearance of the @/kampus.cantik account accompanied by the circulation of beauty standards created by societyand other external factors. In connection with this social construction, it sharpens beauty standards in society andnormalizes the objectification of women.