Symbolic Interactionism in Communication

Abstract

Symbolic interactionism has nearly a hundred-year history as an approach to understanding human communication. With its roots in pragmatism (Dewey), social theory (Mead, Blumer), and later social psychology (Goffman), symbolic interactionism contends that humans interpret and assign meaning to events via an elaborate set of symbols. The meanings of these symbols originate and evolve through human social interaction. These interactions form the foundation for people’s notions of self and society. Thus, the material world, as well as concepts of self, is constructed through an interactive, communicative process. Observing neither idealist nor materialist suppositions about ontological precedence, symbolic interactionism is a micro-level theory addressing how the social world is created and sustained through continual and varied interactions among people. It is useful in the study of communication because it explains meaning creation among interlocutors; symbolic interactionism is a theory of language, communication, and socialization. Symbolic interactionism centers on the subjective interpretation of meaning by individual actors. Symbolic interactionists do not deny that institutional structures possess social importance; rather, they attend to the act of meaning construction—how repeated, significant interactions among people, within themselves, and with environments construct the social order. With the interpretive turn in social theory—in which subjective epistemologies gained scholarly value—during the 1980s and beyond, symbolic interactionism became more prominent and influential in other theoretical strains, including identity theory, feminist and queer theories, post-structuralism, critical race theory, and theories of performativity. Increasingly, symbolic interactionism is being applied to the study of social institutions in a meso or macro sense. Methodologically, symbolic interactionism’s emphasis on symbolic meaning, human agency, and interpretive epistemology compels it toward discourse and textual analysis, ethnography, observation, and performance studies. However, a form of symbolic interactionism promoted chiefly by Manford Kuhn introduced a quantitative vein to the scientific study of human interactive behavior. With its broad perspectives (including Karl Weick’s work in organizational culture), symbolic interactionism has gained status in the study of communication.