Symbolic interactionism is centrally but not exclusively concerned with the interpretive study of urban life. The American sociologist Herbert Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism in 1937, initially using it to refer to the study of the symbols and meanings that operate within specific social groups. He also emphasized the importance of the ideas of Charles Horton Cooley. Thirty-two years later Blumer published Symbolic Interaction, a book that clarifies the central ideas of the perspective, emphasizes that the origins of the approach are found in George Herbert Mead’s work (rather than in Cooley’s), and advocates the use of an eclectic set of qualitative methods without completely ruling out quantification. Blumer’s interpretation of and extension to Mead’s work also connected symbolic interactionism to the empirical interests of the Chicago school of sociology, the first major body of works specializing in urban sociology that arose during the 1920s and 1930s.
Symbolic interactionism has also retained its initial connection to the Progressive politics of the early-twentieth-century United States that were favored by many of the sociologists in Chicago during this time. Blumer’s 1969 formulation of symbolic interactionism stresses three premises and six root images. The three premises are: (1) "human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them"; (2) meanings are derived from social interaction and group life; and (3) "these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he [or she] encounters" (1969, p. 2). The six root images stress that social life is a group activity that is structured by layers of meaning. These meanings are incorporated into any group’s understanding of physical, social, and abstract objects. Group members initially learn these meanings through childhood socialization processes and, over time, each group member develops a sense of self through both role taking and the internalization of the group into his or her own identity. This activity is not a mechanical process: People remake their social worlds col-laboratively and Blumer stressed that symbolic interac-tionists must be aware of the fact that although social interaction is regulated, routinized, and therefore stable, it is not fixed.
Blumer believed that symbolic interactionism was an alternative to three rival approaches: mainstream sociological research with its emphasis on quantification and variable analysis; the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons; and psychoanalysis. Contemporary sociologists, notably Gary Alan Fine in his 1993 work and David Maines in 2001, argue that the symbolic interactionist perspective has been incorporated into mainstream sociology. However, according to Maines, this incorporation is not widely acknowledged and has therefore produced a fault line that runs through the discipline. Fine argued that the contemporary relationship between symbolic interactionism and contemporary sociology is unclear because symbolic interactionism has simultaneously been "fragmented, expanded, incorporated, and adopted" by sociologists of very different persuasions. In Fine’s view, symbolic interactionists themselves have become "intellectually promiscuous" (1993, p. 64).
In 1954 Manford Kuhn and his associates quantified traditional interactionist concerns, thus paving the way for contemporary quantitative studies of self and identity, notably by Peter Burke and Sheldon Stryker, both in 1980. Symbolic interactionists have also explored theoretical intersections, not only to structural functionalism and psychoanalysis, but also to semiotics, feminism, poststruc-turalism, and other traditions of thought. The journal Symbolic Interaction is a major resource for those interested in this perspective.
