The Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm

• Weber – humans have the capacity to make decisions and choices

• Agency – humans make choices, act on those choices and respond to social structures, sometimes in surprising ways

• people behave in different ways in light of how they understand or perceive what is around them

• Symbolic interactionists focus on subjective meanings, small-scale social interaction, what individuals do in relation to other individuals

• Structural functionalist & Conflict thinkers focus on how objective, large-scale social structures determines behaviour

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The Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm

• Macro level analysis – focus on the larger picture; how large scale organizations, groups as a whole shape people’s behaviour

• patterns of interaction are bigger than us, predate us and impact what we can do and what we think

• Eg. Durkheim’s study of suicide – looked at varied patterns of countries overall rates of suicide based on people’s participation in particular social organizations (family, religion)

• Structural Functionalist Paradigm, Conflict paradigm

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The Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm

• Micro level analysis – focus on smaller interpersonal dynamics – day-to-day interactions between individuals or individuals and smaller group settings (family, classroom)

• Symbolic – human experience is intimately tied to how people • understand and respond to symbols• Symbols are things, actions, practices, gestures and situations that • have meaning which guide our actions

• Interactionist – learn symbols through communication and learning with others over a lifetime

• we behave and interact in relation to that meaning • Stable patterns of social interaction emerge based on these meanings

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The Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm

• Through interaction we generate shared meanings• Society is emergent rather than already independent or

objective• We are limited by these emergent meanings• These meanings are not perfectly stable• We have the capacity to renegotiate or exercise agency• A number of factors limit our ability to renegotiate or change

the subjective meaning of a symbol• Eg. limited by our social position• teacher – student interaction

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The Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm

• Implication – although subjective meanings of symbols have some flexibility in interpretation, shared meanings give our interactions a kind of habit that is hard to break

• Society is a constantly changing mosaic of subjective meanings

• Interaction suggests that reality is intersubjective – it is what we produce with each other

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