The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism

Wayne H. Brekhus (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780190082178 Print ISBN: 9780190082161

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

CHAPTER

The Historical Foundations of Symbolic Interactionism 

Robert Dingwall

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.013.2
Published: 08 September 2021

Abstract
This chapter models a symbolic interactionist approach to the history of symbolic interactionism. It
begins with a discussion of the term ‘symbolic interaction’ as devised by Herbert Blumer and the limits
of its applicability to the body of work that represents this tradition. This owes at least as much to
borrowings from plant ecology and evolutionary theory by sociologists in Chicago in the 1920s and
1930s, with in uences from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Contemporary symbolic
interactionism is distinguished from the post-modern version developed by Norman Denzin and
associates; from the more structuralist legacy of Erving Go man; and from ethnomethodology. The
chapter then examines the in uence of nineteenth century German philosophy and social thought on
Chicago sociology. This is shown to draw on the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment,
particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hulme, which also had a direct in uence of its own.
Ultimately, the story leads back to Stoic thought in ancient Greece and Rome from around 300 BCE to
around 180 CE. Although its leaders have not had a great interest in the history of the approach, it is a
genuine heir to long-running debates about humanity, nature and society rather than a fringe novelty
of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Symbolic Interactionism, Herbert Blumer, Social ecology, Evolution, Improvised order,
Immanuel Kant, Scottish Enlightenment, Stoicism
Subject: Social Theory, Sociology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Conventionally, chapters of this kind begin from some iconic founder of a lineage that has proceeded in
unbroken succession to the present day. The present is legitimized through its ancestry and its connections
to the great symbols of the tribe. Elvi Whittaker and Virginia Olesen (1964) demonstrate this process in their
interactionist analysis of the references to Florence Nightingale in di erent accounts of the origins of
modern nursing. The problem with this approach is that it is not particularly sociological, in that it tends to
tell a story of historical inevitability, of a march of progress that leads ineluctably to the present rather than
seeing the present as shaped by a great deal of chance and contingency. As we shall see, such an approach
would be particularly ill-suited to a style of doing sociology where the uncertainty of the world is taken for
granted and the sociologist’s task is to understand how this is made su ciently orderly for actions in the
here and now to be possible. The chapter will, then, begin by discussing what kinds of sociological work the
label “symbolic interactionism” might be applied to. It will then travel backward to investigate the elements
that have contributed to this bricolage—the word comes via the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1966) to describe an assembly of ideas from whatever happens to be lying around and useful at the time.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

The Invention of Symbolic Interactionism

The label “symbolic interactionism” seems to have a clear and de nite history. In an introductory essay to a
selection of his published work, under the general title Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method,
Herbert Blumer (1969:1) describes how the term “has come into use as a label for a relatively distinctive
approach to the study of human group life and human conduct.” He links this to a footnote that describes
the term as “a somewhat barbaric neologism that I coined in an o hand way in an article written in MAN
AND SOCIETY (Emerson P. Schmidt, ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1937). The term somehow caught on and
is now in general use.” The essay associates a range of scholars with the program—George Herbert Mead,
John Dewey, W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, William James, Charles Horton Cooley, Florian Znaniecki, James
Mark Baldwin, Robert Red eld, and Louis Wirth. We shall meet several of these gures again, but it is worth
noting that the essay itself is largely an exposition and commentary on the translation of Mead’s
philosophical analysis of human minds, actions, and society into a program for sociology.

If we go back to the original formulation, however, it clearly refers to a program for social psychology—
indeed, Blumer is contributing a chapter with that title to a volume compiled as an introductory text for a
general course in social sciences taken by rst-year students at the University of Minnesota. The chapters
on “Sociology and Culture” and on “Social Institutions” are written by other authors, Elio D. Monachesi
from Minnesota and Joyce O. Hertzler from Nebraska. There is also a separate chapter on “Psychology and
Some of its Applications” by Howard P. Longsta , from Minnesota. Longsta ’s chapter is positioned
squarely within the behaviorist tradition that represented the mainstream of the discipline at that time.

Blumer’s chapter begins by noting that social psychology was originally conceived as the study of “group
minds,” the idea that human groups, such as crowds, mobs, panics, and the like, might be driven by a
consciousness above and beyond that of the individuals involved. As he notes, by the 1930s this had come to
be regarded as a metaphysical idea that could not be veri ed empirically and had been discarded. These
phenomena were now the topic of the eld of “collective behavior,” which did not assume that joint actions
required supra-individual mental states.

Today, the interest of social psychology is focused largely on the social development of the
individual. It is now generally agreed that every human being grows up inside of some form of
group life, that in this development he is subject to the stimulation and in uence of his associates,
and that his conduct, his character, his personality, and his mental organization are formed inside
of this association with his fellows. The central task is that of studying how the individual develops
socially as a result of participating in group life.

(Blumer 1937:146)

Blumer emphasizes both the distinctive identity of social psychology and the porousness of its boundaries
with both psychology and sociology.
 Social psychology is particularly subject to the importation of theories and points of view from
surrounding sciences and disciplines. The very nature of its central problem has placed it between
the older and more recognized elds of psychology and sociology, and has invited the borrowing of
the theories of both. Any general theory that gains any vogue in these two elds is rather certain to
be applied to the eld of social psychology. This means that the general theoretical disputes in
psychology and sociology are transferred to social psychology, where, furthermore, are to be found
the theoretical contentions as they exist between psychology and sociology.

(Blumer 1937:146–47)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

The chapter then proceeds to review the eld and to develop a position in the terms of “social behaviorism,”
as formulated by G. H. Mead (1962, 2015).

Brie y, Blumer rejects the idea of an innate human nature characterized by a set of instincts, derived from
some readings of Charles Darwin’s work. His argument re ects earlier writings by Chicago sociologists
(Bernard 1921; Faris 1921; Dingwall, Nerlich, and Hillyard 2003). This idea of an innate human nature is
vaguely speci ed and inconsistent with empirical observation of the diversity and complexity of actions and
cultures. He then introduces the stimulus-response model, where an innate set of re exes are organized
into a capacity for complex action by processes of conditioning and reinforcement. The chapter contrasts
this with the symbolic interactionist understanding of humans as being born only with a capacity to engage
actively with the social world. Through this interaction, the essentially plastic nature of the infant is shaped
into membership of a society in ways that are not fully determined. The shape of the chapter broadly follows
Meltzer’s (1967) respeci cation of Mead’s (2015) classic trinity as Society → Self → Mind. Group life
establishes a symbolic context within which individuals learn to interact while coordinating actions or
pursuing projects. Through these interactions, a sense of self is created, as an individual distinct from
others but capable of cooperating with them through shared “de nitions of the situation”—a term that
Blumer uses but does not acknowledge by citation. The process of cooperation is taken from Cooley’s
(1912:28) discussion of sympathy: “… Cooley thinks of ‘sympathy’ not in the sense of pity or compassion,
but instead as the unique human ability to project oneself imaginatively into the position of another and to
experience vicariously his feelings and state of mind.” Blumer elaborates the account through more speci c
discussion of standard psychological topics like personality, motivation, and attitudes, where he seeks to
de ne the di erences between Mead’s social behaviorism and the radical behaviorism of his Chicago
contemporary, J.B. Watson (Dingwall 2001).

One version of the origin myth of symbolic interactionism would, then, represent it as quite a narrow story,
focused very much on the legacy of Mead and Cooley. In his chapter, Blumer rarely cites other Chicago
colleagues. There is an approving mention of Ellsworth Faris and a rather dismissive reference to Thomas’s
(1917) Four Wishes—fundamental human interests or desires that were proposed as drivers for action.
Conceived as social psychology, Blumer’s legacy is rather limited. It can be seen in the work of Shibutani
(1961) and, to some extent, in Strauss’s (1959) Mirrors and Masks. In the introduction to the 1977 UK edition
of this book, however, Strauss notes that it was intended to reconcile Mead’s social psychology with the
structural interactionism of Thomas, Park, and Everett Hughes: “These are still not at ease with each other
—some interactionists moving almost totally toward Mead, others paying rather little attention to social
psychological issues” (Strauss 1977:4). These comments remind us that Blumer was quite a divisive gure
within the Sociology Department at Chicago, which was generally less harmonious than legend suggests
(Abbott 1999; Lacaze 2017). His colorful life history, with a career in professional football and connections
to the Chicago Mob and the brutal world of industrial labor, was very di erent from the more genteel
experiences of some of his colleagues (Wiley 2014). There were also considerable political di erences
(Lyman and Vidich 1988; Abbott 1999). Blumer’s contempt for Everett Hughes, for example, seems to have
been a considerable factor in his departure for Berkeley in 1952, when Hughes was installed as department
chair in Chicago.
On the other hand, symbolic interactionist research tends to lay claim to a wider body of work derived from
the supposed general heritage of Chicago sociology. If we look at what people who call themselves
“symbolic interactionists” actually do, the speci c debts to Blumer or Mead are quite limited, although they
are often invoked as tribal ancestors, much as Whitaker and Olesen noted for Florence Nightingale. What is
the legacy from sociology rather than social psychology?

Sociology and Social Ecology

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

While Blumer may have given symbolic interactionism its name, its practical legacy owes at least as much to
the work of Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, and their students in urban studies during the 1920s and 1930s,
and to the extension of this approach into studies of work and occupations, particularly by Everett Hughes
and his students, immediately before and after World War II. Although this body of research and writing
draws in a rather general fashion on the ideas of Mead and other pragmatist philosophers, its intellectual
heritage is quite di erent. In particular, it borrows extensively from evolutionary and ecological ideas in
biology (Dingwall 2016) in ways that give it a distinctive understanding of the nature of social order and its
construction. These are not inconsistent with Blumer’s social psychology, but they may partially explain
how Blumer’s department at Berkeley was able to assimilate more radical political traditions in the 1950s
and 1960s in ways that still have an impact on symbolic interactionism.

When thinking about borrowings from biology, it is important to distinguish between the ecological
metaphor and the organismic metaphor. The latter identi es human societies with the processes that go on
within an organism, while the former examines the interactions between organisms. Ecological thinking
tends to see social order as the spontaneous outcome of undirected social processes, where organismic
thinking tends to see the processes as directed toward the functional requirements of the observable order.
In practice, most sociologists use elements of both approaches in their work, but it is helpful to distinguish
them for the purposes of analysis. The rise of ecological thinking in Chicago sociology has been examined by
Marlene Shore (1987). Park’s (1915) rst statement on a research program for studies of the city drew on
biological thinking. The Park and Burgess (1969) textbook, rst published in 1921, which de ned the
department curriculum for at least two generations, reproduced an extract from Plant Succession, published
in 1916 by the in uential plant ecologist Frederic Clements. Park regularly attended seminars in ecology
with biologists from both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, together with two
prominent anthropologists, Robert Red eld, his son-in-law, and Alfred Kroeber. He also encouraged his
younger son to take courses in plant and insect ecology during his own college studies (Raushenbush 1979).

The fundamental principles of ecology derive from Darwin’s analysis of natural selection, where
competition between species generates an equilibrium of mutual accommodation and adaptation. It is
important to understand the dynamism of this account. Many popular versions tend to assume that the
environment is xed and that competition is a zero-sum game. As Darwin saw it, each species forms part of
the environment for others so that changes in any one species that lead to an advantage change the context
for others in ways that may select them for di erent characteristics. Order is local, temporary, and
inherently unstable. By studying how plants colonize bare ground, botanists were able to show how the
initial colonizers created conditions that favored their displacement by other species, a process that might
be repeated over many generations. This approach is re ected in the work of one of Darwin’s major
popularizers, the sociologist Herbert Spencer.

Spencer’s in uence on early American sociology is well documented (Hinkle 1980). However, Chicago
sociology tends to be seen in opposition to his in uence on the conservative doctrines of Social Darwinism
(Hofstadter 1955; Bannister 1979; Dickens 2000), a precursor of modern neoliberal skepticism about the
possibility of collective action to ameliorate poverty or other social ills. Because most of those involved did
not share this political analysis, Spencer’s in uence on interwar Chicago thought is often overlooked.
Spencer and Darwin are, though, two of the ten most frequently cited authors in the Park and Burgess
textbook (Raushenbush 1979). What excited the Chicago reading of Spencer was his extension of Darwin’s
dismantling of the idea of a Divine and immutable natural order to consider social institutions. These, too,
survived and prospered only as long as they maintained their tness in an environment of other institutions
seeking to change and adapt (Dingwall and King 1995). The city of Chicago was an ideal case study. The
Great Fire of 1871 had razed most of the city center to the ground, so the processes of recolonization could be
observed in action, or at least within living memory. The language of ecology—zones, succession, transition

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

—was taken directly into sociological analysis (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925). The same thinking
informed Everett Hughes’s sociology of occupations. His rst published paper (Hughes 1928) speci cally
links the division of labor to human ecology. However, he was already beginning to invert the relationship
and to see social organization as prior to spatial organization with the same dynamic character:

New occupations are created every day, and the concatenations of functions of old ones are subject
to change. The industrial revolutions of every day mean to the individual that he is not sure of his
job; or, at least, that one is not sure of one’s son’s job …. Occupational selection … becomes a erce
process which begins anew each day, atomizing families and tearing them loose from their soil.

(Hughes 1928:757)

In the same paper, he begins the Linnean task of producing a classi catory scheme for occupations, a
challenge picked up again many years later by one of his most distinguished students, Eliot Freidson (1978).
The emphasis on the social construction of occupational worlds is central to all those in uenced by
Hughes’s work, notably Howard Becker (1970, 1982) and Anselm Strauss (1975) and into later generations,
like Andrew Abbott (1988) and Gary Alan Fine (1995), or, more recently, to Sida Liu (2013, 2015; Liu and
Emirbayer 2016).

The legacy of Darwin and Spencer is also important for understanding the politics of this element of the
symbolic interactionist tradition. From the start, the Chicago department was de ned by a commitment to
scholarship rather than activism.

We have attempted to make students suspicious of all apparently easy solutions to the problems of
society … we once more propose the scholarly ideal—not investigation as a substitute for civic
service but investigation as both promise and performance of civic duty … Scienti c students of
society ought to oppose with all their power the many mischievous tendencies to construct
mountainous social philosophies out of molehills of social knowledge … This is not to urge that
sociologists should be reactionaries. There is little likelihood that men who personally observe
actual social conditions, according to the method which we propose, instead of speculating about
them in the study, will want to fold their hands and let social evil work out its own salvation. In the
interest of larger and truer knowledge, and better social cooperation in the future, it is,
nevertheless, necessary to distinguish very clearly between provisional action prompted by
sympathy, and the discovery of social principles attested by science.

(Small and Vincent 1894:373–74)

This commitment has often been seen through the lens of those critical of the interactionist tradition,
particularly in the increasing distance between the sociology faculty and Jane Addams’s work at the Hull
House settlement as a community organizer (Deegan 1988, 2006). Some sociologists have di culty in
dealing with liberal or moderate conservative thought, which is represented as an unde ned other in
relation to more radical approaches. How should we, for example, assess the award to women of 10 percent
of PhDs between the department’s foundation in 1893 and 1935 (Faris 1979)? Do we castigate the
department for not doing more or celebrate its achievement relative to the general environment for women
in higher education? Do we focus on the appointment of Annie Marion Maclean (PhD 1900) to the extension
faculty in 1903 or regret the contingencies that limited her impact (Deegan 2014)? Similarly, do we
recognize the handful of dissertations on Black groups and institutions, including that of E. Franklin Frazier
(PhD 1931), who became the rst Black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, or ask
why there were so few? Di ering views of the history of symbolic interactionism stem from di erent
political orientations. However, the part of symbolic interactionist thought distinguishing scholarship from
activism sits squarely within a tradition known as “spontaneous order” (Polanyi 1941). Order is not created

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

by planned and conscious acts but by local and contingent interactions. In this respect, it presents a problem
for many of the claims for sociology as a science of society, although it does not necessarily exclude
empirical generalizations that provide a foundation for practical actions, much as Small and Vincent imply.
The point has, perhaps, been better understood by the French advocates of the Chicago School, who have
used this as a means of challenging the Marxist orthodoxies that dominated their discipline in the postwar
period, culminating in the long hegemony of Pierre Bourdieu (Pene 2018).

The notion of “spontaneous order” may not quite capture the Chicago position, which could better be
described as “improvised order,, created from joint and purposive human actions, as Blumer and Mead
proposed, but located within a context of structural and material conditions, as recognized by the ecological
metaphor. Polanyi’s label does, however, provide a basis for digging deeper into the genealogy of the
Chicago tradition. Before doing so, though, we should look brie y at three other contemporary bodies of
work that sometimes invoke, or are assigned to, the tradition of symbolic interactionism. Each is important
in its own domain, and the brevity of the treatment here is mainly a re ection of the limited space available.

Fellow Travelers

The three strands that make up this section have very little in common apart from their problematic
a liation with symbolic interactionism: the postmodern strand identi ed particularly with Norman Denzin
and his associates; the legacy of Erving Go man; and the contribution of Harold Gar nkel, Harvey Sacks,
and Emanuel Scheglo in the form of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They are only grouped
here as a matter of convenience.

Postmodern Interactionism
Denzin began his career as an orthodox symbolic interactionist, trained at Iowa in the early 1960s, when it
was a major center for this type of work. From the mid-1980s onward, however, his work increasingly
turned toward postmodernism and cultural studies with a more explicitly political thrust toward social
justice movement activism. While this work has continued to have an in uence on symbolic interactionism,
and to be recognized as part of the family, it has tended to move into di erent journals, conferences, and
other publication outlets. It has also adopted a variety of representational strategies as alternatives to
conventional academic forms of journal papers and monographs, including experimental forms of narrative
writing, performance texts, and poetry, intended to evoke emotions in the audience response rather than
scienti c rationalism. Audiences are encouraged to share the author’s moral response to the problems being
described rather than to remain detached observers of the injustices of the world.

In these terms, the tensions with many of the traditions of symbolic interactionism should be apparent.
While the anticipated mobilization may fall within that heritage, the basis on in emotion rather than reason
does not (Deegan 2006). There is also a division on the extent to which sociology is a vehicle for activism or
a foundation for understanding problems. Is it better to be right or right-on (Strong 1988)? Postmodernism
certainly adopts the same vision of a world that is socially constructed rather than given, a spectacle rather
than a necessary reality. While this may free the imagination to envisage alternatives, it may also overlook
the real physical and material constraints, from the structures and processes of human bodies and cognition
to the environments within which we live and work—we may imagine walking on water but we are likely to
get our feet wet. Postmodern social constructionism emphasizes the freedom to make the world any way we
choose—and our moral responsibility for that—while symbolic interactionism has generally acknowledged
the importance of context, re ecting the ecological principles that in uenced early writers.

Postmodernism and symbolic interactionism are, though, clearly cousins in terms of genealogy, beyond the
speci c track of Denzin’s own career. Although postmodernism had little direct in uence on French

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

sociology, it can be traced back to the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,
which, in turn, are shaped by phenomenological philosophers, mainly German, whose in uence is felt
elsewhere in symbolic interactionism and related work. The attempt by Jurgen Habermas (1984b, 1984a) to
incorporate symbolic interactionism into his version of critical theory draws on the same traditions and
runs into many similar problems (Rochberg‐Halton 1989). Nevertheless, German philosophical work has
had an important part in shaping symbolic interactionism and will be discussed further later in this chapter.

Erving Go man
It may seem odd to relegate such an iconic gure as Erving Go man to a relatively small note within this
chapter. Certainly, his work is widely identi ed with symbolic interactionism. There have, though, also been
constant questions about how canonical it really is (Trevino 2003). Although Go man is widely cited within
symbolic interactionism, his approach owes much more to currents in anthropology and linguistics that run
in parallel to the sources drawn on by Blumer, Hughes, and their students than directly connecting with
them. As Jaworski (2000) points out, Go man’s relationship with Hughes was decidedly ambiguous,
although his thinking on total institutions owed a good deal to Hughes’s work. His principal mentor seems
to have been Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist, and his 1953 PhD dissertation, “Communication Conduct in
an Island Community,” is a classic piece of eldwork in the British tradition. British social anthropology is a
neglected in uence on Chicago social science—both A. R. Radcli e Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski visited
and worked there during the 1930s, although this was after anthropology and sociology split into separate
departments in 1929. Even so, important ties of kinship and friendship remained through to the 1950s.

The big di erence between Go man and the main symbolic interactionist position was his emphasis on the
structures within which interactions were framed. This is very characteristic of British social anthropology,
with its agenda of structural functionalism, although Go man seems to have been less concerned with the
second element. Where the in uence of Blumer fell on the scope for freedom in the creation of order,
Go man was more focused on the restraints. As Go man (1967, 1988) himself put it, he was engaged in the
study of “moments and their men” rather than “men and their moments.” The structures surrounded the
actors and de ned the spaces within which they could improvise. This may, for example, help to explain
Go man’s (1969) sympathetic treatment of Parsons’s (1951; Parsons and Fox 1952) concept of the sick role
as a constraint on interactions between patients on respirators and the health professionals attending them.
When reading Go man, it is important to recognize the extent to which he used a changing vocabulary to
express relatively constant ideas over the course of his career. His disagreement with the
ethnomethodologists, for example, is couched in terms of “frames” rather than “structures” but comes to
essentially the same thing (Go man 1981). Even in his very last paper, “Felicity’s Condition” (Go man
1983), he is looking to the pressure of the audience: what can we say in this situation and not discon rm
their assumptions about our sanity and competence?
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism have often had the relationship of feuding cousins on
adjacent plots of land. Looking back to the 1960s, leading symbolic interactionists had a de nite interest in
ethnomethodology: Strauss and his collaborators (1964) refer approvingly to Gar nkel’s (1967) work on the
indeterminacy and localized interpretation of rules, for example. Denzin contributed to the collection
Understanding Everyday Life, edited by Jack Douglas (1971), which was something of a manifesto for the
development of ethnomethodology beyond Gar nkel’s original work.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

While there are important di erences of topic and substance between these two bodies of work, many of
these re ect di erences in the philosophical traditions that they have drawn on. At various points, these
gaps have not appeared to be unbridgeable. Berger and Luckman (1966), for example, proposed an explicit
synthesis between the legacies of Mead and of Alfred Schutz (Barber 2004), a social phenomenologist whose
work was an early in uence on ethnomethodology. Schutz’s work had a clear impact on Olesen and
Whittaker’s (1968) classic study of the professional socialization of student nurses, which also recognizes
their debts to many of Hughes’s students. Although Gar nkel’s work is in many ways sui generis (vom Lehn
2014), it does look back to the philosophical circles of 1930s Vienna and to conversations between scholars
that have been prised apart by subsequent disciplinary claims on precursors. Gar nkel once acknowledged
to me the in uence of Aron Gurwitsch, and others in his circle have clearly taken inspiration from
Wittgenstein (Wootton 1975). If we were to look for a macro theory to accompany ethnomethodology, it
would be probably be found in the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises and their more radical
approach to spontaneous order (Hayek 1945; Gamble 1996).

Ethnomethodology and its sibling, conversation analysis, are however indi erent to the traditional
concerns of sociology with larger-scale structures. While they share symbolic interaction’s interest in the
here and now, they do not generally see it as an enactment of anything else. It is what it is. Perhaps the most
important di erence lies in the role of the analyst. Symbolic interactionism is a verstehende sociology, which
assumes that observers can, in some sense, enter into or replicate the minds of those who are being studied.
This is an extension of the notion of sympathy, which Blumer took from Cooley. Ethnomethodology takes a
much stricter approach. Since humans are not known to be a telepathic species, we must create orderliness
in interaction through public acts, particularly language. These acts are equally visible to the participants
and to the observer. To the extent that there is an agreed program, it rests on the detailed examination of
actions and responses to understand how alignments, or misalignments, occur. Moral or ethical critiques of
the outcomes of this process belong in a di erent realm to an understanding of their production.

These three consorts of symbolic interactionism each emphasize di erent aspects of a shared heritage and
look to sources beyond that. It is, though, now time to consider where the ideas embedded in the classic
tradition of symbolic interactionism have their origins. As we do this, we may be able to recognize how and
where branchings or parallel developments have taken o . This journey takes us across the Atlantic, rst to
Germany and then to Scotland.
The German Imprint

The transient prejudices of two world wars and the mythology of American exceptionalism have obscured
the extent to which science and scholarship in the United States were in uenced by the intellectual
dynamism of nineteenth-century Germany. This is, perhaps, best recognized by historians of science:
Bonner (1963), for example, documented the interplay between American medicine and German science in
the years before World War I. This exchange fundamentally shaped the approach of US doctors to the 1918
in uenza pandemic (Barry 2009). Similarly, German developments in biblical criticism had a wide impact

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

across the humanities (Reventlow 1984; Baird 1992). Like many of the other pragmatist philosophers, Mead
studied in Germany (1888–90) (Joas 1985), as did Albion Small (1879–81) (Dibble, 1975) and Robert Park
(1899–1903) (Raushenbush 1979). Small went on to publish a book on German social thought (Small 1909)
and to include many translations of German work in early issues of the American Journal of Sociology. Park
attended lectures given by Georg Simmel, which included the only formal course in sociology that he ever
took. This is likely to have introduced him to Spencer’s work, which featured strongly in the original version
of Simmel’s doctoral dissertation, although he was required to delete it from the published text (Levine
1997).

Max and Marianne Weber spent a week in Chicago in 1904, en route to the Congress of Arts and Sciences in
St Louis, but there is no record of them visiting the university—although they did go to Northwestern
University on the other side of the city. Weber was involved in events organized by Albion Small, and they
are likely to have met, especially given Small’s networks and family connections in Germany—but Small
clearly did not leave an impression (Sca 2011). The leading pragmatist philosophers largely boycotted the
St Louis Congress over its attempt to formulate a uni ed view of science, including social science, rather
than respecting a diversity of methods appropriate to problems. Weber spoke about his work on rural
communities but otherwise mostly seems to have talked to the economists—and gone to the receptions
(Sca 2011).

The German in uences on symbolic interactionism have been explored in some depth by Paul Rock (1979).
He focuses on the pivotal role of Immanuel Kant in responding to the work of the Scottish philosopher David
Hume (1975). Before Hume, philosophers had tended to assume that nature and society could both be
understood by the systematic exercise of reason alone. There was a broad consensus that true knowledge
was a direct copy of reality. Hume, and his Scottish contemporaries, pulled this apart. Nature, and society,
were only understood through the conceptual schemes that were applied to them. Humans could not expose
the hidden workings of the world, whether by induction or deduction, because they had no access to them
other than through their perceptions. The world we see is a world we have constructed from our own prior
framing. We cannot discover laws in nature, merely empirical generalizations: the sun will rise tomorrow
because it always has done—so we might reasonably expect this to happen again—not because it is required
to.

Given this radical skepticism, it is hard to see how there would be space for any kind of science, and, indeed,
few of Hume’s contemporaries followed him completely. Kant, however, explicitly modi ed Hume’s
account by arguing that it did not deal adequately with the nature of our lived experience. There were
di erent ways of understanding the world, which were complementary rather than competitive or mutually
exclusive. One type of knowledge was formal and logical, producing ideas independently of observation. It
would be evaluated in terms of its coherence and rigor rather than its empirical content. Another type was
based on our immersion in the world. However, it is simply the knowledge derived from our own senses in a
raw and unmediated form. Kant introduced a third type of knowledge, which occupied an intermediate
position. We could, he suggested, never know things as they are, independent of our perceptions. Without a
prior organization to our perceptions, however, we could not know what to see. We act in the world through
the categories that we bring to it, what a later generation would call “culture.” The results may allow us a
dim view of the world itself and the opportunity to derive modest generalizations about it, which may, in
turn, allow the categories of perception to evolve. Turning to biology and its treatment of forms, Mead
(1938:629–30) responded to these proposals by urging a view where the concepts through which we
observed the world were subject to correction by the materiality of the world itself.

As Rock notes, Kant cast a long shadow over German social science, provoking three main responses. Weber,
he suggests, worked within the Kantian framework to produce a sociology that made no claims to general
truths, rather than limited classi cations from closely speci ed areas, like his taxonomies of religion or
bureaucracy. The neo-Kantians, including Windelband, who supervised Park’s doctoral dissertation

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

(Raushenbush 1979), developed an approach that was closer to positivism. This abandoned inquiries into
the “true nature” of reality in favor of a stress on the development of logical structures of knowledge, based
on law-like processes, which could be tested and corrected by targeted empirical inquiries. This model did
not, though, necessarily apply to the humanities and human sciences, which they saw as idiographic,
understanding unique cases, rather than nomothetic, seeking universal laws. The phenomenologists, later
exempli ed by Schutz and others in the networks based in Vienna, focused on systematic introspection. If
the world was unknowable, perhaps the self and its conditions of knowing might be. While some of these
classi cations are debatable in the light of more recent scholarship, they do provide a broad indication of
the impact of Kant’s work on the development of the sources that inspired Mead, Park, and others.

For Rock, the most direct in uence on symbolic interactionism was, though, the work of Georg Simmel,
another of the highly cited authors in the Park and Burgess (1969) textbook. Simmel took up the Kantian
program to ask how it was possible to understand society as a human construction from experience. It was
an order produced through collaborative work to impose structure on events in the world that were
otherwise inherently meaningless. Rock (1979:37–38) notes that Simmel even tended to avoid the word
“society” and to prefer “sociation,” emphasizing the act of creation. This process of construction drew on a
shared grammar of forms, which could constitute the topic for sociological inquiry, moving beyond the
purely idiographic model proposed by the neo-Kantians.

A full explication would go well beyond the bounds of this chapter, but we should be able to recognize the
ways in which this argument reappears in the work of Schutz and of Wittgenstein. Schutz (Schutz and
Luckmann 1974) argues for the practical impossibility of reconstructing the world anew on each occasion
that it is experienced and for the study of the shortcuts o ered by common-sense knowledge of
typi cations and recipes for action, how “people like me” generally de ne and act in speci c kinds of
situation. Wittgenstein’s (1961, 1972) view of language o ers a similar approach. Language cannot be
private: it is essentially a socially shared system for coding our experience of the world. We can only
describe the world to each other through this system so that the relationship between our knowledge and
our experience is inevitably social. Although Wittgenstein does not extend the argument in this way, he has
created a space for sociology as the study of that knowledge and the ways in which it is used to create order
—or, perhaps better, orderliness—in the world that we experience (Winch 1963).

If we bring these arguments back to the core position of symbolic interactionism, the continuities are not
di cult to see. The Kantian heritage is one where the relationship between humans and the world is
continuously uncertain, which is something that Blumer took over from Mead. The world is a social
construction, and the program for sociology is to understand how that construction is accomplished. At the
same time, the accomplishment is not random and unconstrained. There is a logic and an order to the
process of ordering social relations, and the interactions between humans and their environments, that
creates a degree of stability and certainty, even if only temporarily. Whether or not we accept the speci c
formulation of the zones of the city in Chicago urban studies, the zones are, in e ect, Simmelian forms. The
same might be said of Hughes’s classi cation of occupations. Sociologists are creating second-order
accounts of the practices of ordinary people that produce society. Symbolic interactionism does, however,
have two key di erences. The rst is a recognition of the importance of materiality. Where the Kantian
tradition can be uncertain about whether there is a world “out there” beyond our perceptions of it, most
symbolic interactionists accept that there is something that can push back against human attempts to
organize it. We may not be able to have direct knowledge of this world, and we may only be able to act on it
within the frames that we bring to it, but it nevertheless exists. The second is that symbolic interactionism
has not, on the whole, pursued the questions of language as fully as, say, ethnomethodology or
conversation analysis. Although symbolic interactionists are concerned to learn the language of a setting,
and to characterize the referents of speci c vocabulary, they have been more interested in the substantive
content than in the use of the language. When Becker (1993) describes his discovery of the term “crock” in

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

the argot of medical students, for example, he is more concerned with developing a de nition applicable
across contexts than with the how and when of its usage, and the ways in which this might serve to identify
membership of a group. These tasks are not mutually exclusive, of course, but they do mark out di erent
genealogies.

At the beginning of this section, we noted Kant’s debt to Hume. This ags the other line of descent to leave
its mark on symbolic interactionism. For this we need to turn to Scotland in the eighteenth century.

The Athens of the North

The stamp of the Scottish Enlightenment may be less immediately visible in symbolic interactionism, but it
is real enough. Albion Small’s (1972) other major study, alongside his work on the German Cameralists, was
a book on Adam Smith, where he concluded that:

If logic and a deliberate methodology ruled the world, or even the supposedly intellectual part of it,
Adam Smith would have been as immediately, if not as intensely, in uential upon concrete moral
philosophy, or sociology, as he was upon economics …. It is therefore not fanciful to repeat in
substance the proposition with which this inquiry began, viz.: Modern sociology is virtually an
attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in
Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in
the technique of the production of wealth.

(Small 1972:96–97)

The in uential Heritage of Sociology series, published by the University of Chicago Press, included a volume
on “The Scottish Moralists,” edited by Louis Schneider (1967), intended to provide students with an
overview of their contribution. Interestingly, Schneider acknowledges the prompting of Hayek as an
inspiration for his own reading in the area, underlining the links to the Viennese theorists of spontaneous
order introduced earlier in this chapter.

The Scottish Enlightenment is a label for a group of scholars working mainly in Glasgow and Edinburgh over
a period stretching from the appointment of Frances Hutcheson to a chair at the University of Glasgow in
1729 to the retirement of Dugald Stewart from a chair at the University of Edinburgh in 1810 (Berry 1997).
The focal point was the years 1760–1790, when most of the key gures lived in what is now known as the
Old Town district of Edinburgh. This was an overcrowded neighborhood of tenements where they would
meet one another in the street and frequent the same drinking and dining clubs—hence the comparison
with Classical Athens (Buchan 2003). Their work was widely read in Europe and in uential in North America
(Himmelfarb 2004). John Witherspoon, sixth president of Princeton, and a major in uence on US higher
education, was strongly in uenced by Hutcheson and by Thomas Reid, from Aberdeen, who wrote on
common-sense reasoning. Witherspoon, in turn, taught both James Madison and Aaron Burr and was
admired by Alexander Hamilton, as well as being a member of the Continental Congress in his own right
(Morrison 2003).
In the eighteenth century, Lowland Scotland also had something in common with late nineteenth-century
Chicago as a last outpost of civilization before bandit country. The Scottish Highlands had risen in revolt
twice against the English Crown, in 1715 and 1745, and these men had been caught in crises of identity as the
rebel armies marched through their cities. Mostly, they actually identi ed as North Britons and tried to
model their language and culture on that of London and Europe rather than on the feudal society of the
Highlands. Like Chicago, Glasgow was also rapidly industrializing. When Adam Smith wrote about practical
examples of factory work and the division of labor, this was from personal observation. The pro ts of trade
in slaves, sugar, and cotton, and the bene ts of the single market with England established in 1707, were

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

being plowed into scienti c and technological innovation, national infrastructure, and economic
development. Just as in 1890s Chicago, questions about the nature of social and economic organization were
not theoretical but intensely practical.

The legacy of David Hume has already been mentioned. His questioning of causal explanations still has a
powerful legacy in the reluctance of symbolic interactionists to use causal language or to consider law-like
or necessary connections between events. Interactionists will reason from observations of constant
conjunctions to propose frames or principles that provide for the regular linkage of certain events but not
determine that connection. Their approach operates more in terms of probability than necessity: If A, then B
is more likely than C—but C cannot be ruled out if some contextual element is present or absent. In practice,
this skepticism has been reined in by attention to the later attempt by John Stuart Mill to discipline the
process for reasoning: grounded theory is essentially a restatement of Mill’s methodological principles
(Murphy et al. 1999).

Two other examples can be taken from the work of Adam Smith, whose impact on Albion Small has been
noted. Smith is best known today for Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976a) but he made his name with his earlier
book, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1976b). I commented earlier on the way in which Blumer took over
the notion of “sympathy” from Cooley. Symbolic interactionism is strongly in uenced by the idea of the
“looking glass self” (Cooley 1902). Cooley argued that we developed a sense of self from the responses of
others to our actions, which, in turn, led us to imagine those reactions in formulating further actions. The
meaning of an act did not, then, lie wholly in the intentions of its author but in its reception by others. Mead
(2015:154–59) extended this with his idea of the “generalized other,” the imagined response of a
disinterested observer as a constraint on actions that went beyond speci c situations. This, for Mead, was
an important glue between otherwise disconnected acts that purely re ected the local contingencies of
context and actors.

This model, however, is clearly derived from Adam Smith, who uses very much the same imagery, although
neither Cooley nor Mead acknowledges the debt. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, Smith
(1976b:112) discusses the emergence of a moral sense and our e orts to judge ourselves by imagining the
response of others to our acts:

We suppose ourselves to be the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what
e ect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in
some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct.
(emphasis added)

Our own judgment may, however, be overruled by that of the “impartial spectator” conceived of as a “man
within” who judges the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of our actions, both in anticipation and in
retrospect. Smith’s language is somewhat di cult here because he is trying to avoid identifying the
impartial spectator with God, but without actually sliding into explicit atheism, which had led Hume, his
great friend, into serious trouble with the Scottish church.
While Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations are often thought of as discontinuous projects, Smith
did not see them that way. The market society he described in Wealth of Nations rested on a moral foundation
that it did not itself generate, a theme echoed in Durkheim’s (1964) work. Moral Sentiments is the basis of
the self-restraint that checks tendencies toward monopoly and capitalist abuses. In this sense, we can see
the echoes of Smith in the passage from Small and Vincent quoted earlier, the aspiration of Chicago
sociology to develop capitalism with a conscience rather than the radical alternatives associated with Jane
Addams. Wealth of Nations is, however, also important for its understanding of the division of labor and for
its vision of a dynamic economy and society, which has a legacy in almost all later social science. Remember

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

that Adam Smith was directly observing a society that was undergoing change at least as drastic and rapid as
that of Chicago from the 1890s to the 1930s. The replacement of craft by factory processes of manufacture
was bringing about huge increases in productivity and making many goods more a ordable for the mass of
the population. At the same time, it was rewriting the division of labor and social mobility (Dingwall 2016).
People were no longer born into their parents’ station in life and to the crafts or trades open to that class or
locality. Occupational structures are not xed but constantly in process. Changes in technology, market
demand, or means of transport divide some occupations and combine others in processes of ssion and
fusion. This is precisely Hughes’s (1928) starting point. We might also note that Darwin was familiar with
Smith’s work: there is an argument that this observation provided a basis for his shift away from the idea
that species were xed at a moment of creation to seeing them as moments of organization in a changing
environment (Schweber 1980).

If we can show that symbolic interactionism, at least as articulated through the networks around the
University of Chicago, had a strong foundation in the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment, can we take
the story any further back? Whose shoulders were the Scots standing on?

The Classical Heritage

In an earlier generation, the links to ancient Greece and Rome would probably have come at the beginning of
the chapter, as a way of linking symbolic interactionism to the icons of the white tribes of Europe. However,
there is more than a symbolic function in tracing the roots of interactionist ideas back to the years around
300 BCE. Many of the theoretical issues confronting interactionism today have, in fact, been present for a
very long time and are probably not capable of being de nitely resolved. This does not mean that they are
not important or that we should not try to produce workable approximations to a solution—but we may not
want to let them stand in the way of a mission to produce empirical knowledge of our contemporary world
and the actors that create it. In the space available, we cannot go into the rediscovery of Latin and Greek
learning in sixteenth-century Europe and the ways in which this reached Scotland, particularly through its
contacts with the Netherlands. A shared version of Protestantism and a similar legal system meant that
there were extensive scienti c and scholarly interchanges, particularly in the seventeenth century
(Emerson 2004). The writings of Justus Lipsius, Hugo Grotius—both Dutch—and Samuel von Pufendorf,
from Germany, on law, nature, and social order circulated widely and were referenced by Adam Smith in his
Lectures on Jurisprudence (Bastable 1898; Smith 1978). This body of work speaks to the strength of the
in uence from Greek and Roman Stoicism on European thinking and the ways in which this was used to
displace the Aristotelian doctrines that had held sway throughout much of the medieval period.

Although Robert Prus (2004; Puddephatt and Prus 2007) has made a case for the in uence of Aristotle on
symbolic interactionism, there is much more evidence in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for Stoic
in uence. Stoicism was founded as a school of philosophy around 312 BCE by Zeno, who came from Cyprus.
He was succeeded by Cleanthes and Chrysippus, both from Turkey, and, in the next generation by Diogenes
from Iraq and Antipater from Syria (Inwood 2003). The Stoics were outsiders to the genteel world of
Athenian philosophy, expressed both in their criticisms of its institutions like gender roles and slavery and
in their everyday life (Erskine 1990). Stoic thought was taken up by leading Roman thinkers like Cicero and
its in uence is generally considered to have ended with the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE.

The Stoic vision of the world emphasized its indeterminacy. Change and movement were its natural states,
which could only be temporarily stabilized. This was achieved by a process of human cognition. According to
Zeno, this involved four steps. The human mind was constantly exposed to a stream of impressions. But
these impressions were only absorbed and became a basis for action as the result of a deliberate act of
selection or assent. This, in turn, was subject to the exercise of reason in determining whether it should
become a matter of conviction. Finally, by comparing the present conviction with past experiences and the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

evidence of others, it might become a matter of knowledge. This is not a purely constructionist account, but
it does shift the emphasis away from Aristotle’s insistence that structures or forms were inherent in nature.
In this account, the goal for human perception was to grasp these forms. The Stoics, in contrast, saw forms
as tools used by humans to organize the world perceived by their sense, in a way that would be familiar to
symbolic interactionists.

Similarly, human cognition was founded on a developmental process that would be recognizable in the work
of Mead and Blumer. Aetius (ca. 100CE) summarized it in this fashion: “When a man is born, the Stoics say,
he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon” (Long and Sedley
1987:238). This is not a blank-slate theory—the sheet of paper has an a ordance that prompts the user to
write upon it. The Stoic child di ers from the models of other ancient writers. She does not have innate
knowledge of the world and its properties or have her development shaped purely by external stimuli of pain
or pleasure (Becker 1998). The child was, rather, primed for the process of appropriating the world and
creating a sense of self through interaction with society.

Early Stoic thought is hard to reconstruct from fragmentary evidence—Zeno’s book on society and political
order has not survived, for example. However, another way to write this chapter would be to see it as the
beginnings of a golden thread that links two thousand years of social thought, of which symbolic
interactionism is one modern version. As such it presents not just an epistemological but also an ethical
challenge to many other contemporary approaches in sociology (Strong and Dingwall 1989).

Conclusion

Symbolic interactionism is often presented as if it sprang fully formed from the waters of Lake Michigan
sometime between 1890 and 1940. This chapter has argued that it is not a fringe novelty in social science but
heir to discussions about the nature of human beings and their relations to one another that go back to the
earliest written arguments in societies that had su cient economic surplus to support people to engage in
them. As a group, symbolic interactionists have generally been more interested in acquiring knowledge
about the world than in creating theoretical genealogies. Howard Becker’s response to an uppity graduate
student who asked how to choose a theoretical perspective—“just go out there and do it”—is deservedly
famous. On the other hand, such family trees do matter a lot to other sociologists, and it is as well to
recognize this. In the case of symbolic interaction, though, the family tree is more like that recognized by
modern evolutionary biology: a straggly bush, full of false starts, dead ends, and competing branches,
rather than an ineluctable, linear march toward the present.
References

Abbott, A. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Abbott, A. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Baird, W. 1992. History of New Testament Research: From Deism to Tübingen. Fortress Press.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Bannister, R. C. 1979. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Barber, M. D. 2004. The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Barry, J. M. 2009. The Great Influenza. London: Penguin Books.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Bastable, C. F. 1898. “Adam Smithʼs Lectures on ʻJurisprudence,ʼ” Hermathena, 10(24):200–11.

Google Scholar WorldCat

Becker, H. S. 1970. “The Nature of a Profession.” Pp. 87–104 in Sociological Work: Method and Substance, edited by H. S. Becker.
Chicago: Aldine.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Becker, H. S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Becker, H. S. 1993. “How I Learned What a Crock Was.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22(1):28–35. doi:
10.1177/089124193022001003.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Becker, L. C. 1998. “Stoic Children.” Pp. 45–61 in The Philosopherʼs Child: Critical Essays in the Western Tradition, edited by
S. M. Turner and G. B. Matthews. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Bernard, L. L. 1921. “The Misuse of Instinct in the Social Sciences.” Psychological Review 28(2): 96–119.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Berry, C. J. 1997. Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Blumer, H. 1937. “Social Psychology.” P. 144–98 in Man and Society: A Substantive Introduction to the Social Sciences, edited by
E. P. Schmidt. New York: Prentice Hall.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Bonner, T. N. 1963. American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual Relations, 1870–1914.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Buchan, J. 2003. Crowded with Genius—The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburghʼs Moment of the Mind. New York: HarperCollins.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Cooley, C. H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Charles Scribnerʼs Sons.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Cooley, C. H. 1912. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York: Charles Scribnerʼs Sons.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Deegan, M. J. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Deegan, M. J. 2006. “The Human Drama Behind the Study of People as Potato Bugs.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6(1): 101–22.
doi: 10.1177/1468795X06061288.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Deegan, M. J. 2014. Annie Marion Maclean and the Chicago Schools of Sociology 1894–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Dibble, V. K. 1975. The Legacy of Albion Small. Edited by M. Janowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (The Heritage of
Sociology).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Dickens, P. 2000. Social Darwinism. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Dingwall, Robert. 2001. “Notes Toward an Intellectual History of Symbolic Interactionism.” Symbolic Interaction 24(2): 237–42.

Dingwall, Robert. 2016. “The Ecological Metaphor in the Sociology of Occupations and Professions.” Pp. 31–48 in Professions and
Metaphors: Understanding Professions in Society, edited by A. Liljegren and M. Saks. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Dingwall, R., and M. D. King. 1995. “Herbert Spencer and the Professions: Occupational Ecology Reconsidered.” Sociological
Theory 13(1): 14–24.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Dingwall, R., B. Nerlich, and S. Hillyard. 2003. “Biological Determinism and Symbolic Interaction: Hereditary Streams and Cultural
Roads.” Symbolic Interaction 26(4): 631–44. doi: 10.1525/si.2003.26.4.631.

Douglas, J. D., editor. 1971. Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Durkheim, E. 1964. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Emerson, R. L. 2004. “The Founding of the Edinburgh Medical School.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
59(2): 183–218. doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrh066.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Erskine, A. 1990. The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action. London: Duckworth.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Faris, E. 1921. “Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses?” American Journal of Sociology 27(2): 184–96.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Faris, R. E. L. 1979. Chicago Sociology 1920–1932. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Fine, G. A. 1995. Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Freidson, E. 1978. “The O icial Construction of Occupations: An Essay on the Practical Epistemology of Work.” in 9th World
Congress of Sociology. Uppsala.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Gamble, A. 1996. Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cli s, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Go man, E. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Doubleday.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Go man, E. 1969. “The Insanity of Place.” Psychiatry 32(4): 357–87.

Google Scholar WorldCat

Go man, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Go man, E. 1983. “Felicityʼs Condition.” American Journal of Sociology 89(1): 1–53.

Google Scholar WorldCat

Go man, E. 1988. Les moments et leurs hommes. Edited by Y. Winkin. Paris: Seuil/Minuit.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Habermas, J. 1984a. The Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Habermas, J. 1984b. The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35(4): 519–30.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Himmelfarb, G. 2004. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Hinkle, R. C. 1980. Founding Theory of American Sociology 1881–1915. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Hofstadter, R. 1955. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Hughes, E. C. 1928. “Personality Types and the Division of Labor.” American Journal of Sociology 33(5): 754–68. doi:
10.1086/214539.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Hume, D. 1975. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Third Edition. Edited by
L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Inwood, B. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to The Stoics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Companions).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Jaworski, G. D. 2000. “Erving Go man: The Reluctant Apprentice.” Symbolic Interaction 23(3): 299–308.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Joas, H. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of his Thought. Cambridge: Polity.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Lacaze, L. 2017. “Ellsworth Faris: An Outsider of the Chicago School?” retrieved November 5, 2020
(https://www.academia.edu/33855036/ELLSWORTH_FARIS_AN_OUTSIDER_OF_THE_CHICAGO_SCHOOL_FROM_WACO_TO_CHI
CAGO_VIA_BOLENGE_1).
WorldCat

vom Lehn, D. 2014. Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology. Walnut Creek, CA: Le Coast Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Levine, D. N. 1997. “Simmel Reappraised: Old Images: New Scholarship.” Pp. 173–207 in Reclaiming the Sociological Classics: The
State of the Scholarship. Edited by C. Camic. Oxford: Blackwell.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Liu, S. 2013. “The Legal Profession as a Social Process: A Theory on Lawyers and Globalization.” Law and Social Inquiry 38(3):
670–93. doi: 10.1111/lsi.12007.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Liu, S. 2015. “Boundary Work and Exchange: The Formation of a Professional Service Market.” Symbolic Interaction 38(1): 1–21.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.137.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Liu, S., and M. Emirbayer. 2016. “Field and Ecology.” Sociological Theory 34(1): 62–79. doi: 10.1177/0735275116632556.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Lyman, S. M., and A. J. Vidich. 1988. Social Order and the Public Philosophy: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Work of Herbert
Blumer. Lafayette: University of Arkansas Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Mead, G. H. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by C. W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Mead, G. H. 1962. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by C. W. Morris. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Mead, G. H. 2015. Mind, Self and Society: The Definitive Edition. Edited by C. W. Morris, D. R. Huebner, and H. Joas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Meltzer, B. N. 1967. “Meadʼs Social Psychology.” Pp. 5–24 in Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology, edited by

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

J. G. Manis and B. N. Meltzer. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Morrison, J. H. 2003. John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press. Retrieved
November 30, 2020 (https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268035082/john-witherspoon-and-the-founding-of-the-american-republic).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Murphy, E., et al. 1999. “Qualitative Research Methods in Health Technology Assessment: A Review of the Literature.” Health
Technology Assessment 2(16): 1–276. doi: https://doi.org/10.3310/hta2160.

Olesen, V. L., and E. W. Whittaker. 1968. The Silent Dialogue: A study in the social psychology of professional socialization. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Park, R. E. 1915. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment.” American Journal of
Sociology 20(5): 577–612.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Park, R. E., and E. W. Burgess. 1969. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Park, R. E., E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie. 1925. The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban
Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Parsons, T. 1951. The Social System. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Parsons, T., and R. Fox. 1952. “Illness, Therapy and the Modern Urban American Family.” Journal of Social Issues 8(4): 31–44. doi:
10.1111/j.1540-4560.1952.tb01861.x.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Pene , J. 2018. Howard S Becker: Sociology and Music in the Chicago School. Translated by R. Dingwall. New York: Routledge.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Polanyi, M. 1941. “The Growth of Thought in Society.” Economica 8(32): 428–56.

Google Scholar WorldCat

Prus, R. 2004. “Symbolic Interaction and Classical Greek Scholarship: Conceptual Foundations, Historical Continuities, and
Transcontextual Relevancies.” The American Sociologist 35(1): 5–33.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Puddephatt, A. J., and R. Prus. 2007. “Causality, Agency, and Reality: Plato and Aristotle Meet George Herbert Mead and Herbert
Blumer.” Sociological Focus 40(3): 265–86.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Raushenbush, W. 1979. Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Reventlow, G. H. 1984. The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World. London: SCM Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Rochberg‐Halton, E. 1989. “Jürgen Habermasʼs Theory of Communicative Etherealization.” Symbolic Interaction 12(2): 333–60.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/si.1989.12.2.333.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Rock, P. 1979. The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. London: Macmillan.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Sca , L. A. 2011. Max Weber in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Schneider, L. 1967. The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (The Heritage of
Sociology).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Schutz, A., and T. Luckmann. 1974. The Structures of the Life-World. London: Heinemann.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Schweber, S. S. 1980. “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character.” Journal of the History of Biology 13(2):
195–289. doi: 10.1007/BF00125744.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Shibutani, T. 1961. Society and Personality: An Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology. Englewood Cli s, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Shore, M. 1987. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School and the origins of Social Research in Canada.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Small, A. W. 1972. Adam Smith and Modern Sociology. Cli on, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley (Reprints of Economic Classics).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Small, A. W. 1909. The Cameralists: the pioneers of German social polity. New York: Burt Franklin (Burt Franklin Research and
Source Works Series No. 43).
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Small, A. W., and G. E. Vincent. 1894. An Introduction to the Study of Society. New York: American Book Company.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Smith, A. 1976a. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by E. Cannan. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Smith, A. 1976b. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Smith, A. 1978. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Strauss, A. L. 1959. Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Strauss, A. 1975. Professions, Work and Careers. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Strauss, A. L. 1977. Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. London: Martin Robertson.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Strauss, A. L., et al. 1964. Psychiatric ideologies and institutions. New York: Free Press.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323192162 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Strong, P. M. 1988. “Qualitative Sociology in the UK.” Qualitative Sociology 11(1–2): 13–28. doi: 10.1007/BF00988686.

Strong, P. M., and R. Dingwall. 1989. “Romantics and Stoics.” Pp. 49–69 in The Politics of Field Research: Sociology Beyond
Enlightenment, edited by J. F. Gubrium and D. Silverman. London: Sage, pp. 49–69.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Thomas, W. I. 1917. “The Persistence of Primary Group Norms in Present-Day Society and Their Influence in Our Educational
System.” Pp. 159–97 in Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education, edited by H. S. Jennings et al. New York: The
Macmillan Company.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Trevino, A. J., editor. 2003. Go manʼs Legacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Whittaker, E. W., and V. L. Olesen. 1964. “The Faces of Florence Nightingale; Functions of the Heroine Legend in an Occupational
Sub-culture.” Human Organization 23(Summer): 123–30.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Wiley, N. 2014. Interviewing Herbert Blumer.” Symbolic Interaction 37(2): 300–8. doi: 10.1002/symb.98.
Google Scholar WorldCat

Winch, P. 1963. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Wittgenstein, L. 1972. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Wootton, A. J. 1975. Dilemmas of Discourse: Controversies about the Sociological Interpretation of Language. London: George
Allen & Unwin.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC