Thursday
Apr012010

Symbolic Interactionism (Howard Becker and the School of Chicago)

Symbolic Interactionism, the intellectual tradition inaugurated by the philosophical pragmatism stream of John Dewey, George H. Mead, then Herbert Blumer, examines how shared meanings and social patterns are developed in the course of social interactions. There are numerous applications of this powerful sociological perpective instigated in the early 1920s with the very first urban studies in the city of Chicago whereabouts waves of immigrant people brought into existence unprecedented social problems. There's the reason why Symbolic interactionism is associated with the notion "School of Chicago".

Nearby, there's the Dramaturgical perspective that is an offspring of the Symbolic Interactionism a paradigm developed by Erving Goffman, seeing life as a performance. Citizen of Canada, Goffman is the father of the courant named "Ethnomethodology" systematized by Harold Garfinkel, a perspective in sociology that focuses on the way people make sense of their everyday world. Through this approach, people are viewed as "rational actors" using practical reasoning rather than "formal logic to make sense of and function in society. Dr, Goma has fully used the perspective in a study related to understanding the "Social world of frail elders and disabled persons".