Interactionism, Social Organization, and Social Processes: Looking Back and Moving Ahead
With its roots in American pragmatism, symbolic interactionism has created a distinctive perspective and produced numerous important contributions and now offers signie cant prospects for the future. In this article, I review my intellectual journey with this perspective over forty years. This journey was initiated within the American society, sociology, and symbolic interaction of circa 1960. I note many of the contributions made by interactionists since that time, with particular focus on those who have contributed to the study of social organization and social process. I offer an agenda for the future based on currently underdeveloped areas that have potential. These are inequality orders, institutional analysis, collective action across space and time, and the integration of temporal and spatial orders. The article concludes with calls for further efforts at cross-perspective dialogues, more attention to feminist scholars, and an elaborated critical pragmatism.
1. Autonomous modularity: syntax and semantics 2. The interface 3. Role structure 4. The linear order component 5. Morphology and morphophonology 6. Gaps and other defective elements 7. Conflict resolution 8. Tough 'movement': a tough construction.