ABSTRACT
Unlike conventional symbolic interactionism, radical interactionism places more importance on Park’s ideas than those of Mead and his protégé Blumer. Of course, I am not the first person to call for interactionists to draw on ideas from pragmatists other than Mead, if they want to transform interactionism into a viable sociological perspective from which to examine the problems confronting an ever more precarious world. Eugene Rochberg-Halton made a similar plea more than twenty years ago that was stubbornly ignored and so bears repetition: “Until symbolic interactionism gets over its half-century long infatuation with George Herbert Mead, it will remain the dubious sociological sect that it does today.” 1 According to Bernice Fisher and Anselm Strauss, there are a significant number of sociologists with strong ties to interactionism that refuse to become members of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism. One refuser, who Fisher and Straus felt captured perhaps best the sentiments of this group, was paraphrased by them as saying “they seem too sectarian, there is much more to sociology than Meadian social psychology.” 2
