ABSTRACT
In the debates surrounding symbolic interactionism, a recurrent charge was that it endorsed a relativist stance which denied any objective reality whatsoever to social life by reducing it entirely to the perceptions or definitions of individuals. In so far as the notion of defining the situation was taken seriously and to its limits, it was seen to combine with other arguments, e.g. Winch’s, in inducing a relativist current into sociological thought. The accusation was most prominently made in relation to the notion of labelling, which, as we have shown in Chapter 6, can be seen as adopting a strange attitude to social reality, i.e. deviance exists only in the eye of the beholder. If symbolic interactionism appeared to encourage such relativist developments, then ethnomethodology was regarded as carrying them even further, to the extreme.
