ABSTRACT
Symbolic Interaction Theory has always been the heart and soul of American sociology. Other theoretical approaches have focused on disembodied statistical aggregates, impersonal macroprocesses, the raging, changing flow of class struggle, and on the surgical interplay of demographic categories. Symbolic interaction theory has focused on real thinking—intending, trying, failing, loving, hurting human beings. Symbolic Interaction theory has fallen upon hard times. It developed in a world in which people tried with considerable success to share in the creation of a cooperative symbolic environment with but little in the way of practiced deceit and scientifically informed fraud. Symbolic interaction research opened up the social organization of homosexual life, of barroom behavior, of the microdynamics of the classroom as well as the structure of action at funerals, weddings, courts martial, and in the framing of the holy. People, together, construct and deconstruct the meaning of whole historical epochs.
