ABSTRACT
Several scholars over the years have provided descriptions and assessments of symbolic interactionism. Richard Bernstein's observation complements author's thesis that interactionism was ill-timed for sociology's institution-building phase, and so in both the cases of pragmatism and interactionism there has been a lag in the conventional understanding of their relevance to and necessity for a more mature sociology. The sociologist focuses on the actor as a socially constructed entity, as "actor-in-interaction", or "actor-in-society". The site of the most concentrated and explicit interactionist work, of course, is the journal Symbolic Interaction. Utilizers represent a category of liminal interactionists in the sense that they overtly use the perspective but are not known as interactionists. The next category, what author's call "unaware interactionists", represents a kind of invisible interactionism, because neither the scholars themselves nor their scholarship are associated with interactionism.
