ABSTRACT
Sometimes the meanings assigned to appearances are merely vague as when, for example, one notices 'a man in the middle of the road doing something with a round yellow thing'. Yet, even in these cases, happenings are not apprehended 'in the raw' but structured in terms of meanings, albeit ambiguous and provisional ones. Sometimes, however, through the energy of imagination, men fashion innovatory meanings from the substance of appearances, causing changes in patterns of human life and radical revisions of worlds-taken-for-granted. Thus meanings are socially constructed, maintained and revised. Care must be taken not to distort hopelessly the first-order meanings which form the second-order happenings of our sociological interest. The first-order meanings exist independently of the sociologist's imagination. They are products of the creative activity of real people in the real worlds, people who incidentally, may or may not welcome.
