ABSTRACT
Symbolic interactionism (SI) is a distinctly American variant of interpretive scholarship, showing significant influences of pragmatist thinking and steadily developing as an applied sociological tradition at the University of Chicago. Intellectually, SI is the offspring of German phenomenology (Husserl, 1960; Simmel, 1950) and American pragmatism, emerging largely out of the ideas of George Herbert Mead (1934; 1977) and Charles Horton Cooley (1918). The American influences are most striking in SI's emphasis on individual sense making, expressed through its detailed development of the role of the self in the construction of reality. In fact, Martindale (1981) characterizes SI as a genre of research and thinking that emphasizes the creation of meaning in social situations, with the point of gravity being located in the self or personhood.
