Brief Lecture Notes - MAINES/SI

In his book The Faultine of Consciousness: A View of Interactionism in 
Sociology, David Maines gives a nice summary of the principles of symbolic
interactionism:

From Mead and  especially Blumer, he identifies three prime interactionist 
principles: 

    1) People transform themselves; 
    2) people transform their social worlds; and 
    3) people engage in social (communication) dialogue to do so

In this way, people construct situations and societies, social structures 
and cultures, then, once established, they act reflexively to direct and 
channel conduct. From this, he identified four basic "facts" from which
interactionists begin: 

    1) People can think and they possess self-awareness; 
    2) Communication is central to all human activity; 
    3) All forms of human activity occur in  situations; 
    4) Human relationships and collectivities are forms of human  activity. 

From this emerge three basic orienting propositions: 

    1) human activity involves transactions of meaning; 
    2) Variation, change, and uncertainty are intrinsic to group life; 
    3) "society" and the  "individual" are inseparable - they are 
        simply different phases of  social processes. 

From this simple framework, he then identifies and dispels five basic 
myths about interactionism:

    1) Interactionism is subjective; 
    2) To assert centrality of meaning  does not reduce interactionism
       to a variant of social pyschology; 
    3) Looking at behavior as situation is not limited to microanalyses; 
    4) Focusing on human agency does not constitute a denial of social
       structure; 
    5) Nothing prevents interactionists from using any method,  
       including quantitative variable analysis. 

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