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Symbolic Interactionism and the

Concept of Social Structure
Alex Dennis*
University of Salford
Peter J. Martin
University of Manchester

Although Blumer asserts that to deny the existence of “structure” in human

society is “ridiculous,” just such a denial has commonly been attributed to
him. The more conventional mainstream understanding of structure in
sociology, however, is theoretically incoherent, as demonstrated by classic
and modern studies of, for example, stratification. Blumer’s sociology is
shown, with particular reference to its bases in the pragmatist tradition, to
provide an alternative understanding of structure that is both theoretically
coherent and capable of empirical investigation. Furthermore, it is capable
of dissolving the dilemma of structure and agency in contemporary socio-
logical theory.
In his remarks on the implications for sociology of the thought of George Herbert
Mead, Herbert Blumer emphasizes the point that, although Mead describes the social
order as the outcome of collaborative “joint action,” such a position does not entail a
denial of “the existence of structure in human society. Such a position would be
ridiculous” (Blumer 1969: 75). Blumer’s critics would disagree, arguing that symbolic
interactionism “prevents the understanding of social structures and their constraining
characteristics or of patterns of human organization such as class hierarchies or power
constellations” (Coser 1976: 157). Even apparently sympathetic commentators are
prepared to accept that the perspective suffers from an “astructural bias,” and displays
an “unconcern with social structure” (Meltzer et al. 1975: 113). More recently,
Musolf (1992) has also accepted this criticism, arguing that only new directions in
interactionist thought will allow the perspective to address the macrosociological con-
cerns of power, inequality, and social structure. Ridiculous or not, then, the notion
that Blumer denied the existence of structure has become widespread, from the pub-
lication of Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer 1969) to the present day (see, for exam-
ple, the discussions in Denzin 1992: 56; Gouldner 1970: 379; Maines 1977: 236;
Morrione 2003: xiv; Sauder 2005: 286).
Our purpose here is to question the validity of this criticism, not only because it
misrepresents Blumer’s sociological position—although many critics do present a

*Communications should be sent to Alex Dennis, School of English, Sociology, Politics, and
Contemporary History, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, United Kingdom. We are
grateful to participants at the 2005 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction annual
meetings for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to the anonymous review-
ers for their criticisms.
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288 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

curiously myopic version of this but also because it fails to acknowledge symbolic
interactionism’s status as a distinct and coherent alternative to more orthodox forms
of sociological thought. At the risk of tautology, we will argue that the very concep-
tion of “social structure” is a product of, and embedded in, orthodox “structural”
sociology—the same orthodoxy to which Blumer’s work stands as a principled objec-
tion. This conception cannot be transported from one perspective to another, because
its meaning differs between the different theoretical traditions. Moreover, although
symbolic interactionism has indeed developed an approach for the analysis of pat-
terned social organization, including hierarchical differentiation and asymmetries of
power (see, for example, Hall 2003), interactionists have good reasons to regard “social
structure” as a problematic concept.
Just as Mead concluded that “metaphysical problems were unnecessary ‘riddles’
created by dualistic philosophies” (Baldwin 1986: 24), Blumer’s theoretical work aims
to overcome various problematic dualisms, among them the fruitless opposition
between realism and idealism in sociology. The concept of social structure is an exem-
plary case of the former in three ways. First, it requires a reification of social processes,
so that (as in Durkheim 1982) they become “things,” external to real people. Second,
it facilitates a portrayal of social life as static rather than processual, understood
through categories with largely stable relationships instead of through social actors
actually doing things. Third, its analytic utility depends on its being seen as the
cause of human behavior: it is necessarily deterministic in application. In short,
then, the structural conception of sociology takes society to be an external system
that is the “overall determinant of social action” (Blumer 1969: 74).
Often neglected in the secondary treatments of Blumer, however, is the fact that
Blumer was also concerned to show that an exclusive focus on the individual actor
could not form the basis of a theoretically satisfying sociological alternative: his rejec-
tions of psychological reductionism, subjectivism, and solipsism were equally forth-
right (Morrione 2004: xi). Indeed, one of Blumer’s neatest arguments is that structural
sociology is irredeemably subjective, as it inevitably requires analysts to impose their
own definitions of reality onto the social world they are investigating (Blumer 1969:
74). Blumer stresses that such a position ignores or denies the “obdurate character” of
the empirical world, which can “talk back in the sense of challenging and resisting, or
not bending to, our images or conceptions of it” (Blumer 1969: 22).
Blumer’s opposition to dualisms, then, should not be mistaken for a desire to show
that one side of a dualistic relationship (in this case, a commitment to Durkheimian
structural sociology) could be dissolved into the other (here, an individualistic or sub-
jectivist position). Rather, his aim is to develop a sociological perspective that tran-
scends the sterility of the realist—idealist or objective—subjective dualisms. In his own
words, “Mead was a pragmatist in philosophical stance, and so am I. . . . [F]or prag-
matism, reality does not exist in consciousness, nor is the reality eternally real, inde-
pendent of human experience with it” (Blumer quoted in Morrione 2004: xii). What,
then, is this reality that Blumer regards as the “obdurate character” of the social world?
Blumer’s answer cannot be clearer: “the empirical world of our discipline is the nat-
ural social world of everyday experience” (Blumer 1969: 148). As Morrione puts it,
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 289

“Blumer located action and the creation of meaning in an ever-emergent situated present
that is cognitively, behaviorally, and intersubjectively inseparable from the past and
future” (Morrione 2004: xii, emphases in original). In these formulations, and in his
view of the social order as a situated accomplishment, Blumer echoes the Schutzian
phenomenological tradition evident in such contemporaneous works as Berger and
Luckmann’s (1966) The Social Construction of Reality and Garfinkel’s (1967) Studies
in Ethnomethodology. Unlike these approaches, however, Blumer’s focus on “the
social world of everyday experience” has clear foundations in pragmatist philosophy.
It is our intention to show that these foundations provided Blumer with the tools to
develop a coherent and distinct mode of sociological thought and inquiry that is
incompatible with such notions as social structure and variable analysis as they are
conventionally understood (Abbott 1997), and that represents a viable alternative
approach to the dominant sociological orthodoxies. We will make this demonstra-
tion with particular reference to the concept of social structure—a topic, it will be
readily recalled, that symbolic interactionism has often been regarded as “incapable” of
addressing.

BLUMER AND THE PRAGMATIST ORIENTATION

OF THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
Sociological classics tend to be reread through the lens of contemporary disciplinary
developments, and, because of its current theoretical centrality, structure/agency
dualism tends to provide the means by which Blumer’s thought is understood.
Commentators overwhelmingly locate symbolic interactionism at the agency end of
this dualism (Dennis and Martin 2005). Our aim in this section is to question such
an attribution and to offer a preliminary clarification of what we understand symbolic
interactionism to be.
Blumer’s thought emerged from a radically different approach to doing sociology
(usually glossed as the “Chicago School”) from that which currently commands main-
stream recognition. Fundamentally empiricist in method, this approach stressed the
pragmatist arguments of James, Dewey, and (particularly) Mead as epistemological
touchstones and methodological foundations. Although notions of structure and
agency could be extracted from the Chicago School’s works, such an extraction would
represent a redescription of those works in contemporary terms rather than a reasonable
reconstruction of their authors’ own positions. In his exemplary excavation of Mead’s
views on what society might be, then, Athens (2005) is careful to demonstrate that the
meaning of institution in Mead’s thought, common maxims (Athens 2005: 307), is
similar but irreducible to the same concept as used by structuralist sociologists.
What is distinctive about the Chicago approach is, as Abbott (1997: 1152) puts
it, the presumption “that one cannot understand social life without understanding
the arrangements of particular social actors in particular social times and places.”
This presumption is most corrosive to those forms of sociology based on the analysis
of variables: the idea of context-independent Durkheimian social facts, capable of
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290 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

allowing different settings to be compared, contrasted, and organized on continua,

is utterly alien to the Chicago tradition. Although facts can be extracted from set-
tings, they remain the products of those settings, and the social property of partici-
pants to their production—including those facts, like anomie, alienation, astructural
bias, or the masculine gaze, generated in the settings of professional sociologists.
Settings are not, of course, hermetically sealed off from one another, but their rela-
tionships require discovery and are not capable of being specified a priori. But, as
Abbott (1997) points out, sociology remains committed to just the kinds of variable
analysis Blumer (1956) sought to undermine, his critique producing what has been
called “one of the most telling 35-year silences in the recent history of academic life”
(Watson 1995: 317).
Blumer’s critique of variable analysis did not come out of nowhere: it is a contri-
bution to, and development of, the Chicago tradition’s emphasis on the specificity of
situations. Although Blumer was often critical of this tradition’s orientations and
organization (see, in particular, Blumer 1939), the Chicago School provided both an
intellectual home and a critical context within which he could pursue his method-
ological and conceptual arguments. Although much has been written about the divi-
sions between Blumer and other Chicago sociologists (see, for instance, Becker 1999;
Abbott and Gaziano 1995), to the extent that there is a “Chicago School,” it is one
that shares many of the same characteristics and concerns of symbolic interactionism.
These characteristics might very generally be characterized as a militantly empirical
sociological practice informed by pragmatist philosophical underpinnings. For the
purposes of our argument, we will focus on three themes that illustrate these charac-
teristics: (1) that institutions are the products of interactions; (2) that sociological
studies are descriptions of the formal features of such institutions; and (3) that sta-
bility and change are context-dependent. Wirth’s (1928) The Ghetto will be used to
illustrate their application.
Institutions Are the Products of Interactions
Blumer drew on the Chicago School’s orientation to a fine-grained analysis of every-
day activities. Although this did not preclude statistical or other larger-scale forms of
analysis, it provided a background where some of the claims subsequently enunciated
on their behalf were treated with suspicion: institutions, organizations, classes, reli-
gions, and other structural aspects of the social world were treated as the product of
people’s activities rather than the unquestioned bases for sociological investigations.
This instantiates a key concept of pragmatist philosophy: rather than unquestioningly
accepting or peremptorily denying the existence of a phenomenon (in this case context-
independent features of social situations), that phenomenon becomes something to be
discovered, located empirically through processes of description and comparison.
Thus, in Wirth’s (1928) work, a particular synagogue was shown to be the prod-
uct of the elaboration of secular, traditional (usually first-generation immigrant), and
“Americanized” forms of Judaism. Its relative stability is not taken for granted but is
used to say something about the nature of religious institutions at times of social
change, and how political negotiations between different ethnic communities resolve
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 291

themselves through negotiation, compromise, and schism. For example, conservative

congregations were forced to postpone the Friday evening service from sundown until
after supper to accommodate urban American working practices. Although such con-
gregations professed to be orthodox, they were regarded as relatively secular by the
strictly orthodox on the one hand and relatively conservative by the reformed con-
gregations on the other. What Wirth brings to our attention is the range of practices
that count for members of a community as a congregation: having the status of a syn-
agogue is not something that rests on either adherence to Judaic custom or the abil-
ity to maintain a large and active community of believers. Rather, it is something
that is constantly worked out between groups of interested parties, more or less to
their satisfaction, with new circumstances and interested parties always having to be
taken into consideration. Most important of all, it is absolutely not something that
can be determined a priori by a sociologist or other disinterested observer.
Sociology Is the Description of the Formal Features of Institutions
Blumer shared with earlier Chicago scholars an orientation to formalism as a means
of organizing and presenting sociological findings (see Park and Burgess 1921 on the
role of Simmel in Chicago sociology). Rather than seeking generalizations that can
be applied to larger and larger groups, an emphasis was placed on the ways in which
institutional features of one setting might reflect those of another. Perhaps the clear-
est statement of this position is to be found in Hughes (1951: 320): “The compar-
ative student of man’s work learns about doctors by studying plumbers; and about
prostitutes by studying psychiatrists.” Instead of reducing the study of different jobs
to the sociology of work, Hughes evinces the Chicago desire to find out what dif-
ferent jobs have in common and how they differ—and, by asking questions of this
kind, finding out what the formal features of those different jobs might be in the first
place.
This reflects the pragmatists’ rejection of neo-Platonism on the one hand and what
Mills (1959) called “abstracted empiricism” on the other. There is no reason to believe
that social phenomena necessarily have essential features in common, that these fea-
tures could be specified on an a priori basis, or that they could be unproblematically
applied in different cases as a theoretical framework for understanding something
novel. Social facts cannot be assumed. This, however, does not imply a rejection of the
notion that different settings might have features in common, or, indeed, that such fea-
tures could be used as sensitizing concepts, or spurs to the imagination, in other inves-
tigations (Blumer 1954: 7). This focus on empirical investigation furnished the Chicago
School with the analytic resources to discover formal features of the social world.
In Wirth’s (1928) account of ghetto life, one such formal feature is community sol-
idarity, mediated by the synagogue. “[D]eep bonds of sympathy” emerge through
“colorful ritual,” thus providing “a place of dignity” for an individual who would be
a “mere Jew” in the outside world. The centrality of the synagogue depends crucially
on its capacity to provide families and households with the status they deserve, based
on their “learning, piety, the purity of family life, and services rendered to the com-
munity,” rather than on the basis of their wealth. In turn, the community as a whole
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292 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

“acquired a reputation . . . through its outstanding personalities, particularly through

its philanthropists and scholars” (Wirth 1928: 37). The synagogue is not, then, just
an instance of a religious institution, or even an instance of a synagogue like any
other. What Wirth emphasizes is the ways in which the institution in this case is used
by members of the ghetto community to satisfy certain basic human needs that, given
their circumstances, cannot be fulfilled elsewhere. Their marginal status means that
their capacity to be afforded respect by others, and gain a reputation for their actions
rather than their ethnic and/or religious identity, cannot be taken for granted in the
ways members of other communities might legitimately expect. Formally, then, the
synagogue does not represent that which makes Jews Jewish, but rather allows them
to maintain their status as human beings as well as Jews and so—over time—reduce
the extent to which they are treated as different. Ironically, the very institution which
is at the heart of their religious beliefs becomes the thing that facilitates greater inte-
gration with Gentile culture. The formal features of the synagogue, viewed from a
pragmatic Chicago School position, prove to almost reverse its institutional features,
viewed from the perspective of structuralist sociology.
Stability and Change Are Context-Dependent
Notions of structural integrity and system maintenance were treated with analytic
suspicion by Blumer and his earlier Chicago counterparts: “stable and recurrent forms
of joint action do not carry on automatically in their fixed form but have to be sus-
tained by the meanings that people attach to the type of situation in which the joint
action reoccurs” (Blumer 1969: 59). Inertia alone will not maintain an orderly social
situation, and one cannot treat such a situation as self-maintaining independently of
the interpretative work of its members. Thus, just what something is—an institution,
a class, an ethnic group, a religious movement—depends on the meanings people give
it and take from it. For example, an apparently context-independent feature of
human life is the nature of intergroup relations. “All societies of any great size have
in-groups and out-groups; in fact, one of the best ways of describing a society is to
consider it a network of smaller and larger in-groups and out-groups. And an in-
group is only one because there are out-groups” (Hughes 1962: 8). The formal fea-
tures of a social institution, then, are the outcome of interactional work that
determines what the boundaries of that institution are, who is “inside” and who is
“outside,” and how individuals can move between the two categories.
The pragmatist roots of this approach should by now be evident: rather than treat-
ing stable social phenomena as the unquestioned starting points for analysis, or by
denying their stability altogether, the ways in which those phenomena are constituted
as stable becomes a topic of investigation. Neither stability nor change is assumed to
be a natural characteristic of human life or social phenomena, but both are to be
regarded as the outcomes of meaningful action. In his careful critique of the concept
of industrialization, Blumer (1990) takes this concern to its logical conclusion by
demonstrating the radical incoherence of the idea that industrialization or its effects can
be treated as consistent or analytically coherent between settings—and, indeed, that the
concept of setting is itself one that requires further elaboration to be analytically useful.
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 293

The idea of a stable set of institutions being driven from one form to another by a
homogeneous set of social forces is revealed as a myth.
For Wirth, these concerns map literally onto the geography of the ghetto area.
Individuals’ social and religious commitments shape where they choose to live and
work, and their domestic and vocational situations shape their outlooks. “Social types
range themselves in constellations, each stellar figure with its little circle of satellites
seeking its place in the life of the group and changing its position and character as the
culture of the area is transformed” (Wirth 1928: 250). But just as the ghetto inhabi-
tants and their beliefs are transformed in the areas of “second settlement” (those areas
inhabited by “Americanized” Jews), elsewhere they remain static and traditional: the
daily routine of the “ghetto Jew” “is confined largely to the narrow area of his imme-
diate vicinity. Even when he drives his wagon through the other sections of the city,
he does so with his eyes closed to the life that goes on” (Wirth 1928: 251). In short,
the institution of Judaism is challenged both by internal differences and by external
pressures, and, self-consciously, members of the community locate and maintain them-
selves in particular, but gradually changing, positions as participants and creators of
this institution.
Blumer’s intellectual development is not, therefore, merely reducible to a commit-
ment to ethnographic method or a suspicion of theory—or, indeed, to a continuous
reinterpretation and analysis of Mead’s “social behaviorism.” Many of the key tropes in
his argument are just those of earlier Chicago sociologists, and, we will argue, his work
is best understood with this in mind. Central to these arguments are a pragmatic rejec-
tion of dualisms, in particular a rejection of the notion that one must either accept or
deny the existence of social structure as an a priori theoretical matter, and a commit-
ment to finding out through investigation how orderly social institutions are produced
and maintained. One of Blumer’s great contributions to sociological thought was to
demonstrate the dangers of not maintaining such a tentative position with respect to
theory: “Theoretical positions are held tenaciously, the concepts and beliefs in one’s
field are gratuitously accepted as inherently true, and the canons of scientific procedure
are sacrosanct. It is not surprising, consequently, that the images that stem from these
sources control the inquiry and shape the picture of the sphere of life under study. In
place of being tested and modified by firsthand acquaintance with the sphere of life
they become a substitute for such acquaintance” (Blumer 1969: 37).

STUDIES OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

In accordance with the pragmatist position, then, the Chicago School’s approach to
the concept of structure takes it as a possibly useful redescription of the ongoing flow of
human activities, rather than an ontological feature of the social world itself. Structure
is (sometimes) a useful placeholder, a way of illustrating how the pattern of social
organization is perpetuated and reproduced, but not that pattern itself—because such
a pattern is inevitably a way of facilitating sociological description, not something
intrinsic to the setting in its own right. People orientate to different things, move out
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of and into geographical areas and social circles, reinforce and change their institu-
tional affiliations, and so on. In the course of their doing this the structure of a social
world changes or remains the same—but that structure is not something that inheres
in the social world but is an artifact of the questions we ask of it. It is a part of human
activities in just these ways and no others—and to treat it as a real thing, something
that can be related to other real things, is to conflate a sociological description with
the thing being described. In this section we will suggest that this distinction is clearly
exemplified by the ways in which conventional sociologists have understood and
described social inequality and stratification. In doing so our aim is to substantiate
Blumer’s point that what is claimed to be an “‘objective’ approach holds the danger
of the observer substituting his view of the field of action for the view held by the
actor” (Blumer 1969: 74).
Sociological descriptions of societies in terms of a hierarchy of strata, or as a struc-
ture of classes, derive from an understandable wish to represent societies as wholes,
and to present the big picture of class inequalities as institutionalized features of such
societies. The problems of such approaches are well documented, from disputes
about what classes consist of (Martin 1987) to arguments over the utility of differ-
ent methodological and measuring techniques (Crompton 1993). From a pragma-
tist position, however, one would have to argue that such approaches cannot achieve
the degrees of neutrality and objectivity to which they aspire. Such approaches
inevitably fail to be literal descriptions of the social structure as they are, and have to
be selective representations that depend on the particular interests—practical and
theoretical—of researchers, and those researchers’ a priori theoretical and method-
ological commitments (Scheff 1995). Putting it bluntly, the ways in which the class
structure has been represented in most sociological studies is an artifact of those
studies’ theoretical and methodological preconceptions: “all class schemes are social
constructs, or rather, the constructs of sociologists. Therefore different class schemes,
when applied to the same occupational structure, can produce quite different ‘class
maps’” (Crompton 1993: 50).
The concept of social class is itself a source of theoretical problems. Indeed,
although most European researchers have accepted the validity of the term, the dom-
inant American approach has been to conceptualize social inequalities in terms of sta-
tus (until challenged by neo-Marxian authors such as Bowles and Gintis, 1976, and
Wright 1978). The very existence of such a divergent approach suggests that the def-
inition of social classes, and the assignment of people to them, is not a neutral or
objective process, but one in which theoretical perceptions of relevance are actively
involved. Even among those theorists who accept the validity of the concept of class,
major disputes exist concerning where boundary lines between class strata can be
drawn. In the classic Marxian formulation, a tiny bourgeoisie comes to confront a
huge proletariat, and some authors (for example Braverman 1974) continued to argue
for this view. Others, however, attempted to incorporate an expanding middle class
into their models: for Poulantzas (1975), for example, the real working class has been
reduced to about a fifth of the overall working population, whereas for Wright (1985:
45) those in the middle class occupy a contradictory class position.
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 295

Other sociologists have developed models of class that owe more to Weber than
to Marx, regarding the formation of social classes as an empirically open question,
and seeking to identify the structural conditions under which real classes actually
come into existence—or fail to do so (see, for example, Goldthorpe 1980). In
retaining the Marxian priority accorded to economic relations in the class structure,
however, and in basing their analyses on the occupations of individual people, such
analysts have been accused of neglecting the other factors Weber (1948) thought
were important in social stratification—in particular ethnicity, nationality, and reli-
gion. Additionally, Garnsey (1978) argued that the conventional approach to class
analysis is “male-centered” both because it presupposes that women’s class position
depends on that of husbands or fathers, and because it assumes that women’s
domestic labor is marginal to the system of production. By excluding women, the
young, and the old, and by its inability to incorporate families, then, research in
this tradition yields a picture of social life that is hard to relate to any real, or pos-
sible, societies. Similar points could be made about the neglect of, among other
things, ethnic or national identification and their effects, or political organizations
and culture (Crompton 1993: 77). Inevitably, there have been more recent efforts
to incorporate women and ethnic groups into studies of class and social mobility,
but none has been successful—and it is hard to see how any could succeed: the idea
of producing a multidimensional model of the social structure cannot be realized.
Our point here is that class is essentially a commonsense, rather than a scientific,
concept (Schutz 1962). As such it “cannot simply be taken for granted as the basis
of sociological analysis which aspires to be scientific, for the ‘objective’ research
ends up simply reflecting the subjective preferences of the researcher” (Martin
1987: 95).
Attempts to investigate the class structure have encountered equally intractable
methodological problems. Many of these concern the validity and reliability of data
generated by sample surveys in which individual people are interviewed or sent ques-
tionnaires about their occupational experiences. By restricting what counts as class to
what happens to people at work, and by treating those people as isolated experiencers
of their structural position rather than members of social networks and other groups,
such studies tend to reinforce the gap between individual experience and the social
structure. Somehow what happens to individuals has to be reconciled with their class
positions—but how this is actually achieved in practice depends on the skillful use of
theory to bridge the gap. Because more than one theoretical reconciliation is possible,
in each case the researcher has to select among alternative accounts to provide what
can be construed as an objective account. Such attempts illustrate the pragmatist view
of knowledge as contextual—in this case, dependent on the a priori assumptions of
the analyst.
Such studies are also problematic insofar as they seek to determine the life (or at
least employment) experiences of all the members of a particular population. One
problem with such an approach is that, if the theoretical justification for the concept
of class is correct, a tiny proportion of that population will have a disproportionate
effect on the social structure as a whole. More attention, then, should be paid to
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members of powerful and wealthy elites—but these are precisely the groups that are
significantly underrepresented in such studies: indeed, in the Oxford Mobility Study
of the 1970s no data whatsoever could be collected on these sections of the popula-
tion (Martin 1984: 33).
There are also concerns about how occupational positions are, in fact, related to
social classes: theorists have been increasingly concerned by people in the routine
nonmanual class category (those doing clerical and lower administrative work). Are
they members of the new middle class, or are they becoming proletarianized? In fact,
the great majority of people in such occupations are female, and so excluded from
most studies of class. Moreover, it has been shown that, for men, the significance of
occupying such a position is variable: for those whose origins are in manual work this
may represent promotion to an office job, but to younger men it may be only a step-
ping stone on the way to a more senior managerial post (Stewart et al. 1980). The
sample survey thus cannot reveal that the significance of the same occupational posi-
tion is very different for the different people occupying it, and thus it cannot be con-
sidered to be the same thing as far as class location is concerned.
Studies of stratification, then, demonstrate that in order to bridge the gap between
theoretical claims and research practice, sociological approaches must deal with large
numbers of people, constant uncertainties, and continual change. One response to
this problem is to allow the availability of methodological techniques to determine
data collection and analysis—as in Blau and Duncan’s (1967) attempt to get the big
picture of a social system’s stratification. The result, unfortunately, is a description of
the American “occupational structure” that could not possibly describe any imagina-
ble human society, being restricted, as we have suggested, to a sample survey of men
between ages twenty and sixty-four. Others have foreclosed the debate by theoretical
fiat (Cicourel 1964). Giddens, for instance, correctly observed that a rigorous
Weberian approach, taking all the different factors that could influence patterns of
stratification into account, would lead to the identification of a “cumbersome plural-
ity of classes” (Giddens 1981: 104). He therefore asserted that there are “only a lim-
ited number of classes” (Giddens 1981: 106) in any society. Just why this is so is
unclear. There is surely a “cumbersome plurality” of chemical components in a com-
plex protein, but a biologist or pharmacologist could not use this fact to decide a
priori that they can be divided into discrete categories to simplify analysis. On the
contrary, he or she would necessarily have to deal with contingencies, uncertainties,
and the impossibility of conventional measurement until the details of the phenom-
enon under investigation could be adequately described. In some respects things are
easier in social life, as Weber (1978: 15) pointed out: “We can accomplish something
which is never obtainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understand-
ing of the actions . . . of individuals.” Certainly a wider scope of phenomena is readily
observable.
There are, of course, patterns of inequality—of wealth, power, prestige, and so
on—that are the outcomes of the activities of individuals and groups as they pursue
their perceived interests. It is likely that our understanding of the processes of social
stratification will be best furthered by the direct investigation of these activities in the
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real world rather than through the heavy-handed imposition of concepts such as the
“class structure.” We will return to this point subsequently.

THE IDEA OF INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

If the concerns raised above are legitimate—and, as we mentioned, we are unaware
of any coherent responses to them—then a central concern for nonstructural soci-
ologies must be to radically separate description from the things being described: to
remain faithful to the phenomena under investigation. Such concerns are elaborated
by, and find a radical expression in, the “mature” Chicago School’s emphasis on
institutional analysis. The concept of institution, of course, is usually seen (cer-
tainly in sociology textbooks) as one denoting collectivities basic to the perspective
of mainstream structural sociology, as when, for example, the family, the church,
the nation-state, armies, or business corporations are described as institutions. Our
argument, however, is that a close examination of the concept and its usage reveals
not only some (normally ignored) problems for the structural perspective but also
the distinctiveness of the alternative vision of sociological work that animates inter-
actionist studies.
Alexander and Giesen’s (1987) characterization of Mead stands as a fairly typical
assessment of his ideas and influence. Although they defend Mead against the
(common) misreading that his ideas lead to a “microsociology devoid of macrorefer-
ence,” and emphasize the ways in which his analysis is “open to more collectivist con-
cerns,” they conclude that “Mead lacked an institutional theory,” and that his followers
neglected the possibility of this “collective link” so that “experience, not individually
mediated structure . . . became the hallmark of interactionist microanalysis” (Alexander
and Giesen 1987: 9–10). This reading presupposes that social life can only be con-
ceptualized in terms of interactional (micro) or institutional (macro) levels, and that
the basic theoretical problem for sociology must be to provide a link between both
sides of the great divide. In fact, almost a third of Mead’s most famous work is con-
cerned with society, and an entire section devoted to “The Community and the
Institution” (Mead 1934: 260–273). What emerges from Mead’s account is not an
understanding of social life as operating on different levels, but—particularly as a result
of the ability to “take the role of the other” and the ways in which the “generalized
other” enters into the thinking of individuals (Mead 1934: 256)—a perspective that
sees organized patterns of social life as constituted and reproduced through the regular
interactions of real people in particular times and places. In this, Mead emphasizes the
importance of the uniquely human capacity to communicate through the medium of
language and the infinite possibilities for symbolic representation it facilitates.
Given this general perspective, and Mead’s (1934: 262) insistence on the pro-
foundly social sources of the individual’s self, it is somewhat perplexing that socio-
logical work in the interactionist tradition has been characterized by some of its
critics as “subjective and voluntaristic” (Lichtman 1970: 77), and as “an atheoretical
sociological theory [sic] that refuses in principle to transcend the peculiar characteristics
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298 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

of social processes in the here and now” (Coser 1976: 156). Indeed, there is a certain
irony in the fact that Mead has also been criticized for presenting an oversocialized
conception of human action, exaggerating the degree to which people are led to
conform to the perceived expectation of the (internalized) “generalized other”
(Katovich and Reese 1993). It is hard to reconcile this Mead with the one who has
been accused of ignoring “social structures and their constraining characteristics”
(Coser 1976: 157). In fact, Mead’s analysis is an attempt to transcend a sterile and
false subjective-objective dualism, and to propose a genuinely dialectical model of
human conduct. Thus, for instance, although institutionalized patterns of activity are
essential components of any form of social organization, institutions themselves need
not “crush or blot out individuality, or discourage any distinctive or original expres-
sions of thought or behavior. . . . On the contrary, they need to define the social, or
socially responsible, patterns of individual conduct only in a very broad sense” (Mead
1934: 262). Mead’s focus, then, is neither on coercion nor unconstrained volun-
tarism, but on how people define situations in ways they consider appropriate, and
interact with others on that basis. Athens’ (2005) recent exposition of the relation-
ships between selves, institutions, and maxims in Mead’s thought is an excellent clar-
ification of these issues.
With this in mind, it is clear why, in one specific sense, Alexander and Giesen
(1987) are right to suggest that Mead lacks a theory of institutions. For Mead, and
for the interactionists who followed him, institutions are not entities existing on a sep-
arate level from that of the individual, nor are they ontologically distinct emergent
properties of social interaction. Mead does not need a theory of institutions, as they
have no privileged place in his theoretical framework. Instead, institutions—as par-
ticular instances of all orderly patterns of social organization—are simply complexes
of human interaction, chains of self-other relations in which processes of symbolic
communication are of fundamental importance. From this perspective, we can
develop an empirical approach to what Blumer (1969: 148) called “the natural social
world of everyday experience.”
We wish to emphasize that a focus on how the intersubjective world is constituted
and sustained leads to an analytical approach in which the familiar concepts of main-
stream sociology—such as structures, systems, classes, organizations, institutions, and
so on—appear not as objective entities but rather as modes of representing the complex-
ity of human activity. From Blumer’s perspective, there is no higher level of social life
that requires theorizing by sociologists. It makes little sense to argue that Mead lacks a
theory of institutions or that interactionists ignore social structures, since their under-
standing of the social world is based on premises fundamentally different to those of
conventional structural sociology. Only if the presuppositions of orthodox sociology
are accepted a priori can interactionists be accused of being antitheoretical. Moreover,
it may be further argued that modern sociology has gradually (and reluctantly) had to
come to terms with the empirical inadequacies of the theoretical postulation of social
systems or structures, so that “the collective concepts developed by early theorists have
been reformulated in ways that recognize the processes through which people actively
constitute their social worlds” (Martin 2004: 34; see also Jenkins 2002).
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 299

To anticipate a misunderstanding that has become tediously familiar, it should be

emphasized that this perspective does not entail a denial of the reality of armies,
bureaucracies, nation-states, and so on. Such complexes of human activity constitute
the very facticity of the social world, or, as Blumer (1969: 22) had it, its “obdurate
character.” An interactionist approach need not deny the authority of the president,
the reality of income differentials, the power of global corporations, and so on, but
must seek to explain such phenomena as the results of, and as sustained or challenged
by, the activities of real people in particular situations, often over considerably long
periods of time. Moreover, a principled refusal to accept the ontological reality of struc-
tures or systems, and a corresponding focus on the ways in which they are socially con-
stituted, does not (as some critics would have it) mean that the organized patterns of
social life are to be seen as subjective, malleable, or open to arbitrary redefinition. As
individuals, we are confronted with the social reality of established, organized, norma-
tive patterns of activity and a stable environment of symbolic representations—the fact
that the norms and the symbols are ultimately sustained through patterns of interaction
does not make them any less resistant. We learn the language of our culture, for exam-
ple, and although we may modify it in some ways, or use it more or less effectively, we
are not at liberty to abandon it or invent a new one. As Maines (1977: 238) has put
it, “Blumer’s message should not be lost . . . because these very constraining processes
are composed of and expressed through interacting individuals.”
Putting the matter another way, we could say that although collective concepts
may constitute powerful symbols in everyday discourse—indeed, they are indispensa-
ble in the process of communication—this does not mean that they should therefore
be treated as real for the purposes of sociological analysis. To do so would be to ille-
gitimately reify them, to commit the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead
1925: 72). It is inconceivable that we could sustain even routine conversations with-
out making reference to such notions as, for example, political parties, churches, or
heavy metal fans. Yet as any empirical investigation shows, and as our experience of
social participation confirms, no such grouping is a unified entity composed of par-
ticipants sharing the same ideas and motivations—as our comments on Wirth, above,
indicate. As Blumer (2004: 95, emphases in original) points out:
Group life exists in what people do. It is not a preestablished organization con-
ceived in terms of the completed acts that it is believed or hoped the people will
carry out. However much people may conform in their acts to a preestablished
scheme, the scheme is not their action. Nor is group life a kind of product of the
acts of the individual participants, such as the articulated arrangement into
which one finds the completed acts of the individuals to have fallen. Group life
consists of the actual acting of people—not a conceived organization that ante-
dates that acting, nor of an articulated product of that acting. . . . Group life . . .
has an organized character, but that character exists in it, not before it or after it.
Blumer has also made explicit the direct link between this interactionist approach to
the empirical analysis of the social world and Mead’s pragmatist philosophy, pointing
out that Mead was “primarily a philosopher. He differed from the bulk of philosophers
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300 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

in believing that the cardinal problems of philosophy arose in the realm of human
group life and not in a separate realm of an individual thinker and his universe”
(Blumer 1981: 902). This intimate connection between pragmatism and the interac-
tionist approach to sociological study is at the heart of our argument. The manner in
which this connection manifests itself in sociological practice therefore requires expli-
cation. To achieve this we will consider three areas of sociological concern: the cre-
ation and maintenance of the social world, the negotiated nature of that world, and
the relationship between people’s values and that world’s constitution.

THE PRAGMATIST BASES OF INTERACTIONIST STUDIES

The Creation and Maintenance of the Social World
First, as we have mentioned, the analytical focus of interactionist studies is on the cre-
ation and maintenance of a shared social world by real people in particular situations.
If successful, such an analysis will make explicit the bases on which such situations are
defined by participants, including symbolic representations and the taken-for-granted
aspects that influence their interpretations of what is going on. What it does not aim
to produce are decontextualized, objective descriptions that will reveal the intrinsic
meanings of cultural objects.
An example will make this point in a less abstract way. In what Becker (1982) calls
the “art world” of symphonic music, interactions take place against a background dis-
course in which such terms as orchestra, composer, score, audience, critic, conductor,
and so on are generally unproblematic. Such discourses and their conventionally
established concepts may reveal much to the sociologist about the assumptions, inter-
ests, and purposes of the various people in different social worlds. It does not follow,
though, that these concepts correspond to ontologically real entities that can be ulti-
mately or unambiguously defined. The concept of “conductor,” for example, is not an
objective description of a particular individual, but rather something that tells us
about the role such a person is expected to play within the symphonic art world. There
are many other ways in which the person could be defined, all of which are (poten-
tially) relevant to other situations, other “worlds.” The person who in certain times
and places is the “conductor” may also, in other contexts, be “a father,” “the accused,”
“a high coronary risk,” “a board member,” and so on. That is to say, there is no sin-
gle, privileged, or transcendent way of describing such a person—any person in
fact—independently of the discursive contexts in which particular modes of repre-
sentation are established. In seeking to understand social activities in such contexts,
interactionist analyses reflect the pragmatists’ principled objections to essentialism.
The Social World Is a Negotiated World
As we argued above, the notion that structural features of society have stable prop-
erties independent of the activities of members of that society is deeply problem-
atic. In order to generate a model of those features—of that society—it is necessary
either to systematically reduce the empirical complexity of the phenomena under
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 301

investigation (as in Blau and Duncan 1967) or to make a theoretical decision about
how such phenomena must operate (as in Giddens 1981). Both strategies must be
adopted as a priori matters as they do not represent analytical claims based on empir-
ical data, but rather specify what is to count as an instance and what each instance
might be an instance of.
The interactionist alternative to such positions may be exemplified by the concept
of a “negotiated order” (Strauss et al. 1964; Strauss 1978). People in complex organ-
izations operate not on the basis of their role alone, because many such people with
different and possibly contradictory roles are required to cooperate to get the work of
the organization done. Instead, they negotiate with one another to get work done,
partly on the basis of their role, but also on the basis of their personalities and per-
sonal preferences, their relationships with other staff members, their extraorganiza-
tional networks and affiliations, to whom they owe favors and who owes them favors,
and so on. Through these negotiations work gets done. It is not the case, however,
that a stable, objective structure preexists those negotiations or is produced by them.
Such a structure simply does not exist in the ways Blau and Duncan, or Giddens,
might imagine. Rules govern participants’ activities, but those rules are themselves
interpreted and negotiated as part of the ongoing work of the organization. (This
does not mean that they are capable of being interpreted however one likes—as with
any social phenomena they do have an “obdurate character.”) Finding out what rules
might apply and how activities can be shown to be conducted with proper respect to
their authority are themselves part of ongoing organizational work. The structured
and stable features of any organization are necessarily the products of the webs of
interaction undertaken by that organization’s members. In accordance with pragma-
tist ideas, then, what seem to be “things”—stable structures—are empirically investi-
gated and found to be “activities”—human interactions—that maintain and develop
the stable operations of the setting under investigation.
Values Shape How the Social World Is Constituted
In conventional structuralist sociology there is a tendency to treat activities as deter-
mined by objective and external social facts. Where norms do appear they do so not
as individuals’ personal, professional, and collective values but as the products of
social systems. Thus, classically, Durkheim’s (2006) analysis of suicide relocates indi-
viduals’ feelings of alienation and hopelessness away from their psychological makeup
and toward the normative order of the society they inhabit: these things become func-
tions of religious affiliation, domestic circumstances, economic conditions, and so on.
And, as Alexander (1988: 98–99) argues, “[f ]or Herbert Blumer, George Homans,
the early Erving Goffman, the later Garfinkel, Ralph Turner, and Aaron Cicourel, the
only way to emphasize the importance of individual, contingent action was to neu-
tralize the influence of values and prior social structure as such.”
Interactionist sociologists, however, do not reduce the nature of social norms and
human values to mere psychological phenomena—indeed, the idea that they must
either be located at the level of a “prior social structure” or inside the heads of social
interactants is entirely alien to their perspective. Rather, values are found to be
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302 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS

things that emerge through, and are modified by, the interactional work of partici-
pants to a setting. Thus, in his careful analysis of the relationships between native
Canadians and Canadian Somali immigrants, Maines (2001: 158–161) shows how
each group’s attitude to the other is shaped by their culturally specific values.
Although most white Canadians orientate to other ethnic groups on the basis of
their race, Somali migrants make such in-group/out-group distinctions on the basis
of nationality. By being reduced to their racial characteristics, Somalis experience
majority Canadian understandings as denigrating and respond with hostility, thus
accelerating and worsening divisions between the two groups. The point here is not
that these distinctions are structural, but that the structural features of difference
emerge from the two groups engaging in social activities with one another: cultural
values are elaborated, strengthened, and crystallized through intergroup interac-
tions, rather than predetermining the ways in which those interactions could occur.
Just what values will be relevant in any situation is a function of the situation and
its participants—without people doing things the “normative order” can be no more
than an analytical fiction.
This focus on what Blumer called the “natural social world of everyday experience”
(Blumer 1969: 148) is, we believe, at the heart of interactionist sociology, and allows
the analyst to avoid the determinist account of human behavior inherent—and
inescapable—in structural approaches. This was certainly Blumer’s conclusion: “The
point of view of symbolic interactionism is that large-scale social organization has to
be seen, studied, and explained in terms of the process of interpretation engaged in
by the acting participants” (Blumer 1969: 58).

CONCLUSION
We have argued that, far from being deficient in its ability to deal with “macro” soci-
ological phenomena, symbolic interactionism is a coherent alternative to structural
approaches, and as a consequence the concept of structure (in any of the various ways
in which it has been employed in mainstream sociology) cannot simply be imported
into, or imposed upon, the interactionist perspective. That is, from the latter point of
view the concept of structure is itself problematic; indeed, as Blumer argued, the sup-
posedly objective concepts of “macro” sociology are themselves ultimately subjective
in that they are formulated on the basis of analysts’ assumptions and presuppositions.
We have suggested that the Chicago tradition of research—strongly influenced by
pragmatist currents of thought—has been, from the start, concerned with the ways
in which social order emerges out of the dynamics of human interaction. In contrast,
with reference to efforts to describe the class structure sociologically, we have argued
that the (widely varying) results not only betray the theoretical presuppositions of the
researchers but also are representations of no conceivable societies. So, following the
directions indicated by Mead, the symbolic interactionist tradition has focused on
institutional analysis in which—instead of presupposing that institutions are collec-
tive entities—the regular, orderly patterns of social life (including inequalities of
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SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 303

wealth, power, and prestige) are viewed as the outcomes of the collaborative interac-
tions of real people in real situations.
Our conclusion, then, is consistent with Blumer’s wish to differentiate the basic
premises of symbolic interactionism from those of the sociology and psychology that
have become orthodox—premises in which “the meanings of things for the human
beings who are acting are either bypassed or swallowed up in the factors used to
account for their behavior” (Blumer 1969: 3). Thus, “sociological views of human
society are, in general, markedly at variance with the premises . . . underlying sym-
bolic interactionism” (Blumer 1969: 83). By respecting Blumer’s message and his
legacy, we believe, it is possible both to demonstrate the problems inherent in struc-
tural thinking and to rescue sociology from its continuing grip.

Alex Dennis is Lecturer in the Sociology of Deviance at the University of Salford. His
previous publications include Making Decisions about People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

Peter J. Martin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. His pre-
vious publications include Sounds and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995) and Music and the Sociological Gaze (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006). The authors are currently working on an edited collection on the problem of
structure and agency in contemporary sociology.

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