The Interactionist Imagination: Studying Meaning, Situation and Micro-Social Order

The study of human interaction is integral to sociology and its attempt to shed light on and understand the social world. The tradition of interactionism is therefore a longstanding and time-honoured perspective within sociology, and although it has always been regarded as an alternative perspective in a discipline often focused on macrosocial developments and large-scale structures, it has continued to retain relevance and produce important theories and studies. This edited volume explores the roots and shows the development in, diversification of and recent advances in interactionism as an important perspective in sociology. All chapters are introductory and illustrate, exemplify and discuss the impact individual sociologists working within an interactionism framework have had on interactionism as perspective and on the discipline of sociology as such. The book contains introductions to the works of: Georg Simmel, Robert E. Park, George Herbert Mead, Everett C. Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Manford H. Kuhn, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Anselm L. Strauss, Jack D. Douglas, Howard S. Becker, Stanford M. Lyman, Arlie R. Hochschild and Gary Alan Fine.