THE SOCIOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

This article reports secondary findings that emerged from a more general concern with social change. In attempting to make explicit the substantive arguments and implications of various theoretical approaches to the study of social change, sociologists discovered a substantial area of disagreement among symbolic interactionists with regard to this topic. In as much as symbolic interactionism is usually regarded as a unitary theoretical position, this considerable disjunction seemed to call for explanation in its own right. Both the historical development of interactionism and the nature of its principal intellectual sources suggest the possibility of important differences within this tradition. The purposes of this article are, first, to report the extent and nature of the differences that divide symbolic interactionists with respect to a topic of general concern, social change; second, to note certain sociological factors associated with these divergences; and, finally, to explore theoretically the relationship between a particular theoretical stance and a constellation of sociological variables. A central contention of this article is that differences among interactionists are associated with the kinds of relationships in which these sociologists are involved. A sociological perspective focusing upon the nature and types of relationships should be as useful in understanding sociological reasoning as it is in understanding any other type of reasoning.