Interaction and Symbolic Interactionism 1

This special issue of Symbolic Interaction aims to explore the role of the concept of interaction in contemporary theory and research within the discipline and cognate areas. The impetus for this collection of essays came from the observation that studies in symbolic interaction and other “interactionist” approaches differ greatly in the extent to which interaction is a focus of concern and, where it is of interest, in the theoretical and methodological resources employed to explore it. As the essays that form the beginning section of this edition show, interaction ritual theory, structural symbolic interactionist approaches, ethnomethodology, and the Iowa School all represent quite distinctive orientations to this issue. Chris Hausmann, Amy Jonason, and Erika Summers-Effler compare interaction ritual theory (Collins 2004) with Stryker’s (2008) structural approach to symbolic interactionism. Following Collins, the authors argue for the importance of participants’ emotional orientation to situations. They see individuals’ actions being motivated by an anticipation of emotional energy. In contrast, interaction ritual theory entails a clear focus on interaction as a Durkheimian “ritualistic” activity, through which the sense of society as a moral entity emerges. Dan E. Miller’s essay illustrates that the Iowa School’s concern continues to be with developing universal models of copresence and social processes that outline the sequences of forms of action such as greetings, negotiation, deviant activity, as well as particular forms of relationships, such as authority or autocratic relationships. In contrast, Alex Dennis’s essay demonstrates that this is quite different to an ethnomethodological approach, which is not directed toward generalization but toward exploring the distinctiveness or the “just-thisness” of particular settings. As these examples show, then, the