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A history of the intellectual origins of the debate over the astructural bias is presented. The chapter summarizes both the emergent bias thesis and the charge of an astructural bias. The major works within this debate are reviewed. It has been found that the astructural bias still exists within the work of contemporary interactionists. The conclusion is that if interactionists want their work to be taken seriously, then they must seriously confront the distinguishing concept in sociology: social structure.

The papers in this section come from an idea that popped up in a bar after a day of meetings at the annual Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) meetings a couple years ago. The idea was to create an annual session at the SSSI meetings where we could bring together thoughtful people who knew the history of symbolic interactionism (SI) to hash out where they thought SI was coming from, the advantages of where it is, and where they would like it to go. The session would be called “Investigating Interactions” and would, in alternating years, focus on theory and methods. One of the prime reasons I wanted to institute this session was that younger generations of interactionists could learn a bit about our collective history. We interactionists do love good debates from time to time and I figured that an annual opportunity to discuss our paradigm would give us all a fairly neutral setting for generating productive discussions among people who otherwise might not be inclined to talk shop across the political and/or theoretical divides – a common condition in academic circles.

A common charge against qualitative researchers in general and interactionist researchers in particular is that they produce descriptive, a-theoretical accounts of group life. We consider the problem of “analytic interruptus” in contemporary symbolic interactionism – that is, a failure to move beyond analyses of individual cases – and offer a potential to a solution via the pursuit of a generic social process (GSP) research agenda. A GSP approach involves developing, assessing, and revising concepts from the close scrutiny of empirical instances across diverse contexts. By considering criticisms of GSPs from feminist and postmodernist scholars, a more informed, qualified, and better-situated approach to the framework becomes possible. We argue that GSPs remain a quintessential analytical tool to explore subcultural realities and build formal theories of the social world.

Lawrence Angus is Professor is Head of the School of Education at the University of Ballarat. His most recent book (with Professor Terri Seddon of Monash University) is Reshaping Australian Education: Beyond Nostalgia. His publications include several books over 50 refereed book chapters and articles in academic journals. His particular research and teaching interests include education equity and policy.Eve Gregory is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London She joined the Department of Educational Studies in 1987, after having taught for nine years in schools and two years at Nene College, Northampton. During her years at Goldsmiths, she has co-ordinated language and literacy programmes for the BA Ed, taught across Early Years programmes and established student exchanges in France, Spain and Austria. Recent research has included studies on family literacy history, on siblings (both funded by the ESRC) and children’s home and school literacy practices (funded by the Leverhulme Trust).Kathleen Gwinner began her career in education as a high school art teacher in rural areas near Kansas City, Missouri and El Paso, Texas, and then in Houston’s urban schools. Travel and a continuing interest in art history prompted her to return to university for a Masters degree in European history, and she subsequently taught history and art history courses at private and public schools with a great variety of student populations. Her doctoral research was conducted at a specialized vocational school within the Houston metropolitan district where she was a teacher. She now teaches at a school for the gifted and talented where she is continuing her research on high achieving girls.Martyn Hammersley is Professor of Educational and Social Research, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, the Open University. His early work was in the sociology of education. Much of his more recent work has been concerned with the methodological issues surrounding social and educational research. He is currently investigating the representation of research findings in the mass media. He has written several books, including: (with Paul Atkinson) Ethnography: principles in practice (Routledge, 1995); The Dilemma of Qualitative Method (Routledge, 1989); Reading Ethnographic Research (Longman, 1998); What’s Wrong with Ethnography? (Routledge, 1992); The Politics of Social Research (Sage, 1995); (with Peter Foster and Roger Gomm) Constructing Educational Inequality (Falmer, 1996); Taking Sides in Social Research (Routledge, 1999); and Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice (Paul Chapman, 2002).Sam Hillyard is a lecturer in sociology at the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society and a member of Nottingham’s Institute for Rural Research. Her research interests include ethnographic research and theorising; the Sociology of Education; the history of symbolic interactionism and the sociology of Erving Goffman. At Nottingham, she teaches rural sociology and recently finished a research project studying images of farming in children’s literature.Caroline Hudson is Basic Skills Advisor in the Home Office National Probation Directorate. Caroline has published on offending and education, evidence-based policy, and family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear, single parent and care) and young people’s perceptions of family and schooling. Her principal research interest is issues related to social exclusion. Prior to working in the Home Office, Caroline was a researcher at Oxford University Department of Educational Studies and Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research. Before doing a Master’s and doctorate at Oxford University, Caroline was a secondary school English teacher for 12 years.Bob Jeffrey’s ethnographic research at The Open University has focussed on the effects of policy reform and managerialism on the creativity of primary teachers in England. Together with Peter Woods, he has identified their dilemmas and tensions, their creative responses, identity reconstructions, and changes in professional role. He has, together with Geoff Troman, and Dennis Beach, established an extensive European network of ethnographic research interests and his current research project involves ten European partners focussing on the student’s perspectives of their learning experiences with particular reference to their creativity. He has maintained a regular flow of articles concerned with ethnographic methodology.Susi Long is an Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education and Language and Literacy at the University of South Carolina in the U.S. Her research interests include language and literacy learning in marginalized populations and teacher education. In 1997, she received the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Promising Researcher Award for her ethnographic study of cross cultural learning in Iceland. She continues similar work in the United States with projects that include a study of professional development at the University of South Carolina’s Children’s Center, a six month study of Mexican American kindergartners, and a long-term study of new teachers during their first three years of teaching. Key publications can be found in the journals, Research in the Teaching of English; The Journal of Teacher Education; Reading, Language and Literacy; NCTE’s Primary Voices; and in an upcoming issue of the NCTE’s Language Arts. Her most recent work is coedited with Eve Gregory of Goldsmiths College and Dinah Volk of Cleveland State University. The volume, Many Pathways to Literacy (Routledge Falmer, 2004) is a collection of studies that illuminate mediators of language and literacy learning in the lives of young children across a range of cultural settings in the U.S. and in the U.K.Colton Paul worked as a primary school teacher for a number of years in the London Borough of Haringey and Tower Hamlets. He is now employed as a lecturer at Goldsmiths College educational department. Colton Paul is primarily concerned in his research with culture, identity and education, in particular the ways in which notions of race, power, and representation interact to influence cognitive development. his current area of research for his PhD thesis is focused on the effects of mythologies and power relations on the educational development of children of Caribbean heritage.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Ruth Silva teaches at the College of Education, University of North Texas having completed her doctorate in teacher education at the University of Houston. She has been a teacher and administrator in high schools in Australia and an administrator with the Department of Education (Independent and Catholic Schools) in Sydney. Her research focuses on the role of the classroom teacher as researcher, instructional supervision, and pre-service teacher education.Katie Van Sluys is a doctoral research student at Indiana University.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a lawyer turned teacher and an Associate- Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University. She has taught in secondary and tertiary institutions for the past fourteen years. Currently, she is teaching Corporations and Business Law to international students, whilst also undertaking doctoral studies in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia. Her Ph.D is a cross-disciplinary investigation of notions of plagiarism, from perspectives of Legal and Literary theory. She is particularly interested in the Internet literacy practices of tertiary undergraduate ESL students. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is focuses on Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field. She applies these critically in analyses of international ESL students’ academic writing, both print-text and Web-text based, with respect to plagiarism and intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher (2002), Prospect (2002), and TESOL Journal (2003) on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments. She has also published in the broader area of the nexus between linguistic and legal theory. Her email address is wendyss@deakin.edu.au.Dinah Volk is a Professor and Coordinator of the Early Childhood Program, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. She has taught young children in the U.S. and Latin America and her research interests include sibling and peer teaching and the language and literacy practices of young bilingual children and their families. Volk is co-editor, with Gregory and Long, of Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Peers, Grandparents, and Communities (RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) and is co-author, with DeGaetano and Williams, of Kaleidoscope: A Multicultural Approach for the Primary School Classroom (Prentice Hall, 1998). Her articles have been published in Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Reading: Language and Literacy, and the Early Childhood Research Quarterly.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, Ed.). Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001) and British Private Schools: Research on policy and practice (Woburn Press, 2003, Ed.). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, private schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He is editor of the Oxford Review of Education and has recently completed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.Sue Walters completed her DPhil research in the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University and is now a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes (researching Ethnicities and Contemporary Rural Identities). She was previously a Secondary School English teacher and an English as an Additional Language specialist and has academic degrees in Literature, Women’s Studies and Educational Research Methods. Her current research interests lie in issues concerning academic achievement and Bangladeshi pupils, ethnic minority and bilingual pupil’s experiences of schooling and ethnicities and identities.

The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to analyze the current state of the astructural bias in symbolic interactionism as it relates to three inter-related processes over time: (1) the formalization of critiques of symbolic interactionism as ahistorical, astructural, and acritical perspectives; (2) an ahistorical understanding of early expressions of the disjuncture between symbolic interactionism and more widely accepted forms of sociological theorizing; and (3) persistent and widespread inattentiveness to past and present evidence-based arguments that address the argument regarding symbolic interactionism as an astructural, ahistorical, and acritical sociological perspective. The argument frames the historical development of the astructural bias concept in an historically and socially conditioned way, from its emergence through its rejection and ultimately including conclusions about contemporary state of the astructural bias as evidenced in the symbolic interactionist literatures of the last couple of decades. The analysis and argument concludes that the contemporary result of these intertwined historical and social conditioning processes is that the astructural bias myth has been made real in practice, and that the reification of the myth of an astructural bias has had the ruinous effect of virtually eradicating a vital tradition in the interactionist perspective which extends back to the earliest formulations of the perspective. As a result, a handful of suggestions that serve to aid in reclaiming the unorthodox structuralism of symbolic interactionism and the related interactionist study of social organization are provided in the conclusion.

The decisive antidualism in Bourdieu’s thought permits searching for the complementary traits of his theory of symbolic social system and symbolic interactionism, rather than opposition. The theory of the symbolic social system, which is characterized by the double structure of meanings in the order of social relations and its symbolic representation in the narrower sense, has many convergent points of view with the symbolic interactionists’ perspective, starting with the category of habitus. Conceptual frameworks of structuralist constructivism and symbolic interactionism have one major difference – in Bourdieu’s theory the individual self is not inscribed. There are, however, strong common premises in terms of epistemology, theory of meaning and social ontology. Both epistemologies are antidualistic and relativistic (antiessentialism). Both approaches are based on a common theory of the social origin of meaning (anticognitivism). Both social ontologies are constructivist (social construction of reality). However, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic struggle for control over the commonsense world-view introduces a new, political dimension to interpretive sociology.

In this chapter, the approach of radical interactionism is juxtaposed against symbolic interactionism, its older conservative turned rival cousin, to highlight primarily the major differences between them. The five key differences identified are as follows: (1) the major progenitors for symbolic interactionism are Mead and Blumer, while those for radical interactionism are Park and, by default, myself; (2) although radical interactionism presumes that domination and power are always of great importance for understanding human group life, symbolic interactionism assumes that they now have only limited importance for understanding it; (3) radical interactionism makes it mandatory for researchers to examine the role of dominance and power during social interaction, whereas symbolic interactionism makes it only discretionary; (4) while radical interactionism stresses the impact of individuals’ and groups’ unstated assumptions on their interaction with one another, symbolic interactionism de-emphasizes their impact on it; and finally (5) radical interactionism discourages, while symbolic interactionism encourages researchers falling into the trap of linguistic phenomenalism. Thus, unlike radical interactionism, symbolic interactionism facilitates sociologists not only falling prey to linguistic phenomenalism, but also conservative and idealistic biases, while allegedly conducting “value-free research.”

The place of G. H. Mead’s works in symbolic interactionism is both central and paradoxical. It stands at the very foundation of Hebert Blumer’s initial invention of symbolic interactionism with respect to Mead’s social behaviorism and has been discussed and debated ever since because of the problems caused by such a presumed direct filiation. Returning to Mead in order to broaden the perspective offered by Blumer is a must and has to face some fundamental issues raised in this context. This article starts by examining the ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes involved in Mead’s concept of society, in order to show the multiple dimensions involved in significant symbols. An illustration of Mead’s wider perspective is given in reference to the feminist movement as analyzed first by Mead’s student, Jessie Taft, and goes back to the origin of the movement with Mary Wollstonecraft. This leads to the analysis of the debate about the place of power in symbolic interactionism, initiated by Peter M. Hall, and addresses the alternative between domination and emancipation. This alternative has been worked out by Lonnie Athen’s radical symbolic interactionism analysis of domination on the one side, and by Kathy Charmaz and Norman K. Denzin on the other side of emancipatory symbolic interactionist practices. Another solution is proposed to this alternative, with the analysis of power being intrinsically constituted by domination and emancipation, in their respective contribution to the understanding of the symbolic dispositions of autonomy – a concept that remains relatively undeveloped in Mead’s works.

Athens’ Radical Interactionism and Rorty’s neopragmatism represent two differing interpretations of pragmatist philosophy that are used to inform contemporary approaches to social inquiry. Athens’ and Rorty’s views differ greatly in their positions on the implications of a Darwinian worldview, leading to different perspectives on the value and role of truth, scientific method, and rationality in engaging in social inquiry and political reform. By tracing out the differences between Radical Interactionism and neopragmatism with respect to epistemology, social science, and political reform, I show that Athens’ Radical Interactionism accomplishes more to inform concrete social inquiry and political change. While Rorty’s neopragmatism helps readers to situate pragmatist-inspired inquiry in its evolutionary context, his work provided little guidance for social science. Conversely, Athens’ Radical Interactionism expands upon the value of a pragmatist version of rationality and scientific method, directing researchers’ attention to domination and dominance orders in contemporary social life. Furthermore, the Darwinian underpinnings of both Athens’ and Rorty’s pragmatist-inspired philosophies suggests that concepts in social inquiry are to be understood as sensitizing as opposed to definitive. As such, Athens’ Radical Interactionism remains true to the pluralistic thrust of pragmatist philosophy by conveying domination as a sensitizing concept in contrast to a more neo-positivist definitive concept.