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Assigning or claiming identities can be a dangerous business. Labels carry conflicting meanings and, even more importantly, what is a laudatory term to some will be grounds for condemnation by others. My immediate response to the invitation to write this piece about becoming a symbolic interactionist, aside from the pleasure of being asked, was that I was not sure that I could claim, or even that I would want to claim, this label. I have a visceral dislike of theoretical-cum-methodological camps, not least because over the years I have been accused of belonging to a variety of these, from positivism to post-modernism. Reflecting a little more on the invitation, however, I realized that I could not reasonably deny that in the past, particularly in the 1970s, I regarded myself and was seen by others as an interactionist. Moreover, while my ideas about sociological work are now somewhat different from what they were then, and the direction of travel might be viewed as ‘un-interactionist’, in fact much of my work is still focused on issues coming out of the interactionist tradition: notably, Blumer's views about methodology, Becker's arguments about ‘Whose side are we on?’, and the notion of analytic induction.

The passing of David Maines has left a void in the field of Symbolic Interactionism. His contributions to developing narrative sociology remain part of the foundation of the perspective, but his empirical contributions and theoretical insights were at least as important in advancing Interactionist thought on scientific principles. His teaching and mentoring of others stimulated interest in Interactionism and his career-long dedication to helping others as an Interactionist apostle were factors in encouraging students and peers to launch their own successful careers in academia and elsewhere. My intent here is to trace his career and provide examples of how his legacy both influenced the profession and provided the basis for defining Interactionism as the powerful approach it has become today.

Million Dollar Baby displays a contrived, provocative, and dramatic sequence of events that culminates in the death of a paralyzed woman, Maggie (played by Hilary Swank), a boxer by trade, who became a quadriplegic after her opponent “cold-cocked” her during a championship fight. The cheap shot caused her to fall on her wooden stool and break her neck. She calls upon her trainer, Frankie (played by Clint Eastwood), to kill her through an injection of adrenaline. Maggie claims that she has already died in that she can never be a boxer, which represents the only self she knows and loves. Ignoring Frankie's efforts to dissuade her, Maggie evokes a story from their shared past. The story, first told in a diner in which Maggie and Frankie had stopped to eat, described her own father's decision to kill the family dog. She iterates the story from her hospital bed and begs Frankie to do what her dad (to whom Maggie refers as “daddy”) did to the dog. In effect, she asks Frankie to assist her suicide, as she defines herself as useless beyond any reason to live.

Self-report questionnaires are the predominant method used in human resource management (HRM) research to assess employees’ work-related psychological constructs (e.g., processes, states, and attributes). However, this method is associated with significant shortcomings, including the introduction of self-serving bias and common method variance when used exclusively. In this chapter, the authors challenge the assumption that individuals themselves are the only accurate source of the self-focused information collected in HRM research. Instead, the authors propose that other-ratings – ratings of a target individual that are provided by a workplace observer, such as a coworker, supervisor, or subordinate – can accurately assess commonly measured work-related psychological constructs. The authors begin by explaining the advantages of other-ratings for HRM research and practice, reviewing the history of other-ratings and how they emerged in the personality and person-perception literature, and outlining how they have been used in HRM research to date. Then, the authors build upon Funder’s (1995) realistic accuracy model to develop a theoretical argument detailing why workplace others should be able to accurately judge how another employee thinks and feels about work. Next, the authors highlight existing evidence in the literature on the accuracy of other-ratings and present the results of a preliminary meta-analysis on the ability of other-ratings to predict self-ratings of work-related psychological constructs. Finally, the authors discuss potential moderators of other-rating accuracy and reflect on a number of practical considerations for researchers looking to use other-ratings in their own work. The authors intend for this chapter to meaningfully contribute to the larger conversation on HRM research methods. Other-ratings are a simple, yet powerful, addition to the methodological toolkit of HRM researchers that can increase flexibility in research design and improve the overall quality of research.

The purpose of this paper is to defend a social constructionist approach to conceptualizing and managing organizational change. This approach requires that one pays more attention to the relational qualities of ongoing interaction processes among the parties involved, and that the individual and the organization are conceptualized as inextricably linked rather than separate entities to be related. Specifically, the authors take the relationship as constructed by employees as the focus of analysis, illustrating that by focusing on the relational quality of the interface between individuals and organizations, new possibilities for dialogue among parties can be created and new ways of intervening can be contemplated.

To illustrate this argument, a detailed case study of a planned change scenario is described, looking in particular at the way employees construct the change as a basis for identifying the core elements of meaning construction in this instance.

The findings reveal that contrary to management assumptions, employees interpret change as either attractive or non‐engaging rather than as either a threat or an opportunity. The findings highlight the importance of actively managing the attractiveness of the new organization (its corporate identity and image) as an integral part of the change effort rather than focusing solely on strategic issues.

This paper tries to develop a better understanding of “relational perspectives on the construction of meaning” as they relate to organizational change, especially the kind of broad‐ranging, transformational change. Understanding change events of this type from the perspective of those involved is an important task for organizational scholars. Moreover, it tries to integrate a number of distinct but potential complementary theoretical perspectives, including the social construction of reality, negotiation and argumentation, the negotiated order perspective, sensemaking, personal construct psychology, thematic networks, and identity. Finally, it attempts to ground its inquiry in the words and constructs of those involved in the change process, rather than trying to impose pre‐existing organizational theories on the observed events.

SI offers a distinctive theoretical language for practice: a vocabulary and a grammar for identifying the personal troubles and joys of group members and for locating these experiences in shared symbol systems and in associated social arrangements (Weigert, 1995). SI can provide the ideal base for social work and sociological helping work (Forte, 2004a, 2004b). It is a coherent organizing language that can guide practitioner thinking, acting, and feeling especially when professional action is blocked.

This chapter assesses the power focus in contemporary interactionist theory, and advances several premises about power based on recent research and theory. I first examine the main assumptions of the view of power that emerged in the wake of the astructural bias debate, which became an implicit standard for assessments of power in the tradition. Next, I explore the criticisms of the astructural bias thesis and related conceptualization. My argument is that while the debate correctly spotlighted the power deficit of interactionism, it had theoretical implications that distracted us from the task of fully conceptualizing power. In the second part of this chapter, I examine recent interactionist work in order to build general premises that can advance interactionist theory of power. Based on this analysis, I elaborate four premises that interactionists can use, regardless of theoretical orientation. Drawing on examples from my ethnographic research, I illustrate how researchers can benefit from the use of these premises.

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.

My intellectual journey as a sociologist and a symbolic interactionist began when I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader in Catholic School on the working-class, southwest side of Chicago. My eighth-grade nun pulled me aside after school one day and gently told me that, now that I should think about what to be when I grow up. She suggested I study to be “either a sociologist or a priest.” After some serious thought, I eliminated the option of becoming a priest – yet, the word sociologist was intriguing. I had no idea what it really meant, but it had a certain ring to it in 1960, when society was becoming a viable and visible orientation in terms of major events we were learning a little bit about from the good nuns and television – like civil rights, the cold war, and the space race. I took her advice and set out on a 50-year journey to become a sociologist. The map of the journey has been elusive, though, in that what it means to be a sociologist – especially an interactionist sociologist – has changed over the years as events in my life and the social world have evolved. This journey has had three segments: sociology as something to do; sociology as something to know; and sociology as something to be. The journey has been profound as well as fun because, as I continue to discover what it means to be an interactionist sociologist, I discover who I am.

From the pioneering work of Howard Becker (1982) on jazz scenes as art worlds, to the influence of Erving Goffman (1967) on Ingrid Monson’s (1996) foundational framework for jazz ethnography, symbolic interactionist premises have already had a powerful impact on the study of jazz and popular music. Nonetheless, they still have much to contribute toward a richer and more nuanced understanding of how jazz musicians jointly improvise meaningful musical discourses. Building upon these earlier precedents, I propose that further critical elaboration of symbolic interactionist notions – including social worlds, generalized others, and facework – could hold the key to a hermeneutics of musical meaning premised upon improvisational interplay. Specifically, I propose that the internal structure of local jazz worlds or scenes, arising from distinctive modes of meaning production, gives rise to particular types of generalized other, which in turn structures the development of artists’ professional selves or personae through the dialogic internalization of durable aesthetic predispositions. From this perspective, the common stylistic commitments that make group improvisation possible and productive may begin with widely acclaimed paradigmatic performances, whose import is then encapsulated in the shared technical conceptions of artist peer circles, broadened through articulation with the consensus aesthetic principles of culture industries, and deepened by investment with the normative beliefs associated with audience identification and consumption. Ultimately, through improvisational interaction predicated on such shared paradigms, conceptions, principles, and beliefs, jazz musicians construct and project mutually compatible creative selves, whose onstage encounters with one another suggest dramaturgical processes of meaning production, which endow the interplay of their spontaneous aesthetic gestures with narrative significance.