The Interactionist Tradition In Symbolic Interaction
Raffaele Rauty
University of Salerno - Italy
Via Giovanni Paolo II - 84084 – Fisciano (Sa)
rauty@unisa.it
Symbolic Interaction did not start, like The American Journal of Sociology or L’Année
Sociologique, as a generating review. The date of its founding (1977) was fourty years after the
formal origins of Symbolic Interactionism by Herbert Blumer (1937) and even more from the
academic activity of that first generation of scholars who mainly contributed to its foundation and
spread.
We can say that Symbolic Interaction opened, about in the same time of the different but
similar journal Urban Sociology, a new period during which, following Blumer’s antecedents,
confirmed and strengthened
the tradition, and further enlarged theoretical approaches and
qualitative social surveys, of Symbolic Interactionism, in a continuous connection with sociological
theories and everyday common lives.
In the 39 years, and in the 123 numbers of its publishing, the journal not only introduced
classical texts or some debates from or about founding fathers of Symbolic Interactionism, but
developed too its theoretical approach in connection with social change. From this standpoint I
highlight, in my paper, how, notwithstanding the different directions from an editorial board to
another, that tradition was each time preserved, reconstructed, examined closely and developed in
the journal, especially in some monographic numbers or special issues, in the debate of several
authors about particular sociologists or categories, in the careful choice of the reviews.
The paper, utilizing an analysis of all the course of the journal, highlights also some key
debates and points out the heterogeneous continuity of its work, which, at the core of the tradition,
poses again the relationship between past and present, memory and future, all essential premises for
every fair contemporary analysis and a further growth of Symbolic Interactionism.