Sociological imagination describes the process, during which person usually connects his own experience with those of other people or his/her role in the history. “The sociological imagination is the ability to look beyond one’s own everyday life as a cause for daily successes and failures and see the entire society in which one lives as potential cause for these things.”(Schneider 2006) With the help of social imagination one can easily conceptualize how a person’s macro level, consisting of family, government and the environment in whole, and person’s individual micro level combine in order to form this particular individual. Considering this point from interactionist position, one can assume that people usually tend to relate certain events to some outer factors or environment.
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Interactionism implies observing things by dedicating full attention to the sociological micro level. Therefore, one observes things depending upon the individual and their relations in the society, instead of focusing the attention on broader aspects. In fact, the use of symbols gives us an opportunity to assign meaning to people and things, thus developing our own interpretation further along. According to the interactionist point of view on people, everything what people do, get, or expect depends on circumstances. In fact, each particular situation forms person’s perception of it and the way one acts if it occurs. In other words, human decisions and experience are related to the variety of external factors. For instance, person’s view on medical treatment may range depending on his/her age, income, and status. People with lower income usually consider medical treatment as something they cannot rely on. As higher income guarantees an increase in the quality of metical care rich people usually suppose that health care services are effective.
Secondly, people usually transform themselves adjusting to some particular conditions. Therefore, they tend to relate their successes and failures to constantly changing environment. In fact, through social imagination people get focused on explicit obstacles and the society’s indifference is transformed into public issues involvement. Individuals also appear to transform their social worlds, for their actions take place in social environment. Moreover, people are capable of modifying their own active social matrices, thus being agents of modification. Engaging in social dialogue provides generic communication, in which spoken words serve as the predominant symbols, and remains at the foundation of stability and change. According to interactionist perspective words are not static and they have certain meaning for both parties – sender and receiver – and need interpretation and intention. Basically, a conversation between two individuals involves interaction of symbols and constant interpretation of the environment.
In order to analyze social phenomena sociologists use various perspectives and symbolic interactionist perspective is among them. So, symbolic interactionists always seriously overthink people’s actions, and then look forward to define what meaning are assigned by individuals to their own actions and symbols, as well considering those of others. Consequently, anything can play the role of a symbol as long as it is related with something beyond itself.
Works Cited
Charon, Joel. Symbolic Interactionism: An Introduction, an Interpretation, an Integration. 9th ed. Pearson Education, 2007.
Fuller, Steve. The New Sociological Imagination. SAGE, 2006.
Schneider, Linda & Silverman, Arnold “Global Sociology: Introducing Five Contemporary Societies” (4 ed.). New York: McGraw Hill, 2006.
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