Many sociologists appear to assume that there are only two broad approaches to the study of inequality: functionalism and conflict theory. Textbooks on introductory sociology and social stratification frequently compare the two theoretical camps by distilling and juxtaposing their contradictory premises. In this article, I argue that a third alternative, symbolic interactionism, can make a dist...

The aim of this article is to respond to the question of whether social networks represent a possible terrain of application and investment for interactionist research. The answer to that question is, without a doubt, affirmative. What appears to be truly problematic, if not completely improbable, is that this investment can come about through a “coming together” of symbolic interactionism and ...

This essay considers how we might come to understand social constructionism sociologically. It examines a number of related approaches to gender and sexuality that speak to sociological concerns and might be termed social constructionist: historicism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and materialist feminism. By recognising that social constructionism is multifarious rather than unifie...

This study aimed to understand the experience of caring for a child with a congenital anomaly from the family's perspective. Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory were the theoretical and methodological references, respectively. Data collection was carried out with eight families with children having congenital anomalies through semi-structured interviews and participating observation. Da...

This paper focuses on the importance of trust in business-to-consumer e-commerce. Divided into three sections the paper first asks the question of why trust is important to the development and implementation of e-commerce and suggests some of the areas where user trust is specifically important. The second offers a view of trust developed using sociological theory and interactionism and looks a...