A new synthesis: incorporating Blumer, Weber, and Peirce

This chapter proposes to refine the symbolic interactionist project by incorporating Peircean semiotics and neo-Weberian interpretation. Symbolic interactionism appears to have forgotten key sources of its American pragmatist roots. Peirce's indirect influence on Mead and Blumer, for instance, is often undertheorized but should be made central to the foundational narratives of symbolic interactionism. This calls for more sophisticated understandings of meaning-making that incorporate Peirce's semiotic triadic model and classifications of signs where symbols are just one kind of signs among others. Here, I take on these matters and expand on my pragmatic sociology (Bakker, 2011a) to introduce the emergent project of a semiotic sociology. In stepwise fashion, I lay foundations of a metaparadigmatic synthesis— a “big tent”— based on five key arguments that build upon each other, including Blumer as its anchor point, American symbolic interactionism, global interactionism, neo-Weberian interpretive analysis for cross-historical comparison, and Peircean semiotics as the culminating paradigm that pulls it all together.

The Cold War is over (Menand, 2021). But new conflicts are on the horizon (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2019). Only one social science is highly respected by key elite decision-makers: neoclassical economics. The other social sciences are more fragmented. US sociology, in particular, is focused on political issues having to do with intersectionality, but it is also fragmented, lacking an overarching framework. One “fragment” that has had a lasting impact is the empirical study of the phenomena we can call “interactions” based on “symbols.” Many US sociologists were intrigued by micro-level social psychological aspects of actual symbolic actions and interactions, and for a while that was for many what sociology as a discipline was all about, but the focused symbolic interactionist tradition no longer exists, except as a memory (Blumer, 1975, 1986 [1969]). It was never the paradigm that pulled all of sociology together.

Talcott Parsons attempted to establish a big tent for sociology and the social sciences in general through the Department of Social Relations (DSR) at Harvard. But the DSR is long gone (Cossu, 2021). Parsons (2012 [1951]) wrote on “social systems” and the “theory of action” (Smelser, 2012).