Definition
Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnomethodology are sociological approaches that are based on the social psychology of George Herbert Mead and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz (Schutz 1932/1967; Alfred Schütz is of German origin and his family name is originally written with the German umlaut “ü”. In publications in German his name appears in its orgininal spelling). The empirical interest is the immediate concrete situation of the communicative exchange between individuals. Goffman calls this the “situational perspective,” meaning a focussing on the occurrence to which an individual can be “alive to at a particular moment” (Goffman 1974, p. 8). These everyday episodes are governed by symbolic interaction: the meanings that people ascribe to things and events are developed and modified in an interactive process of negotiation of meaning based on the situational interpretations of the symbols used in their remarks (Blumer 1969).
Ethnomethodology focusses on the...
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Krummheuer, G. (2020). Interactionist and Ethnomethodological Approaches in Mathematics Education. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15789-0_81
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