A future for symbolic interactionism

I will briefly suggest why Blumer's injunctions are crucial, and lay out several of their implications. To me, gaining intimate familiarity means gaining an in-depth knowledge of the research participants, their setting or settings, and their situations and actions. This notion of intimate familiarity has been espoused in Analyzing Social Settings from its earliest edition by John Lofland (1971) to the recent edition in which David Snow and Leon Anderson (2005) were centrally involved. Throughout the discipline of sociology, acceptance of a goal of establishing intimate familiarity has weakened.