When We Do Not Share the Same Situation
Symbolic Interactionism as Practical Philosophy in Social Work
A social worker takes a seat on one side of the table. Opposite her sits a mother who has been called in for a meeting. The social worker believes the purpose is to gain a better understanding of the family's situation and explore what kind of support might be needed. The mother believes the meeting marks the beginning of a process that could ultimately lead to the loss of her child.
They are sitting in the same room. They are participating in the same conversation. Yet they are not necessarily sharing the same situation.
For the social worker, the meeting may be an exploratory conversation. For the mother, it may feel like an interrogation. The social worker asks questions in order to understand. The mother hears those questions as expressions of suspicion. One is trying to create openness; the other is trying to protect herself.
What takes place between them cannot therefore be understood simply by asking what the social worker intended. It must also be understood through the meaning the encounter acquires for the other person.
This is one of the central insights of symbolic interactionism: people do not act merely in response to what happens. They act in response to what they believe what happens means.
When a Situation Becomes Real
The sociologist W. I. Thomas formulated an idea that has become one of the cornerstones of symbolic interactionism: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
This does not mean that every interpretation is equally true. Nor does it deny the existence of an objective reality. It means, rather, that human action arises from the reality people perceive themselves to inhabit.
If the mother believes that the social worker intends to remove her child, her fear is real—even if the social worker has no such intention. That fear may lead her to become silent, defensive, or angry. She may withhold information, refuse assistance, or attempt to end the conversation. The social worker, in turn, may interpret these reactions as a lack of cooperation, poor parental insight, or resistance to necessary intervention.
In this way, two different definitions of the situation begin to reinforce one another.
The mother protects herself because she experiences the social worker as threatening. The social worker becomes increasingly concerned because the mother is protecting herself. One sees suspicion in the questions; the other sees danger in the resistance. Gradually, both become more convinced that their own understanding of the situation is the correct one.
What began as a misunderstanding can eventually become a social reality.
In social work, this is not a marginal issue. It lies at the heart of professional practice. Social workers meet people who may already carry experiences of surveillance, rejection, loss, psychiatric diagnoses, poverty, violence, or intervention by public authorities. A new conversation therefore rarely begins on neutral ground. The other person enters the room with memories, expectations, and assumptions about what a social worker is and what the welfare system is capable of doing.
The social worker does not arrive empty-handed either. The professional also brings expectations, theories, categories, and previous experience. Before the other person has even begun to tell their story, the social worker may already have begun to recognise a pattern: neglect, substance abuse, lack of motivation, psychological distress, or limited willingness to change.
Both parties are interpreting.
The difference is that the professional's interpretation usually carries greater power.
The Professional Gaze Is Never Neutral
Symbolic interactionism reminds us that meaning does not reside solely within the individual. Meaning emerges between people. A facial expression, a pause, a silence, or a gesture possesses no complete significance in itself. Its meaning arises through the context into which it is placed.
Silence may express shame. It may express fear. It may signal anger, exhaustion, reflection, or a lack of trust. It may also represent an attempt to preserve the last remaining sense of control in a situation where someone else asks all the questions.
Yet silence is almost always interpreted.
It may appear in a case record as withdrawn, reluctant to communicate, difficult to engage, or shows limited understanding of the situation.
These phrases may appear to be neutral descriptions. Yet they are never merely words. They place the person within a particular framework of meaning. They shape expectations before the next meeting. They influence how colleagues read the case and how future actions are understood.
A description can therefore become the beginning of an identity.
Howard Becker demonstrated that deviance is not determined solely by a particular act but also by society's response to that act. A person is not judged only for what they have done. They may become labelled as a certain kind of person: criminal, deviant, difficult, irresponsible, or dangerous. Once such a label has been attached, later actions risk being interpreted through it.
Someone once described as aggressive may have every sign of anxiety interpreted as threatening. Someone labelled uncooperative may find that even sincere questions are understood as resistance. Someone regarded as lacking resources may discover that every attempt at self-determination is interpreted as unrealistic.
Professional language is, of course, necessary. Social workers must investigate, assess, document, and make decisions. The problem arises when professional language loses its provisional character—when an interpretation comes to be treated as though it were the person.
The human being disappears behind the description of the human being.
The Self in the Mirror of the Other
Charles Horton Cooley introduced the idea of the looking-glass self. We do not develop an image of ourselves simply through introspection. We come to know ourselves through the reactions we perceive in others.
We imagine how we appear. We try to understand how the other person evaluates us. On the basis of that imagined evaluation, we develop pride, shame, confidence, or insecurity.
The self is therefore not a closed possession carried independently of the world. It is formed in relationship.
This insight is of particular importance in social work. Professionals often meet people at moments when their sense of self has already become fragile. They may have lost employment, housing, health, family relationships, social belonging, or faith in their own possibilities. Many have spent years seeing themselves reflected in the critical, anxious, or disappointed gaze of others.
A child who is repeatedly treated as difficult may eventually come to understand himself as a difficult child.
A parent who is seen only through deficiencies may lose contact with his or her own capacity for care.
A person who has for years been described as passive may eventually come to believe that action itself is futile.
The professional gaze can reinforce this development.
But it can also interrupt it.
To meet another person as someone with possibilities does not mean ignoring problems. Recognition does not imply that every action should be accepted or that responsibility should disappear. It means refusing to reduce a human being to their worst action, their diagnosis, their case file, or the most painful chapter of their life.
The other person must be allowed to become more than what the professional already knows.
Taking the Role of the Other
George Herbert Mead described the uniquely human capacity to take the role of the other. We are able to imagine a situation from another person's standpoint and to ask how the world appears from there.
This capacity is fundamental to social interaction. Without it, we would respond only from within our own perspective. We would hear words without understanding what they mean for the one who speaks them.
In social work, this ability is often described as empathy.
Yet role-taking is more than empathy.
It is the disciplined effort to understand a situation from a place we ourselves do not occupy.
What does it feel like to be asked to reveal intimate details of one's life to a stranger who is writing everything down?
What does it feel like to have one's home evaluated by someone who may later express an opinion about one's ability to care for one's children?
What does it feel like to be asked to trust an institution that one has previously experienced as controlling or humiliating?
These questions do not require the social worker to abandon professional responsibility.
They require that responsibility itself be understood more deeply.
Good intentions are not enough. The professional must also try to understand how those intentions are experienced by the other.
A social worker may be kind and still appear threatening.
A conversation intended as support may nevertheless be experienced as surveillance.
A procedure that is professionally correct may still be deeply humiliating.
To take the role of the other is therefore to accept that one's own understanding is never the whole truth about an encounter.
Theory That Grew in the Shadow of Hull House
George Herbert Mead is often presented as one of the principal founders of symbolic interactionism. What is mentioned less frequently is that many of his ideas were developed in close proximity to Hull House in Chicago, one of the most influential social settlements in modern history.
Hull House was founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, not simply as a charitable institution, but as a democratic experiment. Immigrants, workers, children, artists, reformers, and scholars lived and worked side by side. Social problems were not studied from a distance; they were encountered in everyday life.
Mead was a regular visitor to Hull House. John Dewey was also closely connected to its work. The conversations taking place there shaped an intellectual environment in which philosophy, sociology, education, and social reform became inseparable.
Seen in this light, symbolic interactionism did not emerge solely from university lecture halls. It grew out of kitchens, classrooms, neighbourhood meetings, playgrounds, and conversations with people whose lives were marked by poverty, migration, discrimination, and exclusion.
Jane Addams occupies a unique place in this story.
She is often portrayed merely as someone who translated pragmatist philosophy into social practice. The opposite interpretation may be equally convincing: that practical experience at Hull House profoundly influenced the philosophical development of thinkers such as Mead and Dewey.
For Addams, understanding another person was never simply a matter of observing behaviour. It required sharing everyday life with them.
One cannot understand poverty solely by reading statistics.
One cannot understand migration solely by analysing demographic data.
One cannot understand loneliness solely through psychological theory.
One must enter the world in which these experiences are lived.
In this respect, Addams broadened the very idea of role-taking. To take the role of the other was not only an individual psychological capacity; it became a democratic and moral practice. It required openness to lives different from one's own and a willingness to allow those encounters to reshape one's own understanding.
This perspective remains highly relevant for social work today.
Professional knowledge is indispensable, but it can never replace lived encounter.
Theories become meaningful only when they are continually tested against the lives of real people.
Hull House also reminds us that symbolic interactionism should never be reduced to a theory of face-to-face encounters alone. Human interactions always unfold within larger social structures—poverty, labour markets, housing conditions, migration, educational systems, and political institutions. Personal meaning and social conditions are inseparable.
Perhaps this is one of Jane Addams' most enduring contributions.
She showed that democracy begins in everyday encounters, but it cannot end there. The way we meet one another is inseparable from the kind of society we choose to build.
Life as a Stage
Erving Goffman later expanded symbolic interactionism by describing everyday life as a form of theatre.
This metaphor is not intended to suggest that people are dishonest or insincere. Rather, it highlights the fact that social life always involves presentation. We continuously adjust our behaviour according to the situation, the audience, and the expectations we believe others have of us.
A social worker behaves differently in a case conference than at home with family.
A young person may speak one way among friends and another during a child protection meeting.
Parents may clean their homes more carefully before a scheduled home visit than they would on an ordinary day.
None of this necessarily implies deception.
It simply reflects the fundamentally relational nature of human interaction.
We all seek to present ourselves in ways that preserve dignity, competence, and belonging.
Social work therefore never takes place behind the masks people wear. It takes place through them.
The professional task is not to expose a supposedly "true" self hidden behind the performance. Rather, it is to understand why this particular presentation has become necessary.
Sometimes the mask protects vulnerability.
Sometimes it conceals shame.
Sometimes it expresses pride.
Sometimes it is simply a person's way of surviving.
The social worker also enters the encounter wearing a professional role.
Professional language, routines, assessment tools, legal authority, and institutional expectations all shape how the worker appears to others.
The encounter is therefore never between one completely authentic individual and another.
It is always a meeting between people who occupy social roles while simultaneously remaining human beings.
Recognising this does not weaken professionalism.
It makes professionalism more self-aware.
From Individuals to Society
Symbolic interactionism has occasionally been criticised for paying too much attention to individual encounters while overlooking broader social structures such as class, inequality, discrimination, and political power.
The criticism contains an important reminder.
No individual meeting takes place in a social vacuum.
The mother and social worker sitting across from one another bring with them not only personal histories but also the accumulated weight of institutions, laws, professional traditions, cultural expectations, and unequal distributions of power.
Yet symbolic interactionism contributes something equally essential.
Structures never act directly.
They become real only as they are interpreted, experienced, negotiated, resisted, or accepted by living human beings.
Poverty is not only an economic condition.
It is also a social experience.
A diagnosis is not only a medical classification.
It becomes part of a person's identity only through the meanings attached to it.
Authority is never exercised solely through legislation.
It is enacted in conversations, documents, decisions, and everyday encounters.
This is why symbolic interactionism remains indispensable for social work.
It reminds us that social structures always pass through human relationships before they become lived realities.
The Ethics of Description
Social work is, in many ways, a profession of description.
Professionals observe, listen, interpret, document, and assess. Every case file, report, and recommendation is an attempt to describe another person's life. These descriptions are necessary. Without them, no decisions could be made, no support could be offered, and no public accountability could exist.
Yet every description also contains an ethical risk.
The moment we describe another human being, we begin to shape how that person will be understood by others. Words do not merely record reality; they participate in creating it.
To describe a parent as uncooperative, a child as oppositional, or an adolescent as lacking motivation may appear professionally objective. Yet these descriptions rarely capture the complexity of a human life. They illuminate certain aspects while leaving others in shadow.
Symbolic interactionism therefore calls us to intellectual humility.
Every professional description is an interpretation.
Every interpretation could have been different.
This does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid or that professional judgement should be abandoned. Social workers have a responsibility to make careful assessments and, when necessary, to take difficult decisions.
But it does require a continual awareness that no description is ever identical with the person being described.
The report is not the human being.
The diagnosis is not the person.
The case file is not the life.
Professional responsibility begins precisely at the point where we remember this distinction.
Social Work as Practical Philosophy
Symbolic interactionism is often introduced as a sociological theory.
It is certainly that.
But it is also something more.
It is a practical philosophy of human encounter.
Its central question is not merely how society functions, but how people come to understand themselves and one another within society.
This question lies at the heart of social work.
Every professional encounter begins with interpretation.
Who is this person?
What kind of situation are they living in?
How do they understand what is happening?
How do I understand it?
And perhaps the most important question of all:
What might I still have failed to see?
Practical philosophy begins where certainty ends.
It asks us not only to think clearly but also to question our own assumptions. It reminds us that understanding is never complete, that every encounter contains something unexpected, and that another person's life can never be fully captured by theories, categories, or diagnostic language.
This does not weaken professional knowledge.
It deepens it.
Knowledge without reflection easily becomes certainty.
Reflection without knowledge easily becomes sentimentality.
Professional wisdom grows in the tension between the two.
This is why symbolic interactionism continues to speak so powerfully to contemporary social work. It reminds us that the profession is not only about interventions, legislation, methods, or evidence. It is equally about interpretation, recognition, language, and relationship.
Social work is, fundamentally, an interpretive practice.
When We Do Not Share the Same Situation
The social worker and the mother remain seated across the same table.
They still inhabit the same room.
The conversation is still about the same family.
Yet they may continue to experience two profoundly different realities.
The challenge is not to eliminate these differences.
That would be impossible.
No two people ever enter the same encounter with identical histories, fears, hopes, or expectations.
The challenge is something both simpler and more demanding.
It is to remain aware that the situation which appears self-evident to me may look entirely different to the person sitting opposite.
This is not only a matter of communication.
It is an ethical discipline.
The social worker who assumes that his or her own interpretation is the only reasonable one risks turning professional knowledge into professional power.
The social worker who remains open to the possibility that the other person sees something different creates space for dialogue.
Dialogue does not require agreement.
It requires the willingness to let another person's perspective challenge one's own.
Perhaps this is the most enduring contribution of symbolic interactionism.
Thomas reminded us that situations become real through the meanings people give them.
Cooley showed that our sense of self develops in the mirror of other people's responses.
Mead demonstrated that human beings become capable of community by learning to take the role of the other.
Becker revealed how labels can become social identities.
Goffman taught us that social life unfolds through the performances by which people seek to preserve dignity.
And Jane Addams reminded us that none of these insights can remain abstract. They must be lived among neighbours, families, children, immigrants, and communities. Understanding another person is never only an intellectual achievement. It is a democratic practice and a moral responsibility.
Together, these thinkers point toward a social work that is neither merely technical nor merely compassionate.
It is reflective.
It is relational.
It recognises that every professional meeting takes place between two human beings who are attempting to understand one another, while each stands within a different history.
The task of social work is therefore not only to solve problems.
It is also to build bridges between different definitions of reality.
For it is often there—between two people who do not yet share the same situation—that understanding begins.
References and Further Reading
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press of Glencoe.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. University of California Press.
Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor Books.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, W. I., & Thomas, D. S. (1928). The child in America: Behavior problems and programs. Alfred A. Knopf.
The task of social work is therefore not only to solve problems.
It is also to build bridges between different definitions of reality.
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