Examples Of Symbolic Interactionism

Visualize a Tuesday night where there are only three registers open at the local grocer. The lines are lengthy and the customers are edgy. What’s worse is that one of the lines is at a standstill thanks to a customer complaining about the price of their five packs of fried chicken. The victim of this customer’s objection is a young cashier who does not appear a day over eighteen. The customer is outraged and claims that his chicken should be free based on his food stamps. She, the cashier, denies him this opportunity by stating that his food stamps are for a raw package of chicken. The objection turns into a childish tantrum and only progresses from there. The gaping customers are surprised at the cashier’s lack of hostility throughout the dispute. Unbeknownst to the bystanders, the cashier is essentially disguising her true self. She is at work where professionalism is demanded and in these demands is no place for curses and insults. This act is Symbolic Interactionism.
An employee of an establishment must act a certain way and this is especially so when an employee’s job revolves around pleasing a customer. Although that person may want to oppose their establishment’s main idea of pleasing consumers, they are usually more concerned about keeping their job. In this position, one cannot help but wonder if the fuming and chaotic customer always acts like this. At one point in time he may have been portraying the theory of Symbolic Interactionism by explaining his disagreement in a polite manner when in reality (as his fellow customers have noticed) he is far from well-mannered. In an argument that evolves to a match of offenses, the customer starts to insult the cashier about her age, about her knowledge, and about her livelihood.
He believes that in doing so he will somehow verify that he is right, that he is smarter than she, and that at the conclusion of it all he is prevailing. Now this is not in the sense of super powers or physical strength but the power of success. By putting down the cashier, he is building himself up as well as giving an example of Social Conflict. He is making her feel like a lesser, unequal existence. She can strike back by showing him the food stamp’s print, perhaps compare the food stamp’s listed content and the purchased item, and can even break away from her act of an employee and inquiry about his mentality. No matter which action she takes she too would be committing the exact same theory. If her rudeness is excluded, she is not attempting to put the man down, but show him that she is correct. By doing so, she is giving herself
power. The man insults her livelihood and now he continues by insulting her family. He questions if they failed to educate her properly and he questions if they feel ashamed. By bringing her life’s stability and solidarity into the verbal fight, he is bringing in the theory of Structural Functionalism. Now the reason that he portrays Structural Functionalism with his insult is due to the fact that he focused on the relationship between parent and child, a relationship that is a part of society. He brings in outside sources that she at one point in time relied on (and perhaps still does) as a way to continue oppressing the cashier. In this way he is also using Social Conflict again by continuing to put her down to so that he himself may feel superior. The cashier in turn could easily fire back a similar insult which would also be a show of Structural Functionalism and Social Conflict. Of course, if the young cashier were to do such a childish antic, then she would stray away from her stand in Symbolic Interactionism. In conclusion, though this situation was intended to introduce the sociological theories of macro and micro, these theories can be used in any situation by any type of individual. It doesn’t essentially need to surround that of an argument to bring forth all of these theories.