Symbolic interactionism revisited: Concepts for science and technology studies

German STS research has paid little attention to the empirical and theoretical contributions of symbolic interactionism. Therefore, this article aims to give both an overall view of the development of theoretical concepts from E.C. Hughes and A.L. Strauss to the recent STS studies of, for example, S.L. Star and J. Fujimura and a short introduction to some of the key concepts the latter have developed in their empirical work in the domains of engineering work, molecular biology, and distributed artificial intelligence. Following this, some aspects of the special achievements of symbolic interactionism are discussed. Although this is not a comparison of the STS-approaches, some comparative notions with respect to different constructivist approaches from ethnomethodology to laboratory studies to the actor-network approach appear in the concluding section.