In this and the following lecture we shall be getting to grips with two different sociological theories, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, which are oft en referred to in the literature by the generic term ‘interpretive approaches’ and are even confused from time to time as a result. The term is quite problematic, but at least captures the important point that there were undoubtedly other significant approaches than the neo-utilitarian paradigm of exchange theory or ‘rational choice’ and the normativist-functionalist theory of Talcott Parsons within the sociology of the 1950s and 1960s – approaches, moreover, of enduring vitality. Those authors to whose work we may apply the term ‘interpretive approaches’ advocated a fundamentally different model of action than the representatives of rational choice theory, but also one which differed from that developed by Parsons, with his emphasis on normative aspects of action. This also explains the literal meaning of the label ‘interpretive approaches’. First, it gives expression to the existence of a camp hostile to Parsons and his model of action; the representatives of the ‘interpretive paradigm’ complained that Parsons' notion of norms and values, to which action always relates, was insufficiently complex. They were not disputing the importance of norms and values in human action. Quite the reverse. But what Parsons had overlooked, they asserted, is the fact that norms and values do not simply exist abstractly for the actor and cannot be unproblematically converted into action.