Editors' Introduction to Lyn Lofland's Intellectual Legacy

In this editors' introduction to the special issue honoring the work of Lyn Lofland, we familiarize the reader with Lofland's scholarship and outline the themes taken up by this project. We argue that because Lofland's scholarship exemplifies a particular tradition within late 20th-century American symbolic interaction, it serves as a model for those of us working in the same vein, while also offering a steelman case against which we can consider the downsides of our tradition. Thus, this special issue allows us to consider how we, as contemporary scholars, attend to tensions in our work related to the nature of social structure and social process, generalization, and the politics of knowledge.