Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist with a rather impressive curriculum vitae to his credit, spent five years of his otherwise privileged life keeping company with drunks, derelicts, drug addicts and the homeless on the sidewalks of New York's Greenwich Village. His purpose was not to exploit the individuals whose reason for being on these streets is to drum up whatever income they can by selling books and magazines; rather, it was to learn and understand why they were there. In the process of doing so, Duneier drew his arguments and methods mostly upon symbolic interactionism perspective's theories; his focus on "shared meanings", "deviant", `laws", "individual (and social) interactions" flourish throughout "Sidewalk."

The first important and root-like unit in Duneier's arguments is "shared meaning." By deeply analyzing many unique sets of ideas, perceptions of different social class members, he was able to emphasize and portray the complicated system of multi-levels...