of everyday interactions of individuals. In other words, society in its most basic form is nothing more than the shared reality constructed by individuals as they interact with one another. In this sense, individuals interact within countless situations through symbolic interpretations of their given reality, whereby society is a complex, ever-changing mosaic of subjective meanings. Some critics of this approach argue that it focuses only on ostensible characteristics of social situations while disregarding the effects of culture, race, or gender (i.e. social-historical structures). Important sociologists traditionally associated with this approach include George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, George Homans, and Peter Blau. New contributions to the perspective, meanwhile, include those of Howard Becker, Gary Alan Fine, David Altheide, Robert Prus, Peter M. Hall, David R. Maines, as well as others. It is also in this tradition that the radical-empirical approach of ethnomethodology emerged from the work of Harold Garfinkel. Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is often referred to as exchange theory or rational choice theory in the context of sociology. This tradition tends to privilege the agency of individual rational actors, assuming that, within interactions, individuals always seek to maximize their own self-interest. As argued by Josh Whitford (2002), rational actors can be characterized as possessing four basic elements: "a knowledge of alternatives;" "a knowledge of, or beliefs about the consequences of the various alternatives;" "an ordering of preferences over outcomes;" and "a decision rule, to select amongst the possible alternatives." Exchange theory is specifically attributed to the work of George C. Homans, Peter Blau, and Richard Emerson. Organizational sociologists James G. March and Herbert A. Simon noted that an individual's rationality is bounded by the context or organizational setting. The utilitarian perspective in sociology was, most notably, revitalized in the late 20th century by the work of former ASA president James Samuel Coleman. Basic theory Overall, there is a strong consensus regarding the central theoretical questions and the key problems that emerge from explicating such questions in sociology. In general, sociological theory attempts to answer the following three questions: (1) What is action?; (2) What is social order?; and (3) What determines social change? In the myriad of attempts to answer these questions, three predominantly theoretical (i.e. not empirical) issues emerge, largely inherited from classical theoretical traditions. The consensus on the central theoretical problems is how to link, transcend or cope with the following "big three" dichotomies: Subjectivity and objectivity: deals with knowledge.