Herbert Blumer

Works

• 1939An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s “The Polish Peasant in Europe and America”

  Critique, commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, of the most admired study of American sociology: its concepts of attitude and value are not clearly kept apart, and the letters and life histories illustrate its theory rather than test it.

• 1969Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method

  Essays opened by “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism”: people act towards things on the basis of the meanings these have for them, meanings arise in social interaction and are handled through interpretation; research must go directly to the empirical world by exploration and inspection.

Position

Blumer is on the map because he gave the sociological reading of Mead’s social psychology a name and a programme. In an essay of 1937 he coined the term “symbolic interactionism”; the essays collected in “Symbolic Interactionism” (1969) set out three premises: human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings these things have for them; these meanings arise out of social interaction; and they are handled and modified through an interpretive process. Society, on this view, consists of people fitting their lines of action together in “joint action”, and institutions are not forces acting on people but continuing patterns of such action. From this followed a method: sociology should go directly to the empirical world by “exploration” and “inspection”, and its concepts should be “sensitising” rather than definitive (“What Is Wrong with Social Theory?”, 1954). He criticised the reduction of research to relations between variables (presidential address, 1956), the relation between theory and documents in Thomas and Znaniecki’s “The Polish Peasant” (1939) and theories that derive action from norms and systems, as in his exchange with Talcott Parsons (1975). His essay “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position” (1958) explained prejudice by the position that groups claim in relation to one another. Commentators note that he narrowed Mead’s approach to the level of interaction; C. McPhail and C. Rexroat (1979) argued that his methodology diverges from Mead’s social behaviourism, and Blumer replied in 1980 that the two converge.

Life & context

Herbert Blumer was born on 7 March 1900 in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at the University of Missouri (BA 1921, MA 1922) and then at the University of Chicago, where he took his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on “Method in Social Psychology” supervised by Ellsworth Faris. In Chicago he heard George Herbert Mead and, after Mead’s death in 1931, took over his course in social psychology. From 1925 to 1933 he also played professional American football for the Chicago Cardinals. He taught at Chicago from 1927 to 1952, was secretary-treasurer of the American Sociological Society and edited the American Journal of Sociology (1941–52). In 1952 he went to the University of California, Berkeley, as the first chair of its department of sociology, to which he brought Erving Goffman in 1958; he retired in 1967. In 1956 he was president of the American Sociological Society. He died on 13 April 1987 in Danville, California.

Further main works

• Movies and Conduct (1933)
• Social Psychology (essay in E. P. Schmidt, ed., Man and Society, 1937)
• What Is Wrong with Social Theory? (1954)
• Sociological Analysis and the “Variable” (1956)
• Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position (1958)
• Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change (posthumous, 1990)