赫伯特·布鲁默

作品

• 1939评托马斯与兹纳涅茨基的《身处欧美的波兰农民》

  受社会科学研究理事会委托，对美国社会学中最受推崇的研究所作的批评：其态度与价值的概念没有被清楚地区分开来，书信和生活史只是在例证其理论，而不是检验它。

• 1969符号互动论：视角与方法

  以《符号互动论的方法论立场》开篇的文集：人们根据事物对他们所具有的意义而对其采取行动，意义产生于社会互动之中，并通过解释而被处理；研究必须通过探索和审视直接面向经验世界。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• Movies and Conduct (1933)
• Social Psychology (essay in E. P. Schmidt, ed., Man and Society, 1937)
• An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1939)
• What Is Wrong with Social Theory? (1954)
• Sociological Analysis and the “Variable” (1956)
• Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position (1958)
• Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969)
• Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change (posthumous, 1990)