Herbert George Blumer (March 7, 1900 – April 13, 1987) was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research.
[3] Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism.
He moved to Webster Groves with his family in 1905 onto a farm, but his father commuted to St. Louis every day to run a cabinet-making business.
Herbert Blumer was constantly being grounded in the world of economics and labor, insofar as having to drop out of high school to help his father's woodworking shop which was recovering from a fire.
While studying undergraduate at the University of Missouri, Blumer was fortunate enough to work with Charles Ellwood, a sociologist, and Max Meyer, a psychologist.
[10] Upon completing his doctorate in 1928, he accepted a teaching position at the University of Chicago, where he continued his own research under Mead and became captivated with the prospects of examining the interactions between humans and the world.
[14] With Emeritus Professor status until 1986, Blumer continued to be actively engaged in writing and research until shortly before his death on April 13, 1987.
[17][18] During that season, the Cardinals won the league championship, although that victory remains controversial due to the disqualification of the Pottsville Maroons, a team with a better record.
[16] Source:[8] Awards Although Blumer devised the term symbolic interaction in 1937,[19] the early development of this theoretical approach to social analysis is largely credited to the work of George Herbert Mead during his time at the University of Chicago.
[2][20][21] Blumer played a key role in keeping the tradition of symbolic interactionism alive by incorporating it into his teachings at the university.
[26] Based on this, Blumer believed that society exists only as a set of potentials, or ideas that people could possibly use in the future.
[20] As social life is a "fluid and negotiated process," to understand each other, humans must intrinsically engage in symbolic interaction.
[28] Following this logic, Blumer discounted social research that blindly applies methods that have been traditionally used in the natural sciences.
[4] Through Blumer's works and his focus on symbolic interactionism and methods of social research, he advocated modern techniques to aid people in further understanding society as well as the ability to navigate it.
Herbert Blumer says, "there is a conspicuous absence of rules, guides, limitations, and prohibitions to govern the choice of variables."
This address was meant to question how well variable analysis is suited to the study of human group life in its fuller dimensions.
[11] Blumer claimed that Thomas and Znaniecki failed to properly distinguish between attitude as subjective and value as a societal collective element.
[32]In conclusion, Blumer recognized that in society there was no clear distinction between attitude and value, and that even social theorists have difficulty distinguishing between the two.
Based on the work of Robert E. Park, Blumer, in a 1939 article, called to attention a new subfield of sociology: collective behavior.
This now developed area of inquiry is devoted to the exploration of collective action and behavior that is not yet organized under an institutional structure or formation.
Blumer was particularly interested in the spontaneous collective coordination that occurs when something that is unpredicted disrupts standardized group behavior.
He theorizes that prejudice crumbles and loses its former power when the messaging of the dominant group is no longer being persistently enforced.
Blumer was a proponent of a more micro-focused approach to sociology and focused on the subjective consciousness and symbolic meanings of individuals.
[34] Similar to George Mead, sociologist Charles Ellwood also influenced the development of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism.
The concepts of "interstimulation and response," "intercommunication," and "coadaptation" function in Ellwood's social psychology in the same way that "self-indications" and "interpretations" are found in Blumer's symbolic interactionism.
By eliminating all references to the visual erotic that made up early cinema, as well as the psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject, this paradigm claimed a scientific objectivity for social observation.
Moreover, it is argued that the social constructionist perspective of Blumerian interactionism provides an "over-socialized" account of human life, and downplays and ignores our unconscious.
[36] Blumer's theory of symbolic interaction, although fascinating, received criticism on its subjectivity and emphasis on different aspects of society.
[38] Reza Azarian uses Herbert Blumer's concept of the definition of the situation to improve the already-existing framework of the Desire-Belief-Opportunity model of Analytic Sociology.
Reichelmann demonstrates how experimental research design and quantitative measure can be used to capture threats as Blumer outlines them.