Herbert Blumer

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. Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Mead's social psychology, which he labeled symbolic interactionism. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism.

Life

Blumer was born March 7, 1900, in St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, with his parents. 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. Blumer attended Webster Groves High School and later the University of Missouri from 1918 to 1922. 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. Ellwood was a University of Chicago alumnus (PhD 1899) who advised Blumer on his academic future.

Upon his graduation in 1921 with a bachelor's degree and in 1922 with a master's degree (both from the University of Missouri), 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.

Blumer was the secretary treasurer of the American Sociological Association from 1930 to 1935 and was the editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 1941 to 1952. In 1952, he moved from the University of Chicago and presided and developed the newly formed Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. During World War II, he had a role as an arbitrator for the national steel industry, Blumer was appointed the first chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, a post he held until he retired in 1967. In 1952, he became the president of the American Sociological Association and he received the association's award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship in 1983. Blumer was also elected as the President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1954 and of the Pacific Sociological Society in 1971. 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. Blumer played football professionally for the Chicago Cardinals, now known as the Arizona Cardinals, a team in the National Football League. He had two career touchdowns both in the 1925 season. The first was in the 4th quarter of a game against the Milwaukee Badgers with a distance of under 3 yards. The second was in the second quarter of another game with against the Badgers which was 30+ yards in distance. Both touchdowns were via the quarterback, Red Dunn. Blumer played as an end, guard, and a series of other positions. He had 4 jersey numbers over the course of his career, numbers 8, 20, 17,15. During his first year of his doctorate, he also scored two touchdowns for the Cardinals. 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. Blumer was selected to the 1929 All-Pro Team. 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. Blumer played a key role in keeping the tradition of symbolic interactionism alive by incorporating it into his teachings at the university. He presented his articles on symbolic interactionism in a single volume in which he conceptualized symbolic interaction into three main points:

Humans act towards things (including other individuals) on the basis of the meanings they have for them.
There is a particular emphasis on the consciousness of actors as they interpret their actions.
It is important to recognize that the meaning or value of an object to one person may differ with another person- sociologists should not reduce human action to social rules and norms.
Blumer stresses this point because of the fear that our subjective meaning of our actions could be overshadowed by the norms and rules of society
The meaning of things arises out of the social interactions one has with one's fellows.
Meanings are seen as a series of interpretive actions by the actor.
The actor gives objects meanings, act accordingly based on these meanings, and then revises the meanings to guide his future action.
The actor has an internal conversation with himself to determine the meanings, especially when encountering something out of the ordinary. His theory of symbolic interaction, some argue, is thus closer to a theoretical framework (based on the significance of meanings

This complex interaction between meanings, objects, and behaviors, Blumer reiterated, is a uniquely human process because it requires behavioral responses based on the interpretation of symbols, rather than behavioral responses based on environmental stimuli.

Blumer believed that when positivistic methods were applied to social research, they created results that were ignorant to the empirical realities of the social world. Because people act towards the world based on the subjective meanings they attribute to different objects (symbolic interactionism), individuals construct worlds that are inherently subjective. Therefore, "objective" analysis is intrinsically subjugated to the researcher's own social reality, only documents the researchers own personal assumptions about social interaction, and ultimately yields biased findings. the only empirical reality is that which stems from human interaction. Therefore, contextual understanding of human action is intrinsic to valid social research. In this paper, Blumer addresses the shortcomings with variable analysis that he sees in social research. Herbert Blumer says, "there is a conspicuous absence of rules, guides, limitations, and prohibitions to govern the choice of variables." Overall, he felt that variable analysis needed to be looked at more carefully and precisely to see if the variables are correct and connected to the social research at hand.

Generic variables Blumer does not find generic:

The frequent variable that stands for a class of object that is tied down to a given historical and cultural situation.
Abstract sociological categories. Example- "social integration"
Special set of class terms. Examples- "Age, time, authority"

Blumer believed these shortcomings are serious but not crucial, and that with increased experience they can be overcome. This address was meant to question how well variable analysis is suited to the study of human group life in its fuller dimensions.

Blumer's criticisms of Thomas and Znaniecki

In 1939, Blumer published Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America", criticizing what, at the time, was a popular social theory. Blumer said,

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.

Collective behavior

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 saw the combination of events that follows such phenomena as a key factor in society's ongoing transformation.

Relationship with George Herbert Mead

Blumer is well known for his connection with George Herbert Mead. Blumer was a follower of Mead's social-psychological work on the relationship between self and society, and Mead heavily influenced Blumer's development of Symbolic Interactionism. Mead transferred the subject field of social psychology to Blumer's sociology. One important aspect Blumer learned from Mead was that in order for us to understand the meaning of social actions, we must put ourselves in others' shoes to truly understand what social symbols they feel to be important. However, Blumer also deviated from Mead's work. Blumer was a proponent of a more micro-focused approach to sociology and focused on the subjective consciousness and symbolic meanings of individuals. Similar to George Mead, sociologist Charles Ellwood also influenced the development of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism. There are four prominent areas where Ellwood's ideas can be found in both Blumer's work and symbolic interactionism: interactionism, methodology, emotions, and group behavior. 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. There are six areas where Ellwood and Blumer are similar when addressing methodology: studying human behavior in context, a disdain for the physical science method, understanding the people being studied, using sociology to assist humanity, using inductive reasoning, and avoiding hypotheses. Looking at their ideas on emotion, both Ellwood's and Blumer's ideas deal with the relationship between emotion and interaction, with Ellwood stating, "all our social life and social behavior are not only embedded in feeling, but largely guided and controlled by feeling." Similar to that, Blumer states that, "feeling is intrinsic to every social attitude." Both Ellwood and Blumer were social nominalists and positioned that reality is reduced to properties of individuals and their interrelations.

Scholarly critiques of Blumer

Many have argued that Blumer's theory is a simplified and distorted version of Mead's. Many contemporary positions see "Blumerian interactionism" as "old hat," because it is gender blind (as argued by feminists) and is too conservative. In Blumers study "Movies and Conduct" (1933), Blumer made a contribution to sociology by developing an observational methodology that relied on a cinematic sense of vision and was known as 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. Due to this, a study through feminist film study claims Blumer's methodology presents itself as "sexless." It is also contested that symbolic interaction needs to adopt an agenda that takes race, class and gender into consideration more. 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.

Theory of symbolic interaction

Blumer's theory of symbolic interaction, although fascinating, received criticism on its subjectivity and emphasis on different aspects of society. His theory was said to be too subjective and that it had too much emphasis on day-to-day life and the social formation of the individual while ignoring social structure.

Perspective of empirical research

Methodological contributions are hard to implement in practice
Since Blumer rejected the behaviorist approach to the study of meaning, societal research within a symbolic interactionist framework poses empirical challenges The DBO model is mainly criticized for lacking analytical specification and empirical validation.

Blumer and collective emotion

Ashley Reichelmann connects Blumer's GPT (Group Position Theory) and views on perceived, prejudiced threat to the current studies on racial threat. Reichelmann demonstrates how experimental research design and quantitative measure can be used to capture threats as Blumer outlines them. She illustrates that collective threat is distinct from other collective emotions, using factor analyses and regression, and operates according to Blumer's theoretical predictions. Reichelmann writes that there is a gap between Blumer's framework and the methodologies of current sociologists and hopes that the use of Blumer's ideas will bridge the gap by identifying current tensions as a type of collective emotion.

Works

Movies, Delinquency, and Crime (1933)
Movies and Conduct. New York, Macmillan and Company (1933)
Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" (1939). New York : Social Sciences Research Council
Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (1967)
Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective & Method (1986)
Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change: A Critical Analysis (1990)

References

External links

A Blumer Bibliography
Movies and Conduct
at DatabaseFootball.com
List of ASA Presidents (with Pictures)