Herbert Blumer (born March 7, 1900 in St. Louis, Missouri; died April 13 1997) was an American sociologist and a pupil of George Herbert Mead.
When Mead had to give up his position as a lecturer at the University of Chicago due to illness, Blumer took over and continued his work. Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism and summarised Mead's ideas into three premises:
- The way people view objects depends on the meaning these things have for them.
- This meaning comes about as a result of a process of interaction.
- The meaning of an object can change over time.
In 1952 Blumer became the Chair of the new Sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. He was secretary-treasurer, and later President, of the American Sociological Association. Blumer was presented with the association's Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship in 1983.
Works
- Movies and Conduct (1933)
- Movies, Delinquency, and Crime (1933)
- The Human Side of Social Planning (1935)
- Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" (1939)
- Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method (1969)
Further reading
- The Methodology of Herbert Blumer by Kenneth Baugh, Jr, 1990. ISBN-10: 0521382467
External links