53 Facts About Herbert Blumer

Herbert George Blumer was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research.

Herbert Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism.

Herbert Blumer was a vociferous critic of positivistic methodological ideas in sociology.

Herbert Blumer was born March 7,1900, in St Louis, Missouri.

Herbert Blumer grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, with his parents.

Herbert Blumer 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 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.

Herbert 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.

Herbert 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.

Herbert Blumer served as the 46th president of the American Sociological Association and his Presidential Address was his paper "Sociological Analysis and the 'Variable'".

Herbert Blumer was elected as the President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1954 and of the Pacific Sociological Society in 1971.

Herbert Blumer was said to be "the only white man whom Malcolm X trusted".

Herbert Blumer had two career touchdowns both in the 1925 season.

Herbert Blumer played as an end, guard, and a series of other positions.

Herbert Blumer had 4 jersey numbers over the course of his career, numbers 8,20,17,15.

Herbert Blumer played 59 games over the course of his career and retired in 1933.

Herbert Blumer played a key role in keeping the tradition of symbolic interactionism alive by incorporating it into his teachings at the university.

Herbert Blumer presented his articles on symbolic interactionism in a single volume in which he conceptualized symbolic interaction into three main points:.

Herbert Blumer believed that what creates society itself is people engaging in social interaction.

Herbert Blumer theorized that assigning objects meaning is an ongoing, two-fold process.

Herbert Blumer criticized the contemporary social science of his day because instead of using symbolic interactionism they made false conclusions about humans by reducing human decisions to social pressures like social positions and roles.

Herbert Blumer was more invested in psychical interactionism that holds that the meanings of symbols are not universal, but are rather subjective and are "attached" to the symbols and the receiver depending on how they choose to interpret them.

Herbert Blumer defined objects as the things "out there" in the world.

Herbert Blumer persistently critiqued the idea that the only form of valid knowledge is derived through a totally objective perspective.

Herbert Blumer believed that theoretical and methodological approaches to studying human behavior must acknowledge human beings as thinking, acting, and interacting individuals and must employ that they represent the humanly known, socially created, and experienced world.

Herbert 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.

Herbert Blumer believed that society is not made up of macrostructures, but rather that the essence of society is found in microstructures, specifically in actors and their actions.

Herbert Blumer did not reject the idea of macrostructures, but instead focused on the concept of emergence, a concept that focuses on our larger social structures emerging from the smaller.

Herbert Blumer admitted that macrostructures are important, but that they have an extremely limited role in symbolic interactionism.

In sum, Herbert Blumer said that large scale structures are the frameworks for what is crucial in society, action, and interaction.

Herbert Blumer is not denying that social structures influence our actions, just that they do not determine our actions.

Herbert Blumer advocated direct observation of social life, interviewing and listening to people's conversations, listening to the radio and watching television, reading newspapers, reading diaries, letters, and other written life histories, reading public records, and finding well-informed participants.

In 1952, Herbert Blumer became President of the American Sociological Association and his Presidential Address was his paper "Sociological Analysis and the 'Variable'".

Herbert Blumer believed these shortcomings are serious but not crucial, and that with increased experience they can be overcome.

In 1939, Herbert 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.

Herbert Blumer claimed that Thomas and Znaniecki failed to properly distinguish between attitude as subjective and value as a societal collective element.

Herbert Blumer said they used the terms interchangeably, therefore making the theory unreliable.

In conclusion, Herbert 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.

Herbert Blumer was particularly interested in the spontaneous collective coordination that occurs when something that is unpredicted disrupts standardized group behavior.

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

Herbert Blumer published an article discussing his theory on race based prejudice entitled "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position" in a spring 1958 edition of The Pacific Sociological Review.

Herbert Blumer argued that the formation of racial prejudice was based on the creation of a dominant and subordinate groups and reproduced through these groups acting as units with prominent individuals in each speaking as representative of the whole.

Herbert Blumer outlined 4 characteristics of the dominant group that placed it in the position of domination.

Herbert Blumer goes on to describe the treatment of individuals in a different group as a matter of playing out the placement of the other group with the person in one group being a representative interacting with the representative of another group.

Herbert Blumer was a follower of Mead's social-psychological work on the relationship between self and society, and Mead heavily influenced Herbert Blumer's development of Symbolic Interactionism.

One important aspect Herbert 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.

Herbert Blumer was a proponent of a more micro-focused approach to sociology and focused on the subjective consciousness and symbolic meanings of individuals.

Many have argued that Herbert Blumer's theory is a simplified and distorted version of Mead's.

Herbert Blumer's 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.

Herbert Blumer himself was at fault, in some part, for criticism because he refused advice to include substantive papers in his book.

Herbert Blumer wanted to restrict the volume to more general topics which caused a large amount of criticism.

Since Analytic Sociology stresses the individual, just as Herbert Blumer stresses the acting unit, Azarian writes that Herbert Blumer's framework can aid in determining the actor's perception and set of actions in response to a situation.