Blumer, Herbert

Herbert George Blumer (1900–1987) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. At age 15, he dropped out of high school to help with his father's cabinetmaking business, but in 1918, he enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he earned his BA (1921) and MA degrees (1922) with Phi Beta Kappa honors. During his time there, he studied with some of the preeminent scholars of the day, in particular Charles Ellwood, a sociologist, and Max Meyer, a behavioral psychologist. He also was an All-American tackle with the Missouri football team and continued his football career at the professional level, playing for the Chicago Cardinals from 1925 to 1933, a time during which he completed his doctoral studies in sociology at the University of Chicago, and was then hired there as an assistant professor. During his faculty career at Chicago (1928–1951), he generated additional income as a labor negotiator, first with the Milwaukee Meat Packer's Union and in the 1940s by chairing the Board of Arbitration for the U.S. Steel Corporation and the United Steel Workers of America. In 1951, he was appointed as the first chair of the new Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1967, although he continued his teaching and scholarly writing well into the 1980s. Blumer was one of the premier founding voices of American sociology and was engaged in cutting-edge thinking with the likes of W. I. Thomas, Robert Park, Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, Robert Merton, George Lundberg, Samuel Stouffer, and William Ogburn, He was president of several scholarly societies and received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the 1983 Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Society (see Morrione 1999, for additional biographical information on Blumer).

Initially, through his studies with Ellwood and Meyer, and later with Ellsworth Faris, Robert Park, and George Herbert Mead at Chicago, Blumer became committed to the tenets of philosophical pragmatism and social behaviorism, and he devoted much of his scholarly life to translating and applying pragmatist principles to the field of sociology. Rejecting both idealism (reality is located in people's subjective experiences) and realism (reality is located outside people's experiences), beginning in his master's thesis at Missouri and worked out in a more mature fashion in his doctoral dissertation at Chicago, Blumer sought a conceptual framework for developing a science of society that acknowledged both human interpretive processes and obdurate social structures. The key to such a framework was the pragmatist contention, expressed most explicitly by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, that any such science must start with an understanding of human social activity; and in 1937, Blumer assigned the term “symbolic interaction” to the kind of communicative activity engaged in by human beings. Over the course of his career, Blumer worked out a form of action theory, or what today we might call “structuration theory,” in an array of substantive areas. Beginning with his classic analysis of concepts (1931), drawing largely from John Dewey, he assessed various methodological procedures in terms of their adequacy for developing sociology into a science, and found each one to be insufficient in and of itself. Following Robert Park, he wrote foundational analyses of collective behavior and mass society, out of which he later theorized fashion as a form of modernity, and conducted early empirical studies of the movie industry and its effects. He articulated pragmatist principles for a sociological social psychology (1937) and developed a theory of race relations that has been enduringly useful (see the essays in Symbolic Interaction 11(1), 1988, for assessments of range of Blumer's substantive contributions to sociology).

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