From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Herbert Blumer (born March 7, 1900 in St. Louis, Missouri; died April 13, 1987) 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. In his 1937 article "Social Psychology", 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.

Anselm Strauss, who worked as a research assistant with Blumer, co-founded grounded theory.

He also played Professional Football for the Chicago Cardinals.

• Movies and Conduct (1933)
• Movies, Delinquency, and Crime (1933)
• The Human Side of Social Planning (1935)
• Social Psychology, Chapter 4 in Emerson Peter Schmidt (ed.) Man and Society: A Substantive Introduction to the Social Science. New York, Prentice-Hall (1937)
• 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)
• Blumer, Herbert. 1951. “Collective Behavior.” Pp. 166-222 in New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, ed. A. M. Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble.

• The Methodology of Herbert Blumer by Kenneth Baugh, Jr, 1990. ISBN-10: 0521382467

• Symbolic Interactionism as defined by Herbert Blumer