Herbert Blumer - Works, Further reading

Sociologist, born in St Louis, Missouri, USA. He studied at the University of Chicago (PhD), where he taught (1925–52) before joining the University of California, Berkeley (1952–75). He edited the American Journal of Sociology (1940–52). His areas of interest are indicated by his book titles, such as Movies and Conduct (1933), Movies, Delinquency, and Crime (1933), and Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change (1990).

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.

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

Works

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)

Further reading

The Methodology of Herbert Blumer by Kenneth Baugh, Jr, 1990.