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

• Symbolic Interactionism as defined by Herbert Blumer