Herbert Blumer gave a perspective its name and a method its manifesto. It was he who coined the term symbolic interactionism in 1937, and it was he who spent the following three decades translating George Herbert Mead's philosophy into a programme for sociological research and defending it against the statistical mainstream that came to dominate American sociology after the Second World War.
His position rests on a single conviction with radical consequences: that human beings do not respond to stimuli but act towards objects on the basis of the meanings those objects have for them, and that meanings are neither intrinsic to objects nor fixed in individual psychology but produced, sustained and altered in the course of interaction and interpretation. If that is true, then sociology cannot proceed by treating people as the site where independent variables produce dependent ones, because the interpretive process intervenes at every point. Blumer's methodological writing is the working out of that consequence, and it remains the sharpest internal critique of quantitative sociology written by a sociologist.
Life and intellectual formation
Blumer was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1900, and studied at the University of Missouri before moving to Chicago, where he took his doctorate in 1928 and joined the faculty. He was a large, physically imposing man who paid for part of his graduate education by playing professional American football, and colleagues recalled that he could quell a disorderly meeting simply by standing up.
Chicago in the 1920s was the centre of American empirical sociology, and Blumer absorbed its ethnographic instincts from Robert Park and W. I. Thomas while attending Mead's social psychology course — the experience that shaped his entire career and made him Mead's principal interpreter to sociology. His early research, including the Payne Fund study Movies and Conduct (1933), examined how audiences made sense of film, using life histories rather than experiments.
He held the Chicago chair until 1952, editing the American Journal of Sociology and serving as secretary of the American Sociological Society and later as its president. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he built the sociology department that would become one of the discipline's strongest. He also worked for years as an arbitrator in the American steel industry, an experience visible in his later writing on industrialisation and race, and he continued publishing into the 1980s.
The three premises
Blumer's most quoted passage opens Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969) with three premises which together define the perspective.
First, human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that those things have for them — including physical objects, other people, institutions, ideals and the situations they find themselves in. Meaning is not a secondary consideration but the ground of conduct.
Second, such meanings arise out of, or are produced through, social interaction. Meaning is neither an intrinsic property of the object, as realism would have it, nor an expression of psychological elements in the person, as most psychology assumes. It is a social product, formed in the activity of people as they engage one another.
Third, meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things they encounter. This premise carries the greatest weight. The actor is not a vessel through which culture flows but an agent who indicates things to themselves, weighs them, suspends judgement, rehearses lines of action and revises them. Because the self can be an object to itself — Mead's insight — action is constructed rather than released.
Joint action
From these premises Blumer derived his account of collective life. Society is not a structure that acts but a process of joint action: the fitting together of separate lines of individual conduct into a larger organised whole, whether a marriage, a trial, a market transaction or a war. His term deliberately displaces the functionalist vocabulary of system and role.
Three features matter. Joint action must be built up each time it occurs; a repeated pattern is repeatedly accomplished, not automatically reproduced. Because it must be built up, it can always break down, deviate or be reconstructed — which is why change requires no special explanation in this scheme, whereas stability does. And joint action has a career or history, so that any given instance is linked to a prior world of meanings rather than beginning afresh. Institutions, on this account, are recurrent joint actions whose participants have worked out shared definitions; they persist only so long as those definitions are re-established.
Sensitising concepts and the critique of variable analysis
Blumer's methodological writings, especially the 1954 essay on what is wrong with social theory and the 1956 essay on sociological analysis and the variable, are his most important contribution outside interactionism proper.
He distinguished two kinds of concept. A definitive concept refers precisely to a class of objects by means of a clear definition in terms of attributes or fixed benchmarks, which is what operationalism demands. A sensitising concept lacks such specification and instead offers a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances, to be filled out and corrected by the particular cases it is used to examine. Blumer's contention was that the concepts of sociology — social class, integration, assimilation, morale — are inescapably of the second kind, and that dressing them up as the first produces spurious precision rather than knowledge.
His critique of variable analysis followed. He objected that the variables sociologists select are typically not generic but local and disparate, tied to particular studies and populations, so that findings do not accumulate into theory. He objected that quantitative operationalisation captures a convenient indicator while losing the concept it stands for. Above all he objected that correlating an input with an output leaves out precisely what sociology should explain: between the two lies the interpretive process by which people define their situation, and a variable relation that skips it describes without explaining. His well-known demand that inquiry respect the obdurate character of the empirical world was aimed at research designs that impose their categories before looking.
In place of this he proposed naturalistic inquiry in two phases: exploration, a flexible and self-correcting immersion in the area of life being studied, aimed at getting close and at unsettling the researcher's preconceptions; and inspection, the careful analytical scrutiny of the concepts thrown up by exploration, tested against varied empirical instances.
Collective behaviour and race prejudice
Blumer's substantive work applied the same logic to phenomena the functionalists treated as pathology. His much-reprinted treatment of collective behaviour analysed the emergence of new social forms out of situations where habitual definitions have failed. He described milling and circular reaction as the elementary mechanisms of collective excitement, and distinguished elementary collective groupings — the acting crowd, the expressive crowd, the mass and the public — before setting out types of social movement, including general, specific and expressive movements. The unifying claim is that collective behaviour is the seedbed of new institutions, not a breakdown of old ones.
His 1958 essay on race prejudice as a sense of group position is his most consequential single article. Prejudice, he argued, is not properly understood as an attitude, feeling or personality trait lodged in individuals; it is a collective definition of the relative positions of racial groups, formed in public discussion and carried by a group's leaders and its media. He identified four elements in the dominant group's position: a feeling of superiority, a conviction that the subordinate group is intrinsically different and alien, a proprietary claim to certain areas of privilege and advantage, and a fear or suspicion that the subordinate group harbours designs on those prerogatives. Prejudice therefore intensifies not when individuals become more hostile but when the group position is felt to be under challenge — which is why the approach has been so productive in studies of majority backlash, and why it separates Blumer from the psychological literature on the authoritarian personality.
Criticisms
The standard objection is astructuralism. Critics — including sociologists sympathetic to interaction, such as Anselm Strauss and Norman Denzin, as well as Marxist and conflict theorists — argue that a sociology of joint action and shared definitions has no adequate account of the historically formed structures within which definitions are negotiated, and no theory of how power distributes the capacity to make one's definition stick. Alvin Gouldner and others charged the Chicago tradition with a bias towards the local and the underdog that leaves the larger order unexamined; Blumer's own writing on race is often cited against this charge, but the general objection to the perspective has stuck.
His methodological programme has drawn equally strong replies. If concepts are to remain sensitising, how is a bad interpretation to be distinguished from a good one, and how are findings from separate studies ever to be compared? Critics contend that Blumer's alternative offers craft counsel rather than procedure, that exploration and inspection cannot be replicated, and that his critique of variables applies to poorly conducted quantitative work rather than to quantification as such. There are also textual criticisms: Hans Joas and others argue that Blumer's reading narrowed Mead considerably, converting a philosophy of the act, sociality and time into a social psychology of definitions, and quietly dropping Mead's naturalism.
Legacy
Blumer institutionalised a perspective. The vocabulary of definition of the situation, career, negotiated order and interpretive process passed into the sociology of deviance and labelling, medical sociology, the study of social problems and organisational ethnography; Erving Goffman, Howard Becker and the whole second Chicago school worked in the space he defended. His methodological essays remain the standard reference in arguments about qualitative research, and the notion of sensitising concepts is now common property, used well beyond interactionism, notably in grounded theory. His theory of prejudice as group position continues to generate empirical research decades after publication.
For the UPSC answer
Blumer is the bridge between Mead in the thinkers paper and symbolic interactionism in the methodology paper, so use him to connect the two. State the three premises in his own order and dwell on the third, since the interpretive process is what distinguishes his position from both behaviourism and functionalism, and add joint action to show that interactionism does have an account of collective life. In any question on quantitative and qualitative method, his sensitising versus definitive concept distinction and his objection that variable analysis omits interpretation give a precise and attributable critique of operationalism. Bring in race prejudice as a sense of group position as your substantive illustration, especially in answers on ethnicity or on majority-minority relations, since it shows the perspective handling a structural topic. Close with the twin criticisms — neglect of structure and power, and the difficulty of validating interpretation — and note that his reading of Mead is itself contested.
References & further reading
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
- Blumer, H. (1954). What is Wrong with Social Theory? American Sociological Review, 19(1), 3–10.
- Blumer, H. (1956). Sociological Analysis and the Variable. American Sociological Review, 21(6), 683–690.
- Blumer, H. (1958). Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review, 1(1), 3–7.
- Blumer, H. (1933). Movies and Conduct. New York: Macmillan.
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.