SOC 2112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism, Social Theory
2 Sep 2015
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He was a student of gh mead at the university of chicago and became the key theorist and proponent of symbolic interactionism in usa. He helped to establish the department of sociology at berkeley. California: symbolic interactionism: perspective and method (1969, movies and conduct (1933, social problems as collective behaviour (1971) He was an important contributor to a major subfield of sociology and the study of collective behaviour . He was heavily critical of concepts of social structure and their functions. Society is not a fixed static thing it is an emergent. There are relatively unstructured situations and outcomes such as crowds, masses, and publics, including riots, rumour, public opinion, and social movements. Blumer identified four stages of social movement"s lifecycles. They are: social ferment, popular excitement, formalization, and institutionalization. Social theory its divorcement from the empirical world is glaring it is compartmentalized into a world of its own, inside of which it feeds on itself.
