Herbert Blumer

Herbert Blumer was an American sociologist who founded symbolic interactionism and coined the term in a 1937 essay, developing the perspective as a systematic extension and interpretation of his teacher George Herbert Mead's social psychology at the University of Chicago. Blumer argued that people act toward objects, including other people, on the basis of the meanings those objects have for them, that such meanings arise out of social interaction, and that meanings are continually reinterpreted through an active process of interpretation rather than simply transmitted or fixed. He was also an influential critic of variable-based, quantitative sociology, arguing it could strip away the interpretive processes that make social action meaningful, and he chaired the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, after a long career at Chicago, shaping several generations of interactionist sociologists.