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American sociologist (1900–1987)

Herbert George Blumer (March 7, 1900 – April 13, 1987) was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research. Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Mead's social psychology, which he labeled symbolic interactionism. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism.

In 1939, Blumer published Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America", criticizing what, at the time, was a popular social theory. Blumer said,
This scheme declares that a value playing upon a pre existing attitude gives rise to a new attitude, or an attitude playing upon a pre existing value gives rise to a new value. With terms that are uncertain and not clearly disjunctive, the presumed causal relation becomes suspect. In conclusion, Blumer recognized that in society there was no clear distinction between attitude and value, and that even social theorists have difficulty distinguishing between the two.

Based on the work of Robert E. Park, Blumer, in a 1939 article, called to attention a new subfield of sociology: collective behavior. This now developed area of inquiry is devoted to the exploration of collective action and behavior that is not yet organized under an institutional structure or formation. Blumer was particularly interested in the spontaneous collective coordination that occurs when something that is unpredicted disrupts standardized group behavior. He saw the combination of events that follows such phenomena as a key factor in society's ongoing transformation.

Blumer is well known for his connection with George Herbert Mead. Blumer was a follower of Mead's social psychological work on the relationship between self and society, and Mead heavily influenced Blumer's development of Symbolic Interactionism. Mead transferred the subject field of social psychology to Blumer's sociology. One important aspect Blumer learned from Mead was that in order for us to understand the meaning of social actions, we must put ourselves in others' shoes to truly understand what social symbols they feel to be important. However, Blumer also deviated from Mead's work. Blumer was a proponent of a more micro focused approach to sociology and focused on the subjective consciousness and symbolic meanings of individuals. Similar to George Mead, sociologist Charles Ellwood also influenced the development of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism. There are four prominent areas where Ellwood's ideas can be found in both Blumer's work and symbolic interactionism: interactionism, methodology, emotions, and group behavior. The concepts of "interstimulation and response," "intercommunication," and "coadaptation" function in Ellwood's social psychology in the same way that "self indications" and "interpretations" are found in Blumer's symbolic interactionism. There are six areas where Ellwood and Blumer are similar when addressing methodology: studying human behavior in context, a disdain for the physical science method, understanding the people being studied, using sociology to assist humanity, using inductive reasoning, and avoiding hypotheses. Looking at their ideas on emotion, both Ellwood's and Blumer's ideas deal with the relationship between emotion and interaction, with Ellwood stating, "all our social life and social behavior are not only embedded in feeling, but largely guided and controlled by feeling." Similar to that, Blumer states that, "feeling is intrinsic to every social attitude." Both Ellwood and Blumer were social nominalists and positioned that reality is reduced to properties of individuals and their interrelations.

Many have argued that Blumer's theory is a simplified and distorted version of Mead's. Many contemporary positions see "Blumerian interactionism" as "old hat," because it is gender blind (as argued by feminists) and is too conservative. In Blumers study "Movies and Conduct" (1933), Blumer made a contribution to sociology by developing an observational methodology that relied on a cinematic sense of vision and was known as symbolic interactionism. By eliminating all references to the visual erotic that made up early cinema, as well as the psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject, this paradigm claimed a scientific objectivity for social observation. Due to this, a study through feminist film study claims Blumer's methodology presents itself as "sexless." It is also contested that symbolic interaction needs to adopt an agenda that takes race, class and gender into consideration more. Moreover, it is argued that the social constructionist perspective of Blumerian interactionism provides an "over socialized" account of human life, and downplays and ignores our unconscious.

Blumer's theory of symbolic interaction, although fascinating, received criticism on its subjectivity and emphasis on different aspects of society. His theory was said to be too subjective and that it had too much emphasis on day to day life and the social formation of the individual while ignoring social structure.

Ashley Reichelmann connects Blumer's GPT (Group Position Theory) and views on perceived, prejudiced threat to the current studies on racial threat. Reichelmann demonstrates how experimental research design and quantitative measure can be used to capture threats as Blumer outlines them. She illustrates that collective threat is distinct from other collective emotions, using factor analyses and regression, and operates according to Blumer's theoretical predictions. Reichelmann writes that there is a gap between Blumer's framework and the methodologies of current sociologists and hopes that the use of Blumer's ideas will bridge the gap by identifying current tensions as a type of collective emotion.