ハーバート・ブルーマーのシンボリック相互作用論の展開可能性 The potential of Blumer's symbolic interactionism

Since 1960s，Symbolic Interactionism (SI) has come to the forefront as an alternative sociological and social psychological perspective not only in American Sociology，but also in Sociology of the world. In the beginning，many scholars in the field drew fundamental ideas mainly and approvingly from Blumer's works，especially，from his 'three premises.' However 1970s and 1980s have brought many criticisms of the perspective. Therefore，SI needed to reconsider and re-develop its perspective and method in response to the criticisms. Among those criticisms，two of those have become common and popular as the labels characterizing both Blumer's SI and SI as a whole. That is，on the one hand，SI has been seen as one of the subjectivist theories，and on the other hand，it has been called micro-sociology by its very nature. In sum，there are four challenges facing Blumer's SI: i) theorizing the influences of social structures on self-interaction; ii) theorizing the influences of self-interaction on social structures;iii) theorizing the social structure itself; and iv) consideration of the 'approach from "the positions of the actors" in relationship to the macro-sociological version of SI's perspective. The main purpose of this paper is to examine Blumer's SI and to show the way in which his perspective (and method) should be reconsidered.