Herbert Blumer and the Chicago Tradition^[1]                    

Tsukasa Kuwabara^[2]

Yuhuan Wang^[3]

Shigeaki Sawada^[4]

  The Chicago School of symbolic interactionism, represented by the work of Herbert Blumer and often regarded as part of the Chicago Renaissance, has been seen as a major alternative to functionalism and social system theory in American sociology. This approach also has been influential as a critique of positivism. To date, one of the authors has published a number of reviews of Blumer's symbolic interactionism; these are summarized in Kuwabara and Yamaguchi (2013). In this paper, we clarify in what sense Blumer's symbolic interactionism is generally categorized as part of the Chicago Renaissance.^[5][a]

Keywords: social process; self; naturalistic inquiry; Kant; reflection-in-action; standpoint of the actor^[b]

“It is too early for a final assessment of Blumer's work. That will have to wait until the twenty-first century, when future historians will be able to see what remains of current sociology. It seems likely that many of his views will prevail.”^[6][c]

Introduction 

  Herbert George Blumer, one of the most distinguished sociologists, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1900. In 1922, while studying under the renowned psychological sociologist Charles Elwood, he completed his master's thesis, “Theory of Social Revolutions,” earning an M.A. from the University of Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1928. His doctoral dissertation was titled Method in Social Psychology, and he wrote it under the supervision of Ellsworth Faris. From then until his death in 1987, he held various positions, including professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of California, and he served as president of the American Sociological Association.^[d]

 Blumer made significant contributions to sociology and social psychology. However, it was his formulation of symbolic interactionism (SI)^[7] that propelled him to a central position in the sociological world. When discussing its relationship with the Chicago School of Sociology,^[8] SI has been linked to various intellectual contexts and movements, including the third and fourth generations of the Chicago School, the Chicago Renaissance, the rediscovery of the Chicago School's intellectual legacy, the Second Chicago School and the Neo-Chicago School. These associations suggest that Blumer’s SI inherited much of the knowledge of the early^[9] Chicago School of Sociology in constructing its perspective and method.^[10] In what sense, then, does Blumer's SI inherit the legacy of the early Chicago School of Sociology?

Emphasis on Social Process

 Any attempt to trace the origins of the early Chicago School of Sociology's approach to understanding society leads first to the sociological thought of Georg Simmel. This was introduced by Albion W. Small and actively adopted by Robert E. Park. Simmel's approach understood individuals and society not as absolute entities but as processes of constant interaction among multiple elements. This concept was adopted by the early Chicago School of Sociology, which placed an emphasis on social processes. This emphasis was faithfully adopted in Blumer’s SI, as well as in the work of Everett C. Hughes. It was later inherited by Howard S. Becker, who was a student of both Blumer and Hughes.

 For Blumer, human society is understood first and foremost as symbolic interaction.^[11]

 In the process of adapting to^[12] the social and physical environment that surrounds them, humans engage in a definition of the situation. As in the work of William I. Thomas, this point is also fundamental to Blumer’s SI.^[13] The social and physical environment to which particular meanings have been assigned through such definitions is referred to as the world. Its constituent elements can be broadly divided into three categories: physical objects, social objects, and abstract objects. Among these, social objects include others. When human adaptive activity is directed toward others as social objects, it takes the form of mutual adaptation. The term “society as symbolic interaction” used by Blumer refers precisely to this process of mutual adaptation.

 Among the “three”^[14] forms of social interactions in which humans engage, Blumer uses the term joint action to refer specifically to those in which significant symbols are employed. Blumer acknowledges that the concepts of significant symbol and joint action are both derived from the work of George H. Mead. In Blumer’s usage, joint action is also referred to as a transaction (sometimes glossed as negotiation), and it is this that Blumer identifies as the actual mode of human interaction.^[15] Accordingly, when Blumer speaks of society as symbolic interaction, the symbolic interaction in question is joint action, that is, transaction.

 Blumer sees the transaction as something that is constructed and reconstructed through actors’ definitions and redefinitions of the situation. As Blumer states, “the transaction ... is constructed or built up in the process of its occurrence, and is thus subject to having a variable career. Human interaction flows on in a movement of definition and redefinition of one another’s action. ... This picture of human association as a flowing process in which each participant is guiding his action in the light of the action of the other suggests its many potentialities for divergent direction.”^[16] Here, defining the situation takes the form of taking into account of taking into account.^[17] In other words, each actor, through the processes of definition and redefinition,  constructs and reconstructs^[18] the perspectives held by the other actors with whom he/she is interacting (their perspectives) and his/her own perspective as seen from those actors' perspectives (one’s own perspective as seen from the others’ perspectives).^[19] As this process continues, the transaction continually changes its form.

 It goes without saying that this process-oriented view of society in Blumer’s work was not established solely through his inheritance of the early Chicago School of Sociology. It was also formed through a deliberate and thorough differentiation from the structure-oriented image of society held by structural functionalism, which constituted the dominant current in American sociology at the time.

Focus on the Self

 The definition of the situation mentioned above is possible only because humans are able to engage in self-interaction. Self-interaction is the process of interacting with oneself. Blumer formulated this concept on the basis of Mead’s idea of the interplay between the “I” and the “Me.”^[20] Blumer describes this process as literally the process in which the individual interacts with themselves. Human actions are brought about by this process, not by social forces^[21] of various kinds.

 The self is what enables humans to engage in such self-interaction. In other words, only by possessing a self do humans become able to perform self-interaction. It is well known that Charles H. Cooley and Mead once challenged Cartesian mind–body dualism and emphasized the social nature of the self. As is widely known, Cooley, through the concept of the looking-glass self, showed that the self is formed by using others as mirrors, while Mead, through the concepts of the play stage and the game stage, showed that the self is formed through taking the role of others. Like these two scholars, Blumer emphasizes the social nature of the self.  Social interaction produces joint action on the one hand and forms the human self on the other. An individual's self emerges in social interaction, through the ways in which others act toward him/her in the course of their involvement with the individual. This was Blumer’s theory of how the self is formed, derived from the second of the well-known three basic premises of symbolic interactionism: “that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows.”^[22]

Naturalistic Inquiry

 In Pragmatist philosophy, science was understood as an activity that “develop[s] from problems in life, then; and they are, or should be, directed towards the solution of those problems.”^[23] Pragmatist philosophy regarded science, which serves to overcome problematic situations, as a model of what human knowledge ought to be. At the same time, science was viewed as a means of developing human knowledge and, consequently, promoting mutual adaptation among humans and their adaptation to the environment. This view of science strongly influenced the early Chicago School of Sociology, as well as Blumer’s own perspective.

 Blumer's view of science treats it as a refinement of the problem-solving activities people engage in their daily lives. He sees its utility in promoting human adaptation to various environments–what he understands as understanding and control of the environment. This view is most clearly expressed in his article “Science Without Concepts” (1931).   

 Humans engage in perception^[24] when adapting to their immediate environment. What they perceive arises from the activity they are performing and is closely tied to it. Perception organizes an individual's activity. It arises from the interaction between an individual's activity and their environment, and it directs the course of that activity. This process of perception is based on certain concepts, but sometimes existing concepts cannot effectively serve as tools for adaptation. In such situations, humans engage in the process of reconstructing existing concepts. Blumer refers to this process as conception.^[25] Conception makes possible new directions and forms of action that had not previously been discerned. Once it becomes clear through this conceptual process that existing concepts are inadequate for adaptation, the results of conception are incorporated back into existing modes of perception to form new, alternative concepts on which subsequent perception is to be based. In other words, a person's conception reshapes their perception. Conception is not merely a supplement to perception, but an activity that forms or reshapes it. Through this process, existing concepts are reconstructed, and the reconstructed concepts guide new perception.^[26] Blumer acknowledges that he adopted this way of thinking about the relationship between humans and the environment from functionalist psychology and Pragmatist thought. This approach was pioneered by William James and others, and later solidified by John Dewey, among others. These activities of perception and conception never cease. In that sense, the concepts humans possess always retain the character of hypotheses. There are two types of concepts used by humans: common-sense concepts and scientific concepts. In scientific activity, in which the latter are employed, scientists must carry out the reconstruction of existing concepts in a more refined and more active manner. Scientific concepts formed in this way further promote human understanding and control of the environment, or human adaptation to it. Blumer explains such scientific activity by referring to the research practices of natural scientists such as Pasteur, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin.^[27] What Blumer sought to emphasize most strongly in this work was that “most of the improper usage of the concept in science comes when the concept is set apart from the world of experience,^[28] when it is divorced from the perception from which it has arisen and into which it ordinarily ties.”^[29] Based on this view, Blumer criticized the sociological world of his time, noting that “the charge has been made against sociology that it has the greatest number of concepts and the least knowledge.”^[30]

 What Blumer presents in Chapter 1, “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism,” in his major work Symbolic Interactionism (1969) as naturalistic inquiry, or alternatively as exploration and inspection, is another name for the reconstruction activity described above. In his 1977 paper “Comment on Lewis,” Blumer characterizes naturalistic inquiry as “a continuing interaction between guiding ideas and empirical observation.”^[31] It is not a particular concept itself but, rather, the way in which scientists–and sociologists in particular–are to use concepts within this constant interaction. Blumer addresses this through his well-known  sensitizing concepts. In other words, Blumer advocates a way of using concepts in which, rather than “embracing the instance in the abstract framework of the concept [whose content is strictly defined],” “one moves out from the concept [whose content is broadly specified] to the concrete distinctiveness of the instance.”^[32] 

 The Chicagoan world as grasped by the early Chicago School was brought about by the massive influx of immigrants from Western, Northern, Eastern, and Southern Europe: a world in which “there are few customs that are common” to its different regions, a world in which “there is certainly no common view which holds the cosmopolitan population of this whole region together in any common purpose,” and a world inhabited by “very different classes and kinds of people.”^[33] Viewing the reality before them as a domain filled with such diversity and heterogeneity, Thomas approached it through concepts such as social disorganization and social reorganization, while Park employed concepts such as accommodation and assimilation. It can thus be regarded as hardly surprising that Blumer, who shared Thomas’s and Park’s sense of reality and research orientation, arrived at the conclusion of rejecting the use of definitive concepts and supporting the use of sensitizing concepts, on the basis of the view that “since the immediate data of observation in the form of the distinctive expression in the separate instances of study are different, in approaching the empirical instances one cannot rely on bench marks or fixed, objective traits of expression.”^[34]

 In the concluding section of Chapter 1 of Symbolic Interactionism, Blumer states the following:

My conclusion ... is indeed brief. It can be expressed as a simple injunction: Respect the nature of the empirical world and organize a methodological stance to reflect that respect. This is what I think symbolic interactionism strives to do.^[35]

 Blumer's method of naturalistic inquiry is the thought which reflects his desire to stay grounded in the empirical world and to adopt “a down-to-earth approach”^[36] and which crystallized into a methodology.^[37]

The Approach from the Standpoint of the Actor: Inheriting the Ethos of the Early Chicago School of Sociology

 In Blumer’s SI, society is understood as a process (a social process) in which joint actions, constructed and reconstructed daily by people through the activity of defining and redefining situations (taking account of others and taking into account of taking into account), are mutually interwoven. People conduct the definition of the situation through self-interaction, but such self-interaction is possible only because they possess a self. Both joint action and the self have social interaction as their generative basis. This is Blumer’s view of society, as we observed earlier. If a researcher seeks to practice the naturalistic inquiry described above while holding this perspective, they are inevitably required to approach society from the actor’s perspective (the standpoint of the actor). This is how Blumer understands the matter.

 What is meant by the approach from the standpoint of the actor is the activity in which the researcher takes the roles of the actors being studied. On this point, Blumer states the following:

Insofar as sociologists or students of human society are concerned with the behavior of acting units^[38], the position of symbolic interaction requires the student to catch the process of interpretation through which they construct their actions. … To catch the process, the student must take the role of the acting unit whose behavior he is studying. … The process has to be seen from the standpoint of the acting unit. It is the recognition of this fact that makes the research work of such scholars as R. E. Park and W. I. Thomas so notable.^[39]

 In other words, the above statement amounts to a methodological requirement that the sociologist enter into joint action and engage in taking account of others (the studied) and taking into account of taking into account. The use of “human documents,” which Blumer evaluated highly (albeit with reservations), following suggestions from Thomas and F. W. Znaniecki’s co-authored The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–20), is also one way to fulfill this requirement.^[40] The foremost ethos that Blumer’s SI inherited from the early Chicago School was the approach from the actor’s perspective in this sense.^[41] Blumer’s SI is often criticized for falling into subjectivism, but he is by no means arguing that the actor’s subjectivity should be treated as absolute. Rather, he insists that the actor’s subjectivity must not be disregarded in the construction of sociological theory. The raw subjectivity of the actor (the standpoint of the actor in the raw^[42]) must be taken up and made an object of analysis. From Blumer’s standpoint, it is precisely a mode of research that fails to observe this principle that falls into the worst kind of subjectivism. Bearing in mind the sociological positivism (operationalism) that occupied a dominant position as a research method in American sociology at the time, Blumer states the following:

To try to catch the interpretative process by remaining aloof as a so-called “objective” observer and refusing to take the role of the acting unit is to risk the worst kind of subjectivism— the objective observer is likely to fill in the process of interpretation with his own surmises in place of catching the process as it occurs in the experience of the acting unit which uses it.^[43]

 It can be said that Blumer’s requirement mentioned above—that the researcher enter into the social interactions before them and grasp the activities through which people construct society day by day—faithfully inherits the ethos of the early Chicago School of Sociology: sociology that goes into the streets.^[44] 

Note: This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP25K05540.^[45]

References
Blumer, H. G., 1969, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Prentice-Hall.

 --------, 1977, Comment on Lewis’ ‘The Classic American Pragmatists as Forerunners to Symbolic Interactionism,’  The Sociological Quarterly, 18(2): 285-289.

 --------, 1993, L. H. Athens (ed.), Blumer’s Advanced Course on Social Psychology, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 14: 163-193.

 Hammersley, M., 1989, The Dilemma of Qualitative Method: Herbert Blumer and the Chicago Tradition,  Routledge.

 Ito, I.^[46], 2001, Shinborikku sōgosayōron ni okeru shitsuteki kenkyū ronsō [Symbolic Interactionism in the Qualitative Research Controversy: The Exchange between Postmodernists and Interactionists], M. Funatsu (ed.), Amerika shakaigaku no chōryū [Trends in American Sociology], Koseisha Koseikaku, pp.171-188.

 Kuwabara, T., 2000, The Sociology of Social Processes, Ph.D. dissertation, Tohoku University.^[47]

 --------, 2002, The Early Chicago School of Sociology and Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism, Discussion Papers in Economics and Sociology, 0203: 1-8.^[48] 

 --------, 2003, ‘Sōgosayō’ to ‘gōi’: ‘gōi’ haaku e no shinborikku sōgosayōron kara no sekkin [‘Interaction’ and ‘Consensus’: An Approach from Symbolic Interactionism to Theorizing ‘Consensus’]. Shakai bunseki [Social Analysis] 30: 57–74.

 --------, 2019, “Symbolic Interactionism Notes” Web Release, Journal of Economics and Sociology, Kagoshima University, 93: 33-39.^[49]

 --------, 2020, Media Harassment in Japan: An Interactionist Approach, Discussion Papers In Economics and Sociology, 2001: 1-8.^[50]

 -------- and A. Kihara, 2010, The Potential of Blumer's Symbolic Interactionism, Journal of the Doctorate Studies in Social Sciences, 7: 237-249.^[51]

 -------- and M. Aburada, 2011, Introduction to a Sociological Perspective of Symbolic Interactionism: Corrected Edition, Journal of Economics and Sociology, Kagoshima University, 76: 1-13.^[52]

 -------- and K. Yamaguchi, 2013, An Introduction to the Sociological Perspective of Symbolic Interactionism, The Joint Journal of the National Universities in Kyushu, Education and Humanities, 1(1): 1-11.^[53]

 Maines, D. R., and T. J. Morrione, 1990, On the Breadth and Relevance of Blumer's Perspective, H. G. Blumer, Maines and Morrione (eds.), Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change, Aldine, xi-xxiv.

 Okuda, S., 2008, The Sociological Implications of T. Shibutani's Reference Group Theory: An Interactionist Analysis of “Modern Mass Society,” Master's Thesis, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kagoshima University.^[54]

 Shibutani, T., 1988=1992, Herbert Blumer's Contribution to Twentieth-Century Sociology, P. Hamilton (ed.), George Herbert Mead: Critical Assessments, vol. II, Routledge, pp.249-257.

 Smith, D., 1988, The Chicago School, Palgrave Macmillan.

 Wang, Y., 2025, A Sociological Study on the Adaptation of Chinese Workers, Master's Thesis, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kagoshima University.^[55]

 Wallace, R. A., and A. Wolf, 1980, Contemporary Sociological Theory, Prentice-Hall.

 Zorbaugh, H., 1929, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side,  University of Chicago Press.

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