The essay delves into George Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism, emphasizing three key premises. Firstly, human interactions are guided by assigned meanings to objects and individuals. Secondly, Blumer challenges innate or psychological origins of meaning, proposing that meanings arise from s...
Outline Blumer’s conception of symbolic interactionism. What are the important
theoretical and methodological premises of his theory?
The sociological theory of ‘symbolic interactionalism is developed from actions or
certain objects that lead to certain ways of interaction and communication between
each other. It looks at the idea social behaviour that puts a spotlight on the idea of
gestural communications or linguistic and the mutual understanding of said
subject, most importantly the formation of a social being using language. The
person who I will be writing this essay about and took a great interest to the
sociological theory of symbolic interactionalism is George Herbert Blumer. Blumer
1986, mentioned how there were differences between scholars on how they
viewed symbolic interactionism, however, he also thought that in general the views
of the scholars were similar in the terms of the way they studied and viewed group
life as humans. Furthermore, he also believed that ‘symbolic interactionalism’ is
formed around the idea of ‘general similarity’ and at the time believed that the
methodological approach of ‘symbolic interactionism’ was very much
underrepresented and there was no ‘clear formulation ‘on the position of this
theory. In this essay I will be highlighting and explaining Blumer’s Conception of
symbolic interactionalism as well as the importance of the methodological and
theoretical premises of Blumer’s theory.
Looking at the nature of symbolic interactionism, Blumer 1986, believed that
symbolic interactionism has three main premises. Firstly, one of Blumer’s
premises is the idea that us as human beings only interact with things based on
the idea that these things have the meaning that were given to them. An example
of this is everything that us as humans understand as being physical objects in the
world, for example tables, flowers, computers ; Moreover, other human beings
besides ourselves, for example a chef in a kitchen or a brother; also we can
include categories of human beings for example enemies or friends, rich or
poor ;institutions such as a hospital or university, virtues, for example courage,
intelligence; Other peoples activities, for example what they ask you or order you
to do and finally the general situations that us as individuals face in our everyday
lives. This is an important theoretical premise of symbolic interactionism because
it explains to us how the reason, we are able to interact with one another is
because of our understanding of meanings of various objects and subjects of our
everyday lives where we have a mutual understanding of roles of individuals,
institutions, and other everyday objects that we might also interact with. Blumer
1986, argued that this premise that us as human beings only act a certain way
towards things because of the meaning of the object/thing is too simple.
Secondly, looking at one of the methodological premises of symbolic
interactionism by Blumer 1986 is the idea that we look at where have these
meanings come from, or rather what produces these meanings and the interaction
that we have with one another. In short, this premise focuses on the ‘source of
meaning’. One main way of getting the origin of meaning is to see the meaning of
the object/ thing to be innate, for example regarding it as a natural piece of what
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