The Spirit of Blumer's Method as a Guide to Sociological Discovery

Abstract

Herbert Blumer did not offer textbook‐style instructions for how to do research. What he offered, in his classic 1969 essay “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism,” is a broad account of what research must entail to accord with symbolic interactionist premises that human social life depends on meanings, interpretation, and interaction. Blumer's essay also voices a spirit of research that is ardently empirical, sociological, and creative. It is this spirit, I argue, that holds great value for guiding sociological research toward fresh discoveries. I make this argument by reviewing what Blumer meant by exploration and inspection, and then drawing out five Blumerian principles of inquiry. By embracing these principles we can avoid the problems of inadvertent theorizing, unreflective mesearch, analytic foreclosure, excessive subjectivism, and aprocessuality. I also suggest how we can enhance the sociological value of Blumer's method by paying more attention to power, inequality, and our own institutional biases. Embracing the spirit of Blumer's method, I conclude, can help a new generation of symbolic interactionists do more imaginative and insightful work.

Volunteers do the fun stuff ‒ Experiences from volunteer‒professional caregiver cooperation in nursing homes

“…The meanings on which the cooperating parties acted were closely interwoven with how the institutions traditionally involve volunteers. According to Blumer [34, 52], meanings are maintained, developed or changed in the process of human interaction, and institutions consist of these human interactions. Berger and Luckman [53] focus on the dialectic relationship between micro and macro conditions in human social life and reality, and they emphasise that roles and actions are determined by objective meanings and attributed socially in context, arguing that meanings exist because of the acting parties’ reiteration (ibid.).…”

Interaccionismo simbólico y teoría feminista: una aproximación psicosocial a los sistemas de significación y desigualdad

“…Su enfoque procesual e intersubjetivo también sitúa al interaccionismo como un marco metodológico que, más que ofrecer una serie de pasos a seguir o técnicas específicas, abre un espacio creativo e imaginativo al entenderlo como un posicionamiento orientador en la investigación social (Schwalbe, 2019). Detrás de dicha postura está el objetivo de comprender los fenómenos psicosociales desde la perspectiva única de sus protagonistas, de adaptar la observación a las demandas de los contextos y situaciones de investigación, y de evitar adentrarnos al campo portando una escafandra que nos aísle de percibir la naturaleza de la experiencia de los sujetos (Blumer, 1940).…”

An Embattled Yet Enduring Influence: Introduction to a Special Issue on Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism

“…But the term can also be read as an implicit reference to the distinction legal analysts make between the “letter of the law,” the actual words on the page and the “spirit of the law,” the reasoning and intent behind the words on the page (Garcia, Chen, and Gordon 2014:479). Through a close reading of the text and an appreciation of Blumer's intentions, Schwalbe makes explicit five Blumerian principals that serve to facilitate sociological discovery: (1) “get inside others' worlds of meaning,” (2) “take interaction seriously as a formative process,” (3) “look at categories and ‘analytical elements’ as tied to action” in order to avoid their reification, (4) “look at social organization…as an ‘interlinkage of action,’” and (5) “examine social organization…historically” (Schwalbe 2020).…”

“…These principals are then used to identify a variety of problematic research tendencies (“inadvertent theorizing,” “unreflective mesearch,” “analytic foreclosure,” “excessive subjectivism,” and “aprocessuality”) which act as constraints on sociological discovery and, more significantly, can be avoided by “checking in with Blumer”—that is, by taking the spirit of Blumer's research process seriously (Schwalbe 2020). However, Schwalbe recognizes that there has been a lot of sociological water under the bridge since the publication of Perspective and Method and that the contemporary current of it draws our attention to three methodological practices “consistent with but extending Blumer in a more critical direction.” These involve prescriptions to “link meanings to power,” “look for inequalities that might be rendered invisible by the operation of power,” and “turn a symbolic interactionist eye on ourselves in a way that goes beyond formulaic statements of positionality” (Schwalbe 2020).…”

“…This is, admittedly, harder and requires a significantly greater level of understanding than suggested by most contemporary research methods texts, with their bullet lists of the pros and cons of specific research protocols. But, as Schwalbe (2020) concludes: “if members of a new generation of qualitative researchers can put these ideas into practice…they can take sociology to new places.”…”