Blumer College Essays Samples For Students

Introduction

Herbert Blumer was an American sociologist with interests in interactionism and methods of social research. He believed that people create their own social reality through both group and individual action. Through his work, he stressed that the creation of social reality is a continuous process and always criticized the positivistic social research approach. He believed that applying positivistic methods to social research would create results that could be ignorant of empirical realities of the social world. According to him, it’s the examination of the empirical world demands that one should be put in a theoretical form with no conventional protocol ...

Question 1

Symbolic interaction theory views society as the conglomeration of all of the different ways that individual people interact with one another. The pioneers of this theory were Max Weber and George Herbert Mead, but the person to give this theory its name was Herbert Blumer, who summarized it like this: people tend to treat things according to the significance that those things have from their perspective. This significance comes through social interaction and can change over time as the interpretation of those things varies over time (Nelson). Blumer outlined three tenets of this theory:

People assign significance based on interaction with others.

Interaction with others shapes the ...

Understanding society, and indeed the world, is a complex task that is unlikely to ever be fully achieved. There are various social theories that work to explain the workings of society, three of which are structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. The structural functional approach works on the idea that society is made up of systems that are beneficial to all concerned. However, there are substantial problems with this theory, as it does not acknowledge that certain structures need to change even if they seem to be working for the majority. Conflict theory asserts that society functions based ...

Symbolic interaction theory can be described as a theory, which connects language with thinking, perception, and culture. The theory traces its origins from the philosophers such Charles H. Cooley, George H. Mead, Herbert Blumer, and John Dewey. The theory reflects the interpersonal communication, that is, the communication, which entails two or more individuals exchanging information. The symbolic interaction theory centers on human thought as well as interpersonal communication. In particular, this theory tries to describe human communication between the individuals who have some relationship. It offers insights regarding human communication behavior in a range of contexts. The symbolic interaction ...

Introduction

Management science and organizational behavior are important features in a productive business enterprise. As a part of a team several times in my life, experiences had taught me to place a great deal of emphasis on control either I have been the person in control as exemplified in the playground photo or the person controlled through the administration for the educational system in the form of education. . The third photo is the ultimate control involving money and wealth which people seek in order to facilitate life’s necessities and enjoyments. Financial rewards are very often the controlling factor in ...

Introduction

Sociology is the study of human groups and their interaction with one another. Different people have a differing view of the world from an outside point of view, what is popularly called, social imagination or perception. The different theories in sociology avail the various sociological perspectives through which human beings view the social world. Bluntly stated, a perspective is basically a way of looking or viewing the world. As such, sociological perspectives make it possible for human beings to predict and explain the social world in which they inhabit. To this end, there are three major sociological perspectives to explain this social ...

Introduction

Symbolic interactionism is essentially a sociological perspective, which is influential in numerous areas of this discipline. The theory as thought of George Mead and Herbert Blumer is actually the process of interaction or relations in formation of meanings for the individuals. Herbert Blumer, an interpreter and a student of Mead, devised the term “symbolic interactionism” and with influence of John Dewey who argued, that we are understood best in relation to our environment outlined the term as a study of the human group life as well as conduct. For this reason, this essay relates this theory to the topic, “Measuring Peer Pressure, ...

Sociology

The individual’s actions, daily routines, habits and competencies play a central role in the society. The actions, habits, rituals, competencies, expertise, abilities and thinking of people are considered as the building blocks of social structures. They are the small units from which a huge unit i.e., whole society emerge and any changes and modifications in these small units also influences the big unit and lead to reproduction and re-structuring of the society. In this paper the role our individual actions, routine works, habits, and aptitude are discussed in detail and their influence for reproducing the society is explained. Social actions ...

Defining Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism can be defined as a belief of ideology that upholds the superiority on one’s own culture or viewing it as superior to any other culture. Racism and ethnocentrism in America or any other modern Western society was never simply based on individual prejudices, attitudes and emotions, but was always structural and institutional, especially toward blacks in housing, jobs, education and the criminal justice system (LeVine & Campbell 1971). Blacks in the U.S. face severe economic and social discrimination, which dates back to the era of slavery and segregation. In the past, Jews, Asians and other immigrants who were considered ‘ ...