DESENSITIZING HERBERT BLUMER'S WORK ON RACE RELATIONS

Recent applications of Herbert Blumer's group position model to the study of contemporary race prejudice have misrepresented the ongoing process of definition and accommodation that, according to Blumer, mediates race relations. By conforming to the canons of research design and using standard sample surveys, public opinion polls, variables analysis, and statistical techniques to study perceptions of group threat, group hostility, and prejudicial attitudes, Blumer's dynamic social imagery, as well as the socially grounded methodology he sought to promote, are undermined. The result is a static depiction of race relations that has nothing to do with the variegated experiential complexities that Blumer claimed underlie all human group life.     

HERBERT G. BLUMER (1900–1987): A LEGACY OF CONCEPTS,CRITICISMS, AND CONTRIBUTIONS

This article introduces a collection of articles written in honor of Herbert Blumer. It is noted what contributing authors identify as strengths and weaknesses of his theoretical and methodological analyses. Emphasized, however, is his view of reality as an ongoing emergent process. This view, coupled with his fundamental pragmatist stance, are the unifying and enduring themes in his life work. Blumer's impact on the social sciences will grow as more scholars become familiar with the full range of his ideas.     

Researching Race: Identifying a Social Construction through Qualitative Methods and an Interactionist Perspective

Although much of the sociological community now views race as a social construction, empirical research does not always identify it in this way. Many practices of designating a research participant's race approach this process uncritically, implicitly framing race as uncomplicated. Although this is more common in survey‐based work, in this article I explore the tendencies and difficulties of studying race using qualitative methods. I discuss two prevalent but potentially problematic ways of “operationalizing” race in qualitative methodology, and then elaborate on the difficulties of identifying race in practice, using examples from my own ethnographic research. I suggest that symbolic interactionism provides a unique perspective from which to express race as socially situated, as long as this process is approached reflectively.     

THE CULTURAL FRAMEWORKS OF PREJUDICE: Reputational Images and the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism

Responses to prominent reputations provide a framework for understanding the growth and decline of group prejudice. In the 1930s, the connection between American Jews and Communism was both an empirical and cognitive reality—Jews constituted a significant portion of the American Communist Party and many Americans stereotyped them as such. However, by mid-century, the perceptual linkage between Jew and Communist had largely vanished. We explain the change in public attitudes by treating prejudice as a cultural framework for collective memory. Building on Blumer (1958) and the empirical conclusions of other prominent sociologists of the period, we argue that group prejudice depends on a group's distinctiveness, its perceived moral imbalance, and the discursive utility of attacks. When components of this three-part frame weaken, prejudice dissipates. Specifically, we claim that the specificity of reputations serves as a concrete stand-in for more diffuse images of social groups. While group position is not only the result of the reputation of prominent figures, the public images of these figures help to shape prejudice and its decline. As an empirical case, we examine the cultural framework for interpreting the linkage of American Jews and Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s through the reputations of Alger Hiss, Roy Cohn, and Adolf Hitler. Presented by reputational entrepreneurs, these images emphasize American Communists who were decidedly non-Jewish, underline the prominence of anti-Communist American Jews, and delegitimize public anti-Semitism.     

MYTH,TEXT, AND INTERACTION COMPLICITY IN THE NEGLECT OF BLUMER'S MACROSOCIOLOGY

This article depicts a major line of assessment of the work of Herbert Blumer as constituting a series of myths. Portrayals of his work as subjectivistic and ideographic combine with the predominant myth that Blumer ignored issues of large-scale organization and social structure. Documentation of his analyses of corporate power relations, racial stratification, and industrialization and industrial organization reveals the mythical character of much published opinion regarding his work. The micro-macro distinction is an ideology within which these myths have been created and perpetuated. Interactionists who have benignly bought into that ideology contribute to the myth of Blumer's neglect of societal organization. In closing it is suggested that greater attention needs to be given to the influence of Robert Park on Blumer's perspectives and that such an assessment might contribute to a broadening of the base of symbolic interactionism.     

The Work Sites of an American Interactionist: Anselm L. Strauss, 1917–1996

This article offers a situated overview of the work of Anselm Strauss. Beginning from its intellectual genesis at the University of Chicago with Blumer and Hughes, Strauss's creation of a sociology of action through concepts of routine and nonroutine action, negotiated order, social worlds, arenas, properties and kinds of work, and trajectory are examined. Strauss's ideas about medicine and chronic illness, psychiatric institutions, death and dying, awareness contexts, biography and trajectory are discussed. His profoundly innovative contributions to research methods, including grounded theory and the integration of structural elements through his conditional matrix, are also detailed. In conclusion, the ways in which Strauss himself framed the critical space of an interactionist sociologist are laid out through new interview materials.     

Race,Gender, and Class in the Persistence of the Mariel Stigma Twenty Years after the Exodus from Cuba

The study examines the mediating effects of gender, race, and class in the Mariel Cuban immigrant adaptation process. It explores the significance of the Mariel identity by comparing the experiences of pre‐1980 arrivals with those of the Mariel cohort (1980–1981) and post‐Mariel arrivals (1982–1990, 1990–2000). The central question of the study is the extent to which the Marielitos’ experience as a group with stigmatization and being labeled as “different” and pathological has persisted in having a different effect on their adaptation to the U.S. from that of other Cuban arrivals before and after Mariel. This study bases its definition of stigma on sociologically grounded theoretical orientation of the construction of a social identity in which a dominant group(s) attribute an undesired difference from what was anticipated to an out‐group such that it leads to varieties of discrimination that reduce one's life chances.     

Understanding Everyday Life: Generic Social Processes and the Pursuit of Transcontextuality

This paper joins earlier interactionist projects in advocating for an analytical attentiveness to generic social process (GSP). This dynamic form of theorizing is indebted to the thought of Herbert Blumer and the extended phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. Rather centrally, the study of GSPs draws upon the foundational concepts of duration, intersubjectivity, and the self. Such concepts have contributed to some of symbolic interactionism's most enduring, empirically grounded and theoretically robust work. Drawing on a series of ethnographic research projects, this paper offers a research agenda for engaging GSPs transcontextually. Specifically, I argue for extending the study of GSPs through the examination of management in everyday life, the creation of subcultural value, and the social construction of doubt.     

G. H. MEAD'S SOCIAL BEHAVIORISM VS. THE ASTRUCTURAL BIAS OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM*

Symbolic inleractionism has been criticized for having an astructural bias. This paper presents a response to that criticism by examining the ontological stance contained in Mead's social behaviorism and contrasting it with the ontological stance of symbolic interactionism's chief architect, Herbert Blumer. Mead's social behaviorism is shown to be a nondualist philosophy of conduct based solidly on conceptions of the human community and of individual conduct as organized on the basis of social acts–a view not shared by Blumer.     

“The Way That I Look at Things [Is] Different Because It's Me”: Constructing and Deconstructing Narratives About Racialized Sexual Selves

Many gender scholars have abandoned the notion that we can explore women's experiences without attention to other identities such as race, class, and/or sexual orientation. Until now, the ways race influences the development of sexual selves has been underexplored. In this paper, I focus on heterosexual women's accounts of the interplay of race, gender, and sexualities. Based on in‐depth interviews with sixty‐two white and African American heterosexual women between the ages of twenty and sixty‐eight, I examine the ways in which narrative work tells a story about the presentation of public sexual selves. I also explore how women's personal narratives are impacted by larger cultural narratives about race. Specifically, through a study of sexuality, I focus on the social construction of “postracialism.”     

Structure,Agency, and Social Reality in Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism: The Influence of Georg Simmel

Mead no doubt had a manifest influence on Blumer's thinking, and Blumer's acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Mead is a central feature of Blumer's writing. While I do not presume to question the importance Blumer assigns to the role played by Mead in the development of Blumerian symbolic interactionism, I argue that the perspective also owes much to the insights of Georg Simmel. In particular, a Simmelian flavor is evident in how Blumer addresses the core sociological issues of the nature of social reality, the nature of the relationship between the individual and society, and the nature of social action.     

Agile Materialisms: Antonio Gramsci,Stuart Hall,Racialization, and Modernity

This article investigates why Gramsci's theories and concepts have a discrete relevance to the study of race and ethnicity in contemporary contexts. Two theoretical points emerge from the investigation. First, through Gramsci's work, Hall's approach to the structural/cultural theory problem provides an important mediation for theoretical approaches to race. Hall is then able to demonstrate that the racialization of labor and the coercion of workers in colonial and neocolonial contexts, with regard to the “global south” was the rule and not the exception. Second, through an historical and discursive approach, I demonstrate how Gramsci's analysis of politics and political strategies took race into account. I contend that Gramsci's perspective on race facilitated Hall's ability to deploy Gramsci's theoretical framework and concepts.     

Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

Working with Homeless Populations to Increase Access to Services: A Social Service Providers’ Perspective Through the Lens of Stereotyping and Stigma

Through the lens of stereotyping and stigma, this article examines discrimination and prejudice toward homeless families from the perspective of social service providers. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with practitioners. A critical social work practice perspective is used to provide a framework for understanding how social worker knowledge about discrimination and prejudice informs the ways in which the workers engage with clients, build capacities, and advocate for clients in an anti-oppressive manner. The themes found in this study include: a) providers’ awareness of bias, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination; b) providers’ use of a range of strategies to work with people experiencing homelessness; c) providers’ ideas about strategies that organizations can implement for service provision; and) providers’ belief that additional advocacy and policy are needed in relationship to people experiencing homelessness.     

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

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.     

The Utility of Social Class,Race, and Gender in Clinical Practice: A Case Study Involving Intraracial Dyads

This article focuses on clinical work involving a male Black practitioner and a male Black client in which issues of social class, race, and gender were prominent in the treatment process. Three questions raised by the client early in the therapeutic encounter informed assessment, treatment, and the clinician's countertransference. Tenets from self-psychology, relational theory, intersubjectivity, and sociocultural factors relative to Black men are used to ground the discussion. Finally, the article illustrates why intraracial therapy should be understood in the context of the delivery of culturally competent services, highlighting how the intersection of a client's psychological issues, social class, race, and gender can emerge as functional features in psychotherapeutic work.     

Reframing Black Social Work Students' Experiences of Teaching and Learning

This article draws on critical race theory (CRT) to foreground the role of race and racism in the ways in which Black students experience social work teaching and learning. It reviews some of the available literature on Black social work students' experiences of teaching and learning. The article reframes understandings of the perceived failures of this group of students to adapt to the world of higher education. It is argued that race and racism are salient determining factors in the experiences of Black students within social work education. Emphasis is placed on understanding the specificity of this group of students taking into cognisance the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts within which they are located. The article uses CRT as critical lens to reflect on peer support groups as potential counter spaces that can disrupt the negative experiences of black social work students.     

The Search for Meaning: Revisiting Herbert Blumer’s Interpretation of G.H. Mead

Herbert Blumer’s interpretation of George Herbert Mead’s work has set the intellectual foundation for the symbolic interactionist tradition. However, the adequacy of this interpretation has been challenged, leading to a series of highly charged debates in the 1970s–80s. This article reflects back on these debates, and reconsiders the contrast between the Blumerian and Meadian epistemologies from a contemporary perspective. It is demonstrated that while Mead’s work is able to adapt to and contribute to emerging challenges to dualism in contemporary interpretive theory, Blumer’s root epistemological position fails in this regard, and creates an inconsistent framework for social reality.     

Portraits and collaborations: a reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald

This reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald as a photographer, storyteller and teacher highlights Ewald's methodology, her manner of presenting work and her images. First, in describing Ewald's artistic practice, I discuss the innovative ways she collaborates with children, sharing control over the process of visually representing children's lives, their stories and their faces. I also describe her influence as an educator and suggest that researchers as well may benefit from Ewald's approach to exploring individuals' social realities. Next, I propose that Ewald's body of work provides a rich source of material for those interested in the analysis of visual culture. As an example, I focus on Ewald's American Alphabets, which presents four visual alphabets and deals with questions of identity and language. The collaborative images simultaneously address and raise sociological questions and offer a compelling visual example of the confluence of gender, race and social class. I finish with a discussion of Ewald's two latest collaborations—In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits in Richmond, Virginia and Towards a Promised Land from Margate, England. In these new works, Ewald places larger‐than‐life portraits in symbolically meaningful public spaces. Her public art involves a complicated and conceptual exploration of context.