Herbert Blumer and the Chicago Tradition

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.