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George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct, by Herbert Blumer. Edited by Thomas J. Morrione. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. 196 pp. $72.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-7591-0467-0. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7591-0468-9.
The Herbert Blumer archives include a term paper he wrote for George Herbert Mead in the late 1920s bearing his teacher's comment, "A most satisfactory statement opening up the field of the world of objects within which the self arises" (p. 1). So impressed was Mead with this studious lad that he invited him to be his teaching assistant and later asked Blumer to take over his social psychology class. For the rest of his life, Blumer carried his master's legacy, using it to fight what he perceived to be misguided structural functionalism and teaching his students to look at social reality as a process.
Thomas Morrione is among the scholars whose sociological imagination was fired by Blumer and his vision of society as "symbolic interactionism." The two met in 1971 when Morrione gave a talk on Parsons and Blumer that caught the latter's attention. With time, the mentorship grew into a friendship that lasted until Blumer died in 1987. Shortly before his death, Blumer asked Morrione to look after his papers, which are now gathered in the Herbert Blumer Collection at Colby College where Morrione teaches sociology and edits Blumer's opus postumum.
The book under review is the first of three projected volumes collecting Blumer's unpublished works. It contains a near-book-length manuscript on Mead, correspondence with David Miller, several brief notes on interactionism, and a short essay interpreting two philosophical poems on the meaning of self. A biographical note based in part on interviews with Blumer concludes the book.
The main manuscript appears to be part of a more ambitious and apparently unfinished project exploring Mead's relevance for the social sciences. Midway through Blumer mentions topics he plans to cover "much later in this book" (p. 50), including the interfaces between organizational structure and human conduct, but the discussion falls short of this aim. The text covers mostly familiar territory-symbolic and nonsymbolic...