ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a metatheoretical perspective that frames Herbert Blumer’s analysis of both large- and small-scale social phenomena. It focuses on his treatment of the relation between persistence and change as he sketched it out in an unpublished position paper on the subject written in the mid-1970s. From the very start of his career as a sociologist, Blumer sought explanations of macrosocial phenomena. In a 1950 University of Chicago/NBC ‘Round Table’ radio broadcast, as the Cold War began, Blumer had occasion to voice his views on the future of Soviet-American relations. Empirically, ‘forces’ of social change and persistence in large-scale social phenomena are human actions that are constructed in regard to situational definitions. Embodying a composite process of change and persistence, social reality takes the form of an “ongoing stream” of situations that are met wittingly and unwittingly by acting units.
