(PDF) An Introduction to the Chicago School of Sociology. Lutters The crowd, to Park, was merely the most intense example of social control, upon which social order depends, and a special form of the recurrent collaborative efforts to bring about change in society. Finally, both Smelser and Turner attempt to use principles explaining collective behavior which are no different from those applicable to institutionalized behavior. Park thought of a region as a social unit to the extent to which its inhabitants read one group of newspapers. During his searching years, prior to arriving at Chicago, Park had the experiences and intellectual encounters which provided the background for his formulation of an urban theory. What has been gained and lost since Park's work appeared? And here we find requirements both of uniformity and of diversity. Nationalistic movements are me natural reaction to the new principle. My contribution to sociology has been, therefore, not what I intended, not what my original interest would have indicated, but what I needed to make a systematic exploration of the social work [sic] in which I found myself. He observed that the city was full of what he termed plenty of "human junk," who "have fallen out of line in the march of industrial progress." Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Strongly influenced by the tradition of German folk ethnology of careful reporting and accurate and objective observation, but also having a strong theoretical orientation, he gradually moved from traditional ethnographic research and empirical social psychology to a pronounced interest in the fusion of theory and empirical data in both social psychology and sociology. The contemporary assessment of Robert Park's work roughly coincides with his self-appraisal when he wrote: We had in sociology much theory but no working concepts. [In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.] Today, tentative agreement on what constitutes collective behavior would focus on the idea of extra-institutional behavior. Second, a natural history is a cycle produced by natural forces, rather than by human planning. Vol. The concept of "social distance," which Park derived from Simmel, seemed to him of much greater importance for an understanding of contemporary race relations. Park's general approach to society as a system of interactions, and his more specific ideas such as those on social conflict, the marginal man, the characteristics of urban dwellers, and social distance, were all stimulated by Simmel. Park noted that scholars had generally concentrated on the characteristics of crowds as if they were transitory disruptions in the social order. 1987 Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Here Park's wide knowledge of history led him to a more viable conception of urbanism than was possible for students who knew only the modern Western city. An example is Park's idea that public opinion, the product of the public, cannot create the fundamental norms under which the public operates. Additionally, in order to explain the otherwise incomprehensible behavior in religious sects we must recognize that they have at some time been individually or collectively frustrated in their efforts to act. The recognition of a biological and a social order in human life was not uncommon, but followers of the organismic school often simply derived the categories and principles for analysis of the social order from the biological. He could have said about his theories what the great French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem once said of his doctrine: "It has not been constructed through the sort of meditation that is hostile to concrete detail. Park's few attempts to offer specific advice to social workers, educators, and others must have been disappointing to the practitioners, for this very reason. [In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.]. (original 1925). There is no better testimony to the impact of Park's teaching than the imposing roster of his students. "Society is everywhere a control organization. The impact of the press in this process drew Park's special attention. Ed. Park's own most serious excursion into empirical research, reported in The Immigrant Press and its Control, is fundamentally like the work of a historian who writes topically rather than chronologically. 73. Through this experience Park became more sensitive to racial issues in the U.S., and came to know Booker T. Washington, the noted African American teacher and reformer, with whom he developed a close relationship that lasted many years. It is as such that he commands our attention. One is tempted to say that Park's published statements on the city reveal more the admiration of the scientist investigating a fascinating phenomenon than the delight of a person who finds that phenomenon intrinsically pleasing. So ill-adapted is the natural, undomesticated man to the social order into which he is born, so out of harmony are all the native impulses of the ordinary healthy human with the demands which society imposes, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if his childhood is spent mainly in learning what he must not do, his youth will be devoted mainly to rebellion. After his retirement in 1933 he continued to travel and lecture widely throughout the world. He did not admire without qualification the anonymity and impersonality of the city as Dreiser did at timescertainly he did not romanticize the life of the Bohemian. "What is needed, however, is not so much a history as a natural history of the pressnot a record of the fortunes of individual newspapers, but an account of the evolution of the newspaper as a social institution." ", Park's well-known notion of the marginal man emerges directly from his views on self-conceptions as reflections of the status a person has within a group. In the city, social relations are primarily external. Whatever rapport or consensus exists in a human public emerges by means of a temporary resolution of conflict through discussion. Park apparently considered mass circulation media preferable to magazines, which, by and large, catered to a more restricted and more highly educated readership. THE MORAL ARC OF JUSTICE: ZAMBIA PERSECUTIONS OR - LinkedIn A leading member of the Chicago School, who introduced the work of Georg Simmel to a generation of American sociologists, mainly indirectly and via the widely used textbook Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) co-authored with Ernest W. Burgess. Reserve, for example, allowed the urbanite to avoid too many unselective personal contacts without his becoming completely indifferent to others and thus stunting personal development. Park believed that accurate and objective reporting was, thus, essential for the good of society. It encompasses some of the major journal articles from the 1980s and 1990s in neighborhoods and crime, and then addresses some of the quintessential works in environmental criminology. "A man without prejudices is a man without conviction, and ultimately without character." In Park's work, then, there is an interesting tension. It is not merely a collection of people, of social conveniences, or of administrative arrangements. Park grew up in a small town and then spent a good portion of his life trying to understand the metropolis. The link was not copied. "News" played a dual role, aiding communication in the local area and helping to integrate individuals and groups into the wider society. The two basic forms of communication are pointed out again, the first more rational and the second more emotional; one communicating ideas, the other expressing feeling. "The degree of intimacy measures the influence which each has over the other." These men encouraged him and provided the intellectual elements from which he forged a framework for organizing his reflections on city life. This monumental work is the first great classic in American empirical sociology. The social order softens the impact of the competitive struggle for existence through social control and inveolvement in common tasks. "Competition determines the position of the individual in the [ecological] community, conflict fixes his place in society. In 1914, at the age of fifty, there came another turning point in Park's life: he embarked on an academic career. The sect develops out of a crowd: Park endorses Sighele's view that a sect is a chronic sort of crowd, with established membership. So the urban sociologist who studied the American city as few had studied it up to his time, continued the intellectual tradition of grave doubt about its future. From this perspective, Park's town origins have rendered him incapable of coping realistically with urban realities. But it is one thing to admire a state of affairs for its own attractive qualities, and another to admire it because its very corruptness challenges one's theoretical, practical, or artistic powers. Constantly on the prowl for news and feature stories on urban affairs, Park came to view the city as a privileged natural laboratory for the study of the new urban man whom industrial society had created. Perhaps his closest approach to utopianism is found in an observation that the best integrated society is one in which there are the fewest enacted lawsan assumption which is contradicted by a large body of his thinking regarding civilization as contrasted with culture. Park reiterated in his essay, "Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency," that division of labor, social mobility, and the multiplication of the means of transportation and communication had undermined the influence of older forms of social control like the family, the neighborhood, and the local community. If accommodation is the normal state of society, it is reached through a series of stages that Park described first in completely general form and later rediscovered in the natural history of race relations in Hawaii. For Park, however, urbanity was not a virtue. What is a gang? During the years Park worked for Booker T. Washington, he gave up regular writing for newspapers but wrote exposs on the abuses of colonialism, more particularly Belgian colonialism, for mass circulation magazines. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. He is saying that even under the threat of being overwhelmed by outer stimuli, the urbanite develops certain traits which can enable him to deal with the conditions of big city life. In "Reflections on Communication and Culture," Park states that communication is a fundamental process in human affairs because meaning or interpretation is crucial to distinctly human interaction. Civilization has distinctive organizational characteristics. Having spent six years in the academy, Park resolved to return to the give-and-take of the social world which had fascinated him during his newspaper career. This interpretation is incorrect because it over-looks both the meaning of Park's life (as presented here in preceding pages) and the full range of his concept of the city, which gave ample attention to nonspatially determined forms of urban association. "The newspaper and news became my problem"a problem that led him back to school at Harvard to study philosophy and then to Europe in search of "a fundamental point of view from which I could describe the behavior of society, under the influence of news, in the precise and universal language of science." The administration had finally discovered what was going on and wished to regularize the irregular. "Urbanity is a charming quality, but it is not a virtue. He concentrated his attention on it and based his generalizations on it during the first three decades of this century, when it was growing at the rate of half a million new inhabitants every decade. Civilization. During his newspaper work, Park came to realize that "a reporter with the facts was a more effective reformer than an editorial writer thundering from the pulpit." A leading member of the Chicago School, who introduced the work of Georg Simmel to a generation of American sociologists, mainly indirectly and via the widely used textbook Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) co-authored with Ernest W. Burgess. He was soon given special assignments to cover the urban scene, often in depth through a series of articles. "The conscious participation in a common purpose and common life, rendered possible by the fact of speech and by the existence of a fund of common symbols and meanings," is the fundamental and distinguishing feature of human society. Because our actions cover a long period and many objects, man's life is a series of episodes and adventures. "It is probably," he warned, "that the most deadly and the most demoralizing single instrumentality of present-day civilization is the automobile The connection of the automobile with vice is notorious." In attempting to account for the spread of a hysterical belief, investigators found that a "social isolate" theory based upon ideas of isolation and deviance, a "group influence" theory utilizing sociometric channels, and a "contagion" theory from classic collective behavior all seemed to fit successively as the episode developed. Park's was above all a synthesizing mind, able to put to its own uses many differing and often contradictory strands of ideas. Yet the very thing that most interested Park about the philosophers at Harvard was their efforts to distnguish between various ways of knowing, between a variety of "abbreviated and shorthand descriptions" of the real world. Before reform could be implemented, a much greater knowledge was needed of present-day society than was so far available. Certain groups of people, such as the American mulattoes, European Jews, Asiatic mixed bloods, and the Chinese traders of southeast Asia, have become deeply enough involved in two distinct societies that they cannot wholly accept the one, or be wholly accepted into the other. ! []], vol. At Harvard, Park studied psychology with Muensterberg and philosophy with Royce and James. His students, inspired by his teaching and impressed with the serious task of finding out what actually went on about them, carried out much of the early empirical research in sociology and established a pattern for the work of others. If some commonly treated units are sorted out according to these categories, a tentative agreement might be established as follows: The concept of the public is missing from this array. The view that from expressive crowd to religious sect is an altogether separate line of development is compromised when Park examines nationalistic movements. Park's effort was molded by the "climate of opinion" of his times, but was not entirely bound by such dominant categories as "social disorganization" and "local community." After one year there, he transferred to the University of Michigan. At Ann Arbor, Park was fortunate to find an inspiring teacher, the young John Dewey, and to become a member of a group of like-minded students who discussed the social issues of the day in the spirit of the reforming ideas then spreading all over the Midwest. Park's subsequent evaluation of cultural and interactionist approaches has been ably summarized elsewhere. His professor at the time was prominent pragmatist philosopher William James.

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