Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The style of social research associated with the Chicago School of American sociology owes much to the determination of Robert E. Park and his younger colleague, Ernest Burgess, to understand city life. (Park was a faculty member in the department of sociology/anthropology at the University of Chicago between 1913 and 1934. Burgess was a faculty member in the department between 1916 and 1952. In 1929 sociology and anthropology became separate departments.) Other scholars who aided them in this endeavor included W. I. Thomas, Louis Wirth, Everett Hughes, Clifford Shaw, Donald Cressey, Frederick Thrasher, St. Clair Drake, and Horace Cayton. Economic growth, industrialization, population increase, immigration, and rural-urban migration including the large-scale movement of African Americans from the South contributed to the emergence of Chicago as a city in which diversity of occupation was complemented by differences having to do with race, ethnicity (whether or not foreign-born), religion, and language. Chicago, and cities like it, differed profoundly from the rural towns that had hitherto shaped American social life and politics. What, asked Park in an essay published in1926, is to be the basis of a “moral order” which supposes communication and obligation between individuals and groups, in an urban environment characterized by “physical propinquity” and “social isolation”? The ... log in or subscribe to read full text