The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.     

Aquatic landscape change,extirpations, and introductions in the Chicago Region

Urban Ecosystems - Prior to European settlement, swamps, marshes, lakes, and streams were the major landscape features of the Chicago region. Much of this has been altered or lost in the past...     

Neighborhood co-offending networks,structural embeddedness,and violent crime in Chicago

Neighborhood disparities in crime are a persistent feature of U.S. cities. Scholars have documented that both local structural conditions and characteristics of spatially proximate communities influence neighborhood crime rates. Previous studies on neighborhood inequality in crime, however, are limited by their focus on identifying average spillover effects between pairs of spatially contiguous neighborhoods, and have neglected to consider how the broader social organization of the city influences local outcomes. This study examines the role of neighborhood-level criminal networks in shaping the distribution of crime throughout cities. Employing arrest records and survey data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, we construct a neighborhood-level co-offending network for Chicago for 2001. We use this network to investigate how a focal neighborhood’s homicide rate is influenced by its structural embeddedness within the larger inter-neighborhood co-offending network. Results indicate that a neighborhood’s embeddedness increases the local homicide rate, even after controlling for the neighborhood’s internal propensity toward crime and accounting for unobserved spatial processes.     

Chicago,Jazz and Marijuana: Howard Becker on Outsiders

In this article on the social production of Outsiders I will situate its making in the daily practice of the social worlds Becker was involved in. Therefore I focus on the relations, interactions and situations which were relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. The fragments from my email communication with Becker, the collected interviews and other publications show that Becker demystifies Outsiders. In fact my contribution here is that I use Becker to demystify the ethnographic practice of Outsiders and describe it's mundane backstage reality, which is described by Fine as “the underside” of ethnography (1993).     

Inequalities,Democracy, and Fieldwork in the Chicago Schools of Yesterday and Today

Barriers to public discourse and participation in a democracy were central to the social reform concerns of Mead. Urban ethnographies of the last thirty years that are associated with the University of Chicago and the Chicago School contribute to this aspect of Mead's work. These ethnographies help to illuminate how extreme poverty and racism affect public discourse between groups. The Chicago tradition linked to the work of Park and Wirth has emphasized the importance of persistent inequalities and a lack of public discourse and participation rather than a symbolic interactionist approach that emphasizes the ability of people to create a place for themselves in an open, fluid world. Through field research in poor, often minority urban communities, the sociologists linked more closely to the former group have explored issues of the maintenance of patterns of extreme inequalities, the muting of public dialogue, and blockages to participation while maintaining a focus on the agency of the poor and their efforts to create their social worlds.     

Old Chicago and new France

It is only when theories are located in history, when we view the demands for verification in highly particular contexts of a historical kind that we are freed from either dogmatism or capitulation to scepticism (MacIntyre 1977: 471). The world has problems; the university has disciplines whose boundary lines inhibit our abilities to address those problems. The boundaries acquire such seeming validity that it becomes necessary to defend problem-oriented research as “interdisciplinary,” when the real point is to examine social reality, rather than defer to academic turf (and scientistic scruples). Faced with the contemporary range of global problems, it is helpful to re-assess and re-construct our history. The artificiality of the disciplinary lineages within the U.S. has diminished Old Chicago. Yet the problems which it addressed have remained pertinent not only to the U.S., and not only to France, but throughout the world. Because the French disciplinary lines have been other than ours, and their nation has been confronting a set of social problems akin to those faced by the Chicagoans, some of their social scientists have sought to draw upon that heritage. The abstract and allusive discourses of a Derrida or Lacan tend to distract observers from the engaged character of the best French intellectual discourse. Park was engaged in the best sense, but he had observed too many campaigns of urban reform which simply clothed the attempt of a culturally dominant group to impose its ethos upon a socially subordinated populace. Underlying Park’s disparagement of “do-good” campaigns and “evangelical sociology” was a moral insistence on respecting the varieties of social life. 19 This is manifest in his life trajectory and in his role as teacher. To me he is cast in the heroic figure of Bernard Rieux in Camus’ The Plague. After undergraduate studies (B.S., 1942) at University of Chicago, Murray L. Wax returned there to teach and undertake doctoral studies (Ph.D., 1959)- He has taught at several universities and is now emeritus Professor, Washington University, St. Louis. The author wishes to express his gratitude for their advice and encouragement to Joan Cassell, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Paule Verdet.     

Book Review: How Emotions Work. By Katz,Jack, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 407 pages,hardcover, ISBN: 0226425991

Qualitative Sociology -     

Chicago and Water Problems of China

With the rapid development of economy, the water resource of our country faces a lot of problems. For a specific city, those problems are reflected in the shortage and the pollution of water resource mainly. After the coming of the 21 st century, the situation becomes harder to control and acuter to solve. While in Chicago of 19 th century, the local government and people solved the emergent water problems by digging tunnels, enlarging canals, etc. During the fast pace of urbanization today, although there is still long distance between Chicago and some cities in China in terms of economy, stage of city development and other aspects, some experience could be distilled from the solution of Chicago.     

Theories of Social Casework,Robert W. Roberts and Robert H. Nee,Eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 440 Pages, $9.75 Hardbound

Empathy and social work education behaviors comprising empathy, an important social work skill, were delineated. The impact of professional social work education upon empathy was found, contrary to hypothesis, to be significantly positive. Students identified personal maturation, human behavior classes, and experiential parts of the curriculum as being most beneficial in enhancing empathy. The best students were found to have the highest levels of empathy on the videotape criterion measure. Moreover, female students had slightly higher empathy scores than males. There was no evidence of higher levels of empathy in students specializing in microsystem intervention.     

Race,Gender, and Attitudes Toward War in Chicago: An Intersectional Analysis1

Although prior research has documented persistent racial and gender differences in public opinion on war across U.S. military conflicts, there is little understanding as to how race and gender simultaneously shape war opinion. Using data from the 2008 Chicago Area Study, this analysis locates gender within an intersectional examination of black‐white differences in support for the U.S. war in Iraq. “Structural” and “racialized” explanations for blacks’ lower level of support relative to whites are tested, first using all respondents, and then for men and women. Exploratory analyses show the race gap in war support to exist solely among Chicago women. Racial differences in partisanship and education are most strongly associated with black‐white differences in Iraq War support among Chicago women. In addition, while affiliation with the Republican Party increases the odds of support among both men and women, education and political alienation decrease the odds of support only among women and the odds of support increase with age only among men. Results highlight the utility of an intersectional lens to the study of public opinion on foreign policy.     

The Chicago Tradition and Social Change: Thomas,Park And Their Successors

Through their writings and research, Thomas and Park exemplified to their students and their successors at Chicago how to “do” sociololgy. Central to their respective positions were their conceptions of social change, reform and progress; the role of science and especially sociology; the agents of social change; the arenas and mechanisms of social change. Not only were there some basic differences in their respective conceptions, but succeeding generations of Chicago sociologists have been profoundly influenced in their ideas and work by selective interpretations of either or both founding fathers of this tradition. Like any other intellectual tradition, the Chicago one is neither as integrated as it often seems nor have its participants drawn on precisely the same aspects of their intellectual heritage. To understand the work of contemporary “Chicagoans,” it is necessary to, at least, understand what they have made and are making of their diverse heritage.