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This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886–1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well‐known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser‐known pamphlets designed for a broader audience—Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long‐standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in modeling contemporary crime trends, a task that has historically been considered valuable to the public, researchers, and policymakers, is resurging. Advancements in criminology have made it clear that understanding crime trends necessarily involves understanding trends in how likely individuals are to report crimes to the police, as well as how likely the police are to accurately record those crimes. In this paper, we use dynamic linear models to simultaneously model the time series for several crime types in order to gain insight into trends in crime and crime reporting. We analyze crime data from Chicago spanning 2007 through 2016 and show how correlations in the way crime trends evolve may contain information about drivers of crime and crime reporting. We provide evidence of substantial differences in the relationships between the trends of crimes of different types depending on whether crimes are violent or nonviolent and whether or not crimes are tracked in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875–1951) is a neglected figure within North American sociology, yet he made a distinctive contribution to the sociology and politics of race relations. He was one of the first sociological critics of eugenics and developed a distinctive approach to race relations and the position of subject minorities derived from a critical analysis of European empires. His approach was complementary to that of Du Bois with whom he had a close relationship. In this article, we trace Miller's critique of eugenics and the idea of 'Americanisation' as a policy of immigrant assimilation, showing the distinctiveness of his approach within North American sociology, including the milieu of Chicago sociology with which he was associated. We also examine the connection between his sociology of race and Park's position on race relations as being a process of gradual assimilation. We conclude with discussion of the Chicago school influence over Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma and the alternative approach to race relations that both Du Bois and Miller had already outlined in the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent studies have used surveys of neighborhood informants and direct observation of city streets to assess aspects of community life such as collective efficacy, the density of kin networks, and social disorder. Raudenbush and Sampson (1999a) have coined the term “ecometrics” to denote the study of the reliability and validity of such assessments. Random errors of measurement will attenuate the associations between these assessments and key outcomes. To address this problem, some studies have used empirical Bayes methods to reduce such biases, while assuming that neighborhood random effects are statistically independent. In this paper we show that the precision and validity of ecometric measures can be considerably improved by exploiting the spatial dependence of neighborhood social processes within the framework of empirical Bayes shrinkage. We compare three estimators of a neighborhood social process: the ordinary least squares estimator (OLS), an empirical Bayes estimator based on the independence assumption (EBE), and an empirical Bayes estimator that exploits spatial dependence (EBS). Under our model assumptions, EBS performs better than EBE and OLS in terms of expected mean squared error loss. The benefits of EBS relative to EBE and OLS depend on the magnitude of spatial dependence, the degree of neighborhood heterogeneity, as well as neighborhood's sample size. A cross-validation study using the original 1995 data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and a replication of that survey in 2002 show that the empirical benefits of EBS approximate those expected under our model assumptions; EBS is more internally consistent and temporally stable and demonstrates higher concurrent and predictive validity. A fully Bayes approach has the same properties as does the empirical Bayes approach, but it is preferable when the number of neighborhoods is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the history of the South Side Planning Board (SSPB)—an organization committed to battling urban blight in Chicago—to show how urban renewal backers used the concepts of social organization and disorganization to speak to the perceived blight that marred the city’s African American neighborhoods, to bolster the legitimacy of large-scale urban renewal programs meant to address such conditions, and to inform the architectural and planning vision undergirding these programs. However, the SSPB and its allies stripped these ideas of any nuance, drawing from earlier sociological understandings of urban disorganization to posit that individual behavior, rather than structural realities, created disordered cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the causal effects on child mortality from moving into less distressed neighborhood environments. We match mortality data covering the period from 1997 to 2009 with information on every child in public housing that applied for a housing voucher in Chicago in 1997 (N =11,680). Families were randomly assigned to the voucher wait list, and only some families were offered vouchers. The odds ratio for the effects of being offered a housing voucher on overall mortality rates is equal to 1.13 for all children (95% CI 0.73–1.70), 1.34 for boys (95% CI 0.85–2.05) and 0.21 for girls (95% CI 0.01–1.04). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chicago School’s use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. This article considers how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical approach to the study of human forms of organization and traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communication. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects, and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy, and citizenship. This article suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1940, a "critical mass" of variously trained scholars collaborated as part of the University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development (CHD) and conducted pioneering interdisciplinary research that put education at the center (Havighurst, n.d.b, p. 9.14). The four most important figures here were Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, Robert Havighurst, and Ralph Tyler. This essay focuses on the CHD's theoretical and practical achievements as they related to education, emphasizing in particular the Committee's combination of anthropological, sociological, and psychological theory. Positing class as a type of culture, CHD researchers took concrete steps, especially in the realm of intelligence testing, to make education less biased in favor of the middle class and more inclusive of the skills and abilities of the lower class. This essay explores these historical synergies between anthropology, psychology, and education, and it explains the ends to which these Chicago intellectuals put them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article I argue that the production of live music shares many formal properties with that of confidence games: specifically, (1) a set of structural relationships in which operators, ropers, insiders, shills and marks are enmeshed, (2) the deployment of carefully planned strategies of deception, and (3) a pattern of success owed in part to the moral and financial motivations of insiders, the willingness of the state to assist in the enterprise, and the desire among victims to be swayed by the production. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in some of Chicago's most popular blues clubs, I examine these three components of live music production qua confidence game. I also briefly discuss how one group of participants—local blues musicians—reacts to their own performances as musicians/confidence artists. Finally, I conclude by exploring the broader implications this case suggests regarding other types of live music production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a five-year ethnographic study of informal social control in the Chicago neighborhood "Beltway," where controls at the private and what has traditionally been known as the parochial level are weaker and less important than heretofore assumed. In addition, the parochial and the public arenas are inseparable from each other, not independent as others have argued. Instead, informal social control in Beltway is characterized by what the author calls the "new parochialism," where diminished private and traditionally parochial forms of social control are replaced by a combination of parochial and public controls. The new parochialism is occasioned by wider societal and local changes, and the concept is shown to have theoretical and empirical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the discussion recently stimulated through the volume, A Second Chicago School? That book's connecting postwar Chicago sociology with the "Chicago approach" of mainly the 1910s to 1930s is extended, going back as far as the turn of the twentieth century and also forward to the 1990s, with a view endorsing Simmelian interactionism as opposed to Spencerian utilitarianism. Albion Small, first Chairman of the Chicago Department, introduced a Simmelian sociology to the U.S., and the question arises to what extent this legacy is being realized until today. Using Anselm Strauss as a case in point, the article has two main parts. Part One recapitulates various attempts at understanding the phases and realms of Chicago sociology. The focus is not only on the various "Chicago Schools" that may be separated, but also the differences in the work of three scholars who often are grouped together under the label of Chicago, namely Herbert Blumer, Robert Park, and Everett Hughes. Part Two recollects Strauss's intellectual biography, as life of a scholar determined to make a contribution to modern sociology, in the name of "Chicago interactionism." Strauss's work, however, came to endorse Spencerian-type utilitarianism more than Simmelian-type interactionism from the middle 1960s onwards--thereby joining in with anti-structural functionalism tendencies in American sociology.(n1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the contemporary appeal of the Chicago sociology perspective in France, and analyzes the bases of its attraction. Old Chicago sociology/anthropology was a heady and fruitful conjoining of ethnography, urban ecology and geography, interactionist social psychology, and pragmatist epistemology. Using the vocabulary of science, it spoke of the city of Chicago as its laboratory, but what this meant was that its students were exhorted to exit the library in order to roam, observe, and undertake what then were termed case studies and today, urban ethnography. The laboratory was particularly exciting because of the growth in the population in Chicago, Illinois. Immigrants had been flooding the U.S. and its urban centers throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, and Chicago was a nodal point. Within Europe of the period there had also been migrations on a lesser yet also significant scale, especially from the east to the west. In France, Europe, an throughout the world, an intense process of urbanization has been occurring. The challenge has been how to understand and describe the processes and their consequences, other than being publicly appalled. Jammed side by side in these immense cities are clusters and communities of families and peoples differing in languages, religions, ethnic-cultural origins, and social race.

The article focuses on the concept of sociological Marxism. The Midwest meeting in Chicago, Illinois was organized in April 1993 to address the issue of the relevance of sociology in Marxist style of analysis. The papers presented in the meeting were very well received but triggered off much discussion. A key question informing Marxist discourse in recent decades concerned whether or not socialists coming to power could use bourgeois state structures to further their goals. Obviously much of the urgency has gone out of this question. Douglas V. Porpors in his article "The Theoretical Status of Marxism," does not argue that Marxism should be the only perspective employed by sociologists. But he does argue that Marxism does many things that other perspectives simply do not do and that in many instances it does them far better. He provides a convincing rationale for judging a framework on strengths and widths of its positive heuristic across an entire band of problems of disciplinary interests.