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In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's certain writings. and if he had studied and pondered writings of other such thinkers. Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology--he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s--nor was he ignorant of the contributions of other social thinkers. In the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, research is all too often associated with the transmogrification of knowledge into numbers and the reification of the latter into the simulacra of theory. Park's career as an academician was confounded by this disciplinary hubris. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as sociology emerged from its immersion in German romantic philosophy, its academicians still clung to its baptism in American Protestant thought, seeking to infuse the latter with the trappings of positive science. In any event, a transvalued and secularizing sociology would have to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world.

Drawing on the entire body of Robert E. Park's work published in the period 1921–1944, this paper describes his general theoretical system at three points in time: in 1921, between 1922 and 1929, and from 1930 to 1944. Park refined and altered his general theory of society over this period partly because of ambiguities in his original 1921 formulation and partly because of pressure from changing social and intellectual milieux. Park is treated as the leading theorist of the Chicago School of Sociology, and this account of his theoretical system is used as a base for assessing the validity of five different contemporary claims about the theoretical contributions of the Chicago School of Sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the life and work of Everett Hughes. I discuss the similarities and differences between his writings and those of Robert Park; I describe his biographical influences and the use he made of marginality; I consider the relevance of his professional commitments for contemporary sociology and his unique vision of sociology's mission. I conclude by calling for renewed interest in his concepts and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Robert Park’s work, first at the American Congo Reform Association (ACRA) as a secretary/publicity agent and later at Tuskegee Institute as Booker T Washington’s researcher, ghostwriter, and co-author, influenced how he conceptualized what academic sociology could do and should be. Once he secured an academic position at the University of Chicago, Park, like many of his peers, sought to establish his difference from and superiority over practical reformers by defining his object of study – society – as a ‘social organism’ which was governed by natural laws. Park’s definition of sociology and its object of study made it possible not only to exclude non-academic researchers from the discipline but also to place his own actions as a ‘reformer’ (i.e. imperial consultant at Tuskegee and the ACRA) beyond scholarly inquiry. Park’s relationship to Washington helps to explain the relationship between sociology’s separation from the reform movement and the erasure of colonialism and imperialism from disciplinary history. It also partially accounts for why contemporary sociology’s analytical structure still struggles to account for and theoretically capture the complexities of colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within empirical approaches to racial residential segregation, there has been a tendency to draw on the work of or influenced by Robert E. Park and his ecological hypothesis to explore social and spatial relations between members of different ethnic and racial groups, thus framing research within a race relations paradigm. This has promoted an analysis which naturalizes racial differences but which also sidelines structural considerations. In turn this approach has also fed into political discourses on segregation, at times supporting more reactionary positions. This paper seeks to address this debate by considering whether emphasis on minority ethnic concentration sidelines the more pertinent issue of concentration in deprived areas, suggesting that neighbourhood deprivation as a measure can be more easily aligned with structural conditions which have influenced the settlement and historical experience of many ethnic minority communities. Specifically, I consider the extent to which a measure of neighbourhood deprivation is more important than the ethnic composition of an area for thinking about the distribution of inequalities in unemployment (as one example of socio-economic inequality). Using multilevel logistic regression I find neighbourhood income deprivation to be more important than levels of co-ethnic concentration for explaining ethnic differences in unemployment. The findings imply that neighbourhood deprivation is significantly more important for considering inequalities in unemployment for ethnic minorities than the ethnic composition of an area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. Considering that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly literature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself, I propound a new interpretation of the writing process of Robert E. Park's "The City," the famous paper he published initially in 1915. Customarily depicted as a manifesto for an autonomous urban sociology, I argue on the contrary that its general economy has to be linked to Park's biographical background. When he affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Park was brought to teach a course on the social survey. "The City" was to be the academic expression of his point of view on the topic. Park's biographical encounters with some active promoters of the social survey approach are evidenced and their influence on his 1915 essay is carefully analyzed, showing notably that curious intellectual omissions in "The City" can be traced back to these previous encounters. Park's latter texts, and the 1925 revised version of "The City" in particular, are shown to provide the interwar sociologists with a peculiar narrative about the history of sociology: Park's predecessors are deliberately confined in a pre-scientific stage of the discipline and Park's original essay is presented as a seminal research program destined to be later fulfilled by the newly established urban sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many sociologists have written about the development of the sociological perspective, known as 'interactionism,' two relatively important questions for understanding its emergence remain scarcely examined. (1) Why did George Herbert Mead become known as its progenitor rather than Robert E. Park ? (2) Why did 'radical interactionism,' which was inspired by Park, fail to appear on the sociological landscape until the first decade of the 21st century, almost a century after the appearance of the 'symbolic interactionism' that Mead inspired? To oversimplify, Mead became anointed as the progenitor of interactionism instead of Park primarily because Herbert Blumer proved to be a far more effective champion of Mead's thought than Everett Hughes proved to be of Park's ideas in sociology. Blumer's greater effectiveness in performing this role was primarily due to a stronger desire to carry the banner for a new sociological perspective, more personal charisma and verbal adroitness, and much closer connection to Chicago School of Sociology during its golden era than Hughes had. Thus, the delayed emergence of a radical interactionism based on Park's work cannot be attributed solely to the failure of Park and his heir apparent, Hughes, to fully grasp the radical implications of Park's work. Even if these implications of Park's work had been crystal clear to Hughes, however, it is highly doubtful that he would have ever considered promoting a radical version of interactionism. His lack of lack of desire to carry the banner for a sociological perspective, absence of personal charisma and verbal adroitness, as well as his want of closer ties to the original Chicago school of sociology, not to mention tepid liberalism, would have made him a very unlikely figure in American sociology to play this historic role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Annee Sociologique is the property of Presses Universitaires de France and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contemporary discussions on hybridity in cultural and ethnic studies have overlooked the work of the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. Park's idea of the “marginal man” and his work on cultural and racial hybridity can shed further light on the construction and representation of the hybrid self. The contribution that Park has made to a social theory of hybridity has been overshadowed by research conducted within post-colonial and cultural studies. I do not suggest that recent conceptualisations of hybridity are inadequate; rather that Park has something to contribute to contemporary accounts and in some cases anticipates some of the themes and issues surrounding the concept of hybridity. The following examination connects Park's work on hybridity with ideas such as civilisation, culture and modernity and argues that a mild form of primitivism underlines his notion of the “marginal man”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major blind spot in the development of a radical interactionist's perspective is the lack of an explanation of societal change, whether it be revolutionary or only reformatory in scope. Robert Park began to develop a cyclical theory of societal change, but he was unable to finish it. Nevertheless, in our development of a theory of societal change from a radical interactionist's perspective, we were able to follow up and launch this project with the valuable clues that he left behind. First, we expanded the number of phases in his cycle from three to five, so that each type of social interaction that he and Burgess identified could be incorporated under one of the different phases. Second, the cycle was refined to operate on a contingent rather than a strictly deterministic model allowing the occurrence of a truncated cycle. Next, we filled-in various missing details needed for this cycle's on going operation, such as circular reaction, social contagion, and social unrest. Fourth, we drew on his distinction between "societies" and "communities" to demarcate clear-cut starting, mid- and end points of the expanded cycle. Fifth, we replaced his dated notion of dominance with the newer and more nuanced one of domination, as well as updated his conception of the dynamics of super-ordination by incorporating the role of power within it. By improving on Park's ideas in these different ways, it was demonstrated that unlike symbolic interactionism, radical interactionism squarely addresses societal change on both the micro- and macroscopic planes. Unlike functionalist and conflict theories of social change, it stresses cooperation as much as conflagration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of American Jews is informed by perspectives from the sociological study of ethnic groups in American society. Within this literature may be found several distinct approaches to the ethnicity of European immigrants and their descendants in the United States. The first type is best exemplified in the work of the members of the Chicago "environmentalist" school, including Robert E. Park and Lows Wirth. As the name implies, their focus was on the effect which the new host environment had on the immigrants and their progeny. In this essay, the author reviews the major trends that have characterized the sociological study of American Jews since the early twentieth century Originating in the structural emphasis of the Chicago school, the treatment of American Jewish ethnicity was dominated for several decades by the primarily cultural focus of melting pot and cultural pluralism theorists. More recently, there has been a shift back to a major consideration of structural factors which support the maintenance of the Jewish group in America.

Three pernicious myths that have been perpetuated about Robert E. Park merit our present attention. These myths are important because they now foreclose almost any chance of him ever becoming recognized as the true progenitor of the interactionist school of thought or of latter-day sociologist from building on his work. The first myth, which lays the foundation for the other two, is that he was a social Darwinist. The second and third myths, which directly follow from the first one, are that Park concocted a racist and conservative sociology. An inquiry into his sociological works published over more than a quarter of a century, however, reveals that these myths are based more on fiction than fact. Although these myths are widely maintained among present-day sociologists, they appear to be driven more by prevailing ideology than supported by hard evidence (i.e. the full written record of what Park actually argued in his sociological publications). This confusion underscores the danger of advocacy research, an approach currently in vogue in the field of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Park died, he left his theory of the human habitat not only incomplete, but in considerable disarray. Although few present-day scholars have demonstrated much interest in building on this critical body of Park’s work, which he based on dominance, it probably represents his most important contribution to American sociology. I argue that the key to systemizing his highly discursive account of the human habitat is to view it from an emergent social evolutionary perspective, which makes it possible to differentiate his notion of “community” from “society,” as well as explain how the two concepts can logically be viewed as both separate and unified entities. A community is not only a necessary stage in the social evolutionary process of producing a society, but it also provides the habitat needed for a society’s later emergence. Among other things, Park’s theory of the human habitat is also criticized for its failure to (1) distinguish dominance from domination, (2) identify the reciprocal relationship existing between power and domination, (3) accurately characterize the nature of the economic order operating in communities, and (4) demarcate a pre-lingual, lingual and literate communal stages that precedes in the social evolutionary process the possible development of a society. In passing, I also point out critical, but often overlooked aspects of Park’s theory of the human habitat that contradict popular characterizations of his work as being purblind to the operation of dominance and power, social Darwinist, conservative, sexist, and racist. Finally, I deduce the implications of his theory for the future emergence of a “world society.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Robert Ezra Park and George Herbert Mead were both pragmatists, they became the progenitors of two alternative versions of interactionism. Mead developed his version on the basis of his principle of “sociality,” which subsequently became known as “symbolic interactionism.” Conversely, Park developed his opposing version later labeled “radical interactionism,” on the basis of the principle of “dominance.” To solve this mystery behind their development of divergent forms of interactionism, I examined their lives from a “socio-biographical” approach. This entailed my comparing the critical, formative social experiences that they had undergone from their early childhoods to the end of their academic careers. My comparisons uncovered some important similarities in their critical formative social experiences shedding light on why they became career-long pragmatists. Despite the significant overlaps found in their socio-biographies, however, crucial differences also surfaced that lead to their development of opposing forms of interactionism. The dissimilar critical formative social experiences that were found sprang from the starkly different paths that they followed toward becoming tenured, full professors at the University of Chicago. To oversimplify, Park followed a much more zigzagged, bumpier, and obstacle-ridden path than Mead to reach this destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of EMPIRIA: Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Calls for reform in the wake of the 1919 Chicago race riot came to centre on the perceived need for greater order and oversight in the relations between the black and white residents of the city. This article examines the city's official response to the racial violence of 1919, which took the form of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations and its 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago. Demand for the interracial commission emanated from both progressive reformers and official political channels but many among Chicago's African American population resisted the undemocratic and segregationist implications of such a deliberating body. I assess the nature of the political ideas animating the commission's membership and the intellectual sustenance provided by its primary researcher, Charles S. Johnson, and his mentor, Robert E. Park. I argue that the report not only institutionalized Jim Crow in 1920s Chicago but by giving official sanction to racial marking, it embedded racial categorizations in the newly emerging conceptions of citizenship in the modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert E. Park played a central part in defining sociology as a natural science. He imagined sociologists as unbiased and unaffected by the human behavior they studied. He particularly criticized the work of female sociologists who applied their sociological knowledge with the help of hundreds of thousands of clubwomen. He mocked these clubwomen and their ‘do-goodism’. Clara Cahill Park, his wife, was one of these clubwomen who engaged in all the work he mocked and she was allied with female sociologists. This resulted in a curious situation where Park supported his wife and engaged in social reform while simultaneously he criticized clubwomen and the work of applied sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is informed that one of the persisting paradoxes confronting sociology, a discipline that seeks to explain the organization and dynamics of societal processes, is that of explaining its own development and changes as part of those societal processes. When one thinks of those persons whose writings and professional activities helped to set the compass of American sociology's early development, few-- if any -- were as enigmatic, influential or interesting as Robert Park. It will come as a surprise to those who are familiar with Robert Park's works on race relations that he published essays on colonial Africa during the pre-Chicago phase of his career. Starting in October 1904, Park wrote an article for The World Today magazine publicizing the mistreatment of blacks in the Congo. Afterwards in November and December 1906 and January 1907, Park published essays in Everybody's magazine excoriating King Leopold II of Belgium. To appreciate the broader significance of the Congo essays, it is necessary to understand the circumstances under which they were written and the effects of those experiences for the subsequent direction of Park's work. Park's Congo essays were written while he was employed as a publicist by the Congo Reform Association (CRA), an organization affiliated with Protestant missionaries. Though he worked for the CRA for only a few years, that job had some major repercussions on his intellectual career. It caused him to become disillusioned with social reform. Park was especially upset when he learned that the Protestant missionaries in the Congo, the major source of his information about the atrocities, had sent him exaggerated reports.

In recent years one has witnessed a widespread renewal of interest in the work of Robert E. Park, as sociologists and historians alike have sought to reassess his place in the history of the discipline, his role in shaping the form and content of the Chicago School, and the matter of whether or not his work is of enduring relevance to the discipline as it positions itself for the twenty-first century. This interest in Park's work is somewhat surprising as Park's political and economic views have often been the subject of sustained criticism. Herman and Julia Schwendinger, in their diatribe leveled against American sociology in its formative years, depict Park as a "technocratic urban ethnographer" content to serve the interests of the ruling class. Another reason for the surprise at Park's resurgence has to do with the way his sociology has often been assessed, the general thrust of which concludes that the discipline has in fundamental ways transcended the brand of sociology associated with the Chicago School.

In an autobiographical note that was found after his death, researcher Robert E. Park stated that he had, finally, become convinced that in his researches on blacks in the South, he had in fact been observing the historical process by which civilization, not merely here but elsewhere, has evolved, drawing into — its influence an ever widening circle of races and peoples. Modern "mobile societies," as Park called them, have an inexorable tendency to attract to themselves the still tradition-oriented people and, in the event, to convert them from their custom-bound ways of life into civic-minded citizens of a new occidental socio-economic order. That order, in turn, would shift them away from their membership in collective, family-based primary groups and move them into individuated, impersonal and secondary associations of persons who must struggle for necessarily scarce material and spiritual rewards in a society built around commerce and competition. How America's blacks fitted into this universal process became a matter of special significance to Park, and proved to be the most difficult and ambiguous instance of the operation of his postulated race relations' cycle.

The article discusses the series of sociology in various countries in relation to Robert E. Park's essay on practical politics. According to the author, Park's essay centers on the fanatical patriotism, strategic belief and tactical strength of the Third Reich's armed forces. In addition, it is said that he did not only analyze the democratization of officer corps but also locates exactly the social psychology that inspires the military organization in Germany. Furthermore, the author asserts that it is more likely that Parks had the heavier significance in the outgrowth of war.

Walter C. Reckless's Vice in Chicago (19830 examined the consequences of the closing of Chicago brothels in 1913 and the transformation of prostitution from an encapsulated enterprise into a more laissez-faire pursuits. the contents of the monograph, one of the under studies that marked Chicago School research under Robert E. park, are reviewed both in terms of what they tell as about prostitution then and what significance they hold in regard to the behavior today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Robert H Park's prominence in American sociology, his early writings (before 1913) have been neglected. This article argues that Park's early writings illustrate an important transitional phase in twentieth-century sociological thought As sociology moved out of German romantic philosophy and toward rationalism and positivism, it had to come to terms with the existence of evil in the work Park's essays on the Congo formulated a more complex perspective on modernity's modes of evil. Along with the Congo essays, Park's Black Belt studies form a comprehensive portrait of the double-sided moral character and socioeconomic effects of the Reformation. Park's early writings adumbrate a Gothic sociology of horror, in which the civilizational process erodes the many folk cultures that it draws into its basicforms-civilsoci- ety and urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]