A Second Chicago School?: The Development of a Postwar American Sociology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226249395 ISBN 13: 9780226249391

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1995

Synopsis

From 1945 to about 1960, the University of Chicago was home to a group of faculty and graduate students whose work has come to define what many call a second "Chicago School" of sociology.

Like its predecessor earlier in the century, the postwar department was again the center for qualitative social research—on everything from mapping the nuances of human behavior in small groups to seeking solutions to problems of race, crime, and poverty. Howard Becker, Joseph Gusfield, Herbert Blumer, David Riesman, Erving Goffman, and others created a large, enduring body of work.

In this book, leading sociologists critically confront this legacy. The eight original chapters survey the issues that defined the department's agenda: the focus on deviance, race and ethnic relations, urban life, and collective behavior; the renewal of participant observation as a method and the refinement of symbolic interaction as a guiding theory; and the professional and institutional factors that shaped this generation, including the leadership of Louis Wirth and Everett C. Hughes; the role of women; and the competition for national influence Chicago sociology faced from survey research at Columbia and grand theory at Harvard. The contributors also discuss the internal conflicts that call into question the very idea of a unified "school."

About this title

About the Author

Gary Alan Fine (Ph.D., Harvard University, Social Psychology, 1976) is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He is interested in understanding controversial reputations and problematic collective memories of figures. His current research involves shifting reputations and political positions of Southern segregationist politics and the examination of ruptures in political alliances. He is the co-author of Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality (Oxford, 2013) and the author of Authors of the Storm: Meteorology and the Culture of Prediction (Chicago, 2010) and Everyday Genius: Self-Taught (Chicago, 2004). Several of his twenty books have received disciplinary awards in sociology and in folklore.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226249395
• ISBN 13: 9780226249391
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 436
• Editor: Fine Gary Alan