Department and discipline : Chicago sociology at one hundred

The Chicago school of sociology has become big news. A swelling stream of books and articles has profiled its leaders and discussed its work. It has been taken to exemplify the very concept of "school." This interest is recent; the 1960s saw a total of four articles on the Chicago school. But since 1970 has come a steadily increasing flow of work. 1 Urban sociologists, social psychologists, and ethnographers have all tried their hands at annexing the Chicago tradition even while Marxists and feminists have worked equally hard to debunk it. Surprisingly, much of the interest has come from Europe. From France Manuel Castells's 1968 article "Y a-t-il une sociologie urbaine?" launched a reconsideration of Chicago's urban studies. From Sweden Ulf Hannerz's 1980 book Explor- ing the City appropriated the Chicago tradition for anthropology. From England Martin Bulmer provided in 1984 the first fully archival treatment of the Chicago school, and Dennis Smith in 1988 published what remains its most radical reinterpretation. By the 1990s, there were original summary works on the Chicago school in Polish, Italian, French,]apanese, and Spanish. Historical writing on Chicago is of two kinds. There is of course explicit historical analysis, aiming to delimit and examine the strategies, methods,

In this detailed history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers?

Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline's main journal, the American Journal of Sociology.

Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott's theories grow directly out of the Chicago School's insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding one hundred years ago.

"In this detailed history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers? Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline's main journal, the American Journal of Sociology. Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott's theories grow directly out of the Chicago School's insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding one hundred years ago"--Book cover