CHICAGO SCHOOL

CHICAGO SCHOOL

Chicago School

Introduction

In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School (sometimes described as the Ecological School) was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago , now applied elsewhere. While involving scholars at several Chicago area universities, the term is often used interchangeably to refer to the University of Chicago's sociology department-one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious. Following World War II, a "Second Chicago School" arose whose members used symbolic interactionism combined with methods of field research, to create a new body of works (Burgess, 1967, pp.25-30). This was one of the first institutions to use quantitative methods in criminology. Discussion

The Chicago School is best known for its urban sociology and for the development of the symbolic interactionist approach. It has focused on human behavior as determined by social structures and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic and personal characteristics. Biologists and anthropologists have accepted the theory of evolution as demonstrating that animals adapt to their environments. As applied to humans who are considered responsible for their own destinies, the School believed that the natural environment which the community inhabits is a major factor in shaping human behavior, and that the city functions as a microcosm: "In these great cities, where all the passions, all the energies of mankind are released, we are in a position to investigate the process of civilization, as it were, under a microscope. (Abbot, 1999, p.150-170)"

The work of Frederic E. Clements (1916) was particularly influential. He proposed that a community of vegetation is a superorganism and that communities develop in a fixed pattern of successional stages from inception through to some single climax state or to a self-regulating state of equilibrium. By analogy, an individual is born, grows, matures, and dies, but the community which the individual inhabited continues to grow and exhibit properties which are greater than the sum of the properties of the parts.

Members of the School have concentrated on the city of Chicago as the object of their study, seeking evidence whether urbanization (Bulmer, 1984, pp.12-30)and increasing social mobility have been the causes of the contemporary social problems. Originally, Chicago was a clean slate, an empty physical environment. By 1860, Chicago was a small town with a population of 10,000. There was great growth after the fire of 1871. By 1910, the population exceeded two million. The rapidity of the increase was due to an influx of immigrants and it produced homelessness (Anderson: 1923), poor housing conditions, and bad working conditions based on low wages and long hours. But equally, Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) stress that the sudden freedom of immigrants released from the controls of Europe to the unrestrained competition of the new city was a dynamic for growth.

"Ecological studies consisted of making spot maps of Chicago for the place of occurrence of specific behaviors, including alcoholism, homicides, ...