Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 22, No.

1, 1999
The Chicago School, So-Called
Howard S. Becker
Many sociologists believe in the myth of a "Chicago School," a unified and
coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of
Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a
coherent system and is better understood as a "school of activity," a group of
people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.
Sociologists have been talking about the Chicago School of sociological
thought for a very long time. It has become a sort of origin myth for a
sociology at least some of us now approve of. People say "Chicago School"
and think to themselves, as the late Helen Hughes used to say (though she
said it sarcastically), "There were giants on the earth in those days," and
then they add that it is time we imitated those giant ways. The principal
chroniclers of the Chicago School, notably Gary Alan Fine and his col-
laborators (1995, especially 1-16 and 82-107) and Martin Bulmer (1984,
especially 151-89), do not, of course, have so simple or simple-minded a
view of what the school consisted of. But the myth, powerful enough to
overcome any qualification or contradictory details, persists.
What is (or was) the Chicago School? At the very least, these things
go into the contemporary picture, the myth, of what the school consisted
of, believed in, and represented:
1. The founders, who included Albion Small, W.I. Thomas (Thomas
and Znaniecki 1918; Thomas and Znaniecki 1920), and the
philosopher George Herbert Mead (Mead 1934), created and held
to a unified scheme of sociological thought, shaped by the guiding
Direct correspondence to Howard S. Becker, 884 Lombard Street, San Francisco, CA 94133.
c 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
KEY WORDS: Chicago school; theory; history of sociology.
3
originality of Thomas and Mead, whose ideas formed a coherent
and cohesive framework within which research could be done).
2. A second generation at Chicago undertook a vast research
program, based on the thinking of the founders and propelled by
the energy and vision of Robert E. Park and his junior colleague
E.W Burgess (Park and Burgess 1921).
3. As a result, a generation of researchers and thinkers, trained by
these people and led by Everett C. Hughes (Hughes 1943; Hughes
1984) and Herbert Blumer (Blumer 1939; Blumer 1969), undertook
research and theoretical development which could be, and
eventually was, characterized as "symbolic interactionism."
4. After the Second World War, the University of Chicago
experienced an enormous influx of students whose education was
paid for by the G.I. Bill. These talented and energetic students of
Hughes and Blumer, having been in the war, benefited from an
experience of the world until then uncommon among students of
sociology. They created a "Second Chicago School," (Fine 1995),
whose members used the ideas of symbolic interactionism
combined with methods of field research to create a substantial
body of research and thinking, still relevant to contemporary
interests almost fifty years later.
5. And all of these people were the carriers of a common theoretical
tradition which flowed from the vision of Park and the philosophy
of Mead, was nourished by the theoretical profundities of Blumer
and the research ingenuity of Hughes, and was responsible for two
great bursts of theoretically integrated "Chicago School" work, first
in the late 20s and 30s, and again after the Second World War.
This is a vision of a school in the sense that historians of thought
speak of a school, or what French intellectuals sometimes refer to as a
"chapelle" (a chapel). In the structure of such a school, one person's
thought is usually seen as central. When sociologists speak of a Durkhe-
imian school, they mean to indicate, and with good reason, that everything
connected with that school of thought was of a piece. The theory was and
is consistent and coherent. The theory informs the research done in its
name. The followers or acolytes preserve the founder's memory, embellish
the theory and its associated body of thought, and further its fortunes, cor-
recting errors and inconsistencies in the master theory and doing work that
exemplifies its vision.
The Chicago School was never a school in that full sense. As Jennifer
Platt (Platt 1996) has made amply clear, Chicago, the real Chicago on 59th
Street in the Social Science Building as opposed to the Chicago of the
4 Becker
origin myth, was much more varied and differentiated than that. Park, Bur-
gess, and Ellsworth Paris, the people now commonly thought to have em-
bodied the great Chicago tradition during the crucial years of the 20s and
30s, were early on joined by Ogburn, who had a quite different view of
sociology and its mission. Ogburn was the greatest single proponent of
quantitative work during those years, perhaps in the entire history of so-
ciology, and was personally responsible (Laslett 1991) for convincing the
United States government that his view of sociology and social science
quantitative, empirical in a narrow sense, and scientific in an equally narrow
sensewas just what the government needed to do its work efficiently. Og-
burn had many followers at Chicago, during both periods of the supposed
efflorescence of the tradition and school: Philip Hauser and Samuel Stouf-
fer in the 30s, Otis Dudley Duncan and others in the 50s.
Louis Wirth, a contemporary of Hughes and Blumer and, like them,
a student of Park and therefore with a full claim to having legitimately
inherited the tradition, often said that he could never understand what peo-
ple were talking about when they spoke of the Chicago School, since he
could find nothing, no idea or style of work, that he and his colleagues
shared. Anyone who was there during those periods (as 1 was during the
late 1940s and early 1950s) could not help but be aware of the great dif-
ferences that divided the faculty and their styles of work, divisions that
were passed on to the students, some of whom became serious devotees
of one or another of the faculty, but most of whom made their own idi-
osyncratic combinations of the variety of ingredients they were offered.
Here are some details about the variety of the allegedly monolithic
"school" in the post Second World War period, when I was a student. The
faculty included, of course, the two giants of the myth, Herbert Blumer
and Everett Hughes. It also included some other Chicago-trained people,
notably the demographer Philip Hauser. Hauser used, it is true, to boast
that he had done field work: He had helped gather data on the employees
of the taxi-dance halls described in Paul Cressey's book on that topic
(Cressey 1932) by dancing with them. But, despite this boast, Hauser was
in fact a strong proponent of quantitative research and had little use for
the qualitative work so central to the contemporary idea of the Chicago
School.
Ogburn and Burgess were still teaching, and each of them insisted on
the importance of statistics in social research. Though Burgess had worked
closely with Park, he was not so clearly a proponent of what we now think
of as "Chicago-style" research, though he did not oppose it. He devoted
much of his research to such topics as predicting criminal behavior and
marital "success," using conventional quantitative research techniques to
analyze questionnaire data.
The Chicago School, So-Called 5
During the same period, the National Opinion Research Center, then
a relatively new organization, was persuaded to make its headquarters at
the University of Chicago, where it still resides, so that survey research was
an active and lively presence. Many students worked at NORC and some
did dissertations based on survey data.
There were already representatives of the competing "Columbia"
school at the university, particularly Bernard Berelson, who collaborated
with Lazarsfeld on the famous study of voting in Elmira County (Lazars-
feld, Berelson and Gaudet 1948), and with whom other Chicago students
worked (e.g., David Gold). After I left, but still in the 50s, other Columbia
graduates joined the faculty (Peter Rossi, James Coleman, Peter Blau, Elihu
Katz).
In a quite different direction, another influential member of the Chi-
cago sociology department was W. Lloyd Warner, now somewhat forgotten,
but then well-known as an author and as having provided the impetus for
a number of major community studies. Warner studied, but never com-
pleted a degree in, social anthropology at Harvard, his dissertation a large
book on the social organization of an indigenous Australian society, the
Murngin (Warner 1937). Though that was a classic anthropological mono-
graph in the style of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was one of Warner's men-
tors, Warner worked after that almost exclusively in American communities.
He was author or co-author of all the volumes in the Yankee City Series,
the large study of class and ethnicity in what was eventually revealed to
be Newburyport, Massachusetts (Warner et al., 1941-1959). He was the in-
spiration for and major adviser to the authors of Deep South, the important
study of caste and class in Natchez, Mississippi, done by Elizabeth and Al-
lison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner (Davis, Gardner and Gardner
1941). He was intimately involved in the work done by Conrad Arensberg
in Ireland (Arensberg 1950), and in the work that led to St. Clair Drake
and Horace Cayton's book on Chicago's black South Side, Black Metropolis.
(Drake and Cayton 1945) In the late forties, Warner was just finishing a
community study in Morris, Illinois (called, in the resulting book, "Jones-
ville" (Warner et al., 1947)).
I recite this list of Warner's now mostly (and quite unjustly) ignored
work to indicate what a presence he was to students. We knew that he was
actively involved in major pieces of qualitative research and some us found
inspiration in what he was doing. But, strangely enough for the origin myth,
his lineage had nothing to do with the Chicago school, but was classically
anthropological, traceable back through Radcliffe-Brown to Durkheim.
Warner was closely associated with the then young William Foote
Whyte who, though he received his Ph.D. at Chicago, had actually done
what little graduate work he did at Harvard, seriously influenced by Warner,
6 Becker
and especially by Warner's associate Arensberg. Whyte's Street Comer So-
ciety (Whyte [1943] 1981) was a model for all of us of what a Chicago style
field study ought to look like, as were Black Metropolis and the other
Warner inspired works. But, as I said, none of this work, seemingly so in
keeping with the Chicago style of thought, had anything to do with that
tradition. In fact, as we have eventually learned, some of the major repre-
sentatives of the Chicago tradition, Wirth in particular, were quite unhappy
with Whyte's work.
Hughes did similar workhis major community study of an industri-
alizing town in Quebec (published as French Canada in Transition (Hughes
1943)) and his later studies of race relations in American industry (e.g.,
(Hughes 1984), pp. 265-75)which did stem directly from the tradition of
Park. Hughes, in fact, quoted Park all the time and it was from him that
some of us learned that we were spiritual descendants of Park. But the
Park we learned about from him was not just the Park who told people to
get then- hands dirty in the real world, the advice that Blumer incessantly
repeated. No. Hughes's Park was the one who wanted not just interviews
and observations, but statistical studies of the spatial distribution of social
phenomena as well.
So there were a varied lot of people at Chicago at every period of its
development and by no means all of them were participants in the "Chicago
tradition," as it is now conceived, and some of those whose work was con-
gruent with the Chicago tradition had scarcely heard of it.
(There is more to the confusion. Nelson Foote, a social psychologist
trained at Cornell, came to Chicago as an assistant professor and made
common cause with people like Anselm Strauss, who were coming to be
seen as "symbolic interactionists." And Herbert Goldhamer, whose work
was much more political, much more influenced by large-scale social theory
in the European style, and by psychoanalysis (see Goldhamer and Marshall
1953), was also present, and had a remarkable influence on some people
who worked with him.)
Further, there was grave dissension within the ranks of the true "old
Chicagoans," the students of Park and Burgess from the first Golden Age.
In particular, as the archival research of Abbott and Gaziano (1995) has
revealed, Hughes and Blumer, now thought of as the twin embodiments
of the tradition in their generation, had very low opinions of one another.
Blumer thought Hughes had a second-rate mind, and Hughes was openly
contemptuous of Blumer's inability or unwillingness to do research (see
also Lofland 1980). A similar tension existed between Hughes and Wirth,
and Hauser sided, in a coalition that doesn't make much sense if you think
about "Chicago" as the embodiment of a "symbolic interactionist" tradition,
with Wirth and Blumer.
The Chicago School, So-Called 7
Hughes, on the other hand, was very close to the anthropologists: To
Robert Redfield (Redfield 1941) who, like him, was a spiritual descendant
of Park (as well as Park's son-in-law); and to Lloyd Warner, with whom he
collaborated in teaching and in a variety of other ways. It's clear, in the
documents Abbott and Gaziano found, that Hughes and Warner regarded
themselves as the "active researchers" in the department, as opposed to
Wirth and Blumer who they saw as mere talkers and tenders of the flame.
When Anselm Strauss (Strauss 1959; Strauss 1961; Strauss et al., 1964)
returned to Chicago, where he had been a student of Blumer and Burgess,
he soon became involved with Hughes and thought of himself as in that
camp, insofar as he was in any camp.
If you imagine that students of the generation I belonged to were pas-
sive recipients of a great coherent tradition of Chicago symbolic interac-
tionism, then, you are quite mistaken. The department did not give us any
coherent tradition to receive. We were, instead, confused by the melange
of contradictory viewpoints, models, and recommendations the department
presented to us. And each of us made what we could of it, emphasizing
what we could use, ignoring what we couldn't. Most of us, for example,
though not all (e.g., Albert J. Reiss), eventually pretty much ignored Bur-
gess. Most of us ignored Ogburn (but not, of course, Dudley Duncan).
Some of us were heavily influenced by Warner. Warner was the main in-
spiration for Erving Goffman (Goffman 1961; Goffman 1963) until many
years after he left Chicago, when he announced an allegiance to Hughes
that was not reciprocated. Warner was a major influence for Eliot Freidson
(Freidson 1970) as well, and for me, in my case mostly because he repre-
sented to me the romance I associated with social anthropology, a field I
admired but whose strenuous work settings I wanted to avoid. (That is why
I was so taken with the idea of urban anthropology: You had all the ro-
mance of anthropology but could sleep in your own bed and eat decent
food.) David Gold thought of himself as a Lazarsfeldian, but later saw that
he had a lot in common with people like me, something he seemed to
have absorbed from Blumer that he couldn't quite put his finger on.
And so on. The result of thisof each person inventing his own private
Chicagowas that no two of these Chicagos were exactly alike. There were
many things that people who had been trained there at a particular time
shared, but there were also enormous differences. Not usually contradic-
tions, but only because (I think) we were more interested in research results
than in grand theorizing. I think it's true that this generation was known
far more for the research projects its members published than for any theo-
ries they developed.
And yet there was a Chicago School and a Chicago tradition. What
were they?
8 Becker
Here I want to draw on a crucial distinction made by Samuel Gilmore
(Gilmore 1988) about a quite different arena of social life. Gilmore studied
contemporary musical composers and found that some composers who were
commonly thought to belong to a particular "school" of composition not
only didn't know each other, they felt nothing in common with people
whose views they were supposed to share, indeed often weren't even aware
of those people and their views. And, on the other hand, some people who
shared little or nothing in the way of compositional theories, ideas, or prac-
tice, nevertheless collaborated in all sorts of musical activities.
He calls the first type a "School of Thought," and says that schools
of thought are created from the outside, by critics who look at the field
and decide that certain people share certain ideas, that their work shares
certain stylistic features, and that they thus constitute a school. The second
group he calls a "School of Activity." What members of such a school have
in common is that they work together on practical projects. For instance,
they may organize a concert series together, each one thus getting his or
her music played, even though they disagree violently on what music should
be. So some people who, at least in our later view, think and act alike,
may never have acted collectively (the "school of thought"). And some peo-
ple have acted collectively even though their ideas may not be congruent
(the "school of activity"). A school in the classical sense I alluded to at
the beginning would combine both of theseits members would think alike
and act together in pursuit of their shared ideas.
It may be that the "chapelles" of French sociological thought, promi-
nent until the mid-1970s, approached this model. But that is probably a
result, I'm tempted to say an artifact, of the way French sociological ac-
tivity was then organized, in small research groups headed by well-known
leaders who competed with other leaders to make their theories domi-
nant.
American sociological life, on the other hand, is organized in depart-
ments, which find their homes in teaching institutions, in colleges and uni-
versities in which the department is required to teach all the sociology
courses that need teaching, and thus very often to encompass a great variety
of styles of work. So American departments are, for the most part, "schools
of activity." They can only harbor a "school of thought" with great difficulty
and even successful efforts to make them do so have seldom had lasting
results. This is a long story I won't go into fully here, but it would repay
close study. At every period of its development, Chicago was a school of
activity, an organization that was trying to cover the major possibilities
available in the field at any moment (even though one might for a time
be dominant) in order to be able to field an adequate team. The object
was not to present a united theoretical front, but to get students taught
The Chicago School, So-Called 9
and degrees given, to raise money for research projects, and so to develop
and maintain a reputation for the department as a good all-around place.
Since Chicago had been the first (or almost the first, pace Alan Sica (Sica
(1983)) sociology department in the country, quite possibly in the world,
the job was to continue to be Number One in every respect.
And so Goffman, having first been interested in Wirth, finally got a
degree working with Warner. My dissertation committee consisted of
Hughes, Warner, and the anthropologist Allison Davis, who taught in the
School of Education. Research projects were done by people who had little
in common; e. g., Wirth and Hughes collaborated on studies of the Chicago
public schools, though they had quite different ideas about what was im-
portant to study and how to study those things. (My field work for my
dissertation was supported financially by this project; I never had two words
with Wirth about what I was doing.) "Chicago" was, to repeat, a school of
activity, the activity being the training of more sociologists, and the award-
ing of degrees, and the maintenance of a reputation within and beyond
the university.
American departments are seldom, for the reasons I have given and
because of the nature of generational changeeven if people are from
the same school, the second generation is very different from the first
monolithically of one persuasion. It only looks that way if you don't look
too closely. The Columbia department of the 40s and 50s (the great days
of that department) looked quite monolithic, the "tradition" they es-
poused a combination of Merton's theorizing and Lazarsfeld's hustling
of survey contracts out of which sociological silk purses could be made.
But there were other people there then, who get left out when the story
is told. And other kinds of work done too. That's also a story for another
day.
The moral of today's story is that "Chicago" was never the unified
chapel of the origin myth, a unified school of thought. It was, instead, a
vigorous and energetic school of activity, a group of sociologists who col-
laborated in the day-to-day work of making sociology in an American uni-
versity and did that very well. But we cannot make an inferential jump
from that pragmatic collaboration to a "tradition," a coherent body of the-
ory. The real legacy of Chicago is the mixture of things that characterized
the school of activity at every period: open, whether through choice or ne-
cessity, to a variety of ways of doing sociology, eclectic because circum-
stances pushed it to be. I think, and not just because I was his student,
that Hughes wasin that sensethe true Chicagoan, the real descendant
of Park, the sociologist who was properly skeptical of every way of doing
social science, including his own.
10 Becker
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