A “Scientific Revolution”: Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945

Some important work (Bulmer, Harvey) in the history of sociology questions whether the Chicago School should be identified with qualitative as opposed to more quantitative, statistical, and correlational methods. This paper will examine whether this characterization is a "myth" or whether tbere was some real basis for this association of Chicago sociology with qualitative research and a broader epistemological stance critical of radical neo-positivism. It does so by utilizing Floyd Nelson House's The Development of Sociology (1936) as a primary source for answering these questions. House received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1924Chicago in , taught there in 1925Chicago in -1926, and continued to identify himself as a Chicagoan after his appointment to the University of Virginia.Although his book provides a long historical survey, House paid ample attention to the development of American sociology. He frequently drew attention to the differences between Chicago sociology and that produced by the First Columbia School of Sociology founded by the radical neo-positivist Franklin H. Giddings. These differences focused on methods and epistemological stances. House identified himself as part of a Chicago "Group of Five" (including Park, Blumer, Eubank, and Bogardus) which questioned "concrete sociological research" in the absence of careful conceptualization. The contrast between Columbia and Chicago sociology in both descriptive and evaluative terms is, in fact, a leitmotif of what appears to be on the surface an impartial textbook. This paper concludes that the depiction of the Chicago School as welcoming to qualitative methods and much less inclined to radical neo-positivism than the First Columbia School is not a latter-day construction of neo or "wannabe" Chicagoans but has its roots in contemporary developments of the Chicago School in its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. The Myth About Methods in Chicago SociologySeveral sociological historians of the Chicago School have suggested that it is wrong for sociological historians and commentators to associate a qualitative and non-statistical epistemological-methodological stance with Chicago sociology because this has led to a denial or denigration of that department's quantitative and statistical approaches. Martin Bulmer is probably the locus classicus of this in his important book The Chicago School of Sociology (1984) and a previous article (1981). He refers to "the neglect of this quantitative tradition in Chicago social science in the 1920s and 1930s" by sociological historians and to "the David'Nock has been (full) professor of sociology since 1986. His interests include the history of sociology/ social thought, classical theory, and sociology of knowledge. Nock63

Section: The Myth About Methods In Chicago Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…House was enumerated as one of the group, as was Blumer (and Charles Ellwood, a senior Chicago graduate, Ph.D. 1899). Emory S. Bogardus (1882-1973, born in Belvedere, Illinois, had received his M.A. in philosophy and psychology at Northwestern University in 1909.…”

Section: The Chicago "Group Of Five" and Their Questmentioning

confidence: 99%

The myth about “myths of the Chicago School”: Evidence from Floyd Nelson house

Nock

2004

“…These latter all claimed that the rebellion was the work of younger members of the profession motivated by a rejection of Chicago's value neutral stance (Faris 1967), or of its qualitative methods (Martindale 1976) or of its micro theories (Kuklick 1973). While Lengermann's investigations were guided by all these models, her final patterning of connection depended above all on empirical research: scrutinizing the records of the controversy surrounding the 1935 ASS Annual Meeting, she identified exactly who had been the players in the rebel group, and socially located them in terms of employment site, career stage, region of the country, age, ties to Chicago, and the amount and content of their interactions around issues of the rebellion (as preserved in correspondence and remembered in interviews with survivors).…”

Section: Moment 3: the Movement From Data Collection To Patterning Fimentioning

confidence: 97%

Moments in the Methodology of Meso History

Lengermann

Niebrugge

2007

Meso history is that branch of the history of sociology that focuses on social relations, that is, patterns of connection among groups, group members, and group meanings, as explanatory factors in the shaping of sociology. The methodology of meso history consists of strategies for discovering, documenting and patterning connections. This paper explores those strategies in terms of three moments generic to the research process in social science-moments of movement from intellectual curiosity to conceptualization, from research question to data collection and from data to presentation of findings-focusing on the distinctive permutations on this research process that occur in the practice of meso history.

“…Several rich veins in Mead's corpus drew close attention: the temporal structure of reality (Flaherty and Fine 2001;Bergmann 1981;, the genesis of language (Ionin 1975;Glock 1986;Koczanowicz 1994), the politics and ethics of reform (Lichtman 1970;Ropers 1973;Deegan and Burger 1978;Deegan 2008;Shalin 1988a;Schwalbe 1988), the relationship between pragmatism and sociology (Kuklik 1973;Fisher and Strauss 1979;Joas 1980Joas , 1993Harvey 1986;Shalin 1986a; see also Intercyberlibrary, http://cdclv.unlv.edu//archives/interactionism/index.html).…”

Section: Mead and Sociological Cannonmentioning

confidence: 98%

Making the Sociological Canon: The Battle Over George Herbert Mead’s Legacy

Shalin

2015

This paper tracks Mead's induction into the sociological canon, focusing in particular on American sociologists who made a concerted effort to reconstruct Mead as a systematic social theorist and apply his ideas to empirical research. It distinguishes two interpretive strategies of framing the classic and constructing the canon -the politics of orthodoxy and politics of the open canon. The politics of orthodoxy aims to ascertain the original meaning and close the textual canon, creating a template relative to which alternative interpretations are judged incomplete, unorthodox, or wrongheaded. The politics of the open canon proceeds on the assumption that the classic text lends itself to conflicting interpretations, that room for the honest difference of opinion must be safeguarded, and that the capacity to further productive inquiry rather than the adherence to an orthodox view recommends a particular construal as viable and canon-worhty.