In sociology and then criminology, Chicago school (sometimes described as ecological school ) was the first major body of work that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s specializing in urban sociology , and research into urban environments by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, is now applied elsewhere. Currently involving scholars at several universities in the Chicago area, the term is often used interchangeably to refer to the University of Chicago sociology department. After the Second World War, a "second Chicago school" emerged whose members used symbolic interactionism combined with field research methods (today often referred to as ethnography), to create a new working body.
Key researchers at the first Chicago school included Nels Anderson, Ernest Burgess, Ruth Shonle Cavan, Edward Franklin Frazier, Everett Hughes, Roderick D. McKenzie, George Herbert Mead, Robert E. Park, Walter C. Reckless, Edwin Sutherland, WI Thomas [ 1], Frederic Thrasher, Louis Wirth, and Florian Znaniecki. Activist, social scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams also forge and maintain close ties with some members of the Chicago school sociology.
Video Chicago school (sociology)
Discussion
The Chicago School is renowned for its urban sociology and for the development of a symbolic interactionist approach, especially through the work of Herbert Blumer. It has focused on human behavior shaped by social structure and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic and personal characteristics. Biologists and anthropologists have accepted the theory of evolution as showing that animals adapt to their environment. As applied to people who are held responsible for their own destiny, school members believe that the natural environment, inhabited by society, is a major factor in shaping human behavior, and that the city functions as a microcosm: "In this great city, where all lust, all human energies are released, we are in a position to investigate the process of civilization, as it is, under a microscope. "
The work of Frederic E. Clements (1916) is very influential. He proposes that the vegetation community is a superorganism and a developing community in a fixed pattern of succession stages from scratch to multiple climactic states or to a self-regulating state of equilibrium. By analogy, an individual is born, grows, matures, and dies, but the individual community inhabits continues to grow and exhibit traits greater than the sum of the properties of the parts.
School members have concentrated on the city of Chicago as the object of their studies, looking for evidence of whether urbanization (Wirth: 1938) and increased social mobility have been the cause of contemporary social problems. Originally, Chicago was a clean, empty physical environment. In 1860, Chicago was a small town with a population of 10,000. There was great growth after the fire in 1871. In 1910, the population exceeded two million. The speed of this increase is due to the influx of immigrants and homelessness (Anderson: 1923), poor housing conditions, and poor working conditions based on low wages and long hours. Nevertheless, Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) emphasize that the sudden freedom of immigrants released from European control to the uncontrolled rivalry of the new city is a dynamic of growth. See also broken window thesis.
Ecological studies consist of making a Chicago spot map for the occurrence of certain behaviors, including alcoholism, murder, suicide, psychosis, and poverty, and then calculating rates based on census data. A visual comparison of maps can identify the concentration of certain types of behavior in some areas. The tariff correlation by region is not done until later.
For Thomas, the groups themselves had to reconstruct and reconstruct themselves to succeed. Burgess studied the history of development and concluded that the city was not growing on the edges. Although the presence of Lake Michigan prevents complete siege, it postulates that all major cities will be shaped by radial expansion from the center in concentric circles which he describes as zones, ie business areas in the center, slums (called zones in transition and studied by Wirth: 1928, Zorbaugh: 1929, and Suttles: 1968) around the central area, the worker's further housing zone, the residential area outside this zone, and then the bungalows and commuter zones on the outskirts. Under the influence of Albion Small, research in schools mines the mass of official data including census reports, housing/welfare records and crime rates, and spatially related data with different geographic areas of the city. Shaw and McKay create maps:
- place map to show the location of various social issues with a primary focus on juvenile delinquency;
- map ratings that divide the city into one square mile and show populations by age, gender, ethnicity, etc.;
- zone maps indicating that the main issues are grouped in the city center.
Thomas also developed a self-reported life history technique to provide a subjective balance of analysis. Park, Burgess, and McKenzie are credited with institutionalizing, if not building, sociology as a science. They were also criticized for their overly empirical and ideal approach to the study of society but, in the interwar years, their attitudes and prejudices were normative. Three broad themes characterize the dynamic period of this Chicago study:
- cultural contact and conflict. It emerged from Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) and studied how ethnic groups interact and compete in the process of community succession and institutional transformation (Hughes and Hughes: 1952). An important part of this work is related to African Americans; the work of E. Franklin Frazier (1932) and Drake and Cayton (1945) formed a white American perception of the black community for decades.
- succession in community institutions as stakeholders and actors in the ups and downs of ethnic groups. Cressey (1932) studied dance hall and commercial entertainment services, Kincheloe (1938) studied church success, Janowitz (1952) studied the community press, and Hughes (1979) studied the real estate council.
- city politics. Merriam's commitment to practical reform politics was matched by Gosnell who examined voting and other forms of participation. Gosnell (1935), Wilson (1960), Grimshaw (1992) considers African American politics, and Banfield and Wilson (1963) put the politics of the city of Chicago in a wider context.
This school is probably best known for the theories of the subcultures of Thrasher, Frazier, and Sutherland, and to apply ecological principles to develop social disorganization theory which refers to the consequences of failure:
- social institutions or social organizations including families, schools, churches, political institutions, police, business, etc. in the community and/or surrounding environment identified, or in the wider community; and
- social relationships that have traditionally encouraged interpersonal cooperation.
Thomas defines social disorganization as "the inability of the environment to solve problems together" which indicates the degree of social pathology and personal disorganization, so the term, "differential social organization" is favored by many, and possibly a source of Sutherland (1947) theory of differential association. The researchers have given a clear analysis that the city is a place where life is shallow, where people are anonymous, where relationships are temporary and friendships and family ties are weak. They have observed the weakening of primary social relationships and linked them to the process of social disorganization (compared with the concept of anomie and constructive tension theory).
Maps Chicago school (sociology)
Vasishth and Sloane argue that while it is tempting to draw an analogy between organisms in nature and human condition, the problem lies in reductionism, namely that biological science is overly simplified into a rule that is then applied mechanically to explain human growth and dynamics. community. The most fundamental difficulty is the definition. If a community is a group of individuals who inhabit the same place, is the community just the number of individuals and their activities, or is it something more than a collection of individuals? This is very important in planning research into group interactions. Will the research be effective if it focuses on the individual who makes up a group, or is the society itself a proper research subject regardless of the individual who composed it? If the former, then the data on the individual will explain the community, but if the community either directly or indirectly affects the behavior of its members, then the research should consider the patterns and processes of communities that are different from the patterns and processes in the individual population. But this requires definitions and differences between "patterns" and "processes". Structures, shapes, and patterns are relatively easy to observe and measure, but they are nothing more than evidence of the underlying processes and functions that constitute a real constitutive force in nature and society. The Chicago School wants to develop a tool for researching and then transforming society by directing urban planning and social intervention agencies. It recognizes that urban expansion is not haphazard but strong enough to be controlled by community-level forces such as land values, zoning procedures, landscape features, circulation corridors, and historical contingencies. It is characterized as ecological because external factors are not coincidental or intended, but rather arise from forces of nature in an environment that limit the adaptive spatial and temporal relations between individuals. Schools seek to derive patterns from the study of the process, rather than to assume the processes for the observed patterns and patterns they see emerge, strongly reminiscent of Clements community development ideas.
Conclusion
The Chicago Area Project is a practical effort by sociologists to apply their theory in city laboratories. Subsequent research shows that youth athletics leagues, recreational programs, and summer camps work best along with urban planning and alternatives to detention as crime control policies. These programs are non-entrepreneurial and non-self-sufficient, and they fail when local or central government does not make a sustainable financial commitment for them. Although with hindsight, the school's attempts to map crime may have resulted in some distortion, the work was valuable in that it moved away from studies of patterns and places toward function and scale studies. So far, this is a high-quality work that represents the best science available to researchers at the time.
The Social Disorganization Theory itself is a landmark and, because of its focus on the absence or impairment of social control mechanisms, there is a clear relationship with the theory of social control. In the Causes of Delinquency (1969) Travis Hirschi argues that variations in misbehavior among youth can be explained by variations in the dimensions of social bonding, ie attachment to others, commitment to conventional goals, acceptance of conventional standards or moral convictions , and involvement in conventional activities. The greater the social bond between youth and society, the less likely it is to engage in delinquency. When social ties with conventional role models, values ​​and institutions are gathered for youth in certain settings, they measure many of the same phenomena as those captured by concepts such as network ties or social integration. But the fact that these theories focus on the absence of control or obstacles to progress, means that they ignore the social pressures and cultural values ​​that drive the Merton system identified in Cohen's Theory of Tension or motivational forces proposed to produce crime and delinquency.. More modern theorists such as Empey (1967) argue that the value system, norms and beliefs can be irregular in the sense that there is a conflict between values, norms, and beliefs in the shared dominant culture. Although condemning crime in general, law-abiding citizens may respect and admire criminals who take risks and succeed in engaging in activities that are both interesting and dangerous. The depiction of society as a collection of socially differentiated groups with different subcultural perspectives that cause some of these groups to conflict with the law is another form of cultural disorganization, usually called cultural conflict.
Modern versions of the theory sometimes use different terminology to refer to the same ecological causation process. For example, Crutchfield, Geerken and Gove (1982: 467-482) hypothesize that social integration of society is inhibited by population turnover and to report supporting evidence in explaining the variation in crime rates among cities. The greater the mobility of the population in a city, the higher the crime rate. These arguments are identical to those proposed by social disorganization theorists and the evidence supporting them is just as indirect as the evidence cited by social disorganization theorists. However, with reference to social integration rather than disintegration, this research has not produced the same level of criticism as social disorganization theory.
References
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments