Because it gave rise to a "school," Park's most conspicuous contribution to sociology was the distinction between two orders, governed by somewhat different principles, yet constantly interacting upon one another. It was a time-consuming procedure, but he loved it. His main contributions came in a series of influential articles and introductions to the books of his students, which have now been gathered in the three volumes of his Collected Papers. mile Durkheim, the French scholar, had used the term "anomie" in explaining how the social development of modern society had released men from group and moral restraints, leaving them isolated and lacking the values which give meaning to life. Everything was in a state of agitation, and everything was undergoing rapid change. Vincent left in 1911 to become President of the University of Minnesota, and later President of the Rockefeller Foundation.). The individual's conceptions of himself are anchored in the division of labor and hence in the status order. His overarching concern with abstraction and generalization becomes clear as the reader discovers that a very few facts about the press are used again and again to support a constant search for the general conditions affecting consensus in society, and that a relatively small amount of objectifiable information about race relations serves to launch Park into broad exploration of the accommodations among groups or the relationship between individual and society. Without a conceptual apparatus, useful observation is impossible; with such an apparatus, the specific data-gathering procedures are of lesser moment. In the moral or social order, as distinct from the ecological order, men participate as self-conscious individuals in communication with one another and hence are able to engage in collective action. But eidier these states are never reached or the approach to one equilibrium creates another disequilibrium that starts a second sequence before the first is finished. His mother, Theodosia Warner Clark, was a school teacher. Were there not sources of stability amidst this apparent chaos? He was born in 1864 on a farm in Pennsylvania, but grew up in Redwing, Minnesota, originally settled by New Englanders but also containing a very sizable Scandinavian population. SOURCE: "The Plea for Community," in The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, Mentor, 1964, pp. Turner suggests instead of a typology, a continuum of increasingly complex responses to increasingly severe breakdowns or inadequacies in the normative order. 6 July 2023 , Last Updated on June 8, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. ", Social control refers to the variety of mechanisms by which collective behavior is organized, contained, and channelled. "You remember," he explained, "that Faust was tired of books and wanted to see the world.". According to this reading, he "looked back from the metropolis to the days of the family, the tribe and the clan with some sense of nostalgia," a nostalgia "for a cozier, warmer form of human association" than the industrial metropolis provided. "The principle of dominance operates in the human as well as in the plant and animal communities. Park sees man as part of the web of life, sharing some characteristics with both plant and animal communities. Patterson Smith reprint series in criminology, law enforcement, and social problems. It is only because the news is capable of more than one interpretation that we discuss it. But Park is satisfied to take for granted that the inequities of race relations, the corruption of political machines, criminality, and vice are problems, and proceed directly to their examination without stopping to moralize in the fashion so common during his era. The leaders of emerging social movements or religious organizations impose social control on the previously unstructured collective behavior of the crowd, thereby transforming it into an audience. Park's appointment as a full professor came only in 1923, when he was fifty-nine years old. The Crowd and the Public demonstrates an early recognition of the deficiencies of each perspective used alone. He listed various contributions of Royce in the bibliography for his (and Burgess') Introduction to the Science of Sociology under the headings of "Social Interaction and Social Consciousness," "Communication and Interaction," and "Imitation and Suggestion"; we may therefore assume that Royce stimulated his thinking in these areas. Unlike writers who have treated morale as a sort of personal attribute and attitude, Park viewed it plainly as an aspect of collective behavior. The materials deal rather with the historical and situational evolution and use of the various means of control. Despite his emphasis on practical work, Park developed several significant theoretical concepts. An idealized state of assimilation stands at the end of conflict; institutionalization is the end product of collective behavior; public opinion process rigidifies into the mores. Park said: Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. But not any conceptual apparatus will do, for what one can see is dependent upon the concepts employed. Is Park suggesting that normative ambiguity, inadequacy, and breakdown extending beyond a certain point will produce a crowd rather than a public? He toyed with ideas of racial temperament, and never wholly rejected the idea of a biological basis for racial inequality. He had come to see stock prices as a reflection of public opinion shaped by the news, and was therefore led to infer that with more adequate reporting, general public opinion could be made to respond to current events in as accurate a manner as the stock market. Some of the confusion regarding the essential nature of ecology emerges from Park's effort to integrate his earlier concern with a spatial realm into an order in which the assignment of position and change depend upon the operation of the impersonal process of competition. The fact that antagonisms are regulated by control mechanisms does not mean that they are eradicated, but only that they have become latent or have been driven into socially accepted channels. The important question, Baltzell maintains, is how to institutionalize relationships which will promote a "responsible neighborliness" appropriate to an urban order. Intimate acquaintance with social problems was a prerequisite for attempts to resolve them. [In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.]. Contemporary students might be amazed to learn that one could receive a sociology degree at Chicago with a thesis entitled "Stages in the Theological Development of Martin Luther." Park may have been excited by the city as a challenge to social scientists, as a laboratory for the study of social problems, but he had serious doubts about its moral qualities when he compared it to the pre-urban communities and modes of social organization that had preceded it in America and elsewhere. Park's work at Chicago indicates he had found his way, his method. Any change in the situation may upset the accommodation and nullify control over the antagonistic forces. The administration had finally discovered what was going on and wished to regularize the irregular. The Department had developed because of Small's intelligent realization that the growth of sociology would be inhibited by premature doctrinal closure. Robert Ezra Park Criticism - Essay - eNotes.com sociology professor Robert Ezra Park (1864-1944), gave urban sociology/criminology an important boost. In contrast, where social bonds are removed and old institutions weakened, great crowd movements develop more easily and forcefully." ], Park's career is the story of a sociologist who first saw society at close range as a newspaperman, then developed broad philosophical and sociological interests, and finally became an influential teacher of sociology at the University of Chicago. Thomas may have sensed that Park, the student of James and Windelband, was a man who could do more than reporting; he could, given the proper stimulating environment, think conceptually. 125. Without formalizing it, Park adumbrates a sophisticated conception in which the method of social science supplies a frame of reference through which it is possible to observe significant regularities. Each part in the division of labor is a role. In analyzing the cultural level of human association, Park first distinguished between a "mass" which absorbs the individual completely into the purposes of the group, and a "public" marked by a diversity of opinions and sentiments. Park was concerned with the dynamics of race prejudice throughout his career. Though he was now groping for a new profession, he was still thinking of himself as a highly skilled gatherer of facts, a muckraker with a Heidelberg degree. Before one can begin to make sociological sense of any group, the investigator must overcome the normal "blindness to the feelings of creatures and people other than ourselves." The idea of morale is inapplicable to the crowd, because its actions are unpremeditated. The third Harvard man listed by Park in his intellectual biography is the psychologist Hugo Muensterberg. Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group. Robert E. Park - Wikipedia The milling herd can never attain a focused, deliberate collective act. The family is singled out as a vestige from an earlier "authoritative and sacred society in which everyone has duties and no one has rights," and in which personal interests are invariably subject to communal authority. "My contribution to sociology has been," he said, "not what I intended, not what my original interest would have indicated, but what I needed to make a systematic exploration of the social work [sic] in which I found myself. The problem I was interested in was always [i.e., always at Chicago, L.A.C.] There is no explicit statement as to what, if anything, in the social setting would tend to produce one or the other kind of collectivity. 73. Park told them flatly that the world was full of crusaders. It is the role of the press to facilitate the emergence of a collective will after a sequence of agitation and unrest. Park's social disorganization theory forms the basis for several other theories in contemporary criminology. The sect was singled out for special attention, although Park seemed undecided whether it was a deviant terminus to the collective behavior sequence, an alternative line of development to more active movements, or a stage in the mobilization and discipline of members for extreme action. E. S. Bogardus credits Park with the suggestion that he develop a generally applicable device for the measurement of social distancea suggestion which resulted in the widely used social distance scale. 0 Reviews. It is unfortunate that the study of urban spatial patterns is sometimes identified as ecology. The individual is exposed mainly to the gaze of "transient observers" in churches, theatres, hotels, shops, and parks; and therefore "the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read.". His interest in racial issues, which continued to be a prime focus of his concerns throughout his later career, was spurred by having met Booker T. Washington, the President of Tuskegee Institute. They invented a type of newspaper that appealed to the millions of modern urban dwellers, with their hunger for news, and especially for news that exposed the lives and deeds of the high and mighty. A different set of principles was required, however, to deal with man's capacity to create a moral order and to engage in communication. Historically, the background of American life has been the village community. But with the growth of great cities the old forms of social control represented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local community have been undermined and their influence greatly diminished., For Park the problem was to understand how both traditional and newer forms of association function for those facing the unsettling consequences of the migration from nonurban areas to the metropolis. Park argued that the basic process underlying social relationships was competition; however, because of human interdependence due to the division of labour, this competition always involves elements of unplanned cooperation (thus yielding competitive cooperation). His public may not always have been stirred to the righteous indignation that he wished to call forth, but it was certainly hungry to learn more of the facts, especially the ugly variety, which Park and his fellow muckraking newspaper crusaders poured forth in a steady stream. 257-383. Conflict, on the other hand, is intermittent and personal. Accordingly, sociology is "a point of view and method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into and induced to cooperate in some sort of corporate existence we call society. Park studied the ecological order to understand better man's moral order. Ford had been a newspaperman and had reported in detail on the vagaries of the stock market and the impact of news on that market. One is frequently startled by the results but is mainly interested to discover by what sleight of hand the trick was turned.". Perhaps all theorists would agree on some scale of complexity and stability in collective behavior, with crowds, panics, and fads at one end and organized social movements at the other. PARKA NEWSPAPERMAN AND STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY. Society is in constant flux, and Park is more interested in the past and future of events tiian he is in their momentary interrelationships. One final feature of Park's methodology deserves to be stressed. Each of his careers was marked by a different style of thought. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Self-consciousness is rooted in the moral order rather than the ecological. He soon realized, however, that he differed from his Michigan friends by not indulging in Utopian dreams and blueprints for reform. At least three features of his approach were unchanged during this time. The thoroughly intransigent posture of the sect and its demand for absolute unanimity distinguish the sect from other groups. to be a In The Crowd and the Public Park is careful to state that his analysis of the difference between the two kinds of collectivity does not imply a judgment, but this can only be taken as a formal disclaimer. The city is a convenient locus for investigation because every human impulse finds expression somewhere in a relatively small area, and because institutions grow more rapidly there. Building on two centuries' experience, Taylor & Francis has grown rapidlyover the last two decades to become a leading international academic publisher.The Group publishes over 800 journals and over 1,800 new books each year, coveringa wide variety of subject areas and incorporating the journal imprints of Routledge,Carfax, Spon Press, Psychology Press, Martin Dunitz, and Taylor & Francis.Taylor & Francis is fully committed to the publication and dissemination of scholarly information of the highest quality, and today this remains the primary goal. It was the study of this organism in all its details that he now urged upon his students. This interpretation is incorrect because it over-looks both the meaning of Park's life (as presented here in preceding pages) and the full range of his concept of the city, which gave ample attention to nonspatially determined forms of urban association. Later, Park altered the terms by which he referred to these phenomena. But despite its blemishes the work surely remains an enduring monument to that creative merger of empirical research and theoretical sophistication which even contemporary sociology only attains at rare moments. He thought of the city as a part of nature, but he also thought that it would naturally become corrupt, mat the body politic, in the traditional anti-urban metaphor, would succumb to internally generated poisons which would destroy the joy of social existence. But through discussion people penetrate this surface consensus, lay bare hidden disagreements, and find the reconciliation of their views more difficult than heretofore. Upon returning to the United States he taught philosophy at Harvard for two years, but was no longer satisfied with academic life. Men are practical creatures, and their attitudes and their knowledge are relative to their purposes. Park looked about him in Chicago and saw that it was attractive and interesting, but that beneath its attractions it generated a maze of social problems as industrialization and mobility increased. in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. To understand the contribution of the Chicago School of criminology is to understand how the confluence of geography, urbanisation, economics, immigration and the exchange of social theory between Europe and America combined to create new ways of looking at society. The exposition contains the justification for this emphasis. Park thought of a region as a social unit to the extent to which its inhabitants read one group of newspapers. Park distinguished four major social processes: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Natural areas, Park asserted, are a combination of people living in a particular place, under certain occupational, social, and economic conditions. The new political products must ultimately be "assimilated, digested, and incorporated with the folkways of the original and historic society." For perhaps thirty years, Park's conception of the field, its units, and its explanatory principles held unchallenged dominance among sociologists. From: The implication was that the scientific techniques, which on Park's view were characteristic of the city, really did lead to the destruction of spontaneity and joy. This whole sum of adaptations to urban life, in the view of Park, Simmel, and may other students of the city, but a premium on rationality and impersonality, for the individual was forced to develop an urbane, emotional reserve and use his intelligence more energetically under city conditions. Park's views are clearly stated, and fall closer to the second alternative in each case, although he occasionally lapses into an opposite stance. date the date you are citing the material. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. The couple Were to have four children. In addition, he "wanted to gain a fundamental point of view from which [he] could describe the behavior of society under the influence of news, in the precise and universal language of science.". The city of Chicago was to become a great natural laboratory for research on urban man and his natural habitat. 7 The Physical Object Park's effort was molded by the "climate of opinion" of his times, but was not entirely bound by such dominant categories as "social disorganization" and "local community." But it was also true that mere fact-gathering would have diminished the stature of the Department in the eyes of powerful neighboring departments and disciplines. Though some developments in Chicago around the turn of the century, particularly the cohesion of isolated ethnic groups and the formation of neighborhood associations in the slums, protected people from social dislocation in the new environment and preserved mutual understanding, the more powerful process of division of labor ultimately substituted organization based on occupation and vocational interests for one based on family ties, culture, caste, and status. Even where an accused person is acquitted, the consequences resulting from a prosecution can include loss of reputation, disruption of personal relations, loss of employment and financial expense . But while M.A. "Robert Ezra Park - Henry Eisner Jr. (essay date 1972)" Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 1984. Park was especially interested in immigrants, and conducted numerous studies on them. At different places Park reveals what he regards as essential elements in a natural history, although he offers neither formal definition nor careful prescription. Park continued the work of W. I. Thomas in turning the attention of sociologists away from speculation over vast evolutionary fictions, away from moralization, and toward the development of a body of knowledge firmly based upon those phenomena that were close enough and concrete enough to be examined reliably. After his retirement from the Chicago faculty, Park, ever ready to share his knowledge with students, moved to Fisk University, where, right through his eightieth year, he taught students and directed their research activities. The tendency to generalize to process rather than structureto be remarked at greater lengthturned his attention toward a different kind of generalization than came to dominate a subsequent generation of sociologists. Crowd and public do not have traditions and customs, but lead to their generation. From 1887 to 1898 Park worked for daily newspapers in Minnesota, Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago. "It is in the mind of the marginal man that the moral turmoil which new cultural contacts occasion, manifests itself in the most obvious forms. For Park, however, urbanity was not a virtue. "Everyone, it seems, is capable of getting on with everyone else, providing each preserves his proper distances." One of his profound contributions to contemporary - Course Hero During World War II, without direct reference to totalitarianisms of the right or the left, Park pointed to a danger from too rapid social change. The big city uniquely rewarded eccentricity, according to Park: even the criminal, the defective, and the genius found more opportunities to develop their dispositions in a great city than in a small town. The perspective was a system of concepts abstract enough to comprehend all forms of interaction of men with one another.". After graduation in 1899, Park went to Germany to study in Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. "The 'blindness' of which James spoke," writes Park, "is the blindness each of us is likely to have for the meaning of other people's lives. What sociologists most need to know is what goes on behind the faces of men, what it is that makes life for each of us either dull or thrilling." They had four children. We don't ever really get to know the urbane person, and hence never know when to trust him. Of many continuities in Park's writing about collective behavior, three will serve to illustrate the social order in process. Steakhouse, Louisville, Ky,
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