Park and Burgess’s Sociology

Rereading Introduction to the Science of Sociology at One Hundred. Critical Perspectives and News

Giuseppina Cersosimo

Abstract: This chapter will give criticism recommendations for possible rereading of the Introduction at 100 years of its publication, and remarks needed on the challenges that young sociologists and scholars from social science in transitional societies face. Furthermore, the editor will summarize discussions and results from the following chapters.

without history, sociology is blind, without sociology, history is dumb

A. Cavalli (1963)

History inevitably is interpreted history

M. Orlinsky (1992)

The central question of this volume is whether one hundred years after its publication, Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, the first manual on a discipline whose role was yet to be discovered, through the emerging science, “the organization of knowledge pertaining to the relations of men in society,” is still being used by many researchers. The text represented the beginning of a very close collaboration and is a very effectual piece of work by two authors who expressed, in their very different ways, the long theoretical and administrative government of the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago.

For more than 20 years, the text, “the green bible”—a name describing the color of the cover and the “sacredness” of the volume—was the leading textbook on this discipline, read by generations of students. The book sold more than 30,000 copies in those years, and it represented, as Robert Faris remembered, “a standardization” of sociological subject matter, and a major contribution to the research impetus that followed its publication: the proposal of a “unified theory for social research,” a really new and proper territory (Faris, 1967).

Park and Burgess developed the volume around a series of sociological categories, from a wide range of sources, and represented “the observation and reflection of men who have seen life from very different points of view.” About 1,400 authors were cited within the book, across its 1,000 pages and 14 chapters. Every chapter has an introduction, materials, methods and problems, a bibliography about the growing field of American Sociology, enriched by the contribution of other social sciences, and above all, particularly by the sociological analysis of Georg Simmel. The text represented a theoretical eruption in a time of social closures, offering an incomparable instrument to address Chicago’s cultural dominion inside American universities.

Robert Faris in his seminal book on Chicago Sociology defined the Introduction as one of the most influential works ever written on sociology, a text which “constituted a major contribution to the research impetus that followed soon after its publication” (Faris, 1967, p. 37).

As I have just said, our aim is to celebrate the Green Bible a hundred years after its publication while discussing the different ideas at the roots of its conceptual framework, development, and contents, in an open debate connecting old and modern sociological categories aimed at finding a common denominator shared by the participants concerning both “the place of sociology among the sciences and, in particular, its relationship to other sciences” and the contemporary emergence of public sociology.

I think that one of the reasons why Introduction to the Science of Sociology has shaped the worldview of Chicago sociologists for more than 20 of its most productive years is that it forced novices, graduate students, and their teachers to ponder the words written by such outstanding scholars, and there are too many of them for me to quote them all, a big family including the “fathers” and the “uncles” of sociology. In fact, the Introduction was enriched by the contributions of anthropologists, psychologists, statisticians, pedagogists, and philosophers. I should add that almost all of them were men. Such an approach was a peculiarity reminiscent of Park’s European studies, conducted both for his doctoral thesis (in 1904) and for other purposes

Few commentators have examined The Green Bible with more insight than Robert Faris, about 40 years after his experience at the University of Chicago as a student. In an amazing memoir he pointed out that the book did not advance a “new” theory, but it did organize an astonishing range of “materials” as Park and Burgess called them, under headings and with introductions, which made them applicable for students and their teachers of that time. Burgess wrote rough drafts, Park refined or rewrote them, and Burgess polished up their commentaries, which were full of caveats addressed to prospective social researchers.

Sociology, in Park and Burgess’s mind, had to move out of the nineteenth century, away from the speculations of Sumner, Ward and Giddings, turning toward a new, empirically testable terrain suitable for fieldwork and for what came to be called “grounded theory”; a sociology that is “the pursuit of objective scientific knowledge concerning the nature of society and social organization, groups and institutions, the nature and effects of processes of social interaction, and the effects of these forms and processes on the behaviour of persons” (Park and Burgess, 1921, pp. 312–314). In doing so, they introduced sociology to thousands of students and to their teachers by means of their textbook and of a very broadly defined body of seminal texts.

Moreover, this confirmed Park’s ability to be flexible in his theoretical work: “Park’s genuine interests were in particulars, not generalization. He was … concerned with individuals, pictures of the life of groups— immigrants, denizens of skid row. Hoodlums, etc., such as showed Dreiser, Gorky et al.” (quoted in Matthews, p. 108). Carla Cappetti reaffirms that Chicago sociology and its tradition were also the source of great inspiration for the evolution of American literature after the Twenties thus confirming the social presence of this piece of research, often despite the authors themselves (Cappetti, 1993).

The Park and Burgess text contains a series of characteristics and critical perspectives that, 100 years later, are still interesting and topical, but it also confirms the time gone by.