"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. Learning about their background and interests in this personal way, Park then helped them map out their field of research and specific research problems. In Turner's current formulation, the significant feature of the setting appears to be increasing severity of normative inadequacy ranging from situations in which norms are lacking or ambiguous through those in which prior organization is disrupted to those where satisfaction of needs dictates that the normative order be set aside. The newspaper has a history; but it has, likewise, a natural history. The Crowd and the Public demonstrates an early recognition of the deficiencies of each perspective used alone. This is important because each individual has his own unique experiences and insights into the world that no other person can have. Turner suggests instead of a typology, a continuum of increasingly complex responses to increasingly severe breakdowns or inadequacies in the normative order. Park knew this to be the case: "The life of the average newspaperman seemed, at that time, to be about eight years. Influence from the biotic to the social order is simpler, as social definitions tend to arise to express and reinforce the interpersonal order which has been produced by competition. The case of the peasant is typical. Smelser's theory is based on a general scheme of categories capable of classifying all social behavior; collective behavior types are differentiated according to which of the various universal "components of action" they attempt to change or restructure. "What is needed, however, is not so much a history as a natural history of the pressnot a record of the fortunes of individual newspapers, but an account of the evolution of the newspaper as a social institution." It is in the mind of the marginal manwhere the changes and fusions of culture are going onthat we can best study the processes of civilization and progress.". Everett C. Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Stuart Queen, Leonard Cottrell, Edward Reuter, Robert Faris, Louis Wirth, and E. Franklin Frazier all became presidents of the American Sociological Society. Thus, according to Simmel, the city has the potential of stifling the individual at the same time it provides the freedom by which he can most fully express his potentiality. Role and self. Like any seminal thinker, Park put forth some incompletely digested ideas, revised his thinking in the course of his intellectual career, and suffered from some of the limitations of the era in which he worked. Park's emphasis in The Crowd and the Public on the concept of the General Will heightens the contrast between the stable normative order and collective behavior existing apart from it. The Department of Sociology at Chicago, common misconceptions to the contrary, was by no means only interested in fact-gathering; from the beginning it was groping for conceptual and theoretical formulations that would distinguish the discipline of sociology from applied social work on the one hand and from mere social reporting on the other. In spite of the social psychological tenor of his approach and his explicit concern with human nature, Park is seldom singled out for his contributions to this area. "Inevitably he becomes, relatively to his cultural milieu, the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational view-point. Second, race prejudice is an aspect of an intergroup process rather than a product of personal peculiarities. Park takes the crucial importance of the public as the mechanism for democratic decision-making and its function of facilitating change without disruption so entirely for granted that he does not deal with these matters explicitly. (Franklin Ford, the other major influence on Park in Michigan, was, of course, not an academic man.) ! During his searching years, prior to arriving at Chicago, Park had the experiences and intellectual encounters which provided the background for his formulation of an urban theory. Mead's self-process was formulated in complete generality, Cooley insisted upon the key place of primary groups even in the most secular society, and Thomas leaned toward a frustration theory. It is developed in the urban world, and not in what he calls the "little worlds" of the family, the tribe, the local community. Park's emphasis was on the internal mechanisms active in both crowd and public; this approach, ultimately deriving from Le Bon, long remained dominant. Log in here. 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. Thus the distinction between culture and civilization refers to the social and ecological systems together and does not rely upon the one or the other. "Quite the contrary. [In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.] That this was emphatically not the case can be seen in even a cursory glance at his academic writings. Even Park fell into the latter error, contributing to the paradisiacal fantasy about Hawaii with his observation that "Race relations in Hawaii today seem to be approaching the terminus of such a cycle as here described." If anything customary seems shocking or quaint, it is because the custom is not quite intelligible to the observer. Park rejected the concept in no uncertain terms while making clear what he regarded as the nature of social ties. 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. Park's social disorganization theory forms the basis for several other theories in contemporary criminology. No brief passage can do better than the following to summarize his view that the reform of the city should be seriously influenced by a model of the pre-industrial past: "The social problem is fundamentally a city problem. There is an inherent opposition between the unity of the whole and the closed sentiments of we-groups. It is not then a psychological bias but his conception of a fluid social order that requires constant attention to individual attitudes as phases of societal process. Muensterberg is mentioned frequently in Park's Introduction, and the book includes a selection by Muensterberg on "The Psychology of Subordination and Superordination," which deals with suggestion, imitation, and sympathy in terms of domination and submission. Reserve, for example, allowed the urbanite to avoid too many unselective personal contacts without his becoming completely indifferent to others and thus stunting personal development. The immigrant press and its control by Robert Ezra Park, 1971, Patterson Smith edition, in English . Social unrest "represents at once a breaking up of the established routine and a preparation for new collective action." Park's theory of the city rests on the assumption that human society is organized on two distinguishable but interdependent levels: the symbiotic, which humans share with organic life, and the cultural, which distinguishes human organization from plant and animal groups. It is more or less fundamental traits of personality which arise in the intimate group which enable us to act with definiteness and assurance toward others. 73. []], vol. Society appeared to be merely a random collection of social atoms, with no visible means of holding things together. Although tradition and sentiment develop, the sense of solidarity characteristic of simpler societies is lacking. 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. Once an accommodation is reached, the slower process of assimilation sets in. The recognition of a biological and a social order in human life was not uncommon, but followers of the organismic school often simply derived the categories and principles for analysis of the social order from the biological. The Sociological Quarterly In contrast, "in the public, interaction takes the form of discussion. A crucial feature of the social order for the individual is the division of labor. (He attributed this hope to the ideas of Dewey and a newspaper man named Franklin Ford.) It is not the function of publics to make peace, and war is often the natural continuation of discussion. Competition is as universal and continuous in human society as it is in the natural order. Park borrowed the term "symbiosis" to denote the kind of unintentional cooperation among various species which emerges from a struggle for survival. During Park's time at the University of Chicago, the sociology department began to use the city that surrounded it as a sort of research laboratory. Stimulating though his lectures were, Park's reputation did not depend on them. He admitted that the vast, nondescript, deteriorated areas which had become the American city slums were not places of "unity and charm," but the slums seemed to Park unusually interesting because they were in social transition. PDF Journal of Intercultural Studies - ResearchGate By analogy with the physical sciences, he seeks to identify the smallest meaningful particle for social analysis. But there is a very special sense in which Park sees the city as a microcosm in which are exposed and magnified, as under a microscope, the processes taking place in the larger society. Likeness is, after all, a purely formal concept which of itself cannot hold anything together. It is only necessary that some sort of interaction, communication, and leadership appear. Park considered geographical areas as urban mosaics, each with their own spatial density. How do people regroup or reorganize themselves under this pervasive personal and social "disorganization?". Devoted to the enterprise of studying urban life and culture with the same painstaking meticulousness and attention to detail that anthropologists use when they describe primitive tribes, Park was convinced that no such study was, to use his expression, worth a damn, if it was not guided by an array of concepts that would allow the student to sift the significant from the unessential. But the impression is not altogether just. But the sectarian life then arouses a lively sense of common purpose and the inspiration of a common cause, which may permit the group to develop a political aim and become a power to be reckoned with. He was soon given special assignments to cover the urban scene, often in depth through a series of articles. As the rational and nonrational are inextricably bound together, so are cultural constraint and social change. In one of his most bitter attacks upon quantification, Park stresses the deficiency of "a purely scholastic exercise in which the answers to all the questions are already implicit in the conceptions and assumptions with which the inquiry started." Thomas, an uncommonly vigorous, intellectually advenr turous and productive thinker, soon became the most outstanding figure in the Department. A phenomenon related to these concerns of Redfield and Anderson is the experience of those who left smaller places like Bidewell or the Yucatan villages of Tusik and Dzitas and came to cities like Chicago or Merida (population 96,600 at the time Redfield did his research).. Park's stress on social process as a source of noveltyhis rejection of a static structuralism in favor of a processual viewlikewise has some of its sources in the work of the great German sociologist. , View all related items in Oxford Reference , Search for: 'Robert Ezra Park' in Oxford Reference . The upshot of racial conflict is re-adjustment in the distribution of status and power between the races, which is translated into accommodation temporarily by devices such as accepting an "etiquette" of race relations. For that reason he threw himself with great ardor into his work as a newspaperman. One of his profound contributions to contemporary - Course Hero One of the oldest and most extensive forms of criminology falls within what is referred to, among other names, as social ecology. The marginal man is always relatively the more civilized human being." Through the effects of collective behavior in undermining tradition, reformers might inadvertantly deliver the community into the hands of irresponsible and intractable authority during the period when needed reforms were being consolidated. In 1917 he laid the foundation, with a thoroughly economic interpretation. A student of Wundt, Muensterberg had been brought to Harvard at James's invitation as an exponent of the new experimental psychology, but soon his interests changed and he became one of the earliest proponents of applied psychology in America. Robert Park, who originally came from a small town and then spent a good portion of his life trying to understand the modern metropolis, offers an interesting example. Park pointed out that the word person in its root-meaning refers to a mask, and that this was "a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. Unity based on similarities and differences immediately brings Durkheim to mind, but the use of the two principles of unity is very different for each writer. But Park reminds us that commercial bargaining is a highly evolved social transaction, and thus different in kind from the biotic competition that underlies social life. "In so far as social structure can be defined in terms of position, social changes may be defined in terms of movement; and society exhibits, in one of its aspects, characters that can be measured and described in mathematical formulas. Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Classic Reprint) - Robert Ezra Park - Google Books Excerpt from Introduction to the Science of Sociology The materials upon which this book is based. After his review of devices for quantifying the objects of study, Park asserts that "History alone can, it would seem, make these different meanings intelligible to us. Just because it has been a record of events rather than a description of things, history has given sociology much, if not most, of its subject matter." It is this that lends an interest to those ideal states in which men at different times have sought to visualize the world of their hopes and dreams. Park adumbrated the distinction in his earliest writings, and continued to rework the fomulation until his death. 1998 eNotes.com At this point Park returns to Le Bon's simplest model of collective behavior, milling and interstimulation. After graduation in 1899, Park went to Germany to study in Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. The one semester he spent in Simmel's classroom was probably the most important academic semester in his life. Although he accepted the substance of LeBon's description of crowd behavior, he appraised its relation to social order differently. To Park the self is constituted by the individual's conception of his role, and this role in its turn is built upon the recognition others in society accord the status upon which roles are based. This concept refers to the degree of intimacy that prevails between groups and individuals. But he also came to be identified popularly with an atheoretical and undisciplined empirical approach, personifying a stereotype of the dominant trend in American sociology during the interwar period. "The crowd has no tradition. It has therefore neither symbols, ceremonies, rites, nor ritual; it imposes no obligations and creates no loyalties." Education and social service apply principles which sociology and psychology deal with explicitly. On the other hand, trading requires a special skillto know both one's own and the other's mind at a single instant. When unthinking crowds are transformed into reflective publics, there emerge new social entities that may, if conditions are propitious, make successful claims which break the cake of custom and thus prepare the way for novel accommodations characterizing a new social order. The conceptions which men form of themselves seem to depend upon their vocations, and in general upon the role that they seek to play in the communities and social groups in which they live, as well as upon the recognition and status which society accords them in these roles. When Park came to list the contributions of the city, he did so in a matter-of-fact manner. "Robert Ezra Park - Ralph H. Turner (essay date 1967)" Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism Natural areas, Park asserted, are a combination of people living in a particular place, under certain occupational, social, and economic conditions. There are thirty entries for Darwin in the index of the Introduction, and the book contains four selections from his work. On the conceptual and substantive levels, many of Park's later concerns emerge in this first work: competition, self-awareness, reciprocal interaction, process and change, characteristics of the sect, significance of strikes, focusing of social attention, social epidemics, and many more. Park seems to have been especially impressed by Washington's consummate skills in the strategy and tactics of social action. But just because they function smoothly, it is difficult to detect their operation in the small town. One may doubt that Park was much interested in Paulsen's metaphysics, but it may be that through Paulsen, who was an intimate personal friend of Ferdinand Toennies, Park was introduced to the latter's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Smelser has been the most vocal revisionist here. And this remark was not ironical or jocose in intention. Animal communities are social and sometimes elaborately organized; this would suggest that there exists a form of communication among members. Moreover, as the isolated individual shifted his attachments from primary to secondary contacts, from more continuous association with kin and neighbors to discontinuous associations at distant jobs in the wider world of the city, social control had to be transformed from the mores to new legal instruments of discipline that Park describes as necessarily formal and for the most part crude and inefficient. Although struggle, domination, competition, and hierarchy were central concerns of Robert Park and the human ecologists during the 1920s and 1930s, they did not specifically set out to articulate a comprehensive theory of social inequality in their work. He did not admire without qualification the anonymity and impersonality of the city as Dreiser did at timescertainly he did not romanticize the life of the Bohemian. 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. Park's career seems to testify that institutions help produce personalities. These idealistic motivations must be underlined to understand Park's choice of an occupation, since the status of a newspaperman, especially one reporting on crime, corruption, and city slums, was not very high in his day. And he revealed the extent to which he was impressed by pre-industrial society when he reflected that, "in some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. Otherwise we do not know the world in which we actually live.". Constantly on the prowl for news and feature stories on urban affairs, Park came to view the city as a privileged natural laboratory for the study of the new urban man whom industrial society had created. He was most likely impressed by Park's wide knowledge of race relations in general and of the American Negro in particular, but knowledgeable journalists abounded then as they do now.