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In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School (sometimes described as the Ecological School) was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specializing in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere. While involving scholars at several Chicago area universities, the term is often used interchangeably to refer to the University of Chicago's sociology department—one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious. Following World War II, a "Second Chicago School" arose whose members used symbolic interactionism combined with methods of field research, to create a new body of work.〔Gary Alan Fine. ''A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)〕 This was one of the first institutions to use quantitative methods in criminology. The major researchers in 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, W. I. Thomas (), Frederic Thrasher, Louis Wirth, Florian Znaniecki. Activist, social scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams also forged and maintained close ties with some of the members of the Chicago School of Sociology. ==Discussion== The Chicago School is best known for its urban sociology and for the development of the symbolic interactionist approach. It has focused on human behavior as determined by social structures and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic and personal characteristics. Biologists and anthropologists have accepted the theory of evolution as demonstrating that animals adapt to their environments. As applied to humans who are considered responsible for their own destinies, members of the School believed that the natural environment which the community inhabits is a major factor in shaping human behavior, and that the city functions as a microcosm: The work of Frederic E. Clements (1916) was particularly influential. He proposed that a community of vegetation is a superorganism and that communities develop in a fixed pattern of successional stages from inception through to some single climax state or to a self-regulating state of equilibrium. By analogy, an individual is born, grows, matures, and dies, but the community which the individual inhabited continues to grow and exhibit properties which are greater than the sum of the properties of the parts. Members of the School have concentrated on the city of Chicago as the object of their study, seeking evidence whether urbanization (Wirth: 1938) and increasing social mobility have been the causes of the contemporary social problems. Originally, Chicago was a clean slate, an empty physical environment. By 1860, Chicago was a small town with a population of 10,000. There was great growth after the fire of 1871. By 1910, the population exceeded two million. The rapidity of the increase was due to an influx of immigrants and it produced homelessness (Anderson: 1923), poor housing conditions, and bad working conditions based on low wages and long hours. But equally, Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) stress that the sudden freedom of immigrants released from the controls of Europe to the unrestrained competition of the new city was a dynamic for growth. See also the broken windows thesis. For Thomas, the groups themselves had to reinscribe and reconstruct themselves to prosper. Burgess studied the history of development and concluded that the city had not grown at the edges. Although the presence of Lake Michigan prevented the complete encirclement, he postulated that all major cities would be formed by radial expansion from the center in concentric rings which he described as zones, i.e. the business area in the center, the slum area (called the zone in transition and studied by Wirth: 1928, Zorbaugh: 1929, and Suttles: 1968) around the central area, the zone of workingmen's homes farther out, the residential area beyond this zone, and then the bungalow section and the commuter's zone on the periphery. Under the influence of Albion Small, the research at the School mined the mass of official data including census reports, housing/welfare records and crime figures, and related the data spatially to different geographical areas of the city. Shaw and McKay created maps: *spot maps to demonstrate the location of a range of social problems with a primary focus on juvenile delinquency; *rate maps which divided the city into block of one square mile and showed the population by age, gender, ethnicity, etc.; *zone maps which demonstrated that the major problems were clustered in the city center. Thomas also developed techniques of self-reporting life histories to provide subjective balance to the analysis. Park, Burgess, and McKenzie are credited with institutionalizing, if not establishing, sociology as a science. They are also criticized for their overly empiricist and idealized approach to the study of society but, in the inter-war years, their attitudes and prejudices were normative. Three broad themes characterized this dynamic period of Chicago studies: #culture contact and conflict. This arises from Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) and studies how ethnic groups interact and compete in a process of community succession and institutional transformation (Hughes and Hughes: 1952). An important part of this work concerned African Americans; works including E. Franklin Frazier (1932) and Drake and Cayton (1945) shaped white America's perception of black communities for decades. #succession in community institutions as stakeholders and actors in the ebb and flow of ethnic groups. Cressey (1932) studied the dance hall and commercialized entertainment services, Kincheloe (1938) studied church succession, Janowitz (1952) studied the community press, and Hughes (1979) studied the real-estate board. #city politics. Merriam's commitment to practical reform politics was matched by Gosnell who researched voting and other forms of participation. Gosnell (1935), Wilson (1960), Grimshaw (1992) considered African American politics, and Banfield and Wilson (1963) placed Chicago city politics in a broader context. The School is perhaps best known for the Subculture Theories of Thrasher, Frazier, and Sutherland, and for applying the principles of ecology to develop the Social Disorganization Theory which refers to consequences of the failure of: *social institutions or social organizations including the family, schools, church, political institutions, policing, business, etc. in identified communities and/or neighborhoods, or in society at large; and *social relationships that traditionally encourage co-operation between people. Thomas defined social disorganization as "the inability of a neighborhood to solve its problems together" which suggested a level of social pathology and personal disorganization, so the term, "differential social organization" was preferred by many, and may have been the source of Sutherland's (1947) Differential Association Theory. The researchers have provided a clear analysis that the city is a place where life is superficial, where people are anonymous, where relationships are transitory and friendship and family bonds are weak. They have observed the weakening of primary social relationships and relate this to a process of social disorganization (comparison with the concept of ''anomie'' and the Strain Theories is instructive). :''For a complete discussion, see Social Disorganization Theory, Symbolic interactionism and Subcultural Theory.'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chicago school (sociology)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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