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Department and Discipline

Chicago Sociology at One Hundred

In this detailed history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers?

Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline’s main journal, the American Journal of Sociology.

Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott’s theories grow directly out of the Chicago School’s insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding one hundred years ago.

262 pages | 11 tables | 6 x 9 | © 1999

History: History of Ideas

Library Science and Publishing: Library Science, Publishing

Sociology: General Sociology, History of Sociology

Table of Contents

Preface
Prologue
1. The Historiography of the Chicago School
2. Transition and Tradition in the Second Chicago School
With Emanuel Gaziano
3. Albion Small’s AJS
4. The AJS of the Chicago Schools
5. The AJS in Transition to Professionalism
6. The AJS in Modern Form
7. The Continuing Relevance of the Chicago School
Epilogue
Sources and Acknowledgments
References
Index

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