Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred - Softcover

Abbott, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226000990 ISBN 13: 9780226000992

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Abbott is the Ralph Lewis Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the author of The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0226000990
• ISBN 13: 9780226000992
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262