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The Person/Work

Readers who are familiar with the work of the Chicago School of Sociology and its most influential member, Robert E. Park, may wonder why a chapter in a book on sociological theory is devoted to a man most often as- sociated with research rather than theory. The fact is, however, that Park himself, although very much concerned with accurate social reporting and description, saw his major contribution in the development of a set of concepts that would allow systematic classification and analysis of social data.

The contemporary assessment of Robert Park's work roughly coincides with his self-appraisal when he wrote:

We had in sociology much theory but no working concepts. When a stu- dent proposed a topic for a thesis, I invariably found myself asking the ques- tion: what is this thing you want to study? What is a gang? What is a public? What is a nationality? . . . etc. I did not see how we could have anything like scientific research unless we had a system of classification and a frame of reference into which we could sort out and describe in general terms the things we were attempting to investigate. Park and Burgess' In- troduction was a first rough sketch of such a classification and frame of refer- ence. My contribution to sociology has been, therefore, 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. The problem I was interested in was always theoretic rather than practical.

Park not only classified, as he modestly says; he searched for relationships be- tween classified variables and thus engaged in theoretically guided research rather than merely descriptive reporting. As Everett Hughes has noted, "[Park] had no desire to form a system, yet he was primarily a systematic sociologist." It is as such that he commands our attention.

From Coser, 1977:357.