Chicago Sociology

Reviews 39 in preceding chapters and individuals working to increase the exposure of craft beer in black neighborhoods. It shows that there are many movements to change brewing, distribution, and consumption of craft beer in the United States through new spaces, places, and narratives. This book does an exceptional job of identifying the whiteness of beer and craft beer, as well as identifying the work being done to incorporate those who have been marginalized and excluded from the industry. The limitations of the book are acknowledged by Brunsma and Chapman when they state that the book has identified ‘‘some basic and fundamental surface-level issues’’ but also has ‘‘uncovered many other holes.’’ Overall, this book is a great starting point for a large issue and is one that will begin the conversation around race and racism in terms of cultural studies and, more specifically, studies on food. Beer and Racism is an effective academic text that highlights the cultural and sociological issues that affect our food and beverage choices. This book should be read by all those working in the alcoholic beverage industry or researching alcoholic beverages. Additionally, it would be a great read for those who consider themselves to be craft beer aficionados. Beer and Racism is a strong academic work that can promote dialogue in academic circles as well as in private industry around racial inequality and how it affects the consumption choices we make. Reference Infante, Dave. 2015. ‘‘There Are Almost No Black People Brewing Craft Beer. Here’s Why.’’ Thrillist, December 2. https://www.thrillist .com/drink/nation/there-are-almost-no-blackpeople-brewing-craft-beer-heres-why. Chicago Sociology, by Jean-Michel Chapoulie, translated by Caroline Wazer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 488 pp. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231182508. SIDA LIU University of Toronto sd.liu@utoronto.ca How should the history of the social sciences be written? In the Afterword to the English translation of Chicago Sociology, originally published in French as La Tradition Sociologique de Chicago, Jean-Michel Chapoulie raises this odd question. Indeed, it is intriguing that he refused to use the term ‘‘Chicago School’’ in the book title, which resulted in ‘‘a preeminent French publisher’’ passing on publishing the book (p. 352). The reason for doing so, as Chapoulie states in the conclusion, is that ‘‘the label ‘Chicago School’ as it is still currently used corresponds to an arbitrary division within a much vaster set of works and researchers, groups possessing some common characteristics that give them something of a family resemblance’’ (p. 316). Under this label, there is not ‘‘a simple formula’’ or ‘‘a small set of abstract ideas’’ but ‘‘a blossoming research enterprise’’ and ‘‘works that exist within networks of exchanges and borrowings between researchers’’ (pp. 323–24). The book was published in French in 2001, two years after Andrew Abbott’s Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (1999), another historical inquiry into the nature of the Chicago School and its journal, the American Journal of Sociology. By arguing that the Chicago tradition is not a school but a label for sociologists sharing a family resemblance, Chapoulie resists this Chicago-centric orientation of reproducing certain ways of doing sociology over a century. After all, for a French sociologist, the institution of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago matters less than the people who passed through it and their ideas and activities. Accordingly, Chapoulie’s book is organized largely around the scholars in the Chicago tradition, ranging from conspicuous figures such as W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, and Howard S. Becker to researchers ‘‘on the margins’’ Contemporary Sociology 51, 1 40 Reviews (p. 285) such as Nels Anderson and Donald Roy. He adopts a classic biographical writing style, starting from the life and career trajectories of the sociologists and proceeding to detailed examinations of their scholarly works and contributions to the Chicago tradition. In the final paragraph of the conclusion, Chapoulie highlights the intellectual legacy of African American social scientists such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and argues that ‘‘they remain essential milestones on the path toward a fine-grained comparison of the long journey undertaken by African Americans to erase the moral and symbolic traces of slavery’’ (p. 331). Nevertheless, as William Kornblum observes in his Foreword to the English translation, Chapoulie’s presentation of Robert Park’s research on race relations ‘‘will be the most controversial aspect of this volume, as it appears for the first time to an American audience’’ (p. IX), especially after the publication of Aldon D. Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology in 2015. Through an archival investigation of Park’s interactions with both Washington and Du Bois, Morris (2015) provides a groundbreaking and sobering account of how Park and the Chicago School deliberately ignored Du Bois’s pioneering scholarship and, in effect, marginalized him in the intellectual map of American sociology in the early twentieth century. In other words, the Chicago School was the villain who killed the earlier Du Bois-Atlanta School and claimed itself as the first major school of American sociology. Yet Chapoulie’s painstaking and detailed analysis of Park’s race scholarship suggests that Morris’s discussion of Park and the Chicago School is biased in at least two aspects. First, whereas Morris characterizes Park’s approach to sociology as an abstract and assimilationist social science that portrays blacks as inferior culturally and biologically, Chapoulie maintains in Chapter Eight that Park ‘‘completely rejects the idea of a biological difference between races’’ and ‘‘emphasizes the ambiguity of the notion of assimilation’’ (pp. 244–45). Although Park’s race relations cycle reflects ‘‘the perspective of a member of a dominant group, who sees Contemporary Sociology 51, 1 assimilation into this group . . . as the main conceivable future for other groups of the population’’ (p. 252), he also ‘‘argues that racial prejudices constitute a spontaneous defensive phenomenon, whose practical effect was the limitation of free competition between the races’’ (p. 254). It is also worth noting that the empirical foundations of Park’s sociology of race include not only African American experiences but also Asian migration experiences on the west coast (Yu 2015). In other words, despite the marginalization of Du Bois in his teaching and writing, Park’s approach to race is far more complex and sensitive than Morris’s selective and simplistic account of it suggests. Second, and perhaps more important, Park’s sociology is not primarily a sociology of race, but a sociology of ‘‘ecological and moral order’’ (p. 85). While ecological order ‘‘designates as a field of study the competition of individuals and groups for the occupation of the same territory,’’ moral order ‘‘designates the realm of communication between individuals’’ (p. 86). For Park and his students, such as Everett Hughes and Howard S. Becker, ‘‘the finished product of a sociological analysis was not a corpus of verified general propositions, but the articulation of a group of categories that defined a point of view (perspective) on the field in question’’ (p. 85). Park and Burgess’s (1921) classic typology of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation as the four great types of interaction is a good example. Race scholars such as Persons (1987) and Morris (2015) often misinterpret this typology as a linear progressive cycle toward racial assimilation, yet these ecological categories were never meant to be unidirectional, as illustrated by W. I. Thomas’s seminal concepts of social organization, disorganization, and reorganization. Furthermore, the Chicago School’s ecological approach has been applied by sociologists to a large variety of social phenomena beyond race and ethnicity, ranging from urban sociology (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1967) and political sociology (Zhao 1998) to work and occupations (Abbott 1988; Hughes 1994) and organizational sociology (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Liu and Wu 2016). In most of those applications, there Reviews 41 is no assumption of progression or assimilation, only an assumption about social life as processes of interaction. This enduring focus on interaction and social process is arguably a trademark of the Chicago tradition, which is shared by not only Park and his students, but also symbolic interactionists of the Second Chicago School and later theorists such as Donald N. Levine and Andrew Abbott. Take Everett Hughes (1994), a key figure between the first and second Chicago Schools whose work Chapoulie discusses in detail in Chapter Six. Rather than developing causal propositions, ‘‘Hughes was interested much more in the range of variations in the phenomena that he studied, and in the diversity of forms that they could take’’ (p. 183). His sociology of work and occupations ‘‘argues in favor of sustained attention concerning the experiences of the different categories of actors involved directly or indirectly in the system of work being studied,’’ with the aim ‘‘to penetrate more deeply into the personal and social drama of work’’ and to study ‘‘encounters between different groups of workers . . . and the specific definition of the situation, interests, and logic of action developed by each of these worker groups’’ (p. 187). A major theme in Hughes’s sociology, as Chapoulie argues, is ‘‘the critique of ethnocentrism’’ (p. 188), which can be observed from his writings on both work and race relations. What is in common between Hughes’s approach to work and Park and Burgess’s approach to ‘‘the city’’ is a persistent effort to not only classify and locate people and groups but also to develop conceptual tools for making sense of their processes of interaction in particular spaces and times. This is the lifeblood of the Chicago tradition, which has run through the writings of generations of sociologists who passed through the Department of Sociology on the South Side of Chicago. In this sense, there is something more than a ‘‘family resemblance’’ to the history of Chicago Sociology than what Chapoulie presents in his book. A great contribution of this book, however, is precisely its resistance to generalizing any stereotypical portrait of Chicago sociologists and its insistence on treating each person as a fullfledged scholar in his or her own right. In an age of widening ideological and social divisions, when inequalities and power struggles overshadow everything else in American sociology, this classical and dispassionate approach to intellectual history is especially laudable. References Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abbott, Andrew. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman. 1989. Organizational Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hughes, Everett C. 1994. On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liu, Sida, and Hongqi Wu. 2016. ‘‘The Ecology of Organizational Growth: Chinese Law Firms in the Age of Globalization.’’ American Journal of Sociology 122(3):798–837. Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert E., Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. 1967. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Persons, Stow. 1987. Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905–45. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Yu, Anthony. 2015. ‘‘Reviving a Lost Potential of the Chicago School of Sociology? A Century of Studies of Trans-Pacific Migrations.’’ Journal of Migration History 1:215–41. Zhao, Dingxin. 1998. ‘‘Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing.’’ American Journal of Sociology 103(6):1493–529. Contemporary Sociology 51, 1