a dualistic vision': robert ezra park and the classical ......robert ezra park and the classical...

"A Dualistic Vision": Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social InequalityAuthor(s): Richard C. Helmes-HayesSource: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Conceptions of Temporality in SociologicalTheory (Autumn, 1987), pp. 387-409Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Midwest Sociological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4120650 .Accessed: 20/01/2015 14:45

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"A DUALISTIC VISION": ROBERT EZRA PARK AND THE

CLASSICAL ECOLOGICAL THEORY OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Richard C. Helmes-Hayes* Carleton University

University of Toronto

Although struggle, domination, competition, and hierarchy were central concerns of Robert Park and the human ecologists during the 1920s and 1930s, they did not specifically set out to articulate a comprehensive theory of social inequality in their work. Indeed, the period of Chicago school dominance has been portrayed by some analysts as one during which sociologists for the most part ignored the study of social inequality. This article suggests, by contrast, that social inequality was a central focus of the human ecological perspective and outlines the basic assumptions, intellectual origins, components, structure, and logic of the classical ecological account of inequality.

INTRODUCTION

During the period between World War I and II, the sociology department at the Univer- sity of Chicago was the center of the North American sociological community.' The impact of the "Chicago School" on the discipline was considerable and, thus, it has since become a popular focus of attention for intellectual historians and sociologists of knowledge interested in understanding the early development of the discipline.2 The purpose of this article is to contribute to our understanding of Chicago sociology and the early history of stratification studies in American sociology by outlining and assessing the classical ecological theory of social inequality revealed in the work of the school's major figure, Robert Ezra Park.3

Despite the substantial amount of critical attention focused on Park and his colleagues, the ecological contribution to the study of inequality has escaped analysis. This is somewhat puzzling, for human ecology was clearly intended by Park et al. to be a totalizing theoretical perspective.4 Thus, we would expect it to incorporate a theoretical account of social inequality. Indeed, given the centrality of such concepts as "dominance,"

*Direct all correspondence to Richard C. Helmes-Hayes, New College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5S IAl.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 28, No. 3, pages 387-409 Copyright ? 1987 by JAI Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0038-0253


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388 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987

"competition," "struggle," and "hierarchy" to the ecological perspective, we would expect such a theory to constitute a central and clearly defined feature of the overall framework. This is not the case, however. Indeed, although the ecologists often touched on inequality-related phenomena in their research, they never made it a focus of systematic empirical investigation. Neither did they ever make a sustained and/or explicit attempt to construct a comprehensive theory of inequality like that developed earlier by Marx or that developed later by functionalists such as Davis and Moore (1945).

The ecologists would have done well, of course, to have situated their analysis of patterns of urban social change within a broader national frame of reference, and they would have done well to have considered the impact of the specifically capitalist character of American economic development on the character of city life during the 1920s and 1930s. Given their interest in urban economic issues and social problems, it is, in fact, quite surprising that patterns of property ownership and control and patterns of class relations did not spark their theoretical interest, especially since the period was one of such obvious and dramatic economic change. In fact, without in any way suggesting that the adoption of a specifically Marxist approach was a likely theoretical tack for them to take-given the intellectual milieu of the period-it is not unfair to suggest that they were perhaps a bit obtuse about recognizing and com- ing to intellectual terms with the impact on urban-level phenomena of both capitalist industrial production and its particular distribution of property and power. The theoretical project specified by their ecological approach, however, did seem to "structure out" the likelihood, if not possibility, of their paying sustained attention to these issues. Insofar as the ecologists concerned themselves with urban social problems, then, they tended to see them as involving conflicts between "competing values and institutions" rather than between "social classes" (Carey 1975, p. 67, see also p. 35). As a result, the details of the ecoligical theory of inequality remained partial and vague in their work, scattered in suggestive but unintegrated fragments in the many monographs they published between 1915 and 1935.

Among those who have studied the Chicago School, only Matthews (1977) has made more than passing mention (see Faught 1980, pp. 75-76; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974, pp. 388-397; Simpson 1972) of the ecological theory of inequality-and even his work does not contain a systematic or detailed analysis. The same may be said of those who have examined the historical development of the field of "stratification studies" in American sociology. Indeed, some of them have even gone so far as to suggest that the human ecologists ignored the study of social inequality and that the period of Chicago School dominance was one that marked a lull in American sociological interest in this phenomenon.5

A close reading of the work of Park and the others indicates, however, that this latter claim is simply incorrect. There is an abundance of empirical and theoretical material on inequality in the writings of the Chicago ecologists that, when systematically organized, comprises a relative comprehensive account of the phenomenon. Further, given that struggle, dominance, and hierarchy are central to the logic of human ecology, the theory is clearly integral to the overall approach. The remainder of this article is devoted to outlining and assessing the assumptions, intellectual origins, components, structure, and logic of this theory.6



Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social Inequality 389

HUMAN ECOLOGY: A "DUALISTIC VISION"7

Human ecology in its most mature form was intended by Park (and his colleagues) to be a totalizing theoretical perspective capable of describing and explaining what they saw as a reality comprised of two mutually intracting "'orders' of social forces"; i.e., an "ecological order of unwilled, symbiotic interaction" and a "moral order of conscious meaning and willed institutions" (Matthews, 1977, p. 133). Two "ways of knowing"-- Science8 and Verstehendesoziologie, respectively-were necessary in order to interrogate and grasp the complexity of this two-sided reality.

Society was described by ecologists as an ever-changing, symbiotic, organic whole comprised of a large number of different "types" and "levels" of interrelated systems and subsystems. These systems were made up of different sorts of "units" (individuals, groups, cities, zones, etc.)9 engaged in a struggle with each other to establish themselves within a particular geographic area.10 According to McKenzie (1925a):

[Human ecology is the] study of the spatial and temporal relations of human beings as affected by the selective, distributive, and accommodative forces of the environment. Human ecology is fundamentally interested in the effect of position, in both time and space, upon institutions and human behavior (pp. 63-64).

As a consequence of this interest in social "position," one of the basic interests of the ecologists was "mapping": documenting where within the city'" the units of various social systems were physically located.12

Human ecologists attempted to explain the structure and functioning of whatever system they had mapped out by interpreting it in terms of a four-stage or four-level struggle for existence among system units, a conception they had adopted directly from the work of Darwin and the plant ecologists Eugemius Warming (Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 93-100) and Ernst Haeckel (Bailey 1975, p. 122; Matthews 1977, p. 138). The four stages, i.e., "competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation," have become known as the "interaction cycle" (Matthews, 1977, p. 160).

The first stage-"biotic competition"--is the "elementary, universal and fundamental form" of social interaction, a "universal, unintentional struggle for existence" (Faris 1967, p. 45) that is "universal" among all forms of life (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 185). It is an unwitting form of interaction, however, wherein system units struggle, without any knowledge they are doing so, to achieve a secure place in the ecological community. It is

only in plant communities that this process of struggle and "adaptation" takes place in a pure form (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 187). In the human community, struggles always13 occur at more than just the unconscious, biotic level of interaction. Although thrown into some sort of spatial configuration by the brute and compelling forces of an immanent, inevitable, natural competition for space and resources, humans also create, via their capacities for reason, sentiment, and morality, a second reality: a superstructure of "willed" institutions ranging in complexity from simple person-to-person interactions to elaborate language and rituals. These institutions moderate the influence of purely biotic forces of competition and mark the point where humans enter the second stage or level of the interaction cycle, i.e., conflict.

Conflict occurs whenever population units within a given system come to the conscious recognition that they are engaged in a struggle for survival and they begin,




therefore, to engage in intentional activities, ranging from rhetoric to voting to war, designed to gain control over ecological resources. "Conflict," writes Park, "is always conscious, indeed, it evokes the deepest emotions and strongest passions and enlists the greatest concentration of attention and effort" (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 236).

Park attempts to delineate the difference between plants and humans via the use of a distinction between a community and a society. A community is the spatial organization of a population within a fixed geographic area according to principles of an all-out, unconscious biotic competition for space and resources. A society is comprised of a hierarchy of three additional, interrelated, uniquely human levels or orders of interaction beyond the biotic, i.e., the "economic," the "political," and the "moral."'4 The exact nature of the relationship among the four orders is not entirely clear in Park's writing, but the idea seems to be that they form a pyramid with the ecological order at the base and the moral order at the apex (Park 1952b, p. 157). In the context of this hierarchical relationship the orders mirror and mutually determine one another, and, as a result, the biotic and cultural orders become "different aspects" of one another (Park 1925b, p. 157).'15 The ecologists' interest in mapping basic features of the biotic order is thus explained, for they believed that, as "social relations [were] frequently correlated with spatial relations" (Park 1925, p. 1), clues to social structure might be found in physical space.

Once conflict has occurred and the struggle has been resolved, either by the total capitulation of one party and the absolute victory of another or in some other, less one-sided way, the parties to the struggle are then said to have "accommodated" themselves to the new situation. It is through this process of accommodation that new forms of social organization become, first, institutionalized and, then, "transmitted to and accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order" (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 190).

Finally, if the tensions that generated the competition and, hence, the conflict created a new order to which all parties accommodated themselves ful/y (i.e., where conflict ceased), then "assimilation" is said to have taken place. Assimilation presumes, then, that there is agreement on core group values (Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 360-361).

The outcome of the struggle among humans was at any given time an organic "community," and all of the parts of the system were regarded by Park as "functional," i.e., as contributing to a "symbiotic" (see Faris 1967, pp. 45-46; Park 1952d, pp. 240-262) social order in which the needs of the whole were met by the complex interweaving of all of its "mutually interdependent" parts (Mitchell 1968, p. 156).16 The order was not static, however, for the "social forces" and "natural processes" of "competition" at the community level and "conflict," "accommodation," and "assimilation" at the societal level were always upsetting the system's "unstable equilibrium" (Park 1952d, p. 241) and creating a new social system.

HUMAN ECOLOGY AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

The ecological theory of inequality draws on the same intellectual sources, uses the same explanatory logic, and employs the same scientific and Verstehende means as the overall perspective. That is, it is based on a combination of plant and animal ecology, Spencer's adaptation of Darwin, Simmel's work on dominance, superordination-subordination




relations, and social distance, and aspects of the social psychology of Dewey, Thomas, Cooley, and others."7 The theory of inequality that emerges is dualistic, a combination of scientific and social psychological sensibilities that is, like many other aspects of his work, "kaleidoscopic" (Matthews 1977, p. 119). The theory is at once intricate, suggestive, and sensitive, but also polymorphous and resistant to systematization, a consequence, as Matthews noted, of two of the defining features of Park's eclectic and haphazard style of scholarship. In the first place, he drew on a wide variety of intellectual sources that, while they made his work "refreshingly broadminded," also made it "inevitably inconclusive" (1977, p. 53), for his "erudition exceeded his logical rigor" (1977, p. 131). Second, his theoretical work was generally presented in an "inchoate" and "casual" fashion (Matthews 1977, p. 130). Both phenomena were a function of his failure to pay much attention to the explicit degree to fit between what was theoretically suggestive and interesting and what was empirically defensible.

The Intellectual Origins of the Theory Park on Human Nature

Characteristically, Park's conception of human nature is a diverse admixture of ill- fitting elements drawn from a variety of sources. It is outlined in Chapter 11 of Introduc- tion to the Science of Sociology (Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 58-78).18 In addition to an introduction by Park in which he draws heavily on Cooley, the chapter includes selec- tions by Thorndike, Dewey, and Park himself. In it he makes an important distinction between "human nature" and "original nature," the former being one's learned attitudes, ideas, behaviors, and the like and the latter being one's genetically and biologically determined characteristics. In a number of places in the chapter Park flirts with biologically reductionistic, physicochemical conceptions of both original nature and human nature. He suggests at one point, for example, that both intellect and morals are part of the genetically determined "nature of the embryo in the first moment of his life" (citing Thorndike 1913; Park and Burgess 1970, p. 67). At another he notes that all of human behavior might someday be understood as "a system of chemical and physical reac- tions."'9 The attraction of these arguments is evanescent, however, and the dominant conceptions of original and human nature in his work are not biologically reductionistic. At the same time, though, despite a stress on the emergent, plastic, and socially deriva- tive character of human nature,20 an element of biological determinism lingers in his view that human nature rests ultimately on "animal nature" (Park and Burgess, 1970, p. 75). Humans, then, like other parts of the natural world, are naturally competitive and self-seeking;21 a sentiment that Janowitz describes as the "Hobbesian overtone" in Park's thought (1970, p. xvii).22

While the "Hobbesian overtone" of Park's conception of original nature is compatible with his social Darwinism, it is not compatible with his argument that human society and human nature are emergent and plastic, the result not just of conflict but of consensus, not just of instinct but of culture, not just of competition but of cooperation. The difference is clearly reflected in the gap between the implicit functionalism of the symbolic interactionists and others (e.g., Simmel, Cooley, Dewey et al.) previously discussed and the Hobbesian overtones of Spencer's social Darwinism discussed in the following section.




Darwinism and the Social Darwinists23

According to social Darwinists, society was an organism; its structure and functioning was directly analogous to biological structure and functioning. The law governing change of structure and function was the same in each case: the law of natural selection. At any given time the social structure that did exist was the best that could exist, since it was a result of a competitive struggle for existence among social forms selected on the basis of adaptive advantage.

A similar logic was used to explain the positions occupied by individual humans in the stratification hierarchy. At the poles of the reward structure were those who possessed the greatest and least amounts of adaptive capacity.

So far as dominance in a community arises out of what Sumner calls the competition of life, it results in the regulation of numbers, the distribution of vocations, putting every individual and every race into the particular niche where it will meet the least competition and contribute most to the life of the community, the function of dominance in human society is not different from the function it performs in the plant community. It determines the orderly distribution upon the soil and in the occupational pyramid of all the individuals which society, as organized, can support, and disposes of those for which it has no place (Park 1952g, p. 161).

The implications of this view are fourfold. First, inequality was regarded as both natural and inevitable. Second, by virtue of the close fit between the social Darwinistic account of social inequality on the one hand and the classical liberal's view of the best of all possible worlds on the other (i.e., society as a competitive order of individuals held together by economic self-interest and unintended mutual utility), social Darwinists gave support to politicians and conservative businessmen then extolling the virtues of laissez- faire ideology (Coser 1978, p. 293; Hofstadter 1955, pp. 6-7). Third, it contained an explicit, biologically based injunction against melioristic intervention in the law-bound operation of nature (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974, pp. 55-57). Fourth, it clearly demonstrated the functionalist logic explicitly employed later by Parsons, i.e., that social change involved a process of progressive differentiation that created a variety of unconsciously evolved structures to fulfill the various functional needs of society (see, e.g., Ritzer 1983, pp. 27, 44; Turner 1974, p. 44).24

Georg Simmel

Park's conception of "social space"--society as a sort of geometric configuration of positions and spaces-was drawn from Georg Simmel (Matthews 1977, pp. 46-47).25 Simmel's concept of "social distance," for example, was used to describe differences in social rank (see Park 1924).26 Park also drew on Simmel's conception of "dominance." According to this view, inequality was one of a number of different types of dominance, each of which operated at a specific level or stage of the "social interaction" cycle previously described. The basic form of dominance was that which resulted from ecological "competition"; individuals, occupational groups, etc., established themselves in the various differentially desirable natural areas of the city on the basis of their adaptive capacity. Other forms of domination (e.g., social class) were the result of conflict and accommodation. They were "negotiated" forms of inequality. Superordination-




subordination relations, then, not only eventually achieved a measure of reciprocity and consensus, but also served a societal function.

Thus the fundamental function of dominance seems everywhere the same. It is to stabilize, to maintain order, and to permit the growth of structure in which that order and the corresponding functions are embodied (Park 1952g, p. 162, see also pp. 159-164; Faris 1967, pp. 64, 108; Matthews 1977, pp. 41-50; Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 335-343).

W.I. Thomas

Another concept important to the ecologists' account of inequality was "social disorganization," a notion they borrowed from Simmel via Thomas (and Znaniecki). For ecologists, "disorganization" was a persistent feature of the urban social order. Whether at the level of the individual-"personal disorganization"--or the group or neighborhood-"social disorganization"-the concept constituted a powerful descriptive and explanatory tool. They used it extensively in their accounts of criminality, deviant behavior, poverty, and so forth. It could be recognized in their view by patterns of group or individual behavior that were "pathological": basically behaviors that were not congru- ent with dominant, generally middle-class, small-town norms (see Bailey 1975, pp. 120-121, 125-126, 133). Social problems, then were explained as an indication of (and/or as a result of-this was never entirely clear) social disorganization. Social disorganization in turn was a result of a failure to adapt to city life. For example, the accepted explanation of poverty prior to this time had been that offered by the eugeni- cists. However, by empirically demonstrating that all immigrant groups eventually "adapted to urban life, moved upward on the occupational ladder and outward from the slums," the ecologists proved that social disorganization was a result not of genetic deficiencies but of "a general and too rapid transition from a preindustrialfolk society to a highly mechanized urban civilization (emphasis added) (Faris 1967, pp. 62-63, see also p. 57).

Here, in fact, is an important part of the Chicago conceptual apparatus, i.e., the notion of the city-the urban environment-as an important determinant of human behavior. This notion is significant in the context of our discussion of social inequality because poverty is regarded as a "pathological" form of behavior-an indication of social disorganization. While the idea that it is remediable refutes the eugenicist view, it is the urban rather than the national environment that is specified as crucial. This has two implications: (1) poverty is a problem rooted in the behavioral and attitudinal traits of individuals rather than in the environment, and (2) it is the city rather than the national system of production that causes the disorganization that in turn causes (is indicated by) poverty.

Functionalism

Overall the ecological account of inequality is a functionalist one. In fact, some of the specific ideas that Park et al. used derived directly from the functionalist tradition. For example, Park relied on the basic functionalist argument that society was a unit made up of interdependent parts that was becoming progressively more differentiated and integrated. From Comte, Tonnies, and Durkheim, then, he retained the idea that "the central




mechanism of functional organization" was the division of labor (Matthews 1977, p. 23). Further, he retained the functionlist view of sociology's problematic: the study of social order and stability, and the conditions necessary for its maintenance. Herein lies the source of Park's interest in social disorganization, particularly in the city, for social disorganization seemed to him to accompany inevitably the transition from folk/Gemeinschaft society to urban Gesellschaft society (Matthews 1977, pp. 131-132, 191-192).

As previously noted, Park also drew on the functionalism of a more particularly biological organicism that had its roots in plant and animal ecology, specifically in the idea of "symbiosis"--the existence of a relationship of "unwitting competitive cooperation" (Faris 1967, p. 45) among the units making up an ecological community. His attachment to this purely biologistic variety of organicism should not be overstressed, however, for he was deeply interested in the role of consensual values as a source of social unity. As Matthews points out, "Park's human ecology was a substitute for overtly functionalist analysis, based on classical economic theory (mediated through plant ecology) rather than directly on biology" (emphasis added) (1977, p. 139; see also Bailey 1975, p. 124). In fact, Park drew on Spencer's notion of the "superorganic" to describe the integrative role of values (Mitchell 1968, p. 156; see also White and White 1977, pp. 159-160). Matthews suggests that in this regard Park's work was "transitional, [for] he retained the evolutionary framework of the previous generation, [while altering] its implications and refin[ing] its application" (1977, p. 131). What was retained of Spencer was the view of society as "an elaborate structure of functionally interrelated parts with competition as its mechanism" (Matthews 1977, pp. 26-27). At the same time, however, Park was somewhat uncomfortable with the biologically deterministic fatalism of Spencer's social Darwinism, so he adopted a somewhat more optimistic and ameliorative variety of positivism and functionalism in the tradition of Comte and Saint-Simon.

The Structure and Logic of the System Given ecology's concern with mapping, its strong "visual, spatial quality" (Matthews

1977, p. 128), and Park's reliance on Simmel's concept of "social space," it is not surprising that there is a visual or spatial aspect to the ecological conception of the structure of inequality. Burgess's work on the "concentric zone theory" of the city is a good example. Burgess attempted to define the social pattern that accompanied city growth and development by documenting the physical layout of the city.27 His analysis clearly revealed that different social classes lived in separate, clearly demarcated zones of the city (see Faris 1967, p. 59; McKenzie 1968c, pp. 51-61). Related work carried by Park and Burgess's colleagues and graduate students documented the distribution of other class-related forms of behavior and lifestyle, thereby both mapping out the various regions of social class in the city (e.g., Zorbaugh 1929) and revealing the multidimen- sionality of the phenomenon of inequality in the process.28

Competitive forces originating in and characteristic of the city created a variety of "natural areas"29 inhabited by individuals whose needs and capacities suited the area. The most important force determining the location (and hierarchical ranking) of these areas was the process of "economic segregation."

Economic segregation is the most primary and general form [of segregation]. It results from economic competition and determines the basic units of the ecological




distribution. Other attributes of segregation, such as language, race or culture, function within the spheres of appropriate economic levels. Economic segregation decreases in degree of homogeneity as we ascend the economic scale; the lower the economic level of an area, the more uniform the economic status of the inhabitants, because of the narrower range of choice... The slum is the area of minimum choice. It is the product of compulsion rather than design. The slum, therefore, represents a homogeneous collection as far as economic competency is concerned... Being an area of minimum choice, the slum serves as the reservoir for the economic wastes of the city (McKenzie 1925a, pp. 152-153).30

Status and changes in status (social mobility) were reflected in and/or could be measured by physical location in the city (H.M. Hughes 1980, p. 73; Park 1925, p. 1).31

[C]hange of occupation, personal success or failure-changes of economic and social status, in short-tend to be registered in changes of location. The physical or ecological organization of the community, in the long run, responds to and reflects the occupational and the cultural (Park 1925, p. 7).

Normative Components of the Theory: The Function, Rationality, and justice of Unequal Rewards

The strength of the combined ecological-functionalist logic that Park followed in describing and explaining inequality suggests that, for him, the social hierarchy that results from the four-level struggle for dominance was just, rational, and functional.

It was just because Nature and Society somehow sorted through and weeded out the weak and incompetent. "Competition has its setting," said Park and Burgess, "in the struggle for existence. This struggle is ordinarily represented as a chaos of contending individuals in which the unfit perish in order that the fit may survive" (1970, p. 192; see also Park 1952g, p. 161).

Similarly, societal-level structured inequality was rational. It recognized and manifested at a societal level invidious distinctions that could correctly be made between social groups and members of social groups. The theory can properly be regarded as one of invidious distinctions because it was based on stereotypes and prejudgments. Racial prejudice and racial inequality were, for Park, quite rational and just because they recognized real, in-born differences between, for example, the black and the white. Their different "racial temperaments" (Matthews 1977, pp. 170-174; Park 1950a, p. 281) made whites better able than blacks to function and adapt in the American metropolis.

At the same time, racial prejudice was functional. It was "one means by which the moral order restricted pure competition among individuals for wealth and status" (Mat- thews 1977, p. 173; cites Park 1950b, p. 232), thereby preventing violence and maintain- ing appropriate "social distances" between the races (Park 1924, p. 340; Matthews 1977, pp. 173-174, see also pp. 250-251 n.66, n.67, n.68).32

The struggle for dominance was functional for a number of other reasons as well. First, it strengthened society overall by weeding out what Park, following Simmel, regarded as the system's "inner enemies," i.e., "the poor, the criminal, and the insane" (Park 1952c, p. 81; see also Matthews 1977, p. 19). Second, in the same way that the ecological struggle for space among large-scale social and economic "interests" such as business, industry, and residence created function-specific "natural areas" in the city (the




"business core," the "slum," etc.), the economic struggle among individuals selected people to occupy the different positions in the tecnical division of labor and the stratification hierarchy.33 Furthermore, as previously noted, this selecting and placing function was extended to the locating of individuals and groups into particularly "suitable" geographic areas of the city. The societal-level struggle for space and the individual- level struggle for rewards acted together in a natural, functional, mutually self-selective manner to create a stable, equilibrated urban social system.34 The third reason that this multilevel sifting and sorting was functional, Park said, was because while satisfying systemic needs for order, stability, and task completion, it at the same time allowed individuals to satisfy their personal needs for self-fulfillment.

Social institutions may... be thought of as tools of individuals for accomplishing their purposes. Logically, therefore, society, either as a sum of institutions or as a collection of persons, may be conceived of as a sum total of instrumentalities, extensions of the functions of the human organism which enable individuals to carry on life-activities. From this standpoint society is an immense co-operative concern of mutual services... (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 80).

[T]he individual man finds in the chances, the diversity of interests and tasks, and in the vast unconscious cooperation of city life, the opportunity to choose his own vocation and develop his particular individual talents. The city offers a market for the special talents of individual men (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 352).

In doing so, ecological competition placed those best able to perform leadership roles, i.e., those best able to satisfy the social need for leadership, in positions of social responsibility and dominance and rewarded them commensurately. "Personal competition," said Park, "tends to select for each special task the individual who is best suited to perform it"(Park and Burgess 1970, p. 352). Further, he said, "the man who is the greatest service to the world is the best paid" (Matthews 1977, p. 19).

The strength of the latent functionalism in Park's social Darwinistic account of inequality is also suggested by the fact that he viewed inequality as a relation of "accommodation" rather than conflict. Although competitive in origin, class and other forms of inequality came, for Park, to have a consensual basis (Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 307-309). A consequence of this view was the idea that the system was inviolate, for it was differences in individual adaptive capacity within a system of consensually agreed-on performance standards that determined the distribution of rewards.

By conceptualizing groups and interpersonal conflict located in the stages of accommodation and assimilation as a struggle for status, they shift attention from economics to values. Park and Burgess undoubtedly insist on the need to study social conflict, but only within the context of what is assumed to be the pre-given, unconscious and natural processes of economic competition... Park and Burgess, in this sense, have incorporated into their presuppositions a belief in the survival value of competitive individualism as it was manifested in the earlier stages of competitive capitalism. This is the grounding of their theory of assimilation. Park and Burgess's presupposition becomes clear when they categorize classes as accommodation groups, rather than as sources of conflict (Faught 1980, p. 76).




The "functional rationality" of structured inequality as outlined above was not regarded by the Chicago school as a product of human design. Rather, it was the product of three natural, immanent, and complementary logics: (1) competitive human nature; (2) ecological necessity, and (3) unconsciously evolved consensual agreement on socially valued and, therefore, reward-deserving behavior. Like Adam Smith, Hobbes, Darwin, and Spencer, Park relied on the workings of an Invisible Hand to create and maintain order (Matthews 1977, p. 54; Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 79-80). To summarize, it could be argued that plant ecology, classical economics, social Darwinism, and a Spencerian variety of functionalism came together in Park's work to create an image of society as a natural, rational, organic, and functional order with an equally natural, rational, organic, and functional system of structured inequality.

CRITIQUE

Students of the Chicago School have reached a rough consensus that human ecology, while formidably broad and ambitious in its scope and enriched by a sensitive tradition of empirical investigation, is an approach whose theoretical reach exceeded its grasp. Detailed analyses of a variety of substantive, methodological, and theoretical shortcom- ings of human ecology may be found in inter alia Alihan (1938), Matza (1969), Martin- dale (1976), Bailey (1975), and Matthews (1977). It is inappropriate and impossible to summarize them here. The following discussion mentions a number of these problems, however, because some of the specific problems with the ecological theory of inequality derive at least in part from inadequacies in the general ecological approach.

Some of the problems with the ecological account of inequality stem from the fact that inequality was never a specific and enduring focus of the ecologists' attention. Having paid relatively little direct attention to developing a theory of inequality, they could scarcely be expected to have made a major contribution. At the same time, though, Park's catholicity of empirical interest and his desire "to entrap every datum in the spiderweb of theory" led him not only to touch from time to time on the empirical manifestations of inequality such as housing, poverty, and lifestyle, but also to engage in theoretical speculation as to the character and causes of inequality. In fact, as the previous discussion suggests, he came to incorporate many aspects of a comprehensive theory of inequality into the overall ecological perspective and, given that concepts such as competition, survival, struggle, dominance, hierarchy, and so on played such a major role in ecological thinking, it is somewhat puzzling that we can legitimately chide Park for not having paid more attention to social inequality than he did, especially in light of the drastic fluctuations that characterized the American economy during the interwar period.

Park's theoretical expansiveness was, in fact, a major source of difficulty in and of itself. For, while human ecology was potentially valuable as a way of taking into account the influence of geographic environment on social structure (e.g., patterns of population dispersal, urban space usage), the approach became problematic when the "interaction cycle" used to describe succession and dominance in plant (and animal) communities was adopted as an homologous explanation of patterns of dominance in human society. Part of the problem was the shift from the conception of the interaction cycle as analogous to homologous, for it was not. Such a use of the interaction cycle creates three basic problems. First, the ecological explanation then borders on a form of geographical




reductionism, for human culture in general is portrayed as a blind response to and/or a reflection of factors in the natural environment (Bailey 1975, pp. 119-121). More particularly, social inequality is regarded as a natural and inevitable consequence of the existence of different degrees of in-born adaptive capacity. Park's solution to this problem-i.e., arguing that there was no instance of a struggle among humans that corresponded directly to the ecological form of "competition" characteristic of plant "communities" and that it was thus necessary to supplement ecology with theories of "meaning construction" that could account for negotiated hierarchical patterns of accommodation in "society"35-only made things worse. While the strategy allowed him at least to deflect the reductionist critique, it created two other, potentially more contentious problems.

To begin, despite Park's formal training in philosophy,36 he never made a serious attempt to either analyze the basic epistemological and ontological assumptions of human ecology or assess systematically its compatibility with the social psychological theories of meaning construction and intentionality on which he drew when supplement- ing it. The result was that the human ecological account of inequality became carelessly eclectic and only indifferently integrated. This problem is clearly illustrated by Park's problematic attempt (described above) to draw on both Hobbes and Cooley for a theory of "original nature." A second problem consequent to Park's theoretical eclecticism was even more devastating. Given Park's own admission that there was no instance in human society of a struggle that corresponded to the basic form of ecological struggle- i.e., "competition"--it is easy and proper to suggest that there is little point in placing the interaction cycle at the center of his theoretical account of social order in general and social inequality in particular.37

These are not the only problems that trouble the classical ecological account of inequality. Park experienced difficulty in attempting to incorporate the two very different aspects of Spencer's functionalist-social Darwinist account of inequality into a convincing whole. Inequality cannot be portrayed at one and the same time as a functional, rational response to the needs of an organic social system-a nonconflictual source of social integration (accommodation-assimilation)-and as the outcome of an all-out struggle for survival (competition-conflict). One need only read the extensive critical literature that developed later in the wake of the elaboration of the more specifically "structural functionalist" theory of inequality proposed by Parsons' students Davis and Moore to begin to appreciate the range and severity of the problems that such an approach encounters.38

Problems attend the ecologists' use of the funcionalist theory of "social disorganization" as well. There is a consensualist bias to the labeling of nonmiddle-class behavior and attitudes as "pathological" (Bailey 1975, p. 133). There are also problems of definition.39 We are never sure, for example, whether the diversity in "transitional," so-called disorga- nized parts of the city is evidence of disorganization and one and the same thing as social disorganization, or whether diversity is separate from but indicative of social disorganization.40 Finally, it is very difficult to claim that poverty is a form of personal "disorganization" when the poverty-stricken have adopted dominant values and have attempted to succeed according to hegemonic middle-class values and yet have failed to do so for reasons (e.g., the Depression) that have structural rather than psychological roots.

This mention of structural conditions leads us to a final criticism of the perspective: that is, the specifically urban focus of the ecological theory of inequality. While impor-




portant as a stimulus to the development of a tremendous volume of empirical research and theoretically significant in the understanding of a number of processes either idio- syncratic to the city or laid bare more clearly there than anywhere else, human ecology suffers from the fact that it freezes at the urban level of analysis a discussion of devel- opments and problems such as poverty that have their roots far beyond the "great sifting and sorting mechanism" of the metropolis. Bailey noted in this regard that ecologists focused almost exclusively on processes of community formation and change at the metropolitan level and that they dealt only sparingly with "national institutional conditions," which they regarded, he says, as "a constant and unproblematic factor and unchanging 'environment' for the city" (1975, p. 123). The criticism is in some measure overstated for it is more a question of emphasis rather than inclusion or exclusion. Certainly, Park and the ecologists were aware of the impact on development of extra- urban factors, including the overall significance of economic issues and of the determinative impact of the capitalist economy on other aspects of social life. Park notes, for

example, that "society is essentially an economic organization" (1952c, p. 180) and that changes in society's "equilibrium" are dependent on economic changes (1952e, p. 199; see also Carey 1975, p. 104). In fact, he chooses the shifting balance within the economic community as his example par excellence of societal "unstable equilibrium" (Park 1952a, p. 27).41

A further indication of Park's awareness of the importance of the economy may be found in his programmatic essay "The City" (1952a). Here he outlines a series of questions that an investigator interested in understanding the urban division of labor, the development of "vocational types," and so on would be compelled to investigate. In addition, in another essay he notes that some the social problems in the city were a

consequence of the particularly capitalist character of economic production, suggesting in this regard that "until a more rational organization of industry has somehow been achieved little progress [in the elimination of the "social disease" of poverty (1952f, p. 69)] may be expected or hoped for" (1952f, p. 67).

Having said all of this, it is nonetheless still true that Park never analyzed the influence of extra-urban economic forces and, more specifically, the impact of capitalist industrial in any depth. And, as a consequence, the ecological approach to the study of social

inequality never realized its full potential under his direction. It was only in the work of

Hughes and Dawson that the ecological approach was stretched to the limits of its utility in this regard.42

For Park, with his focus on the ecological processes of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, and his interest in patterns of "social disorganization," questions of national economic structures (e.g., the system of production and distribution, the class structure, patterns of political power-holding) were just not as salient as

questions that arose and could be explained by reference to forces operating at the urban level of analysis. For Park "[t]he social problem was fundamentally a city problem" (emphasis added) (White and White 1977, p. 163). Problems of poverty, delinquency, deviance, and so forth were perceived not as issues of power, ownership and class, but as the results of social disorganization visited on the disadvantaged as a consequence of "the freedoms of the city." This urban freedom had not only "broken the cake of custom" (White and White 1977, pp. 163-164) but had also loosened "social ties."43 The result was that massive disorientation and disorganization often accompanied the movement




of people into the urban environment: "the standing of the individual and the family became uncertain and subject to abrupt changes upward or downward in the social scale" (White and White 1977, p. 165).

In Park's defense it must be remembered that his focus on the city and his relative deemphasis of the explanatory importance of political and economic power was typical of American liberal thinking of the period. "The city" was one of three "root metaphors" (the other two were "mobility" and "democracy") that "influenced the development of American sociology by diverting the early generations from the analysis of class structure toward a differentiation of human types expressed in spatial, ecological patterns" (emphasis added) (Matthews 1977, p. 124).44 It was not until later, during the period 1930-1954, that American sociologists concerned themselves with the study of local patterns of status and power distribution. Studies of national systems of economic and political power did not become common until after 1955.45 The focus on "human types" is also noteworthy here for, as previously suggested, Park's theory of inequality was based in part on the idea of invidious distinctions between groups. This is ultimately problematic not only because it contradicts his own view of human nature as emergent and plastic, it fails to account for his own evidence about the capacity for different ethnic and racial groups to change their social standing over time, and it relies on a psychologically-even biologically-reductionistic form of argumentation rather than a sociological one.

CONCLUSION

In spite of its deficiencies, it would be imprudent to condemn the classical ecological theory of social inequality as entirely barren of interest or insight. Certainly, it is of interest because of the impact it had on the early development of stratification studies in the United States. In this area of study as elsewhere it helped to move the discipline away from the speculative theorizing of the "Fathers" of American sociology46 toward an empirical mode of investigation that stressed the importance of observation and data collection. In doing so, it also helped to sociologize and legitimate the social survey movement of the period and to provide empirical ammunition for the social gospellers and reformers then railing against the material inequities generated by America's rapidly expanding industrial capitalist social order.47 (In fact, Park was a staunch opponent of "do-gooderism" although it not one of his interests; the Chicago School concern with social problems made it a very short conceptual and practical leap into the realm of social welfare and policy research where they made a number of important contributions during the 1920s and 1930s.) This is not its only importance, however.

The ecologists' concern to understand the multisidedness of phenomena led them to further the process of methodological sophistication. They used and improved a variety of investigative methods-such as field observation, participant observation, unobtrusive measures, and secondary data analysis of census tract information-in their attempts to understand the forms and consequences of a variety of inequality-related social phenomena (e.g., differences in lifestyle, attitudes, housing, mobility, income, etc.). Further- more, insofar as the data they gathered revealed the societal (structural) rather than the biological bases of poverty, ecologists provided a solid challenge to the eugenicist accounts of poverty then in vogue. Similarly, they revealed the necessity of challenging




accounts of inequality that failed to consider the role of meanings and values in human society. As they clearly illustrated, human society could not be comprehended via the use of deterministic eugenicist and social Darwinist accounts.

The fact that the classical ecologists adopted an early variant of functionalist theory and that they never entirely abandoned the determinism of Hobbes and the social Darwinists may have rendered their theoretical treatment of the problem untenable, but it by no means detracted from the value of their basic insight that the processes by which social structures, including structures of inequality, come into being are as much questions of socially negotiated meanings as they are questions of biological capacity and/or ecological necessity. Finally, if Park and the classical ecologists tended to overestimate the role played by ecological factors in determining the character of human social organization, this should not lead us to ignore the influence of such variables entirely (Faris 1967, p. 62). For example, the geographically uneven distribution of natural resources among various regions of a country are, without doubt, factors that contribute greatly to both the distribution of persons on the land and the hierarchical nature of the relationships that develop between regions within social systems of different types. As an example, McKenzie's theory of"metropolitan domination" might profitably be seen as a protean ecological form of "metropolis-hinterland" or dependency theory. That McKenzie failed to examine the specifically capitalist character of regional dependency in the United States does not detract from the usefulness of his remarks on the characteristics of metropolitan areas as centers of social and economic change.

Similarly, while there is a sense in which the ecological attempt to understand human relations in the geographic-geometric terms of social spaces and distances is simplistic, it is also true that there are geographical-spatial patterns to social phenomena. People of different social classes do live in separate areas of the city, for example. Thus, some hints as to the character of class relations might be gained from the use of Parkian concepts like social "distance" and social "position." At the same time, however, Park's particular formulation of the relationship between position and status was not well developed. In the first place, his conception of status was not one confined to designating hierarchical relationships between people. He also used the term as a way of labeling or naming people as parts of a group. One's status in the community might be that of father, wage earner, tenant, union member, etc. (i.e., status-as-role) without any sense of hierarchy (status-as-rank) necessarily being implied. The problem with this sort of conception is that social positions and roles and physical and social distances are never very well differentiated (Helmes-Hayes 1985, pp. 393-396). While potentially somewhat useful as a way of approaching the study of inequality, human ecology theory thus was only indirectly concerned with class relations as such, and there was a focus on the individual and his or her adaptive capacity that prevented much attention from being focused on this issue. As Matthew explains, "the concept of status accepts the phenomenon of social stratification, but tends to undercut the study of stratification in terms of class (1977, p. 152).

To summarize, we can say that despite its contributions, both realized and potential, the classical ecological theory of social inequality was not especially satisfactory. What- ever it gained from its empiricism and from Park's sensitivity to the weaknesses of a purely deterministic biologism and social Darwinism it lost as a consequence of his failure to jettison the interaction cycle entirely, to recognize more fully the impact of capitalist industrialization as a significant extra-urban influence, and to organize the




social psychological side of his argument into a more coherent whole. Like many others of his era, however, Park was heavily influenced by the social Darwinist Spencer. The result was that he came to view inequality as the natural, rational, and functional outcome of the two immanent, interrelated "wisdoms"-the wisdom of Nature and the wisdom of The Market.

Park's attraction to Spencer's views is revealed in a fatalism that runs as a dark thread through his work and that sparked an uncertainty in him regarding humanity's capacity to understand and control the social problem of inequality.48

The concept of Nature in writers like Herbert Spencer filled the emotional role of a secularized Deity; it was an order of impersonal regularity whose interwoven complexity made conscious efforts to manipulate it appear to be impertinent presump- tions. Even without the notion that a scientific law was no mere descriptive state- ment but a moral command to conform to Nature's norms, the organicism of post-Darwinian science-its model of nature as an elaborate structure of functionally interrelated parts with competition as its mechanism-led to an exaltation of the superior wisdom of this impersonal process which maintained the equilibrium of nature. The limited intelligence and short time span of man could rarely produce results equal to it in scope or staying power (Matthews 1977, pp. 26-27).

This uncertainty immobilized his ameliorative spirit and was clearly reflected in Park's ambivalent personal political views, which were cautiously reformist at most.49

Taken together with his interest in the exotica of the city these factors created a degree of moral and analytic momentum away from the systematic consideration of national structures of class and power and away from the analysis of industrial capitalism as a mode of production with an influence on patterns of social inequality. The result was inevitable. The classical Parkian version of the ecological theory of inequality, often suggestive and empirically sensitive, occasionally even theoretically incisive, was incomplete and poorly integrated. Too interested in the city as its exclusive referent and too greatly dependent on the theoretical logic of plant ecology and the functionalist organicism of Spencer it could not provide a sociologically competent account of the structure and dynamics of social inequality in early twentieth-century America.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Bernd Baldus, Pamela Helmes-Hayes, William Michelson, and, especially, Dennis Wilcox-Magill for insightful comments made on earlier drafts of this article. Also, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial assistance received during the preparation of this manuscript. Finally, I thank reviewers and the editorial staff of The Sociological Quarterly for their suggestions and criticisms.

NOTES

1. The term "North American" is used here advisedly. The only English-language department of sociology in Canada at this time was at McGill university where Everett Hughes and Carl Dawson, both graduates of the University of Chicago sociology department, were attempting to establish a "miniature Chicago school" (Wilcox-Magill 1983, p. 5).




2. For a discussion of the degree to which the sociologists working at Chicago during this period could be thought of as a "school" see Blumer (1985) and Carey (1975, pp. 151-190). On the characteristics of "schools" more generally, see Mullins (1973).

3. The work of others (e.g., Burgess and McKenzie) will also be considered, but it is Park's formulation of the classical theory that is the focus of the analysis. This is justified on the grounds of his prominence within the human ecology/urban studies tradition of the Chicago school.

4. Regarding the totalizing intent and actual comprehensiveness of human ecology, see Janowitz (1970), Faris (1967), Raushenbush (1979), and Matthews (1977). The dispute is, in this author's view, best resolved by Matthews (1977, p. 130).

5. See Bain (1927), MacRae (1953), Pfautz (1953), Hinkel and Boskoff (1957), Gordon (1958), and Page (1969) for different assessments of the degree to which the human ecologists involved themselves in the study of inequality. For an assessment of their respective views see Helmes-Hayes (1985, pp. 146-150).

6. Seymour Martin Lipset (1950) has done exactly the same thing with relation to Park's scattered theorizing on race. For comments on the character and prominence of theory in Park's work, see Matthews (1977, pp. 117-118, 119-120, 130).

7. The phrase "dualistic vision" comes from Matthews (1977, p. 131). 8. The members of the Chicago school were clearly influenced by the movement toward

"scientific" sociology. An obvious indication of this is the fact that the entire first chapter of the Park and Burgess textbook, An Introduction to the Science of Sociology, is devoted to outlining a positivist conception of sociology. If sociology was to be a science, it was not to bejust a science, though. Park was uncomfortable with the attempt to see social reality in exclusively scientific categories. To him sociology should be as scientific as possible, i.e., it should be empirical, systematic, disciplined, in search of laws and regularities of human behavior, etc., but always sensitive to the limitations of science, particularly its incapacity to deal adequately with issues related to personality formation, attitudes, meaning construction, and intentionality. It was the intrusion of meanings and intentionality into human actions that differentiated the first stage or level of the interaction cycle, competition from the other three: conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Matthews discusses the roles played by William James, Georg Simmel, W.I. Thomas, and Wilhelm Windelband (1977, pp. 32-33, 48, 101, and 132-134 respectively) in Park's intellectual development and concludes that, for Park:

... the student of society must employ both the analysis of consciousness and of external competitive forces. He must both explain social phenomena, in the sense of discovering the causal forces which mold them, and make them intelligible, in the sense of revealing their function for and conscious meaning to the people who live them (1977, pp. 133-134).

9. The unit involved depended on the "level" and "focus" of analysis. The same logic was used to describe and explain all of the different levels of social interaction. For example, ethnic groups, city districts, and individual humans were regarded as being in competition and conflict with other groups, districts, and individuals, respectively.

10. There is a problem here with describing human ecology in purely geographical terms. Park (1925, p. 2) makes a distinction between concrete geographical space and a more abstract concept of "social space" or "social distance" that attempts to get away-although in the end unsuccessfully-from a purely geographical conception of the boundaries of an ecological system.

11. The argument was made above that human ecology was intended to be theoretically all-inclusive or comprehensive. Sometimes this "totalizing" intention is obscured by the Chicago school's focus on the city.

12. Park contended that statements about positions, relations, and social distances could be made with a degree of mathematical certainty and precision (1925, pp. 8-10, 14).




13. Park is not always consistent and decisive on the issue of the degree to which "competition" can be used to describe the first "level" of interaction among human beings. He notes that there is a degree of consciousness among humans even at this first level; a level that is supposed to be free of the influence of values, meanings, etc. (Park and Burgess 1970, p. 187).

14. There are a considerable number of "forces" and "processes" operating at each of these four levels (McKenzie 1925a, pp. 74-77, 1925b, pp. 141-153).

15. Matthews argues on this account that Park was not always consistent in his designation of the economic base or the cultural superstructure as determinative in human society (1977, pp. 144-145).

16. Park often talked of "the city" in such terms: "[W]e may, if we choose, think of the city... as organically related; a kind of psychophysical mechanism in and through which private and political interests find not merely a collective but a corporate expression" (1952, p. 14).

17. Raushenbush (1979, pp. 81-82) described the wide range of intellectual forces- international in origin and multidisciplinary in scope-that shaped the human ecology perspective.

18. Park addressed the issue of human nature at length in an earlier work titled Principles of Human Behavior (1915). See Matthews (1977, pp. 148-149) for a discussion of the earlier version.

19. At the same time, however, Park was clearly wary of those who would use the research of physiological psychologists to explain human behavior exclusively in such terms (Park and Burgess 1970, pp. 73-78). In an attempt to be comprehensive Park is here showing his awareness of their approach to the study of human behavior.

20. This conception of human nature was drawn from Cooley, Dewey, and Baldwin (Faris 1967, pp. 88-99; Matthews 1977, p. 148).

21. Clearly, to designate animal and plant behavior as "competitive" or "self-seeking" is to impute motive and intentionality where none exists. Park's use of Darwinian terminology of this sort involved the completion of a "conceptual round trip" for these terms that biologists had originally borrowed from the classical economists (see Matthews 1977, p. 139).

22. Matthews argues that Park turned to ecology specifically because it would allow him to "organiz[e] the data of the Hobbesian side of his analysis" (1977, p. 137).

23. It has been noted that Darwin's personal position on the relationship between biological Darwinism and social Darwinism is not clear (Hofstadter 1955, p., 90; Ruse 1979, pp. 197, 264-265, 266-267).

24. The generally functionalist character of the Chicago approach is illustrated in Faris (1967, pp. 111-112) and described in the "Functionalism" section below.

25. The only specific instruction that Park ever received in sociology was from Simmel at the University of Berlin in 1899. Park used Simmel's lecture notes and Simmel's Soziologie to organize his own textbook, An Introduction to Science of Sociology, as well as using Simmel's essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" as the basis for his own essay "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment" (Matthews 1977, p. 41). The influence was broader even than his, however, as Matthews has pointed out (1977, p. 41).

26. Park's essay "The Concept of Social Distance" was reprinted in Race and Culture (1950, pp. 256-260).

27. The interest in the documentation of city structure and life can be linked to the strength of the "social survey tradition" of the period 1890-1930 brought from England (Mitchell 1968, pp. 126-143). Faris points out that, by 1928, 154 general urban surveys as well as 2,621 surveys in special fields had been completed in the United States (1967, p. 8).

28. Much of this material was gathered together and published as The Local Community Fact Book of Chicago (edited by L. Wirth and M. Furetz) in 1930.

29. They were "natural" because they exhibited an organization that was "not the result of




design." Rather, they were a "manifestation of tendencies inherent in the urban situation" (Park 1952e, p. 196).

30. For comments by Park to the effect that the slums of cities are full of "human junk," see Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1925, p. 109).

31. With relation to social mobility, Park (along with McKenzie) argued that the class structure was sufficiently open that mobility opportunities were freely available (McKenzie 1925b, p. 143; Park and Burgess 1970, p. 307). Park cited Sorokin's work (1927) on "vertical" and "horizontal" mobility in this regard (Park 1952a, p. 188).

32. In outlining this aspect of Park's views, i.e., regarding the temperaments of different racial groups, the intention is not to suggest that Park was not an opponent of racial discrimination. The years he spent working for Booker T. Washington are clear testimony to his desire to obliterate racism. Similarly, as already pointed out, the ecologists' research clearly challenged eugenicist explanations of racial inequality. Nonetheless, there is an ambivalence in Park's treatment of this issue, as these passages suggest and as Matthews clearly outlines in his discussion of Park's theory of social action on this issue (1977, pp. 76-82). On the issue of Park's ambivalence toward melioristic interventionism see Matthews (1977, p. 112).

33. McKenzie's work on metropolitan domination simply extended this form of argumentation to other systems of units (cities/towns/areas) operating at other levels of social organization (regions/countries/the world). A given region was comprised of a number of centers of population struggling not only to adapt to their immediate environment, but also in competition with other centers of population-to gain control ("dominance") over the ecological area as a whole. Out of this struggle inevitably rose a hierarchy of cities, towns, villages, regions, etc., with a center of metropolitan dominance (a large and powerful urban area), the needs of which were satisfied by its "constellation" of lesser urban centers (McKenzie 1968a, pp. 205-219, 1968b, pp. 244-305.

34. For example, the unequal distribution of rewards at the individual level, itself a function of the sorting of people into slots in the technical division of labor, created a group in the population- the poor-who "needed," as it were, less-expensive areas in which to live. Slum areas thus became quite functional, satisfying at once both individual needs for cheap housing and the social need for stability and order-stability and order that might have been threatened if no such areas were available (Faris 1967, p. 59).

35. See previous section for the distinction between a "community" and a "society" according to Park.

36. Park studied philosophy at Heidelberg while under Wilhelm Windelband (Matthews 1977, p. 35).

37. A better strategy was followed in this regard by Park's famous pupil, Everett Hughes. Hughes (1938a, b, 1943) developed an "institutional" variant of human ecology that maximized the potential of the ecological account. He circumscribed the use of ecological principles specifically to the description and explanation of the impact of geographical variables on the spatial distribution of social phenomena. This served as a preliminary means of setting the stage for an analysis of cultural phenomena based on symbolic interactionism and functionalism (see Helmes- Hayes 1985, pp. 414-495).

38. The functionalist explanation does not work at the level of satisfying either "social needs" or personal needs. Limitations on equal opportunity created by inequalities of condition often prevent the "best" from reaching the most important positions and therefore, fulfilling society's need for the best possible leaders. The systematic exclusion of women from positions of societal leadership and responsibility is an example. Likewise, structured social inequality acts as a barrier to the poverty-stricken individual by limiting his or her "life chances."

39. There are other problems of "definition" as well. Note, for example, Alihan's comment:

Ecologists extend at will the concept of environment, so that more often than not it includes the geographical, physical, economic and social environments; and the result is that the organism




and environment merge into one another, so that the ecological organism is sometimes treated as though it were its own environment (1938, p. 243).

40. For an alternative view of these problems and a defense of the ecological position, see Carey (1975, pp. 105-114).

41. This line of reasoning is pursued by McKenzie (1925a), who argues that the size and stability of the human community is not so much a function of enviromental factors as it is a function of the food supply and the process of production and distribution of commodities. He provides a typology of urban areas characterized by their basic "mode of production" (McKenzie 1925a), which not only correlates the character of economic activity with the size of the urban aggregation but points in the direction of a form of economic determinism by arguing that it is the economic base that causes changes in the demographic base in the first place (McKenzie 1925a, b, p. 152; see Matthews 1977, pp. 144-145).

42. For a discussion of the character and limits of the ecological-type approaches to the study of social inequality as developed by Dawson and Hughes at McGill University, see Helmes- Hayes (1985, 290-413, 414-495, respectively).

43. This is not to say that the city could not bind people together. Rather, it is that it could not provide the Gemeinschaftliche relations people had experienced in rural places and in simpler times (Matthews 1977, p. 191).

44. Westby notes on this account that "the model of social disorganization... was a way of not seeing [the specifically] capitalist [character of] exploitation and class conflict" (emphasis added) (1978, p. 126).

45. See Page (1969), Pfautz (1953), MacRae (1953), Hincle and Boskoff (1957), and Gor- don (1958) for different assessments of the periods in the development of stratification studies in American sociology. For an overview of them all see Helmes-Hayes (1985, pp. 140-170).

46. For the best review of the ideas of the Fathers of American sociology on the issue of class, see Page (1969).

47. For a brief discussion of the early links between the Social Gospel, the social survey movement and the meliorism of the Chicago School, see Matthews (1977, pp. 89-92). See also, comments by Faris (1967, pp. 10-11) regarding the theological and humanitarian concerns of work done by early graduate students in the Chicago department.

48. The Chicago sociologists were of widely varying opinions on the subject of interventionism. Park was against a crusading "do-gooderism," but an argument can be made that he was a cautious positivist in the full and dual sense of the term (see Faris 1967, pp. 35, 40, 4 1; Matthews 1977, pp. 16, 78, 114-117; Raushenbush, 1979, pp. 96-97, 102). The most detailed analysis of the Chicago school's relationship to political practice is Carey (1975).

49. It is difficult to label Park politically, for his views combine not only the individualism of Hobbes and Smith but also the organicism of Hegel, Darwin, and Spencer (Matthews 1977, pp. 26-27). Certainly Park was a conservative reformer at most. Raushenbush (1979, p. 176) refers to him as an economic "conservative" while Hughes refers to him as a "nineteenth century man" (Raushenbush 1979, p. 122). Park drew on Adam Smith in the Park and Burgess textbook (1979, pp. 226-234) and seemed to be basically supportive of an individualistic, entrepreneurial form of capitalism (note Faught 1980, p. 76, cited above in this regard). His reticence to suggest radical changes was a result of his view of the existence of a just and natural rationality in the world (Matthews 1977, p. 20). This had the consequence of justifying "the system" at the expense of the individual.

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