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"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
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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 assump- tions, 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 knowl- edge 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 theo-
retical 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 in- equality-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 systemati- cally
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
ori- gins, components, structure, and logic of this theory.6
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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 environ- ment. 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 con- scious recognition that they are engaged in a
struggle for survival and they begin,
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390 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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" them-
selves 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 "compe- tition" 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
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 391
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, sugges- tive, and sensitive, but also
polymorphous and resistant to systematization, a conse- quence, 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 "in- evitably
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 biologi- cally 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 dis- cussed and the Hobbesian overtones of Spencer's
social Darwinism discussed in the following section.
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392 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 competi- tion 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 domi- nance, 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-
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 393
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 disor- ganization," 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 neighbor- hood-"social
disorganization"-the concept constituted a powerful descriptive and
explanatory tool. They used it extensively in their accounts of
criminality, deviant be- havior, 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 disor- ganization. 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
implica- tions: (1) poverty is a problem rooted in the behavioral
and attitudinal traits of individu- als 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 inte- grated. From Comte,
Tonnies, and Durkheim, then, he retained the idea that "the
central
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394 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 coopera-
tion" (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 ecol- ogy) 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 ameliora-
tive 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
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 395
distribution. Other attributes of segregation, such as language,
race or culture, func- tion 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 manif- ested 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
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396 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
"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 stratifica- tion
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 respon- sibility
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).
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 397
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 summa-
rize, 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 competi- tion,
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
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398 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 inequal- ity. 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 disorganiza- tion" 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 disorganiza- tion.40 Finally, it is very
difficult to claim that poverty is a form of personal "disorganiza-
tion" 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-
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 399
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 condi-
tions," 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 deter- minative 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 eco-
nomic 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, accom- modation, and assimilation, and his
interest in patterns of "social disorganization," questions of
national economic structures (e.g., the system of production and
distribu- tion, 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
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400 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 struc- ture 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 pheno- mena
(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
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 401
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 ques- tions 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 character- istics
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
differen- tiated (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
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402 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 com- plexity 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 function- ally 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 depart- ment 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
attempt- ing to establish a "miniature Chicago school"
(Wilcox-Magill 1983, p. 5).
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 403
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).
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404 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
13. Park is not always consistent and decisive on the issue of
the degree to which "competi- tion" 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
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Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social
Inequality 405
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 argumenta- tion 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 specifi- cally 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
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406 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 28/No. 3/1987
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 intervention- ism. 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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