The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes 085728178X, 9780857281784

Citation preview

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The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

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ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological traditions and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society. Series Editor Bryan S. Turner—City University of New York, USA; Australian Catholic University, Australia; and University of Potsdam, Germany Forthcoming titles in this series include: The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim The Anthem Companion to Robert Park The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

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The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

Edited by Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2016 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA © 2016 Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Helmes-Hayes, Richard C. (Richard Charles), 1951– editor. | Santoro, Marco, 1964– editor. Title: The Anthem companion to Everett Hughes / editors, Rick Helmes-Hayes (University of Waterloo, Canada), Marco Santoro (Bologna University, Italy). Description: London ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem companions to sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016043561 | ISBN 9780857281784 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Hughes, Everett C. (Everett Cherrington), 1897-1983. | Sociology – United States. Classification: LCC HM479.H845 A57 2016 | DDC 301–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043561 ISBN-13: 978-0-85728-178-4 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0-85728-178-X (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-book.

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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Foreword  Everett C. Hughes, Great Teacher   Howard S. Becker

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Introduction

Insight through Craftsmanship: The Sociological Legacy of Everett Hughes Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro

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Chapter One

Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition Jean-Michel Chapoulie

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Chapter Two

Studying “Going Concerns”: Everett C. Hughes on Method Rick Helmes-Hayes

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Chapter Three

The Natural History of Everett Cherrington Hughes: A Master of Fieldwork Philippe Vienne

Chapter Four

Everett C. Hughes: A Key Figure of the Canadian Chicago School Diaspora Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden

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Chapter Five

Everett Hughes: Notes from an Apprentice Douglas Harper

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An American in Frankfurt: Everett C. Hughes’s Unpublished Book on Germans after the End of the Nazi Regime Christian Fleck

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The Origins and Evolution of Everett Hughes’s Concept: ‘Master Status’ Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott and Deborah K. van den Hoonard

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Discovering the Secret of Excellence: Everett Hughes as a Source of Inspiration in Researching Creative Careers Izabela Wagner

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Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

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Chapter Nine

Everett Hughes on Race: Wedded to an Antiquated Paradigm 211 Neil McLaughlin and Stephen Steinberg

Notes on Contributors

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Index of Names Index of Subjects

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ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 0.1 Total references to Everett Hughes, and to three selected books authored or co-authored by him, in ISI Web of Science, 1985–2014

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0.2 References to The Sociological Eye in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

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0.3 References to Men and Their Work in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

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5.1 Everett Hughes in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1982

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Tables 0.1 References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, top five countries

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0.2 References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, by research areas

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0.3 References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, by source

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0.4 Properties of texts citing The Sociological Eye or Men and Their Work according to Scopus, 1971 to present

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Foreword EVERETT C. HUGHES, GREAT TEACHER Howard S. Becker

Everett Hughes, a great sociologist and a great teacher, may not be as unappreciated as the editors of this book suspect. His work continues to reverberate as new generations discover it for themselves. Equally important, more and more people discover, one way or another, that he didn’t just inspire generations of later-to-become-prominent sociologists. He did better than that. He taught us ‘How to Do It’, just as his teacher Robert E. Park had taught an earlier generation (Hughes was one of them) how to do it. I always imagined, when I sat in Hughes’s seminar, that he was reproducing, in his own style, the rambling, reflective, worldly, elegant style of thought and of imparting ideas that had characterized Park’s teaching. As fine a sociologist as Hughes was (and there has never been a better practitioner of our trade), he was even better as a teacher. I think that many people who sat through his classes would disagree with me. Many colleagues of mine in graduate school found his classes disagreeable: rambling, without a clear point, even tedious. The first class I took when I entered the University of Chicago Sociology Department in the fall of 1946 was his class in how to do fieldwork, taken by all the incoming students in sociology, anthropology and human development. He assigned us, in pairs, to Chicago census tracts (a small area of one or two Chicago blocks) and gave us assignments to do: collect genealogies from two or three people (a bow to the anthropologists, I suppose), observe for an hour or two in a public place, attend a group meeting of some kind and interview a number of people who lived in the area about whatever he (Hughes) happened to be interested in that quarter. And write down all this ‘information’ we collected and turn it in to him each class period – which we all dutifully did. He didn’t talk about that work in class. Instead he talked about any damn thing that came into his head, rambling in a contented way over things whose relevance to fieldwork wasn’t clear. At least, it seemed that way to us. We were bewildered. I noticed that a number of much older students – typically guys who had been in the army and were now in graduate school as a result of the G.I. Bill of Rights – would sometimes show up to listen to these monologues with great interest. I finally got my nerve up one day and asked David Solomon, one of the several Canadians who had come to Chicago to study with Hughes and a veteran of the war, what he was doing there. He wanted to know

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what I meant, and I said that he must know far more than what would be taught in an introductory class. He looked at me with real pity, and said, as best I can remember, ‘I can’t explain it to you now, but one of these days you’ll understand that these lectures are pure sociological gold.’ And they were. You had to be a little more sophisticated than we were then to appreciate Hughes’s way of taking a walk around a topic, noting some features you would otherwise have ignored, comparing it to other things happening in places that didn’t seem to have much in common with our census tracts and then concluding with a general remark that tied it all together. Was that sociology? These explorations were a far cry from the polished, logical analyses so elegantly enunciated by his fellow faculty member Herbert Blumer, who explicated the complex, subtle and hard-for-us-to-grasp social psychology of one of his teachers, the philosopher George Herbert Mead. Many students thought that was the Real Thing. Nor did these explorations have the ostentatious erudition of Louis Wirth, who occasionally entertained himself by translating obscure passages from Georg Simmel instead of lecturing. But when it was time to write a master’s thesis, some of us chose to study situations of work and were directed to see Hughes on the fifth floor of the Social Science Building (it had been Robert E. Park’s office, but none of us knew that then). And whatever kind of work you had chosen to study – and especially if, like me, you had chosen something less ‘noble’ than medicine or law – he would encourage you to get started doing some preliminary scouting around, to talk to some people in that line of work, to start your thesis right then and there without waiting for the formalities of making a written proposal. And then you would take – sometimes for several quarters in a row – his eventually legendary seminar in what started as ‘The Sociology of Occupations and Professions’ and eventually was known as (not an innocent change, this) ‘The Sociology of Work’. So I started doing fieldwork with the musicians (of whom I was one) who played in bars and for parties, and with that ticket of admission to the class, joined a hard-working and productive rotating group, which included, among many others, Bob Habenstein (studying funeral directors), Dan Lortie (anaesthesiologists), Harold MacDowell (osteopaths), Bill Westley (police), Lou Kriesberg (retail furriers), Ray Gold (apartment house janitors) and eventually Erving Goffman (who proposed but never did a study of butlers). The discussions were lively – always centred on what we had been finding out in our continuing field research and never allowed to stray into sterile discussions of ‘theory’ (which in those days would have meant trying to define the essence of a ‘profession’ as opposed to more mundane kinds of work), or the equally tedious questions which we liked to pester each other with about whether our samples were ‘adequate’ or not. The heated discussions always, under Hughes’s skilful guidance, led somewhere, to a new idea or direction for our inquiries, not necessarily to a solution to whatever problem we had brought up but surely to a direction to follow that would ultimately move our work along. And they led, finally, to broad hints that it was time to get on with the tedious work of actually writing a report of our research that could become a thesis or dissertation. In other words, he taught you how to do it, from the first vague ideas to a finished, written product.

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And beyond that. I  started working for him, interviewing schoolteachers for his research on schools, work I  meant to use as the raw material for my dissertation (the master’s thesis done and accepted already). One day he looked at up me in the quizzical way he had, which I knew likely meant that there was something he’d thought up for me to do, and said, ‘Time you wrote an article. About what you wrote your master’s thesis about’ – meaning, clearly, musicians. I said, ‘Which part of it should I write up?’ He gave me one of those practical gems David Solomon had alerted me to: ‘Take one idea and put in anything you can make stick to it and leave the rest of it out.’ I did and that was my first article, published in the American Journal of Sociology. Many other people have stories like that to tell. He didn’t teach his students his ‘theory’, partly because he didn’t have one. He had something better: ideas you could use to shape an investigation and the later report of its results. And he had ways of working that were better than ‘methods’ out of a cookbook: how to think about what you were learning in your research and use that to shape the next steps you took. He taught you how to be a sociologist.

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Introduction INSIGHT THROUGH CRAFTSMANSHIP: THE SOCIOLOGICAL LEGACY OF EVERETT HUGHES Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro

He’s never been given, I think, the credit he deserves. (Erving Goffman on Everett Hughes [Verhoeven 1993: 336])

When one reads sociology textbooks or accounts of major trends and figures in the historical development of the discipline, there is a litany of names from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries  – Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman – that appears over and over again. These figures are universally acknowledged as belonging to a list of scholars who built the theoretical foundations of the discipline. More recently, figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have been added to that list. This Anthem Companions to Sociology series is noteworthy from our perspective because it is the first time that Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) has been accorded a place in the pantheon. Hughes is largely unknown, or known by name only, to most practicing sociologists. He is rarely listed among ‘the masters’ by social theorists or historians of social thought and is usually missing from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and guides to the discipline.1 Nonetheless, it is our view that Hughes belongs on these lists. And there is a growing community of scholars spread across North America and Europe – France and Italy, in particular – who regards him as among the most innovative and original sociologists of the twentieth century. Moreover, he was – and is – more influential than would appear to be the case. The source of his impact? His conceptual/ theoretical influence on other high-profile scholars who were his students and colleagues (e.g., Howard S. Becker, David Riesman, Anselm Strauss, Eliot Freidson and Goffman) and his role in developing, nurturing and teaching the value of fieldwork. Hughes’s contribution to North American sociology in the middle decades of the twentieth century is indisputable. Hughes, along with his wife, Helen MacGill Hughes, did his PhD at Chicago. While there, he became one of Park’s favourite students (Riesman

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1983: 480). After an interval at McGill University in Montreal (1927–38), he returned and became a prominent member of the Chicago department between 1938 and 1961.2 While there, he championed the teaching of fieldwork methods and, by so doing, became a crucial figure in the ‘second Chicago School’ (Fine 1995). As well, Hughes is among the most influential pioneers of Canadian sociology in both its English- and French-language manifestations. During the 11-year period he spent at McGill, he collaborated with Carl Dawson to build English-language sociology in Canada and then, from that base, helped champion sociology in French Quebec, first, by writing French Canada in Transition (1943a), one of the first classics of Canadian sociology (Hiller and Langlois 2001) and, then, by helping French-language scholars in Quebec – especially at Laval University – develop a program of social research for the province (Hughes 1943b; Falardeau 1953; see Wilcox-Magill 1983; Ostow 1984; Fournier 1987; Shore 1987; Helmes-Hayes 2000). But Hughes’s influence as a sociologist extended beyond Northern America. In the 1940s he played a substantial role in the re-establishment of empirical sociology in (occupied) Germany following the demise of Nazism (Staley 1993; Guth 2010; see Fleck chapter, this volume). He was already familiar with Germany and its sociology, however, because he had spent the year 1930–1 in the Rhineland doing fieldwork on the Catholic labour movement (see Hughes [1935] 1971). Indeed, on the earlier trip he had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and got a foreboding of what it might become.3 However, Hughes’s ideas have spread in Europe not through these early German experiences but as a consequence of the latter-day discovery of ‘the Chicago tradition’ by European scholars in the 1980s.4 During this period many European scholars and political activists became disenchanted with structural functionalism on one side and Marxism on the other. Some of them, casting around for a more ethnographically rooted sociology, turned to Chicago sociology. Whether it was under the general rubric of the ‘Chicago School’, or more specific labels such as ‘symbolic interactionism’ or ‘fieldwork’, Hughes’s ideas gained currency because they appealed to new generations of sociologists looking for an alternative to both mainstream sociology – Parsons, Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld – and what some perceived as the outdated radical sociologies of the 1970s – Marxism, critical theory and so forth. Paradoxically, Hughes’s somewhat marginal status while alive might have contributed to his rediscovery and celebration post-mortem. Hughes resisted being referred to as part of ‘the Chicago School’ (see Hughes in Lofland 1980: 276–7) and made no effort to build a coterie of followers. Nonetheless, he had a deep and abiding impact on those with whom he worked (see Harper’s chapter, this volume). This influence, sometimes revealed only indirectly in their work, becomes apparent only upon closer investigation.5 In fact, only recently has Hughes’s stock once again begun to rise. Crucial to his new-found prominence has been the reputational entrepreneurship of his students and former collaborators, chief among them Becker. Beginning in the 1990s, and thanks first and foremost to Becker’s mediation and support, Hughes has come to enjoy a notable reputation in France.6 Becker has been aided in this endeavour by several French scholars, most important among them Jean-Michel Chapoulie. Chapoulie has written a number of landmark studies on Hughes (1987; 1996; 2001; 2002; Sociétés contemporaines, 1997, entire issue) and, as well, edited the first-ever collection of Hughes’s writings translated into a

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language other than English. This development would have pleased Hughes, who spoke fluent French and German, taught for some years in Quebec and spent much of his early career writing about French Canada. Together, via their collective interest in the history of the Chicago tradition, Becker, Chapoulie and their colleagues have created what has come to be known as the ‘Chicago School in Paris’ (see Wax 2000).7 From France, Hughes’s ideas travelled to Italy, where symbolic interactionism had never gained a foothold, but where the name of Goffman – in both his ‘critical’ persona (e.g., as a major source for the anti-psychiatry movement) and his ‘scholarly’ persona – was well established by the 1960s. Perhaps the earliest evidence of this interest was a conference organized by Luigi Tomasi (Trento) in 1993 that attracted papers from three Italian scholars (Filippo Barbano, Raffaele Rauty, Margherita Ciacci) and was highlighted by contributions from Edward Shils and Martin Bulmer. Two collections of essays that appeared subsequently added Stanford Lyman, Jennifer Platt and Chapoulie to the list (Gubert and Tomasi 1995; Tomasi 1998). In 2010, a representative of a younger generation of sociologists, Marco Santoro, published an Italian translation of some of Hughes’s most influential essays (from The Sociological Eye), bearing witness to a burgeoning interest in Hughes’s ideas in the country of Antonio Gramsci – though it would be an overstatement to talk of a Hughes fashion there (Hughes 2010a).8 As well, translations of some of Hughes’s texts – articles not books – are now available in Spanish and Russian.9 However, perhaps the best sign of growing interest in Hughes’s work is the book you hold in your hands, published in a series devoted to classics in social theory. It is edited by a Canadian sociologist and an Italian one, with contributions written by scholars from France, Belgium, Canada, Austria, Poland and the United States. This volume is not the first attempt to assess Hughes’s place in the history of the social sciences or to offer a general discussion of his legacy to contemporary social research and theory. At least two predecessors should be mentioned:  the Festschrift published in 1968 with contributions by many of his students and colleagues (Becker et al. 1968c), and a special issue of the French journal Sociétés contemporaines, published in 1997, one year after the release of the first French edition of The Sociological Eye (Hughes 1996), with contributions by selected former students and colleagues as well as historians of sociology from both France and the United Kingdom.10 A third, more circumscribed assessment was published in 2010 in the English-language Italian journal Sociologica (see Helmes-Hayes and Santoro 2010; Hughes 2010b; 2010c; 2010d). It was published at the same time as the abridged Italian edition of The Sociological Eye mentioned above (Hughes 2010a). In addition to the collections of essays mentioned above, it should be noted that during the last years of his career, and especially after he died in 1983, commentaries about Hughes and his work appeared in various journals and textbooks.11 The current volume builds on these previous enterprises. Among the questions our contributors ask and answer are the following: What is Hughes’s legacy 30 years after his death? How could, and should, we make use of it now without becoming victims of presentism on the one hand or historicism on the other (Stocking 1965)? Unlike most scholars, whose legacy is largely confined to their oeuvre, Hughes’s greatest legacy may rest in his teaching and example. This is in part because Hughes never wrote either a theoretical treatise or a methodological handbook. In the words of Arlene Daniels, ‘What Hughes once said about Park could apply equally as well to himself: ‘Park

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has left no magnum opus’ (1972: 402; citing Hughes ([1964] 1971: 548; emphasis in original).12 Indeed, over his long career, Hughes authored just two monographs:  his PhD thesis on the Chicago Real Estate Board (1931) and his book on French Canada (1943a). The rest of his books are either collections of previously published articles (1958; 1971a; 1984) or collective research projects he directed but that were written largely by his younger collaborators (Becker et al. 1961; Becker, Geer and Hughes 1968a). However, though scattered across numerous journals and sometimes left for long periods unpublished, his essays and ideas had a major impact on scholars – students and colleagues alike – who, following his example or under his tutelage, produced a number of sociological classics: Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (1943, 1955); Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959); Becker, Outsiders (1963) to name just a few. The study of Hughes’s work and ideas offers the discerning reader a more complex, detailed and comprehensive approach to doing sociology than what might first seem to be the case, given the often casual, folksy style of his writing. To read his oeuvre is to take a sagacious, if meandering, voyage through many of the most interesting and challenging problems with which scholars – not just sociologists – must deal as they try to understand social life. In the balance of the introduction we 1. outline key biographical details of Hughes’s life in order to provide historical context for the rest of the book;13 2. identify the main principles and features of ‘Hughesian sociology’, demonstrating how it has borne fruit in the work of a distinguished group of scholars directly formed or influenced by Hughes’s teaching and example; 3. outline the theoretical frame of reference that undergirded Hughes’s thinking and research; 4. assess the contemporary relevance of Hughes’s ideas for the social sciences (in part through a brief bibliometric mapping of their current international profile) and, finally; 5. provide a synopsis of the present book.

The Trajectory of a ‘Marginal Scholar’ Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) was born in Beaver, Ohio, the son of a Methodist minister and his wife. Like many early American sociologists, he was, thus, a ‘PK’ (a preacher’s kid), a background that proved consequential both for his choice of professions and for the detached attitude he came to adopt in pursuing it. His ancestors were pious, progressive farmers who praised higher education, especially for men (Coser 1994: 2). After earning his degree from Ohio Wesleyan University at 20 years of age, Hughes moved to the Green Bay area of Wisconsin and spent five years teaching English to immigrants – an important opportunity for the would-be sociologist to come in contact with people really different from him. He entered the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Chicago in 1923 and, as Philippe

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Vienne notes (see his chapter, this volume) soon confirmed that he had found his niche. From that point on, Hughes recalled, he was ‘hooked’ on sociology: ‘I knew what I was going to do’ (Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago, Box 1, Folder 9: ‘Life after 60’; hereafter ECH Papers, UCHI, …). At Park’s urging, he took a part-time position as a director of a Chicago city park, which again put him in contact with migrants and others from backgrounds very different from his own. Doubtless, these early experiences shaped his view of the importance of using comparative analysis to understand the variety of human experience and belief. In 1928, he defended his PhD thesis, a study of the origins of the Chicago Real Estate Board and its search for legitimation and respectability. His adviser was Robert Park (1864–1944), then the leading light of the department. Shortly before defending his thesis, Hughes moved to Canada to assume a position in the newly formed Department of Sociology at McGill University, an English-speaking university in (mainly French) Montreal. Hughes stayed in Canada for over a decade and became a central figure in the establishment of sociology in that country. Perhaps his most important contribution was French Canada in Transition (1943a). The volume, which became part of the canon of Canadian sociology, is a classical community study that describes and makes sense of the troubles experienced by the French-speaking members of a small, rural community as they try to cope with the impact of industrialization and modernization imposed on them by British and American industrial capitalists. As a part of his research for this project, and, more specifically, to better understand relations between Catholic French and Protestant English, Hughes spent a year in Germany doing research on the Catholic Labour Movement in the Rhineland. This experience proved to be consequential after the fall of Nazism and the occupation of Germany, when Hughes was part of a delegation of social scientists sent there to help re-establish German sociology along empirical (i.e., American) lines. Indeed, one of Hughes’s most insightful essays, ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ ([1962] 1971), came out of that experience (see Fleck chapter, this volume).14 In 1938, on the invitation of Herbert Blumer and Louis Wirth, Hughes returned to Chicago. He remained there for 23 years, during which time his name came to be firmly linked to what is now widely known as the ‘Second Chicago School’. Like Blumer and others of his cohort, he came to be a bridge between those who had founded the socalled Chicago School in the early twentieth century and newer cohorts of students who developed ‘Chicago sociology’ in ways that brought it into the modern era.15 He once again took up his interest in occupations and professions, making them privileged objects of teaching and research. In the process, he stimulated the development of a whole subfield in the discipline. As he recalls it, In 1939, I began to teach a course on professions. People from various departments of the university and from many occupations came into the course; many of them wanted to write about the efforts of their own occupation to have itself recognized as a profession […] I soon changed the name of the course to ‘The Sociology of Work’ [in order to] include studies of a greater variety of occupations and problems […] The occupations considered included […] janitors, junk dealers […], furriers, funeral directors, taxi drivers, rabbis, school teachers, jazz

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THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO EVERETT HUGHES musicians, mental hospital attendants, osteopaths, city managers, pharmacists, and YMCA secretaries. Others studied lawyers, physicians, and the clergy, as well as the newer professions or the newer specialties in these older professions. We studied workers, union leaders, and management in a variety of industries […] We […] got clues about how levels and directions of effort and production are determined in both lowly and proud kinds of work. Those who perform services, it turned out, prefer some customers, clients, patients, or even sinners, to others. Some tasks in any occupation are preferred over others; some are jealously guarded, while others are gladly delegated to those they consider lesser breeds, such as women or Negroes […] The contingencies which face people as they run their life-cycle, their career at work, turned out to be a constant theme. The great variety of students and of occupations and work situations studies stimulated the search for and the finding of common themes. Some of these common themes I put into an Outline for Sociological Study of an Occupation which was used by a whole generation of students. ([1970] 1971: 418–19)16

During his career, Hughes contributed to a range of subdisciplines, moving from one project to another without any apparent overall plan, taking up subjects as opportunities presented themselves. Certainly this was the case with relation to his research in work and occupations. He carried out or supervised several studies because he got a research grant or one of his students expressed an interest in a particular occupation and so forth. However, as the passage above indicates, undergirding this unsystematic body of research was a theoretical goal. By uncovering ‘common themes’, he could begin the process of elaborating a conceptual framework useful for making sense of any occupation: plumbers and clergymen, junkmen and psychiatrists, occupations both ‘humble’ and ‘proud’. The list of studies on occupations done by Hughes’s students during the period is impressive and helped establish the sociology of occupations as a distinctive field of sociological research. Indeed, Hughes was a pioneer in the field and for a long time its major advocate and practitioner – as Merton knew well when in the 1950s he began to establish an empirical tradition of research in the sociology of professions at Columbia.17 During the same period, Hughes became involved in research on ethnic and racial relations in industry  – a topic he had started to investigate while in Canada. The University of Chicago established a Committee for the Study of Human Relations in Industry and Hughes became central to the enterprise, contributing a series of papers of his own and supervising research done by others. As well, he taught courses in the area. For Hughes and his colleagues, there was a substantial link between the two research fields, that is, occupations and race and ethnicity. In Hughes’s estimation, the nature and organization of work – and, therefore, occupations – were central to understanding the dynamics of modern societies, not just for nation states but also for individuals and their sense of self as well. Hughes regarded work and occupations as a privileged lens through which he could make sense of race and ethnic relations and elaborated such concepts as the ‘knitting of racial groups’ and ‘dilemmas and contradictions of status’ to do so. It was while Hughes was engaged in research on the relations binding work, occupations, race and ethnicity that he – perhaps unwittingly – made one of the most consequential decisions of his career, that is, to become a proponent of ‘formalized’ instruction in fieldwork.18 When Hughes first arrived at Chicago, he was assigned a course in

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introductory sociology. Dissatisfied with traditional approaches to teaching it, he soon reorganized it as a primer in fieldwork. For Hughes, this meant, above all, the observation of people in situ. Only by studying people in their natural settings was it possible to understand the meanings of those activities for the people involved. Much other work was involved in fieldwork as well: conducting interviews with participants and informers, gathering data about the location (neighbourhood, institution, space) and so on. But even this was not enough. Hughes was, as Paul Rock has noted, a ‘methodological agnostic’ (1979: 20, 242n49) – we would probably refer to him today as a proponent of ‘multimethods’ – who felt that field researchers had an obligation to contextualize their in situ observations by becoming familiar with official governmental statistics (e.g., census tract data) and by learning how to interpret them using quantitative data analysis techniques. In Hughes’s view it was not possible to understand the day-to-day behaviours of workers in various occupations – indeed, the workings of any neighbourhood, organization or institution – without understanding the broader web of relations – economic, political, cultural, regional, national, international  – in which they were enmeshed (see Becker 2010; Verdet 1997). After offering the fieldwork course for over a decade, in 1951 Hughes was given an opportunity to augment its profile. With anthropologists Robert Redfield and Lloyd Warner, he launched a ‘Field Training Project’ in the Department of Social Sciences, which eventually led to the publication of Cases in Fieldwork (Hughes, Junker, Gold and Kittel 1952). He was likewise instrumental in the preparation of Buford Junker’s volume Fieldwork: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (1960), and wrote the introduction. It is telling that even though Hughes had been teaching fieldwork for several years, he did not use the occasion to provide a ‘how-to’ manual for readers. Indeed, Hughes never wrote a methods text or its equivalent. His long experience as a fieldworker told him that any attempt to codify the research process would be futile – and wrong-headed in any case. Hughes regarded social phenomena and research settings as fluid, complex and often novel. In such circumstances, it was Hughes’s view that the fieldworker ‘is better equipped with a flexible theoretical frame of reference and an eclectic methodological orientation than with a formal theory to “test” and a set of textbook-determined procedures to “apply” ’ (Helmes-Hayes 2010: 11). In short, as Hughes phrased it in Junker’s fieldwork book, ‘the situations and circumstances in which field observation […] is done are so various that no manual of detailed rules would serve’ ([1969] 1971: 503). In this respect, Hughes’s approach was in keeping with a view generally held at Chicago that fieldwork ‘could be learned but not taught’.19 One became accomplished at the task only through practice (Fielding 2005: 2; see also Helmes-Hayes 2010: 11). In 1949, in recognition of his contributions to the discipline and the department, Hughes was granted full professorship. Ironically, his rise to prominence inside the department occurred at the same time that its status in the discipline declined. Chicago had lost its position of dominance as a consequence of postwar theoretical and methodological developments at Harvard and Columbia in particular. This decline in status and influence had a negative impact on Hughes’s chances of being widely read and influential beyond the bounds of his home department and university. Fortunately, the Chicago department remained sufficiently well regarded that it was able to attract a wide array

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of talented students and accomplished scholars (e.g., Riesman, who moved from law to sociology as a consequence of encounters with Hughes). During his career, Hughes assumed many offices and duties in the department, in the discipline and across a smattering of other disciplinary fields. In addition to serving as chair of the Chicago department during a difficult period in its history, he served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1951–2), editor of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS; 1952–60), president of the American Sociological Association (1962–3) and president of the Eastern Sociological Society (1968–9).20 Just before he would have been forced to retire from Chicago, Hughes moved to Brandeis University in Boston, where he helped establish a fieldwork-oriented graduate program in sociology (see Reinharz 1995). His final academic stop was Boston College, beginning in 1968. There, too, he introduced several cohorts of students to the virtues of fieldwork (see Ostow 1985; Holmstrom 1984). He retired from academia in 1977 and died six years later, at 85 years of age. In recognition of his many contributions, Hughes was awarded several honours, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship, honorary life presidency of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and honorary degrees from a number of Canadian and US universities.

Helen MacGill Hughes Before we leave this description of Hughes’s career, we regard it as appropriate, indeed essential, to reflect at least briefly on the contributions of his intellectual partner and wife, Helen MacGill Hughes (1903–92). MacGill Hughes was an extremely bright and able woman – like Everett, the recipient of a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago (1937). However, unlike her husband she never had the opportunity to enjoy a full career in academia. As a consequence of family, institutional and societal dynamics, MacGill Hughes, like most well-educated women married to male academics, worked in the margins of the discipline. She and Everett had a strong, mutually supportive relationship and, like other academic wives of the period, she helped advance her husband’s career by acting as a largely unacknowledged research assistant/collaborator and, of course, managing their home life. Hughes did nothing to change this traditional set-up (Hoecker-Drysdale 1996: 227–8, 230), but it is unlikely he would have been able to do much in any case. Overt sexism in the academy that reflected and exacerbated sexist norms and structures of opportunity that favoured men, meant that she never held a full-time teaching position. Instead, she served in ‘auxiliary’ capacities in the discipline, filling a variety of significant but poorly paid and episodic positions on sociology’s fringe (Hoecker-Drysdale 1996: 227). At the end of her career, in part as a consequence of her involvement in the feminist movement, she seemed somewhat regretful about what she had been ‘allowed’ to accomplish.21 There is no little irony and pathos in her remarks on this phenomenon in her essay ‘Women in Academic Sociology, 1925–75’ (MacGill Hughes 1975: 217–18).

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MacGill Hughes was raised in an upper-middle-class family in Vancouver. Her father was a lawyer; her mother a feminist lawyer and juvenile court judge (MacGill Hughes 1977: 72–4). After earning a degree in German and economics at the University of British Columbia in 1925, she enrolled, with Park’s encouragement, in the master’s program in sociology at the University of Chicago (MacGill Hughes 1980–1: 27–38). Shortly thereafter, she met and married Everett Hughes. She then accompanied him to McGill when he went to Montreal in 1927 to take up his position in the Sociology Department later that year. Over the following decade, she worked as a research/teaching assistant and completed her PhD with Park at Chicago. Her dissertation on the human interest story in the newspaper was completed in 1937 and published three years later (MacGill Hughes 1940). It was the first in a string of publications over the next few years, but even after the Hugheses moved back to Chicago in 1938, she was unable to find a teaching job – this despite the fact that years later her writings on the media came to be regarded as ‘some of the best scholarly studies of news media among all those working on the subject in the 1930s and early ’40s’ (Women in Media Research). Instead, after a five-year period as a stay-at-home mother from 1938 to 1943, she took a job on the editorial staff of the AJS. She remained there in a part-time capacity for 17 years, eventually becoming managing editor. All the while, she did other, related jobs and collaborated in various capacities with her husband as he carried out the research that built his reputation and career. The pattern began when she helped him do the fieldwork for French Canada in Transition, for which she received some acknowledgement, and carried on through other projects for which she received greater and lesser degrees of public recognition.22 In the end, MacGill Hughes ‘lamented’ that she built a resume, indeed ‘a busy and gratifying life’ (1977:  80), but not a ‘career’. Over her working life, she undertook a remarkable range of duties and published on an impressive, if disparate, list of topics. As well, at various junctures she wrote for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Time and Scientific Monthly, published articles in mainstream sociology journals such as the AJS, Public Opinion Quarterly, the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science and so forth. She did a good deal of editorial and related work for the AJS, of course, and undertook similar and related duties at the National Opinion Research Center, including the writing of grant proposals. The subjects of her research ranged from newspapers and the media to race and ethnic relations, occupations, drug addition, delinquency, arthritis (!) and the status of women in sociology (among others). In an autobiographical essay, reflecting on this eclectic set of accomplishments, she remarks that most of her job opportunities were the result of happenstance rather than design – she recalls never having applied for a job (1977: 80) – and notes that they occurred by happenstance because she simply followed along behind her husband whenever he got a new job. In ‘Wasp/ Woman/ Sociologist’, published in 1977, after she had been involved for some time in the feminist movement and had done research on women’s academic careers, she wrote that before the ‘awakening’ occasioned by her exposure to feminism she had been ‘content […] to let accidental connections and friendly interventions determine the course of [her] life as a sociologist’. ‘Until very recent years’, she wrote, ‘I felt luckier than any woman I knew. I enjoyed an unusual measure of autonomy, was never locked into a routine – and never looked beyond the gratifications of running

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my own show’ (1977: 80). Later, she was more critical – both of herself and of the structure and ideology of patriarchy that infused the university, the discipline and wider society during her professional lifetime. ‘In the phase when I was a second-class citizen, I did not recognize it and I certainly was not unhappy; I was unalert and stupid concerning my status, as were most women then of theirs’ (1977: 69). This is a curious statement coming from a woman who grew up in a strongly feminist household and regarded her mother’s and grandmother’s feminist views and actions with admiration. In an essay comparing the careers of Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes, Susan Hoecker-Drysdale notes that MacGill Hughes ‘suppressed’ her feminist outlook for many years until it was ‘awakened’ by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s (1996: 228–9). Whatever ambivalence or regret MacGill Hughes had about her somewhat scattered career, she was clearly admired and respected by her peers. In 1973 she was presented with the Award of Merit by the Eastern Sociological Association, in 1975 she was nominated for President of the ASA (though not elected) and in 1979 she was chosen as president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

‘Hughesian Sociology’ Everett Hughes’s unconventional teaching and pioneering research practice attracted many students. Indeed, he contributed to the formation of numerous sociologists who became influential in their own right. Above, we listed Becker, Riesman, Strauss, Freidson and Goffman. A more complete list would include inter alia Jean Burnet, Robert Emerson, Herbert Gans, Blanche Geer, Joseph Gusfield, Oswald Hall, Shulamit Reinharz, Donald Roy, Gregory Stone, Barrie Thorne, Gaye Tuchman and William Foote Whyte. His influence on Goffman is especially noteworthy and instructive, given Goffman’s high profile in the discipline. Goffman probably never attended any of Hughes’s classes, but at least once he attributed to Hughes not only some of his ideas but his whole approach to sociological research, referring to himself as a ‘follower’ of ‘Hughesian sociology’. This is a surprising homage, considering Goffman’s dislike of labels and intellectual schools and his reluctance to reveal his sources.23 Riesman, Hughes’s colleague and close friend at Chicago, likewise acknowledged Hughes’s strong influence on his life’s work. And Hughes’s direct influence extended to subsequent generations as well. The work of Susan Leigh Star, author of Sorting Things Out (Bowker and Star 1999), is one example among many. But perhaps the best example is Becker. Though Hughes disdained the notion of creating a school or a set of followers, the lineage from Hughes to Becker is clear. Indeed, over his career, Becker has frequently underlined the connection, drawing attention to Hughes’s lasting contribution to his formation as a scholar. For example, in 2011 and 2012, Becker made repeated references to Hughes’s influence on him at a pair of sessions at the École des Hautes Études de Sciences Sociales in Paris at which Becker was the featured speaker (Becker, EHESS 2011–12; 2012–13). But Hughes’s contribution to sociology extends beyond his impact, both personal and scholarly, on important and influential scholars. He was a highly original student of social processes and social life in his own right. In order to understand this point we have to enter more deeply inside Hughes’s conception of the sociological enterprise – what

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Goffman referred to as ‘Hughesian sociology’. By this the author of Asylums meant a kind of sociological vision that at its core had an exceptional curiosity about ‘small-scale entities’ (e.g., an occupation, a setting, a situation) and relied, above all, on a ‘qualitative, ethnographic perspective’ (Goffman in Verhoeven 1993: 318) to frame and understand it. ‘Small scale entities’ is an apt expression that describes not only the kind of objects in which Hughes was interested but also the attitude he employed as a social researcher. For him, nothing was too small to be without interest and relevance for sociology. Every detail of social life had some meaning if you were good and patient enough to look for it. This position was extremely useful for practicing the kind of research Hughes privileged and long taught, that is, fieldwork. But we should not miss also the theoretical relevance of this assumption; indeed, it is because he worked at this level of empirical research – situations such as medical emergencies, encounters such as those between white patients and black doctors – that he was able to discover and identify new sociological concepts such as ‘dirty work’ and ‘dilemmas of status’. As emphasised by Santoro (2010a; 2010b), occupations were to Hughes privileged entrées for sociological investigation – and this would be true in any occurrence of social life, not only in the economic system or while studying the labour market.24 They were a crucial aspect of the structure and dynamics of modern societies and a central ingredient of the identities of individuals in the modern world. ‘If you want to understand anything about a man’, Hughes said, ‘you ask him what is his work. What does he do for a living? What you will learn will explain much of how he feels, much of how he thinks, and all of his obituary’ (Hughes quoted by E. Gross, interview by R. Helmes-Hayes, 17 November 1995). Far from being a contingent research object, and as such modifiable and interchangeable with any other, Hughes regarded occupation as both a crucial social reality and a strategic object for sociological analysis. Nobody exists socially without being occupied in doing something and without occupying some place at some time in some wider system. This is the double meaning of occupation, that is, as human activity and as position. We should therefore conceive of occupation as an elementary structure of social life and, likewise, an elementary category of social thought. Be it occupation of the soil or of a certain position in the social division of labour, occupation has to do with the basic conditions of human life. People are always and everywhere socially and spatially grounded (Santoro 2010a; 2010b). Not surprisingly, given the strategic significance of occupations for social analysis, Hughes’s influence on the sociology of work and occupations has been substantial. Indeed, in a sense, we can say that the field exists in good measure because of Hughes and his early courses, teaching and writings. His first contribution to occupational sociology dates to 1928, the year he finished his PhD dissertation, The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board. The thesis, later published as a book by the same name, was an ethnographic study of an occupation – real estate agents – and its claim to professional status (Hughes 1931). He retained this interest in work and occupations throughout his career. At least five books Hughes authored or co-authored, including the classic Men and Their Work (1958), are devoted to the study of occupations. It is to Hughes that contemporary sociologists of occupation (themselves an integral part of the more general sociology of work) owe such profitable concepts as ‘license’, ‘mandate’, ‘career’ and ‘the

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social drama of work’ – not to speak of original developments from Hughes’s ideas like Andrew Abbott’s notion of ‘jurisdiction’ (Abbott 1988). Another feature of Hughesian sociology is that it is rooted in an ethnographic perspective. With Becker we would argue that Hughes was an authentic and undisputed master of the ethnographic approach as both a research method and a philosophy of social research. This was true in a double sense. First, he was a highly skilled practitioner of the method, singularly talented at discerning patterns in the mess of notes inevitably produced by those doing in situ fieldwork. ‘He was’, as Riesman put it, ‘the star to pull the wagon of fieldwork through the mud of dailiness’ (1983: 481). Second, he introduced more than one generation of American and Canadian sociologists to ethnographic research and taught them how to look at social reality with a sensitive and discerning ethnographical ‘gaze’ or, better, ‘eye’. It is to his teaching, supervision and influence that we owe a series of outstanding ethnographic studies that to this day are considered essential reading for any apprentice to the ethnographer’s art. In addition to those mentioned above we would add Ned Polsky’s Hustlers, Beats and Others (1967); Roy’s ethnography of factory work, later replicated and supplemented by Michael Burawoy (Roy 1959; Burawoy 1979); Tuchman’s Making News (1978); and Thorne’s Gender Play (1993). Indeed, ethnography has become Hughes’s trademark – not because he was alone in practicing it, of course, but because it was mainly on account of his initiative and teaching that ‘fieldwork’ became an identifiable, self-conscious and acceptable way of doing social research. This was no mean feat in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when survey research and other quantitative approaches – largely hostile to the principles and practices of fieldwork – increasingly dominated the discipline (Platt 1995; 1998). Indeed, even at Chicago the approach had few defender-practitioners and Hughes ‘was almost the only one in the United States at that time to offer such a course’ (Chapoulie 1996: 15–16). Though ‘Hughesian sociology’ focuses on small-scale entities, it is, in fact, capable of dealing with a variety of ‘orders’ or ‘levels’ of social reality. We would like to describe briefly at least some of these basic principles and ideas because they help contextualize our discussion of his broad theoretical frame of reference in the section immediately below. The first such principle is Hughes’s stress on doing ‘detached’ research and analysis. Value considerations (moral as well as political) might enter into the selection of a research problem, but it is the scholar’s privilege  – indeed, for Hughes, a duty  – to investigate fundamental problems that may have no short-term policy implications. The case for detachment was set forth in Hughes’s presidential address to the ASA, ‘Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination’. There Hughes declared, ‘The kind of freeing of the imagination I am speaking of requires a great and deep detachment, a pursuit of sociological thought and research in a playful mood. But it is a detachment of deep concern and intense curiosity […] [T]‌hose sociologists who will contribute most […] are those so deeply concerned with [human society] as to need a desperate, almost fanatical detachment from which to see it in full perspective’ (1963: 890). For Hughes, the case for policy research should not be pressed at the expense of research based on detachment (see Banton 2005:  630). Hughes clarified how much one can learn by adopting such an intellectual stance in the paper ‘Bastard Institutions’ ([1951a] 1971), which was, for its time, an impressive attempt to transcend conventional ways of seeing social life

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by looking for the whole range of possibilities social life might offer to human agents, in their both angelic and diabolic versions. For Hughes, once one adopted this detached perspective, the criminal racket was just one institution like others, not that different from the state.25 This is not to say that Hughes had no social conscience. Quite the opposite. He was, in fact, a ‘moral man’, much troubled by ‘cruelty, injustice and war’ (Becker, Geer, Riesman and Weiss 1968b: ix, viii). He had strongly held, politically liberal views on social issues, but was leery of tying sociology to political causes in any but extraordinary circumstances (see Helmes-Hayes chapter, this volume). Second, ‘Hughesian sociology’, deeply rooted in Georg Simmel’s formalism (see Becker 1998: 1; Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 652; Rock 1979: 48, 51; Heath 1984: 220), aimed to discover ‘social patterns’ – in the sense of what Eviatar Zerubavel (2007) has more recently referred to as ‘social pattern analysis’. Drawing on Simmel, Hughes argued that social interaction should be studied in processual terms and claimed, further, that the primary theoretical purpose of sociology was the discovery of ‘recurring forms of social interaction’ (Hughes 1971b:  viii; Chapoulie 1996:  24). And as Hughes’s friend, Lewis Coser, has pointed out, he was exceptionally good at it. ‘He displayed a genius for discerning similarities of pattern among social phenomena of the most diverse sort, and for inventing constructs – mistakes at work, routinized emergency, bastard institutions, dilemmas and contradictions of status – that threw new light on everyday happenings by viewing them as instances of such general parts’ (1994: 1). What Simmel pioneered, Hughes helped transform into a generalized research approach that students and apprentices (even ‘reluctant’ ones such as Goffman) could imitate and develop further. Essential to this search for patterns is a third aspect of Hughesian sociology, that is, its stress on comparison. According to Becker, ‘comparison has always been the backbone, acknowledged or not, of good sociological thinking’ and, in his mind, Hughes was the ‘master’ of comparative sociology (2010: 1). Hughes’s emphasis on this principle can be found in the closing sentence of his preface to The Sociological Eye: ‘One of my basic assumptions is that if one quite clearly sees something happen once, it is almost certain to have happened again and again. The burden of proof is on those who claim a thing once seen is an exception; if they look hard, they may find it everywhere, although with some interesting differences in each case’ (1971b: ix). This is the reason that Hughes repeatedly encouraged his students and colleagues to use comparative analysis. A comparative gaze allowed one to draw on multi-contextual evidence in order to develop a transcontextual sociology. This is exactly the strategy Hughes envisioned for the sociological study of work. The essential problems of men at work are the same whether they do their work in the laboratories of some famous institution or in the messiest vat room of a pickle factory. Until we can find a point of view and concepts which will enable us to make comparisons between the junk peddler and the professor without intent to debunk the one and patronize the other, we cannot do our best work. ([1951b] 1971: 342)

However, the attempt to identify formal patterns implies the capacity to limit one’s attention to only certain aspects of actual situations. Only by learning how to be selectively

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observant could one stay analytically focused – to see the abstract in the concrete, the general in the specific. To adopt this strategy one had to be willing to repurpose one’s theoretical concepts and to decontextualize one’s empirical findings. But for Hughes this is essential: ‘If one frees his curiosity of the peculiarities of some one time and place by developing a good set of abstract ideas for comparing one case or situation with another, he will see many situations in various parts of the world comparable to those that originally aroused his interest’ ([1956] 1971: 439–40). ‘The more abstract one’s way of conceiving things, the more likely one is to make generic discoveries which apply to many concrete […] phenomena’ (438). Essential to the fixing of the comparative gaze and the rethinking and/or development of abstractions and concepts were two other notions: ‘marginality’ and the use of what Hughes referred to as ‘free association’. The former, marginality, referred to benefits that come from being an outsider to whatever setting is under investigation. The outsider can see things that insiders miss – or, at least, can see them in a new light – because he or she does not take them for granted (Hughes [1957a] 1971: 529; [1956] 1971: 434–5; see also Weiss 1997: 548–51; Strauss 1996: 273–4). The latter, free association, is a wideranging and creative, but disciplined, attempt to think about cultural objects and social processes – from multiple settings, familiar and unfamiliar – in novel and revealing ways. The essence of the sociological imagination is free association, guided but not hampered by a frame of reference internalized not quite into the unconscious […] When people say of my work, as they often do, that it shows insight, I cannot think what they could mean other than whatever quality may have been produced by intensity of observation and a turning of the wheels to find a new combination of the old concepts, or even a new concept. (1971b: vi)

It is the adoption of Simmel’s ‘formal’ sociological imagination, a search for recurring forms and patterns of behaviour, that allows us to see the generic when we look at the specific. From this perspective, we can realize that the setting of statutes of limitations is actually not that different from enacting bankruptcy laws or letting bygones be bygones (Zerubavel 2003: 9, 94; see also Becker 2010). Similarly, studies of ‘lowly’ occupations can, in fact, shed light on work-related behaviour in high-status occupations (Hughes [1951b] 1971: 343). ‘The comparative student of man’s work learns about doctors by studying plumbers; and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists’ (Hughes [1951c] 1971: 316). One final point in this regard, to bring the discussion full circle. The style of social pattern analysis Hughes employs is of a special type. While ‘formal’ in the Simmelian sense, it does not abstract totally from time and space. Hughes wrote on a wide range of social issues and phenomena:  the industrialization and modernization of French Canada, German social movements, student culture in American colleges, professionalization and the growth and development of various historically contingent institutions, ‘bastard’ and otherwise. In each case, the institutions and social processes he discussed were real entities embedded in concrete spatial and temporal contexts. This suggests that while Hughes was interested in ‘social patterns’, he retained a balance between conceptual abstractness and historical concreteness. In the true Chicago spirit, he never forgot

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that the social sciences are historical sciences, and that social life is temporalized and located in physical space (see Abbott 2001). This was a necessary implication of the ecological approach he adapted from his mentor, Park, and used in modified form in his own research. As the two subsequent sections make clear, Hughes’s general theoretical frame of reference is best understood as a form of ‘interpretive ecology’, that is, as a pioneering attempt to capture in one framework both the ‘objectivism’ of a ‘structuralist’ ecological approach to social life and a ‘subjectivist’ approach to meanings and symbols that is the mark of any interpretivism. In our view, this framework constitutes one of Hughes’s major legacies to contemporary scholarship in the social sciences.26

Hughes’s Theoretical ‘Frame of Reference’: Interpretive Institutional Ecology27 It is best to be modest or circumspect in claiming to be able to ‘describe’/‘construct’ Hughes’s general theoretical frame of reference. Indeed, Becker, Chapoulie and others have argued that for three reasons it would be wrong to look for such a thing in his work. 1. Hughes was suspicious of pure or general theory, especially the sort of speculative theorizing undertaken by Parsons.28 As Joseph Gusfield put it, ‘Hughes always gave me the feeling he considered “theorizing” a waste. Everett was one whose sociology was always “grounded” and [thus he] had a mild distaste for those who “did theory” and avoided grounding’ (   J. Gusfield to R. Helmes-Hayes, n.d. [December 1994]). Robert Weiss, Hughes’s colleague at Brandeis said the same thing:  ‘Hughes was […] a strong theorist, but one not that interested in developing pure theory in the fashion of Parsons. Everett was a little uncomfortable with people who were too abstract. He thought it was easy to get lost in pure conceptualization’ (R. Weiss to R. Helmes-Hayes, 23 March 1995). And it is not just that Hughes did not ‘do’ theory in the sense that Parsons ‘did theory’. 2. Some commentators on Hughes’s work argue that there is no coherent, general theory to be found in his oeuvre. As Becker put it, ‘Hughes had no love for abstract theory […] He thought that there were theories about specific things like race and ethnicity or the organization of work, but that there wasn’t any such animal as theory in general’ (1998: 1). ‘He had, rather, a theoretically informed way of working […] His theory was not designed to provide all the conceptual boxes into which the world had to fit. It consisted, instead, of a collection of generalizing tricks he used to think about society, tricks that helped him interpret and make general sense of data’ (1998: 3). Chapoulie makes a related point: ‘Freely developing a small number of concepts, [Hughes’s] work offers a collection of subtly elaborated ideas that outline an analytic perspective on social reality. But these essays, in form and content, scarcely resemble what is understood today as “theory” ’ (1996: 21). 3. In fact, for Chapoulie, the very act of searching for, identifying and codifying the theoretical content of Hughes’s work would be to misrepresent its nature and purpose. ‘You postulate that there is a quasi-complete coherence and unity in the work of Hughes. I think it’s not true for Hughes and for all serious research in the

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social sciences. These works are historical products shaped by a genuine approach (or point of view), but also by historical contingencies, and there is not a core in these intellectual products you can prove you have discovered (J.-M. Chapoulie to R. Helmes-Hayes, 9 June 1995; see also Chapoulie 1987: 278–9). To look for and outline Hughes’s theoretical frame of reference would, he says, do an injustice to ‘the investigative spirit at the centre of his sociology’. (1996: 21, 12; see also Becker to R. Helmes-Hayes, 31 December 1994; interview of Becker with Helmes-Hayes, 16 November 1993) In our view, this representation of Hughes as a ‘theorist’ should be reconsidered. Part of the problem is our disciplinary conception of what a theory is, what theorizing looks like and, thus, who gets to wear the mantle of theorist. What does it mean to say one is a ‘theorist’? What do we mean when we say Hughes is a theorist? We certainly do not claim that Hughes was a theorist on the model of Parsons or Habermas. However, we can reasonably say that he regarded theory as crucial to the sociological enterprise and that he used and developed it over his career. Becker himself points out that ‘Hughesian sociology’ was larded throughout with intellectual devices and conceptual innovations – ‘tricks of the trade’ (1998) – which might be understood as ingredients of a truly theoretical approach to sociological investigation (see also Simpson 1972: 547; Strauss 1996: 281; Strauss to Helmes-Hayes, 2 November 1994; Emerson 1997: 40). We acknowledge that he never wrote the ‘little book of theory’ mentioned by Becker – a modest volume that would have distilled ‘the essence of [Hughes’s] theoretical position’ from the ‘nuggets of sociological generalizations scattered throughout his essays and books’ (Becker 1998: 1). However, none of this means that there was no general theoretical frame of reference to be gleaned from Hughes’s writings. Such is the claim Rick Helmes-Hayes makes in ‘Everett Hughes:  Theorist of the Second Chicago School’ (1998a; see also 1998b; 2005). There Helmes-Hayes argues that Hughes was a ‘social theorist’ in his own right and that there is a theoretical ‘frame of reference’29 to be found by a close reading of Hughes’s work. ‘The fact that Hughes did not outline his frame of reference in the self-consciously coherent and comprehensive way that today’s tastes demand’, Helmes-Hayes writes, ‘does not mean that there isn’t a relatively coherent and comprehensive theory to be found in his oeuvre [… and] systematized’ (1998a: 633). Once systematized, insofar as this is possible and appropriate, Helmes-Hayes argues, this frame of reference is found to be ‘abstract, generalizable, empirically grounded and reflexive’ (1998a:  633; see Hughes [1957a] 1971:  525–6).30 Moreover, it is directly and symbiotically tied to an equally reflexive, complementary ‘methodological orientation’ Hughes developed and employed (see Helmes-Hayes, ‘Studying “Going Concerns”: Everett C. Hughes on Method’ [2010]; reproduced in the present volume). The last mentioned feature – reflexivity – is especially crucial and appealing in Helmes-Hayes’s view because it means that Hughes’s theoretical/methodological approach ‘is capable of describing itself in the same way that it describes other aspects of social reality’. That is, ‘like other aspects of social reality, Hughes’s perspective is a ‘going concern’ – elusive, multi-sided, changeable and lacking closure’ (1998a: 633).

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In our estimation there is much that is theoretically interesting and valuable in Hughes’s writings. We acknowledge that Hughes did not produce either an elaborate, complex and highly abstract system of conceptual categories or a philosophically inclined critical theory of the type we have become accustomed to reading in recent decades. Nonetheless, he had highly developed conceptual skills, a keen critical and political eye, and always kept theoretical concerns in mind. As a result, when read as a whole, his work can be seen to contain a general theoretical ‘frame of reference’ that can be outlined ‘without violating either the investigative spirit or the tentative and processual character of the approach’ (Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 633). Helmes-Hayes’s article refers to Hughes’s frame of reference as interpretive institutional ecology.31 It has two aspects, one microsociological, the other meso-/macrosociological. The micro- (or interpretive) aspect is based on a set of concepts – social interaction, institution, the definition of the situation, process, careers and so on (1998a: 649) – drawn from the work of William Graham Sumner, Charles Horton Cooley, Park, Thomas and, above all, Simmel. Hughes used this framework to examine ‘the typical processes by which people in face-to-face interaction situations individually and collectively interpret “reality” and then uncritically use or intersubjectively renegotiate […] institutionalized forms of social behaviour appropriate to that reality as they have defined it’ (653). This is the ‘interpretive’, ‘interactionist’ Hughes so familiar to students of the Chicago School.32 Not so well known are the meso- and macrosociological elements of his approach based on an ecological and functionalist analysis of institutions. Most sociologists see Hughes as an interpretive/interactionist scholar (see, e.g., Prus, 1996:  125–32), but Hughes’s own view was that he was an ‘ecologist’. Note the following claim, made in 1977: ‘I think I can rightly claim to have trod the ecological path from my graduate school days until now’ (Everett C. Hughes Papers, Boston College, Box 5, file ‘Memorandum on possible lecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’, 8 March 1977). Like Park and Roderick McKenzie, he was interested in the macrosociological factors and processes that affected the distribution of people and institutions in physical and social space. For him, ecological analysis was an essential part of sociological research:  ‘It is not probable that any institution could be completely understood without study of the ecological conditions of survival of its operating units’ (Hughes 1969:  159; see also 1936:  188). Thus he retained elements of the classical Chicago approach: a focus on the ecological struggle for survival among competing individuals, groups and institutions (which he often referred to as ‘enterprises’ or ‘going concerns’); a concern with the ‘natural history’ of institutions; the sense of society as an organic system and a web of reciprocal social relations; and so forth (ECH Papers, UCHI, Box 100, Folder 13; ‘A Proposal for the Study of the Dynamics of Rural Culture and Institutions, 1945’, 6 November 1945; see also Hughes 1936; 1939; 1946; 1957b; 1969; Simpson 1972: 550; Riesman and Becker 1984: xi–xii). The purpose of this aspect of his approach, according to Helmes-Hayes, was to provide ‘a solid ecological understanding of the broader institutional framework within which […] interpretive (formalist-interactionist) analyses of face-to-face interaction milieux might be developed’. More specifically, its purpose was to deal with (a) ‘the meso-sociological description and explanation of typical […] social processes operational at the level of single institutions’ (see, e.g., Hughes 1931:  2, 6–8; 1939:  304–9;

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1969: 147–53) and (b) ‘the explication of phenomena such as industrialization, colonialization, power and social class in terms of the logic of inter-institutional relations at the level of what we now refer to as macrosociology’ (Hughes 1939: 289–95; 1969: 130–7; see Chapoulie 1996: 21 and Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 637; 1998b). However, to say that Hughes viewed himself as an ecologist and to argue that he used the ecological approach is not to claim that he employed classical human ecology in an unthinking way. Hughes recognized the shortcomings of Park’s approach and developed a version of ecology that incorporated some aspects of the classical approach and modified or excised others (Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 626–33; 1998b; see also Faught 1980: 74, 79). In addition, he added elements from other theoretical perspectives; for example, from anthropological functionalism he picked up Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of ‘function’ (Hughes 1939: 290; 1936: 187; see Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 646; 1998b). Despite these modifications, which gave the frame of reference a structuralist side or component, Hughes’s approach remained dualistic. In the paragraphs immediately above, we have outlined some of the basic elements of Hughes’s theoretical frame of reference. It is possible to look at Hughes’s theoretical orientation in another way as well. That is, rather than looking at the pieces and kinds of theory he cobbled together to develop his frame of reference, we can describe some of the theoretical and methodological principles that undergirded his approach to doing sociology.

Hughes’s Underlying Theoretical Principles Hughes’s vision of what social life is and how it should be studied – a relatively comprehensive set of theoretical principles – is very different from the general systems of such theoretically minded scholars as Parsons, Habermas or Luhmann. Instead, it resembles in content and style the approaches of such scholars as Norbert Elias, Goffman and Bourdieu. 1. What we call ‘society’ looks like a bundle of interactions. 2. Interactions are both interpersonal, face-to-face and subjectively experienced and objective, that is, identifiable by scholars on the basis of observations and documentary records, independently of the actors’ consciousness – even if the latter is the primary source of data for social observers. This means that there is a social structure that is made of interpersonal interactions but extends beyond them. 3. If society is a bundle of interactions, then social phenomena are continuously in flux, that is, they have a processual nature. Change is inscribed in social life, though evolutionary models are not the best way to capture this changing nature of social life, even if the Chicago notion of ‘natural history’ makes a case for an idea of change as a recurrent succession, or sequence, of stages. 4. Every social object  – a norm, an institution, a social group, even a social representation – is a historical product situated in specific spatial-temporal coordinates. It is context-dependent and should not be analysed exclusively in general and abstract ways.

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5.

Every social object is what it is thanks not to some mysterious ‘essence’ but because of the system of relations in which it is embedded. Even when studying an individual object, such as an occupation, the task of sociology is to locate this object in a larger field of social relations. 6. Sociology is the study of recursive forms of interaction (collective action) that are constantly being made and remade – even disappearing, for that is always an open possibility. Sociology is also, however, the study of persistent social rules, norms, folkways and institutions, which impinge on that interaction, not in a predetermined, or fixed, way but according to the social uses people make of the rules in their local and temporally defined context. Norms are not fixed entities, but are subject to interpretation and manipulation, even distortion, by those who are supposed to be regulated by them. However, social actors’ agency has limits; it is historically and spatially constrained. These limits have to be empirically determined. 7. Language is a crucial ingredient of social life and must be studied carefully. Social situations are what they are because of the ways in which they are defined. Such definitions depend on the social uses of terms and vocabularies. As language is a social tool, crucial in social intercourse, it should be a key focus of sociological investigation. Since language is an instrument, possibly the instrument, of objectification and reification, the analysis of language is the best antidote against ethnocentrism.33 8. Sociology has to be rigorously non-ethnocentric, even if ethnocentrism is a common feature of social life. Sociology must be a cosmopolitan enterprise. This is why the comparative gaze is crucial. In our view, the centrality and strategic mission granted to language and to the analysis of words and symbolic tools makes Hughesian sociology an important – and curiously neglected – forerunner of current cultural sociology. That is, it is an important forerunner to the ‘cultural turn’ that has marked contemporary sociology. This attention to language as a natural means of social life is pivotal, and it accounts for Hughes’s interest in redefining ordinary language terms (career, drama, restriction, turning point, mandate, license and so on) in order to make them into analytical tools. Hughes was not an inventor of technical neologisms but a forger of definitions for selected terms from the ordinary linguistic repertoire (Demazière and Dubar 1997). This makes his sociological writings not only extraordinarily readable but also apparently easy – even if under the surface there is a complex reasoning.

Hughes’s Contemporary Relevance: Bibliometric Evidence A return to Hughes, especially a revisiting of his intellectual example and teachings, can be justified for reasons other than a nostalgic homage to a forgotten master. As the pages above make clear, Hughes dealt sensitively and intelligently with a range of complex issues that continues to engage the discipline, issues best captured, perhaps, under the heading of the problem of structure and agency (see Coser 1994: 1). Moreover, ethnographic research now has a high profile in social research, thanks in part to the rise of cultural studies and other transdisciplinary approaches that are especially sensitive to

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issues of subjectivity, interpretation and experience. Given these circumstances, it seems time to re-engage Hughes’s writings and reconsider his influence. In short, it is our view that Hughes’s work should constitute a familiar part of the corpus of everyday sociology. Certainly, it rewards those who read it, use it and assess it. Earlier in the introduction we described in general terms the spread of interest in Hughes’s work in France and Italy and, to a lesser degree, in other parts of Europe. Russia, Brazil and Poland can now be added to the list. In the pages that follow, we offer bibliometric evidence to document Hughes’s impact on the social sciences since his death. Our starting point is a search conducted in the ISI Web of Knowledge, looking for trends in the citation of Hughes’s work – both in general and vis-à-vis his three major books (1958; 1971a; Becker, Geer, Hughes and Riesman 1961). In total, we identified 2,403 texts (articles and reviews) published in scientific periodicals since 1985 (the first year covered by ISI Web) that cited or referred to at least one of Hughes’s publications.34 This body of texts offers useful information about (1)  the timing of the reception of Hughes’s work; (2) the geographical spread of his ideas; (3) the languages in which his work has been published/discussed; and (4) the disciplines/research areas (and publications) that have demonstrated a receptiveness to Hughes’s work. The first thing to note (see Fig.  0.1) is that Hughes’s profile in the social scientific literature is modest compared to the profiles of other major figures such as Merton, Goffman or Bourdieu. References to Hughes in the time span under investigation hover around 80 per year, with a substantial uptick since 2007. References to the others mentioned amount to hundreds each year. This is hardly news, of course. More interesting 140 120 100

Tot. The Soc Eye (331) Men and Their Work (465) Boys in White (673)

80 60 40 20

1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

0

Figure  0.1  Total references to Everett Hughes, and to three selected books authored or co-authored by him, in ISI Web of Science, 1985–2014 Source: ISI Web of Science.

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Table 0.1  References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present^, top five countries (minimum 60 citing texts) USA UK (England + Wales + Scotland) Canada France Australia

1252 468 245 118 60

52 19.5 10.2 4.9 2.5

Source: Elaboration on data from ISI Web of Science. ^ November 2015.

is that while Hughes’s presence is modest, it is relatively steady. Hughes died in 1983, so our data pertain specifically to his post-mortem reception. Looking at individual works in Hughes’s oeuvre, we do not find highly significant differences in the number of citations, though Boys in White usually draws more citations than other pieces. This means that Hughes’s reputation rests less on any single magnum opus or foundational article than on the broad set of ideas he discussed in a wide array of venues. Second (see Table 0.1), citations of Hughes’s work are found overwhelmingly in the English-language literature – 93.5 per cent of all citations – though there are signs it is slowly being extended to French (3.6 per cent) and other languages (i.e., Italian, German, Portuguese).35 Third, while the circulation of Hughes’s ideas continues to be based largely in the United States, his work has a substantial profile in other countries, especially the United Kingdom and Canada. As one might expect, France is the (continental) European country where Hughes’s ideas have circulated most, followed by Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. More surprising are data about the penetration of Hughes in countries in the so-called Global South, that is, Australia, China and Brazil. Surprisingly, Italy is near the bottom of this ranking. With respect to the disciplines/research areas in which Hughes’s works are cited (see Table 0.2), sociology ranks at the top, though his research is frequently cited in economics/business, education and psychology journals as well.36 Some specialized research areas Hughes cultivated during his career, for example, nursing, rank relatively high, a sign of a persistent presence – and possibly strength of impact – on these fields. More striking is the wide dispersion of his ideas across research areas. There are references to his work in over 50 disciplines as disparate and ‘far from home’ as veterinary medicine, reproductive biology, neurology and rehabilitation. However, if we recall that Hughes devoted large part of his research to the study professional education, especially in the health sector, and to the study of issues of identity at work, these apparent anomalies make sense. Nonetheless, the data also suggest that Hughes’s impact on research and scholarship may be difficult to assess because of its wide but ‘thin’ dispersion. By comparison, there is a clear pattern to the journals in which Hughes’s works are cited. Most citations occur in social science journals, especially sociology journals (see Table 0.3). At the top of the list is the flagship journal of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Symbolic Interaction, with 66 articles referring to Hughes. This is hardly surprising, given Hughes’s high status in this intellectual tradition. Equally understandable is his

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THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO EVERETT HUGHES Table 0.2  References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present^, by research areas (first 15 research areas only) Research Area

N

Sociology Business, Economics Education Educational Research Psychology Social Sciences (Other Topics) Public Environmental, Occupational Health Biomedical Social Sciences Health Care Sciences Services Nursing Government Law Criminology, Penology Urban Studies Communication Anthropology History

780 380 326 291 200 197 157 130 82 75 65 61 60 55 45

% 32.4* 15.8 13.6 12.1 8.3 8.2 6.5 5.4 3.4 3.1 2.7 2.5 2.5 2.3 1.8

Source: ISI Web of Science. ^ : November 2015. * Note: Percentage figures do not add to 100 per cent because the same reference might be classified into more than one research area (e.g., Sociology and Urban Studies). Thus, the percentage figures are to be read as follows: 32.4 per cent of the references to Hughes’s writings occurred in journals classified by ISI as pertaining to ‘Sociology’; 15.8 per cent of the references to Hughes’s writings occurred in journals classified by ISI as pertaining to ‘Business, Economics’, and so on.

presence in journals devoted to medical sociology and ethnography. Also worthy of notice, and not unexpected, is the frequent citation of Hughes’s work in two high-profile French journals, that is, Revue Francaise de Sociologie and Sociologie du travail. There are three influential British journals on the list, including Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association, and two core Canadian journals. However, the two main American sociology journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) figure relatively low in the ranking. This is surprising, considering that Hughes was for a long time the editor of the AJS. His lack of profile in Social Problems, the journal of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, is likewise perplexing. Hughes served as vice president of the organization in 1960–1 and published one of his most famous and influential articles – ‘Good People and Dirty Work’  – in Social Problems in 1962 (1962] 1971). Besides medicine and ethnography, journals devoted to organizations and occupations are likely to cite Hughes’s works, for example, Organizational Studies, Administrative Science Quarterly and Work and Occupations. Noteworthy is the citation of his work in management and business journals such as the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Review.37 Authors who make use of Hughes’s work and/or ideas include some of the most wellknown figures in sociology:  Hughes’s collaborator and student par excellence, Becker, and Gary Alan Fine, one of the most active ethnographers and symbolic interactionist spokespersons of recent times. Authors who cite Hughes’s work in the field of work and

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Insight through Craftsmanship Table 0.3  References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present^, by source (i.e., journal title) (first 18 only) Journal Title

N

Symbolic Interaction Social Science & Medicine Sociology of Health & Illness Journal of Contemporary Ethnography Human Relations Sociological Quarterly Journal of Health & Social Behavior Journal of Advanced Nursing Revue française de sociologie Work & Occupations American Journal of Sociology Academic Medicine American Sociological Review Organization Studies Sociologie du travail Medical Education Social Problems Sociology (Journal of the British Sociological Association) Administrative Science Quarterly Academy of Management Journal

66 59 49 42 32 32 27 25 25 23 22 19 19 19 19 18 18 18 17 16

Source: ISI Web of Science. ^ November 2015.

professions (including medicine) include Stephen Timmerman, Julia Evetts, Christian Heath and Robert Dingwall, the last-mentioned an outspoken representative of symbolic interactionism. It is also worth noting the presence of Stephen Barley, a leading theorist of organization; Star, a leading scholar in the field of science and technology studies; and Candace West, a renowned sociologist of gender. All the numbers are small, however:  Fine heads the list with 14 citations of Hughes’s work. Well-known texts in which Hughes’s works are cited include Doing Gender (West and Zimmermann 1987) and ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’ (Star and Griesemer 1989). In each case, the authors not only cite his work but also use it as a source of ideas for building their respective main arguments.38 The ISI Web of Science covers only a relatively small subset of English-language, US- and UK-based scientific periodicals. Since 1997, data in ISI Web of Science also cover Latin American journals, thanks to the inclusion of the SCielo database among its sources. However, still excluded are most journals published in Europe and elsewhere. Thus, its representativeness is limited to top journals and certain geopolitical areas. In order to complement and supplement our data, we searched an additional database, that is, the Europe-based Scopus. While including almost all of the journals covered by ISI, Scopus contains also a large number of European journals. Figures 0.2 and 0.3 compare references to The Sociological Eye and Men and their Work according to ISI and Scopus.

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THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO EVERETT HUGHES 60 The Soc Eye (ISI = 331) The Soc Eye (Scopus = 588) 50

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Figure 0.2  References to The Sociological Eye in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

60 Men and Their Work (Scopus = 641) Men and Their Work (ISI = 465)

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Figure 0.3  References to Men and Their Work in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

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Table 0.4  Properties of texts citing The Sociological Eye or Men and Their Work according to Scopus, 1971 to present^ (N = 1178) Language

English (1,079), French (55), Portuguese (19), German (15), Spanish (6) Chinese (3), Dutch (3), Italian (2), Russian (2), Japanese (1), Slovak (1), Swedish (1)

Country

United States (452), United Kingdom (243), Canada (88), France (78) Australia (43), Germany (39), Sweden (21), Netherlands (17), Switzerland (16), Brazil (14), Denmark (14), Belgium (13), Spain (12), Finland (11), Italy (10), etc.

Subject Area

Social Sciences (796), Business, Management and Accounting (258), Medicine (176), Psychology (148), Arts and Humanities (87), Economics, Econometrics and Finance (78), Nursing (65), Health Professions (28), Computer Science (27), Decision Sciences (22), Engineering (20), etc.

Source Title

Social Science and Medicine (35), Symbolic Interaction (28) Sociology of Health and Illness (25), Qualitative Sociology (22) Human Relations (14), Revue Francaise de Sociologie (11) Gender Work and Organization (10), Current Sociology (10) American Sociologist (10), Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (10), etc.

^ November 2015.

References to Hughes’s two most important books are more numerous in Scopus than in ISI, but show similar patterns of circulation and reception (see Table 0.4): (1) They are cited predominantly in English-language sources, followed at a distance by French-language sources. (2) They are cited predominantly in US and UK sources followed by sources in Canada, France, Australia and Germany. What emerges from Scopus is a wider circulation out of Western Europe and North America, and some indications of the spread of Hughes’s ideas to Eastern Asia and Africa. (3) Hughes is cited predominantly in the social sciences (especially sociology), followed by business, medicine and psychology. (4) The list of journals titles in which his work is cited is similar to the list generated by an analysis of the ISI database, though some journals not included in the latter appear in the former (e.g., Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung) and some of the journals included are more prominent in the discipline (e.g., Theory and Society). Indeed, the greater representativeness of this source, and the greater number of journals covered makes it possible to focus not just on citations in the body of an essay or other source but also to document references to Hughes’s work and ideas that appear in the inner core of articles, that is, in their titles and/or abstracts and/or keywords. This is a more direct way to assess Hughes’s presence and relevance in contemporary scholarship than the simple (and often purely ritual or highly contingent) bibliographic references to various of his texts. Between 1995 and 2015, 24 articles indexed by Scopus referred to Hughes either in their title or, more often, their abstract. The countries involved were the United States (7), France (5), United Kingdom (3), Canada (2)  and, with one each, Belgium, Brazil and Sweden. The subject areas range from the Social Sciences (21) to Arts and Humanities (5), Medicine (3), Business, Management and Accounting (2), Psychology (2), Decision Sciences (1) and Economics, Econometrics and Finance (1). The dispersion

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among journals is very high:  only two journals, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2) and Symbolic Interaction (2), have more than one article. Other journals listed include those in sociology (e.g., Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Theory, Sociologie du travail, Tidsskrift for Samfunnsforskning); organization (Accounting Organizations and Society); economics (Consumption Markets and Culture); history of ideas (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences); medicine (Historia Ciencias Saude Manguinhos, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy); religious studies (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion); education (Education et Sociétés); and history and literature (Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest). Looking at the contents of the citing texts, five are studies of Hughes and his work (Strauss 1996; Chapoulie 1996; Helmes-Hayes 1998a; 2000; Guth 2010); one is a study on Goffman dealing with his relationship to Hughes (   Jaworski 2000); and another is a celebrative assessment of Boys in White (Nunes and de Barros 2014). Apart from an article on Quebec (Fournier 2001) that refers to Hughes as a founder of Canadian sociology, all the other texts invoke Hughes as the inventor of one or more concepts (e.g., dirty work, master status, moral division of labour) that are used in the citing article, or as a major, if not iconic, representative of the Chicago School (e.g., Vienne 2005). Taken together, the image of Hughes these texts transmit is that he is a scholar whose name is relatively well established and who is firmly associated with a set of key concepts to be found in the toolbox of the social researcher. This contrasts with the image that emerges from studies that focus on Hughes’s work in the style of intellectual biography. In these studies he is portrayed as a worthy and insightful scholar whose work should be better known.

This Book This book describes Hughes’s formation and oeuvre and offers an outline and critical assessment of a number of Hughes’s contributions to sociological theory and method while trying to guide readers to an understanding of his current legacy. It includes ten chapters: two were previously published, and eight appear for the first time in this volume. The opening chapter, by Chapoulie is the one that most directly and broadly addresses Hughes’s contribution. The essay, which originally appeared in Sociological Theory in 1996, offers a description and assessment of Hughes’s work that sets it in the context of American sociology and, more particularly, the so-called Chicago School. In Chapoulie’s view, there was no such school for Hughes to join, even had he been so inclined – which he was not. So Hughes is best thought of not as a latter-day representative of the Chicago School but as a bridging figure between the Chicago ‘tradition’ – a ‘collective enterprise’ characterized by only ‘partial intellectual coherence’ – and subsequent generations of students. He argues that Hughes developed an approach that retained some theoretical and methodological sensibilities and elements from the time of Park but refused to ‘preserve the tradition’ and be a ‘representative’ of the school. He stresses Hughes’s role as a champion and shepherd of fieldwork in the 1940s and 1950s. As well, he discusses Hughes’s reliance on the essay as a form of communication, his use of everyday language and his informal style of writing. Chapoulie concludes by arguing that Hughes practised sociology as a ‘craft’ that drew sensitively and creatively on (1) a wide range of theoretical ideas and frameworks and (2) a sophisticated, deeply reflexive conception

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of methodology. The result? ‘Original’, ‘stimulating’ and ‘consequential’ research, wise commentary on a broad array of disciplinary and societal problems and disputes, and ‘inspiration’ for those who engage with his perspective. Helmes-Hayes picks up on many of the themes discussed in Chapoulie’s chapter but focuses on Hughes’s methodological thinking and practice. He argues that Hughes’s methodological orientation can be outlined in terms of eleven interrelated ‘principles’. There is, he says, an integral connection between Hughes’s methodological ‘orientation’ and his overall theoretical ‘frame of reference’. Perhaps the most unusual feature of Helmes-Hayes’s argument is his claim that Hughes’s theoretical frame of reference and methodological orientation contain a view of how to live a reflective and reflexive life as a scholar-citizen. Helmes-Hayes’s contention is that Hughes did not, as the conventional wisdom would suggest, everywhere and always separate sociology and politics. To provide readers with a sense of Hughes as a person and a scholar, we begin the balance of the collection with a biographical chapter by Vienne. For the past 15 years, France, more than any country outside the United States, has been a site of increasing interest in Hughes’s teaching and writings. In part, this has been a consequence of Bourdieu’s mediated reception of Goffman and in part due to efforts described above by Becker and Chapoulie. Vienne’s interest in Hughes is grounded in this recent but well-established Francophone interest in Chicago, interactionism and fieldwork. He thus frames his chapter as an account of Hughes’s formation as a field researcher and inspiring proponent and teacher of fieldwork. The chapter by Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden extends Vienne’s account of Hughes’s intellectual legacy by detailing his contribution to the institutionalization of sociology in Canada. They do so employing the term ‘the Chicago School diaspora’, though their use of the term ‘diaspora’ is a novel one. For them, the use of the term is not meant to invoke ‘an image of the scattering of a people’. Rather, they want to employ it to ‘conceptualize how key ideas and symbolic representations of key figures that people associate with the Chicago School have been dispersed and taken up by scholars, many of whom cannot claim any relationship with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago’. In their rendering, the spread of various facets of the Chicago School, socalled, is best understood as a consequence of the fact that ‘there is no absolute agreement on what is meant by the cultural object known as the Chicago School’. They then draw on a very Hughesian-style analogy – the Chicago School as a ‘Swiss army knife’ – to argue that the idea of the Chicago School is best understood as ‘a multifaceted tool with no predefined purpose’ but many potential uses and capacities. For some scholars it is Blumerian symbolic interactionism; for others, Park’s human ecology and so on. Scholars use it for all these purposes, they say, but inappropriately ‘conflate the ‘tool’ they are using with the entirety of the Swiss army knife toolkit that is the Chicago School’. The chapter by Douglas Harper speaks directly to one of the most consequential aspects of Hughes’s legacy, that is, his impact on the development of fieldwork. Harper earned his PhD at Brandeis University in 1975 and was among the last students Hughes supervised. Harper’s project, described here, was a fieldwork-based study of the culture of railroad tramps who earn a sporadic income travelling (illegally) by rail to pick fruit in various parts of the United States. In his sensitive and respectful chapter, Harper recalls

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Hughes’s efforts to encourage him to see these men not as ‘misfits’ but as migrant workers whose unusual habits fit the needs of an agricultural economy based on seasonal labour. A distinctive aspect of the project – and a subsequent book that Harper produced from the thesis (Harper 1982) – was that photography was integral to the fieldwork. Harper’s recollection of his discussions of these photographs with Hughes showed him to be both teacher and student as he helped Harper to understand society sociologically using visual tools and visually based insights that would supplement a more traditional, text-based form of communication. The subsequent chapter, by Christian Fleck, provides a fascinating account of a consequential ‘non-event’ in Hughes’s career, that is, the University of Chicago Press’s curious decision not to publish Hughes’s fieldwork-based study of the post-World War II culture of silence that developed among Germans  – citizens, scholars, bureaucrats  – regarding Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews, Slavs and gypsies. In the course of describing and explaining how such atrocities could be committed, ignored, even condoned (see Hughes’s memorandum ‘Innocents Abroad, 1948: Or How to Behave in Occupied Germany’, first published in Sociologica 2 [2010d]), Hughes developed the concept of ‘dirty work’. When the University of Chicago Press declined to publish the manuscript, Hughes put the materials aside. Not until 1962, at the urging of Becker, did he publish the iconic essay ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ in Social Problems. Fleck’s chapter is interesting and significant for a number of reasons. Two in particular stand out for our purposes. First, Fleck’s chapter complements perfectly Harper’s essay on Hughes as a proponent of fieldwork. Here is a first-person account of Hughes’s efforts to understand the culture of silence around the Holocaust. We get to hear from Hughes the fieldworker instead of hearing about him from others. Second, it describes the genesis of one of Hughes’s most famous concepts: ‘dirty work’. Historically, scholars have pounced on these nuggets – ‘the drama of work’, ‘routinized emergencies’, ‘total institutions’ – as the core of Hughes’s theoretical contribution to the discipline. The chapter by Lisa Jo van den Scott and Deborah van den Hoonard picks up on precisely this theme, that is, Hughes’s conceptual contribution. We noted above that Hughes is well known for his development of useful concepts such as dirty work. We also argued that his theoretical and conceptual contribution is less well known than it should be. Van den Scott and van den Hoonard illustrate precisely this point by documenting the genesis and development of the concept ‘master status’, a term developed by Hughes and now widely used in sociology. Drawing on data generated by a Google Scholar web search, they show how the concept, originally framed in Hughes’s 1945 article ‘Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status’, came to be part of the taken-for-granted lexicon of sociology. They then demonstrate further how it has been appropriated and modified over the years, applied in settings for purposes very different than those he intended – often, too, without citing him. Their chapter is, thus, more than an exercise in terminological archaeology. It is an illustration of the point we made above that he is a more influential sociologist than most scholars appreciate. The last two chapters in the collection – one by Izabela Wagner, the other by Neil McLaughlin and Stephen Steinberg  – offer very different interpretations of Hughes’s historical legacy and contemporary usefulness.

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Wagner’s chapter is the most enthusiastically positive treatment of Hughes’s work in the volume. Wagner, a student of Chapoulie and others of the ‘Chicago School in Paris’, is a long-time fieldworker. She regards Hughes as a ‘creative’ and ‘inspiring’ scholar and frames her chapter as an illustration of the usefulness of Hughesian-style ethnography. She draws on a number of Hughes’s methodological injunctions but in particular his stress on the utility of extreme comparisons. Her chapter reports on two very different groups of people – musicians and scientists – who live, in a sense, in two very different social worlds. One group performs in public; the other works in the closed confines of a research laboratory. As well, the groups are different in age. Many of the violin virtuosos are children, while all of the research scientists are adults. Despite these and other differences, some things bind them together. Both groups are seen by the public at large as individual ‘geniuses’ in search of ‘excellence’. But this impression, she argues, is partly false – and herein lies the importance of fieldwork. The fieldwork she undertook allowed her to demonstrate that whatever excellence or genius elite musicians and scientists might demonstrate as individuals, it is in part the outcome of a process of social construction. Musicians and scientists alike benefit from efforts made on their behalf by workers who do behind-the-scenes labour that ‘creates’ or ‘enables’ the genius/excellence demonstrated by elite musicians and scientists. McLaughlin and Steinberg’s assessment of Hughes is the diametrical opposite. Like other critics of the Chicago School/Chicago tradition, they take Chicago sociology in general and Everett Hughes in particular to task for what they regard as an egregious failure of nerve and insight. The focus of their analysis is Hughes’s treatment of the race question in the United States, more specifically, his failure to appreciate the depth and significance of racial inequality in the United States in the early 1960s. McLaughlin and Steinberg are respectful of Hughes’s personal moral and political opposition to racism, but unlike other contributors to the volume – and unlike other scholars who have praised Hughes’s contributions to the field of race and ethnic relations – they see his approach to and understanding of the race question as profoundly and irremediably flawed. The chapter provides a cogent and welcome counterpoint to the balance of the book. As editors, we were cognizant throughout the writing and editing process that the collection might tend in the direction of a Festschrift. This is not surprising, given that many of us are admirers of Hughes’s work, but it would do no justice to Hughes if that is all it was.

Notes 1 An exception is Helmes-Hayes (2005). 2 Hughes served as department chair, 1952–6. 3 After returning to McGill, Hughes taught a course on social movements that students referred to as ‘Hughes on the Nazis’ (Hughes 1971b: xv). 4 Hughes’s efforts did not help establish Chicago-style sociology in Germany (Fleck 2011). Almost nothing by Hughes has been translated into German. An exception is Hughes’s preface to Kracauer (1959). 5 Discussed below. 6 Hughes’s connection to French sociology dates to the late 1940s, but only in the last two decades has this relation been cemented (Tréanton 1997: 73).

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7 Others in this group are Michel Briand, Jean Peneff and Henri Peretz. 8 While the publisher of the Hughes volume is the same publisher that produced Italian versions of Goffman’s work, the editor of the Hughes volume, Santoro, discovered Hughes not through Goffman but via other avenues: (i) research in the sociology of professions and of ethnic relations (including migration); (ii) French social theory, especially the work of Bourdieu; and (iii) a search for alternative guides for doing empirical social research, specifically ethnographic methods. The latter gained a wide following in Italy after 2000. Textbooks were published and in 2008 a new journal devoted to this approach (Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa) was established. Despite these developments, Hughes’s work is rarely referred to in this literature, which is more attuned to critical and postmodern versions of ethnography than ‘classical’ ones. 9 In 2008 and 2009 three of Hughes’s articles – ‘Mistakes at Work’, ‘The Making of a Physician’ and ‘Social Role and the Division of Labor’ – were translated and appeared in Russian sociology journals (Hughes 2008a; 2008b; 2009). 10 The special issue, edited by Chapoulie, is organized around two axes: Hughes’s legacy in the United States, and Hughes’s impact on French sociology over time. Contributors included Becker, Platt, Robert Emerson, Robert Weiss and Paule Verdet. 11 In addition to the essays cited elsewhere in this introduction, see Baker (1976), Peneff (1984) and Manning (2000). 12 In the balance of the chapter, we cite many of Hughes’s works from The Sociological Eye (1971). A source originally published in 1936 would be cited as follows: Hughes ([1936] 1971). Page numbers cited are from The Sociological Eye. 13 See Vienne’s biographical essay on Hughes (this volume). 14 See also Hughes’s essay ‘The Gleichschaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook’ re the treatment of Jews in the official statistics of Germany during the Nazi period ([1955] 1971). 15 Many scholars argue that the ‘Chicago School’ was not a coherent school with a shared perspective and goals. They claim it should be understood as a ‘tradition’ or simply as ‘Chicago sociology’, each of the latter two labels intended to convey the idea that there was little (if any) unity to the sociology done at Chicago during the first decades of the department’s existence. 16 The ‘Outline’, a key piece of Hughes’s intellectual legacy, was published for the first time in 2010 in Sociologica (Hughes 2010b; see also Helmes-Hayes 1998a, 639–40; Santoro 2010b). 17 In the early 1950s Merton collaborated with W. J. Goode on a large-scale research program on professions in American society. On 26 July 1950, in a letter to Hughes about the prospect of a visit by the latter to Columbia University, Merton wrote, ‘I would really appreciate if you could find the time to send along the bibliography of projects which you have been directing on the professions and other occupations. We are making haste slowly on our own program, and we would like to have the benefit of your experience’ (Robert K. Merton Papers, Series II: Correspondence, Alphabetical. E. C. Hughes, 1950–1973. Columbia University, Archival Collections). Merton published a series of articles from that project while simultaneously carrying out a research project focused on medical education (Merton et al. 1957). 18 Though we use the term ‘formalized’, it is probably the wrong word. Hughes had no formal fieldwork ‘method’ per se. Instead, he had a fieldwork-based methodological ‘orientation’ and taught some ‘tricks of the trade’ (Becker 2010; see Helmes-Hayes, this volume). 19 See interviews of E.  Friedson and E.  Gross by J.  Platt cited in Platt (1995:  94)  and Verdet (1997: 61–2). 20 During Hughes’s time as chair, the department took the difficult and contentious decision to hire scholars educated elsewhere, including Columbia, in order to bring the department back into a position of prominence in the mainstream of American sociology (Chapoulie 1996: 19 and 19n30, 11–12; see also Abbott and Gaziano 1995).

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21 She wrote some brief essays about her life and career (1973; 1975; 1977; 1980–1) and has been the subject of some sympathetic commentaries (Hoecker-Drysdale 1990; 1996; Deegan 1991; Eichler 2001). The account that follows is based on these sources. 22 It is not clear from Hughes’s papers, interviews with Hughes and MacGill Hughes and relevant passages in Hughes’s publications what she contributed to ‘his’ scholarship. In some cases (Where Peoples Meet and 20,000 Nurses Tell Their Story), her contribution is obvious and acknowledged. In other cases, for example, French Canada in Transition, it appears she contributed substantially to the fieldwork for the book, if not the writing (see Hoecker-Drysdale 1990: 156; 1996: 224, 228). For still others, there is no clear evidence about what she might have contributed, though they likely discussed their respective work on a routine basis. 23 On the relationship between Hughes and Goffman, see Burns (1992), Jaworski (2000) and Vienne (2010a). Drawing on rich documentation about the Hughes-Goffman relationship located in the Hughes Papers in Chicago, Vienne (2010a; 2010b) demonstrates the extent to which Goffman was influenced by Hughes. Vienne documents how the latter originally elaborated the idea of ‘the total institution’, a concept regarded as having been developed by Goffman. In the process, Vienne tries to make sense of an evolving intellectual relation between a ‘master’ – Hughes – and a ‘reluctant apprentice’ – Goffman. Hughes’s ‘memo’ to Goffman is published in Sociologica 2 2010 (Hughes 2010c). 24 Helmes-Hayes (1998a) argues that the best entrée into Hughes’s theoretical perspective is the ‘institution’ (see the discussion of Hughes’s theoretical frame of reference, below). 25 Becker argues that, according to Hughes, once one discovered a typical form of behaviour or belief – a norm – one was likely just at the beginning of one’s investigative quest, for ‘all behaviour can be located on an axis that extends outward in both directions from a central point which corresponds to what is typical (or normalized)’ (1997: 377). 26 This would pave the way for a rereading of Hughes’s work along lines that would possibly make him closer to some contemporary social theorists (especially, Bourdieu) than is usually assumed. Santoro is currently undertaking such a comparison and analysis. 27 Based on Helmes-Hayes (1998a; 1998b; 2000). Summarized in Helmes-Hayes (2005). 28 In this respect Hughes’s attitude reflected the attitude of the Chicago department as a whole (Platt 1998: 95–6, citing Gusfield [1982]). 29 The term ‘frame of reference’ was chosen with a purpose, inspired by Hughes himself. There is a copy of Faught’s article (1980) in the Hughes Papers at the University of Chicago. The only significant editorial change Hughes made to Faught’s manuscript was to strike out the term ‘paradigm’ and substitute in its place the phrase ‘frame of reference’ (ECH Papers, UCHI, Box 31, File ‘Park folder’). Hughes used the same term elsewhere (Everett C. Hughes Papers, Boston College, Box 5, File ‘Memorandum on possible lecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’, 8 March 1977). 30 ‘Hughes’s frame of reference seems elusive and unsystematic [and is certainly incomplete] because he neither developed it all at once nor allowed it to remain static. Instead, he developed it somewhat haphazardly and by accretion, over time and in use, and applied it selectively, driven primarily by his attempts to make sense of particular agglomerations of empirical data’ (Helmes-Hayes 1998a: 632). 31 Helmes-Hayes (1998b) refers to Hughes’s interpretive institutional ecology as a sociology of ‘going concerns’ and frames his essay on Hughes’s method around this notion (Helmes-Hayes 2010, reprinted this volume; see also Hall 2003). 32 Demazière and Dubar (1997) argue that Hughes’s work presaged the ‘grounded theory’ approach developed by Glaser and Strauss in 1967. 33 See the chapter ‘What’s in a name?’ in Hughes and MacGill Hughes (1952). Hughes’s interest in language grew in the last years of his career, in part through his involvement in debates on linguistic politics and policies in Canada.

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34 Technically, we did what the Web of Science website refers to as a ‘cited reference search’. We completed the search in October 2015 in the Core Collections, limiting our search to the following databases: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). The first two cover the period from 1985 to the present, the last-mentioned covers the period 1990 to the present. The 2,403 texts took the following form: articles (85 per cent), reviews (7 per cent), proceedings papers (5.8 per cent), editorials (3.1 per cent), book reviews (1.6 per cent), book chapters (0.8 per cent). The rest (less than 1 per cent) comprised notes, reprints or letters. 35 The ISI Web of Science is an American-based archive published in English and, thus, biased in favour of English-language publications. We return to this issue below. 36 We use the same research classification areas employed by our source. We understand the problematic nature of this classification system, but think it works well enough for our purposes, that is, to map the general patterns and trends in citations of Hughes’s work during the period in question. 37 To Hughes is dedicated the Award for Careers Scholarship, the highest honour given by the Careers Division of the Academy of Management. The award recognizes scholarship that has made a significant contribution to the task of linking careers theory with the broader field of organization studies. 38 In the ISI Web database, Doing Gender records 2,138 citations with an average per year of 73.7, while Institutional Ecology records 1,762 citations with an average per year of 65.2. Other highly cited articles that include references to Hughes are Scott (1987), Zucker (1987) and Hilgartner and Bosk (1988). See also West and Fenstermaker (1995).

References Archival Sources Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives Everett C. Hughes Papers, Boston College Archives Robert K. Merton Papers, Columbia University Archives

Interviews Howard S. Becker by R. Helmes-Hayes, 16 November 1993 Ed Gross by R. Helmes-Hayes, 17 November 1995

Correspondence Howard S. Becker to R. Helmes-Hayes, 31 December 1994 J.-M. Chapoulie to R. Helmes-Hayes, 9 June 1995 J. Gusfield to R. Helmes-Hayes, n.d. December 1994 A. Strauss to R. Helmes-Hayes, 2 November 1994 R. Weiss to R. Helmes-Hayes, 23 March 1995

Other Abbott, A. 1988. The System of Professions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. Time Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— and E. Gaziano. 1995. ‘Transition and Tradition:  Departmental Faculty in the Second Chicago School’. In A Second Chicago School?, edited by G. A. Fine, 221–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Baker, A. 1976. ‘Continuities in Sociological Thought:  From Real Estate Agent to Marijuana Smoker’, Case Western Reserve Journal of Sociology 8: 32–50. Banton, M. 2005. ‘Three Current Issues in Ethnic and Racial Studies’, British Journal of Sociology 56 (4): 621–33. Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press. ———. 1997. ‘La prise en compte de cas inhabituels dans l’analyse sociologique: les conseils de Hughes’, Sociétés contemporaines 27 (July): 29–37. ———. 1998. Tricks of the Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. ‘The Art of Comparison:  Lessons from the Master’, Sociologica 2:  1–12, doi: 10.2383/32713. ———. 2011. ‘Quelques “frecelles” à l’usage des jeunes chercheurs:  rencontre avec Howie Becker’, EHESS, Paris, 11 November 2011, http://www.Act.hypotheses.org/1406; accessed 20 November 2011. ———. 2012. ‘Que faire de la question théorique en sciences sociales’, EHESS, Paris, 5 November 2012 http://www.Act.hypotheses.org/1406; accessed 20 November 2011 Becker, H. S., B. Geer, and E. Hughes.1968. Making the Grade. New York: Wiley & Sons. Becker, H. S., B. Geer, E. Hughes and A. Strauss. 1961. Boys in White. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Becker, H. S., B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss. 1968. ‘Everett C. Hughes – an Appreciation’. In Institutions and the Person, edited by H. S. Becker, B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss, vii–x. Chicago: Aldine. Becker, H. S., B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss, eds. 1968c. Institutions and the Person. Chicago: Aldine. Bowker, G. and S. Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out. Boston: MIT Press. Burawoy, M. 1979. Manufacturing Consent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burns, T. 1992. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Chapoulie, J.-M. 1987. ‘Everett Hughes and the Development of Fieldwork in Sociology’, Urban Life 15 (3 & 4): 259–98. ———. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition’, Sociological Theory 14 (1): 3–29. ———. 2001. La tradition sociolographique de Chicago. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2002. ‘La tradition de Chicago et l’étude des relations entre les races’, Revue européenne des migrations internationales 18 (3): 9–24. Coser, L. 1994. ‘Introduction’. In Everett C. Hughes on Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination, edited by L. Coser, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniels, A. K. 1972. ‘The Irreverent Eye’, Contemporary Sociology 1: 402–9. Deegan, M. J. 1991. ‘Helen MacGill Hughes (1903–)’. In Women in Sociology, edited by Mary Jo Deegan, 191–8. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Demaziere, D., and C. Dubar. 1997. ‘Everett C. Hughes: initiateur et précurseur critique de la grounded theory’, Sociétés contemporaines 27: 49–55. Eichler, M. 2001. ‘Women Pioneers in Canadian Sociology: The Effects of a Politics of Gender and a Politics of Knowledge’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 375–403. Emerson, R. 1997. ‘Le travail de terrain après Hughes: continuités et changements’, Sociétés contemporaines 27: 39–47. Falardeau, J.-C. 1953. Essais sur le Québec contemporain. Québec: Les Presses Universitaires Laval. Faught, J. 1980. ‘Presuppositions of the Chicago School in the Work of Everett C.  Hughes’, American Sociologist 15: 72–82. Fielding, N. 2005. ‘The Resurgence, Legitimation and Institutionalization of Qualitative Methods’, Forum for Qualitative Research 6 (2) Article 32. Fine, G. A., ed. 1995. The Second Chicago School? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleck, C. 2011. A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences, translated by Hella Beiste, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Fournier, M. 1987. Jean-Charles Falardeau, un intellectual à la rencontre de deux mondes. Anjou, PQ: Saint-Martin. ———. 2001. ‘Quebec Sociology and Quebec Society: The Construction of a Collective Identity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 333–48. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. Gubert, R. and L. Tomasi, eds. 1995. Teoria Sociologica ed Investigazione Empirica. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Gusfield, J. 1982. ‘The Scholarly Tension: Graduate Craft and Undergraduate Imagination’. In General Education in the Social Sciences, edited by J. McAloon, 167–77. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Guth, S. 2010. ‘Everett C. Hughes’s Journey in Occupied Germany (1948): Black Market, Bastard Institutions and Dirty Work’. In Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology, edited by C. Schrecker., 255– 66. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hall, P. 2003. ‘Interactionism, Social Organization and Social Processes:  Looking Back and Moving Ahead’, Symbolic Interactionism 26 (1): 33–55. Harper, D. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heath, C. 1984. ‘Review Essay:  Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983). A  Note on His Approach and Influence’, Sociology of Health and Illness 6: 218–37. Helmes-Hayes, R. 1998a. ‘Everett Hughes: Theorist of the Second Chicago School’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 11 (4): 621–73. ———. 1998b. ‘The Sociology of “Going Concerns”: Everett Hughes’s Interpretive Institutional Ecology’. In The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology, edited by L. Tomasi, 217–49. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2000. ‘The Concept of Social Class: The Contribution of Everett Hughes’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 (2): 127–47. ———. 2005. ‘Hughes, Everett’. In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by G. Ritzer, 384–6. London: Sage. ———. 2010. ‘Studying Going Concerns:  Everett Hughes on Method’, Sociologica 2:  1–27, doi: 10.2383/32714. ——— and M. Santoro. 2010. ‘Introduction’, Sociologica 2: 1–10, doi: 10.2383/32712. Hilgartner, S., and C. Bosk. 1988. ‘The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A Public Arenas Model’, American Journal of Sociology 94: 57–9. Hiller, H., and S. Langlois. 2001. ‘The Most Important Books/Articles in Canadian Sociology in the Twentieth Century: A Report’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 513–16. Hoecker-Drysdale, S. 1990. ‘Women Sociologists in Canada:  The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes, Aileen Dansken Ross and Jean Robertson Burnet’. In Despite the Odds, edited by M. Gosztonyi Ainley, 152–76. Montreal: Véhicule Press. ———. 1996. ‘Sociologists in the Vineyard: The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes and Everett Cherrington Hughes’. In Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by H. Pycior, N. Slack and P. Abir-Am, 220–31. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Holmstrom, L. 1984. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes: A Tribute to a Pioneer in the Study of Work and Occupations’, Work and Occupations 11: 471–81. Hughes, E. C. 1928. ‘The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago. ———. 1931. The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board. Society for Social Research of the University of Chicago, Series 2, Monograph #1. ———. [1935] 1971. ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Catholic Movement in Germany’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 255–64. ———. 1936. ‘The Ecological Aspect of Institutions’, American Sociological Review 1 (2): 180–9. ———. 1939. ‘Institutions’. In An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by Robert Park and Samuel Smith, 283–347. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1943a. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1943b. ‘Programme de récherche sociale pour le Québec’, Cahiers de l’École des Sciences Sociales 2 (4): 1–41. ———. 1945. ‘Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status’, American Journal of Sociology 50 (5): 353–9. ———. 1946. ‘Social Institutions’. In A New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 223–83. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. [1949] 1971. ‘Queries Concerning Industry and Society Growing Out of Study of Ethnic Relations in Industry’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 73–86. ———. [1951a] 1971. ‘Bastard Institutions’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 98–105. ———. [1951b] 1971. ‘Work and Self ’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 338–47. ———. [1951c] 1971. ‘Mistakes at Work’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 316–25. ———. [1955] 1971. ‘The Gleichschaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 516–23. ———. [1956] 1971. ‘The Improper Study of Man’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 431–42. ———. [1957a] 1971. ‘The Relation of Industrial to General Sociology’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 524–9. ———. 1957b. ‘Social Institutions’. In A New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 225–82. 2nd edition. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1958. Men and Their Work. Glencoe: Free Press. ———. [1960] 1971. ‘The Place of Field Work in Social Science’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 496–506. ———. [1962] 1971. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 87–97. ———. 1963. ‘Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination’, American Sociological Review 28 (6): 879–90. ———. [1964] 1971. ‘Robert E. Park’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 543–49. ———. 1969. ‘Social Institutions’. In A New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 123–85. 3rd edition. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. [1970] 1971. ‘The Humble and the Proud:  The Comparative Study of Occupations’. Here cited from The Sociological Eye, 417–27. ———. 1971a. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1971b. ‘Preface’. In The Sociological Eye, v–ix. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1974. ‘Who Studies Whom?’ Human Organization 33 (4): 327–34. ———. 1984. The Sociological Eye. 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Transaction. ———. 1996. Le régard sociologique. Edited by J.-M. Chapoulie, Paris: Les Éditions de l’EHESS. ———. 2008a. ‘Oshibki na rabote [Mistakes at work]’, Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki 6 (3): 385–96. ———. 2008b. ‘[The making of a physician]’, Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki 7 (3): 313–26. ———. 2009. ‘Sotsial’naia rol’ i razdelenie truda [Social role and division of labor]’ Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia (Sotsis) 8(304): 46–52. ———. 2010a. Lo sguardo sociologico. Edited by Marco Santoro. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2010b. ‘Outline for the Sociological Study of an Occupation’, Sociologica 2:  1–3, doi:10.2383/32716. ———. 2010c. ‘Memorandum on Total Institutions’, Sociologica 2: 1–7, doi: 10.2383/32719. ———. 2010d. ‘Innocents Abroad, 1948: Or How to Behave in Occupied Germany’, Sociologica 2: 1–8, doi: 10.2383/32715. ——— and H. MacGill Hughes. 1952. Where Peoples Meet. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———, B. Junker, R. Gold and D. Kittel, eds. 1952. Cases in Fieldwork. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Jaworski, G. 2000. ‘Erving Goffman:  The Reluctant Apprentice’, Symbolic Interaction 23 (3): 299–308. Junker, B. 1960. Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kracauer, G. 1959. Die Angestellten. Allensbach: Demoskopie.

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Lofland, L. 1980. ‘Reminisces of Classic Chicago:  The Blumer-Hughes Talk’, Urban Life 9 (3): 251–81. MacGill Hughes, H. 1973a. The Status of Women in Sociology, 1968–1972:  Report to the American Sociological Association. Washington, DC: ASA. ———. 1973b. ‘Maid of All Work or Departmental Sister-in-Law? The Faculty Wife Employed on Campus’, American Journal of Sociology 78 (4): 767–72. ———. 1975. ‘Women in Academic Sociology, 1925–75’, NCSA Golden Anniversary Lecture, Sociological Focus 8 (3): 215–22. ———. 1977. ‘Wasp/Woman/Sociologist’, Society (July-August): 69–80. ———. 1980–1. ‘On Becoming a Sociologist’, Journal of the History of Sociology 3 (1): 27–39. Manning, G. 2000. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes: Sociologist and Mentor Sui Generis’, American Sociologist (Winter): 93–9. Merton, R.K., G. Reader and P. Kendalls, eds. 1957. The Student-Physician. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nunes, E., and N. DeBarros. 2014. ‘Boys in White: A Classic of Qualitative Research Turns 50’, História, Ciências, Saúde 21 (4): 1–17. Ostow, R. 1984. ‘Everett Hughes: The McGill Years’, Society/Société 8 (3): 12–16. ———. 1985. ‘Everett Hughes: From Chicago to Boston’, Society/Société 9 (1): 8–12. Peneff, J. 1984. ‘Note sur E.C. Hughes et la pedagogie du fieldwork dans la sociologie américaine’, Sociologie du travail 26 (2): 228–30. Platt, J. 1995. ‘Research Methods and the Second Chicago School’. In The Second Chicago School?, edited by G. A. Fine, 82–107. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. ‘Chicago Methods: Reputations and Realities’. In The Tradition of the Chicago School, edited by L. Tomasi, 89–103. Aldershot: Ashgate. Polsky, N. 1967. Hustlers, Beats and Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prus, R. 1996. Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnographic Research. Albany: SUNY Press. Reinharz, S. 1995. ‘The Chicago School of Sociology and the Founding of the Brandeis University Graduate Program in Sociology: A Case in Cultural Diffusion’. In The Second Chicago School?, edited by G. A. Fine, 273–321. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riesman, D. 1950. (in collaboration with R. Denny and N. Glazer). The Lonely Crowd. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. ———. 1983. ‘The Legacy of Everett C. Hughes’, Contemporary Sociology 12 (5): 477–81. ——— and H. Becker. 1984. ‘Introduction to the Transaction Edition’. In Everett Hughes, The Sociological Eye, v-xiv. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Rock, P. 1979. The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Roy, D.F. 1959. ‘Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction’, Human Organization 18 (4): 158–68. Santoro, M. 2010a. ‘L’immaginazione sociologica di Everett C.  Hughes’. In E. C. Hughes, Lo sguardo sociologico, edited by M. Santoro, 7–42. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2010b. ‘Postscript: ‘Hughesian Sociology’ and the Centrality of Occupation’, Sociologica 2: 1–13, doi: 10.2383/32717. Scott, R.W. 1987. ‘The Adolescence of Institutional Theory’, Administrative Science Quarterly 32 (4): 493–511. Shore, M. 1987. The Science of Social Redemption. Montreal/Kingston:  McGill-Queen’s University Press. Simpson, I. H. 1972. ‘Continuities in the Sociology of Everett Hughes’, Sociological Quarterly 13: 547–58. Sociétés contemporaines. 1997. Autour d’Everett C. Hughes’s (special issue 27.) Staley, D. 1993. In Whose Image? Knowledge, Social Science and Democracy in Occupied Germany, 1943– 1955. PhD diss., Ohio State University, Columbus OH.

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Star, S. Leigh and J. Griesemer. 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects:  Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907– 1939’, Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420. Stocking, G.W. 1965. ‘On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (3): 211–18 Strauss, A. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission’, Symbolic Interactionism 19: 271–83. Thorne, B. 1993. Gender Play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Tomasi, L. (ed.). 1998. The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tréanton, J-R. 1997. ‘Une Rencontre avec Everett Hughes’, Sociétés contemporaines 27: 73–7. Tuchman, G. 1978. Making News. New York: Free Press. Verdet, P. 1997. ‘Learning from Hughes: The Experience of a French Student’, Sociétés contemporaines 27: 59–66. Verhoeven, J.C. 1993. ‘An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 26 (3): 317–48. Vienne, P. 2005. ‘Mais qui a peur de l’ethnographie scolaire?’ Éducation et Sociétés 16: 177–92. ———. 2010a. ‘The Enigma of the Total Institution:  Rethinking the Hughes-Goffman Relationship’, Sociologica 2: 1–30, doi: 10.2383/32720 ———. 2010b. ‘Introduction to Everett C.  Hughes’s ‘Memorandum on Total Institutions’,’ Sociologica 2: 1–7, doi: 10.2383/32718. Wax, M. 2000. ‘Old Chicago and New France’, American Sociologist 31 (4): 65–82. Weiss, R. 1997. ‘Remembrance of Everett Hughes’, Qualitative Sociology 19: 543–51. West, C., and S. Fenstermaker. 1995. ‘Doing Difference’, Gender & Society. 9 (1): 8–37. West, C. and D. Zimmerman. 1987. ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1 (2): 125–51. Whyte, W. F. 1943. Street Corner Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2nd ed. 1955). Wilcox-Magill, D. 1983. ‘Paradigms and Social Science in English Canada’. In Introduction to Sociology, edited by J. Paul Grayson, 1–34. Toronto: Gage. Women in Media Research. Outofthequestion.org/Women-in-Media.Research/Newsand Journalism-studies.aspx#MacGill_Hughes; accessed 21 November 2015. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. ‘Generally Speaking:  The Logic and Mechanics of Social Pattern Analysis’, Sociological Forum 22 (2): 131–45, doi 10.1111/sref.2007.22.issue-2/issuetoc. Zucker, L. 1987. ‘Institutional Theories of Organization’, Annual Review of Sociology 13: 443–64.

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Chapter One EVERETT HUGHES AND THE CHICAGO TRADITION Jean-Michel Chapoulie

One picture always comes to mind when thinking of Everett Hughes as a teacher. He is standing at the lectern, his glasses, which he had just removed, in his hand, and, with unconcealed relish, he is putting the finishing touches on some illustration. To his students those finishing touches were the mark of a singular craftsman. The craftsmanship lay in the precision and seeming effortlessness with which he would dissect the most commonplace situation and, with a deft and unexpected comparison, lay bare its core. (Zakuta 1968, 69) Marginality, accepted in the spirit of adventure, makes the sociologist. The best way of acquiring and keeping it is to keep changing, not necessarily from one employer to another, but from one object of study to another. (Hughes 1984, 529)

More than a dozen years after his death in 1983, Everett C. Hughes is generally recognized as one of the links between the founders of “The Chicago School” – W. I. Thomas and Robert E.  Park (to whom we might add Ernest W.  Burgess and the philosopher George Herbert Mead)  – and the group of sociologists trained at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and ‘50s, who are often labeled collectively as symbolic interactionists.1 This group, notable for its studies of institutions, work and the professions, art, deviance, and medicine, includes such researchers as Erving Goffman (1961, 1963), Howard S. Becker (1963, 1982), Anselm Strauss (1978), and Eliot Freidson (1970), who have also contributed to making fieldwork – the ethnographic method – one of the most fruitful research approaches in the social sciences. As some of them have emphasized, their sociology, as well as their use of fieldwork, had its origin partly in the teaching and research of Everett C. Hughes at the University of Chicago. Hughes’ position as a link between these two groups would be enough to arouse interest in his work. But that work also offers the elements of a fruitful approach to the study of such central sociological themes as work, institutions, the relations between ethnic groups, and, beyond that, a lively and reflexive conception of research on society as a collective enterprise. Among the obstacles to understanding this current of research, one is easy to identify. Born alongside pragmatist philosophy, on the margin of the social movement that embodied the reaction of some Protestants to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of

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the United States from 1880 to 1920, this research tradition is closely linked to peculiarities of American history and of American universities, which American readers are only too likely to take for granted and European readers to be unaware of. To this difficulty must be added the originality of Hughes’ work: largely essays written for specific occasions, freely developing a small number of concepts, his work offers a collection of subtly elaborated ideas that outline an analytic perspective on social reality. But these essays, in form and in content, scarcely resemble what is understood today as ‘theory.’ The frequent recourse to concrete examples, taken from the author’s own experiences and from literary works as much as from research in the social sciences, is confusing to contemporary readers, especially by a breadth of perspective based on an anthropological and historical background much greater than that of most sociologists. Hughes’ work is profoundly linked to the time in which it was produced, but it is also one of the least ethnocentric of American sociologies. Finally, his style – simple, direct, sometimes informal – risks hiding the subtlety of his analyses and the broad perspective that inspired them. In the word he used to characterize the relation of researchers to their own social origins, Hughes is an emancipated sociologist who uses the latest work in social science, but never forgets what he owes to his predecessors and to the accumulation of knowledge to which they contributed. He knew what others have also discovered, that rigor in the social sciences comes from reflection on the road taken by the researcher. One can read Hughes’ essays with this double reference, which he recommended and applied himself: to the works of the time when he was trained as a sociologist, but also to the period in which he did his own research. So I will discuss, first, the tradition from which Hughes’ sociology arose; then I will examine the context in which his own work was done, principally between 1935 and the mid-1960s, furnishing biographical data that clarify the intentions which inspired his essays. I will, finally, make explicit certain elements of his conception of sociology that can be confusing or disconcerting.

From the First to the Second Generation of Chicago Sociologists It may seem unnecessary to rehearse the Chicago tradition from which Hughes issued. The most recent analyses of that tradition, however, see it in relation to specific contemporary theoretical or methodological questions, insisting more on the underlying theoretical elements of the most well-known studies than on an understanding of the historical environment in which they were done. In other words, these analyses adopt a resolutely ‘presentist’ perspective, projecting on to the Chicago tradition questions and value judgments taken from sociology’s present situation. I will proceed in the opposite direction, making clear the principal features of Hughes’ immediate antecedents, insisting that the Chicago tradition was a collective enterprise exposed to the hazards of historical circumstance and that the intellectual coherence of the work it inspired was only partial. I will indicate Hughes’ interpretation of that past, shared with most of the sociologists trained at Chicago during the same period, because this interpretation influenced his research, and because it is quite different from later reconstructions on the basis of which contemporary sociologists have often interpreted his essays.

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Everett Hughes, like Louis Wirth, Herbert Blumer, and anthropologist Robert Redfield (who were his fellow students before they were his colleagues), belonged to the second generation of sociologists trained in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology. They were taught, in the interwar years, by three professors who, until 1927, made up the core of the department faculty: Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Ellsworth Faris. It is often forgotten that they were the first generation to receive, as a heritage, a completely constituted definition of sociology as a teaching and research discipline. The new discipline had, in fact, been born thirty years earlier, with the creation in 1892 of the University of Chicago, an institution unique in its relative openness to, and orientation to the study of, its environing community.2 In addition to other departments of social science intended to produce PhDs, the University of Chicago had the second in the United States3 and probably in the world – a Department of Sociology (more precisely, a Department of Sociology and Anthropology). In the ensuing years, the first teachers of the department had to invent what teaching and research in the new specialty would consist of. The elaboration of a viable conception of research took some 30 years: The ability of Albion Small, the founder of the department, to do concrete research was not as strong as his faith in empirical investigation or his abilities as an administrator. In the first stage, the Chicago sociologists, like those of two or three other universities that gave doctorates in sociology, devoted their efforts to sketching vast programs of research and to writing textbooks. They also threw themselves into controversies inspired by the German debates on the social sciences and by then-current attempts to adapt Darwin’s ideas to the social situation of the United States. Closely linked to the reform movement of the Progressive Era, some of the first sociologists contributed – it is too often forgotten – to the movement of social inquiry imported from England at the end of the 1880s. In the style of Charles Booth’s monumental study of working-class East London (Booth 1889–91), journalists, social workers, Protestant ministers, academics from every discipline, and educated daughters of the Protestant elite investigated the conditions of life and the customs of the working class in some of the large cities of the United States (these inquiries were known as “social surveys”). One of the first products of this research was the publication in 1895 of a collective work describing a Chicago neighborhood, Hull House Maps and Papers, in which a major participant was Jane Addams, who was close to the first sociologists at the University of Chicago. In the ensuing 30 years, other studies were published, many in the American Journal of Sociology, edited in the Chicago department. These studies, which described many aspects of the life of the poorer classes – that is, of the immigrants to the United States – seem today both substantial and naive. Participants in this movement were more interested in finding solutions to the social problems that worried the Protestant middle class than in elaborating a corpus of general knowledge about society. Such a concern with theorizing – to be more precise, with the elaboration of analytic schemes to order and interpret the masses of data collected – was displayed, not without difficulty, by one of the first members of the Chicago faculty, W.I. Thomas. Thomas, in fact, conducted the first academic research divorced from an immediate practical purpose of reform. Arriving shortly after the opening of the University of Chicago to work on a PhD in anthropology, Thomas was soon recruited as a teacher.

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Nonconformist in his tastes, life-style (he frequented diverse milieus in Chicago), and intellectual judgments, Thomas at first, for some 15 years, worked in the style of anthropologists of the time, relying principally on second-hand documentation. A slow intellectual revolution led him to accept Franz Boas’ critique of theories that grounded inequalities of race and sex in biology. At the age of 45, Thomas found a rich donor to support his research into the question of European immigration to the United States. Focusing for practical reasons on immigration from Poland, he collected in Poland and the United States a vast amount of data. The final research report, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, written with the young Polish philosopher Florian Znaniecki, was in the process of publication in 1918 when Thomas was forced to resign his position and leave Chicago, and academic employment, permanently.4 But the intellectual results of this first research were not lost. With its theoretical ambition and methodological innovations, The Polish Peasant became, at least until 1940, a model for the sociological community. The work combined two elements that had, until then, been separated: the presentation of an abstract (though not very systematic) scheme of analysis, and the first-hand collection of data in the style of the early social surveys. It also introduced two new sources of sociological data: family correspondence and life histories. Although the use of family correspondence later became relatively rare, the collection and analysis of life histories became one of the fashionable methods of data collection in the new discipline (see Peneff 1990). After Thomas’ eviction from the university, intellectual leadership in the Chicago department passed to Robert E.  Park. A  member of Thomas’ generation, Park had studied philosophy with John Dewey, worked eight years as an investigative journalist, and returned to the study of philosophy with William James. After receiving a PhD in Germany, he worked for an association leading the campaign against Belgian colonization of the Congo, and then became secretary to Booker T.  Washington, the principal moderate black leader of the period. During the eight years he spent working for Washington, Park helped collect a vast amount of information on the condition of southern blacks, and made many trips with Washington to study interethnic contacts all over the world. Thomas secured a temporary position at Chicago for Park, now an expert on interethnic relations, so that he could pass on to sociologists what he had learned about the American black community. Though not identical, Park’s intellectual interests and convictions largely converged with Thomas’, which was why Thomas had recruited him in the first place. Park soon interested himself in the discipline he had joined almost by chance, teaching more than he was obliged to and publishing articles. Remaining at the University of Chicago after Thomas’ eviction, he rapidly became the principal source of inspiration for student research. Under his stimulus, some 20 studies, which represented what came to be called the “Chicago School,” were published in the 1920s and ‘30s. The facts of urban life – the development of cities and urban institutions, ethnic relations, delinquency, the press, and the vast domain of collective behavior  – were the themes of these monographs, which became widely known in geography and anthropology as well as in sociology. Ernest W. Burgess, some 15 years younger than Park, also professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, was closely associated with this research enterprise. He brought

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to it an experience of fieldwork in the style of Booth and the social surveys, but also a concern for rigor in the treatment of data and a knowledge of how to deal with the ruling classes of the city and those who ran the organizations in charge of the city’s “social problems.” The originality of the orientation of the researches done in this milieu sprang from Park’s unshakable faith (perhaps related to his journalistic experience and to his contact with pragmatism) in the fruitfulness of empirical research. It resulted, too, from Park’s elaboration (based on his scholarly knowledge and previous experience) of an analytic framework sufficiently abstract and general to enable the comparison of phenomena observable in American society and those that had been studied, in the U.S. and elsewhere, by other social sciences. The theoretical scheme Park outlined in the years following his arrival in Chicago seems in retrospect well adapted to research on American society of that time, marked as it was by rapid urbanization and the problem of relations between diverse immigrant groups. In 1915, Park had drawn up a program for the study of urbanism, republished in 1925 in The City, which also contained some of the first researches based on that program. With Burgess, Park published in 1921 a kind of textbook, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, presenting the basic categories of a sociology centered on ethnic conflicts. This work, which guided a generation of students, contained elements borrowed from a variety of sources, notably Herbert Spencer, animal and plant ecology inspired by Darwin, William Graham Sumner (the Yale sociologist of the preceding generation), Charles H. Cooley, W.I. Thomas, and Simmel, with whom Park had studied briefly in Germany. If the framework of analysis proposed by Park now seems insufficiently precise or coherent, it certainly had the merit of separating research in sociology from the “social problems” approach which had until then inspired most empirical research on American society. The book urged researchers not to limit themselves to the internal analysis of American society, but instead to connect social phenomena observed in the United States to urbanization, to the contacts between races and cultures, and to the evolution of the division of labor-processes that were developing on a world scale, as Park had learned through his own travels. Finally, Park never forgot his own experience as an investigative journalist; as a dissertation adviser, he tirelessly pushed students to collect data through direct contact with the people and phenomena they studied. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1930s, thanks to financing from the Rockefeller Foundation and various local organizations, the University of Chicago Department of Sociology became the center of a large empirical research enterprise which had no rival. The primary workers were students in the department, as well as some former students who had become researchers in organizations loosely connected to the university. The analytic framework for this work was the research program Park had formulated, enhanced by borrowings from Thomas (notably the ideas of social disorganization and the “definition of the situation”). However, this approach was modified both by the contemporary definition of “social problems” and by the influence of the donors who financed the research (mediated through Burgess’ practical interests in reform): one should not take as characteristic of the monographs Park’s defense of an approach to social facts detached from any practical implication, or understand too literally the anecdotes that describe Park as ironically contemptuous of social reform.

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The collection of life histories in the style of Thomas and Znaniecki, Burgess’ mapping of statistical data collected by the Census or by various city agencies, the reports of social workers and organizations, and, more rarely, direct observation furnished the basic data of the theses and studies financed by these contracts. Taken together, these studies provided the first example of what could be done by collective research undertaken in a university setting. The city of Chicago clearly was the field of these studies – the “laboratory” to use Albion Small’s 1895 principal phrase – but investigations were also conducted elsewhere (e.g., the East Coast of the United States, or Hawaii). The coherence and unity of these studies depended far more on the researchers’ confidence in the empirical method than on any theorizing. Quasi-journalistic descriptions often took up more room than analyses, which often were based on ideas only halfelaborated. It is in the style of editing and the way data are used, for which the model is evidently The Polish Peasant, that we see the most striking similarities between these monographs (see Chapoulie 1998). Use of the term “Chicago School,” which only occurred after 1940, misleads by erasing the traces of contact between Chicago sociologists and the many other intellectual currents in the social sciences of that period. Among these, the pragmatist-inspired social psychology of George Herbert Mead, then Professor Of Philosophy at Chicago, is always mentioned. But note that the diffusion of the Meadian perspective, which occurred partly through the teaching of Ellsworth Faris, was much slower than one might expect from the frequency with which Chicago students took Mead’s classes. Note also the close contact Chicago sociologists had with anthropological research, which until 1925 came primarily through Faris’ teaching – his interest in anthropology having been aroused by his experience as a missionary in the Congo – and Park’s; the anthropologists on the university faculty had little influence on sociology students in this early period.5 After 1918, the use of statistical methods in sociology developed, a little after their diffusion in psychology and in political science (the Political Science Department at Chicago was in the forefront of this development). After 1927, this orientation was represented at Chicago by William Fielding Ogburn, who had taken his degree at Columbia, where it already prevailed. Ogburn substantially influenced some Chicago students, one of whom, Samuel Stouffer, was a principal propagandist for the spread of survey research after 1940. The research carried on at Chicago between 1920 and 1935 can be characterized, somewhat schematically, by a tension between two relatively divergent orientations, found at the heart of Park’s sociology itself:  an opposition between moral order – which arises in communication between people – and ecological order – which arises from competition between populations. The first orientation, situated directly in the line of pragmatism, addresses the subjective dimension of social facts and the way the meaning of events is produced in the course of collective activity6; it thus privileges fieldwork, which alone permits one to grasp the meaning of actions in the situations in which they constitute themselves. Conversely, the second addresses the ‘objective’ dimension of social facts, those that appear in the global process of evolution (for example, in the dynamic of the distribution of ethnic groups or in the growth of cities), which can be grasped by such instruments as maps and statistics.

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The conception in which Hughes and other sociologists who studied at the University of Chicago were socialized was thus neither logically integrated nor relatively closed. For them, it included knowledge of source materials, of methods of collecting and analyzing data, as well as a small collection of ideas mobilizable for research.7 The testimony of sociologists trained at Chicago during this period shows that they did not think of this as simply one definition of the discipline among others, but rather as the only way then known of actually doing empirical research. It was thus more a point of departure for later researches than a synthesis, even a provisional one (contrary to what might be suggested by the sometimes peremptory style of Park’s essays). Similarly, the corpus of methods was not, for these sociologists, definitively fixed, but could be enriched by new sources of data. If the sociologists who went through the Chicago department then had anything in common, it was their faith in the fruitfulness of first-hand empirical research and in a certain disdain for pure bookish speculation. These second-generation sociologists did not treat the theories and methods of their predecessors as an untouchable heritage: Herbert Blumer, Faris’ protégé and a classmate of Hughes at Chicago, formulated the most radical critique of the use of biographical documents in The Polish Peasant (Blumer1939), and thus marked the end of the period in which that book was the unquestioned model for sociological research. Similarly, Hughes did not take offense when William Foote Whyte criticized the relevance of analyses of working-class areas in terms of social disorganization, a notion central to the sociology of Thomas, Park, and Burgess.8 Hughes also encouraged the perspective on the analysis of deviance developed by Howard S. Becker in Outsiders (Becker 1963); the defenders of the orthodoxy at that time were Burgess’s protégés and disciples Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay.9 And Edward Shils, one of Park’s last students at Chicago and a convinced admirer of his work, surely contributed to the decline in the reputation of the urban sociology of the 1920s with his critical 1948 review. (See Shils 1994 for a less reserved appreciation of Park’s work.) With heavy teaching loads, and deprived of Park’s stimulation, most of the sociologists trained at Chicago from 1920 to 1935 – including the authors of the celebrated monographs  – published very little further research. Some simply continued work on the topic of their theses. A small number specialized in one of the research areas that grew up in the following years around sources of financing. Each selected, for his own purposes, from the elements offered by the works of Thomas, Park, or Mead (or Ogburn, for the younger ones). The sociologists who turned toward urban ecology (and became demographers) dedicated themselves to the use of statistical data and abandoned the analysis of the moral order; others were completely disinterested in the ecological dimension and instead explored the subjective dimension of social life, according to the program laid out by Blumer, who became in the 1930s the principal propagandist of the Meadian approach in sociology. Hughes was one of the relatively few sociologists trained at Chicago who engaged in further research. He was also one of those who retained a predilection for first-hand knowledge of the subjects studied, and thus for fieldwork – even though nothing indicates that he shared Park’s bias against statistical methods. He was the only one to use the kind of comparative approach that Park got from Simmel, and almost the only one to have

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examined the historical and worldwide dimension of processes, such as urbanization and the relations of ethnic groups, that occupied a central place in Park’s essays. Hughes did not use the cartographic techniques pioneered by Burgess in his own researches, and never had an exclusive predilection for causal determination by ecological context, but he was nevertheless attentive to the environment in which institutions developed. He ignored almost completely some of the concepts elaborated by Thomas and Park, such as social disorganization, usually present in the monographs of the 1930s, or the race relations cycle. Similarly, Hughes was surely the only sociologist of his generation who tried to keep alive the intellectual heritage not only of Park and Thomas, but also of the 1880s–1920s social surveys. This attitude toward the past helped him avoid the narrow perspective that led his contemporaries astray; it also kept him from accepting a radical difference between scientific research and research labeled prescientific, and gave him a principled respect for the institutional limits of sociology as a university discipline. This characterization of Hughes’ sociology as the natural development of that of his predecessors is clearly incomplete. It slights the development (after 1930) of his research on work, his interest in the growth of anthropological research, and, somewhat later, a new attention to differences of class; it similarly omits his reaction to the conditions in which sociology developed in the 1950s. It is when Hughes’ essays are interpreted as a critical confrontation between the heritage of the most robust portions of Park’s sociology and the orientation the social sciences took in the United States in the following years that they appear in all their richness. For American sociology, as for the research enterprise based in Chicago, the 1930s marked a break. Just when the sociologists of Hughes’ generation replaced those of Park’s generation as teachers, many factors altered the discipline. The sociopolitical context changed profoundly with the Great Depression and the New Deal. Questions of poverty and social inequality acquired a new importance in public debate, while the question of the place and the evolution of ethnic minorities lost its acute interest after mass immigration ended. Sociological studies were seen as having a practical use in the definition and establishment of federal policy. In 1930 President Hoover ordered a group of academics under Ogburn’s direction to produce a report on social change in delinquency, urbanization, the family, industrial progress, and the like; later, sociologists worked with the Roosevelt administration. The area of labor “problems” also became a market in which sociologists, following economists and psychologists, found not only financing but also the possibility of entering factories, until then almost completely closed to investigation. Such topics as the statistical study of consumption and of the forms of communication, and especially questions linked to the war and its effects on American society, also opened up as research areas for sociologists. This creation of a market for sociological studies had profound and lasting consequences for the conception and orientation of research. The attention of sociologists and of those supporting research focused more narrowly than before on the study of contemporary American society; the subjects studied were generally of limited scope (the workers in this factory or the listeners to that radio program). But this restriction in the breadth of the subject matter had as its counterpart – at least apparently – much greater precision and rigor in the treatment of data, perhaps partly because the sponsors

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themselves sometimes had some knowledge of the subject. Finally, most sociologists began to use statistics as a guarantee of the ‘scientific’ character of their discipline. As a university discipline, sociology was in other respects quite different in 1935 from what it had been in 1920. Departments of sociology had opened in many universities. The Chicago department was no longer the only center of serious research, nor was it the only center of sociological training. Its hegemony over the American Sociological Association had created a variety of grudges, grouped in an alliance of convenience around L. L. Bernard, which tried to decrease the institutional influence of the Chicago sociologists on the discipline, notably by creating the American Sociological Review to replace the American Journal of Sociology as the Association’s official journal. For other sociologists of the period, such as George Lundberg, the future of the discipline lay in adopting the model of the physical sciences and in the systematic and almost exclusive use of the statistical approach.10 A handful of departments – Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina – launched ambitious research programs. In the 1940s, Columbia, around Lazarsfeld and Merton, and Harvard, around Parsons and the new Department of Social Relations, proposed other definitions of sociological research and (Columbia, especially) emphasized methods of collecting and analyzing data other than those used in the Chicago monographs of the 1920s. Sociology’s contacts with other social sciences tended also to be more limited, and the discipline shut in on itself at a moment when, as we have seen, research was dealing with more limited subjects and mostly with American society. Finally, the growth in the number of sociologists and students gave birth to a ‘market in sociology,’ in which sociologists addressed themselves mainly or exclusively to their colleagues, rather than to a more inclusive group of social scientists or to the larger public that Park’s sociology had tried to reach. In this new context, during the 1940s, a large number of sociologists, including many trained at Chicago, saw a promising instrument of “progress” for the discipline in the statistically analyzed questionnaire survey, and gave preference to the kinds of data and problems to which it could be applied. Use of statistical instruments and the language of proof of the natural sciences was clearly a way to increase the scientific legitimacy of a discipline fully recognized neither in the university nor outside it. Survey research (studies based on questionnaires given to large population samples) – of which Paul Lazarsfeld and Samuel Stouffer were the most well-known promoters – appeared to conform more closely to the model of the physical sciences than studies based on life histories and data collected by interview or observation. Even if most sociologists did not themselves do such surveys, that model imposed its criteria on the appreciation of ‘good research’ in the 1940s and ‘50s. In consequence, fieldwork as it had been practiced by the Chicago sociologists in the 1920s was somewhat discredited: It seemed insufficiently rigorous, too dependent on the personal characteristics of the researcher, and incapable of supporting generalizations. Although he had never done ethnographic research himself and had occasionally expressed reservations about this approach, Herbert Blumer was the principal spokesman defending field researchers against critics, developing a critique and raising radical doubts about the significance of the results of survey research. In a 1948 article, he criticized survey researchers’ inability to give a generic definition of their object of

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study – public opinion – and insisted that these techniques could not deliver what they promised (Blumer,1948). In his 1956 presidential address to the American Sociological Society (1969, 127–39), he took similar exception to methods that required the researcher to define “variables” a priori in order to assess the influence of “independent” on “dependent” variables, because this ignored the fact that these variables necessarily must be interpreted by social actors. He concluded by emphasizing the need to grasp the sense given to things by actors in the course of their activity. Other critics later insisted on the sterility of an approach that privileged the verification of hypotheses concerning the relations between variables based on conventional categories. The 1950s were, in a sense, the golden age of survey research and statistical methods in American sociology. Until the middle of the 1960s, the arguments of the partisans of statistical methods carried greater weight among sociologists than did those of their adversaries. But American sociology was already large enough, differentiated enough, and rich enough in publication outlets to permit the existence of research that, in its method or subject matter, was outside the mainstream. Hughes was one of the small group of sociologists who continued to do or to direct research based on in-depth fieldwork (which was, after all, less costly, in money if not in time) and to teach the approach to a new generation of researchers. He stands in the first rank of those who inspired or encouraged those works published after 1940 – from Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943) to Goffman’s Asylums (1961) and Becker’s Outsiders (1963) – that again attracted attention to the fruitfulness of the approach. The success of the partisans of statistical methods can be seen in the recruitment of faculty trained in the new definition of research in the principal departments of sociology. The Chicago department itself recruited, after 1952, many people trained at Columbia (among them Peter Blau, Elihu Katz, James Coleman, and Peter Rossi), after briefly contemplating the idea of recruiting Lazarsfeld and Merton themselves. The “quantitative” approach to research was also represented at Chicago by demographers, the direct descendants of the ecological approach, such as Philip Hauser (a student of Ogburn) and the methodologist Leo Goodman. It is necessary to add to this the settling at Chicago, in 1947, of the National Opinion Research Center, one of the principal organizations conducting surveys on national samples, with which some people in the department were associated. At the end of the 1950s, of the 20 or so faculty in the department, only three or four were oriented to the use of fieldwork. The cleavage between the partisans of statistical methods and survey research, on the one hand, and those of fieldwork on the other was only one of the divisions in American sociology, which was already made up of multiple schools, none of which could impose its conception or approach on the whole. One might also mention the success, beginning in the 1940s, of the definition of sociology as an activity of speculative synthesis, of which Parsons is the most striking example. Today the excitement aroused by small group research is almost forgotten, as are the many sociologists and anthropologists who were then interested in psychoanalytic theories and looked to them for an inspiration for their own research. Finally, during the 1940s, there was no current or group of sociologists, even half constituted as such, in American sociology which tried to continue the kind of research

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carried on in Park’s time at Chicago. As we have seen, sociologists trained at Chicago between 1920 and 1935 did not consider themselves the inheritors of any particular sociological tradition. It was only afterward, during the 1940s and 50s, that the idea of an identifiable “Chicago tradition” solidified. The visibility of such a group – under the label symbolic interactionism – coincided somewhat with the publication of a collection of essays edited by Arnold Rose (Human Behavior and Social Processes [1962]), with contributions from three generations of researchers, from Ernest W. Burgess to Howard S. Becker and Erving Goffman, and including the generation of Hughes and Blumer.11 The following years, marked by the erosion of the intellectual credit of the Harvard and Columbia sociologists, also saw a regrouping of some sociologists who shared (in varying degree) a critical point of view toward the supposedly dominant currents of American sociology (functionalism and quantification) and a predilection for the ethnographic approach, to which was often added an attachment to the principles of Meadian social psychology. More important than the (generally superficial) expression of these affinities was the role of such means of publication and communication as the Observations collection edited by Howard S. Becker for Aldine in the 1960s, the journal Social Problems during the same period, the journal Urban Life and Culture (now published under the title Journal of Contemporary Ethnography) after 1972, and the founding in 1974 of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Despite the central role always attributed to him (as well as to Blumer) by sociologists of the next generation, Hughes kept his distance from any attempts to create a “school” (which implied an orthodoxy) out of what was in his eyes an intellectual heritage that should be enriched but not fossilized or turned into a dogma.12 The preceding analyses reveal some important elements for an understanding of Hughes’ sociology.13 First, his intellectual career developed in a period in which sociology was almost fully established institutionally, with a teaching tradition that could invoke a heritage of well-known studies, with possibilities of research financing, with professionally autonomous (in relation to those who funded research)criteria of research judgment: In short, Hughes belonged to the first generation of sociologists who worked in conditions nearly like those that are today taken for granted by sociologists in the United States and most of Western Europe. Second, in his intellectual orientation, Hughes carried on what had been the most accepted point of view when he was trained. He thus situated himself somewhat apart from the most fashionable currents of research in sociology in the 1940s and ‘50s. We will see that mainstream American sociology’s reservations about the kind of sociology adopted by Hughes certainly contributed to a growing rigor in his conception and use of fieldwork, and that they fed his reflections on the history of the social sciences and their approaches.

Everett C. Hughes (1897–1983)14 Hughes’ biography followed a typical trajectory for academic sociologists born before 1914. Born in 1897 in Ohio, near the border between the North and the South, son of a Methodist minister who came from a family of farmers that produced many ministers, Everett Hughes acquired in his earliest years (according to his own testimony) a sense of the class differences so significant in small midwestern towns, and inherited a “tendency

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to observe community life almost as much as to participate in it” (1984, 330). In a later memoir, Hughes described his family as morally strict but detached from a literal belief in the Bible, and said that he was gradually emancipated from the grip of religion; like most ministers’ children of his generation, he found himself precociously confronted with the choice of a lay career. After studying classics at Ohio Wesleyan University, Hughes left for Chicago in 1917 because he was thought too young for the job he wanted, teaching Latin in a nearby high school. For some months, he taught an evening course in a steel mill and, for the first time, came into contact with a mixed population of immigrants, thus discovering a society very different from the small rural Ohio towns he knew. In the fall of 1923, he enrolled in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology and Anthropology. The following year, on the advice of Ernest Burgess, he took the test for public park director (that is, the head of a small neighborhood recreational facility) in Chicago. This job, which he held for five years, again put him in contact with a variety of immigrant communities. He said that this contact with immigrant communities and with sociology completed his emancipation from the religion and provincialism of small-town America. At the University of Chicago, Hughes took classes from the department’s founder, the austere Albion Small (for whom he later expressed a reserved appreciation), and from George Herbert Mead. But it was under Robert E. Park’s direction that he began his dissertation. Park wanted him to do a statistical study of real estate prices in Chicago. Because the subject did not interest him, Hughes focused on the way real estate agents reconciled the imperatives of business and the demands, new for them, of being a “profession” (that is, an occupation requiring both technical competence and an ethical orientation, which would lead to higher status for the occupational group). The study, attentive to the historical dimension of the subject, furnished the first example of the perspective on institutions that Hughes kept throughout his career. He showed how the solutions real estate agents found for their work problems progressively gave birth to norms that were then imposed on succeeding generations. Hughes said that he carried out his research without much direction from Park, who was ordinarily generous with his suggestions. Defended in 1928, the thesis was not published, because the University of Chicago Press, in an unfavorable economic situation, required Hughes to help finance the publication, which he could not afford. Copies of an abridged version, published by a local academic organization, the Society for Social Research, disappeared almost immediately, and this first study was relatively accessible only when the abridged edition was republished in 1979. In 1927, Hughes was recruited to the recently opened Sociology Department of English-speaking McGill University in Montreal, where he met Carl Dawson, another student of Park. Hughes immediately set out to become familiar with the French-speaking society of Quebec: With his wife Helen MacGill, a Canadian from British Columbia, who was also writing a thesis with Park, he moved into a working-class neighborhood of Montreal and perfected his knowledge of French  – something quite unusual for a professor at Montreal’s elite English-speaking university. The eleven years Hughes spent at McGill did not isolate him from developments in the social sciences in the United States. He was twice invited to the University of Chicago, where a number of summer

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meetings attracted department alumni. Around this time, his relations with Park became closer, nourished by their common interest in observing the social realities around them. The years at McGill also reinforced Hughes’ interest in anthropology; he spoke of his lively interest in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Having to teach a course in social psychology, he also finally made real contact with the thought of George Herbert Mead. At McGill, Dawson and Hughes started a program in sociology oriented to the empirical study of Canadian society, out of which came many of the first generation of English-speaking Canadian sociologists. The departmental division of labor gave Hughes the frontier between the English and French worlds in Quebec as an area of research. Thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (initially meant to support a study of unemployment), in 1935 Hughes began a study of the consequences of industrialization in Drummondville, a small Quebec industrial city some 70 kilometers from Montreal.15 To have some comparative material, Hughes spent a year in Germany studying the contacts between Catholic workers and Protestant managers in the Rhine region. The research in Drummondville resulted in the publication in 1943 of French Canada in Transition, which quickly became one of the foundations of Canadian sociology. A community study, French Canada in Transition pays attention not only to interethnic contacts, but also to differences of class often neglected in the community studies done at Chicago in the 1930s.16 The study was conceived as part of a larger project that would also include the study of Montreal and some isolated rural communities. As Hughes himself indicated, the project was in part inspired by Redfield’s researches in Mexico, which analyzed communities arrayed along an urban-rural continuum. In the end only one such rural Canadian community was studied, by anthropologist Horace Miner, a student of Redfield (Miner 1939). The conclusions of French Canada in Transition nevertheless go beyond those which the study of one community could generate. The work distinguishes itself as well by the attention given to Drummondville’s different institutions, notably the Catholic parishes and the religious organizations. The ability to extract generic properties from the study of a small number of cases and the attention to the institutional dimension of social phenomena are found again in Hughes’ later researches.17 In 1938, two former fellow students of Hughes at Chicago, Louis Wirth and Herbert Blumer, who had remained at Chicago as teachers, offered him a faculty position there. In a later interview, Hughes attributed the offer to his reputation as a hard worker, capable of handling the teaching of new graduate students, which would be his responsibility.18 He was also charged with developing the area of social organization, which had been monopolized in the 1930s by anthropologists.19 There was less research activity in the department Hughes returned to than there had been in Park’s time. Wirth was more occupied with political activity than with research. The acerbic methodological criticisms of Blumer, his “methodological nihilism,” discouraged many students working on theses. Burgess directed many dissertations, but his interests led him more toward an approach in terms of social problems and toward such areas as delinquency, the family, and (somewhat later) old age. Ogburn’s star as a statistician had paled a little with the development of survey research, whose data required new analytic techniques. Some new faculty had been recruited, but the only one who remained

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at Chicago was anthropologist Lloyd Warner (close to anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown), who had participated in Elton Mayo’s researches at Western Electric. Warner divided his time between the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology, and was engaged in a large-scale program of research: Under his direction several teams of researchers had studied social and ethnic stratification in several American cities.20 The impetus Warner gave to the empirical study of class differences in the United States is often forgotten today, although it had an important influence on American sociology, drawing attention to one of the topics the sociology of 1920–40 had left unstudied.21 Although Hughes and Warner were not associated in any research together, they recruited their research assistants from the same small group of advanced students. Their intellectual interests – ethnic relations, class differences, the use of ethnographic methods – brought them together. Later, a certain complicity, perhaps favored by the antagonism between proponents of statistical methods and proponents of the ethnographic approach, seemed to unite them in their dealings with university politics. The testimony of sociologists who studied at Chicago during this period associates the influence of Hughes with Warner as often as with Wirth and Blumer. Hughes’ research after his return to Chicago cannot be dissociated from his teaching. This was especially true in what became one of his specialties after 1945: the uses of fieldwork in sociology. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, the end of World War II had brought to the University of Chicago an unprecedentedly large cohort of graduate students in sociology. As he describes it in “The Place of Field Work in Social Science” (1984, 496–506), Hughes quickly turned teaching the introduction to sociology into an introduction to fieldwork, an apprenticeship in observation, interviews, and the collection of available statistical and official data. Hughes was almost the only one in the United States at that time to offer such a course, and it lastingly marked many of the students in the department, as can be seen from their own testimony and from their later research. This influence extended to students in anthropology, many of whom took Hughes’ course,22 as well as to several of his colleagues who were associated with that teaching (such as David Reisman, then professor of sociology in the College of the University of Chicago23). After teaching this course for a dozen years, in 1951 Hughes directed a collective project designed to collect and analyze the fieldwork experiences of sociologists and anthropologists. He quickly added an analytic intention to the ‘practical’ objective of providing a textbook useful to young researchers: to reflect, without any intention of establishing a ‘right way’ to do it, on the practice of fieldwork and thus to do, as he wrote, “the sociology of sociology.” The enterprise produced the publication, completed by Buford Junker, an associate of Hughes and Warner, of a kind of textbook whose title reflected the importance Hughes gave to fieldwork: Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (Junker 1960). It presented and reflected on extracts from the writing of both older and beginning researchers (mostly master’s or doctoral students at Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s) on their experiences and proposed a guide for apprentices in this method. Its differences from works of methodology of the same period are clear: Instead of defining a general method applicable in all circumstances, it furnishes guidelines showing, through comparisons, how the researcher can adapt to changing field situations.

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Seen as a kind of testimony about the research practices of Hughes and his associates, Junker’s book also lets us measure the distance covered in a generation. One can compare it to the textbook on methods prepared by Vivian Palmer (1928), in charge of coordinating field researches by Chicago students during the Park-Burgess period: In the 1950s, fieldwork no longer justified itself on the barely codified model of investigative journalism, but rather referred to the experience of anthropologists since the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The Hughes group, however, differed from the anthropologists in paying less attention to practical problems. It was no longer a question of determining the conditions that made it possible or difficult to collect data, but above all of analyzing the effects of the researcher’s position on what he or she perceived. Field Work and Hughes’ methodological essays introduced the idea that observation of the researcher and analysis of the activities of research are instruments for the collective control of the results obtained by fieldwork: In short, without having formulated the idea explicitly, Hughes suggested that making the nature of field experiences clear in a critical way was one of the defining characteristics of rigor in this kind of research. Recalling the success of the appendix on method added to the second (1955) edition of Street Corner Society, in which Whyte told how he had done his research,24 one sees that Hughes’ reflections on fieldwork are one element of a new conception of research in social science, born in reaction to the criticisms of the ethnographic method made by proponents of statistical methods. For Hughes, reflection on fieldwork also put into historical perspective the variety of collective enterprises that carried out the analysis of society. At a time when sociologists were trying to forget researches they thought ‘prescientific,’ Hughes relativized these judgments, recalling what these works had accomplished and showing through comparison the social conditions that made questionnaire studies possible. Hughes’ essays on method thus proposed two leading ideas for the empirical study of the practices of social science:  to consider the social sciences as a kind of social movement or, in his words, a collective enterprise; and to apply to the work of its practitioners the questions and analytic framework that had proved themselves in the study of other forms of work. The first line of investigation was more fully developed in Hughes’ essays than the second, but some of his associates (see, e.g., Roth 1965 and Becker 1986) pursued the second in later years. Hughes’ essays on the sociology of work were also closely linked to his teaching after he returned to the University of Chicago. Underlying what became the most elaborated part of his sociology are the student researches that Hughes at first thought of as small contributions to an ethnography of marginal trades. As we have seen, studies of work constituted one of the areas of research in sociology for which financing could be found after 1940. The University of Chicago, whose administration then favored multidisciplinary research, approved the creation after the war of the Committee for the Study of Human Relations in Industry, whose members included Lloyd Warner and his associate Burleigh Gardner (one of the authors of Deep South [Davis, Gardner, and Gardner1941] and for a time professor in the university’s business school), psychologist Robert Havighurst, and economist Frederick Harbison, as well as Hughes and Whyte, who (after finishing Street Corner Society) did research in industrial sociology.

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This committee took advantage of the close relations of Gardner, a former employee of Western Electric, with the world of Chicago business leaders.25 The committee thus had both a source of financing and access to a field that began to open up to university researchers. Hughes, with some younger sociologists, undertook in this organizational framework a series of researches on ethnic relations in work settings (see his “The Knitting of Racial Groups in Industry” [1984, pp. 265–75]). The Committee supported some of the research of doctoral students, which constituted further material on which Hughes based his essays on the sociology of work. Hughes did not inspire all the research on the sociology of work carried on at Chicago during this period, nor did he play in this area a role like that of Park in the areas of ethnic relations or the study of the press.26 Hughes certainly directed many of these studies, but he also used others to his own ends, and he certainly drew on what passed through his hands as editor of the American Journal of Sociology between 1952 and 1960. The studies that depend most clearly on Hughes’ program are based almost entirely on intensive fieldwork, generally including observation in situ and interviews with populations of a limited size: a particular category of workers in an organization, a particular situation, or a specific occupation. Sometimes the author seems to have chosen a topic himself, even though influenced by Hughes – such as Donald Roy, whose study of the restriction of production by workers in a machine shop (Roy, 1952a, 1952b, 1953, 1954) Hughes considered one of the best dissertations he had supervised; at other times, as in Ray Gold’s study of janitors in Chicago (Gold, 1950, 1952), the inspiration seems to have come almost exclusively from Hughes, the author himself not seeing clearly at first, according to his own testimony, where the research was going. As he added to what became a wide range of cases, Hughes enriched the analytic framework that, in the provisional form of a guide to research, had oriented the earlier investigations. In the end, these researches moved from the study of work situations to the constitution of occupations as a unit in the division of labor, encompassing the study of careers in these institutions as well as in less formally organized sectors of activity.27 The relation of Hughes’ essays to empirical work on the relations between ethnic groups is a little different. These essays extended his research in Canada, as did the studies on ethnic relations in industry, but do not rest on as rich a group of ethnographic researches as do the essays on work.28 Hughes never deserted this field of research; until the end of his life, whenever he went to Quebec, he continued to enlarge his observations on economic, political, cultural, and linguistic aspects of the contacts between anglophones and francophones. His objective in these essays was not to propose an analytic framework capable of inspiring ethnographic research. Especially in Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers (Hughes and Hughes 1952), which compiled lectures from a course he taught at Chicago, his purpose was to describe the larger features of the ensemble of processes of which industrialization, urbanization, migrations, and the creation of nation states are different facets. Hughes’ originality – which brings together here more systematically one of the orientations of Park’s sociology of ethnic relations – comes especially from the diversity of historical examples he mobilizes to escape the simplistic analyses that inevitably arise from the examination of an isolated specific case, such as the relations between black and white in the United

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States, or the relations between the different populations of Central Europe. Some of the essays deal with topics for which the ethnographic approach could furnish only part of the data. The essays on institutions were, similarly, written throughout Hughes’ career and resemble those on work. They are an extension of his dissertation and his work on Canada, and are based on some unpublished theses and dissertations dealing with the development of teaching institutions or religious movements. More than the essays on professions, they contain a radical critique (although, as always in Hughes, expressed without emphasis or polemic) of the then-dominant approach in this area. Hughes thought, specifically, that the list of functions fulfilled by a specific institution was not given a priori but was, rather, something to be discovered by empirical investigation. “Going Concerns” (1984, 52–64), one of his principal essays in this area, sketches a general framework for analyzing the transition from social movement to institution. Beginning in 1950, Hughes’ research focused on two topics at the intersection of the sociologies of work and education, where it was then easy to find research funding: studies on higher education and on medicine. With a number of collaborators, Hughes first undertook, in 1950, a study of the nursing profession, at the request of the American Nursing Association (Hughes, Hughes, and Deutscher 1958; most of the work was in fact done by Deutscher). Five years later, he conceived and directed a much more ambitious project on medical education, for which the University of Kansas furnished the site. For this study, which aimed to explain why medical students did not orient their efforts in the direction expected by their professors, Hughes hired one of his former students, Howard S. Becker, and an educational psychologist, Blanche Geer; Anselm Strauss, then teaching social psychology at the University of Chicago, also took part in the study. Hughes himself studied the faculty. The project dealt, in part, with the same theme – training for the high-status profession of medicine  – as the one directed during the same period by Robert K.  Merton at Columbia. Hughes’ archives reveal that the project had an element of intellectual competition for him; he hoped to show that his approach to the study of professions and his favored method, intensive fieldwork, were more fruitful than the approach to the professions developed by Parsons and Merton and studied through the survey method then in vogue at Columbia. The superiority of Hughes’ study seems, in retrospect, incontestable, even if one can only partially compare the final results obtained by Hughes and his associates with The Student Physician (Merton, Reader, and Kendall 1957),29 a progress report on the empirical work of the Columbia researchers. The final report published by Hughes and his associates, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss [1961] 1991), analyzes the experience of medical students from a perspective much more distanced from and critical of the professions than that of Parsons and Merton; it was followed shortly by a study of college students, Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life (Becker, Geer, and Hughes[1968] 1995). The first remains today an unsurpassed example of the systematic and rigorous use of observation – a characteristic it owes partly to the intellectual rivalry with the Columbia study and to the criticisms then made of the ethnographic approach.

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Like most sociologists of his generation, Hughes climbed the academic ladder slowly. Assistant professor until 1943, he finally became a full professor in 1949. In 1952, he was named, although he probably did not want the job, department chair. These years saw Hughes contribute to a kind of liquidation of what had constituted the Chicago tradition. In a situation of crisis, he presided over a massive change of personnel. Within a few months, Ernest Burgess retired (as Ogburn had shortly before), Wirth died suddenly, and Blumer left to become chair of the new department at Berkeley. Hughes was thus the last representative in the sociology department of the tradition born there.30 At a conjuncture in which personal rivalries made the renewal of generations difficult, Hughes was among those who favored recruiting faculty trained elsewhere, especially at Columbia, where statistical methods were favored over fieldwork.31 By the end of the 1950s, the department faculty so mistrusted the ethnographic approach that students who used it in their dissertations would leave Chicago to follow Hughes or Warner to the universities where they finished their careers.32

In 1961, shortly before he would have had to retire from the University of Chicago, Hughes accepted an offer from Brandeis to create a new doctoral program based on fieldwork. In the agitated campus atmosphere of the 1960s, a new generation of researchers was trained in this approach at Brandeis. In 1968, Hughes left Brandeis for Boston College (moving from a university supported by the Jewish community to a Catholic institution run by Jesuits), where he taught until 1977. During these years, he worked on several research projects, and was particularly interested in the evolution of French usage in Quebec. He also helped complete a biography of Park, based partly on the Park archives at the University of Chicago, which he had saved almost by chance.33 The close link between teaching and research that extended throughout Hughes’ career implies that some of the studies done by researchers of the succeeding generations can be read (depending on the case) as the source material on which Hughes’ essays rest, as illustrations, or sometimes as more or less direct extensions of those essays. This is particularly true of some of the studies in the sociology of work and occupations published as articles, especially in the American Journal of Sociology. Goffman’s analyses in Asylums (1961), which develop the notion of total institutions, show a more indirect influence; even if Goffman borrowed his point of departure from a course Hughes gave in the 1950s, he certainly developed it differently than Hughes would have. The capacity of Hughes’ teaching to suggest fruitful research orientations has been recognized by many of his students and associates at both Chicago and Brandeis.34 Hughes’ contribution to the diffusion of the ethnographic method among sociologists trained in the 1950s and ‘60s is also well known. His relation to the following generation, however, is similar to that which his own generation had to Park: Each generation took from Hughes and those whose orientations were not too divergent – that is, Blumer, Wirth, and Warner – some of the elements that constituted their own sociology.35 Among the elements of Hughes’ sociology that almost completely disappeared among sociologists of the next generation are his attention to the ecological dimension of social facts and the sense of historical context, as well as the possibility of using statistical resources in research based on fieldwork.

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Hughes’ Version of the Sociological Enterprise Aside from French Canada in Transition and Boys in White (which is more an idea of Hughes than his own work), his sociology, like Park’s, principally took the form of the essay. These essays are not, like those of so many others, substitutes for research that was never done. Usually they are based, explicitly or implicitly, on studies by Hughes and his students, presenting in synthetic form some of their conclusions. Beginning with the research findings, the essays reformulate the terms in which questions are submitted for investigation, present the critical elaboration of one or several concepts, and sketch a program for extending the study of the phenomena apprehended by these notions through new research. The essays offer few general propositions that can be erected into a “theory” of a well-defined order of phenomena. They contain, instead, propositions about the range of possible variation of some property characteristic of a kind of behavior, institution, or social methods of investigation which constitute the outlines of a general methodology of the social sciences. These features of Hughes’ essays are part of a conception of the aims of research shared by some researchers in the Chicago tradition, but also by many others. To reformulate the terms in which questions are socially constituted (and eventually submitted to researchers in the social sciences by their proponents) and to clarify the basic notions and enrich the analytic framework by introducing new dimensions of variation – these are for Park, Becker, or Goffman, as well as for Hughes, the major objectives of research in social science. The explicit definition of ideas that permit one to organize the perception of a category of phenomena is the final form, the ‘results,’ that a successful research can produce. Hughes’ essays on the sociology of work, like Goffman’s Asylums (1961), offer a good example of the realization of such a program. They have been used as guides for studies on occupations and situations of work in other historical or cultural contexts than those in which they were first elaborated. Above all, they have inspired studies in other domains: The approach to deviance in Outsiders (Becker 1963) and the approach to artistic production in Art Worlds (Becker 1982) are, as Becker emphasizes, developments of Hughes’ sociology of work occasioned by transposing it to new social arenas. Hughes does not explicitly present this conception of research in the social sciences, but it is there, and underlies many of the scattered remarks in the essays. Hughes finally abandoned the project, once cherished, of giving a more systematic formulation of his sociology (doubtless partly because of the allergy Hughes always had to any kind of dogmatism); besides, it probably would not have done full justice to the investigative spirit at the center of his sociology. Hughes’ essays are written simply enough that the reader has no trouble picking out the important analytic elements. I will limit myself here to clarifying what might be less easily understood in Hughes’ sociology, or what might lead to ambiguities for readers unfamiliar with the current of thought in which Hughes worked.36 I will also try to bring out what was most original in his work and what most distinguished him from others in that current. Like Park’s, Hughes’ sociology is characterized by both an extreme attention to the details furnished by minute observations and an insistence on such macro social processes as urbanization, industrialization, the evolution of the division of labor, and interethnic

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contacts. Hughes devotes a large part of his effort to relating these two orders of phenomena – that is, to showing how the smallest details can be interpreted in light of these global processes and the economic, political, or cultural characteristics of the societies studied. The characterization often advanced of the Chicago tradition as a kind of social psychology centered on the subjective aspect of behavior does not apply to Hughes’ sociology.37 His essays on ethnic relations, so attentive to their political and economic and to their spatial and temporal dimensions, make this point more clearly than do the essays on work, which are more closely connected to specific studies, whose abundant detail more easily conceals the outlines of the whole that inspired them. The diversity of meanings given to the term “interaction” by sociologists linked to the Chicago tradition has certainly helped obscure the role Hughes assigned to both the objective and subjective dimensions of social phenomena. For Hughes, “interaction” sometimes meant face-to-face interaction (the only meaning, for Goffman); he also often refers to the fact that the actions of individuals constitute responses to the actions of others: This usage is clearest in his most Meadian essay, “What Other?” (1984, 348–54), which examines the degrees of sensitivity of individuals to the persons or entities with which they come in contact.38 But for Hughes, as for Park, the notion of interaction “is not a commonsense idea” (as noted in Park and Burgess 1921, 339) that simply designates a collection of concrete phenomena; rather, it is a constructed conception that asserts as a basic postulate that “the members of a society are linked by a system of mutual influences which, by virtue of its properties, must be considered as a process” (Park 1955, 221).39 When Hughes says that “society is interaction,” as he occasionally does, he wants to emphasize that social phenomena have the character of a process – that they constantly undergo change  – and thus cannot be reduced to a combination of “forces,” “structures,” or “factors,” that it is sociology’s job to discover (Becker [1970] 1977, v). This perspective defines sociology as the study of collective action, and thus considers any social object whatsoever – norms, institutions, categories of population, representations – a historical product which cannot be analyzed by making an abstraction of it. It is what Hughes always does in relation to the division of labor, occupations, or institutions. Unlike what was suggested by the radical interpretation of the Blumerian program, as diffused in the 1960s, which accented the creative character of interactions, this perspective does not neglect the existence of socially established norms (or, to use an expression that was not part of Hughes’ vocabulary, what was instituted in society). Park, like all American sociologists of his time, emphasized that “social control is the central fact of society” (Park 1955, 227).40 Hughes did not use this formulation; it was already outdated in the 1930s, when social control acquired another meaning, as social psychologists used it to refer to the socialization of people to conform to norms. But his essays always give a large place to phenomena that sociologists of the preceding generation collected under that term, and it is noticeable that he often referred to William Graham Sumner, whose major work, Folkways (Sumner 1906), concerns the establishment and evolution of social norms. One could even suggest that Hughes’ sociology is “above all the study of regularities in collective life and of the changes in these social types following on industrialization, professionalization, and such events as war and emigration” (Floro 1986).

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If one approaches social phenomena in terms of process, the study of social norms cannot be reduced to examining their expression in laws, rules, or the declarations of principle made by social actors. The interpretation and implementation of those norms in daily life, then, is one of the principal themes to which research must be devoted. That, certainly, is what Hughes made of W. I. Thomas’ concept, “the definition of the situation,” and it was this idea that gave Hughes a new audience when American sociologists, in the 1960s, began to study the complexity of the implementation of social norms in all kinds of institutions (justice, hospitals, and the like). Hughes’ approach seemed to avoid the reification of norms characteristic of functionalist sociology of the time and made room for the empirical study of diverse interpretations of those norms. Although Hughes’ sociology resembles Park’s in its attention to the processual character of social phenomena, it is free of most of the elements in Park that were in vogue at the beginning of the century. Every trace of evolutionism disappears in Hughes, who adopted, like most anthropologists of his time, a relativistic vision of the diversity of societies and cultures. His anthropological knowledge is obviously greater than Park’s could have been, since only after World War II did anthropology stop being based, for the most part, on second-hand reports. Hughes used this anthropological material, as well as his vast historical knowledge, as a means of critical vigilance against ethnocentrism  – for him the primary enemy. He was also much less imbued than Park with the philosophical thought of the turn of the century. He thus completely avoided speculating about the essence of this or that order of phenomena: Social relations are for him the basic element of the social sciences. His essay “The Study of Ethnic Relations” (1984, 153–8) explicitly presents this perspective, but Hughes clearly adopted the same perspective with respect to institutions and occupations. However, there is a less obvious similarity between Hughes’ conception of objectivity and Park’s. As their writings and the testimony of their former students suggest, both Hughes and Park privileged investigation conducted from the point of view of an observer detached from the established norms and values of his epoch and milieu; they believed that researchers should not concern themselves with immediate practical implications, but rather aim to understand phenomena independent of both the characteristics and working conditions of researchers.41 Each, however, interprets this basic conception in his own way: When Park wrote his sociological essays, non-conformism vis-a-vis moral norms was allied to social conservatism; Hughes displays a more irreverent irony with respect to the established order, but sometimes also seems more marked by his Midwestern Protestant heritage.42 Park’s essays, like those of other sociologists of his generation, do not permit us to be more specific about his conception; we might say that he accepted the theory of “absolute objectivity” characteristic of the classical epistemology of the natural sciences, as did the sociologists of the 1970s who were influenced by phenomenology (see, for example, Douglas 1967). The more elaborated conception that can be drawn from Hughes’ essays does not fit easily into this category. To begin with, Hughes was too sensitive to the diversity of the social sciences of his time, too clear-sighted about the social reasons that made inevitable the recognition that his conception of scientific objectivity was only one among the many then available (as is shown by his essay, “Sociologists and the Public”

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[1984, 455–63]). His approach to research was guided more by an intention of objectivity than by a conception of it reducible to a set of explicit rules. To me, it is here, in what one could call Hughes’ craft, as well as in his mode of composition (to which I will return), that Hughes’ originality resides. The critical examination of the properties of terms of ordinary language, which constitute at least part of the preliminary definition of the objects social scientists study, is an investigative strategy Hughes applied to every subject he analyzed. The attention he gave to problems of language  – or, rather, of the languages used by all social science research – may seem relatively banal to a reader familiar with the debates of American anthropologists and sociologists of the last 20 years. It evidently was not when Hughes composed his essays. These questions were either abandoned to the speculations of philosophers of social science or treated by sociologists as technical questions, encountered only during the collection or initial use of data. Hughes was one of the first to see the practical consequences of the fact that data are organized in the categories of ordinary language: An important part of the research, then, must aim, at controlling these categories and their relation to the categories of the scholarly language of scientific communication. His solution to this problem is quite different from that of a Durkheimian sociology, satisfied with producing a ‘scientific’ definition of the subject of study and forgetting it when analyzing empirical material. For Hughes, the control of language is involved in every stage of the research process, including the communication of results, which also relies on the resources of ordinary language. The essential stage is the critical examination of ordinary vocabulary and the making explicit of central ideas; Hughes objected to the invention of an esoteric jargon (his students often mentioned his irony about sociologists’ preference for pompous vocabulary and the most complicated possible syntactical constructions). Hughes began with a banal idea, rarely considered methodically by researchers in the social sciences: that the categories of ordinary language reflect the viewpoint of categories used by specific people, and that those categories impose on the researcher the ‘practical’ viewpoint of the people who use them and their perception of social phenomena – not only the implicit value judgments made by the people studied, but also the carving up of social reality that those judgments imply. A good example is the concept of restriction of production, widely used by sociologists of work in the 1940s: Applied to industrial workers, it reflected the point of view of employers, implicitly assuming that employers had the right to define a ‘normal’ level of production. Another example is the use of the term minority in multiethnic societies, by which the dominant group defines what the other groups are and should become. (The analysis Hughes develops in “What’s In a Name?” is in fact a critique of Park’s sociology of ethnic relations.) The work of objectifying the social world which the social sciences pursue thus requires the construction of categories free of the viewpoints of the social actors who participate in the phenomena studied. Hughes’ principal resource for elaborating such analytic categories and controlling their validity is the comparative method. He used the comparative method not to illustrate but rather, in the style of Simmel, flexibly to reveal, by assembling them under a specific heading, characteristics that socially accepted definitions tended to hide. Thus, for Hughes, the comparative

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method was essentially an instrument observers require themselves to use in order to assess evidence critically. Beginning by retaining only one characteristic – sometimes a characteristic of the relations, such as the keeping of clients’ secrets by a category of workers – Hughes develops a series of cases (occupations, work situations, institutions, kinds of ethnic contact, etc.) which make evident characteristics that the examination of only one of them would have ignored. (The inventory of diverse forms of deviation in relation to norms found in “Bastard Institutions” [Hughes 1984, 98–105] is a good example of the insights obtainable in this way.) Use of this method rests on a conviction Hughes often expressed:  The obstacles that sociological analysis encounters are particularly strong among those who benefit from the greatest legitimacy – or, to use Becker’s term ([1970] 1977, 123–34), among those at the top of the hierarchy of credibility. It is therefore convenient to use cases that offer the least resistance to sociological analysis: To study the medical profession, one should begin with occupations of lesser status; the study of abortion (in the context of the 1960s) is one of the best approaches to the study of medical ethics. Hughes generally gave close attention to the extreme cases of the series he was interested in, no doubt because he found it easier to identify in them the properties of the series to which they belonged than in the more ‘normal’ ones. This attention to limiting cases also explains his interest in determining the field of possible variations of an order of phenomena: For example, “Bastard Institutions” examines the diversity of modes of association between the two sexes observable in North American societies. Analysis of the diversity of social arrangements indicates familiarity with the anthropology of his day, but it also reflects his sensitivity to the role of historical conjunctures in the determination of any social fact, as well as his skepticism toward any form of rigid determinism in social science. For Hughes, the closing of an empirical investigation always seemed a little premature, and some of his students report his satisfaction when he discovered exceptions, even to his own analyses. Another original element of Hughes’ craft derives from his identification of social relations as the basic analytic element of social science. The study of an institution or group thus becomes the study of the network of social relations in which that unit is embedded. Most researches, even today, proceed in the opposite direction, examining only the internal relations of the unit studied, because the sources of data sociologists habitually use ‘naturally’ lead in this direction. But the observer never knows immediately the network of social relations in which the unit studied is embedded; it can be discovered only by systematically investigating what Hughes called “the limits of the system of action” in which the phenomenon studied is immersed (“Going Concerns” [1984, 52–64]). Even though he retrospectively criticized his own research on occupations for having neglected such contextualization in favor of internal analyses, Hughes’ analyses owe some of their originality to it. If one uses the term “ethnocentrism” in an extended sense, to designate every form of projection on to the object studied of the point of view and criteria of judgment of the observers which result from their own characteristics – their country, ethnicity, profession, class, et cetera – or to the influence exercised on them by those they study, it follows that the different elements I have just put in evidence converge, finally, on the same

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objective: to permit an increasing freeing of analyses from every form of ethnocentrism. It is again a question of an intention, not an attainable objective, since the progressive elaboration of ideas is clearly never finished. The substantive content of Hughes’ sociology thus agrees with his ‘private’ convictions, marked by a resolute hostility toward all forms of chauvinism. In a period when American sociology was perhaps marked more than at any other time by ethnocentrism, Hughes was one of the few sociologists to insist, through analyses based on anthropological and historical knowledge, on the infinite diversity of social arrangements and social meanings constructed day by day, which constitute an ever renewed field for social science investigation.

Hughes the Essayist Almost all of Hughes’ essays adopt the same style of composition, which can mislead the reader both because it avoids ordinary editorial conventions and because it seems to avoid the emphasis on empirical research characteristic of the tradition to which he belonged. This is not, however, simply stylistic eccentricity:  His mode of composition reflects a characteristically Hughesian way of working and conception of communication in the social sciences. Many of his essays were responses to a particular occasion – the meeting of a scholarly society, the preface to a book or special issue of a journal, or simply a class or talk he had to give – and he never hid the traces of their origin. Around the analyses devoted to the theme treated were general remarks devoted to the methods or enterprise of social science research, observations on classic questions, passing allusions to the work of students or colleagues, personal anecdotes, and allusions to political or social events of the day (an exemplary illustration of his use of different ingredients is “Of Sociology and the Interview” [1984, 507–15]). These elements may at first give the reader the sense that the essay is a little too much the product of specific circumstances and of the author’s attempt to keep an audience’s attention, to the detriment of its sophistication. It is nothing of the sort. These elements perform a function that is perfectly defined in his method. The improvised character of the essays is only a matter of their most superficial aspects  – the point of departure, as well as the allusions to the context in which they were originally presented. Beyond these one finds a small stock of ideas, finely elaborated as they are applied to a variety of subjects. Hughes’ style, more given to irony than to emphasis, may make the reader lose sight of the abstract and general – theoretical, if you prefer – character of the analytic schemes he uses. Most of the essays are constructed on the same plan: Beginning with an initial remark that seems at first banal, and then placing the phenomenon treated in its social context, they lead the reader, almost insensibly, to a point of view or an idea that is almost always subtle and original. Readers who let themselves be fooled by the simplicity of expression and the scarcity of explicit references to systematic research will not appreciate the road Hughes has taken. The construction of Hughes’ essays is generally thematic:  like Simmel, one of his favorite authors, Hughes follows a thread of analysis by the free association of ideas; when one thread is exhausted, he turns to another question which is not always attached by a strictly logical link to the first, although he sometimes returns to the original idea.

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This is evidently at the opposite extreme, stylistically, from most sociologists of his generation, in their research reports as well as in their theoretical reflections: Hughes does not borrow from the rhetoric of the natural sciences; he does not attempt, as Parsons did, to create his own language, in the manner of the social philosophers of the nineteenth century. His efforts are turned in the opposite direction: to show how one implements the basic principles of his approach and to introduce ideas whose sense is clear and precise, but whose point of departure is found in common language and not in a priori speculative constructions. Hughes combines the long and precise elaboration of ideas that constitute the heart of his essays with ideas of common language whose empirical referents are often imprecise. This is not a lack of rigor, but rather a concern, always present in Hughes, not to shut analysis off prematurely forgetting aspects of social reality or its still unexplored determinations. The commonsense words designate ideas with a large semantic field (such as contingency). Another confusing aspect of Hughes’ style is the illustration of analytic points by personal anecdotes. The work of a small-town minister or university life – two situations familiar to him – furnished the principal matter of his stories. They are sometimes treated as an instrument of scientific communication (the features of university life, of course, belong to the shared experience of the scholarly community). But their use also expresses the conviction that the instruments of social science analysis must also apply to the activities of research itself. There is also, finally, a pedagogical justification for his use of anecdotes in presenting the most abstract analyses. Hughes remarked, about teaching fieldwork, that beginners always had difficulty seeing any connection between their own observations and abstract social science categories. By using simple, often personal, examples in his own essays, he showed how the categories he created functioned, and gave an example of the research posture that expressed his own conception of social science. In making these features of Hughes’ sociology explicit, I have tried to show that it is not reducible to such stereotyped categories as “symbolic interactionism” or “Chicago School,” a mistake that has been widespread for many years. To characterize social science research by a few features, baptized as paradigms or theories in homage to the natural sciences, often creates an obstacle to a deep understanding of them. These constructions are, essentially, a product of the routinization of teaching and the strategic use of supposed ancestors in the quest for scientific legitimacy. But they always let what is most essential escape: that the results of social science research cannot be reduced to a few principles and that their coherence is always only partial. The interest of these results often lies as much in what cannot be contained by the principles advanced by their authors as in what follows logically from them. Thus, these works represent less an application of some formula than an original combination of different elements, notably those I have evoked in relation to Hughes: selective borrowing from one’s predecessors; a critical reaction, depending on one’s biographical path, to contemporary studies and movements of ideas; craft acquired through the experience of prior research; finally, the occasions of research offered by circumstances. I would insist, finally, on the simplicity of the elements that makeup Hughes’ sociology, and on the fact

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that they are found as well in the work of others – at least in their statements of principle. But few use these elements in so consequential a manner, or offer so stimulating a source of inspiration for new investigations. Translated by Howard S. Becker

Notes Reprinted from: Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1996. “Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition,” Sociological Theory 14 (1): 3–29. 1 The year 1983 refers to the original year of publication of this chapter. 2 I have relied here on a few works in which the history of sociology is not reduced to a history of ideas based solely on an internal analysis of works. The first developments in American sociology are analyzed in Bannister (1987). The fullest analysis of the development of sociology at Chicago is Bulmer (1984). The general presentation in Faris (1967) contains useful complementary data, as does Carey (1975). A biography and excellent critical presentation of Robert E. Park’s work is Matthews (1977). The most substantial analysis of the development of survey research in sociology and elsewhere is found in Converse (1987). I have also found very helpful several articles by Jennifer Platt on the history of American sociology (Platt 1996). I have also used my own research on the history of sociology at the University of Chicago, parts of which are reported in Chapoulie (1987) and in my introduction to the French translation of Becker’s Outsiders (Chapoulie 1985). 3 A persistent legend says that the first department to refer to sociology in its title was the one at Chicago. In fact, the University of Kansas had a little earlier adopted the title of “Department of Sociology and History” (see Sica 1990). 4 Thomas was caught in a hotel room with a married woman who was not his wife. The administration of the university demanded his resignation, as had occurred in similar cases. I would not mention this detail here if its semi-hiding for more than 50 years did not reveal an important feature, little understood today, of the cultural context in which the social sciences developed in the United States. (Or, in the words of one of Thomas’s students, Kimball Young, sociology was always suspected of being closely related to socialism and sexuality.) 5 The first dynamic teacher of anthropology at the University of Chicago was an archeologist, Fay Cooper-Cole, who joined the faculty in 1924. In the following years, Edward Sapir (1925– 30) and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (after 1930) taught at Chicago. The separation of sociology and anthropology into two departments in 1929 did not diminish the place of anthropology in the training of future sociologists. 6 Park refers here to a lecture by William James (“A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in James [1899]) which connects with one of the themes developed by sociologists he influenced; see, for example the theme of the “social drama of work” in Hughes. 7 I base this on several reminiscences by Hughes on sociology at Chicago between 1925 and 1935, as well as on interviews collected by James Carey for his book (1975), now in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. 8 To avoid a frequent error, it should be pointed out that Whyte had been a junior fellow at Harvard, and that Street Corner Society ([1943] 1981) was done before he had any contact with the Chicago sociologists. When he moved to Chicago in the early Forties, he benefited from Hughes’ support, which enabled him to counter Wirth’s hostility during his Ph.D. oral. 9 Shaw and McKay, who worked at the Institute of Juvenile Research in Chicago, had published a number of life histories of delinquents during the 1930s, as well as a pioneering statistical study of delinquency (Shaw and McKay 1942). 10 On this point, see the remarks of Richard LaPiere (in Deutscher 1973, 36–8), as well as Platt’s (1996) analysis of what she calls “networks of scientism.”

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11 The expression “symbolic interaction” was first used by Blumer in 1937 and was scarcely picked up by anyone for 20 years. 12 In a debate with Blumer, organized in 1969 by a new generation of sociologists enamored of fieldwork and the studies done in the past at Chicago, Hughes refused to “preserve a tradition,” and was quite ironic toward these young admirers ready to reconstitute a “Chicago school” (see Lofland 1980, 278–9). 13 To make Hughes’ perspective on sociology understandable, I have presented here a version of the history of American sociology centered on Chicago, rather than one of the other possible versions – for example, one that would center on the research done at Columbia, characterized by a quite different relation to the use of statistical methods. 14 This section is based on my investigation of Hughes’ personal archives, and the archives of other sociologists and anthropologists, in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, as well as on two interviews with Hughes, one by Robert Weiss in 1981, the other in 1983 by Jean Peneff, and the already mentioned debate between Blumer and Hughes (Lofland 1980). 15 Shore (1987, especially 254–60) contains an analysis of the context of Hughes’ research at McGill. 16 Compare, for example, Blumenthal (1932), based on a thesis directed by Burgess. 17 I leave aside here an examination of Hughes’ influence on French Canadian sociology, following a period as visiting professor at the Université Laval in 1942–43, during which time he drew up a program of studies on Quebec. See Ostow (1985) and Fournier (1986). 18 Even at this time, Hughes does not seem to have been very close to Blumer or Wirth. Robert Redfield, Park’s son-in-law and a close friend of Hughes, who had the ear of the university administration at this time, may have contributed to his return. 19 In the terminology of the day, social organization encompassed the division of labor, the family, religious institutions, etc., and was distinguished from the area of collective behavior, handled by Blumer. 20 The three groups of studies directed by Warner produced many publications. The first series (Warner et al. 1941–59), known collectively as the Yankee City Series, dealt with Newburyport, Massachusetts. The second (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner 1941) dealt with Natchez, Mississippi. The third dealt with the small Illinois city of Morris (known in various publications as Jonestown, Elmtown, etc.). A major product was Warner (1947). We could also add to this list Black Metropolis (1945), a study of black South Side of Chicago done by Horace Cayton, a student of Park, and St. Clair Drake, an anthropologist who was a student of Allison Davis. 21 The lack of attention to class differences and conflicts – mentioned only in passing and not occupying a definite place in their analyses – is in fact relatively specific to the sociologies of Park and Thomas and is found in neither Cooley nor Small, whose courses gave substantial room to Marx. 22 He taught the course for at least one year jointly with the anthropologist Sol Tax. 23 Hughes’ papers in the University of Chicago library show clearly the close intellectual relations, especially in matters of research, between Hughes and Riesman, at least from the beginning of the 1950s, as well as their cooperation in university politics. Riesman was one of the intermediaries in recruiting faculty trained at Columbia. 24 Remember that it was the appendix on method that transformed Street Corner Society, which had until then enjoyed only a modest success, into a classic of American sociology. 25 Gardner soon left the university to start a commercial research organization that did work for many of the large companies in Chicago and sometimes temporarily employed graduate students from the university. 26 I base this on an examination of theses done at the University of Chicago between 1940 and 1960, only a minority of which related to the sociology of work. 27 Among the published studies most closely linked to those of Hughes are (in addition to those already cited) Becker’s studies of dance musicians (1963, 79–119) and school teachers ([1970] 1977, 137–75); Oswald Hall’s studies of the medical profession (1948, 1949); and those of

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Fred Davis (1959). One could also add the unpublished dissertations of Robert W. Habenstein (portions of which were later published in various collections), Harvey L. Smith, and David Solomon, and two books based on dissertations partly inspired by Hughes’ approach (Dalton 1959; Carlin 1962). 28 The principal ethnographic studies on which these essays are based deal with ethnic relations in industry; see, for instance, Orvis Collins’ dissertation and the article drawn from it (Collins 1946), as well as some studies by Mozell Hill. 29 See also the retrospective examination of these studies in Kendall (1975). At least one study, by Mary Goss, a member of Merton’s group, relied primarily on observation and resulted in several articles. 30 Another graduate of the department, Philip Hauser, was also a professor at Chicago at the time, but his interests lay in demography rather than fieldwork. 31 This text was already written when I learned of an article by Abbott and Gaziano (1995) which develops a subtle analysis that seems to me fundamentally correct (I have inspected the same documents) of the complex conflicts of intellectual orientations and professional interests in the Chicago department between 1945 and 1960. The authors describe in detail the convergences and divergences among Hughes, Blumer, Wirth, Warner, Riesman, Hauser, and others which cannot be reduced to any simple principle:  faithfulness to the Thomas-Park tradition, conceptions of research, methodological preferences, political orientations, or relations with the university administration. I will just note here the final result of this evolution: the progressive disappearance of the kind of research Hughes did. 32 In fact, shortly after Hughes left Chicago, Morris Janowitz was brought into the department (he had gotten his own PhD there), where he directed the work of a new generation of fieldworkers and helped to keep the tradition alive by stimulating the republication by the University Press of monographs from the 1920s, as well as the works of Park, Thomas, and others. 33 Hughes’ papers show that he supervised the work of the biography’s author, Winifred Rauschenbusch (1979), a former assistant of Park; the last chapter was signed by Hughes. Hughes had also earlier overseen the three-volume publication of Park’s collected papers. 34 Hughes’ influence was exercised in other ways than the teacher-student relationship. Some of his associates in research projects (e.g., Deutscher, Geer, and Strauss) were never his students; others (e.g., Goffman), who later claimed kinship with him, had taken scarcely any courses with him or had done theses whose orientation owed nothing to him, although their later work was nearer to his approach (e.g., Julius Roth). 35 A recently published interview with Erving Goffman, whose orientation unquestionably owed more to Warner and Radcliffe-Brown than to the pragmatist tradition, offers a clear example of how Hughes’ influence was combined with that of others (Verhoeven 1993). See also Heath (1984) for an appreciation of Hughes’ diffuse influence on the sociology of health and medicine. 36 See Daniels (1972) and Riesman and Becker (1984) for a general appraisal of Hughes’ sociology, and Heath (1984) and Chapoulie (1973) on his sociology of work. 37 This interpretation gives a central place to Blumer’s programmatic and critical essays (Blumer 1969) and forgets that these were above all part of a polemic against the basic conceptions of survey research as it was practiced after World War II. It is, in fact, impossible to reduce to the working out of this program Blumer’s own essays on race relations and industrial relations, which, until recently, were scattered and barely accessible – even, in certain cases, still unpublished. (See Lyman and Vidich [1988] for a partial recollection.) 38 This point is also developed in Blumer’s essay (1969, especially 65–6) on Mead. It is worth noting that the term interaction does not even appear in the index to Mead’s principal book on social psychology (1934). 39 A little farther in the same essay, “Sociology and the Social Sciences,” Park insists that interaction is a process “which cannot be conceived solely in terms of spatial or physical proximity.”

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This article, originally published in two issues of the American Journal of Sociology in 1920 and 1921, was the first presentation of Park’s point of view; it also figures in the beginning of Park and Burgess’ textbook (1921). Park’s notion of interaction rests on a rudimentary analogy with Newtonian mechanics inspired by Simmel and Gumplowicz. 40 Park and Burgess (1921) illustrated this idea with an extract from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life which emphasizes the way collective representations constrain people. 41 For Park, as for Hughes, it is the moment of investigation that must, in the social sciences, be absolutely separated from the moment of eventual practical applications. To attribute to him a disinterest in or disdain for these applications (as do a number of critics) is a fundamental misunderstanding; it is enough to recall Park’s involvement, toward the end of his life, in activities analogous to those of the social reformers of the Progressive Era between 1890 and 1920. 42 Readers do not always appreciate this aspect of Hughes’ writing. In the context of the time, his irony and detachment sometimes seemed to students at Chicago to be a kind of cynicism, or at least a shocking lack of respect for what they took seriously.

References No author given. 1895. Hull House Maps and Papers, a presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago, together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions, by residents of Hull House. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Abbott, Andrew, and Emanuel Gaziano. 1995. “Transition and Tradition: Departmental Faculty in the Era of the Second Chicago School.” In The Second Chicago School, edited by Gary Alan Fine, 221–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bannister, Robert. 1987. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Becker, Howard S. 1963 [1970]. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. ———. 1977. Sociological Work: Method and Substance. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ———. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1985. Outsiders: Études de sociologie de la deviance. Paris: A.-M. Metailié. ———. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, Blanche Geer, and Everett C. Hughes. 1968 [1995]. Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ———, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm L. Strauss. 1961 [1991]. Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Blumenthal, Albert. 1932. Small Town Stuff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1939. An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.’ New York: Social Science Research Council. ———. 1948. “Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling.” American Sociological Review 13: 542–54. ———. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Booth, Charles. 1889–1891. Labour and Life of the London Poor. London: Williams and Norgate. Bulmer, Martin. 1984. The Chicago School of Sociology:  Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carey, James. 1975. Sociology and Public Affairs: The Chicago School. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Carlin, Jerome. 1962. Lawyers on Their Own. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1973. “Sur l’analyse sociologique des professions.” Revue francaise de sociologie 14: 86–114. ———. 1985. “Presentation.” In Outsiders, by Howard S. Becker, 9–21 (tr. J.-M. Chapoulie). Paris: A.-M. Metailie. ———. 1987. “Everett C. Hughes and the Development of Fieldwork in Sociology.” Urban Life 15: 259–97.

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———. 1998. “From Nels Anderson’s The Hobo (1923) to Elijah Anderson’s Streetwise (1991).” In The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology, edited by Luigi Tomasi, 105–127. Farnham: Ashgate. Collins, Orvis. 1946. “Ethnic Behavior in Industry: Sponsorship and Rejection in a New England Factory.” American Journal of Sociology 51: 293–8. Converse, Jean M. 1987. Survey Research in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dalton, Melville. 1959. Men Who Manage. New York: Wiley. Daniels, Arlene Kaplan. 1972. “The Irreverent Eye.” Contemporary Sociology 1: 402–9. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. 1941. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, Fred. 1959. “The Cabdriver and his Fare:  Facets of a Fleeting Relationship.” American Journal of Sociology 65: 158–65. Deutscher, Irwin. 1973. What We Say/What We Do: Sentiments and Acts. Glenview: Scott Foresman. Douglas, Jack. 1967. Investigative Social Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. 1945. Black Metropolis. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Faris, Robert. 1967. Chicago Sociology: 1920–1932. San Francisco: Chandler. Floro, George. 1986. “Review of The Sociological Eye.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 22: 66–72. Fournier, Marcel. 1986. “Jean-Charles Falardeau, un intellectual à la réncontre de deux mondes.” In L’entrée dans la Modérnité, edited by Marcel Fournier, 176–87. Montreal: Saint Martin. Freidson, Eliot. 1970. The Profession of Medicine. New York: Dodd Mead. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gold, Raymond. 1950. “The Chicago Flat Janitor.” Unpublished M.A.  thesis. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. ———. 1952. “Janitors versus Tenants: A Status-Income Dilemma.” American Journal of Sociology 57: 486–93. Hall, Oswald. 1948. “The Stages of the Medical Career.” American Journal of Sociology 53: 243–53. ———. 1949. “Types of Medical Careers.” American Journal of Sociology 55: 404–13. Heath, Christian. 1984. “Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983): A Note on his Approach and Influence.” Sociology of Health and Illness 6: 218–34. Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press ———. 1984. The Sociological Eye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ——— and Helen MacGill Hughes. 1952. Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Hughes, Everett C., Helen MacGill Hughes and Irwin Deutscher. 1958. Twenty Thousand Nurses Tell Their Story. Philadelphia: Lippincott. James, William. 1899. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt. Junker, Buford. 1960. Field Work:  An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Kendall, Patricia L. 1975. “Theory and Research: The Case of Studies in Medical Education.” In The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton, edited by Lewis Coser, 301–21. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lofland, Lyn H. 1980. “Reminiscences of Classic Chicago: The Blumer-Hughes Talk.” Urban Life 9 (3): 251–81. Lyman, Stanford M. and Arthur J. Vidich. 1988. Social Order and the Public Philosophy. An Analysis and Interpretation of the Work of Herbert Blumer. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Matthews, Fred. 1977. Quest for an American Sociology:  Robert E.  Park and the Chicago School. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa:  A  Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow.

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Merton, Robert K., George Reader and Patricia L. Kendall, eds. 1957. The Student Physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Miner, Horace. 1939. Saint-Denis: A French Canadian Parish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ostow, Robin. 1985. “Everett Hughes: From Chicago to Boston.” Society/Société 9 (1): 8–12. Palmer, Vivian. 1928. Field Studies in Sociology:  A  Student’s Manual. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert E. 1955. Society: Collective Behavior, News and Opinion, Sociology and Modern Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ——— and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peneff, Jean. 1990. La method biographique. Paris: Armand Colin. Platt, Jennifer. 1996. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Rauschenbusch, Winifred. 1979. Robert E.  Park:  Biography of a Sociologist. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. Riesman, David and Howard S. Becker. 1984. “Introduction to the Transaction Edition.” In Everett C. Hughes, The Sociological Eye, v–xiv. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Rose, Arnold, ed. 1962. Human Behavior and Social Processes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Julius. 1965. “Hired Hand Research.” American Sociologist 1: 190–6. Roy, Donald. 1952a. “Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop.” American Journal of Sociology 57: 425–42. ———. 1952b. “Restriction of Output by Machine Operators in a Piecework Machine Shop.” Unpublished dissertation. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. ———. 1953. “Work Satisfaction and Social Reward in Quota Achievement.” American Sociological Review 18: 507–14. ———. 1954. “Efficiency and the ‘Fix’: Informal Intergroup Relations in a Piecework Machine Shop.” American Journal of Sociology 60: 255–66. Shaw, Clifford R. and Henry McKay. 1942. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas:  A  Study of Rates of Delinquency in Relation to Differential Characteristics of Local Communities in American Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, Edward. 1948. The Present State of American Sociology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ——— .1994. “The Sociology of Robert E. Park.” In Robert E. Park e la Teoria del “Melting Pot,” edited by Renzo Gubert and Luigi Tomasi, 15–34. Trento: Reverdito Edizioni. Shore, Marlene. 1987. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sica, Alan. 1990. “A Question of Priority: Small at Chicago or Blackmar at Kansas?” Mid-American Review of Sociology 14: 1–12. Strauss, Anselm. 1978. Negotiations:  Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sumner, William Graham. 1906. Folkways. Boston: Ginn and Co. Thomas, W. Isaac and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Chicago: 6 (Vols. 1&2) _____. 1920. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Boston: Badger Press. (Vols. 3–5.) Verhoeven, Jef C. 1993. “An Interview with Erving Goffman, 1980.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 26: 317–48. Warner, W. Lloyd, e. al. 1947. Democracy in Jonesville: A Study in Quality and Inequality. New York: Harper. ———. 1941–1959. Yankee City Series. New Haven: Yale University Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1943 [1981]. Street Corner Society:  The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zakuta, Leo. 1968. “ ‘We Distinguish – They Discriminate’: Observations on Race Relations.” In Institutions and the Person: Essays Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman, and Robert S. Weiss, 69–79. Chicago: Aldine.

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Chapter Two STUDYING “GOING CONCERNS”: EVERETT C. HUGHES ON METHOD Rick Helmes-Hayes

What principles shall guide us in the discovery of men’s secrets; what, in the telling of them? (Hughes 1971 [1956], 431)1

Introduction In North America, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the work of Everett Hughes (1897–1983) was central to a wide range of disciplinary sub-specialties, including race and ethnic relations, work and occupations, and education. Beginning in the early 1970s, he became subject to considerable critical attention from US scholars eager to examine his legacy (Baker 1976; Becker et  al., eds. 1968; Burns 1980; Coser 1994; Daniels 1972; Faught 1980; Fielding 2005; Heath 1984; Holmstrom 1984; Reinharz 1995; Riesman 1983; Riesman and Becker 1984; Simpson 1972; Strauss 1996; Weiss 1997). In Europe, by contrast, Hughes had no such profile. Only after his death in 1983, in the context of a growing, if belated, interest in the general legacy of the Chicago School (see Rémy and Voyé 1974; Grafmeyer and Joseph, eds 1979), did French and, now, Italian scholars begin to pay appreciative attention to his work (Hannerz 1983; Peneff 1984; Winkin 1988; Coulon 1992; Sociétés contemporaines 27 [juillet] 1997, entire issue; Wax 2000; Chapoulie 2001). Much of this attention grew out of an interest in Hughes’ contribution to the development of interpretive sociology and fieldwork (Chapoulie 1987, 1996a, 1996b: 11).2

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline Hughes’ “methodological orientation,” including his conception of fieldwork (Platt 1997; see also Platt 1996, 1998; Chapoulie 1987, 1996a, 1996b, 2000), bearing in mind the mutually constitutive relationship in his work between theory and method and his conception of research ethics.

Preliminary Observations Hughes regarded the fostering of fieldwork as among his primary responsibilities and crowning achievements and expressed the wish that his students and colleagues would

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build on this aspect of his legacy.3 It is surprising, then, that he never wrote a systematic overview of issues of epistemology, ontology and their relations to theory and method or, even, a practical ‘how-to’ field manual (Hughes 1971, vi). This does not mean that he was methodologically naïve. Quite the opposite. He was a key combatant in the heated battles that took place in American sociology beginning in the 1940s regarding the respective merits of quantitative/statistical and qualitative/ fieldwork methodologies. Like others of the period who refused to cede the field to advocates of neo-positivism, he was heir to a rich legacy of sociological and anthropological fieldwork – British cultural anthropology, the British and American social survey tradition, etc. – to which he referred for inspiration, benchmarks, and advice. For his part, Hughes was especially well versed in the fieldwork-based classics of anthropology and sociology (Hughes 1974; Weaver 2002; Chapoulie 1987, 266).4 As well, he was familiar with Vivian Palmer’s Field Studies in Sociology, published at Chicago in 1928 and was a major motive force behind Cases in Fieldwork (Hughes, Junker, Gold, and Kittel 1952), a sourcebook which grew in part out of a fieldwork course he had initiated at Chicago in the late 1930s (Hughes 1971 [1960]: 497–8; Winkin 1988, 39 n4, 40). A subsequent book, Buford Junker’s Fieldwork (1960), in which Hughes was deeply involved (1971 [1960], was a further development along this line. It reflected the fact that after 1945 American fieldworkers were becoming more rigorous about their approach to observation, classification, and analysis of data (see Chapoulie 1987, 269–71, 274–9; 1996b, 15–16; Platt 1996, 30).5 So while Hughes never wrote a methodological treatise, there is ‘methods talk’ scattered throughout his work and a reader can systematize it for him/herself (Chapoulie 1996b, 20). It is a challenge to do so, though, for Hughes had a broad, eclectic conception of fieldwork not limited to in situ observation. A further difficulty is that his methodological orientation can be understood only by appreciating its relationship to his theoretical frame of reference: interpretive institutional ecology.6 I have described this frame of reference in detail elsewhere (Helmes-Hayes 1998) and offer a brief recapitulation of it here as a final prolegomenon to a description of his methodological orientation.7

Interpretive Institutional Ecology “Interpretive institutional ecology” is a dualistic and multi-level approach which combines a microsociology rooted in a type of interactionism with a meso-/ macrosociology rooted in anthropological functionalism and human ecology (see Hughes 1936, 1939b, 1946, 1957a, 1969b). The microsociological aspect draws on Simmel’s formalism, Weber’s work, and a set of non-Blumerian interactionist sensibilities which focusses on settings and situations. The “setting” for Hughes’ analysis was usually an “institution” (e.g., Hughes 1931; Becker, Geer, Strauss and Hughes 1961; Becker, Geer and Hughes 1968), an instance of “formally established aspects of collective group behaviour” (Hughes 1957a, 227). Indeed, he once defined sociology as “a science of institutions” (1971 [1942], 15) and it has been remarked that his work set the institutionalist side of the agenda in the Second Chicago School (see Short 1971, xxvi; Simpson 1972; Faught 1980). “Institutional settings” operated at three seamlessly connected levels of “social interaction”8:  micro, meso, and macro. People engaged in social interaction  – sometimes

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face-to-face, sometimes indirectly – in immediate institutional settings (a factory, a hospital) or within institutionalized social relationships (boss/worker, doctor/patient) as they constructed selves, defined situations, pursued careers, and struggled to construct and reconstruct institutions in an effort to make them responsive to their often conflicting needs and desires. Chapoulie has correctly remarked on this count that in the course of carrying out such analyses Hughes coined several “abstract” and “general,” but not “global” theoretical concepts – restriction of production, career line, dirty work, etc. – useful at the micro- and mesosociological levels of analysis. But Hughes’ approach was broader than this because, in his view, the dynamics of micro- and meso-settings – including the unfolding “careers” of individuals or occupations  – were often largely determined by forms of social interaction – macrosociological processes and institutional systems such as demographic changes and the division of labour – that also needed to be understood. Hughes attempted to describe and explain the workings of these processes and systems using what he referred to as an ecological framework (Simpson 1972, 548–54; Chinoy 1972, 561; Faught 1980, 75; Burns 1980; Strauss 1996, 272).9 This ecological framework had two purposes:  1/ to describe and explain typical mesosociological social processes operational at the level of single institutions (e.g., Hughes 1931, 2, 6–8; 1939b, 304–9; 1957a, 232–47; 1969b, 147–53; see also Burns 1980, espec. 349–52); and, less centrally, 2/ to capture the dynamics of phenomena such as industrialization and colonialism in terms of the logic of interinstitutional relations at the level of the “social system” (1933; 1971 [1935]; 1938ab; 1971 [1951a], 323), or what we now refer to as macrosociology (Hughes 1939b, 289–95; 1957a, 248–55, 267–80 passim; 1958; 1969b, 130–7; see Simpson 1972; Burns 1980; Chapoulie 1996b, 9, 21; Helmes-Hayes 2000). At all three levels of analysis he portrayed social interaction in terms of institutions as “going concerns” (“a favourite phrase of his,” according to Strauss (1996, 272)) struggling to survive in an ecological setting. Indeed, the idea of the institution as a going concern (sometimes referred to as an “enterprise” (e.g. Hughes 1957a, 227)) was the conceptual vehicle which united the three levels of interpretive institutional ecology. He highlighted this fact in the preface to The Sociological Eye. In any society there are certain mobilizations of people for expression or action. They are “going concerns” […] If we are to study human society, we must attend to the going concerns which are subject to moral, social, and ecological contingencies. It is thus that institutions are discussed in these papers as enterprises (1971, viii; see also Everett C.  Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Box 77, folder 1 [hereafter cited as ECH Papers, UCHI…]; Hughes interview by R. Weiss, n.d. [1980–1]).

The dualistic character of interpretive institutional ecology can be seen as well in Hughes’ (admittedly infrequent) remarks regarding the metaphysics of theory and method. He was well aware of the fundamental ontological and epistemological differences between scientific and interpretive/ constructionist approaches (1971 [1962a], 457)  but rather than choosing between interpretivism and science, drew on both as need required and tried in so doing to combine them. His interactionist sensibilities sensitized him to the

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processual and constructed nature of social reality and led him to have a deep appreciation for the importance of language and meaning construction. Nonetheless, he rejected both the ontology and the epistemology of a strictly constructionist approach. He likewise rejected the related notion that sociology’s main purpose was to ferret out the subjective meanings that individuals and communities attached to their gestures and actions and to describe how they came to construct and share such definitions (Daniels 1972, 402, 407). In Hughes’ view, there was an objective, if changing, social structure ‘out there’ and he was quite prepared to talk in Durkheimian terms about “social facts which gather themselves into wholes changing and moving according to rules of their own” (1931, Preface). Following in this scientific/structuralist vein, he insisted that you could make objective truth claims despite the existence of multiple, competing definitions of the situation (see Riesman and Becker 1984, x). However, while insisting that human behaviour was patterned and somewhat predictable, and that one could make objective truth claims, he rejected the scientific doctrine of determinism. In a faculty seminar in 1951, Hughes, along with some of his likeminded colleagues, argued that prediction was and would always be “a matter of probability  – of approximation  – rather than any kind of certainty […]” (Ernest W. Burgess Papers, University of Chicago Archives, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Box 33, Folder 3, Document: “Minutes, Faculty Seminar, Department of Sociology, 8 November 1951, p.  xx [hereafter cited as EWB Papers, UCHI]; see also Hughes 1971 [1959a], 453). Allied with this view were two others. One was a rejection of the ‘reflectionist’ theory of truth. “Any model,” he argued, “is inevitably an abstract and partial account of reality.” The other was his acceptance of the tentative nature of truth claims. “We are not seeking absolute truth,” he claimed. “We are engaged in an enterprise to understand the world of man and this is a changing and moving world […]” (Everett C. Hughes Papers, J.J. Burns Archives, Boston College, Boston, Massaschusetts, Box 5, file: “Memorandum on Possible Lecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville”; 8 March 1977 [hereafter cited as ECH Papers, BC]; see also Weiss 1997, 546). So for Hughes sociology was neither a social science in search of nomothetic laws nor an exercise in ideographic description and interpretation. On the question of the possibility of generating “universal propositions” as opposed to “historical knowledge,” he wrote, “most of social science will fall in between the two poles of universal generalization and historical investigation” (EWB Papers, UCHI, Box 33, Folder 3, Document: “Minutes, Faculty Seminar, Department of Sociology, November 8, 1951, p. 11; see also Hughes, 1971 [1952], 299–301). And he held two further methodological views consistent with this sense of the discipline. First, sociology would remain more craft than science (see Chapoulie 1996b, 23). Second, when making methodological (and theoretical) decisions, “demonstrated utility” rather than scientific or interpretive “theoretical/methodological purity” was his guide. “We’ll have to use whatever methods we have to [in order to] […] understand the ongoing process,” he said. “You have to have devices for finding out where the hell the action is […] And this is going to lead you into all sorts of methods. But you’ve got to suit the methods to [the problem]” (in Lofland 1980, 276–7). There is a price to be paid for choosing utility over purity, of course, and it is possible to argue that

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Hughes is guilty of a series of sins related to ontological and epistemological inconsistency and incommensurability.10 In that sense, his sociology is messier than sociological approaches that proceed on the basis of interpretive or scientific theoretical/methodological purity, but it was a price he willingly paid, for he had no faith that either pure science or pure interpretivism was up to the task of understanding the human condition.

The Craft of Sociology: Eleven Principles In the pages to follow, I describe Hughes’ methodological orientation in terms of eleven interrelated principles. These principles are deeply intertwined, making it impossible to discuss them one at a time. Thus, where necessary and feasible, I have grouped them. On Theoretical-Methodological Unity And Reflexivity: Principle 1 Principle 1: Theory and method are co-constitutive, mirror images of one another, and reflexive. Hughes’ theoretical frame of reference and methodological orientation are mirror images of one another and must be seen as a unity. Both are multi-sided, multi-levelled, and flexible. This makes them elusive and difficult to formalize. To obtain closure on either is impossible and, Hughes would say, undesirable. In every respect, they are just like the reality they seek to illuminate; that is to say, they are “going concerns.” The unity and reflexivity of Hughes’ theoretical and methodological perspective is reflected in his conception of the research act. Though he does not phrase it in this way, I would argue that for him research is a form (indeed, a set of forms) of institutionalized social interaction. Therefore, all research projects are “going concerns.” As sociologists carry out their research “enterprises,” they must adapt to the ecological and institutional context within which they are studying, developing lines of action, constructing the meanings of their actions, etc, while simultaneously trying to understand the actions and the meanings of the actions of those they are studying. This unity and reflexivity carries over into yet another aspect of Hughes’ view of the nature of sociology as a multifarious kind of human action and interaction; that is, sociology is a human enterprise which has an unavoidably political character. To illustrate: When we think about the nature of sociological research from Hughes’ perspective on the sociology of work, it is clear that research is a form of work carried out by a specific occupational group with a “licence” and “mandate” to study social relations (Hughes 1971, 1939b, 1959a, 1965). This means that among other things sociologists need constantly to bear in mind that their work is part of – rather than separate from, or above – a societal moral division of labour. As they do their research, they must negotiate and fulfill a series of moral bargains among themselves and with those who gave them the mandate and licence to carry out their work, including those they are studying. As they do so, they must weigh not only the scholarly purposes they have in mind and the investigative techniques they want to employ, but also the political responsibilities they bear as a consequence of having the freedom to do research and report their findings. That is, as they attempt to understand other human beings they must do so within the

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limitations imposed by theory, method and scholarly-political moral boundaries. I deal with this last-mentioned issue in my description below of Principles 10 and 11. Theory, Method and the Research Setting: Principles 2 and 3 Principle 2: Theory and method are most fruitfully developed in the process of the direct empirical examination of real-life settings. Principle 3: It is essential to bring both one’s theoretical “frame of reference” and one’s “methodological orientation” into every research setting so that one’s “sociological eye” is neither theoretically nor methodologically naïve. Theory was seldom intrusive in Hughes’ writing for, even if explicit, it was always applied lightly and flexibly and flowed as much from the data as to it. Indeed, according to Robert Weiss, Hughes’ starting point was always an intimate familiarity with the relevant data to hand. “Everett believed strongly that observation preceded theory. You began with a problem, a concern, or awareness, and then you turned to reality and asked what was happening there. Once you knew something about real events, you could look for explanations. Your search for explanation would then make for a theory that was trustworthy and relevant, because it was based on reality” (Weiss 1997, 543–4; see also Platt 1996, 121). This what Hughes’ student Lynda Holmstrom was referring to when she noted that, for him, facts were “sacrosanct,” the starting place for all other forms of discussion. One of Hughes’ favourite aphorisms was, she recalled: “You answer questions in fact, not theory” (1984, 474). But this view is somewhat misleading and must be juxtaposed to another facet of his approach, for Hughes claimed explicitly that when engaged in the process of empirical investigation his thinking was always “guided but not hampered by a [theoretical] frame of reference internalized not quite into the unconscious” (1971, vi). If when one entered a research setting one had to have an open mind, then one also had to have a set of concepts in mind to help provide “insight” (Strauss 1996, 272) that would guide one’s research and thinking.11 As well, Hughes insisted that an investigator’s interest in a particular setting or problem should be stimulated by what he called the “more-so principle.” “While any society at any time is of interest, any one at a given time may show some features of special interest. It may be, because of a combination of circumstance, the ideal laboratory in which to observe certain processes which will give us new knowledge of general interest” (Hughes 1971 [1959a, 454; see also 1971 [1956a], 441; Faught 1980, 77). Two related concepts, “marginality” and “emancipation,” were equally central. “Good sociology,” he wrote, “is always a marginal phenomenon […] Marginality accepted in an adventurous spirit is the making of a sociologist” (1971 [1957b], 529; see also Weiss 1997, 548–51; Strauss 1996, 273–4). This was true in a double sense. First, social observation was best accomplished by someone marginal or ‘foreign’ to the setting being studied. The outsider could see things that insiders missed – or, at least, could see them in a new light (1971 [1956a], 434–5) – because he did not take them for granted. Second, while the sociologist had to get close enough to his subjects to become a “companion” and “confidante,” so that he could tap into knowledge that only insiders could provide, he had to keep an appropriate “social distance” in order to maintain his professional identity and

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integrity and refrain from “going native” (Hughes 1971 [1957b], 528; 1974, 332; see also 1971 [1956a], 434–6 passim; 1971 [1960], 502–3; Chapoulie 1987, 275). The benefits of successfully pulling this off, said Hughes, were two-fold. First, the observer would be “emancipated,” made “free of the restrictions of their background” (1971 [1970b], 573) that prevented him or her from appreciating that social arrangements s/he regarded as natural, fixed or inevitable actually “could have been otherwise” (1971 [1959b], 552). In the best case scenario, Hughes said, this would occur without the investigator becoming “alienated” from his/her personal background (1971 [1970b], 573; see also 1971 [1970a], 419–20; Riesman and Becker 1983, ix; Strauss 1996, 276). And this individual transformation would then have a domino effect. As the observer ruminated on the significance of his/her observations and analysis, s/he might decide that the sociological theories and/or methods that had originally guided his/her thinking, questioning, observing, and reporting needed to be changed and would set about doing so. So, despite Weiss’ pronouncement that Hughes gave primacy to observation, Hughes brought with him to every empirical setting a flexible theoretical sensitivity. This framework was animated and guided by what he referred to as “free association”; i.e. “intense observation” followed by creative thinking (a “turning of the wheels”) drawing on his extensive background of empirical data (see Hughes 1971, vi; 1971 [1970b], 571). That one’s “sociological eye” was to be theoretically open, educated, and flexible had methodological implications. One had to be trained to be able to ‘see’ a wide variety of orders of data at multiple levels of social reality. This meant one had to be familiar with a wide range of research techniques. On ‘Fieldwork’: Principles 4, 5, 6 and 7 Principle 4: Social realities (interaction/ processes) exist on many levels: macro, meso, micro. Methods must allow access to each type/ level of reality. Many methodological techniques are necessary for examining reality. Principle 5: Notwithstanding principle 4, in situ observation is the best and most favoured investigative technique. Principle 6: Never hypostatize method and technique. Principle 7: Though many ‘entry points’ and units of analysis are useful, the institution is most fruitful among them. One of the most frequently quoted passages from Hughes’ work comes from his introduction to Junker’s volume, Fieldwork:  “Field work,” he wrote, “is not merely one among several methods of social study, but is paramount.” He readily granted that other research techniques were useful and necessary, but it was his view that it was when one undertook fieldwork that “the real learning began.” In his estimation, it was the “small observations […] accumulated” in the process of in situ observation that provided “the evidence on which theories of culture and society [were] built” (1971 [1960], 498, 497). Thus, in situ observation was the centrepiece a fieldwork-based methodology that would produce the best sociology. Given this was his view, it is no surprise that for years Hughes taught field work courses in which in situ observation – “the observation of people […] where they are,

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staying with them in some role which, while agreeable to them, will allow both intimate observation of certain parts of their behavior, and reporting it in ways useful to social science but not harmful to those observed” (1971 [1960], 496) – was primary. But a few words of caution are necessary. There is no question that Hughes regarded direct, “on the hoof ” observation as essential (1971 [1960], 504; see also 1971 [1959c], 284) and, likewise, in good interactionist fashion, saw part of the point of that exercise as “deep understanding” (Strauss 1996, 277); i.e. the revelation of the meanings of those activities for those involved (Hughes 1971 [1956b], 508; Chapoulie 1987, 264). However, his conception of fieldwork was not confined to in situ observation and he was not concerned solely with trying to collect/construct data about patterns of face-to-face social interaction or to find and report the meanings and interpretations of reality developed by individuals or small groups in particular settings. Instead, fieldwork for him involved a variety of research techniques chosen in situation-specific combinations to achieve a wide range of additional purposes. For instance, according to Hughes, one goal point of comparative investigation at multiple sites of observation, was to allow the sociologist to ‘step outside’ the realities constructed by individuals and groups. Only in this way could one move beyond their partial and perspectival definitions of the situation to a wider, deeper understanding of settings, processes, or events (Chapoulie 1987, 272–3, 277–8; Demaziere and Dubar 1997, 51; Daniels 1972, 402; Verdet 1997, 63). Likewise, only in this way could the investigator get on with the business of discovering the structure and dynamics of recurring or typical forms and processes of social action and interaction at the micro and meso levels of social reality: the typical life stages of an institution, the typical characteristics of an occupation, the typical career of a medical student (Hughes 1971, viii; see also Rock 1979, 174–5; Faught 1980, 76–7; Holmstrom 1984, 472, 473–4, 479–80; Chapoulie 1996b, 14). But there was more still. Fieldwork might also involve, as it did in French Canada in Transition (1943) and its satellite publications (see, e.g., Hughes and McDonald 1971 [1941]), the study of macrosociological phenomena – the division of labour, capitalist relations of production, patterns of property ownership, etc. Such phenomena could not be understood solely via in situ observation but required a multi-method strategy designed to produce various forms of macrosociological data. In French Canada in Transition, for example, he supplemented in situ observation and interviews with ecological mapping, data regarding the history and population of the town, and data about patterns of corporate ownership in Cantonville, Montreal and Quebec (Hughes and McDonald 1941; Roy 1935). Some of his later essays and book chapters, while very different in form from French Canada in Transition, focus on the same macrosociological level of analysis, take the same long historical view and comparative perspective, and draw on a wide variety of data constructed/gathered using a range of research techniques (Hughes 1971 [1952, 1955, 1956ab, 1960]; 1939b, 1946, 1957a). So, if Hughes preferred in situ field work as opposed to other techniques, he remained methodologically eclectic (Chapoulie 1987, 262, 264, 272–8; Strauss 1996, 272). Fieldwork was for him “paramount,” but he was, in his own words, “suspicious of any method said to be the one and only” (1971:  ix) and advocated the use of a range of research techniques designed to ‘mine’ data of different kinds. “The social science of

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today requires, in fact, a great many arts of observation and analysis. Field observation is one of them” (1971 [1960], 502). That Hughes held this positive evaluation of what we now refer to as mixed methods and insisted on drawing links between micro and macro levels of analysis explains his remark in the Introduction to Junker’s fieldwork text that there are no hard and fast rules to apply. “[T]‌he situations and circumstances in which field observation […] is done are so various that no manual of detailed rules would serve” (1971 [1960], 503; emphasis added). This is the case for two reasons. First, the social phenomena the researcher sets out to understand and the settings in which s/he will find him/herself are likely to be fluid, complex, and potentially novel to her. Thus, s/he is better equipped with a flexible theoretical frame of reference and an eclectic methodological orientation than with a formal theory to ‘test’ and a set of textbook-determined procedures to ‘apply.’ This meant, second, that one could become an accomplished fieldworker only through practice. As Nigel Fielding put it, the general feeling in the Chicago department was that field work “could be learned but not taught” (2005, 2). This explains why Eliot Freidson, Ed Gross and Paule Verdet recall receiving very little formal, conceptual instruction from Hughes before being sent into the field (Freidson interview by Platt; cited Platt 1995, 94; see also Gross interview by Platt, cited Platt 1995; Verdet 1997, 61–2).12 However, the fact that Hughes taught a fieldwork course meant that he regarded sensitization and training as useful and made sure that students were not naïve when they ventured out into the community.13 In order to do field work, one had to have a point of entry and Hughes’ preferred – though by no means exclusive – point of entry was the institution (see Simpson 1972, 558).14 The institution, he said, was “[f]‌or certain purposes … the most fruitful unit of investigation” (1931, 111). He had theoretical and practical reasons for his choice. Recall that Hughes was not an interactionist interested in macrosociology, but an ecologist sensitive to the importance of selves, meaning construction, and the like. Theoretically, then, the institution was the most fruitful unit of ecological analysis, where ecological was defined broadly to incorporate on the one hand processes of institutional development, change and interinstitutional relations (struggles among institutions to survive in an ecological setting) and on the other the processual development the self, the negotiation of meaning and the unfolding of careers (within particular institutions). To give an example: if you want to understand the character and significance of work in modern capitalist society (or, better yet, across societies and epochs), you start by identifying an institution – a family dwelling, a church, a brothel – where work takes place. You become familiar with the ‘goings-on’ in that “going concern” and then move ‘down’ to the micro-level of analysis to study the character and impact of work on selves and groups in that milieu and ‘up’ to the level of macrosociology to study the social system – the division of labour, gender relations, class, colonialism, etc. – that produced that particular institutionalized form of work and within which that “going concern” had to survive. Principle 8: Comparison is the basis of sociological insight. Hughes almost always drew on comparative materials – occupation to occupation, institution to institution, time to time, country to country – as the groundwork for theoretical analysis. Such theoretical analysis, woven into almost all his writings, required a comparative method, one which, in his hands, often drew on unexpected points of reference.

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Vis-a-vis the sociology of work, for example, he wrote: “The comparative student of man’s work learns about doctors by studying plumbers and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists (1971 [1951a], 316). He advocated this strategy because he believed that “the essential problems of men at work are the same” regardless of the type and status of their work. “Until we can find a point of view and concepts which will enable us to make comparisons between the junk peddler and the professor without intent to debunk the one and patronize the other,” he said, “we cannot do our best work in this field” (1971 [1951b], 342). In Hughes’ estimation, this comparative orientation had multiple benefits. First, it forced the investigator to see his work in “dialectical” terms, balancing efforts to search for knowledge about “the timely” while pondering the significance of such ‘news’ in terms of “the timeless”; i.e. “general, abstract,” theoretical understanding (1971 [1959a], 452, 454; see also 1971 [1956a], 440). The two endeavours were complementary and symbiotic (1971 [1970a], 420; see also 1971, vi–vii; Becker et al. 1968, x). The second benefit of the comparative method was that it facilitated going back and forth between disciplinary specialties such as work and occupations and what he called “general sociology.” “[A]‌good sociological generalization,” he declared “[…] fits a great variety of social phenomena: […] monastic orders, vice rings, banks, and professional societies.” Such generalizations, he continued, came from “the observation, description, and comparison of many actual organizations or situations where people are in interaction. Sociological generalizations come from the special or applied sociologies as well as being applied to them” (1971 [1957b], 525). And there was a third benefit of the comparative approach. Comparison allowed the researcher to add complexity to his/her analysis by “mov[ing] from level to level” in order to, for example, describe and explain macro phenomena such as “the growth of cities […] [and] the problems of industrialization” while simultaneously examining meso and micro phenomena such as “the vicissitudes of careers” (Becker et al 1968, x) and the development of selves. On the last-mentioned, Ed Gross recalled the following quotation from Hughes:  “If you want to understand anything about a man, you ask him what is his work. What does he do for a living? What you will learn will explain much of how he feels, much of how he thinks, and all of his obituary” (E. Gross interview, 17 November 1995). This comparative principle is intimately tied to a ninth principle. Principle 9: Investigators should ignore boundaries of time, space, and discipline as they seek to understand social reality. Sociology is not, in its logical essence, the study of the contemporary rather than of the past, of what is close rather than what is far away and exotic. Nor has it, by its logical nature, more to do with one set of institutions, one aspect of social life, or any specific content than with others. If a theory of society comes to be, it will be valid only insofar as it accounts for the societies of the past as well as of the present, for what is exotic to our culture as well as what is part of it, and insofar as it applies to one content, institution, and phase of life as well as to others (1971 [1957b], 524; see also (1971 [1959c], 283; 1971 [1970a], 420).

Throughout his career, this meant drawing on the reported findings of research conducted by the economist, the demographer, the anthropologist, the historian – even the

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survey researcher. And while he was quick to point out the methodological shortcomings and pitfalls of using data gathered/constructed using survey and other methods (1971 [1956b], 507; 1971 [1961], 476; 1971 [1962c], 71; 1971 [1964], 160–1), he nonetheless thought them useful and employed them in good faith on a routine basis (Hughes 1971 [1959c], 284; 1971 [1959a], 453–4; see also Heath 1984, 222–3; Chapoulie 1987, 272–3). In his view, the problem or question should determine the method rather than allowing methods to limit the kinds of issues it was possible or appropriate to investigate. Instead of defining some issue as beyond the pale of sociology because it could not be studied using in situ observation – and explaining away “structure,” “cause,” “power” and the like with vague talk of “negotiation” and “meaning construction” – Hughes simply employed the research techniques of the macrosociologist to frame his analysis of issues such as class, industrialization, race relations, colonialism, etc. (Chapoulie 1987, 272–3; 1996b, 20). This mention of issues such as class, race relations, and colonialism raises the question of Hughes’ views on the relationship between sociology and politics – questions of objectivity and value freedom, personal and professional ethics, and so forth. Such issues have had an especially high profile in the discipline for the past five years because of the imbroglio created by Michael Burawoy’s ongoing advocacy of a morally laden public sociology (2005), but Hughes was highly sensitive to them throughout his career and wrote a good deal about the ethics of doing sociology. Principles 10 and 11 deal with these issues. Sociology and Politics: Principles 10 and 11 Principle 10: In so far as it is possible, the sociologist must endeavour to remain ‘neutral.’ One aspect of this principle – the notion of objectivity – is easy to state: in the gathering/construction of data, one must try to remove all forms of ‘bias.’ In a technical sense, this is a futile endeavour, as Hughes well knew, because it is impossible to live without some kinds of preconceptions. The research act, as a form of human activity, is not immune to the pitfalls of selective perception and conception. Nonetheless, the attempt to remain neutral in this sense is a worthy and necessary objective and Hughes preached the virtue of this practice using such terms as “objectivity,” “detachment,” and “disinterestedness” (1971 [1962a], 461; 1971 [1954], 469). But there is a second, related meaning of the concept of neutrality, the idea of value-freedom or value neutrality, to which Hughes also seemed to profess allegiance. But value-freedom – the doctrine that it is both possible and appropriate for the investigator to refrain from offering moral judgements on his or her research findings  – is a much more difficult and complex problem and, despite appearances to the contrary, Hughes actually rejected it in its classic formulation. To understand his position it is necessary to appreciate his typical, Enlightenment-inspired view of the societal value of research and the knowledge it generates; i.e. the knowledge produced by research, combined with the informed discussion it generates, constitute a societal ‘good.’ Knowledge is better than ignorance and, thus, research might contribute via informed dialogue to social betterment (Hughes 1974, 331). In Strauss’ words, Hughes wanted to “bring informed, enlightened understanding

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of the world to those who would listen” (1996, 274). Beyond this broad endorsement, however, he seemed leery of purposeful ‘do-gooding.’ In fact, by all appearances, he apparently championed the typically professional (scientific) view that sociology should be value neutral. Indeed, on this count, Becker et al refer to him as “the abiding neutral, dispassionate but not uncritical” (1971, vi; Strauss 1996, 272, 274). And that is certainly the unambiguous message in the following passage from his preface to The Sociological Eye:  “Some say that sociology is a normative science. If they mean that social norms are one of its main objects of study, I agree. If they mean anything else, I do not agree” (1971, viii; see Chapoulie 1996b, 23). But he did not always follow this admonition in practice. Riesman and Becker note that while an “abiding neutral,” he believed strongly in the “unfettered freedom of intellectual inquiry” (1971, xiv). Hughes discussed the meaning and practical application of the freedom of inquiry in a series of essays written in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In “The Dual Mandate of Social Science” he argued that the scholar had the right, in fact, a duty, to use the privilege of academic freedom fearlessly, to define problems and frame questions that might lead him to “barge in where the archangels of the academic world would have shuddered to think of treading” (1971 [1959a], 446; see also 1971 [1962a], 460). He explicated this notion further in “The Improper Study of Man.” The scholar, he wrote, should “study man and his institutions with broadsweeping curiosity […] [and] the sharpest tools of observation and analysis which [s/he] can devise” (1971 [1956a], 442). In doing so, he wrote, s/he should retain a “loyalty to truth” that compelled him/her to find and report the truth, no matter how greatly it differed from the conventional wisdom and no matter how much it threatened the status quo. As he put it in “The Academic Mind: A Review,” the social scientist had to have “the right to enough intellectual elbow room among sacred arrangements to do his work […] [He] must have freedom to entertain  – at least for comparative and analytic purposes – all the forbidden thoughts” (1971 [1959b], 552; 1971 [1963], 494–5). Hughes’ student Arlene Daniels (1972) has sagely captured this idea in the very Hughesian notion of the “irreverent eye.” Arrangements that some members of society might regard as “sacred” – natural, inevitable, fixed – might well be revealed by the “irreverent eye” to be nothing of the kind. Likewise, things that some people might regard as inherently ‘good,’ beyond investigation or reproach, or things some people might prefer remain hidden, ignored, or undiscussed, could and should be brought out into the open (405–7). With this licence and mandate came an obligation. Freedom of intellectual inquiry could be exercised only within the limits of a fair and transparent bargain which, at a minimum, required the investigator to be highly tolerant, respectful of a broad range of beliefs, customs, and social arrangements, some of which he might find objectionable (see Strauss 1996, 278). As a case in point, Becker et al point to Hughes’ attitude toward members of the upper class. When Hughes studied them, Becker et al said, he did so “not to debunk or unmask [them], but to understand [them].” Hughes, they claimed, wanted to be “comprehending” rather than “self-righteous.” The result? His writings were “ruminative” rather than “indignant”; “free associations on a theme” rather than “sermons” (1971, xiii, vi, vii; see also Riesman 1983, 477–8; Strauss 1996, 278). Put

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another way: the scholar was to do her work while striving simultaneously to do no harm to those being investigated. But I would argue that while Hughes was generally tolerant and openminded and certainly meant no harm to those he studied, he nonetheless rejected an unqualified version of the doctrine of value neutrality. He was too sensitive to inequality, oppression and injustice to adopt such a view. “While playing the role of the timeless and disinterested outsider is an important item in the repertoire of the social scientist,” he wrote, “it is not the whole of it. Our role requires also intense curiosity and personal concern about the people and problems studied” (1971 [1954], 469; emphasis added; see also Becker et al 1968, viii). That Hughes expressed the need for a degree of “personal concern” is perhaps the best way of introducing Principle 11 and my discussion of his reluctant and cautious but firm rejection of the ‘strong’ version of value neutrality. Principle 11: All human beings are equal. Hughes stated this “equality principle” forthrightly in “The Improper Study of Man” where he rejected the “fallacy” held by some members of society that “some people and peoples are more human than others” (1971 [1956a], 442). He said the same thing in “Teaching as Fieldwork”: “Sociology of the kind I have been talking of […] contains the assumption that men are equal, equal in their humanity. Only so is sociology, the analysis and comparison of culture and societies, possible” (1971 [1970b], 574; cited Riesman 1996, 275). This equality principle underlies the other ten. Perhaps I should have discussed it first, as Principle 1, for just that reason. But I put it here because it is a good way of gathering and encapsulating the spirit that undergirds the lot. Certainly, Hughes regarded it as foundational. In principle,” he wrote, “any person is the peer of any other. Thus, in his quality as a human being, any of us has the right to study any other and also to protect himself from the prying eyes of others” (1974, 330). This principle implies that social scientists have unavoidable ethical obligations to those they study. As I noted above in my discussion of Principle 10, the basic or minimal version of Principle 11 is that social scientists have an ethical responsibility to treat those they study with respect and, thus, to do them no harm. Testimonials from Hughes’ colleagues and students indicate unambiguously that in his teaching, research, and interpersonal relations Hughes held unfailingly to this principle and was quick to criticize those who did research that violated it (1974, 331). But there is a stronger version of this principle as well and to understand Hughes’ position on this more muscular version it is necessary to return to our discussion of value neutrality initiated above. If people are all equally human, then it follows that they deserve to be treated as such. That some people – sociologists and their ‘subjects’ – might individually benefit from the emancipation provided by sociology was a good thing. Indeed, Strauss claims that “emancipation through enlightenment” was “Hughes’ deepest sociological commitment” (1996, 275). But as Hughes pointed out in “Teaching as Fieldwork,” the creation of a humane, rational, inclusive, tolerant society was a challenging further step, the difficulty of which he had underestimated early in his career. “Perhaps all of us in that earlier phase [of sociology] put too much faith in personal emancipation, in enlargement and humanizing of the mind by mutual observation and understanding, which we assumed

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would be followed by appropriate collective action” (1971 [1970b], 574; cited Riesman 1996, 275). To create a humane, egalitarian social order, sociologists would have to move beyond “personal concern” to advocate on behalf of the oppressed and exploited. Hughes’ allegiance to Principle 11 forced him to abandon the distinction between the neutral scholar and the moral citizen and, thus, to set aside the classic version of value neutrality and to argue that as researchers, not just citizens, social scientists have an obligation to help create equality and social justice. The case for objectivity in social science rests on no claim of the rights of the scholar, but on the fundamental premise that the moral man, to be effective, must have some organ of objective observation and analysis so that he will know the nature and strength of the evils with which he has to deal and the efficacy of the instruments to be used in dealing with them.

The whole point of “comparison” as an analytic strategy, Hughes wrote, was to find and point to what is “dangerous” (ECH Papers, UCHI, Frankfurt Diary, “Visit with Professor Max Graf zu Solms, University of Marlburg,” 10 July 1948; cited Staley 1993, 90) or “unjust” (1971 [1947], 213). Speaking about research on race relations in the US he wrote: “[W]‌e should not yield an inch to those who would have us choose our objects of study purely on the basis of something called ‘the state of knowledge’ without reference to what is currently going on in the world.” Were we to do so, he said, we would be complicit in the maintenance of unacceptably unequal and unjust relations among peoples because we might be allowing “the direction of our research and educational effort to be directed by the enemy, the defenders of racial and ethnic injustice” (1971 [1947], 213). How do we square this statement with his claim above that sociology should not be “a normative science”? I think Hughes was prepared to accept a conditional, situational ‘politicization’ of the research act if it would bring to light and help eliminate some form of egregious inequality or oppression. Sometimes Hughes framed this in terms of a distinction between the professional and scientific aspects of the discipline: “We cannot decide once and for all,” he wrote, “to be completely a profession or completely a science. The problem [of neutrality] is chronic […] [and] cannot be settled once and for all.” Instead, he claimed, “within the limits of lasting principles, different solutions have to be found according to the circumstances of time and place” (1971 [1954], 467). Hughes was prepared to allow that his colleagues could legitimately practice a variety of forms of sociology – what Burawoy would refer to as professional, policy, critical and public sociology – and his remarks in “Sociologists and the Public” make that clear (see e.g., 1971 [1962a]). However, he rejected the idea that sociology as a discipline could or should be value free or that the practice of sociology could be value free. This was impossible because research is an institutionalized form of intrusive social interaction. Sociology, as a kind of intellectual work, has a place in the division of labour, including the moral division of labour. It is a part of, rather than separate from, the world it studies and, thus, has unavoidable political consequences for sociologists and those they study. Although many sociologists would like to consider their work politically neutral, it is not considered so by those who make revolutions of right or left, or by those who have special

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interests in the things we study. However strongly we may emulate the model of pure science, claims for applying our knowledge and the fact that what we learn is never a matter of social indifference will continue to put us in the position of people who give a service (or do a disservice) to our client, society (1971 [1954], 467; emphasis added).

So, while generally in favour of a “detached” and “dispassionate” sociology, he was also, in the words of Becker et al. (1968, ix, viii), “first of all a moral man” who “care[d]‌deeply about cruelty, injustice and war.” Becker et al. speculate that in this regard Hughes “carried into his own life the stance of his minister father, a man of great understanding and genuine moral commitment who was singled out by the Ku Klux Klan to have a cross burned on his lawn” (1968, ix). Thus, it is not surprising that from time to time Hughes abandoned the classic version of the doctrine of value neutrality. He did so cautiously and reluctantly – certainly more cautiously than Burawoy – but he did so without regrets for, in his view, some social-political issues and problems were just too offensive and consequential to be treated as mere curiosities (see 1971 [1963], 494, 495). Social scientists had an obligation to society as a whole – to the ‘social good’ – that sometimes overrode the values of toleration and detachment. They had a responsibility to make their work available to the public in a way that contributed to the understanding, public discussion, and amelioration of egregious injustices. His treatment of two of the worst examples of inequality and oppression in the mid-twentieth century – race relations in the US and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany – provide cases in point. In his 1947 essay “Principle and Rationalization in Race Relations,” Hughes claimed outright that racial and ethnic inequality was “one of the most distressing and dangerous of the symptoms of our sick world,” and argued that “more power” and “all credit” should go to those social scientists then trying to understand the causes of such inequalities in order to “bring more justice into the relations between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.” He regarded it as a collective “right” and “duty” of social scientists, especially those scholars that belonged to “disadvantaged groups,” to undertake such “research and action” because it would “benefit society at large” (1971 [1947], 212–3). Likewise, in “Innocents Abroad, 1948,” an unpublished paper15 he wrote during a visit to Germany in 1948 as part of a team of American social scientists sent to modernize German social science (see Staley 1993), Hughes discussed the problem of how to understand the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany during World War II (see also Hughes 1962b). He noted the “conspiracy of silence” Germans created around the subject after the war and argued it was necessary for them to acknowledge publicly and collectively what they had done, to take responsibility for it, and to discuss it (Staley 1993, 93–4; see also Fleck, this volume). Only in this way, he said, would it be possible to prevent such “perverse cruelty” (Hughes 1962b) from happening again – either in Germany or elsewhere (Staley 1993, 91–101). Hughes was well aware that the role of the visiting American social scientist in this exercise was touchy and fraught with difficulties. “To find a course that does not imply condescension, the arrogation of priestly powers, the cheapening of the whole issue, or the descent into the abyss of cynicism; that is the question” (Hughes, “Innocents,” cited Staley 1993, 95; see also Hughes 1971 [1962a] and Staley

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1996). But he did not pull back from the conviction that he had a responsibility to help prevent the reoccurrence of such an atrocity (see Hughes 1971 [1955]; see also Riesman and Becker 1971, x). Hughes’ conception of sociology as a form of social interaction with political repercussions – indeed, sometime transformative aims – was tied to two further views, each equally egalitarian, humane, progressive, and democratic. First, as I have just made clear, he argued that sociological researchers had an obligation to contribute to the humanization of social relations. The power of knowledge should be used to challenge inequalities and injustices, to promote understanding, discussion, and positive change. Only in this way would an emancipated society and an emancipatory kind of sociology become a reality. This would occur because there would be a reciprocal flow of benefits between doing ethical sociology and developing oneself as an ethical citizen/researcher. When one learned how to do fearless, respectful, relevant research and then report and comment on the results with equal fearlessness and respect, contributing when and where appropriate to the reduction of social injustices, one was simultaneously learning to be a good member of society, “a deeply concerned citizen of the world” who, as Anselm Strauss so cogently put it, would “use his ability and training for the benefit of all” (1996, 275).16 David Staley (1993, 86–8) describes exactly this process in his account of Hughes’ postwar efforts to promote positive change in the German university system as a part of his wider efforts to make the country more democratic. For Hughes, properly undertaken, research was a way of learning, teaching, doing, and promoting humane rationality and democracy.

Conclusion In my discussion above of Principle 1, I noted that Hughes’ theoretical-methodological approach was designed to penetrate and illuminate a wide range of human social practices. His goal was first to understand, but this goal always existed in a tension with his humanistic sensibilities. Thus, his efforts to understand “going concerns” – individuals, groups, careers, institutions, societies  – were always undergirded by a moral sensibility:  as you strive to understand human beings, you must do so within the boundaries established by Principles 10 and 11. Do no harm. All humans are or should be equal. If they aren’t, do what you can – respectfully, carefully, but bravely – to help them frame and realize that goal.

Notes Reprinted from: Helmes-Hayes, Rick. 2010. “Studying ‘Going Concerns’: Everett Hughes on Method,” Sociologica 2 (October) doi: 2382/32714: 1-26. 1 Most of Hughes’ essays cited here are cited from The Sociological Eye (1971) with the original date of publication indicated in square brackets, as follows: Hughes, E.C. “Mistakes at Work,” TSE 1971 [1951a], 316–25. 2 Some scholars would argue that Herbert Blumer was and is the most important figure in the development of the fieldwork tradition at Chicago. Platt disagrees. She grants that Blumer was responsible for formulating symbolic interactionist theory but notes that his work was conceptual. He “published very little empirical work himself,” she said, “so did not provide exemplars […] [H]‌e did not provide what are conventionally regarded as methods and that it was not

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clear how to translate his system into data” (1995, 92; see also Blumer interview by Wiley 1982; cited Platt 1995, 92; Chapoulie 1987, 262, 290 n. 34; Fine 1995, 7). 3 Late in his career, reflecting on his legacy, Hughes claimed that the fieldwork course he initiated and taught at Chicago beginning in the late 1930s (Hughes 1971 [1960], 497–8) was “a great thing,” a major accomplishment which, in his view, had a significant impact on American sociology (Hughes interview by R. Weiss, n.d. ca 1980–1). 4 About Hughes’ knowledge of anthropology, see Hughes (1974) and Weaver (2002). 5 The relatively late appearance of such materials is discussed in Gobo (2005, 2–4; see also Winkin 1988, 40; Fielding 2005, 3; Platt 1996). 6 Others who share my view that Hughes’ work contains a relatively comprehensive theoretical approach include Simpson (1972), Strauss (1996, 281–2) and Emerson (1997, 40, 47). For the opposite view, see Chapoulie (1987, 1996a,b). 7 For a summary of Hughes’ theoretical frame of reference, see Helmes-Hayes (2005). 8 Hughes (1971 [1956b], 508) defined “social interaction” in very general terms; for him it was “the subject matter of sociology.” 9 It is important to appreciate that Hughes understood his work as falling in the ecological tradition, as the following comment, written 1977, reveals: “I think I can rightly claim to have trod the ecological path from my graduate school days until now” (ECH Papers, BC, Box 5, File: “Memorandum on Possible Lecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville”; 8 March 1977, p. 5; emphasis added). 10 In this respect Hughes followed in the pragmatist philosophical tradition so widely employed at Chicago. 11 Some scholars claim that in terms of modern-day sociological practice, probably the closest parallel to Hughes’ style is the “grounded theory” approach of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) (Weiss 1996, 544; Strauss 1996, 282; Demazière and Dubas 1997, 51–3; Emerson 1997, 42–3, 47). 12 The course description in 1947 contained no works about the participant observation method and the term was not used, though examples of such studies were listed (Platt 1995, 104 n. 7). 13 Hughes’ broad conception of fieldwork manifested itself in the content of his fieldwork course at Chicago which, he noted, “did not change greatly over the years.” Students were assigned a census tract and had to visit the library to locate relevant census data. This was followed by ‘street time’ – mapping the neighbourhood, observing formal and informal gatherings – as well as structured time with informants – doing interviews, gathering family histories, etc. This was intended to make students intimately familiar with the individuals, groups, and institutions in the area (Hughes 1971 [1960], 498; see also Hughes interview by R. Weiss, n.d. ca 1981; Platt 1995, 94, 104 n7; Verdet 1997, 62). To work with census materials students had to be literate in statistics and Hughes even taught statistics at one point in his career (Becker et al. 1968, vii). 14 Hughes’ claim that the institution is the most productive unit of analysis for sociology may be found not only in his published writings (e.g. Hughes 1939b, 1971 [1942], 1946, 1957a, 1969b), but also in unpublished documents, course notes, and correspondence. 15 This paper was published in 2010. 16 Though I cite Strauss here, it is essential to point out that Strauss would not likely agree with my description of Hughes’ views on this point. Strauss (1996, 278–9) argues that Hughes offers no real solution to the “universal problem of malevolent dirty work.”

References Archival Sources Ernest W. Burgess Papers, University of Chicago Archives

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Everett C. Hughes Papers, Boston College Archives Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives

Interviews E. Gross by R. Helmes-Hayes (17 November 1995) Hughes, E.C. by R. Weiss (n.d. ca 1981)

Other Baker, A. 1976. “Continuities in Sociological Thought:  From Real Estate Agent to Marijuana Smoker.” Case Western University Journal of Sociology 8 1976: 32–50. Becker, H. S., B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss. 1968. “Everett C. Hughes – An Appreciation.” In Institutions and the Person, edited by H. Becker, B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss, vii–x. Chicago: Aldine. Becker, H., B. Geer, A. Strauss and E. C. Hughes. 1961. Boys in White. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Becker, H. S., B. Geer, and E. C. Hughes. 1968. Making the Grade. New York: Wiley and Sons. Burawoy, M. 2005. “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (1): 4–28. Burns, L. R. 1980. “The Chicago School and the Study of Organization-Environment Relations.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16: 342–58. Chapoulie, J.-M. 1987. “Everett C.  Hughes and the Development of Fieldwork in Sociology.” Urban Life 15 (3 & 4): 259–98. ———. 1996a. Introduction: “Hughes et la Tradition de Chicago.” In Le regard sociologique, red. par J.-M. Chapoulie, 13–57. Paris: Presses de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. ———. 1996b. “Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition” (trans. H. Becker). Sociological Theory 14 (1): 3–29. ———. 2001. La tradition sociographique de Chicago. Paris: Seuil. Chinoy, E. 1972. “Review of E.C. Hughes, The Sociological Eye.” The Sociological Quarterly 13 (Fall): 559–65. Coser, L. 1994. “Introduction:  Everett Cherrington Hughes, 1897–1983” in E. Hughes, On Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination, edited by Lewis Coser, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coulon, A. 1992. L’Ecole de Chicago. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Daniels, A. K. 1972. “The Irreverent Eye.” Contemporary Sociology 1: 402–9. Demazière, D. and C. Dubar. 1997. “E.C. Hughes, initiateur et précurseur critique de la Grounded Theory.” Sociétés contemporaines 27 (juillet): 49–55. Emerson, R. 1997. “Le travail de terrain après Hughes: continuitiés et changements.” Sociétés contemporaines 27 (juillet): 39–48. Faught, J. 1980. “Presuppositions of the Chicago School in the Work of Everett C. Hughes.” The American Sociologist 15 (May): 72–82. Fielding, N. 2005. “The Resurgence, Legitimation and Institutionalization of Qualitative Methods.” Forum for Qualitative Research 6 (2) Article 32. Fine, G. A. 1995. “Introduction:  The Second Chicago School:  The Development of a Postwar American Sociology.” In A Second Chicago School?, edited by Gary Alan Fine, 1–16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glaser, B. and A. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Gobo, G. 2005. “The Renaissance of Qualitative Methods.” Forum for Qualitative Sociology 6 (3) Article 42. Grafmeyer, Y. and I. Joseph, eds. 1979. L’École de Chicago. Paris: Éditions de Champs Urbain. Hannerz, U. 1987. Explorer la Ville. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

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Heath, C. 1984. “Review Essay:  Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983):  A  Note on His Approach and Influence.” Sociology of Health and Illness 6 (2): 218–37. Helmes-Hayes, R. 1998. “Everett Hughes: Theorist of the Second Chicago School.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 11 (4): 621–73. ———. 2000. “The Concept of Social Class: The Contribution of Everett Hughes.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 (2): 127–47. ———. 2005. “Everett Hughes.” In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer, 385–6. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holmstrom, L. 1984. “Everett Cherrington Hughes: A Tribute to a Pioneer in the Study of Work and Occupations.” Work and Occupations 11 (4): 471–81. Hughes, E.C. 1931. The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board. Chicago: The Society for Social Research of the University of Chicago, Series II, Monograph No. 1. ———. 1933. “The French-English Margin in Canada.” American Journal of Sociology 39 (1): 1–11. ———. 1971 [1935]. “The Industrial Revolution and the Catholic Labour Movement in Germany.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 255–64. ———. 1936. “The Ecological Aspect of Institutions.” American Sociological Review 1(2): 180–9. ———. 1938a. “Industry and the Rural System in Quebec.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4(3): 341–9. ———. 1938b. “Position and Status in a Quebec Industrial Town.” American Sociological Review 3(5): 709–17. ———. 1939. “Institutions.” In An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by Robert Park and Samuel Smith, 283–347. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1971 [1942]. “The Study of Institutions.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 14–20. ———. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———.1946. “Social Institutions.” In New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 223–82. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1971 [1947]. “Principle and Rationalization in Race Relations.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 212–9. ———. 1971 [1951a]. “Mistakes at Work.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 316–25. ———. 1971 [1951b]. “Work and the Self.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 338–47. ———. 1971 [1952]. “The Sociological Study of Work: An Editorial Foreword.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 298–303. ———. 1971 [1954]. “Professional and Career Problems of Sociology.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 464–72. ———. 1971 [1955]. “The Gleichsaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 516–23. ———. 1971 [1956a]. “The Improper Study of Man.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 431–42. ———. 1971 [1956b]. “Of Sociology and the Interview.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 507–15. ———. 1957a. “Social Institutions.” In New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 225–82. 2nd ed. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1971 [1957b]. “The Relation of Industrial to General Sociology.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 524–9. ———. 1958. “Preface.” In Men and Their Work, by E. Hughes, 7–9. Glencoe: Free Press. ———. 1971 [1959a]. “The Dual Mandate of Social Science: Remarks on the Academic Division of Labour.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 443–55. ———. 1971 [1959b]. “The Academic Mind: A Review.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 550–6.

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———. 1971 [1959c]. “The Study of Occupations.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 283–97. ———. 1971 [1960]. “Introduction: The Place of Fieldwork in Social Science.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 496–506. ———. 1971 [1961]. “Ethnocentric Sociology.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 473–7. ———. 1971 [1962a]. “Sociologists and the Public.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 455–63. ———. 1962b. “Good People and Dirty Work.” Social Problems 10: 3–11. ———. 1971 [1962c]. “Disorganization and Reorganization.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 65–72. ———. 1971 [1963]. “Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 478–95. ———. 1971 [1964]. “The Sociological Point of View.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 159–66. ———. 1971 [1965]. “Professions.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 374–86. ———. 1969. “Social Institutions.” In New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by A.M. Lee, 123–85. 3rd ed. New York: Barnes and Noble. ———. 1971 [1970a]. “The Humble and the Proud:  A  Comparative Study of Occupations.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 417–27. ———. 1971 [1970b]. “Teaching as Fieldwork.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 566–76. ———. 1971. “Preface.” Here cited from The Sociological Eye, by E.C. Hughes, v–ix. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. ———. 1974. “Who Studies Whom?” Human Organization 33 (4): 327–33. ———, B. Junker, R. Gold and D. Kittel, eds. 1952. Cases in Fieldwork. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. ——— and M.L. McDonald. 1971 [1941]. “French and English in the Economic Structure of Montreal.” Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye: 242–54. Junker, B. 1960. Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lofland, Lyn, ed. 1980. “Reminisces of Classic Chicago: The Blumer-Hughes Talk.” Urban Life 9 (3): 251–81. Peneff, J. 1984. “Note sur E.C. Hughes et la pédagogie du fieldwork dans la sociologie américaine.” Sociologie du travail 26 (2): 228–30. Platt, J. 1995. “Research methods and the Second Chicago School.” In The Second Chicago School?, edited by G.A. Fine, 82–107. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America 1920–1960. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. “Chicago Methods: Reputations and Realities.” In The Tradition of the Chicago School, edited by L. Tomasi, 89–103. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Reinharz, S. 1995. “The Chicago School of Sociology and the Founding of the Brandeis University Graduate Program in Sociology: A Case in Cultural Diffusion.” In The Second Chicago School?, edited by G.A. Fine, 273–371. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rémy, J. and L. Voyé. 1974. La ville et l’urbanisation: modalités d’analyse sociologique. Gembloux: Duculot. Riesman, D. 1983. “The Legacy of Everett Hughes.” Contemporary Sociology 12 (5): 477–81. ——— and H. Becker. 1984. “Introduction to the Transaction Edition.” In The Sociological Eye, by E.C. Hughes, v–xiv. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Rock, P. 1979. The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield. Roy, W. 1935. “The French-English division of labour in the province of Quebec,” unpublished MA thesis, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

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Short, J., Jr. 1971. “Introduction.” In The Social Fabric of the Metropolis, edited by J. Short, Jr., xi–xlvi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, I.H. 1972. “Continuities in the Sociology of Everett C. Hughes.” The Sociological Quarterly 13 (Fall): 547–58. Staley, D. 1993. “In whose image? Knowledge, Social Science and democracy in occupied Germany, 1943–1955,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. ———. 1996. “Everett Hughes, the ‘Conspiracy Of Silence’ and the prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, MA. Strauss, A. 1996. “Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission.” Symbolic Interaction 19: 271–83. Verdet, P. 1997. “Learning from Hughes: the experience of a French student.” Sociétés contemporaines 27 (juillet): 59–66. Wax, M. 2000. “Old Chicago and New France.” The American Sociologist 31 (4): 65–82. Weaver, T. 2002. The Dynamics of Applied Anthropology in the 20th Century: The Malinowski Award Papers [http://www.sfaa.net/malinowski/mionograph/Malinowski monograph.html]. Weiss, R. 1997. “Remembrance of Everett Hughes.” Qualitative Sociology 19: 543–51. Winkin, Y. 1988. “Portrait du sociologue en jeune home.” In Erving Goffman: Les Moments et Leurs Hommes, edited by Y. Winkin. Paris: Seuil/ Minuit.

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Chapter Three THE NATURAL HISTORY OF EVERETT CHERRINGTON HUGHES: A MASTER OF FIELDWORK Philippe Vienne

Introduction1 The sociology of Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) is probably today one of the most underestimated contributions to the discipline. Writing in 1998, Rick Helmes-Hayes lamented that Hughes had ‘more or less disappeared from the institutionalized collective memory – especially the textbooks – which constitute the formal history of the discipline’ (1998: 658). But has Hughes disappeared from the discipline’s collective memory? Has he fallen into the ‘tomb of forgotten men’, to use his own metaphor for describing the oblivion into which once notable people sometimes pass?2 In the pages that follow, I argue that he has not. Indeed, even if he is largely overlooked by the authors of textbooks, over the past two decades his work has enjoyed a substantial resurgence. This revival has taken place largely through the efforts of his former American and Canadian students, most notably Howard S. Becker, who have worked diligently to highlight his intellectual legacy. Indeed, Becker’s Tricks of the Trade (1998) is perhaps the most brilliant testimony to a Hughesian sociology yet written and constitutes clear evidence of the benefits of a long intellectual companionship with Hughes. In France, since the 1980s, there has been increased interest in Chicago’s fieldwork-based sociology among sociologists and anthropologists (including Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Jean-Pierre Briand, Pierre Fournier, Jean Peneff and Henri Peretz). Among their publications, Peneff’s Le goût de l’observation (2009) is a clear indicator of Hughes’s current impact on the discipline. In this chapter I take the biographical path to investigate and illuminate the sociological life and work of Hughes, focusing in particular on his contributions to the development of fieldwork. Hughes can be considered a master of fieldwork and of fieldwork training, and his insistence on the importance of both of these dimensions of sociology is both a striking characteristic of his career and a disposition deeply rooted in his habitus from his youth. Hughes defined fieldwork as the ‘observation of people in situ; finding them where they are, staying with them in some role which, while acceptable to them, will allow both intimate observation of certain parts of their behavior, and reporting it in ways useful to social science but not harmful to those observed’ (1971: 496). Fieldwork is

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composed, in a Meadian perspective, ‘of exchanges of tentative social gestures’ (Hughes 1971: 498), and Hughes’s paper ‘The Place of Field Work in Social Science’ is perhaps one of his finest theorizations of fieldwork in terms of how to handle the ‘problems of skill, role and ethic’ that the participant observer must solve (1971: 505). My account of Hughes’s life and career follows Anselm Strauss’s (1996: 271) advice to study Hughes’s biographical ‘commitments’ and sociological ‘mission’ in a sociological life where the scholar’s biography and intellectual work are inextricably related. Hughes developed a distinctive and arresting style of sociological writing and teaching that relied heavily on the use of comparisons, free associations, digressions, anecdotes, stories and yarns – often, notably, focusing on himself and his family. As Chapoulie put it (1996:  15–56), he employed an informal and almost ‘conversational’ teaching technique – the anecdote as a pedagogical tool – that left a deep impression on a number of his famous students and colleagues. Hughes was, as well, a generous correspondent, so his sociological insight and imagination lives on, not only in his books, articles and subtle essays but also in his massive correspondence with students and peers. Together, these resources furnish a beautiful testimony to his sociological imagination and provide a rich source for the kind of biographical essay I craft in the pages to follow. In this chapter, I draw my biographical material from the Everett Hughes archives at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.3 This is a rich and varied fund of data that, according to Andrew Abbott, would allow an interested scholar ‘to write a decent biography’ (1999:  27). I  would never have attempted to write a substantial biography using Hughes’s archives but for the inspiration provided by Chapoulie’s La tradition sociologique de Chicago, 1892–1961 (2001) and his introduction to the French translation of Hughes’s magnum opus, The Sociological Eye (1996). I draw on Chapoulie’s work throughout. Another useful source regarding Hughes’s career is Robin Ostow’s prepublication draft paper entitled ‘The Institutionalisation of Sociology in English and French Canada: The Career of Everett Cherrington Hughes’s (n.d., probably written after 1979), and published a few years later in a shorter version (see Ostow 1984, 1985). Ostow was one of his former students at Brandeis University. The draft, found in Chicago’s archives, is especially valuable because of the handwritten annotations by Hughes. My main debt to the paper lies in Ostow’s decision to refer to Hughes’s biography as a ‘natural history’ of her former teacher, thus implementing in an apt and original way the Parkian concept of ‘natural history’, generally used for studying society (and institutions) rather than for the study of a single individual (ECH Papers, Box 2, Folder 10 ‘Biography’). My chapter, then, is a modest attempt to write the ‘natural history’ of Hughes, the natural history of a ‘secular’ institution, to quote the title of Hughes’s PhD dissertation. I use the term ‘institution’ deliberately. Hughes, considered as an American ‘institution’ in sociology, did not ‘die’ spiritually in 1983; indeed, in some respects, he is maybe more alive and well as a sociological institution today than he was during some phases of his career. There is no end to the natural history of some institutions, whether they are sacred or bastard, saintly or secular. As a biographical subject, Hughes is (or should be, in my estimation) enshrined as a jewel in the discipline of sociology. The writing of a natural history of Hughes offers the possibility of exploring the natural history of the whole discipline, especially from 1923 to 1983. Hughes consistently treated ‘his own life

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as data’, as Strauss (1996: 272) recalled. It is my intention here to demonstrate how these materials can help to enrich our understanding of the nature and history of the discipline of sociology. Biographical work is full of traps and pitfalls, and Hughes was very conscious of those dangers. In a letter to Martin Bulmer written 14 February 1977, he said, ‘Biographies, as a rule, magnify the man they are writing about, and neglect the social setting’ (ECH Papers, Box 16, Folder ‘Bulmer’). It is hard here not to ‘magnify’ the man since he emerges as an outstanding individual and sociologist not only from his published works but also from his correspondence. Scattered throughout his correspondence are little ‘memos’ and good stories that provide to their reader one or another sociological ‘moral’ or ‘lesson’.4 But the social setting, whether it was Ohio, Chicago or French Canada, will not be omitted here. Institutions are products of a social context and Hughes’s sociological orientation developed out of his several ‘careers’ in various institutions and settings. One last prefatory note: I have in my use of his correspondence tried to obey Hughes’s wish that we should ‘not use any of this material in an unduly embarrassing way’.5 The man was never timid in his autobiographical statements and his purpose was always to teach and to contribute to the advancement of the sociological quest he shared with his readers. But as in any biography, the reader, as Pierre Bourdieu (2004: 8) noted with regard to his own use of ‘biographical’ statements, has to question himself about the reasons why he reads this kind of material. Is it for the purpose of gossip or to find in it the possibility of a refinement of his scientific work thanks to the enhanced reflexivity that it allows?

Son of a Preacher Man Everett Cherrington Hughes was born 30 November 1897 in Beaver, Ohio. He was the third of six children of the Reverend Charles A. Hughes and his wife, Jessamine Roberts (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 10 ‘Biography’). The Reverend Hughes’s family, ‘early settlers in Ohio’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’), had a deep concern for religion and education. Everett’s father and grandfather firmly believed in the ‘right to know more rather than less’ (Untitled document, 23 May 1977, ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’), a belief that led six of the sons of ‘Grandpa Hughes’, as he was called in Hughes’s reminiscences, to enter university. Of Everett’s six uncles, two became ministers.6 Charles Anderson Hughes Charles Anderson Hughes, Everett’s father, began his career as a ‘country Methodist minister’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6  ‘Family History’) and schoolteacher in Ohio and Dakota: ‘My father struggled through college after some years as a country school teacher and earned his way by preaching’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life after 60’). Charles Hughes was a very liberal minister who, because of his efforts to fight racial and social inequality in his parsonage, had regular difficulties with some of his parishioners. He especially offended the extreme right wing. At one point, members of the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of his house (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 10 ‘Race’). He

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was also a strict moralist, determined to chase the ‘evils’ of gambling, dancing and drinking from his communities. But his efforts were not always appreciated and, as a result, the strict minister was moved regularly from one parish to another by denominational authorities. These moves from one parsonage to another brought the family to many places in Ohio and North Dakota during Everett’s childhood. Emancipation, Not Alienation The fact that his father, when attending college, became ‘emancipated’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6  ‘Family History’) on the theological question (i.e., came to a ‘liberal’ interpretation of the Bible) had a deep impact on Everett Hughes’s own emancipated views, notably on the question of religious and ethnic-group membership. Hughes had an ability to see a religion, even his own, as ‘a going concern’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’; see Hughes 1971: 52–64), that is to say, as an institution constantly undergoing change, its structure and meaning being defined and redefined by its own members. In this perspective, the most sacred institutions were only one end of the continuum of institutions that one must study sociologically with as much detachment as possible. ‘Bastard’ institutions, too, should be examined with curiosity and sociological ‘respect’ (Hughes 1971: 98–105). As Strauss (1996: 275) put it, ‘Emancipation through enlightenment is the best way to characterize Hughes’s deepest sociological commitment. It is also one of his most profound biographical commitments’. Helen MacGill Hughes, Everett’s wife, noted in this regard that ‘Everett was a PK, a “preacher’s kid”, and often speculated on the role […] In the small Ohio town where Everett grew up, the PK was always something of an outsider. From childhood Everett was disposed to look on people analytically, dispassionately’ (cited in Strauss 1996: 283; emphasis in original). Hughes himself says that he was emancipated from religion very early. In a letter to Lee Braude he notes on this account, ‘One of the things you say, that seemed to me quite true, is that the sociologists who came from parsonages had already undergone their fundamental emancipation from theology when they were adolescents. In my case it happened at about ten. So early in fact that I am not sure whether I ever believed the Creeds in any very strict way from the beginning’. But for ‘emancipation’ to provide its full reward, Hughes says, it must not lead the sociologist to be ‘alienated’, as he points out in the following passage written late in his career. I sometimes wonder what sociology will be when there is no basic set of beliefs for young people to be emancipated from. Sociology has been very much an emancipation subject. I think, perhaps, it is one thing to be emancipated and another thing to be alienated. […] The people who, in course of becoming emancipated also become alienated, are not really emancipated; they have merely somehow escaped. To be emancipated means not to have lost one’s taste for something, but means rather to look at in an easier way. Perhaps, looking upon one’s former beliefs and practices as interesting and useful phenomena. (ECH to Lee Braude, 11 January 1975, ECH Papers, Box 15, Folder ‘Braude, L.’)

In Hughes’s personal habitus, his status as a ‘PK’ goes not without deep connections to the sociologist’s work and perspective. Indeed, his early status as an ‘outsider’ is one of

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the foundations of the kind of profound, ungossipy curiosity for human matters that Hughes later displayed as a sociologist. As Hughes himself recalls, As a minister’s son you know all about the community, you know it inside out. And it’s interesting to you. You certainly don’t tell people, but you get, somehow, this idea of learning about it. At least I did. I know I got that. My father kept a diary and his diary – you could have made a half dozen doctoral theses out of his diary. It’s a fantastic document. So I knew there were stories there. And this really made my bond with Park, that I did know this. (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’)

This connection, as we will see below concerning Robert E. Park, was a commitment to the ‘facts’ and a curiosity about ‘people’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’), a benign curiosity implying that – if you are interested and willing – you should be able to do fieldwork in any community.

Bright Lights, Big City Hughes attended Ohio Wesleyan College in Delaware where he received his degree in 1918 (ECH Papers, Box 2, Folder #10 ‘Biography’).7 However, as he was just 20 when he graduated, he could not immediately apply to become a high school teacher (Interview of ECH by Robert Weiss, ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). Since his family was poor, Everett had to find work. This was not just a practical necessity but also a moral obligation. His father, he recalls, ‘was always calling on me to help my younger brothers and sisters who were coming along. And so I had to have a way to earn money’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). Thus, an arrangement was made in 1917 with an uncle who had a position in Chicago at the YMCA. Hughes would teach night school to blue-collar workers in the Wisconsin steel works (1971: 567). ‘So I went off to Chicago with an uncle who got me a job in the steel mills, running night schools’ (Interview of ECH by Robert Weiss, ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). Hughes stayed at this job much longer than he expected (ECH to Nels Anderson, 13 June 1972, ECH Papers, Box 8, Folder ‘Nels Anderson’). Working in this industrial setting initiated Hughes into a world quite different from calm rural Ohio. It was his first encounter with immigrant workers in industrial settings: Italians, Serbs, Croatians, Poles, and others were in that end-of-the first-war period being strongly encouraged to become citizens of the U.S. Before that no one had bothered much about citizenship, even when it came to voting. Now suddenly, after the war with the country of origin of many of our citizens and after the revolution in Russia, every person of foreign origin became a possible pro-German or a radical of some sort. Out in the steel mills I saw industry for the first time; the heat, the roar, the white-hot iron pouring from the blast furnaces, the ingots being rolled and drawn into bars, the smaller bars racing down the long mill as one imagines serpents chasing souls in hell. It was thrilling after the life in Ohio villages and a quiet college town. (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 10 ‘Race’)

Hughes was therefore initiated, long before entering sociology, and for a substantial period – five years (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life after 60’) – into a field that would

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later become one of his specializations in sociology, that is, ‘the social problems of industrial production’ (ECH Papers, Box 2, Folder 10 ‘Biography’). As he recalls, doing this sort of job involved him in doing fieldwork before he knew he was doing fieldwork: ‘So in a way I got into the field right then and there. I discovered foreigners. I knew foreigners were here, and it was a nice thing’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6  ‘Family History’). Hughes’s introduction to the world of industrial work was complemented by another kind of teacher experience. He also taught lumberjacks ‘in the lumber country in northern Michigan’ (ECH to Nels Anderson, 13 June 1972, ECH Papers, Box 8, Folder ‘Nels Anderson’). Taken together, these experiences brought several benefits. Not only did he pay his college debt and help his younger sisters and brothers go to college (ECH to Nels Anderson, 13 June 1972, ECH Papers, Box 8, Folder ‘Nels Anderson’) but also he broadened his range of life experiences and honed his developing skills as a field researcher. At the end of this period, Hughes was living in the Garrett Seminary (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 11 ‘Autobiography#1’) near the Pullman plant and utopian community just outside of Chicago. There he met a theologian named Beck who suggested to him that he should study sociology at the University of Chicago with Robert Ezra Park (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life After 60’). As a consequence, in the fall of 1923, Hughes enrolled in sociology: ‘After two year’s absence I came back to Chicago and in 1923 took up graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 10 ‘Race’).

The Chicago Department of Sociology in the 1920s The encounter with Park was a revelation for Hughes:  ‘About that time I  really was hooked with sociology.’ ‘[It] really got hold of me and I knew this was my line’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 11  ‘Autobiography#1’). Much later, Hughes recalled that ‘from then on I knew what I was going to do’ (ECH Papers, Box 1 Folder 9 ‘Life After 60’). As Strauss (1996: 272) puts it, Hughes had come to see sociology as a ‘vocation’. He caught Park’s ‘total devotion to serious study’, which implied ‘living for sociology – not merely earning a living from sociology’. Hughes wanted to learn more from Park and set out to catch his eye. ‘I began to see enough of Park’, Hughes recalled, ‘for him to know that I existed’ (untitled autobiographical document, 26 January 1976, ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 11 ‘Autobiography#1’; emphasis in original). Park’s Sociological Perspective Park made many essential and original contributions to the teaching of sociology at Chicago (see Chapoulie 2001:  91–123), especially in the areas of race, news, city life and, later, human ecology. As a sociologist who has been described as the ‘talisman’ of the Department of Sociology (Abbott 1999:  28), Park had many distinctive qualities. Three of them in particular had a considerable impact on his students: his sociological detachment, his personal commitment to students and his competence at fieldwork. In the discussion that follows, I focus principally on this last dimension.

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In Hughes’s generation of students, Park was the initiator of fieldwork training. In Hughes’s words, ‘He did more perhaps than any other person to produce the new American sociology in which people went out and did field observations designed to advance theoretical, as well as practical, knowledge of modern, urban society’ (1971: 500–1). Helen MacGill Hughes recalls that they were taught to do so by use of ‘methodical observing and recording’. Everything they saw was to be kept in a field journal. They were taught, she remembers, ‘to train ourselves to see minutely and accurately – and then to write it all down’. Indeed, two days of the student’s schedule (Saturdays and Mondays) were reserved for fieldwork since there were no classes those days (MacGill Hughes 1988: 73). Below, I consider Everett Hughes’s own fieldwork on the Chicago Real Estate Board, but the general spirit of his emphasis on fieldwork is best understood via an anecdote concerning Park. One of Hughes’s classmates, Ruth Shonle (later Cavan), was then working on a project about suicide for her PhD.8 Hughes heard of a case of suicide in the community of Pullman (where he had lived previously, before 1923). They instantly decided to skip Park’s class in order to rush to Pullman to attend the proceedings. In telling the anecdote, Hughes makes clear that he ‘usually just missed one day of school a week’. They wondered how Park would react. But true to his instincts as a researcher, Park thought they had acted wisely: ‘When Park heard that he was mightily pleased that we put observation above study in a classroom’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 11 ‘Autobiography#1’). We will see that Hughes never forgot this emphasis on fieldwork and made it a personal discipline for himself and his students throughout his career. During his graduate work, Hughes depended on student jobs to finance his studies. As was the case earlier, his family could not contribute; indeed, he had to help his younger brothers and sisters (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). Hughes thus found a job as ‘director of a Chicago city park’. As it turned out, the job provided Hughes with yet another opportunity to do fieldwork. Later, Hughes recalled that when he went to McGill University, he did not see himself as ‘a field worker especially’, despite the fact he earned his way through graduate school by running a Chicago park, keeping diaries about his work there and bringing ‘lots of students to come out there and work with me’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). Hughes did not take an MA degree but enrolled directly in the PhD program and received his PhD in sociology and anthropology in 1928, one year after being recruited to teach at McGill in Montreal (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 1 ‘Vitae’). Hughes’s PhD dissertation, entitled ‘A study of a secular institution: the Chicago Real Estate Board’, was empirically based. But, according to Hughes, it was not a ‘true’ fieldwork study. In his opinion, he did not do anything like true fieldwork until he did the fieldwork in Quebec that would lead to his book French Canada in Transition (1943). That said, Hughes’s dissertation was based in part on fieldwork techniques; in fact, it was what passed for conventional ‘fieldwork’ during the period.9 At the time, to do fieldwork was simply to get out on the field and talk to people, and Hughes did plenty of this for the Chicago Real Estate Board study. Putting it in simple terms, he said, ‘I went to meetings and talked to people’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6  ‘Family History’). However, Hughes’s personal experience of fieldwork was an uneasy one. He sometimes compared the beginning of fieldwork to real ‘torture’ (1971: 497), and made clear, in a letter to Paul Riesman, that

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this was because of his shy nature (ECH to P. Riesman, 8 April 1965, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Paul Riesman’). He said also about his timidity, ‘I have usually been hesitant in entering the field myself and have perhaps walked around the block getting my courage to knock at doors more often than almost any of my students’ (1971: 497). French Canada in Transition, the McGill Years The next chapter of Hughes’s sociological biography involves his move to Montreal in 1927 to teach as an assistant professor in sociology at McGill University, the longestablished anglophone elite institution of Canada’s French-language metropolis. The McGill Department of Sociology was headed by Carl A. Dawson, one of Park’s former students at Chicago. Sociology was then in an embryonic state in Canada, as Hughes recalls: ‘We were the only two full time sociologists in Canada.’ At the time, they were essentially regarded as teachers. Certainly, they were not encouraged to conduct their own research (as would then have been expected at the University of Chicago). ‘We didn’t have to do any research at McGill. Dawson and I decided we’d do something. He studied the [Canadian] frontier and I studied the French [Canadians]. It was a natural division of labor and we worked on that for eleven years’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). Research on French Canada As Hughes explains, in the beginning it ‘was never a question of wanting to do field work’ in French Canada (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). Indeed, when he began teaching in Montreal, Hughes says he did not do any fieldwork ‘except in getting out myself ’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). That is, gradually, he began to immerse himself in French culture. The Hugheses took French courses with a French-speaking university student in Montreal (Hughes 1971: 568), watched French movies and mingled in French circles in the city: ‘I read French avidly […] and Helen and I went to the French movies and theatres; took our trips to the country and eventually had quite a lot of contact with the young people’ (ECH to Aileen D. Ross and Oswald Hall, 3 November 1977, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Ross, Aileen’).10 This first phase of general immersion, during which he did not undertake any ‘specific’ or ‘systematic’ fieldwork, nonetheless led him to engage in wide observation of many aspects of French culture. He claims that he did not do ‘real’ fieldwork during this period, but ‘corrects’ his own statement by saying, ‘well yes I did: I visited lots of towns’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). It was probably during these town ‘visits’ that the Hugheses picked the town of Drummondville, a town ‘which had recently become home to two textile factories’ (Becker 2010: 3), in which to do their research on the dynamics of industrialization in Quebec. Indeed, both of them ‘eventually got out into the field’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’) and ‘jointly did the field work’ (Hughes 1943: v), choosing to live ‘for a while’ (Hughes 1971: 568) in Drummondville ‘while doing [their] study there’ (ECH to Blanche Geer, 12 December 1972, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #1’). And Hughes adds, ‘Later on we went out to the town of Drummondville

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and spent quite a long time there, living in the town and, of course, living completely French, although there were a few English middle-class families there, two of whom we had known elsewhere’ (‘Memorandum on Ethnographic or Sociological Fieldwork’, ECH Papers, Box 24, Folder ‘Falardeau#2’). Drummondville later received the assumed name of Cantonville in French Canada in Transition (1943). This occurred at the request of an important informant who asked that the town not be identified: ‘We agreed not to name it at the request of the president of the largest industry there, who was very helpful indeed in giving information’ (ECH to P. Riesman, 8 April 1965, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riesman, Paul’). The year 1938 was a turning point in Hughes’s career. He had carried out his fieldwork in Drummondville with his wife, Helen, and there were other communities around to study were he to stay in Montreal. But his career at McGill was frozen; the university was not inclined to raise either his status or his salary. That same year, Hughes received an offer from the University of Chicago to teach in the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. Hughes did not hesitate to leave McGill and Montreal, but this put a stop to his research program on communities in French Canada. Twenty-five years later, he wrote to Guy Rocher about his disappointment:  ‘As you know, the plan [of studying other communities] was not carried on; McGill University was not anxious to have me stay, and the University of Chicago called me. I still regret very much that the plan was not carried on’ (ECH to G. Rocher, 21 March 1963, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Rocher, G.’).

The Chicago Years: The Master of Fieldwork Training Hughes was recruited in May 1938 as Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago in the Division of Social Science (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 1 ‘Vitae’) to teach in the field of social organization (Chapoulie 2001: 188). Hughes felt that he was recruited to do the job of a ‘work horse’, with a heavy teaching load (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). He was asked to teach ‘a general introductory course to upper-year and graduate students’ (ECH to Lawton Burns, 25 October 1977, ECH Papers, Box 16, Folder ‘Burns, Lawton’). As he recalls it, his colleagues ‘conned [him]’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’) into teaching this prescribed introductory course, even though it ‘didn’t appeal to [him] very much’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). Hughes took up the task, hoping that someday he would be allowed to ‘substitute a course in field work’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’) in its place. I ‘wanted students to get a sense of social reality’, he said, by sending them ‘out into the city’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). The change occurred in 1944. After World War II, there was a large increase in the number of students in the department. Most men had withdrawn from the department during the war, and Helen MacGill Hughes (1980–1:  36)  recalls that, at one point, the university seemed composed entirely of women and priests. The return of the war veterans, funded by the G.I. Bill, brought many students to sociology. It was the ‘after-the-war crowd’, as Hughes referred to them, and these students ‘worked so hard that they kept us awfully busy’ (Lofland 1980:  258). Hughes’s popularity as a teacher rose quickly during this period

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and, more importantly, he was ‘beginning to attract many of the best students in the department’ (Abbott 1999: 68). To these students, Hughes offered a much better option than studying with the energetic but irritable Louis Wirth or undertaking the prospect of a long and risky project with Herbert Blumer (Abbott 1999: 68; Becker 1988:19; Winkin 1988: 34–5). During this period, Hughes developed a deep interest in the field of occupations. Indeed, Hughes taught a pioneering course, ‘Occupations and Professions’, which, according to Bernard Karsh (1968: 35), was ‘probably one of the first offered […] in the country’. In addition, Hughes was central to many research organizations at the University of Chicago that focused on work and industrial settings, and in this context designed a set of original ‘intellectual tools’ that brought decisive ‘illumination’ to the field of ‘ethnic relations in industry’ (Hall 1968: 88). Hughes’s change of course from general sociology to fieldwork training was the dawn of a fantastic period of originality in the Department of Sociology, though this was not truly recognized or realized at the time. The revival of fieldwork-based sociology constituted ‘something of an adventure’ in these post-Park days (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6  ‘Family History’). The ‘adventure’ involved in particular the forging of a particular link between the ‘master’ and his ‘apprentices’ from which everyone would profit: ‘The teacher gets data and new ideas from the students’, Hughes said, ‘and the students are getting something’ in return (1971: 572). Hughes’s fieldwork course, which he sometimes co-taught with the anthropologist Sol Tax (Habenstein 1968:  208), was ‘built around census tract analysis’ (Hughes 1971: 498). ‘Each student was assigned his own tract, the nearest thing to an ethnographic unit, and was expected to spend every available moment on site, observing, interviewing, and participating if possible in the ongoing society there, all the while entering copious notes in his field diary’ (Habenstein 1968: 208). Hughes immersed himself in this ‘continuing joint field project of student and teacher’ (1971: 576), not just teaching the students but also learning from them in a kind of ‘reciprocal learning’ (573). In Hughes’s perspective, the Department of Sociology was then a ‘mill’ of sorts. As the students passed through the mill, he said, they acquired not only the usual general theory that they could get in any good department of sociology but also they developed a special, disciplined disposition for fieldwork that he offered them. Students recall that Hughes provided them with the ‘substance’, as Erving Goffman referred to it (Verhoeven 1993: 337), or the ‘concreteness’, as Louis Kriesberg (1968: 141) put it, of sociology. Of this sociological ‘mill’, Hughes says, ‘There were an awful lot of people who went through that mill. Several outstanding people in sociology’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 14 ‘Interviews’). Among these people were Becker, Eliot Freidson, Herbert Gans, Goffman, Raymond Gold, Oswald Hall, Julius Roth and Donald Roy. These students carried out fieldwork in a distinctive area during their MA period or later in their PhD project (e.g., Becker in the Chicago public schools). Some, like the professional musician Howie Becker (2002: 128) or the blue-collar worker Roy, used their student jobs (just as Hughes had done previously) to collect observations (ECH Papers Box 1 Folder 14 ‘Interviews’).11 In a long letter to Matilda Riley, Hughes emphasized that it was difficult to teach fieldwork: ‘To teach people to observe is a difficult thing. They are not used to doing that.’ His

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task as a teacher was therefore a very complex one, involving, first, initiation and, then, a patient disciplining of his young apprentices, ensuring they would carry out their duties in the field and afterwards in a meticulous way. ‘Accurate observation’, he said, ‘is itself something that has to be learnt, and it can be learnt only by disciplining people, by having them [write] reports from the first day of observation and having them commented upon.’ That discipline included the ritual of the field diary: ‘Every one of these persons went through some experience that led him to keep a diary and from which he learnt what things to consider significant’ (ECH to Matilda Riley, 2 September 1973, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riley, Matilda’). The discipline of observation is described at length by Hughes in the case of some of his outstanding students. These remembrances are crucial to understanding the very specific and original relationship that was created in each case between the ‘master’ and his ‘apprentices’. Certainly, this was the situation with the most famous of his fieldworkers and partners, Howard S. Becker: ‘When Howard Becker wanted to study the jazz musician, he drew up a big outline, which I required him to throw away and instead sit down for fifteen minutes or a few minutes every day and report some incident as nearly as he could remember it. This led in time, after discussion of the cases, to a very sophisticated memory of particular incidents. Then he began to build his theories around the incidents’ (ECH to Matilda Riley, 2 September 1973, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riley, Matilda’). The case of Roy, who undertook a study of blue-collar work in an industrial setting, is an equally rich story of an initiation into participant observation.12 Hughes recalls the events in the letter to Riley mentioned above: I discouraged him [Roy] from taking courses, and told him to use his experience in the munitions factory as a way of learning something. He was to keep a diary. He said: ‘What about?’ I answered, ‘How could I know what about? I don’t know what goes on there, what’s important to those men.’ He came back a few weeks later cursing me saying that it took so much time to write his diary that he could hardly sleep nights what with the time he had to spend at work as well. He very soon got on the thing which we were studying in a number of plants which was how people decided how hard to work, and how it was wise for them to produce given the tendency of the company to try to force them to work harder for their money, and how if they did work harder and produced more, the piece-rate would be put down. (ECH to Matilda Riley, 2 September 1973, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riley, Matilda’)

In the letter to Riley, Hughes likewise explained what he meant by the discipline of observation: ‘All of them had to learn and they had to learn by a rather tough initiation learning to discipline themselves to accurate study and to be aware of how they look to the people they were studying’ (ECH to Matilda Riley, 2 September 1973, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riley, Matilda’).13 As well, in the letter, he gave examples of how he coached some of his most famous students: In the period when most of these observations were made […] we had an extraordinary number of good, young people at Chicago and I think we were giving them a grilling in field observation such as no one ever did anywhere. The anthropologists, incidentally, don’t do

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very much in that. The young people get to the field and learn what they must do. […] People have to become apprentices of a very special sort. They have to be motivated in some very special way. Julius Roth was motivated by bitter experience and Roy had worked in factories, had an M.A. and had a bitter experience of having some accurate field work turned down as not being true science out at the University of Washington. I don’t know exactly what it was in the experience of Erving Goffman, but I do know that we had to hold him back. He wanted to write his thesis the day he came to graduate school. Warner and I had to hold him back and see to it that he went to the field. Howie Becker, however, was rather easy to train. He was very bright and very interested and willing to do the work. The same was true of Blanche Geer. Of one thing I am sure: that people will not do observation of this quality unless they are indeed strongly committed and unless either they, themselves, or some teacher keeps a hawk’s eye on their day-to-day reporting of their work and see to it that they count and handle the things as quantitatively as can be done. (ECH to Matilda Riley, 2 September 1973, ECH Papers, Box 54, Folder ‘Riley, Matilda’)

These tasks of patient initiation and watchful supervision were arduous, and Hughes deserves much credit for having contributed directly to the forging of outstanding sociologists and for having taken as much time as he did to discipline them. He drew on his personal view that in situ observation was the ‘paramount’ research method (1971: 498) and made it his sociological mission to train a new generation of fieldworkers. In this respect, he modelled himself after Park who, in his generation, helped students develop the capacity to act like true partners in the writing of a new page in sociology.14 For the second time in the history of the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology, Hughes argued, there was a shared sociological research program between the teacher and the students, and it was key to the process that they shared the work and built individual projects together: ‘I have always depended very much upon my good and intimate students to do the work I had neither the energy nor the organizing ability to do’ (ECH to Howard Becker and Blanche Geer, 6 July 1967, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #3’). This training in fieldwork would later be funded as a project by the Ford Foundation with a team composed of Hughes, Buford Junker and Gold. The trio combined their experience to do ‘field work on field work’, as Hughes put it, in order to train the student to become ‘a conscious observer and analyst of himself in the role of observer’. The whole process of theorization on fieldwork was cleverly summarized as ‘studying the sociology of sociology’ (Hughes 1971: 496–506). That project gave birth to a manual (Junker 1960) that Helen MacGill Hughes recalls had an enduring influence in the department: ‘Out of this came a field study project with some Ford Foundation money and eventually E.C.H. got out a manual. He had seminar reports of students’ and others’ experiences and had kept records. This became a large field studies document – the manual – duplicated and used for years at University of Chicago. Buford Junker directed this project under E.C.H.’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 3 ‘Annotated Bibliography’).15 Apart from exploring new social worlds and giving the students an original disposition to become sociologists, the exposure to fieldwork created also an interesting situation where the students, while discovering new social worlds that provided an ‘expansion’ of their own world and an ‘enlargement of perspective’, found their habitus so upset that it gave them ‘a new view’ of themselves (Hughes 1971: 570–3). Sometimes this meant a

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detached exploration of their own social universe via fieldwork (Becker as a jazz musician, Roth as a TB hospital patient). Sometimes it involved the exploration of social worlds that differed substantially from their own. In turn, this often led them to the point of questioning their own identity and values: ‘You would learn so much about the students and they would learn so much about themselves’, said Hughes (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’), who spoke also of fieldwork as some sort of ‘mild psychoanalysis’ (1971: 496). Indeed, in Hughes’s eyes, fieldwork training was intended to provide them with possibility of experiencing ‘emancipation’. ‘When you teach students sociology, if you are successful, you emancipate them. Their religion becomes not just their religion, but one of a number of religions and they could possibly have belonged to any. I  could have been a Jew or a Moslem. And you are emancipated in a very fundamental sense. You are free from the restraints on thinking. It is possible for other people to be human beings. If you really become a sociologist, all creatures of the species are human’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’; emphasis in original). In the 1940s and 1950s, a time when America was a relatively conservative place, this sort of emancipation was vital. Moreover, one form of emancipation led to others. ‘I think the one significant thing about American sociology is the story of emancipation. Intellectual, physical, economic, in every way emancipation’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 6 ‘Family History’). This ‘emancipation through expansion of one’s world by penetration into and comparison with the world of other people and other cultures’ implies also the general statement that ‘all men are equal, equal in their humanity’ (Hughes 1971: 574).

Writing Boys in White Hughes’s next research project would also be in the field of the sociology of work and, as he never liked ‘big research projects’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 13 ‘Carnegie Foundation’), it, too, was a ‘very small project’ like the one he undertook in the 1930s in French Canada. Though not large in scale, its sociological impact proved decisive. The study, an ‘insider’s’ look at the training of medical students, was published as Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (1961). Hughes’s role on the project was largely that of ‘entrepreneur’. The fieldwork was conducted and written up by two first-class fieldworkers, one his former student at Chicago, Howard Becker, the other a colleague he trained directly in the field, Blanche Geer (see Becker 2002: 166–7). Hughes recalls recruiting Howie Becker to work on Boys in White: ‘I hired Howard Becker to work on this project. He was one of my Ph.D.s; he was one of the youngest, got his Ph.D. at 23. He was still as young as any medical-school boy, and he already had his Ph.D. It made it easier for him to do the field work. He still looks young. Besides, he’s a wonderful jazz pianist on the side, a professional pianist, which helps’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 13 ‘Carnegie Foundation’). Geer had a different background, coming from psychology and various work experiences, but she remembers how, despite the fact she was not formally one of Hughes’s students, he was a ‘good teacher’ for her. She remembered he had an unusual style, using ‘a form of stimulation which I can only call nagging’, where the teacher, ‘with ease and delight’ urged his students to learn (1968: 221–2).

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Hughes was her ‘nagger’ during those years of partnership. While for the most part Hughes played the role of entrepreneur and éminence grise, he did considerable fieldwork as well. As he recalled, he ‘talked and interviewed faculty and did a lot of observing’. Unfortunately, however, these interviews could not be used.16 During this period Hughes began to express deep concerns in his correspondence with Becker and Geer about the importance of perpetuating the tradition of doing and learning to do fieldwork, ‘nagging’ both of them on this subject: ‘It is also a real failure on the part of all of us that you and Blanche are not putting people into the field. The people who are to do our kind of research must come from somewhere’ (ECH to Howard Becker, 14 December 1960, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #2’). We should remember here that Hughes, as a professor at the University of Chicago overseeing the fieldwork experience and training the students as they learned the craft in a sort of apprenticeship, had the very Parkian idea that it was a balanced exchange between students and teachers, between masters and apprentices. Teachers would conduct their research projects with the help of young fieldworkers, and the students would acquire in exchange a very rare and precious sort of initiation into the research act. Hughes wanted the tradition to continue and regarded Becker and Geer as the next generation of ‘masters’. ‘You and Blanche will learn from the new people as I  have learned from the old’ (ECH to Howard Becker, 14 December 1960, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #2’). It is important to note in this respect what Hughes meant when he refers in the statement above to ‘our kind of research’. Hughes did not like to be labelled as purely or solely a ‘qualitative’ sociologist or as the defender of participant observation as the only useful method for doing good sociology.17 Nevertheless, here and elsewhere in his work he portrayed fieldwork as especially important, as ‘the real learning’ comparing to the use of documents. ‘In any event’, said Robert Weiss (1996: 547), ‘he believed that observation came first.’ The problem was that fieldwork was difficult to learn and had to be transmitted through first-class fieldworkers. As Hughes pointed out in a letter to Becker, You […] know how few people, even with some help, become first class field workers. It is therefore important to have some school, some place of apprenticeship, in which lots of people have a try at it in order that a few may really be chosen and feel themselves called to do it. I mention this now because your letter obviously talks about what is important to all of us, namely the next career steps for both Blanche and you. Those next career steps, however, concern not merely yourselves as individuals, but the whole progress of our kind of research. I consider the fate of this kind of work very important, as I know you do. (ECH to Howard Becker, 14 December 1960, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #2’)

His letter concludes with a remark about the state of the department at the University of Chicago: ‘There must be a place where people can learn to do it. It is really my fault that there is no such place now. When I got through the business of running the department for a few years, I really did not go after the field training as I had for the seven or eight years prior to that. However that may be, somebody must take it up now and it seems to me that it must be you and Blanche’ (ECH to Howard Becker, 14 December 1960, ECH Papers, Box 9, Folder ‘Becker #2’).

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The Sociological Eye and an Eye on the Fate of Sociology In 1961, Hughes left the University of Chicago to become a member of the new Department of Sociology at Brandeis University in Boston. There, with the help of a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, he established a new and fruitful fieldwork training program: ‘We got the grant and it went on very successfully for some time. We turned out in our first few years people who are now teaching in six or eight leading universities in the country’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life after 60’). Hughes was throughout his career an admirer of good books on fieldwork, like Sherri Cavan’s Liquor License, and worked throughout the Brandeis years to give students the appropriate training:18 ‘We got very good students; the women, especially, were good and have turned out well. The ones who came to me for direction were eager to go into the field and do empirical work’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life after 60’). Some of the letters Hughes wrote during the period provide insights into his counsel on fieldwork. For example, in a 1963 letter to Lucy Barker, he advised her to ‘sit down every day and write down as nearly by free association as you can some incident or another’. ‘Do not try to write up the whole thing in a formal way’, he added, ‘but rather gather materials from your own memory and store them on paper where you can see them’ (ECH Papers, Box 8, Folder ‘B#2’). After retirement from Brandeis in 1968, Hughes was engaged at Boston College. It was for him a period of celebration and homage. The same year, Institutions and the Person, the beautiful Festschrift edited by Becker, Geer, Riesman and Weiss, came out.19 In one of the most significant papers in the collection, Gans spoke of Hughes’s legacy, focusing in particular on the ‘revival of participant-observation’. ‘Students of Everett Hughes and other advocates of participant-observation’, said Gans, were ‘now mature enough to publish their own studies and to send their graduate students into the field’ (1968: 301; emphasis in original). Three years later, Becker and Weiss produced The Sociological Eye, a collection of Hughes’s papers ‘splendidly collected by Becker’ (Riesman 1983: 481). This book can be viewed, in my opinion, as the crowning achievement for Hughes’s faith in the utility of writing sociological essays rather than theoretical treatises or monographs. It speaks as well to his distinctive linking of fieldwork and theory (see Riesman 1983: 481). In keeping with his long-standing status as ‘outsider’, one who was ‘emancipated’ but not ‘alienated’, Hughes’s sociological eye was, as Arlene Daniels put it, not just probing and discerning but also ‘irreverent’ (1972: 409). Hughes had the deep quality of being able to bring a new comprehension of things that most people would prefer remain secret or taboo. Becker (2010:  10)  brilliantly states how the irreverent eye’s distinctive originality and fertility as a frame of reference is rare in sociology today: ‘It is hard to imagine a student today who would compare, as Hughes loved to do, prostitutes, priests, and psychiatrists, and so discover the dimensions of “guilty knowledge” he found so interesting (knowledge of their client’s secrets and possibly illicit behavior). I think, rather, that students would consult the literature on professions and come up with a list of conventionally defined professions as the basis for a comparative analysis.’ Everett Hughes retired as Emeritus from Boston College in 1976 and died six years later, in his 86th year, at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter I  asked the rhetorical question, has Everett Hughes really fallen into the ‘tomb of forgotten men?’ For many reasons outlined above, my answer to that question is ‘No’. In the first place, many of his colleagues and students speak of the continuing sociological value of his work and insight. Hughes remains for them an outstanding figure in sociology. Let us start ‘outside’ the Chicago tradition with the sociologists who were not students of Hughes and were forged in other, very different, schools of the discipline. Lewis Coser, a long-time friend who was trained by Robert Merton, regarded Hughes as ‘a sociological genius’, and described him using a striking image: Hughes was ‘no ordinary member of the sociological tribe; he marched at the very head of the procession’ (1994: 8–16). Another outsider to the Chicago tradition is the French sociologist Bourdieu, who had a few exchanges with Hughes during the 1970s. In a letter where he thanks Hughes for having sent to him The Sociological Eye, Bourdieu says, ‘I am pleased to have the opportunity to improve my knowing of your work that I admire very sincerely, and whose orientation seems to me very close of what we are trying to undertake here’ (my translation) (Bourdieu to Hughes, 27 April 1972, ECH Papers, Box 3, Folder ‘Aldine#6’). Writing about Goffman’s death in 1983, Bourdieu said that Hughes was ‘one of the great masters of American sociology’ (1983:  112). This is a tremendous compliment given that Bourdieu regularly criticized some of the main trends in American sociology. Irving Louis Horowitz, who once described Hughes as ‘a living legend’ (Horowitz to Scott G. McNall, 29 October 1976, ILHP), wrote Helen MacGill Hughes in 1983, after hearing of Everett’s death: ‘The impact of Everett on the life of those whom he touched personally is simply incalculable. He had a passion for social research, good social research that brought out the best in people – many people. There probably are not many professors in America who touched more lives in sociology and anthropology than Everett, and his students can be found from Canada to India, and not just in this country’ (Horowitz to Helen MacGill Hughes, 12 January 1983, ILHP). But it is not just Hughes’s sociological ‘cousins’ from alternative traditions who had words of praise for Hughes. Robert E. L. Faris, Ellsworth Faris’s son, and like his father a social psychologist from Chicago, was likewise highly appreciative of Hughes’s contribution. Writing to Hughes on 14 January 1972, Faris stated, ‘I have been impressed by the sociological unity and depth of your work. It started very strong with your Ph.D. thesis, which I have in the monograph form and still use frequently in my course on organization. And with the years there has been that steady penetration that gets ever closer to the way things are and work. You have a very strong life achievement, and have been of great value to sociological scholarship. I could write all the above in italics and capital’ (Faris to Hughes, 14 January 1972, ECH Papers, Box 24, Folder ‘Faris’). Comments from Hughes’s students and close partners focus even more clearly on his qualities as a sociologist. Most of the homage that Hughes received from his students highlighted the notion of apprenticeship. Note the following from Becker: ‘No matter what the subject matter I turn my attention to, I find that my years of studying and working with Everett Hughes have marked my approach to it; I think that most people who

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have known him as a teacher and colleague have the same experience’ (1968: 272). After stating that Hughes was ‘an outstanding theorist’ (Strauss 1996: 281), Strauss concluded his homage paper with a request: ‘My prescription then; let’s read and study Hughes’s writings more extensively and intensively. For me, his sociological counsel is immensely useful, inspirational, and wise’ (1996: 282; emphasis in original). Hughes’s friend David Riesman goes even further. He makes Hughes’s legacy a key to the fate of the whole discipline: ‘If sociology is to maintain its link with social reality through the interaction of fieldworkers with interviewees and through unobtrusive observation, we will need to encourage more sociologists to follow the example of Everett Hughes’s (Riesman 1983: 481). Becker and Geer present Hughes as a ‘central figure’ in the Chicago School who was, in their estimation, ‘one of the great teachers of sociology’. And they conclude their homage by saying, ‘Everett Hughes leaves us a method, a style of thought, and an example of a mind fully engaged in the exercise of the sociological imagination’ (1983: 8). Two of the key themes that reappear in the tributes paid to Hughes are the image of the ‘sociological eye’ and the relationship between the teacher and his students. Hughes had a ‘remarkable impact’ on his students by ‘igniting their interest in problems of society and social process’ (Becker et al. 1968: vii). It was this more than anything else that was decisive for them: ‘He helped them to see with a sociological eye’ (Becker and Geer 1983: 8). He was able to help them develop this skill because he was deeply committed to his students. But his devotion came with a price. Students were expected to undertake their work with the same degree of commitment and intensity. As Horowitz put it, ‘His support of students sometimes made it easier to forget what a tough-minded individual Everett was, and it is that quality of toughness and resilience that made him such an outstanding field worker’ (Horowitz to Helen MacGill Hughes, 12 January 1983, ILHP). Though Hughes has not been forgotten, indeed, as I  noted above, his work has enjoyed a substantial renaissance over the past 20 years in France and Italy, a number of features of his work help account for the relative neglect his work has sometimes suffered. To begin, as Strauss points out, many people use his work without realizing they are doing so. Many of his concepts have become part of the standard terminology of the discipline. ‘Some of his precepts as well as his concepts (like dirty work and mistakes at work) are so much a part of our perspective that their source is more or less forgotten, or so taken for granted that the source is not cited’ (Strauss 1996: 280). Another way of putting this is to lament that Hughes’s long-time work in the forging of his students led to a kind of theoretical ‘osmosis’ between him and them (Becker cited in Helmes-Hayes 1998: 632) that sometimes veiled how much their own production was a consequence of Hughes’s dedication (see Vienne 2010). Kimball Young offers a different explanation. In Young’s estimation Hughes was not ‘a very prolific writer’ but he was, instead, ‘a stimulator of other people and students’ (Young 1988b: 310). The consequence of this is that the ‘stimulator’ has been pushed to some degree into the shadow while some of his best students have been pushed into the limelight. Goffman – who himself is a perfect example of an apprentice apparently reluctant to quote or praise Hughes’s work (see Jaworski 2000) – said in an interview with Jeff Verhoeven (1993: 336), Hughes ‘has never been given, I think, the credit he deserves’.

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The ironic consequence of Hughes’s dedication to the training of students was that, according to Riesman (1983:  478), ‘he founded no “school”, but he sent many gifted individuals off along the main lines of their interests and his own’. Chapoulie states in this regard that it is only in retrospect that we can say that Hughes can be considered a sociological leader, after the progressive ‘resurrection’ or rehabilitation of his contribution to sociology (2001: 213). Perhaps, as Hughes himself cleverly stated, the delayed and somewhat muted appreciation of his work is a consequence of the fact that, as he recalls it, he was ‘considered somewhat unorthodox in my methods and ideas’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 13 ‘Carnegie Foundation’). Was Hughes unorthodox in his methods? Maybe they were considered to be in an epoch during which fieldwork-based sociology was held in low esteem by mainstream sociologists and patronized as the ‘anthropological’ method (Hughes 1971:  501). The renaissance of fieldwork, even in countries like France that were relatively immune to it for a long time, will help a new generation of sociologists and anthropologists to discover what an incisive role Hughes has played in the refinement of its methodology and epistemology. Was Hughes unorthodox in his ideas? His unusual style of writing and teaching can at first be perplexing, but it represents a beautiful quality of sociological imagination, the combination between fieldwork and sociological imagination giving birth to one of the most insightful contributions to the discipline. And so we are left with a series of catchphrases – the unorthodox mentor, the sociological outsider, the ‘happy marginal’, the ‘outstanding fieldworker’, the consummate ‘master’ – to describe Hughes and his contribution. He had a deep commitment to the discipline, as to his students in particular, and, as a result, forged a small cadre of sociological ‘children’ (Park’s grandchildren) who carry on his tradition.20 In this respect, then, Hughes has himself become a durable sociological ‘institution’, alive to this day in the works of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is time, to quote Strauss (1996: 281), for all these ‘intellectual children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who still pursue the paths he marked out for us’, to cast a revived and fresh sociological eye on the natural history of their admirable ancestor.

Notes 1 I began to work in the Hughes Papers at the University of Chicago in 2008. Since then, I  have accumulated a number of scholarly and personal debts:  to Howie Becker, who read and discussed with his usual generosity some of my papers and drafts, working as a mentor for my generation as Hughes did for his own; to Andrew Abbott and Don Levine, who welcomed me generously at Chicago and allowed me to discover the splendid local tradition of walking conversations between scholars in Hyde Park (since G. H. Mead and Park’s time; it is indeed a wonderful experience); to Yves Winkin and Greg Smith, who launched me into my archival project from an initial interest in Goffman’s work; to Daniel Cefaï, who gave me my first opportunity to discuss the (supposed) Chicago School sociology with other scholars; and to Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro for their support and help. Indeed, Rick can almost be considered my co-author for this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge Gary Jaworski for the discussion we had about his excellent paper on the Goffman-Hughes relationship, Dan Menchik (who was a precious intermediary with Hughes’s family), and Giovanni Semi.

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2 By the expression ‘tomb of forgotten men’, Hughes (1997: 394) means the oblivion in which ‘highly literate, disappointed or ruined men’ may pass. We should thank Chapoulie for his rediscovery of this unpublished paper by Hughes, highlighted in the French edition of The Sociological Eye. 3 Hereafter, I refer to Hughes’s papers using the acronym ‘ECH Papers’. Likewise, I refer to the Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, also at the Regenstein, using the acronym ‘EWB Papers’, and – outside the University of Chicago  – the archives of Irving Louis Horowitz at Pennsylvania State University are referred to as ‘ILH Papers’ (see: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/ilh.html). The authorization to quote from the Everett Hughes Papers has been obtained from the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, and for this I thank Dr Daniel Meyer. 4 Riesman (1983: 480) refers to Hughes’s correspondence in his obituary of Hughes. 5 Hughes made this comment in a letter to Robert Havighurst (29 April 1975) written for the latter’s ‘study of leaders in academic and their life in their sixties or seventies’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder 9 ‘Life after 60’). 6 Two of Everett Hughes’s uncles were ministers, and two of his sisters married ministers. 7 Part of this title (‘big city’) is taken from Hughes’s paper ‘My Personal Experience of Race’, but echoes also Strauss’s (1996: 275) reference to Hughes’s move ‘from small town (in Ohio) to big city, from religion to science’. 8 Cavan completed her PhD dissertation on that subject in 1926 under the title Suicide: A Study of Personal Disorganization. The thesis became a book at the University of Chicago Press in 1928. 9 See Platt (1994) for a detailed analysis of fieldwork techniques during the First Chicago School period. 10 Among the people the Hugheses met were students at McGill, as David Solomon (1968: 4) remembers: ‘Everett and Helen also introduced me to the small coterie of sociology students, all of whom were senior to me, and some of whom had assisted with French Canada in Transition, the fieldwork for which was in full swing at the time.’ 11 See Chapoulie (1984; 2001: 229) for a list and analysis of these theses. 12 On Roy’s work, see the remarkable analysis by Chapoulie (2001: 391–407). Chapoulie states also that Roy and Roth were representatives of a minority of blue-collar students (Chapoulie 2001: 201). 13 That the initiation could be tough is clearly indicated in Ned Polsky’s reminiscences (see Chapoulie 2001: 241–2). 14 The significance of this commitment has sometimes been neglected by Hughes’s students who failed to cite him or at least praise him explicitly for this initiation that proved crucial in their field projects. It is notably Roy’s case (Chapoulie 2001: 396). 15 See also Chapoulie (2001: 246) and the detailed account of the Field Training Project by Cefaï (2002) especially for the role that Hughes’s student Gold played in that seminar. The paper makes it readily apparent that some students were afraid of the ‘sink or swim’ situation of fieldwork (Cefaï 2002: 125). 16 Hughes notes that the interview materials could not be used in a long letter to Irving L. Horowitz of 25 May 1976 (ILHP). In the same letter, Hughes tells that the book was not well received in reviews and especially in the medical community, despite the fact that prominent physicians such as Nobel Prize winner Charles Huggins thought the book was ‘great’. 17 During his interview with Robert Weiss, Hughes said, ‘I hate the word qualitative. If qualitative means you are making a judgment. As a rule.’ (ECH Papers, Box 1, Folder #13 ‘Interviews’.) 18 ‘I am having such fun with Liquor License that I am reading it when I go to bed’, says Hughes in a letter of 6 October 1966 to Alex Morin (ECH Papers, Box 3, Folder 7 ‘Aldine’). As Becker and Geer (1983: 8) recall, Hughes never forgot an occasion to take field notes: ‘The field notes he kept throughout his life – whether of a trip to Japan or to the corner garage to have his

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car fixed – combined his love for ethnographic detail with his bent for strong and provocative generalization.’ 19 Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes. In a letter to Alex Morin written 10 December 1968, Hughes said, ‘One should be generally suspicious of labors of love, but in the Festschrift there are several pieces that are really jewels. The two that I have looked through more recently are those of Herb Gans and Eliot Freidson. If I do say it myself, both are built around ideas which are mine, although I  suppose other people had them long ago’ (ECH Papers, Box 3, Folder 7 ‘Aldine’). 20 I borrow with gratitude a beautiful scene from Simon Langlois’ (2012:  219)  paper on Jean-Charles Falardeau, a student of Hughes at Laval University and Chicago. When Falardeau was presented to Park by Hughes, Hughes introduced him as Park’s ‘grandchild’. We can see that Hughes liked the comparison with the grandfather’s role, as in the marks of affection he received during his 70th anniversary (ECH Papers, Box 2, Folder 7 ‘70th Anniversary’).

References Archival Sources Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives

Other Abbott, Andrew D. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at one hundred, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S. 1968. ‘History, Culture, and Subjective Experience:  An Exploration of the Social Bases of Drug-Induced Experiences’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 272–92. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1988. ‘Herbert Blumer’s Conceptual Impact’, Symbolic Interaction 11 (1): 13–21. ———. 1999. ‘The Chicago School, So-called’, Qualitative Sociology 22 (1): 3–12. ———. 2002. Les ficelles du metier: Comment conduire sa recherche en sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2010. ‘The Art of Comparison: Lessons from the Master, Everett C. Hughes’, Sociologica 2: 1–12. http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/doi/10.2383/32713. ———, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert Weiss. 1968. ‘Everett C.  Hughes  – an Appreciation’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, vii–x. Chicago: Aldine. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. ‘Erving Goffman, Discoverer of the Infinitely Small’, Theory, Culture and Society 2 (1): 112–3. ———. 2004. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris: Raisons d’agir. Cefaï, Daniel. 2002. ‘Faire du terrain à Chicago dans les années cinquante, l’expérience du Field Training Project’, Genèses 46 (1): 122–37. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1984. ‘Everett C. Hughes et le développement du travail de terrain en sociologie’, Revue française de sociologie 25: 582–608. ———. 2001. La tradition sociologique de Chicago. 1892–1961. Paris: Seuil. Coser, Lewis A. 1994. ‘Introduction: Everett Cherrington Hughes 1897–1983’. In Everett C. Hughes on Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination, edited by L. Coser, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniels, Arlene. 1972. ‘ “The Irreverent Eye”. Review of The Sociological Eye, by Everett C. Hughes’s’, Contemporary Sociology 1 (5): 402–9. Gans, Herbert J. 1968. ‘The Participant-Observer as a Human Being: Observations on the Personal Aspects of Field Work’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 300–17. Chicago: Aldine.

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Geer, Blanche. 1968. ‘Occupational Commitment and the Teaching Profession’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 221–34, Chicago: Aldine. Habenstein, Robert W. 1968. ‘The Phoenix and the Ashes’. In Institutions and the Person:  Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 208–18. Chicago: Aldine. Hall, Oswald. 1968. ‘French-Canadian Engineers’. In Institutions and the Person:  Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 80–8. Chicago: Aldine. Helmes-Hayes, Richard C. 1998. ‘Everett Hughes:  Theorist of the Second Chicago School’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 11 (4): 621–73. ———. 2010. ‘Studying “Going Concerns”: Everett C. Hughes on Method’, Sociologica 2: 1–26. http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/doi/10.2383/32712. ——— and Marco Santoro. 2010. ‘Introduction’, Sociologica 2:  1–9. http://www.sociologica. mulino.it/doi/10.2383/32712. Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1971. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers on Institutions and Race. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1997. ‘Careers’, Qualitative Sociology 20 (3): 389–97. Jaworski, Gary D. 2000. ‘Erving Goffman:  The Reluctant Apprentice’, Symbolic Interaction 23 (3): 299–308. Junker, Buford H. 1960. Field Work:  An Introduction to the Social Sciences, Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Karsh, Bernard. 1968. ‘Human Relations versus Management’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 35–48. Chicago: Aldine. Kriesberg, Louis. 1968. ‘Internal Differentiation and the Establishment of Organization’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 141–56. Chicago: Aldine. Langlois, Simon. 2012. ‘Jean-Charles Falardeau, sociologue et précurseur de la Révolution tranquille’, Les cahiers des dix 66: 201–68. Lofland, Lyn. 1980. ‘Introduction to ‘Reminiscences of Classic Chicago:  The Blumer-Hughes Talk’, Urban Life 9 (3): 251–81. MacGill Hughes, Helen. 1980–1981. ‘On Becoming a Sociologist’, Journal of the History of Sociology 3 (1): 27–39. ———. 1988. ‘Robert Ezra Park: The Philosopher-Newspaperman-Sociologist’. In Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course, vol. 2, edited by Matilda W. Riley, 67–79. London: Sage. Ostow, Robin. 1984a. ‘Everett Hughes: The McGill Years’, Society/Société 8 (3): 12–16. ———. 1984b. ‘Everett Hughes: From Chicago to Boston’, Society/Société 9 (1): 8–12. Peneff, Jean. 2004. ‘Les idées originales d’Howard Becker pour enseigner la sociologie’. In L’art du terrain:  Mélanges offerts à Howard S.  Becker, edited by Alain Blanc et Alain Pessin, 15–27. Paris: L’harmattan. ———. 2009. Le goût de l’observation: Comprendre et pratiquer l’observation participante en sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte. Platt, Jennifer. 1994. ‘The Chicago School and Firsthand Data’, History of the Human Sciences 7 (1): 57–80. Riesman, David. 1983. ‘The Legacy of Everett Hughes’, Contemporary Sociology 12 (5): 477–81. Solomon, David N. 1968. ‘Sociological Perspectives on Occupations’. In Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes, edited by Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, David Riesman and Robert S. Weiss, 3–13. Chicago: Aldine. Strauss, Anselm. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission’, Symbolic Interaction 19 (4): 271–83.

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Vienne, Philippe. 2010. ‘The Enigma of the Total Institution: Rethinking the Hughes-Goffman Intellectual Relationship’, Sociologica 2:  1–29. http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/ doi/10.2383/32720. Weiss, Robert S. 1996. ‘Remembrance of Everett Hughes’, Qualitative Sociology 19 (4): 543–51. Winkin, Yves. 1988. ‘Portrait du sociologue en jeune homme’. In Les moments et leurs hommes, by Erving Goffman and Yves Winkin, 13–92. Paris: Seuil/Minuit. Young, Kimball,Fred B. Lindstrom and Ronald A. Hardert. 1988a. ‘Kimball Young on Founders of the Chicago School’, Sociological Perspectives 31 (3): 269–97. ———. 1988b. ‘Kimball Young on the Chicago School:  Later Contacts’, Sociological Perspectives 31 (3): 298–314.

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Chapter Four EVERETT C. HUGHES: A KEY FIGURE OF THE CANADIAN CHICAGO SCHOOL DIASPORA Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden

Introduction Characterizations of Everett C. Hughes’s scholarly work display an apparent paradox. On the one hand, numerous scholars have documented Hughes’s profound influence on sociology in general (Coser 1994; Drysdale 1996; Helmes-Hayes 2000, 2010) and on Canadian sociology in particular (Drysdale 1996; Drysdale and Drysdale 2013). Riesman (1983:  477), for example, describes Hughes as ‘a kind of patron saint of Canadian social science’ whose work foreshadowed several central themes within the Canadian canon. Yet Hughes spent only a relatively brief time in Canada (Shore 1987) and as Helmes-Hayes points out, ‘had no desire and made no attempt to develop followers’ (1998: 658). He neither wanted nor founded a school of thought (Fournier 1986; Riesman 1983). Nonetheless, Hughes had a major influence on sociology in general, especially in Canada, where his impact is undeniable (Riesman and Becker 2009). In this chapter we employ our concept of the Chicago School Diaspora to explain this seeming paradox. By the Chicago School Diaspora we do not mean the scattering of a people but, rather, the process whereby key ideas and symbolic representations of key figures that people associate with the Chicago School are taken up by scholars, many of whom have no formal, or even informal, relationship to the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago (Low and Bowden 2013).

Hughes’s Influence on Canadian Sociology It is widely acknowledged that there are two major streams of Canadian sociology, one Francophone, one Anglophone. Indeed, Brym and Saint-Pierre (1997) argue that it is these two streams of thought that make Canadian sociology distinctive. While sharing some similarities, these two streams emphasize different ‘traditions’ reflecting the cultural distinctions between French and English Canada (Chekki 1987). According to Donald Whyte and Frank Vallee (1988: 2036), ‘in Québec perspectives from Europe (in particular France)’ are more influential while American sociology has had a stronger impact

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on English sociology in Canada. Thus, Hughes is singular in that he has had a significant influence on both French and English sociology in Canada (Chapoulie 1996; Coser 1994; Drysdale 1996; Helmes-Hayes 2000; Ostow 1985; Weiss 1996). However, scholars differ over which of the two linguistic streams of Canadian sociology Hughes influenced most. On the one hand, some argue that Hughes’s approach to his research more ‘strongly influenced French Canadian sociologists’ (Nock 1974:  21; Shore 1987). For instance, Ostow (1985:  9)  writes that ‘French Canadian sociologists […] even more than their English Canadian counterparts, are the direct heirs of […] Hughes’s own institutional approach to the study of communities’ and that the French Canadian students who followed him to the University of Chicago are testimony to the ‘enthusiasm’ with which his approach to sociology was received by French Canadian sociologists (Ostow 1985: 9). On the other hand, Dan Chekki (1987: 62, 67) argues that the Chicago School had only a ‘minor influence on French Sociology’ but a ‘major impact on Canadian Sociology’. The differences between scholars on either side of this debate are reflective of the ‘two solitudes’ of Canadian sociology (MacLennan 1945). In particular, many English-speaking sociologists, unable to read French and/or unaware of the corpus of French sociology, are thus blind to the Hughesian strain that runs through it. In Hughes’s words, One could have taught at McGill many a long year without speaking a word of French. […] No French Canadian taught [at McGill]. […] The teachers of French were all from France […]. Teaching at McGill offered no opportunity for field observation of the French-Canadian language or culture. (1970: 14)

Riesman and Becker (2009: 3) are therefore more accurate in concluding that Hughes crossed ‘the sharp dividing lines both within Quebec and between Quebec and the rest of Canada’ (see also Whyte 1984–5). Indeed, Hughes and his student Hubert Guindon have the unique privilege of being identified as seminal influences on both French Canadian and English Canadian sociology. In Harry Hiller and Simon Langlois’s (2001) survey of Canadian sociologists from each linguistic community, only the works of Hughes and Guindon made both lists of the most important contributions to Canadian sociology in the twentieth century.

Hughes at McGill and Laval Hughes’s foundational influence on Canadian sociology began in earnest when he was appointed at McGill University to join the one-man Sociology Department established by Carl Dawson in 1922 (Coser 1994; Drysdale 1996; Drysdale and Drysdale 2013; Ostow 1985; Shore 1987; Whyte and Vallee 1988). Of course, McGill was influenced by the Chicago School even before the arrival of Hughes. Dawson was trained at the University of Chicago and at McGill emphasized empirical research in the tradition of the Chicago School of sociology (Chapoulie 1996; Chekki 1987; Ostow 1984; Shore 1987; Weiss 1996; Wilcox-Magill 1983). Hughes was a welcome addition to the department given his kinship with Dawson that was based on their common intellectual heritage. That Hughes

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found a happy home in McGill was also due in part to the fact that Hughes’s wife, Helen, a Canadian, was doing graduate work under Robert E. Park’s supervision at that time (Chapoulie 1996: 14; Coser 1994; Drysdale 1996). Together Dawson and Hughes instituted a sociology program that emphasized Chicago School-style empiricism and fieldwork with a focus on the Canadian social context (Shore 1987; Brison 2005). Hughes’s links to developments in American sociology generally and at Chicago specifically remained strong throughout his 11 years at McGill. During that time, he was invited back to the University of Chicago to participate in ‘summer meetings […] of departmental alumni’ (Chapoulie 1996: 14). During those visits, he renewed his relationship with Park and brought the fruits of their intellectual kinship back to his students at McGill. The result was that Dawson and Hughes trained many of the earliest ‘English-speaking Canadian sociologists’ (Chapoulie 1996: 14).1 Among them was Oswald Hall, who in his own turn would be lauded for his contribution to Canadian sociology. In his biographical account, Douglas Brown (2006: 272) writes that Hall ‘remembered’ Dawson as a less impactful presence in the department than Hughes, saying that ‘Dawson and the students recognized in Hughes a free-floating intellect of a very high order’ (Hall as cited in Brown 2006: 272). Hughes’s influence on the development of French Canadian sociology was institutionalized following the year he spent teaching at the University of Laval when he was appointed to the Faculty of Social Sciences in 1942 (Brison 2005; Fournier 1986; Nock 1974). Ostow (1985) argues that his tenure at Laval and the research he did in rural Quebec that produced the classic work French Canada in Transition (Hughes 1943) led him to have a greater influence on French-language sociology than on English-language sociology. This was possible in part because Hughes spoke fluent French, a capacity that at the time was ‘quite unusual for a professor at Montreal’s elite English-speaking university’ (Chapoulie 1996: 14). His fluency was a consequence of purposeful and extended effort (Brison 2005): In the course of eleven years, I  had several very self-conscious French-Canadian students from whom I learned a good deal. My wife and I also engaged a student from the French University to tutor us in his language. He became a willing informant. We later settled in another town for a while to study French Canada. A good many years later I had the opportunity of learning about French Canada by teaching at Université Laval and living ‘French’. (Hughes 1970: 14)

Indeed, among the first students to train with him were French Canadian sociologists Jean-Charles Falardeau and Jacques Brazeau (Fournier 1986; Vienne 2010a). Notably, Falardeau’s edited volume Essais sur le Québec contemporain (1953), which contains essays by Hughes and a number of his students, is recognized as one of the most important French-language contributions to Canadian sociology (Hiller and Langlois 2001). Hughes’s influence on French Canadian sociology was not limited to the legacy of his own work or the students he trained. He successfully sought to prescribe the research agenda of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval at an institutional level. His 1943 pamphlet, entitled ‘Programme de recherches sociales pour le Québec’, outlined the

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‘direction he thought should be taken’ in the Department of Sociology at Laval (Nock 1974: 21). The document is widely acknowledged as having a ‘lasting influence on the institution’ (Acland and Buxton 1999:  217; Nock 1974; Ostow 1985; Whyte 1984–5). Hughes was also a ‘consultant’ to Georges-Henri Lévesque on the direction of ‘longterm policy for the development of the École des Sciences Sociales’ (Ostow 1985:  9; Brison 2005; Drysdale and Drysdale 2013; Fournier 1986; Shore 1987). Hughes’s aim was to ‘diplomatically’ introduce his version of Chicago School ‘methods’ and ‘ideas’ to sociological research at Laval (Brison 2005: 107). Hughes’s ‘Programme de recherches’ was continued by his student Falardeau, who later became chair of sociology and director of the École des Sciences Sociales (Drysdale and Drysdale 2013: 23). He writes, ‘In the Department of Sociology at Laval, we are concerned with observing the characteristics of the rural Canadian parish of old and its contemporary transformations in the urban milieu’ (Falardeau as cited by Nock 1974: 21). Hughes retrained his academic interest in Canada after he left the country. He continued to write works about Canada and publish in Canadian journals during the period he spent in Germany after World War II and on his return to Chicago (Ostow 1985: 11). Similarly, Hughes’s direct connection with students who would later influence French Canadian sociology extended beyond his time at McGill and Laval to his return to the University of Chicago (Drysdale and Drysdale 2013). Notably, Guindon did graduate study with Hughes at the University of Chicago during the mid-1950s and later became one of the founding members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, where he taught generations of sociology students (including an author of this chapter) about Quebec society. As with Falardeau before him, Guindon went on to produce work recognized as a central contribution to French Canadian sociology (Hiller and Langlois 2001). At Chicago, Hughes also trained notable English Canadians from Montreal such as David Solomon and Dan Lortie as well as other Canadian students including Jacques Brazeau, Jacqueline Marcheau, Oswald Hall, Aileen Ross and Leo Zakuta (Nock 1974; Ostow 1985; Shore 1987; Vienne 2010a: 7n12). In 1961, Hughes left Chicago for Brandeis University to create a new doctoral program based on fieldwork (Reinharz 1995) and then went to Boston College in 1968 where he finished his career in 1977. Among those he trained at Brandeis were Nancy Howell, Michal Bodemann and Robin Ostow, all of whom later found academic positions in Canadian universities (Ostow 1985:  10). He retained an interest in Canada, particularly in the ‘evolution of French usage in Quebec’ (Chapoulie 1996: 19), throughout this period and regularly attended the meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.2 In 1965 he gave lectures on ‘French Canada Still in Transition’ at McGill University where, in 1968, he also ‘served as a member of the advisory committee of the French Studies Programme’ (Ostow 1985:  10). Furthermore, Hughes’s formative influence on both French Canadian and English Canadian sociology was widely recognized during his life. He was given the status of honorary life president by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and received honorary degrees from Sir George Williams University3 and the Université de Montréal (Ostow 1985: 11). Hughes’s insights persisted long after the chain of formal association to the department at Chicago disappeared. Both inside and outside of Canada Hughes trained

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numerous students, several of whom acknowledged their own highly regarded work as ‘more or less direct extensions of ’ Hughes research (Chapoulie 1996:  20; Ostow 1985). In addition, Hughes taught and supervised many of the most notable figures of the Chicago School whose work became fundamental to sociology including Howard Becker, Joseph Gusfield, Fred Davis, Gladys and Kurt Lang, Eliot Friedson, Rue Bucher, Robert Emerson, Orrin Klapp, Tamotsu Shibutani, Gregory Stone, Shulamit Reinharz, Gaye Tuchman, David Riesman and, last but hardly least, Erving Goffman (Coser 1994; Strauss 1996; McLaughlin 2002). His influence also spread through relationships with students on his research projects who never took classes from him, most notably Blanche Geer and Anselm Strauss. Even more indirectly, there were students at Chicago such as Julius Roth, who adapted the Hughesian ‘approach’ and viewed Hughes as a mentor, but had no formal connection with Hughes through either teaching or research (Chapoulie 1996: 20n33). It is especially remarkable that Hughes had such a deep and wide-ranging impact because, as we note above, he made no attempt to develop followers. Indeed, in many senses, and with one critical exception, he was not directive with his students and, in fact, claimed the obverse was true. With the exception of direct fieldwork observation (see Vienne, this volume), they took up his ideas via a process more akin to ‘osmosis’ than tutelage (Helmes-Hayes 1998: 632; Vienne 2010a). Thus, through his students, through research trainees, through ‘more or less distant heirs’, and eventually through networks too distant to trace, Hughes influence has gone far and wide beyond his own students (Chapoulie 2002: 51).

Hughesian Canadian Sociology In 1987, Chekki remarked that Canadian sociology was eclectic and ever evolving (74). In this light the correspondence between the major substantive foci of Canadian sociology and topics that occupied Hughes’s research career provides an important measure of his impact on the discipline. For instance, one survey of Canadian sociologists in the 1960s identified social organizations and institutions, social change, social problems, population, community studies and social psychology as the major areas within Canadian sociology (Chekki 1987: 67). Hughes made significant contributions in all these areas. For example, of the top six ranked areas of specialization in Canadian departments of sociology in 1981, five of them (theory and methodology, modernization and development, ethnic and minority relations, the sociology of work, and stratification and mobility) are areas in which Hughes did pioneering research (Heath 1984; Whyte 1984–5). Therefore, in a very real sense, Hughes ‘defined for the first generation of Canadian students the most important social processes to be studied’ (Ostow 1985: 8). While Canadian sociology has evolved and diversified since the 1980s, a number of the areas that Hughes helped define remain central to current practice. The study of race and ethnicity, ‘particularly Francophone–Anglophone relations’, is a hallmark of Canadian sociology (Whyte and Vallee 1988:  2036; Drysdale and Drysdale 2013; Helmes-Hayes 2000, Ostow 1985; Strauss 1996; Whyte 1984–5). So much is this the case that in his analysis of areas of concentration of study in Canadian departments of sociology in 1981,

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Whyte (1984–5) found that ethnic and minority relations ranked second as an area of concentrations in 23 departments of sociology across Canada. And it is in this area that we find the most conspicuous reflection of Hughes’s influence. His seminal work French Canada in Transition was one of the earliest studies of ethnicity in Canada and its foundational influence on the development of sociology in Canada cannot be overstated (Chapoulie 1996; Drysdale 1996; Fournier 1986:  Nock 1974:  Whyte and Vallee 1988). Coser (1994: 6) calls Hughes’s French Canada in Transition ‘the work of a man poised between French and Anglophone Canada’. It was a work that ‘established his reputation as a student of ethnic relations and conflicts’, an area of interest that stayed with him throughout his career (Heath 1984: 221; Drysdale 1996). Not only was French Canada in Transition pioneering research on ethnic relations in Canada, it also provided insight into ‘the relationship between culture and environment and their effects on social and economic life in Quebec’ and thus contributed to the study of stratification and class in Canadian society (Whyte and Vallee 1988: 2036; Chapoulie 1996; Helmes-Hayes 2000). Donald Whyte argues in this respect that French Canada in Transition became a foundation on which John Porter’s (1965) classic study of ethnic stratification in Canada, The Vertical Mosaic, could rise (Whyte 1984–5). As well, of the six master’s theses Hughes supervised at McGill, five ‘dealt, in whole or in part with classrelated themes such as poverty […] elites, and patterns of corporate ownership of industry by ethnicity’ (Helmes-Hayes 2000: 131). Moreover, Hughes’s own work is replete with theoretical concepts related to issues of class, status and power and the organization of occupations by ethnic group membership (Helmes-Hayes 2000:  129; Fournier 1986). Since that time, and in part because of his influence, the study of ethnicity in Canada has always included a consideration of ‘the class-basis of the division of labour’ (Whyte 1984–5: 120). Whyte and Vallee (1988:  2036)  found that “significant social science research had been undertaken from the late 1880’s to 1930’s” that included the work of ‘Hughes on Canada’s indigenous peoples, the human ecological approach to urban growth and planning’ (see also Heath 1984, Helmes-Hayes 2000). As Hughes himself maintained, the research design that gave rise to French Canada in Transition ‘was in part inspired by Redfield’s researches in Mexico, which analyzed communities arrayed along an urbanrural continuum’ (Chapoulie 1996:  14). Thus, along with Dawson’s, Hughes’s work marked the beginnings of Canadian community and urban studies, which by 1981 figured as an area of concentration in 14 departments of sociology in Canada (Whyte 1984–5). More generally, again citing Hughes’s approach to research in French Canada in Transition, Weiss (1996) argues that Hughes’s influence on Canadian sociology is also reflected in the adoption of fieldwork method among Canadian sociologists. Still others point to Hughes’s role in developing the sociology of occupations, professions and institutions in Canada (Chapoulie 1973; 1996; Coser 1994; Holmstrom 1984; Ostow 1985; Strauss 1996). Witness his papers ‘The Making of the Physician’, ‘Professions in Transition’, ‘Work and the Self ’ and ‘Mistakes at Work’ (Heath 1984), found in his books Men and Their Work (Hughes 1958) and The Sociological Eye (Hughes 1971). Indeed, in Christian Heath’s estimation, ‘Hughes initiated some of the finest empirical work within medical sociology and thereby influenced successive generations

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of sociologists’ (1984: 218). Among those influenced by Hughes was Irving Zola, whose ‘perspective was changed forever’ after encountering Hughes at Brandeis and whose writing on the medicalization of society thereafter became essential reading for sociologists of health illness and medicine in Canada (Conrad 1995: v). Similarly, the classic occupational ethnography Boys in White (Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss 1961) has inspired generations of Canadian medical sociologists, including Jack Haas and William Shaffir, who cite Hughes more than any other scholar in their book Becoming Doctors (1991). Clearly, through the diversity of his research and publication, the many students he trained and the academic appointments he held both inside and outside of Canada, Hughes has had a ‘profound’ impact on the development of ‘Quebec, Canadian, and American Sociology’ (Drysdale 1996:  235). Therefore, it is a mystery how someone whose influence was so great and whose works so significant could have become relatively forgotten in the contemporary period (Chapoulie 1996; Helmes-Hayes 1998). As much an enigma is how while unrecognized, his influence is still widespread in Canadian sociology. Below we address this double paradox through our concept of the Chicago School Diaspora.

Everett C. Hughes: A Key Figure of the Chicago School Diaspora Hughes’s influence on Canadian sociology, as well the fact that his contributions have gone relatively unacknowledged in the contemporary period, can be explained through our concept of the Chicago School Diaspora and the processes associated with that concept (Bowden and Low 2013). By the Chicago School Diaspora we do not mean to invoke an image of the scattering of a people but rather to conceptualize how key ideas and symbolic representations of key figures that people associate with the Chicago School have been dispersed and taken up by scholars, many of whom cannot claim any relationship with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. Central to our concept is that, in contrast to other scholarly schools, there is no absolute agreement on what is meant by the cultural object known as the Chicago School. Indicative of this difference is that most schools are analogous to a single-purpose tool like a hammer or screwdriver. That is, there is a widely shared understanding of the central ideas of the school and the explanatory utility of those ideas. In contrast, the Chicago School is more akin to a Swiss army knife, a multifaceted tool with no predefined purpose. Does one use it as a knife, a leather punch or as scissors? In the same way, sociology at Chicago for some means Blumerian symbolic interactionism and/or Meadian pragmatism. For others, it means Park’s human ecology, Goffman’s dramaturgy or the emphasis on empiricism championed by Hughes. Moreover, a Swiss army knife is essentially useless until it is transformed into a particular tool. In the same way, at any particular point of use, individual scholars transform the Chicago School tradition into the form most appropriate for their particular task – be it Blumerian symbolic interaction, Parkian human ecology or Hughesian empiricism. In doing so they conflate the ‘tool’ they are using with the entirety of the Swiss army knife toolkit that is the Chicago School. Thus, the concept of the Chicago School Diaspora allows us to understand the process whereby quite distinctive strands of sociological practice align themselves under a common label, and to appreciate how

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the Chicago School tradition has remained recognizable as an object through time even though the actual tools that are incorporated into it have changed through time. Despite its Swiss army knife character, when people invoke the Chicago tradition, they do so because it is meaningful for them in some way. Moreover, the Chicago School Diaspora does not refer to a rigid adherence to a standardized list of scholars and scholarly insights. Rather, it presupposes the selective incorporation, into their scholarly work and identities, of what people see as Chicago School insights and affiliations with key figures with whom they identify (Bowden and Low 2013). One factor contributing to Hughes’s status as an archetypical exemplar of the Chicago School Diaspora is the Swiss army knife character of his own scholarship. Ironically, this same Swiss army knife character also helps explain the lack of recognition given to his ideas in the post–World War II period. Hughes the Scholar In some ways Hughes himself and, more particularly, his orientation toward scholarship, have contributed both to his status as a key figure of the Chicago School Diaspora as well as to the relative lack of recognition his contributions receive in contemporary Canadian sociology. Hughes was not comfortable with the idea that knowledge was ever finalized. As his student Oswald Hall noted, Hughes’s ‘mind was different’ from those of other scholars he had known. ‘It was something that was continually developing’ (Hall as cited in Brown 2006: 272). He viewed himself as someone who ‘uses the latest work in social science, but never forgets what he owes to his predecessors and to the accumulation of knowledge’ (Chapoulie 1996: 4). Thus, despite developing his own version of the Chicago tradition Hughes was at the same time a ‘ “ferryman” who acted as a “bridge” between his students and the classics of American and international sociology’ (Vienne 2010a: 22; Ostow 1985). This sense of his work as part of the flow of an ongoing and developing research tradition, coupled with his belief in the contextually embedded nature of social processes, fostered in Hughes an aversion to the reification of knowledge claims. Thus, Hughes did not see himself as ‘transmitting a pristine message from the founder’ (Faught 1980: 80). Or, as Hughes put it more bluntly himself, ‘I don’t like the idea of talking about a Chicago School or any other kind of school’ (Lofland 1980: 276–7). A particularly vivid example of Hughes’s views in this regard is his approach to fieldwork methods. His emphasis on empirical observation, particularly the detailed observation made possible through fieldwork, was an aspect of the Chicago tradition that Hughes carried forward throughout his scholarly career. He did not, however, slavishly apply a particular set of methodological prescriptions. Instead, he spent much of his career developing and elaborating fieldwork methods through the incorporation of insights gained from his own research experience and that of others, and by responding to critiques raised by those who questioned their value. Moreover, the fieldwork textbook that Buford Junker (1960) produced in association with Hughes did not lay out a general method applicable in all circumstances. Instead, it provided a set of guidelines designed to help the researcher adapt to changing situations in the field (see Chapoulie 1996: 16–17; Helmes-Hayes 2010). Here we see the

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subtlety of Hughes’s approach laid bare. On the one hand, there is the ongoing commitment to a fieldwork method, manifest in his efforts to further hone its utility through the development of improved practices. Yet, for Hughes, the tool itself is never sufficient. Fieldwork cannot be reduced to a set of universal principles that get applied regardless of the context. The tool is only as helpful as the skills of its user and, in particular, the ability of the master craftsman to adapt the use of the tool to the vicissitudes of new and unexpected situations encountered in the field (see Helmes-Hayes 2010; Vienne, this volume). Hughes’s openness also manifests itself in an unusual intellectual eclecticism. Hughes was, in a sense, his own Swiss army knife. His approach pulled together ideas from several distinct and seemingly unrelated intellectual traditions (Heath 1984:  219–21). In fact, he championed a multidisciplinary approach to social research and ‘was dismayed by the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences’ (Riesman and Becker 2009: 10–11; Chapoulie 2002). In Hughes’s own words, ‘while some […] social science departments have or claim a particular subject matter which sets them off from the others, this subject matter is perhaps more often a product of history, become convention and prerogative, than of pure logic’ (2002: 144). Underpinning his objection to what he saw as artificial disciplinary boundaries was a belief in unity to be brought about by a transdisciplinary commitment to empirical observation: We may discover in due time that there are only a few basic ways of getting human data and a few basic skills for analyzing them. While it may for a long time be true that … departments will be distinguished more by their preoccupations than by their method […] It may also be that we can sort out these basic skills of observation and analysis and work on them irrespective of conventional disciplinary lines. (Hughes 2002: 145)

Moreover, he never restricted his interest to any particular disciplinary specialty (Riesman 1983) and, as a result, left his mark on a diversity of substantive areas as described above. Not surprisingly, he advocated mixed methods (Chapoulie 2002; Heath 1984; Helmes-Hayes 1998: 656; 2010) as exemplified, most famously, in his study of French Canada, which made use of ‘a combination of official statistics, archives and journals, interviews […], and […] observation’ (Chapoulie 2002: 52). Thus, on the one hand, we see that Hughes was innovative and eclectic. His fertile mind wandered across diverse substantive topics. This provides one clue to understanding the breadth of his legacy. He made substantive contributions to many different fields. On the other hand, his attitude and orientation led him to dislike the idea of rigidified schools of thought. As such, his aim was not to cultivate followers or impart certified knowledge in a manner designed to characterize himself as the wise sage. Moreover, Hughes denied his active influence even when others accorded it to him. For example, in a letter from Hughes to Goffman, Hughes writes that people ‘catch some facet of me […] I certainly did not create anything in any of those people’ (Hughes cited in Vienne 2010a: 25). He aimed, instead, to challenge his students to contribute in novel ways to the furtherance of knowledge. As a result, his students and associates such as Becker, Goffman, Strauss and Friedson are typically recognized for their own accomplishments rather than their indebtedness to Hughes. A  particularly dramatic example of this is

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the possibility that the basic outline of a concept widely associated with Goffman, the ‘total institution’, was initially articulated in lectures that Hughes gave while at Chicago (Vienne 2010a). Hughes the Theorist? While acknowledging that Hughes was not a theorist in the modern sense of the word, Helmes-Hayes (1998) makes the most compelling case for Hughes as a theorist. He argues that Hughes understood, applied and developed theory. Indeed, Helmes-Hayes asserts that Hughes employed a distinctive ‘frame of reference’ for analysing society, one that he labels ‘interpretive institutional ecology’ (1998: 623). This frame of reference incorporated both structural elements drawn from human ecology and functionalism as well as a ‘microsociological’ aspect that drew on ‘Simmel’s formalism and a set of loosely interactionist sensibilities’ (Helmes-Hayes 1998:  633–4). The view that Hughes was a stronger theorist than typically recognized is also supported by Becker, who notes Hughes’s frequent references to the ‘little general theory book’ he intended to write (Helmes-Hayes 1998: 628). However, Becker’s and Helmes-Hayes’ arguments to the contrary, the conventional wisdom is that Hughes was not a theorist (Helmes-Hayes 1998:  627; Manning 2000). As Coser (1994, 10)  notes, ‘there is no Hughesian social theory as there is Weberian, Marxian, or Parsonian theory’. Indeed, Hughes himself seems to support this idea: ‘Certainly, I have never sat down to write systematically about how to study society’ (1984: xviii–xix). There is no doubt that Hughes did not formally explicate a systematic theory. Like Georg Simmel before him, Hughes has been characterized as an ‘unsystematic’ scholar uninterested in developing a comprehensive and coherent theoretical approach and, thus, not capable of generating a school of thought (Coser 1994: 11). This characterization has its roots in both his writing style and his way of thinking. Coser (1994) compares Hughes to Simmel in his preference for the essay format, and Strauss argues that, again like Simmel, Hughes wrote with a journalistic flair that ‘undoubtedly was dismissed by the more positivistic sociologists’ (Strauss 1996: 273; Low 2008). In other words, he had a ‘simple, direct, sometimes informal’ style that is not recognized today as theory due to his use of ‘examples, taken from [his] own experiences and from literary works as much as from research in the social sciences’ (Chapoulie 1996: 4). However, despite his assessment that Hughes was not a theorist, Coser (1994) recognized that there was something distinctive about Hughes’s thought. ‘Everett Hughes [was] a prototypical fox’ who sought not to create grand totalizing theory, but rather to focus on ‘the essence of a wide variety of experiences’ in order to account for social life looking for the generic social processes that connected a wide range of empirical phenomena (Coser 1994: 14; Blumer 1969; Chapoulie 1996; Riesman 1983). Thus, for Hughes, observation, by way of naturalistic fieldwork and its ability to identify insightful observations that could be expanded upon, was the way to generate social scientific knowledge. In his words, Among the methods I should recommend is the intensive, penetrating look with an imagination as lively and as sociological as it can be made. One of my basic assumptions is that if one

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quite clearly sees something happen once, it is almost certain to have happened again and again. The burden of proof is on those who claim a thing once seen is an exception; if they look hard, they may find it everywhere, although with some interesting differences in each case. (Hughes 1984: xviii–xix)

Of importance here is that method for Hughes, in contrast to the view of many, is not separable from theory (Helmes-Hayes 2010). However, Hughes never formally articulated a mechanism for inducing theory from observation. That would come later when his colleague and former research associate Strauss, in collaboration with Barney Glaser, authored The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967). In addition, while Hughes was a more distinctive and thoroughgoing theorist than is typically recognized, the structural elements of his approach were built on ideas drawn from human ecology and functionalism that were waning in popularity by the 1960s (Helmes-Hayes 1998: 633–8). Thus, Hughes’s theoretical legacy suffers from its own idiosyncrasy. Those same distinctive elements that imply that his thought cannot be reduced to such stereotyped, and thus easily categorized and identifiable labels as ‘symbolic interactionism’ or ‘the Chicago School’ (Chapoulie 1996) mean that he is not accorded the same status as Blumer and Park. Further, the very elements of his theoretical approach that made it incompatible with such reductive labels as human ecology and structural functionalism were either going out of style or, like his methodological approach, incompletely developed. These factors, coupled with the stylistic features outlined above, help explain why later generations of sociologists have failed to appreciate the depth of Hughes’s theoretical approach. The assumption that there is no Hughesian social theory is partly responsible for the contemporary tendency to overlook his contributions to sociological theory. As Helmes-Hayes (1998: 622) points out, theorists are accorded special status within the disciplinary pantheon. As Hughes was not accorded such status, the contributions he made to sociological theory through articulation of a number of important concepts including dirty work, master status and total institutions, become easier to forget. Hughes and the Chicago Tradition A third factor affecting the lack of recognition given to Hughes can be traced to changes through time in the Chicago tradition specifically and the practice of sociology more generally. One feature of the Swiss army knife character of the Chicago tradition is the ever-evolving nature of its toolkit. More specifically, the knife that is the Chicago School tradition is reconstructed through time as tools are added, foregrounded or hidden from view. Simply put, the cluster of characteristics typically associated with the cultural object known as the Chicago School varies through time. Thus, key ideas and key figures of the Chicago School Diaspora are identified as part or not part of the Chicago School tradition at any given time. Thus, the Chicago School Diaspora is an uneven process whereby not all ideas or thinkers will be dispersed, taken up and/or claimed as key in every instance. In Hughes’s case, the emergence of symbolic interactionism as a coherent theoretical tradition (Fine 1995) had the effect of marginalizing Hughes as a figure in the Chicago

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pantheon. In addition, the history of sociology at Chicago was reconstructed in order to provide an ‘origin myth’ for symbolic interactionism. The key feature of this reinterpretation was the idea of a ‘common theoretical tradition’ that ‘flowed’ through multiple generations of Chicago scholars and culminated in the development of symbolic interactionism (Becker 1999: 3). The power of this myth as an origin story is predicated upon a reconstruction that erases from memory any unsettling and contradictory details among which are certain aspects of Hughesian sociology. Most obviously, Hughes’s work displays an ongoing attempt to link micro- and macroprocesses, in a way more obviously similar to the approaches of Park and Simmel than to contemporary symbolic interactionism (Chapoulie 1996; Helmes-Hayes 1998:  633–8). Another unsettling detail was Hughes’s advocacy of mixed methods. His approach ‘required observation. […] and you were expected to utilize all kinds of data’ (Strauss 1996: 272; Helmes-Hayes 1998; 2010; Chapoulie 2002). Over time, however, the use of statistics in sociology came to embody a specific form of positivist orientation characterized by Andrew Abbott (1988) as ‘general linear reality’, the belief that statistical models based on context-independent fixed entities with variable attributes accurately reflect reality. Blumer (1931, 1940, 1956) critiqued the conceptual underpinnings of this view and, in doing so, reinforced the divide between qualitative and quantitative research. This led ultimately to the elimination of quantitative data from most symbolic interactionist research. Finally, while both Hughes (1967) and Blumer (1969) agreed that society is ‘interaction’, this meant quite different things for each of them. For Hughes, as for Park and Simmel, this meant that while individuals create social structure, it attains a concrete reality that confronts individuals in interaction. This contrasts with the Blumerian interpretation, which emphasizes the continuously creative character of interactions (Chapoulie, 1996: 21–2; Low, 2008). The symbolic interactionist origin myth thus entails the recasting of the Chicago tradition in a way that foregrounds those aspects of the tradition relevant to Blumerian interactionist practice and erases those inconsistent with it. Thus, in conventional wisdom, the full spectrum of Hughes’s legacy becomes reduced to a narrow band consistent with symbolic interactionism, namely his contributions to fieldwork methods and his role as an ingenious researcher.

Discussion Despite the importance of Hughes, particularly to Canadian sociology, there are three dynamics, each of which provides partial explanation for the eclipse of Hughesian insights from much of contemporary sociological discourse. First, there are the characteristics of Hughes and his scholarly practice such as eclecticism and his disdain for the idea of creating followers. Second, there is the conventional modern conceptualization of theory as a system of ideas that links together multiple concepts in an integrated manner. By such a definition, Hughes was not a theorist. As a result, the theoretical concepts he developed tend to be discussed in the context of substantive specialties rather than as part of the discourse about sociological theory in general. Third, the ongoing evolution of the Chicago tradition has produced a contemporary picture of Hughes that minimizes his significance to the tradition and focuses attention on certain elements of his sociological practice while obscuring the existence of many others.

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While such personal characteristics and institutional forces help us understand the lack of contemporary attention Hughes receives, they do not account for how his ideas nonetheless have had and continue to have a profound influence on sociology, particularly in Canada. One such influence is institutional. He was a foundational scholar for both French Canadian and English Canadian sociology as they are currently practiced. His work played a pivotal role in identifying many of the substantive topics that remain at the heart of Canadian sociology, for example, modernization, ethnic relations, social class and work and occupations. Hughes had a disproportionate impact on the shape of Canadian sociology because of his sociological sensitivity and related ability to identify topics and processes central to understanding Canada. These areas remain important to Canadian sociology, irrespective of whether or not Hughes’s ideas have stayed centre stage in the way these subjects are currently researched. Equally as important, Hughes’s ideas have remained central in ways that go largely unacknowledged. The content of the Chicago School Diaspora, that collection of key insights and key figures people associate with the Chicago tradition, never diminishes. The use of particular ideas might decrease from one point in time to another, but the ideas themselves do not disappear. Rather, at any given time, scholars take up the ideas that resonate with them or associate their work with the key figures of the Chicago tradition with whom they identify. In Hughes’s case, this means that aspects of his sociological practice, among them his attention to the ecological dimension of social structure, to the necessity of understanding historical context, and to the use of statistical evidence in fieldwork, have been ‘largely ignored’ by subsequent generations of Canadian sociologists (Chapoulie 1996: 19–20). Once an idea falls into relative disuse, its rediscovery is often treated as a novel event rather than a rediscovery. Thus, for example, the notion of situating qualitative data in historical context is currently being championed by researchers such as David Silverman (1998) who have forgotten, if they ever knew, that Hughes was a pioneer of this approach. Moreover, the dynamics of the Chicago School Diaspora are not always reflexive. One can take up insights from key figures of the Chicago tradition without acknowledging or being aware of their origin. For instance, for individuals working in a variety of substantive fields Hughes’s ideas are so pervasive they have been incorporated into what is tantamount to tacit knowledge. As Strauss (1996: 280–1) notes, ‘Some of his precepts as well as his concepts (like dirty work and mistakes at work) are so much a part of our perspective that their source is more or less forgotten, or so taken for granted that the source is not cited’. Similarly, the concept of master status is routinely used but Hughes is rarely cited. Even the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology edited by eminent theorist George Ritzer (2007), credits Talcott Parsons rather than Hughes with developing the concept, arguing that it is implicit in Parsonian theory. Similarly, Hughes’s contributions to the sociology of health and illness often go uncredited despite their undeniable influence. According to Heath, As Hughes’s approach has percolated through successive generations of researchers, so his own scholarship has become less familiar to the members of our discipline. Yet the very opaqueness of Hughes’s influence on the sociology of health and illness is a sign of his success

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as both a teacher and writer. He furnished the discipline with a framework and method with which to conduct sociological inquiry, an influence so pervasive that he has been able to slip behind the riches generated through its application by others. (1984: 279)

In sum, whether he is acknowledged or not, Hughes has had a tremendous impact on a variety of sociological subfields and, more particularly, had a formative influence on both English Canadian and French Canadian sociology. In addition, there has been a recent rediscovery of Hughesian concepts, approaches to research and theoretical insights including going concerns (Helmes-Hayes 2010; Wasterfors 2011), occupations and professions (Zetka 2011), work and dirty work (Chapoulie 2009; Fleck this volume; Kjeldstad and Lyngstad 2011; Sanders 2010), total institutions (Vienne 2010a; 2010b), race and ethnicity (Aspinall and Song 2013), comparison in fieldwork methods (Becker 2010; Chapoulie 1996; Harper this volume) and master status (van den Hoonaard and van den Scott this volume). Similarly, the existence of contemporary critiques of Hughes’s arguments (McLaughlin and Steinberg this volume) provides evidence of the ongoing resonance of his ideas. That he is now the focus of such a renaissance is renewed testament to his status as a key figure of the Chicago School Diaspora.

Notes 1 The accuracy of Chapoulie’s claim turns on the precise meaning given to ‘training’ and ‘sociology’. As Helmes-Hayes (2013, 2014) has recently documented, there were a number of students ‘trained’ in ‘sociology’ by social gospel sociologists who taught in Canada’s colleges and universities substantially before Dawson and Hughes began teaching. 2 Now the Canadian Sociological Association. 3 Later Concordia University.

References Abbott, Andrew D. 1988. ‘Transcending General Linear Reality’, Sociological Theory 6 (2): 169–86. ———. 1999. Department and Discipline:  Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Acland, Charles, and William Buxton. 1999. Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Aspinall, Peter, and Miri Song. 2013. ‘Is Race a “Salient” or “Dominant Identity” in the Early 21st Century?: The Evidence of UK Survey Data on Respondents’ Sense of Who They Are’, Social Science Research 42 (2): 547–61. Becker, Howard S. 1999. ‘The Chicago School, So-called’, Qualitative Sociology 22 (1): 3–12. ———. 2010. ‘The Art of Comparison: Lessons from the Master, Everett C. Hughes’, Sociologica no. 2. doi: 10.2383/32713. Becker, Howard, Blanche Geer, Everett Hughes and Anselm Strauss. 1961. Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1931. ‘Science without Concepts’, American Journal of Sociology 36 (4): 515–33. ———. 1940. ‘The Problem of the Concept in Social Psychology’, American Journal of Sociology 45 (5): 707–19. ———. 1956. ‘Sociological Analysis and the “Variable” ’, American Sociological Review 21 (6): 683–90. ———. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.  

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Bowden, Gary, and Jacqueline Low. 2013. ‘The Chicago School as Symbol and Enactment’. In The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance, edited by Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden, 3–26. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brison, Jeffrey. 2005. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brown, Douglas. 2006. ‘Oswald Hall, PhD: Pioneer Canadian Sociologist; 1924–1976’, Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association 50 (4): 271–81. Brym, Robert, and Céline Saint-Pierre. 1997. ‘Canadian Sociology’, Contemporary Sociology 26 (5): 543–6. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1973. ‘Sur l’analyse Sociologique des Groupes Professionnels’, Revue Française de Sociologie 16 (1): 86–114. ———. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition’, Sociological Theory 14 (1): 3–29. ———. 2002. ‘Everett C. Hughes and the Development of Fieldwork in Sociology.’ In Qualitative Research Methods, edited by Darin Weinberg, 49–72. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2009. ‘A Framework for the History of Social and Behavioral Sciences’, Sociologica: Italian Journal of Sociology Online, no. 2–3/2009. doi: 10.2383/31363. Chekki, Dan. 1987. American Sociological Hegemony: Transnational Explorations. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Conrad, Peter. 1995. ‘Obituary:  Irving Kenneth Zola (1935–1994)’, Social Science and Medicine 41 (2): v–vi. Coser, Lewis. 1994. Everett C. Hughes on Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drysdale, John, and Susan Hoecker Drysdale. 2013. ‘The History of Sociology:  The North American Perspective.’ In 21st Century Sociology, edited by Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck, 28–44. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Falardeau, Jean-Charles. 1953. Essais sur le Québec contemporain. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval Faught, Jim. 1980. ‘Presuppositions of the Chicago School in the Work of Everett C. Hughes’, American Sociologist 15 (2): 72–82. Fine, Gary Alan. 1995. A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fournier, Marcel. 1986. ‘Jean-Charles Falardeau, un intellectual à la rencontre de deux mondes’. In L’entrée dans la modernité: science, culture et société au Québec, edited by M. Fournier, 150–68. Anjou, P.Q.: Editions Saint-Martin. Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Haas, Jack, and William Shaffir. 1991. Becoming Doctors: Adopting a Cloak of Competence. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press. Heath, Christian. 1984. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983): A Note on His Approach and Influence’, Sociology of Health and Illness 6 (2): 218–37. Helmes-Hayes, Rick. 1998. ‘Everett Hughes: Theorist of the Second Chicago School’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 11 (4): 621–73. ———. 2000. ‘The Concept of Social Class: The Contribution of Everett Hughes’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36 (2): 127–47. ———. 2010. ‘Studying “Going Concerns”: Everett C. Hughes on Method’, Sociologica, 2/2010: 1–27. doi: 10.2383/32714. ———. 2013. ‘ “The Perfect Sociology, Perfectly Applied”:  Sociology and the Social Gospel in Canada’s English-Language Universities, 1900–1930’. Forty-Fourth Annual Sorokin Lecture, University of Saskatchewan, 7 February. ———. 2014. ‘ “Building the City of God in Canada’s Green and Pleasant Land”: The Social Gospel and the Roots of Canadian Academic Sociology, 1890–1930’. Fifth Nels Anderson Lecture, University of New Brunswick, 7 May.

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Hiller, Harry, and Simon Langlois. 2001. ‘The Most Important Books/Articles in Canadian Sociology in the Twentieth Century: A Report’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 26 (3): 513–16. Hoecker Drysdale, Susan. 1996. ‘The Careers of Helen MacGill Hughes and Everett Cherrington Hughes’. In Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack and Pnina G. Abir-Am, 220–31. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press Holmstrom, Lynda. 1984. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes: A Tribute to a Pioneer in the Study of Work and Occupations’, Work and Occupations 11 (4): 471–81. Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1958. Men and Their Work. Glencoe: Free Press. ———. 1970. ‘Teaching as Fieldwork’, American Sociologist 5 (1): 13–18. ———. 1971. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. ———. 1984. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. Transaction Edition, with a new introduction by David Riesman and Howard S. Becker. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. ———. 2001. ‘The Place of Field Work in Social Science’. In Qualitative Research Methods, edited by Darin Weinberg, 139–47. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Junker, Buford. 1960. Field Work:  An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Kjeldstad, Randi, and Jan Lyngstad. 2011. ‘Disability and Gender Equality: Division of Household Work in Disabled Couples’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (1): 39–70. Lofland, Lyn. 1980. ‘Reminiscences of Classic Chicago:  The Blumer-Hughes Talk’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 9 (3): 251–81. Low, Jacqueline. 2008. ‘Structure, Agency, and Social Reality in Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism: The Influence of Georg Simmel’, Symbolic Interaction 31 (3): 325–43. ——— and Gary Bowden. 2013. The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. MacLennan, H. 1945. Two Solitudes. Toronto: Collins. Manning, Geraldine. 2000. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes: Sociologist and Mentor Sui Generis’, American Sociologist 31 (4): 93–99. McLaughlin, Neil. 2002. ‘Sociology’s Public Intellectual’, Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May 2002 http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/soceye/riesman.html. Nock, David. 1974. ‘History and Evolution of French Canadian Sociology’, Critical Sociology 4 (4): 15–27. Ostow, Robin. 1984. ‘Everett Hughes: The McGill Years’, Society/Société 8 (3): 12–16. ———. 1985. ‘Everett Hughes: From Chicago to Boston’, Society/Société 9 (1): 8–12. Porter, John. 1965. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reinharz, Shulamit. 1995. ‘The Chicago School of Sociology and the Founding of the Graduate Program in Sociology at Brandeis University: A Case Study in Cultural Diffusion’. In A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology, edited by Gary Alan Fine, 273– 321. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riesman, David. 1983. ‘The Legacy of Everett C. Hughes’, Contemporary Sociology 12 (5): 447–81. ——— and Howard S. Becker. 1984. ‘Introduction to the Transaction Edition.’ In The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers, by Everett C. Hughes, v–xiv. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Ritzer, George, ed. 2007. Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sanders, Clinton. 2010. ‘Working out Back: The Veterinary Technician and “Dirty Work”’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39 (3): 243–72. Shore, Marlene. 1987. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Silverman, D. 1998. ‘The Quality of Qualitative Health Research: The Open-Ended Interview and Its Alternative’, Social Sciences in Health 4 (2): 104–18. Strauss, Anselm. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission’, Symbolic Interaction 19 (4): 271–83.

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Vienne, Philippe. 2010a. ‘The Enigma of the Total Institution: Rethinking the Hughes-Goffman Intellectual Relationship’, Sociologica:  Italian Journal of Sociology Online no.  2/2010:  1–30. doi: 10.2383/32720. ———. 2010b. ‘Introduction to Everett C.  Hughes’s “Memorandum on Total Institutions” ’, Sociologica: Italian Journal of Sociology Online, no. 2/2010. doi: 10.2383/32718. Wasterfors David. 2011. ‘Disputes and Going Concerns in an Institution for “Troublesome” Boys’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (1): 39–70. Weiss, Robert. 1996. ‘Remembrance of Everett Hughes’, Qualitative Sociology 19 (4): 543–51. Whyte, Donald. 1984–85. ‘Sociology and the Nationalist Challenge in Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (4): 106–29. ——— and Frank Vallee. 1988. ‘Sociology’. In The Canadian Encyclopedia, second edition, Volume 3, 2035–37. Min-Sta. Edmonton: Hurting Publishers. Wilcox-Magill, Dennis. 1983. ‘Paradigms and Social Science in English Canada’. In Introduction to Sociology: An Alternate Approach, edited by J. P. Grayson, 1–34. Toronto: Gage. Zetka, James. 2011. ‘Establishing Specialty Jurisdictions in Medicine:  The Case of American Obstetrics and Gynaecology’, Sociology of Health and Illness 33 (6): 837–52.

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Chapter Five EVERETT HUGHES: NOTES FROM AN APPRENTICE Douglas Harper

The Teacher I met Everett Hughes in 1973, as a student in a graduate seminar at Brandeis University. The Sociology Department at that time had what might be described as a split personality: Marxism and critical sociology on one hand, and the Chicago School, reborn, on the other. Everett Hughes, who came to Brandeis from Chicago in 1961 to help establish the Brandeis graduate program, was a living embodiment of the Chicago School. He was 75 years old and in the last years of his teaching career. I was in my second year of graduate school and knew of Hughes’s importance in the Chicago School. His comments in his seminars and faculty presentations crossed decades, geographies and intellectual traditions; European sociology in the time of Georg Simmel; South America in the context of African slavery, indigenous people and colonizers; professions in the context of the Middle Ages. He would connect circumstances and sociological ideas in a way that struck me as particularly insightful. So I was not startled when Hughes addressed the seminar: ‘The most revolutionary figure in American history was Henry Ford […] because he realized that every worker assembling a Model T must make enough money assembling the car to buy one’. It is strange that I  have such a vivid recollection of that moment. Several students clearly thought this so ridiculous as to be beyond funny. This was not the idea of revolution that was normally spoken about in the department! They were expecting Joe Hill perhaps, or at least Emma Goldman! I still have his course syllabus from a course on multi-ethnic societies, taught in 1973. It is a one-page mimeograph, listing four books that ‘each student will be expected to have available’. They are Philip Mason’s 1970 Race Relations; Pierre van den Berghe’s 1967 Race and Racism:  A  Comparative Perspective; Robert Park’s 1950 Race and Culture and Franklin Frazier’s 1957 Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. We were to read the books and be orally examined, to write and present papers in which we would investigate one or more issues raised in the texts. I wrote about caste and race in India (where I had spent six months as an undergraduate student) through what Hughes had called ‘dilemmas and contradictions of status’ ([1945] 1971: 141). It was the first time in graduate

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school I felt like a sociologist, although I had written several long papers by that time. It was also the first time I felt like a junior colleague of my professor. His lectures were tours through sociology, where he often described how a thinker’s experiences informed his or her sociology. For example, Hughes was not greatly interested in Robert Park’s theories of how competing racial groups evolve through contact, competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation, because he had little time for neat categories into which human interaction were to fit. Rather he gave us Park as a student of Simmel, earning his PhD in Germany after 12 years as a reporter and news editor, turning to sociology because he had lost his faith in his career as a journalist. I remember Hughes saying that an important turning point for American sociology came when Park left his temporary position at Harvard University for the Tuskegee Institute in the American South. During his seven years as a student and colleague of Booker T. Washington, arguably the leading African American voice of the time, he contributed to a novelistic survey about poverty in the United States and Europe (Washington 1912), and came face to face with racism in the American South, which he felt was seemingly intractable. Hughes noted that when Park arrived in Chicago in 1914 to help establish the Chicago School of sociology, he was already 50 and had extensive experiences in two cultures that differed from small-town Minnesota, where he had grown up. As a result his sociology had a built-in comparative framework. I also recall how Hughes brought Park down to earth. He reminded us that Park’s life to that point had hardly been a success. He was casting about for a job when he landed at the Tuskegee Institute and it was luck or good fortune that connected him to W. I. Thomas and then, on a trial basis, to the Chicago Sociology Department. Hughes also pointed out the coincidental events that led to the Chicago School: a handful of professors with complementary skills and a common vision meeting in an institution that supported their efforts (see Hughes [1964] 1971 for an elaboration of this history). Hughes’s sociology was also drawn from immersion in societies and cultures different than his own. For five years after college graduation he taught English to immigrants, first Russian and Eastern European lumberjacks in northern Wisconsin, and then immigrant workers in a Chicago steel mill, before attending graduate school in sociology. He then spent 11  years (roughly the 1930s) as a professor in Montreal helping establish the first sociology department in Canada. He was a visiting professor in pre- and post-Nazi Germany, from which is famous essay ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ ([1962] 1971) emerged, as well as papers on religion, ethnicity, labour movements and industrialization in Germany ([1935] 1971). Hughes often interpreted his family’s experiences in a sociological context. For example, he said that his minister father’s diaries showed a lessening of faith as he approached middle age; he mused that occupational burnout – then a hot topic – had been around as long as occupations were chosen rather than assigned. This phenomenon was particularly troubling when occupations required faith or belief in a larger purpose. Hughes’s interest in life experience as a resource for sociological thinking likely influenced the Brandeis Sociology Department’s practice of giving strong consideration to applicants who did not come directly from undergraduate sociology programs. It must have had something to do with why I was accepted. In that heyday of sociology there

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had been more than 300 applicants for the 12 openings and I had not had a single course in sociology. But I  had my experience in India and an anthropology degree, and was then a research assistant at the Harvard School of Public Health, responsible for gathering epidemiological data on-site at police stations, firehouses, factories and in polluted communities. I described my developing ideas about photography and sociology in my application and I included photos in my admission packet. My classmates had also spent time out of the university and they had varied academic and vocational backgrounds. In the manner described by Hughes in his essay on teaching ([1970] 1971) we taught each other in reading groups and informal tutorials, and as a result became sociologists in an informal, collective process. We were a breed apart from the majority of PhD students in American sociology at that time, trained in quantitative methods served up with functionalist theory à la Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton. In fact several of our cohort had influential careers in sociology, including Elizabeth Long, Ruben Rumbaut and Elizabeth Higgenbothem, and it was very much the case that we were on our own to define our dissertation topics and methods. Hughes connected sociological ideas to problems and issues of the day. The early ’70s were saturated by social movements organized around the war in Vietnam, racial and gender issues and global anti-capitalism that prefigured the contemporary ‘Occupy!’ movements. But rather than see the Black Panthers or other manifestations of African American struggle in isolation (in one example I  recall), Hughes framed them in the thoughts and actions of African American sociologists, intellectuals and movements dating back a hundred years. Thus we read Franklin Frazier, W. E. B. DeBois and Booker T. Washington as an introduction to the contemporary African American scene. I remember his comment that Franklin’s ‘special privilege’ as a black intellectual to critically analyse African American families in The Black Bourgeoisie had made him a controversial figure among the African American intelligentsia as his writings and political activities simultaneously landed him in hot water in the post-McCarthy era. Sociology, Hughes noted, can lead you to an alienated life, separated from friend as well as foe. Hughes would often bring a mimeographed page or two of notes to class, from which he would base his comments for the day. I have kept just one of these, dated ‘Spring Term, 1973’. In it he quotes two lengthy paragraphs from Scott Boorman’s article ‘Analogues in the Social Sciences’, a review of Geographical Ecology, Patterns in the Distribution of Species, by Robert MacArthur, published in Science a month before. The review develops the ‘importance of the dual process of extinction of local populations and colonization of vacant sites’. Hughes then adds reflections and questions: What is a ‘vacant site’ sociologically? The German said – the Nazis – that the Poles were using their land inefficiently. This gave them the right to take it over. The said the same thing about France. The Europeans found America vacant – vacant, that is, of European agriculture and industry. Resources were not efficiently used. Or a region may be vacant of Christian men – this gives them the right to go in and convert or destroy this – see Montesquieu. An underdeveloped country is vacant; i.e. not used by modern methods of economy. Or if people are not fully employed in sense of modern urban industrial labor forces.

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In many countries which are highly industrially developed, there is a shortage of unskilled labor. This is likewise a vacant site. This vacancy is filled by migration by the so-called underdeveloped countries. Thus: the Sardinians in Germany; the Portuguese in France; the Algerians in France; The Italians in Switzerland and Austria; the West Indians and Cypriots to England; the Puerto Ricans to the U.S. etcetera. This might be called reverse colonialization. (1973)

The handout reflects a typical Hughes’s teaching method. He often began with a term or concept, in this case vacancy, and then developed it in a new context, reframed with often ironic meanings. Hughes wrote, in the preface to his selected papers, In my work I have relied a great deal on free association, sometimes on a freedom of association that would seem outrageous to the defenders of some established interest or cherished sentiment. Wright Mills must be given credit for the phrase the sociological imagination. The essence of the sociological imagination is free association guided but not hampered by a frame of reference internalized not quite into the unconscious. (1971: vi; emphasis in original)

Hughes’s sociology encouraged students to see behind meanings, to apply ideas to new circumstances and to contextualize our ideas in classical sociology. But the great originating ideas of the discipline had also to be understood in the contexts in which they emerged. It was wonderful work, and the handful of students who gathered around Hughes in that era recognized our special privilege. I had only one opportunity to enroll in a course from Hughes because at age 75 he was splitting his time between Brandeis and Boston College, and he taught full courses infrequently. But his two-volume collection of papers, The Sociological Eye, had just been published and I read them cover to cover. The 58 papers in the collection are organized in sections dealing with ‘institutions’, ‘the meeting of races and cultures’, ‘work and self ’, and ‘the study of society’. As such they represent the categories of social life Hughes investigated, but many of the papers in one section topically often overlapped with others. All are about ways to study as well as ways to understand. They are often reflections on specific events or circumstances, and Hughes uses these examples to make more generalized statements about social life. The essays stand on their own (and many have no endnotes) and collectively create an intellectual mosaic experienced with equal pleasure from close up and a distance. Hughes’s papers became a background for our independent study courses that followed and I  have turned to them throughout my career. Because he wrote as he spoke, I  often hear Hughes’s voice in these papers, and it does not fade as the decades pass. These recollections of Hughes as a teacher need to be placed into a context, and as per usual, there is a Hughes essay to help. It is ‘Teaching as Field Work’ ([1970] 1971). Hughes described each chapter of his collection in the table of contents with a series of phrases, and those provided for this essay offer a succinct summary of his teaching philosophy. He offers ‘Learning one’s identity from students  – Students as informants about communities, cultures, occupations – Reciprocal learning – Emancipation without alienation – Historic change in teacher-student relation’ (1971b: xix).

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Before digging into this essay one must place oneself into the late ’60s, from which it emerged. It was a deeply unsettling era. The war in Vietnam was an all-pervasive moral crisis and a catastrophe-in-waiting for those of us who were of draft age. Racial tensions had led to protest, riots and destruction. Assassination had claimed Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. During the era in which the essay was published, few of us in graduate school could imagine entering the ‘system’ and reproducing what we criticized as oppressive, alienating and meaningless  – in the university as well as elsewhere in mainstream American society. It was an era of confrontation, with little dialogue across generations. There was also promise and optimism in our searching for new social relationships, institutions and meanings. But in general it was a very difficult time to be a student, and I now realize that it must have also been a difficult time to be a professor. In this context the essay is quite interesting. To many students Hughes appeared politically conservative because he was not vocal about the issues of the day, but there was a wider, and one can say, more radical perspective in the essay that questions what the university had become. Hughes begins with personal recollections of his students over the decades. Clearly he had always taken the time to know them and he found their worlds interesting. Their stories were often about emancipation from family, religion, provincialism or ethnic groups that created close-knit and confining cultures. Hughes wrote, ‘To them [students] the sociology teacher was the person who could listen to their stories, not merely as one who hears confession of guilt turning to shame, but as one who would see their particular case in some broader perspective; their particular plight thus became part of the comedie humaine – and they themselves became part of a larger world’ ([1970] 1971: 569; emphasis in original). Moreover, the process created ‘emancipation without alienation’ for both teacher and student, suggesting that one could live with feet in both worlds: aware and liberated but also immersed and appreciative of one’s originating culture. Hughes observed that ‘it makes a base for mutual learning and teaching […], enlargement of perspective for both [teacher and student] […] they become mutual informants and participant observers, each of the other’s world and both of a new world of which they were becoming part’ ([1970] 1971: 573). The tone of the article shifts as Hughes notes that the meaning of university for students in the late ’60s had changed. First, students came from increasingly liberated, or as he defined, permissive backgrounds, and as a result college offered little to be liberated from. The youth of the day criticized old books, and books in general; old professors (over 30!): They appear to want learning and action to be brought closer together, to want more voice in the choice of subject matter, in the choice of teachers, and in the standards by which they are judged competent to leave school and begin to work. ([1970] 1971: 74)

Yet, something has happened: college has become for many students the heavy hand that would take from them the considerable freedom of conduct, if not of thought, that they have had

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at home, the heavy hand of government, of the draft board, of wars that go on forever (and never ask me why), of business and industry, even of the systems of institutions in which professions are practiced. And if one is to have a job at all after college, he [author’s note: Hughes used the then-typical male pronoun and it is worth noting that his life, research and teaching were strongly marked by commitment to gender equality] is very likely to have to have credentials that are imposed unilaterally by a bureaucratic professional organization. College has become a ‘must’ for all who have, or whose parents have, middle-class lives or aspirations. […] The university has become the organ, for many of this generation, of repression rather than emancipation. ([1970] 1971: 575)

Hughes concludes, To many students the university has become the agent of what students fear most, even of the things that appear likely to prevent them from having any future. And the professor has become either the innocent who is unaware of all this, or a conniving procurer to the lords of hell. ([1970] 1971: 576)

It is surprising that Hughes did not reference Max Weber in his description of the university as an aspect of the soul-robbing routinization of late modernity, but he notes that students, not professors, detect its essence. Perhaps, Hughes imagines, the university might again become liberating: ‘If and when we can create a situation in which students and their teachers see the university and the world in such a perspective’, Hughes wrote, ‘we can more fully realize the ideal of making the teaching of sociology a continuing joining field project of student and teacher’ ([1970] 1971: 576). Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, who studied with Hughes in this era, remembers his support of women’s issues in and out of the university, and his help as a dissertation adviser to several students who studied gendered aspects of occupations, families or social movements. She writes, Everett’s curiosity also meant he was open to almost all students, both to learning from them and to teaching them. He was an educator to the extent that he did not care about the rest of your life – whether you were black or poor or Catholic or female – as long as you were willing to learn. The one exception was students who were overly idealistic. Such a student did not get a hearing from Hughes. I think this was because of his disdain for predefining how things should be; these were students whom he perceived as not being open to facts that might intrude on their ideology. But he was very open to students active in social movements provided they were also astute social observers. (1984: 475)

Holmstrom’s take on Hughes seems particularly right. It was what I discovered: his curiosity, always framed sociologically, and his lack of interest in political correctness. In one of our early meetings he asked me what it was like to be a Minnesotan in an East Coast Jewish university as he reflected on his own experience as a teacher of lumberjacks and steelworkers when he was my age. He encouraged me to think about my experience as a small-town teacher’s son (not so different, he said, than being a preacher’s son, which he was!) as part of what had led me to sociology. The outsider, he said, is the natural

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sociologist. He opened up to me as a person as well as a student and he taught me from the perspective of his experiences as well as his ideas. I felt acknowledged and encouraged, and drawn to him as a person as well as a scholar and teacher.

Hughes as Dissertation Adviser After the seminar in multi-ethnic societies I screwed up my courage to ask Hughes to direct an independent study prior to my dissertation fieldwork. I had read his Introduction to Buford H. Junker’s Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (1960), which emerged from the graduate fieldwork training at the University of Chicago that Hughes oversaw for almost two decades. The book gave me heart and I wanted to be shifted back to that time and circumstance. But of course that era had passed and the Chicago Sociology Department had moved away from its fieldwork orientation anyway. I  had the best second opportunity I could imagine: to study with the person who for years had been at its centre. Hughes’s introduction to the Junker volume begins, Field work refers, in this volume, to observations of people in situ; finding them where they are, staying with them in some role which, while acceptable to them, will allow both intimate observation of certain parts of their behavior, and reporting it in ways useful to social science but not harmful to those observed. […] It is strenuous, but exciting and satisfying business to expand one’s own social perceptions and social knowledge in this way, and to contribute thereby to general social knowledge. Learning to do it  – both parts of it, observing and reporting – can have some of the quality of a mild psychoanalysis. But, as in other kinds of self-discovery, one cannot learn more about one’s self unless he is honestly willing to see others in a new light, and to learn about them, too. (1960: iii)

As was his practice, he reflected on his own experiences: Once I start, I am, I believe, not bad at it. But it has always been a torture. Documents are so much easier to approach; one simply blows the dust off them, opens them up, and may have the pleasure of seeing words and thoughts on which no eye has been set these many years. Yet, in every project I have undertaken, studying real estate men, the Catholic labor movement in Rhineland, and newly industrialized towns in Quebec, the time came when I had to desert statistical reports and documents and fare forth to see for myself. It was then that the real learning began, although the knowledge gained in advance was very useful; in fact, it often made possible the conversations which opened the field. (1960: iii-iv)

His straightforwardness and humility appealed to me. Fieldwork consisted of … well, entering the field! Beyond that, being open, meeting and listening to people, having a sociological frame to interpret what one saw and heard and keeping track of your own transitions and transformations. One learned fieldwork by doing it, and talking to a teacher or peers about what it meant, what you were missing or not seeing or hearing, and how to do it better. Successful fieldwork had a great deal to do with sustained effort and focus, and a willingness to write and rewrite and rewrite again.

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I had had some training in fieldwork through undergraduate anthropology courses taught by Jim Spradley and David McCurdy at Macalester College, especially during my study abroad experience in India. I arrived at Brandeis with a tentative idea for a dissertation encouraged by Spradley, who had written on the exploitation of homeless men in urban America (1970). An exhibition of my photographs had drawn Spradley’s interest, and as I was graduating, he proposed a follow-up project that would combine photographs I had take of skid-row life with writing he wanted to take in a humanistic and documentary direction. Thus inspired, I moved to Boston, and, for several months, photographed homelessness in Boston and New York. I sent the images to Spradley. He studied them and sent them back, and we discussed in detail about how to visualize the ideas we were developing. When he abandoned his plans for the humanistic/documentary book, he encouraged me to continue on my own, which coincided with the beginning of my graduate study. Thus I arrived with a start on a visual ethnographic project, and, as it turned out, a career. The Brandeis program emphasized fieldwork, and most first-year students did the two-semester course taught by Charles Fisher or Irv Zola. We read widely in sociology and anthropology and completed observations, interviews and other fieldwork exercises in the Chicago tradition. We also completed an in-depth fieldwork based study. Mine was based on a two-week (in February!) immersion in Boston’s skid row, where I slept in missions and spent the days on the cold streets, watching, experiencing and talking with homeless men. As an extension of this project the next summer I hitchhiked through the Dakotas, Montana and Washington, where I first met, spoke with (‘interviewed’ is too formal a description!) and photographed railroad tramps. The following summer I made my first cross-country trip on freights, albeit with a seasoned friend, and determined to make a study of this culture the focus of my dissertation. In fact on these trips west I found a different version of homelessness than what I had experienced in New York and Boston, or had read about in the several studies on homelessness published in sociology, which had been done via questionnaires and other non-immersive methods. In my dissertation I also intended to make a renewed case for fieldwork, while questioning the Parsonian/Mertonian paradigm that framed the then-existing studies of homelessness as a form of social deviance. I had begun to see the tramp as an outsider managing a challenging life, and for the most part quite in control of his decisions, rather than, as they had been described, as an example of ‘role failure’, ‘disaffiliation’ or ‘anomie’. In Hughesian terms the tramp had come into existence because of ‘uneven industrialization’ of agriculture and other industries, or deep social disruption such as war, but once there the tramp had created a collective way of life. I thus proposed to Hughes a plan to take my fieldwork one step further. The following fall I would travel from Minnesota to the apple harvest in the Pacific Northwest by freights, hoping to join the migrant labour force that assembled from across the country, listening, interviewing and experiencing the tramp life. Hopefully my small camera, tape recorder and notebook would not get in the way. I wrote this all up in a four-page essay. I asked for Hughes’s oversight and immodestly hoped that my work would become part of a renewed Chicago tradition. Nels Anderson, a near-contemporary of Hughes at Chicago had, in fact, lived on the road before graduate

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school and published his ethnography The Hobo in 1923. In my essay I made references to Hughes’s critical reflections on questionnaires, his appreciation for insider knowledge and his understanding of the reciprocal effect fieldwork had on researcher and people researched. Hughes was pleased to direct my independent study course, where I would read on field methods, ethnography and homelessness, and said he would also join my dissertation committee. When I look back at our subsequent conversations, which I remember well, what startles me is that he took my plans so matter-of-factly. Jumping freights was extremely dangerous, not to mention illegal, but that never came up. He was interested in how tramps shared knowledge that allowed them to manage a complicated means of transport. They managed illegality that shifted to tacit legality when the apples were ripe. There were norms about how to ride, who to hang out with and what to do in the tramp jungles and on the freights, even when on a drunk. There were shared rationalizations that Hughes said were quite like the rationalizations all cultures created. But he also reminded me to go beyond culture to define the tramp in terms in terms of structure and history. In the circumstance I studied, the tramp was labourer who had to appear on time to harvest a vulnerable crop and disappear when it was done. Thus armed I  set off in late August for what I  imagined to be a four- to six-week immersion in the tramp life. After a few days of preparation I snuck into a freight car in Minneapolis and ‘buddied up’ with a tramp I named Carl who was coming down from a three-week drunk, and was also heading for the harvest. I spent the next five weeks in his company riding to the Pacific Northwest, camping in hobo jungles and eventually finding a job in the apple harvest, where we shared a one-room cabin. I had a camera and a small tape recorder, several notebooks and about 20 dollars in cash. In this era before credit cards, cash machines or cell phones I was quite cut off from the world as I knew it, and my immersion for those weeks was close to complete. Carl was the perfect tramp: surly, impatient with my naivety, but willing to ‘buddy-up’, in the parlance of the road – to establish a travelling relationship of precisely defined limitations. For a time he was also interested in telling his story. I was pulled deeply into the experience and felt that I had begun to think like a tramp. I wrote field notes incessantly (which no one found unusual; tramps were always doing odd things), and I  exposed about 20 rolls of film over the five weeks, though I  photographed much less I  as I  became more immersed. I  recorded several hours of conversations with Carl and other tramps and since I  was sharing the hobo jungles and our dumpster stews, no one seemed to mind my odd behaviour. In fact everybody had his story, and probably nobody took mine very seriously. When I explained that I was actually a graduate student, a tramp proclaimed, ‘Actually, I’m a banker!’ Everybody laughed. I had no idea what he was talking about. As the harvest finished I returned to the East Coast via freights (ignoring Carl’s warnings) and was nearly robbed by the thieves who prey on post-harvest workers – just as Carl had warned – and almost lost of my notes, film and tapes, and, less consequently, my wages earned as an apple knocker. It then took me 18 months to write out field notes, transcribe tapes, develop and print my photos and to read, read and read! – and finally to write my dissertation. During this

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period I spent a great deal of time with Hughes. In our meetings, generally every week or two, he would ask me what I had learned since we had last met. We would then talk about transcripts or field notes, and go from there. He would remember stories from his research in French Canada or Germany, or some other incident or insight my information would remind him of. He was led to draw comparisons between seemingly unrelated forms of life. I recall one conversation where he said the tramps reminded him of the Eastern European immigrant lumberjacks he had taught in Northern Wisconsin. In another conversation he noted their resemblance to the sons of poor farmers he had met in the 1930s on the French Canadian Gaspé Peninsula who had to migrate ‘to the woods to work in the lumber camps in winter’ (1943: 17) because their farms were too poor to support the family year round. With Hughes’s encouragement I began to see the tramp in a comparative framework, while not losing sight of their singular culture. My main informant Carl was also one of these leftover people from a poor farm community, sent away from his immediate family to live with relatives, though in his case his World War II combat experiences had clearly damaged him terribly and led him to the road. Hughes was sometimes a stern grandfather type. I announced in June, eight months after returning from my last fieldwork trip, that I intended to head west for one more experience on the road to confirm what I had learned and to add more, and he admonished me, ‘You are NOT PERMITTED to return to your freights! You know enough! You are just looking for a way to put off completing your dissertation! Now go home and get back to work!’ He was very serious: I was NOT PERMITTED! I returned home and got back to work. We often discussed photos from my fieldwork. He would study a photo for several minutes and wax sociological, peeling away layers of meaning. This was three years before Howard Becker’s seminal article on visual sociology ‘Photography and Sociology’ (1974), in which he argues for deep study of images. In fact this was before there was much if any discussion of any visual focus in sociology, but Hughes was very interested in what I was doing and saw it as a natural extension of close observation, which he supported deeply. I recall his reaction to a photo I had made of two tramps waiting beside a run-down house trailer that sat without sheet-metal skirts in a desolate landscape in the apple country. Hughes noted that it was a temporary employment office for temporary workers who had cleaned up extremely well. Their hair was combed and their clothes were clean. One of their bedrolls lay in view. Their identity as tramps was not hidden. In the distance several men waited on a bench for the word that orchard owners were hiring. The long shadows suggest an early hour and the postures of the men in the foreground communicate optimism. Work was around the corner! I remember Hughes noting that I had taken the photograph from the ground looking up. I was also a worker waiting for a job, sitting in the dust and waiting. The point of view of the photographer, Hughes noted, tells an important story of the photo. I had been critical of the photo. I aimed the camera into the early sunlight and the two faces were in shadow, and I had cropped the feet off the tramp in the foreground. I thought the image was a throwaway but Hughes appreciated it for its ethnographic information rather than its aesthetics. Hughes said the photo recorded a key moment in the tramps’ lives, as they were coming off the road and making a case for themselves as workers.

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We had many similar discussions about my photographs and I  have not acknowledged until now how important they were in my developing thinking about photography. I think Hughes’s interest seemed so natural that I took it for granted. After I completed my dissertation and began teaching at SUNY Potsdam, Hughes invited me to four lectures by Becker on photography and sociology, delivered in honour of his retirement from Boston College. His letter of 22 February 1977 lists Becker’s lectures and then reads, ‘These are limited to a certain number of students, but I think I could make a case for a real photographer like you to horn in’. Of course I basked in such praise and skipped out of teaching for several days, and drove the 350 miles to Boston to meet Becker and to feel one mentorship edging toward another. Hughes suggested that I  write a narrative from my fieldwork since my trip was a natural part in the cycle of tramp life: drinking, migrating and working. I had entered the cycle and participated in all parts except for the drunk. He also believed it reasonable to concentrate on Carl’s life as the centrepiece of my narrative, as he had written, famously, Among the methods I would recommend is the intensive, penetrating look with an imagination as lively and as sociological as it can be made. One of my basic assumptions is that if one quite clearly sees something happen once, it is almost certain to have happened again and again. The burden of proof is on those who claim a thing once seen is an exception: if they look hard, they may find it everywhere, although with some interesting differences in each case. (1971: ix)

Carl was that tramp who ‘happened once’, and the others met on the road were the ‘interesting differences’ that completed the story. Some tramps were more accomplished than others; some were hangers-on or fakes. But they all had experiences on the road, and they all had accounts and stories. They filled up empty hours around a jungle fire, waiting for a train or just hanging out with accounts of themselves as tricksters of life up against the powerful. Fitting these parts together became my ethnography-as-narrative. Hughes wrote his essays in the first person and his experiences and observations are part of his analyses, so he encouraged me to write a first-person narrative that could represent a typical slice of tramp life. My dissertation was unorthodox at the time and would be considered unorthodox today, with a long narrative chapter separated from the analysis. This created the problem of having to quote from one part of the dissertation as I wrote another, and I do not think I resolved this well. However, the narrative gave me the chance to write, as Hughes had said, an ‘intense, penetrating look with an imagination as lively and sociological as it can be made’. The book I wrote from the dissertation is unusual in form and format, but it emerged from Hughes’s original encouragement.1 In fact Hughes supported my approach – both ethnographic and photographic – just as he supported any method that he sensed would make thinking and writing more sociologically compelling. Finally, just as critiques of ethnography in the 1970s began to call for more reflexivity, Hughes encouraged me to write about how my own feelings, perceptions and reactions affected what I saw, experienced and interpreted. It felt odd to talk about the joys and sorrows of the road (an ethnography read under Hughes at this time, Jean Brigg’s Never

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in Anger, encouraged me in this regard), but as was the case in our discussions, these ideas emerged naturally and seemed perfectly reasonable. It was only later that I realized how unusual many of these ways of seeing, telling and analysing were. I threatened to appear in medieval armour to defend my dissertation, but in fact it unfolded without a great deal of drama. A day or two after the defence Hughes wrote a long letter to me about the dissertation, which summarized much of what we had talked about. He also wrote, ‘Certainly, I think that if I were an apple-knocker I would from time to time want to go off and get roaring drunk’. After making several suggestions for the next stage of the project he wrote, ‘Any person who observes as closely as you do becomes a pretty good writer the minute he starts putting down his notes’. And then he told me to get it better, to find exactly the right words and to get it ‘strikingly correct’. Probably like many who finish a dissertation on a tight deadline I wish I had taken six more months to do a final revision, but I allowed the pressures of a job that was to begin in two months to prevail. I was lucky to have the opportunity to revise it for publication, and I still am, as I prepare it for its third edition.

The Influence on a Career Soon after the dissertation defence I moved to northern New York to begin life as a professor. We kept in touch via letters and occasional visits from 1975 until 1982, six months before his death. The letters were warm and encouraging, and also helpful. When I told him I was teaching Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, he copied and sent me Ernest Burgess’s book review published in the American Journal of Sociology from 1931, and he told me how the book had influenced sociology in that formative period. In fact, as the first community study in sociology, it had inspired his tome French Canada in Transition. In this era before Google Scholar he sent me reviews of other books he had come across from the first generations of American sociology journals that he thought I might find interesting. Of course they were. I sent him my first publication and he replied (April 1976), My dear Doug: I have enjoyed very much the article called ‘Riding to Wenatchee’. It reads well, and the pictures are very effective. Now that I have it read it I think I shall send it on to my daughter who lives in Brooklyn, and to her daughters who will, I know, find it very interesting. How has the year gone? [it was my first year of teaching]. And how are you set up for next year? I wish you well. ECH

These letters were a delight to me, and as the years passed his signature became more jagged, but his ideas never lost their warmth or humour. His last letter was dated 22 February 1980, after I had sent him an article I had published in Qualitative Sociology. It reads in part, Dear Doug: Did I  ever put you in touch with Nels Anderson? […] I  am sure he would like to see your piece called ‘Life on the Road’ which you recently sent to me. This is the best sociology

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written on this subject. There does come to be a conflict between the role of the observer and the role of the photographer. Sociology is a form of presenting what you see and sometimes the form of presenting disturbs the observation and the relationship with the subjects. You and Howie Becker and Nels Anderson are of the same breed. No doubt, there are more of you people who are now making a distinction between quantitative and qualitative sociology. It is a false distinction. What you are doing is not judging the quality of something; you are getting a closer view. If the original view is false no amount of quantifying can correct it. I think we need a new word. In any case, one has to translate his observations into words. The observation must be correct and so must the words. Yours, ECH

In 1982 I brought a copy of the book that had finally been published based on my PhD to his home in Cambridge, and we visited through a long afternoon (see Figure 5.1). He was pleased to see the book but was mostly focused on diaries he was rereading from his mother-in-law, a campaigner for women’s suffrage in western Canada, and he wondered if I wanted to borrow them to use in my then current study of agricultural change in northern New York. I did not feel comfortable taking the diaries but was rather awed by the prospect. We read several passages together and noted her stern intensity when writing about politics and her playfulness when talking about social life. Clearly prairie people had a good time in their sleigh rides, dances and visits. Winter offered a reason to snuggle up on long drives in a horse-drawn sleigh, which, Hughes said, did not seem to be the worst thing! I had read farmers’ journals archived in the St. Lawrence Historical Society from the same era in northern New York and we found it interesting that courtship rituals and social life in general seemed quite similar in western Canada and northern New York in the era before autos. As I was leaving in the late afternoon I asked if I might take a photo of him. I had long wished to photograph him but had not had the courage to do so. He was, in fact, pleased to pose for the photo. The light was dim; I had him lean toward a lamp to make a single frame. He declined rapidly in the following months and died before I could send him a copy of the photo, but I did not think it was as much for him as those who would want to remember him. I sent copies to his family and to several of his friends after his death. Blanche Geer wrote me that the photo ‘catches the tolerant skepticism of his eyes and their warmth, too’, and his life-long partner, Helen MacGill Hughes, said it was treasured as the last photo of Everett and one that did not pull any punches. For me the photo seemed to grab a moment where time and age were finally catching up. He was always an older man to me, but that had nothing to do with our connection, and he did not change much during the ten years I knew him. Suddenly, it seemed, he had aged, and the end was in sight. Though he was gone, he continued to steer me through my career. I think he would have found photo elicitation (Harper 2002) interesting because it encouraged in-depth research, was interaction based and it acknowledged the complexity of cultural knowledge sometimes taken for granted in research. I think he would have seen it as a proper basis for a research collaboration with Willie, a bricoleur/auto mechanic I wrote about in

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Figure 5.1  Everett Hughes in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1982

Working Knowledge (1987). I think he would have found the eventual development of visual sociology (2012) interesting as a sociological field with multidisciplinary roots, making a case for itself in sociology. That sociologists have begun to study the world as seen would, I think, have interested him greatly. In these and my other projects, on agricultural change, the social life of Italian food and migrancy in Hong Kong (Harper, 2001; Harper and Faccioli 2009; Knowles and Harper 2009) Hughes was always directing my thinking, sometimes more obviously than others, but most certainly always there. Hughes in absentia also oversaw my life as a teacher. Very likely the most fun I have had in my 40-year teaching career was a course called ‘The Cultural Study of Work’ that

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drew heavily on papers by Hughes and his colleagues. I eventually co-edited a collection of these papers (Harper and Lawson 2003)  selected from the 350 examples of studies drawn from the tradition Hughes was largely responsible for. I noted, in the introduction to that collection, that ‘Hughes became editor of the American Journal of Sociology in 1952 and devoted the first issue to the cultural study of work. His editorial foreword to that issue spoke of the “double burden” of sociologists to analyze the processes of human behavior free of time and place while also becoming “ethnologists of their own societies” ’ (Hughes, quoted in Harper and Lawson 2003: xii). There had been a handful of culturally attuned studies of work published before that moment in sociology, but it was in the 1950s that this important subdiscipline formed, primarily as a result of the ground Hughes had broken.

Hughes the Person Lynda Lytle Holmstrom wrote that Hughes ‘was very interested in transforming people into colleagues so he could relate to them on a more equal basis. It was not his style to be a “guru” surrounded by devotees’ (1984: 477). I have already said a great deal that implies my affection for Everett Hughes. I would add that when I first met him he seemed distant, formal and rather stiff. But as I got to know him I realized that he was very comfortable with himself. He always appeared in a suit and did not cater to our youth culture, although he found us interesting. Hughes was also very funny and his own best straight man. Just before leaving for my fieldwork I had cut my long hair to fit in with the tramps I hoped to meet. I stopped by to tell Hughes I was leaving and when I entered his office he looked up, startled. He did not recognize me. He frowned and very sternly said, ‘My grandfather went to the barber and had his beard cut off! He came home and his daughter, my mother, went running in fear, buried her face in her mother’s dress, weeping. She was terrified’. I stood there waiting for the punch line. ‘In those days’, Hughes said, ‘people didn’t mess with their identity! Now go meet your tramps and remember who you are!’ I suppose that is the place to end. He gave me confidence to be who I was, a rather unconventional sociologist who learned to love sociology largely through his ideas and teaching. It is a rare thing to carry a mentorship throughout one’s life and career, and it has been a great and enduring blessing.

Note 1 The book was first published in 1982, with an afterword by Howard S. Becker (Harper, 1982). It was the first sociological ethnography identified as ‘visual sociology’. It was translated and published in France (Harper 1988) and Italy (Harper 1999). Paradigm Press published a second edition (Harper 2006), and the book is currently being revised for a third edition.

References Becker, Howard S. 1974. ‘Photography and Sociology’, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1 (1): 3–26.

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Harper, Douglas. 1982. Good Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. Working Knowledge:  Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Les Vagabonds du Nord-Ouest Américain. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 1999. Good Company: Un Sociologo tra I Vagabondi. Milan: FrancoAngeli. ———. 2001. Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. ‘Talking about Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation’, Visual Studies 17 (1): 21–34. ———. 2012. Visual Sociology. London: Routledge. ——— and Helene Lawson, eds. 2003. The Cultural Study of Work. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield. ——— and Patrizia Faccioli. 2009. The Italian Way:  Food and Social Life. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Holmstrom, Lynda Lytle. 1984. ‘Everett Cherrington Hughes: A Tribute to a Pioneer in the Study of Work and Occupations’, Work and Occupations 11 (4): 471–81. Hughes, E. C. [1935] 1971. ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Catholic Movement in Germany’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 255–65. ———. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. [1945] 1971. ‘Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 141–50. ———. 1960. ‘Introduction: The Place of Field Work in Social Science’ to Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, by Buford H. Junker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. [1962] 1971. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 87–97. ———. [1964] 1971. ‘Robert E. Park’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 543–9. ———. [1970] 1971. ‘Teaching as Field Work’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 566–76. ———. 1971. ‘Contents’. In Hughes, The Sociological Eye, xi–xix. ———. 1971. ‘Preface’. In Hughes, The Sociological Eye, v–xi. ———. 1971. The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. ———. 1973. ‘A Review by Scott Boorman of Robert MacArthur’s Analogues in the Social Sciences’. Course Handout, Brandeis University, Multi-Ethnic Societies: unpaged. Junker, B. H. 1960. Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knowles, Caroline, and D. Harper. 2009. Hong Kong:  Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spradley, James. 1970. You Owe Yourself a Drunk:  An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Boston:  Little Brown and Company. Washington, Booker T. (with the collaboration of Robert E. Park). 1912. The Man Furthest Down. New York: Doubleday.

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Chapter Six AN AMERICAN IN FRANKFURT: EVERETT C. HUGHES’S UNPUBLISHED BOOK ON GERMANS AFTER THE END OF THE NAZI REGIME Christian Fleck

A Book Proposal Early in March 1949 Everett C. Hughes sent a letter to the director of the university press of his home university. In it he described briefly two attachments: the outline of a proposed book and a sample chapter. The letter was a follow-up to some previous conversations between Hughes and his prospective editor.1 The ‘memorandum’ explains what the author wants to do. The ‘material’ for the proposed book would be the ‘diary’ that Hughes kept during his stay in Germany in the first half of 1948. The ‘form’ it would take would be a chronological first-person account. My reason for preserving chronology is to keep the Mss [manuscript] an honest report of the development of my impressions. The diary is a record of what one American saw, thought and felt, not merely about Germany, but about being an American in an occupied country. […] Tentatively, I suggest that certain theme or topical headings be set in here and there to indicate that a major incident of discussion of the given topic occurs at that point. (Everett C. Hughes, Memo on proposed book, Box 100, Folder 6, Everett C. Hughes Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)2 Work on this study started years ago; the finalization was made possible by a grant of the Austrian Science Fund (project number P 24693) ‘The Invention and Diffusion of Social Science Methodologies during the Cold War’. A  different German version of this paper appeared in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 2015. For comments on a draft of this chapter and for help locating sources, I want to express my gratitude to the following: Dirk Raith, who once visited the Chicago archives for me; Albert Müller, who shares my admiration for Hughes’s 1963 paper; Rafael Schögler and Christian Dayé, who commented on a German draft as did Andreas Kranebitter, the editor of the special issue in which the German version appeared; and Andrea Ploder, who read a draft and got hooked on Hughes and provided me with additional archival findings from his Papers in Chicago. I am also thankful for comments received during a presentation at the World Congress of Sociology 2014 in Yokohama. Rick Helmes-Hayes owns a final thanks for his close reading of a draft of this chapter.

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The memorandum then lists a set of themes that would run through the manuscript and that would be brought to a head around one or more incidents or dramatic passages. As Hughes envisioned it, the book would have 13 chapter-like parts. What follows is a selective presentation of the tentative table of contents and illustrative remarks offered by Hughes. Hughes starts by saying he would cover the moods of the Germans  – ‘Ach, armes Deutschland!’ (Alas, poor Germany!). Some Germans he met had expressed the feeling they never again would be able to smile, everything was hopeless, it was a crime to express hope, celebrate holidays and so on. However, Hughes indicates that he met also spontaneous gaiety. Hughes lists politics as a second topic, which he intended to portray via accounts and descriptions of meetings, posters and informal talks. He notes that he had encountered different psychological complexes:  the one claiming ‘all must share the loss equally’, which was connected with the notion of a ‘levelling-down democracy’, the ‘nothing can be done under occupation’ complex and the one that utters ‘better stay out of politics’. Beyond that, Hughes planned to cover ‘positive programs and themes of [Eugen] Kogon,3 the Christian Democratic Union,4 etc’. and wanted to discuss the question whether or not there is ‘nationalism and hidden Nazi-ism in politics’. Finally, in passing, Hughes mentioned his observation that the communist propaganda of 1948 resembled that from the Nazis in 1930. Concerning students, he detected ‘the crust of disillusionment, hiding eagerness and naiveté’ and an attitude that they were ‘hell-bent for the security of a diploma and a state license of some kind’. Hughes wanted to discuss the behaviour of students during ‘bull-sessions’ he held with them and to describe his own ‘experiments in getting them loosened up’. Hughes chose ‘Devils, Saints and Ordinary People’ as the title for the part where he wanted to deal with the behaviour of the Germans under Nazi rule, the way they looked back and gauged it in 1948. Encounters with families Hughes knew from his earlier stays in Germany and those he met during his postwar visit would be recounted in detail: ‘Do they consider themselves “guilty”? Whom do they consider guilty?’ As to Hitler, Hughes noted that one had to raise the question whether he was a devil or a perverted saint. Myths, legends and witticisms about Hitler and his entourage would be discussed. What should one make of utterances such as ‘If only Hitler had not surrounded himself with the likes of Himmler and Goebbels!’? Democracy is a magic word in Germany. How do Germans make use of it? For which purpose and in which spirit? Note the difference between the earnest plea ‘Teach us how to be democratic’ and the more ironic usage in the expression ‘Does that happen even in democratic America?’ How one feels as an American in Germany and which attitudes one encounters when meeting Germans – ‘Is it in America as nice as here in all this rubble?’ – would have to be discussed in connection with the ‘temptations’ Americans experience in Germany. On a related matter, Hughes thought the allied forces should be viewed from two sides: What do Germans say about them? What do the soldiers say? How do they behave vis-à-vis the

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Germans? Hughes would examine the specific language of the occupation as well as the consequences of the phenomenon of occupation for men, women and so on. Hughes’s interest in the phenomenon of the ‘other’ did not stop there. Speaking about ‘refugees from the east’, Hughes did not refer to people fleeing the part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union but, rather, the regions farther to the east (Poland and the Soviet Union). Hughes wondered about tensions between the newcomers and the locals. What do the locals think about the ‘others’? What are the problems with which the locals have to cope? What do the refugees think about their rights and how do they look at the locals? Finally, Hughes mentions the black market and the scruples of those who frequent it. Their ‘wish to live’ urges them to participate in this illegal behaviour. He was particularly interested in the consequences of the black market for families. He observed that women did this business behind the backs of their ‘over-righteous’ husbands. He noted that he would offer some remarks on the connection between morale and behaviour on the black market. If the scanty outline Hughes provided did not make clear exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted to proceed, the sample chapter was more useful. The 13-page chapter was titled ‘Innocent Abroad, 1948 or How to Behave in Occupied Germany’.5 It started with a quotation: ‘ “But you are not an average American.” Thus began the temptations of an American innocent abroad in 1948.’ On Ascension Day, 1948, Hughes sat with hundreds of others in a train that brought them all back to Frankfurt from their first getaway of the year.6 The voyagers were burdened with goods they had barter-traded from farmers in the countryside. A thunderstorm forced the travellers to open their umbrellas inside the train because of leaks in the roof. Drops fell on Hughes’s neck from the umbrella of a ‘tall, dark-haired, brown-eyed woman’ sitting across the aisle. The woman expressed her pity about the trains and about conditions in the country more generally. When he replied to her comment, his accent provoked her to ask a question: ‘ “What country are you from?” I replied, “America, of course.” “But, Mein Herr [emphasis in original], you are not an average American; that is racially. I would have said an Englishman or a man from Hamburg.” ’ Hughes continues the account by pointing out that he experienced the same conversation several times during his stay in Frankfurt. ‘So I recognized it as a lure to get me to betray my own people by allowing the implication to stand that I, being passable tall and blond, am somewhat different from and therefore presumably better than the average American.’ When the woman in the train continued to draw a line between him and average American soldiers he replied, ‘ “Yes”, I admitted, “I am. In fact, most of the soldiers themselves are different from the average. There are so many kinds of us Americans that none of us is average” (I had lately seen or heard this neat way of putting it).’ Over the next three hours – the train wheeled only very slowly through the hills around Frankfurt  – Hughes talked with this former teacher from East Prussia. He found it unnecessary even to ask questions. Germans were clearly hungry for contact with the larger world outside Germany – and they felt a strain to legitimize themselves.

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After many years when speaking in public was dangerous, the Germans were eager to talk. As a German physician said to me, ‘Our tongues are like a muscle that has not been used for a long time. At first, you are afraid it will hurt if you move if, so you go easy. Then you find it doesn’t hurt, and you consciously keep moving in around.’ And in answering the eager, slightly aggressive talk of Germans trying out their tongues, the American innocent abroad is led into temptation; each of us according to the kind of person he is taken for by the Germans and according to what he would like to be at home; as well as according to what he is or would like to be in this first prolonged American occupation of a European country, a country whose age we covertly admire and whose material achievements impress the American eye though they lie in ruin.

Hughes calls this first temptation, which tries to profit from one’s difference from the average, the ‘Peter temptation’.7 It comes in several variants. American intellectuals would be greeted as emissaries of the intelligent people of the world, completely different people from the occupation soldiers. Or one would be invited as a Christian to stand together against the Jews, as a white person against people of colour, as a university professor against army officers, as a liberal against conservatives. ‘You and I  are white. You will understand how we feel about these Negro soldiers going about with our girls.’ […] We swallow the hook, for we share with the Germans a weakness for being liked; besides, the proffered role flatters us. […] Thus we can form – with our new German friends – a little international mutual admiration society. We professors are especially susceptible to this; for we can start talking with our colleagues of an enemy country about science, philosophy and what a pity it is that professors don’t run the world almost as soon as our soldiers start whistling at their girls.

Americans themselves are skilled in practicing this temptation because, says Hughes, they counsel others how to use it. This makes it possible for Americans to bring someone into their own group and at the same time stick to the conviction that the group to which the initiate belongs is inferior. Prepared this way, Americans do not have trouble playing this game abroad, that is, ‘by dissociating ourselves, as exceptional individuals, from some unpleasant image which others have of Americans generally’. Then Hughes illustrates how easily one can switch between ‘we’ and ‘they’ by drawing attention to comments made by people of different national backgrounds about the Jews in their countries. A professor from the Netherlands offered Hughes a way to circumvent this temptation. This man thought it his obligation to come to a German university to teach there despite what the Nazis had done to his home country: ‘The Germans killed thousands of my fellow countrymen who were Jewish and thousands who were not Jewish.’ The Dutch professor wanted to avoid opening a chasm between the We-group of the Dutchmen and the They-group of the Jews. Hughes stated the lesson learned as follows: This made me watch my tongue, lest I slip in the use of we and they [emphasis in original]. Since it is so natural and necessary to say ‘we whites’ and ‘you Negroes’ (or reverse) on many

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occasions at home, it is easy when abroad and conscious of being American, to slip into saying ‘We Americans’, and ‘they’ – the Jews, Negroes, Catholics, or what have you. It becomes still easier when one’s own ego can be helped a little by the implied dissociation of one’s self from other Americans.

Hughes thought it better in this respect to develop the habit, when talking to people from other countries, of speaking about several million ‘black Americans’ instead of speaking of the ‘black element’ in the United States (Hughes adds, ‘element being one of the strongest “they” words in our language’). In doing it this way everyone would learn quickly that an inconspicuous change between ‘we’ and ‘they’ words would save one from experiencing cheap mutual backslapping at the expense of one’s fellow citizens. In making this point, Hughes did not want it to appear that he wanted to avoid hearing criticism of America. In the sample chapter, he remarked that it was his view that if one made it clear from the outset that one was not willing to betray any part of one’s own people, then any action by any person could be scrutinized in detail. This was not easy, he said, because liberal Americans tend to be tempted to characterize their own administration and its personnel as ‘stupid, ill-informed, and [incapable of] understand[ing] the Germans’. This should not come as a surprise, he continued, because these speakers usually think about themselves as socially and professionally superior to those people ‘willing to work for the administration’. Hughes regards this as an easy ‘out’ on the part of such critics. Instead of reasonably discussing the actions taken by officials and understanding them in the context of trying circumstances, critics dissociate themselves from those who are trying to execute the difficult job of an occupation force without having received appropriate training. One day, Hughes gave a public talk about ‘Race Relations in America’ at a small German university. After the talk, a member of the audience raised the question ‘And what about the Indians?’ When Germans got the impression they could speak freely, they liked to confront Americans with embarrassing questions such as this one. Since the student was not trying simply to provoke Hughes, but seemed to mean his question seriously, the only way Hughes felt he could answer was honestly. So I answered that we had found the Indians not willing to get out of our way, so we had killed a lot of them and shut the others up in concentration camps. I could have said that some misguided, malicious people had done it. Or, if asked about lynching, I could have said – as we do in the Northern states that they [emphasis in original], the benighted Southerners do it; or if I had been a white Southerner of the proper social background, I could have said that they, a lot of rough people, not of the better families, do it. This would of course have been yielding to the old Peter temptation.

Indeed, Hughes went one step further and, in so doing, ‘stunned’ the chairman and audience into ‘silence’. He continued, ‘You probably wait for me to disown those people who did the dirty work. But I cannot do it this way because my own family passed on the legend of one predecessor who guilefully killed the last Indian in Gallia County, Ohio.’ Immediately after Hughes relayed this anecdote, a professor, instead of asking a question, started a long speech about the influence of the climate on the English language in America. This

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effectively ended the discussion. From such situations Hughes drew the conclusion that one could break the Germans’ conspiratorial silence about their recent past only by maximum openness in the face of embarrassing questions. Alternatively, one could offer the Germans a loophole that would allow them to dissociate themselves from the ‘Nazi atrocities’ by evoking ‘extenuating circumstances’. They could claim ‘that most Germans didn’t know about it at all, and that it was only the fanatical SS who did those things, anyway’. One result of being open with the Germans in this way was that an American would be tugged into the next temptation, that is, granting absolution to the Germans. Seldom did Hughes feel as uneasy as in encounters with ‘passably sincere Germans’ who asked for such absolution. A three-day visit to a family Hughes had known from an earlier visit to Germany became, he recalled, a ‘ghostly sparring match’ of this sort. Hughes made it clear from the start that he would refuse the demand. ‘This lets them off too easy’, he wrote. ‘If the German concerned really has some sense of guilt, such an absolution can do little for his soul.’ One cannot offer this form of guilt relief, Hughes argued, because what happened had been ‘injuries done to third parties’. While Germans assured him again and again how deeply they felt their guilt, Hughes was steadfast in his refusal to do the easy thing and grant absolution. One must, he said, search for a ‘course that does not imply condescension, the arrogation of priestly powers, the cheapening of the whole issue or the descent in the abyss of cynicism’. ‘That is the question’, Hughes said. ‘Contact with Germans is, like contact with a mentally sick person, a confrontation of one’s self and one’s own soundness.’ There would be other temptations Americans could come across in occupied Germany, for instance, acting like the rich uncle from America. Overall, however, Hughes noted that such temptations are easier to avoid than the two big ones, betrayal and absolution. Near the end of the sample chapter Hughes claimed that there was more at stake in Germany in 1948–49 than just the future of this country alone. On the agenda was the political future of Europe, something the British would know better than the Americans (Hughes did not elaborate on this point and therefore we can only speculate in which respect he thought the Brits would have been better prepared for Europe’s future than his fellow Americans). At the end Hughes confesses personally that he might have fallen into one of these temptations more than once. This seems unavoidable, he says, and then notes that the only remedy would be to closely observe a principle and, in doing so, take a particular attitude. The attitude is that of one man trying to enter into honest, and when possible, sympathetic contact with other men. The principle is that of remaining true to our other principles. A moderate approximation to the attitude and a sincere attempt to keep to the principle will get the American in Germany today the reward of many satisfying and fruitful contacts with Germans of fundamental good will. I am tempted – to go back again.

So much for the book proposal and the sample chapter submitted to the University of Chicago Press in the spring of 1949. Let us now turn to the circumstances that brought

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Hughes into a position to collect enough data to think about writing a book on Germany and the Germans in 1948, three years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.

A Field Trip-like Visit to Occupied Germany What brought Hughes to Frankfurt? How should we evaluate his book proposal with the benefit of hindsight? Was it original and, if so, in what sense? Let us start with the author and his visit to occupied Germany. There is no need to present Hughes as a person to the readers of this book, but even those familiar with his life and career might not be aware of the particularities of his stay in Germany and its written legacy. Hughes did have previous experiences in Europe, and Germany in particular. He spent the academic year 1931–32 on a Social Science Research Council fellowship in Germany, in and around Cologne to be precise, to study the Catholic Workers Movement there. During this stay he met several German sociologists and became fluent in German. The rise of Nazism scared him and after returning to Montreal, where he taught at McGill University at the time, he gave what he claimed was one of the first university courses on the Nazis as a social movement (Hughes 1984: xv).8 His postwar visit to Germany in 1948 did not come out of his own initiative. Hughes had left McGill in 1938 and returned to Chicago, where he had earned his PhD. After being in the department for a few years, and taking up several demanding assignments, he decided that he needed to be promoted to full professor. His schedule was sufficiently hectic that he could very easily have turned down the invitation to be part of the first group of exchange professors going to the Goethe University in Frankfurt for a whole semester. But Hughes decided otherwise. He explained why in a letter to his good friend David Riesman, who was away from Chicago for a fellowship period in Yale: The committee on the exchange with the U.  of Frankfurt pressed me pretty hard to be one of the tema [team] to go to Germany right away this spring, and I  have consented. Perhaps my reluctance was due to unwillingness either to see how bad things are there, or to some prescience of failure. Your ‘nerve of failure’ article and the more recent one on Plans and Utopia steel me up a bit.9 Aynway [anyway], I think the project should be carried through, and I think also that I have a certain obligation to go and to do my part. (ECH to D. Riesman, 12 March 1948, David Riesman Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Hughes then outlines to Riesman the details of the assignments he is expected to carry out and the prospective schedule for the visit. Most surprising is the time frame: the group of professors is expected to depart in less than a month, early in April, ‘as soon as red-tape allows!’ Hughes has only some vague ideas about what he is going to do while there, but a clear principle he intends to follow: My formula is to give them [i.e., students] some ideas of the better sociological work done in this country in the last fifteen years or so  – the problems, the methods  – without any attempt to paint us prettier than we are, but also without any gesture which might encourage cynicism.

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From this letter we learn also that Hughes had read University of Chicago Professor Robert J. Havighurst’s report about German postwar universities.10 Hughes then asked Riesman for any suggestions he might have regarding his stay at Frankfurt. True to form, Riesman replied within a few days and offered many ideas. First, he congratulated his friend and assured him that no one ‘could be a better emissary’. Riesman then informed Hughes that another of his friends, his mentor, Carl J. Friedrich, a German by birth, had recently been in Germany and would be returning there in the near future. In conversations with Friedrich, Riesman says he got some hints of general problems Americans might face in Germany. One that he thought worthy to pass on to his friend Hughes concerned the attitude of members of the military government. According to Friedrich, said Riesman, ‘there were many people who could teach in American universities but almost none who could bridge the vindictiveness of so many MG [military government] people (except for those who are building up for war with Russia)’ (Riesman Papers, Riesman to ECH, 18 March 1948). Riesman, always free with advice and suggestions, mentioned a project that his colleague Herb[ert] Hyman from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) was planning to carry out, that is, ‘a comparative survey of German and American values’.11 Hyman, wrote Riesman, ‘realizes how shallow – and how ethnocentric – are most of the studies which deal with “the” Germans’. Riesman suggested to Hughes that he use his seminar students in Frankfurt to work on the German side of Hyman’s project. Riesman also mentioned a set of ‘community studies which MG has sponsored’, that Friedrich had mentioned to him the previous summer. At the time, Friedrich had proposed to Riesman that he should go over to Germany to ‘edit and help organize these studies’. Since then, however, Riesman had heard nothing. This led him to think that ‘perhaps the project has been dropped’. It should be clear from the foregoing that Hughes did not go to Frankfurt on his own initiative. Neither did he carry with him anything like a plan for an ethnographic field study. In preparing, he did little more than read reports written by previous visitors and ask friends for suggestions. From the letters we learn also that a number of studies had been planned and that the political situation was anything but simple. Tensions between former US soldiers, now acting as the occupation government, and the local population were known even outside the members of the military government. The daily news about politics was unsettling. Especially alarming were reports about attempts by communists to expand the territory of what later became Soviet Europe. Fear of war continued to spread. Indeed, in February 1948, the month before Hughes accepted the invitation, the Czechoslovakian Communists took power via a putsch. In the course of these events, the minister for foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of the Czech Republic, died under mysterious circumstances. Most people in the West believed he was murdered and called what happened the ‘Third Defenestration of Prague’. Before leaving for Europe, neither Hughes nor any of his fellow travellers could know that, coincident with the start of their visit, the Soviets would begin the Berlin Blockade. For any politically informed person it must have been clear that going to Germany in the spring of 1948 could mean that one might end up in trouble, either at the microlevel – a consequence of failed mutual understanding – or at the macrolevel – as a consequence of the outbreak of war.

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Without going further into the details of the beginning of the Cold War (which, interesting in itself, did not find much resonance in Hughes’s diary), let us see what happened during the three months Hughes spent in Frankfurt. We will then turn to an evaluation of the book proposal Hughes submitted a year later. Very soon after arriving in Germany, Hughes started sending typed letters both to his family and to Riesman, offering news of his various activities. In a reply to one such letter Riesman wrote, I can’t tell you how wonderful it has been to get your letters and I am so happy to have your notes on the meeting. I think these should be published as well as your discussion of the talk by Kogon, which I  described briefly to [Eugene V.] Rostow and [Harold] Lasswell12 here. I think Politics Magazine13 or Partisan Review14 would be interested. Would you like me to edit them to protect names and places, and explore these? (Riesman Papers, Riesman to ECH, 5 May 1948)

Riesman not only repeated his suggestion that Hughes publish something out of his diary and letters but also changed his mind about the format of publication. Later he suggested to Hughes that he write a book on the topic and sent detailed comments further to those he had sent Hughes previously (Riesman Papers, Riesman to ECH, 24 May 1948, 14 June 1948). In June 1948 Riesman started forwarding Hughes’s letters to other people, including Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, always remarking to the recipient that he, Riesman, felt Hughes’s notes should be published.15 The first positive response to these efforts came from Philip Rahv, one of the two editors of Partisan Review.16 Rahv encouraged Riesman to send in more of Hughes’s edited notes (Riesman Papers, Riesman to Philip Rahv, 2 June 1948, and Rahv to Riesman, 3 June 1948). Riesman provided Hughes with some background on Partisan Review, describing it as ‘one of the few journals concerned with Germany from the point of view of an anti-Fascist and anti-Stalin stand’ (Riesman Papers, Riesman to ECH, 10 June 1948). Hughes replied with some concern about the negative exposure that university people from Frankfurt might experience if his frank notes were turned into articles. Riesman tried to mitigate his friend’s reservations.17 Shortly after his return to the United States in August 1948, Hughes received a note from Riesman indicating that Partisan Review had declined to publish his field notes: To my astonishment, annoyance, and regret, Partisan Review wrote a few days ago, returning your (partly-edited) letters and saying that they had decided after all not to run them. They explained that they had had ‘too much’ on Europe, and so on. I’ve had much experience of the inconsiderateness of editors, but even so I felt badly. At Nat[han] Glazer’s18 suggestion, I have now sent them to Commentary;19 let me know if this is not agreeable. I wrote you, did I not, my suggestion of having Henry Regnery’s press20 bring them out in book form? (Riesman Papers, Riesman to ECH, 23 August 1948)21

By this point, Hughes was committed to making something out of his diary and so, on 14 December 1948, he approached his university press and eventually submitted the proposal.22

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How should we evaluate this proposal? A  number of the quotations from Hughes cited above make it clear that his manuscript did not conform to the academic norms of the time. Scholarly work was not supposed to have the amount of first-person narration that Hughes’s projected book on postwar Germany would contain. A first-person narrator of this type is not a neutral machine-like observer but a human individual with fears, concerns, feelings and thoughts. To write in such a deeply personal way was more or less forbidden at the time. In the first decades after World War II, even anthropologists, the quintessential ‘personal recorder branch’ of the social sciences, did not position themselves in this way in front of readers (e.g., Rodnick 1948). They started to do this only later when they moved to the autobiographical genre of writing. In sociology, field researchers were allowed to become personal only after the first edition(s) of their studies attracted more than average attention. Postscripts to later editions were the place where authors could start talking about themselves in this personal way (compare, e.g., Whyte 1943 with Whyte 1955). Hughes’s decision to excerpt extensive passages from his interactions with his German ‘subjects’ was a second unusual feature of his prospective manuscript. Anthropologists who studied ‘civilized’ people, something that rarely happened before the second third of the twentieth century, refrained from granting space for testimony to their informants, even if they were highly educated people.23 Only many years later did academic texts come to be filled with long quotations from informants. Hughes has been correctly labelled one of the great ‘essayists’ of twentieth-century sociology. As such, he did not refrain from offering his readers explanatory sketches and unfinished thoughts. Likewise, as an ethnographer Hughes was obviously not anything like a neutral recording machine – as many social scientists of this period thought the researcher should be. The ethnographer Hughes exposes to his readers is much more someone following his intuition instead of executing predefined observational schemes or guidelines. Certainly, there are no hints that Hughes ever made use of such devices.24 Observing the break-up of the ‘cake of custom’ – a mode of knowing Hughes ascribed to his two Chicago teachers, W. I. Thomas and Robert E. Park – requires spontaneous attention instead of an attitude prepared for counting. A sociologically trained reader would have easily detected that the author of both the sample chapter and the book proposal operated with an open visor and discussed problems of field research without referring to ‘rules’ from a methods textbook. More than anything else it was perhaps Hughes’s consistent use of a comparative perspective that created potential for disagreement between him and his coevals.

A Rejection, Finally Less than two weeks after submitting the book proposal and the sample chapter, Hughes received an answer from the director of the University of Chicago Press, William T. Couch. Couch, born in 1901 in the South, was only slightly younger than Hughes and had directed the press since 1945. Before that he had been director of the University of North Carolina Press. Couch’s reputation rested on his editorship of life stories from Southerners, stories produced under the aegis of a Federal Writers’ Project, one of a

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number of New Deal measures designed to fight unemployment and which included better-educated people among its contributors. Couch was an experienced editor whose later dismissal harmed the reputation of the University of Chicago. Couch was let go by the university’s anything but illiberal president Hutchins. Hutchins allegedly fired Couch because he published a book about the internment of Americans of Japanese origin during World War II.25 I do not know whether it was standard procedure for the director of the press to read and judge prospective book manuscripts submitted to the press. We do know, however, that Couch and Hughes knew each other by sight, at least, because Hughes published French Canada in Transition with the University of Chicago Press and negotiated with the press about the American Journal of Sociology.26 The memo from the director of the press, three single-spaced pages long, does not spare many words for reasons of courtesy. Rather, it gets down to business immediately. ‘Your outline looks good to me, and your sample chapter I think is in many ways excellent as far as it goes. I don’t think it goes far enough.’ Couch goes on to argue that not many readers would be able to follow Hughes where he writes about ‘betrayal’ and ‘absolution’. To Couch, it seems that Hughes wants to expose with ‘betrayal’ an attitude where someone, besides belonging to the same human race as all others, betrays it because of a sense of superiority that excludes the possibility of being guilty. This is exactly what Hughes was trying to avoid in elaborating his ‘we-they’ antagonism. Couch’s further efforts to understand Hughes revealed that Couch had completely misunderstood Hughes’s argument: This question, why some of us act as we do – why some of us became Nazis – seems to me the most important question in the world today. I  cannot escape the conviction that that something, whatever it was that made a man a Nazi, that constituted the difference between the Nazi and what I will call, for the want of better language, a ‘civilized’ person is just as important and demands just as much attention as that something which makes the Nazi and the non-Nazi both human beings.

Indeed, in his sample chapter, Hughes did not discuss the question of how one could become a Nazi. Rather, he accepted the existence of Nazis in Germany’s recent past as a fact that did not need to be questioned further. Instead, he decided to take up other research questions. Couch did not explain why he pressed Hughes to give more attention to Couch’s question. His flamboyant pronouncement – ‘So far as I can see, there is a terrible dilemma here, one that most intellectuals of today fumble with in hopeless confusion’ – did not even name the dilemma mentioned. Indeed, instead of providing such a rationale, Couch moved on to another topic on which, again, he had much to say. Unlike Hughes, he demonstrated a preference for terms such as ‘Nordics, Jews, or Negroes’ over citizenship terms such as ‘Germans, French or Americans’: I have seen the comment only once during the last sixteen years that certain of the people living in Germany, that Hitler persecuted, were Germans, that to call them Jews, as we regularly have done, has been to accept Hitler’s propaganda and to share his point of view. In my

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opinion it was terribly unfortunate that when counter-propaganda was made it was made in the name of Jews and not of Germans or Poles, or better yet, of human beings. […] I have the feeling that you are working toward something more reasonable than is customarily said on the subject of human differences and similarities, but I can’t escape the feeling that you haven’t gone far enough, that you don’t see that the argument you are making, if accepted, can work in a direction the opposite of that which you intend.

Assuming for a moment that Couch acted as a benevolent reader of Hughes’s manuscript – and Couch’s remark that he had read the chapter more than once would support this assumption – then Hughes would have had to conclude that he did not express himself clearly enough. However, one would expect that an editor would be able to distinguish between what an author meant and what he actually wrote. Couch’s objection to Hughes’s refusal to draw on the ‘we vs. they’ distinction missed completely what Hughes wrote intelligibly enough. Couch did not content himself with challenging Hughes’s argument on betrayal but moved to a discussion of Hughes’s views on absolution. Couch starts by proclaiming that the power to absolve is beyond any human’s capabilities, and argues then that what we can do is offer forgiveness. Couch demonstrated here unintentionally that he was a lazy and inattentive reader because Hughes argued at length, in the sample chapter, that he was concerned with injustices done to third parties. Ignoring this particular point of view but picking out an unfortunate wording, where Hughes equates Germans and lunatics, Couch appears prejudiced. Besides the point that Hughes always used ‘Germans’ where Couch inserted ‘Nazis’ instead, the press’s director swaggered at length about the question whether lunatics (Couch used even back then the politically correct term ‘mentally sick persons’) could be guilty at all. In spite of these criticisms I can’t help feeling you have a book in you on this subject. I would say that what you need most now is careful criticism, criticism that will help you start an argument with yourself. If someone can manage this I believe you may be able to explode some of the cliches [!]‌current in discussion of this subject.

Couch concludes the letter with a few encouraging sentences, but rejects Hughes’s request for an advance of royalties. Also, he allows for the possibility of further discussion and development of the project by asking Hughes to send in another sample chapter. Given Hughes’s style of work – always juggling with more than one project27 – this critical letter from Couch effectively ended Hughes’s interest in publishing a book about the Germans and their attempt to cope with their Nazi past. Given earlier rejections in the summer of 1948 by Partisan Review (and probably other small magazines) and this rejection by the University of Chicago Press, it was anything but surprising that Hughes buried this project and went on to others. It might even be that Hughes himself was less persuaded than Riesman had been about the significance of this project. In an earlier letter in which Hughes reported to Riesman about the status of the project, he mentioned that working on this book would delay the manuscript of ‘Race in Industry’ (Riesman Papers, ECH to Riesman, 21 January 1949).28 In hindsight, one might question whether

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it was the best idea to send the editor as an appetizer the one chapter, which discussed the Americans and refrained from putting them ahead of the Germans. But Hughes’s selfimposed frankness forced him to do it exactly this way. I do not know whether Hughes was aware of Couch’s background as a proud Southerner and did not realize that his jibe might offend Couch. Even if this was the case, it was nonetheless surprising because at the time the University of Chicago Press published a number of works that were considered controversial.29

Buried in the Archives What remains from this episode are the diary itself and half a dozen ‘memoranda’ (a term Hughes used to describe notes to himself), some of which correspond to the 13 topics outlined in the book proposal. To say ‘the diary survived’ is somewhat misleading, however, because the ‘diary’ is not a unitary notebook. Rather, it consists of letters and notes on separate sheets assembled in Hughes’s files in two different places, under the headings ‘Germany, Frankfurt diary’ and ‘Germany, diary, correspondence’ (ECH Papers, Box 96, Folder 4 and Box 99, Folder 23, respectively). The memoranda are stored in yet another location (ECH Papers, Box 100, Folders 1 to 7 ‘Germany, memoranda’, plus additional headings). It is difficult to rearrange the diary chronologically because the sheets are not always dated, and there are several carbon copies but no originals. As well, there are in Riesman’s papers some lengthy letters that could be seen as additional diary entries. In a word, the files are a mess, indicating that Hughes stopped working on them abruptly. However, if we focus our attention on the memoranda, which are on the whole quite well elaborated, in many cases nearly full-blown drafts of chapters, we can add further to our understanding of Hughes and his views on the Germans and their efforts to cope with the legacy of Nazism in 1948. The first memorandum narrates the story of Hughes’s arrival in Germany and describes a conversation between him and a German student who picked him up at the airport and brought him to the hotel. In commenting on some ‘banal remarks’ Hughes made about damage inflicted by Allied bombing, the young German replied that neighbouring Mainz had been hit much harder. When Hughes speculated that this might have been a consequence of a higher number of industrial sites in Mainz, the student immediately and strenuously rejected Hughes’s explanation: ‘It happened because Frankfurt is a Jewish city and the international Jews did not allow hitting it harder.’ The baffled American professor, tired after a 30-hour flight across the Atlantic, did not react but switched to another topic of conversation. The same memorandum contains as well descriptions of street scenes and commentary by Hughes about the behaviour of American occupation forces and ordinary Germans (ECH Papers, Box 100, Folder 1 ‘Germany, memoranda, 1948’). The second text is prefaced with a quote from Luigi Pirandello’s novel The Outcast (L’Esclusa), which deals with a husband’s partial ignorance about his wife’s daily activities (ECH Papers, Box 100, Folder 2 ‘Germany, memoranda, mores of misery, 1948’). Hughes probably chose it to illustrate what he observed about the black market. Women did the disgraced business of dealing on the black market and hid their doings from their

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husbands. A ‘bull-session’ with students to which Hughes contributed coffee offered him illustrative material about the value of books exchanged for foodstuffs on the black market, and about the difficulties middle-class students experienced in speaking about not really legal behaviour. In the eyes of those who only later became West Germans (but who thought of themselves in 1948 as Hessians, Bavarians, Swabians, Westphalians), refugees from the Eastern part of the Reich seemed to be backward and lacking the will to assimilate. It took a while until these diverse groups started to feel themselves as Germans without further qualifications.30 After a while, students dared to ask the American professor questions. These questions ranged from the usual Germany-America comparisons to queries about styles and theories of education. Hughes likely surprised a young German who asked him about a recently published book by the psychoanalyst Franz Alexander.31 Hughes explained to the student that Alexander and other expelled psychoanalysts probably developed their basic ideas in Germany before they were forced to leave their country of origin. Among other notes, this section of Hughes’s diary describes the first students’ ball, attended by the rector, the dean and all professors of the Law Faculty (to which sociology belonged in 1948).32 We [Americans], and other profs were put one or two a table with students. The students all had places at tables around the hall, with their Bekanntinnen, of course. I sat between a student and his Bekanntin, who is a medical student. The students all had bottles of some kind of homemade wine or schnaps, – pretty poor stuff; one student opposite me had a bottle of good Mosel. There was much toasting, and I had a little – at their insistence – of every brew at the table – as well as a large stein of what passes for beer. The alcoholic content of the various brews was so small, that it did me no harm to mix them. The orchestra did pretty well, in a German sort of way, with hot music; schmaltz is more in their line. The students did their best at jitterbug, with no more than moderate success; but they obviously liked it, and there was little enthusiasm for waltzes and Bavarian hops. They did sing lustily when the fat conductor (enormous) played some Bavarian stuff. The honorary guests (profs) were given a special dance – a series of waltzes – which I enjoyed very much with the medical student, a very pretty lass who is light on her feet. We had room, as the students didn’t dance during this special.

The memorandum on the university begins by telling the story of the first lecture Hughes gave, delivered 12 April 1948. The lecture hall was crowded and even some professors were numbered among those in the audience. The dean of the law faculty, Heinz Sauermann, introduced Hughes.33 Hughes began by reading from the German manuscript he had prepared the day before. Only after some time did Hughes risk lifting his eyes from the manuscript and start to speak ‘off the cuff’. Officially the lecture had been announced as ‘Problems and Methods of American Sociology’, but Hughes was interested in something else. I jumped at once into the forbidden subjects by saying that American sociology really grew out of the great variety of nationalities and races which immigration had brought to our shores. I was convinced this was the right thing to do, rather than to start out on some harmless matter. […] I  talked about the way in which people of one nationality  – close to the

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soil and with large families – may gradually displace another people – more commerciallyminded, ambitious, with small families – on the land. A student asked from the back row, with an air of cynical self-justification, whether I was not talking about Lebensraum. I am not at all sure I was successful in making it clear to him that Lebensraum was a major problem of mankind, but that there are different ways of looking at it and trying to solve it. Within a couple of weeks I  had already mentioned race questions, Jews and military occupation. The formula of frankness was popular with the students when they got used to it.

The seminar was held under the title ‘Closer Review of Some American Investigations, with Field Work’. In order to get the students to report about their own job experiences, Hughes had brought with him copies of studies done in Chicago, some of them carried out by his students there, others by American sociologists. Whereas the Frankfurt students slowly started to admire this style of teaching, a ‘visiting middle-aged Assistant (handyman to a professor) […] thought it all very interesting and timely, but superficial’. Hughes then tells the story of how he found some books he was particularly interested in. He asked his assistant, Dr Erika Becker, to search for books by Karl Mannheim, who had been a professor at Frankfurt before 1933 when he was dismissed by the Nazis.34 Very quickly the assistant brought the books. She had discovered them in the cellar in one of a number of unopened ‘poison cabinets’ there. Ironically, Mannheim’s books and others banned by the Nazis had avoided being damaged by the bombing because they had been expelled to the basement. Hughes’s willingness to accept a temporary workplace in the corner of a corridor suited him well, because it made it easier to develop contacts with students. ‘In fact’, he said, ‘I hadn’t anything to do in Frankfurt but be available to students.’ However, the unusual ‘office’ arrangement astonished the locals and it took a while before students began to show up at his desk. After a day or so of this, my assistant said people were asking whether they could come there to see me. This was the plot, but of course everyone in Germany tried to spare a professor. Anyway, they started coming. Some wanted help to get to America, which I couldn’t give. They asked about books, research, everything. I held a sort of informal seminar there in the corridor several times.

Besides these depictions of Hughes’s experiences with German students, presented here only in brief extracts, several of the memoranda, and a good portion of the diary, are given over to descriptions of events that depict various aspects of the ‘teutonic’ academic life, sardonically characterized by Johan Galtung (1981), who would have loved to refer to Hughes’s description if it would have been publicly available at the time of his writing.

Finally, a Paper on Nazism and Beyond Thankfully, even though Hughes discontinued his effort to turn the diary into a book, he continued his examination of the Germans.35 On two later occasions, he returned to Frankfurt as an exchange professor in the Chicago-Frankfurt program. When he did so, however, he focused his attention on topics closely related to what he was doing in

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Chicago at the time. For the 1953 stay he developed a syllabus for the sociology of professions that he discussed beforehand with Max Horkheimer, who later taught more than once in the Chicago department.36 Hughes returned to Frankfurt again in 1958, and in 1961 he taught at the then newly established Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (see Raith 2001).37 The one instance in which Hughes returned to the topic of the Germans and their coming to terms with their past is the essay, ‘Good People and Dirty Work’, which appeared in print in 1962 in Social Problems.38 In a footnote the author informs his readers that the manuscript was originally presented as a lecture at McGill University in Montreal and resulted from a visit to Germany in 1948. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ is not, however, a short version of the never-completed book. Rather, it is an independent and highly condensed treatment of one crucial aspect of the subject that he had mentioned only in passing in the book proposal and the memoranda. The phrase and concept ‘dirty work’ drew no attention in Hughes’s 1949 manuscripts and the text he submitted to the press did not contain the term. He elaborated it for the oral presentation in 1948 but did not make use of it before his former student Howard S.  Becker persuaded him to publish the piece in Social Problems (Becker had become editor in 1961). The perspective apparent in the 1962 essay shows a much different angle on the subject than what Hughes wrote in 1948 and 1949. When, during my 1948 visit to Germany, I became more aware of the reactions of ordinary Germans to the horrors of the concentration camps, I  found myself asking not the usual question, ‘How did racial hatred rise to such a high level?’ but this one, ‘How could such dirty work be done among and, in a sense, by the millions of ordinary, civilized German people?’ (Hughes 1994: 181, emphasis added).

From the first line onward Hughes makes it clear that he is not concerned exclusively with the German case: ‘Nearly all peoples have plenty of cruelty and death to account for’, he notes (1994: 180). He unflinchingly mentions the phenomenon of lynching in his own country, refers to the victims of forced collectivization in the Soviet Union and notes the phenomenon of worldwide starvation. He then emphasizes that it was not just Jews that the Nazis selected as victims of their program of racist supremacy and racist extermination but also ‘Slavs and Gypsies’. One point of interest that did not change over time was Hughes’s search for an explanation of how it could have happened that millions of ordinary Germans acquiesced in the torture and killings. Likewise, he continued to search for answers to the question, how could it happen that after the Allies stopped the killing, the German people did not show any concern about these events and did not speak about this horrific aspect of their past? To understand this, Hughes used the distinction between ‘good people’ and those who executed the dirty work. Hughes rejected any interpretation that blamed the Germans for a particular inclination toward cruelty or a higher level of racism than other peoples. He pointed to a series of facts about Germany during the period before the Nazis rose to power that conflicted with such an interpretation, that is, the lack of prewar residential segregation and high rates of intermarriage across ethnic and religious boundaries.39

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For Hughes, the postwar reaction of Germans to the persecution and extermination of Jews in the death camps followed a pattern that deserved closer examination. He used a lengthy quote from an informal conversation he had with a German architect and a teacher to illustrate Germans’ initial resistance even to talk about the dirty work. For him, psychological or psychiatric interpretations about suppressed memories do not offer a fitting explanation: we have taken collective unwillingness to know unpleasant facts more or less for granted. That people can and do keep a silence about things whose open discussion would threaten the group’s conception of itself, and hence its solidarity, is common knowledge. (1994: 184)

Hughes goes on to describe some of the incidents in which Germans broke the collective silence and started to talk to him about the Nazi atrocities without having been nudged by him or anyone else. He then poses the question about how much average people usually want to know and when and where they start closing their ‘perceptual pods’, so to speak, to protect themselves from the world. Hughes finds one more aspect of the behaviour and the subsequent reactions of decent people worthy of further attention. Many average people he talked to during his earlier visit, before the rise of Hitler, and again in 1948, acknowledged that something had to be done because of the Jews. This vague phrase indicated for Hughes the wish of average Germans that someone should take the initiative to solve the so-called ‘Jewish Problem’ in any way they thought appropriate – they themselves were not interested in details. Quite the contrary. They would appreciate not being involved or even informed. We can reconstruct the logic of Hughes’s argument in the following way. Note that it abstracts from the particular case of the Nazi past and highlights the mechanism by which good people agree to let dirty work be done. (1) First and foremost, good people agree that somewhere out there a ‘problem’ exists that concerns them, makes them anxious and prompts them to agree that something must be done to solve it. (2) So that this wish can be fulfilled, there must be an outsider group of pariahs that is willing to do the dirty work, most probably in order to improve their own inferior status or to change the balance of power between ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’. According to Hughes, there were many gescheiterte Existenzen (broken lives) in preNazi Germany who joined the Nazi Party to become members of an ascending ingroup. Hughes is drawing on the Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele, from whom he used a phrase as a motto for the article. Sighele (1898) claims that one should look for the sect in the core of any mass. In the German case, the SS was this sect within the Nazi movement. (3) Whatever the dirty workers do, they can hide it from the good people, or at least can count on them to be not really interested in the details, as long as the original ‘problem’ is dealt with. (3.1) As a corollary to the above-mentioned process of mutually looking away, it is important to stress that the interplay between good people and dirty workers functions

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without public approval, debate or recognition. One could easily make reference to what we know of the well-documented behaviour of passers-by and bystanders in public spaces to whole societies:  something might happen there that I  do not want to be involved in, yet I let it take place because it serves my own convictions or purposes. (4) When the dirty work is done, the good people do not applaud the executioners. If there is a leadership change or if one political system is substituted for another, good people can claim they had no knowledge about the dirty side of the recent past. (5) To avoid the intermingling of the wishes of good people and the execution of dirty work by pariah groups, the majority must abstain from granting a mandate of any sort to such sects. Published half a century ago, Hughes’s brief but powerful essay has not received much recognition. And it cannot be claimed that the piece was hard to access. The essay has been reprinted several times: three times in separate collections of Hughes’s essays (1971, 1984, 1994) and in a widely distributed reader edited by his student and collaborator Howard S. Becker (1964). Citation analyses show that moderate use has been made of the essay, and inspecting the data about who has cited the piece reveals some interesting patterns.40 Inspecting the Google Scholar references to Hughes’s text demonstrates at least two things. Only a few citers grasp the elaborate set of mechanisms outlined above. Most frequently, they refer just to one or two of the catch phrases, sometimes employing a literal use of the term ‘dirt’! However, and this finding invites further thinking, Hughes’s insight did not reach the historians of the Holocaust and later genocides. None of the leading scholarly figures on the Nazi period refer to Hughes’s work. The simple reason might be that they really did not know about the author and his paper, but it could also be the case that historians do not like mechanisms like the one Hughes employed as explanations.41 To illustrate, we will look briefly at two leading historians and their handling of ordinary people’s opinions during the Nazi reign. Both Ian Kershaw (1981) and Otto D.  Kulka (1982/3) have published studies on ‘public opinion’ or ‘popular opinion’ during the Nazi regime. Both inspected huge collections of data but their explanatory procedure is very simple. If and only if individuals expressed approval of an action that harmed Jews did they count it as an instance of support for Nazism. Kershaw, for instance, summarizes his examination of the so-called Lageberichte, a kind of secret public opinion straw poll of the security services of the SS, in this way: Popular opinion, largely indifferent and infused with a latent anti-Jewish feeling further bolstered by propaganda, provided the climate within which spiraling Nazi aggression towards Jews could take place unchallenged. But it did not provoke the radicalization in the first place. (1981: 288)

Kershaw appears ready to absolve the average person for their behaviour rather than asking what the consequences of such indifference on the part of good people might be. Kulka is more critical of the proverbial ‘average German’ and blames them not for not

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raising their voices in protest against what happened to the Jews, but his explanation is very similar to Kershaw’s: The only active response [of ordinary Germans] – a wave of interest in the flats of the Jews marked for deportation after word of the impending expulsion first spread – is consistent with the pragmatic response [fear of consequences for themselves]. All these reactions are characterized by a striking abysmal indifference to the fate of the Jews as human beings. It seems that here, the ‘Jewish question’ and the entire process of its ‘solution’ in the Third Reich reached the point of almost complete depersonalization. (1982/3: 44)

Kulka declares at the outset of his article that he is interested in ‘the problem of public opinion in a totalitarian state’ (121), but does not pay enough attention to the fact that individuals holding oppositional views are usually wise enough not to declare their opinions in public. There are dire consequences for offering criticisms of totalitarian states. Both historians prefer to use loose psychological concepts such as latency and depersonalization instead of adopting an approach that focused on the social interaction in a way similar to studies on the relationship between principles and agents, as it is now called in economic theory. Ironically, one of the few reactions to Hughes’s 1963 paper by a sociologist blames him for not taking into account the insights from psychology and history (Rose 1963). Hughes’s reply (1963) is very polite but does not enter into a deeper examination of the principle difference between sociology and neighbouring disciplines. Several factors likely prevented Hughes’s planned book from seeing the light of day: an unwilling editor, an audience that was saturated with reports about Germany, perhaps even an author who did not spare enough time and effort to produce a persuasive book proposal, but preferred to move on to his next project.42 Whatever the causes, the result is unfortunate. The explanation for atrocities (but also minor harms) Hughes began to sketch out in his diary and memoranda and later elaborated in ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ should be used more often.

Notes 1 In a letter to David Riesman written 21 January 1949 Hughes mentioned that he had sent his diary to the editor of the press and then remarked, ‘To my astonishment he wants a book, not in the strict diary form – but organized a little more about themes and written in consecutive form’ (David Riesman Papers, Everett C. Hughes Correspondence 1948, Harvard University Archives; hereafter Riesman Papers). 2 Hereafter ECH Papers. All block quotes in the chapter are from this source. 3 Eugen Kogon (1903–87), a social scientist by education, spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps and wrote about his experiences immediately after his liberation in 1945. This book (Der SS-Staat:  Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, Munich:  Alber 1946; translated as The Theory and Practice of Hell:  The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1950) was initiated by the US Army. It became an early standard reference for the understanding of the concentration (but not the extermination) camps. Kogon was a Left Christian Socialist in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and editor of an influential magazine, Frankfurter Hefte.

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4 The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) became the leading party in West Germany and won the first elections in 1949 with a small advantage of eight seats more than the second big party, the Social Democrats. Konrad Adenauer from the CDU was the first elected chancellor of the FRG, heading a coalition government with the Social Democrats. 5 This sample chapter has since been published (Hughes 2010). Andreas Hess pointed out to me that Mark Twain used the same title for his book about his travels to Europe. Given Hughes’s familiarity with fiction, he might have chosen the same title on purpose. However, the Hughes Papers give no indication that such was the case. 6 Guth (2010) discusses this text at great length. 7 Hughes refers here to Saint Peter, cf. Luke 22: 31–4. 8 The material Hughes collected during this year in Germany is in ECH Papers, Box 99 and Box 74, ‘Folder 6: Sociology 6, Social Movements, notes, 1933–1937’. 9 Riesman defined ‘nerve of failure’ in 1948 as ‘the courage to face aloneness and the possibility to defeat in one’s personal life or one’s work without being morally destroyed’ (Riesman [1948] 1954, 55). The other article Hughes referred to is Riesman (1947); both are reprinted in Riesman (1954). 10 Regarding the history of this report, see Fleck (2011, 274). 11 Sociologist Herbert H. Hyman (1918–85) was involved in the US Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany 1942–46 and became Senior Project Director at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in 1947, a position he kept part-time after becoming professor at Columbia University in 1951. 12 Rostow and Lasswell were at the law school at Yale where Riesman spent the year 1947–48 on a fellowship. 13 Politics Magazine was founded in 1944 by Dwight Macdonald. It was an anti-Stalinist magazine by and for New York intellectuals. It ceased publication in 1949. 14 Partisan Review was the leading ‘small magazine’ of New York intellectuals. Founded in 1934, it appeared until 2003. In the beginning, it belonged to the Communist Party but later switched to a Trotskyist and then to a fundamental anticommunist, and finally a neoconservative orientation. 15 Hutchins (1899–1977), one of the leading American educational experts, led the University of Chicago from 1929–51 as president and chancellor. 16 Rahv (1908–73) was the founding and long-time editor of Partisan Review. 17 One has to be aware of Riesman’s personality to judge his behaviour correctly, but there is no reason to fear that Hughes missed this. In June 1948 Riesman even proposed that someone whom he had met recently be hired as an exchange professor in the future. The person Riesman recommended, Lewis A. Coser, did not hold a PhD at the time and started teaching for the first time in the fall term at the college of the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, the ‘recommendation’ letter from 22 June 1948 by Riesman is a wonderful example of his actions as an intermediary (Riesman Papers, Riesman to Hughes, 22 June 1948). 18 Nathan Glazer worked as a journalist for Commentary and with Riesman (and Reuel Denney) wrote The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950). They carried out the research for this study while Riesman was on a fellowship at Yale, where he hired Glazer as a research assistant/collaborator. 19 Started in 1945 and published by the American Jewish Committee. 20 Henry Regnery (1912–96) founded his own press in Chicago in 1947. It later became known for its conservative outlook. The first book Regnery published was Our Threatened Values, by Victor Gollancz (1893–1967), a British author and owner of a publishing house. In this pamphletlike book Gollancz defended the Germans and criticized the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland.

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21 The short letter by Rahv, written 11 August 1948, contains a criticism by Rahv that Riesman had hidden from Hughes: ‘The excerpt you sent me some time ago seemed far more interesting than the total manuscript now strikes us’ (Riesman Papers, Rahv to Riesman, 11 August 1948). 22 Hughes asked the press’s director in December 1948 about potential publication by sending material from the diary. Early in March 1949 Hughes completed the submission for publication by sending in the memorandum and the sample chapter (ECH Papers, Box 100, folder 6). 23 For example, anthropologist Robert Lowie did not quote many Germans or Austrians verbatim in his book, Toward Understanding Germany (1954). 24 See Hughes (1960) and Hughes (1970); compare Chapoulie (1984) and Helmes-Hayes (2010). 25 See the obituary in the Chicago Tribune, 15 December 1988 and the online listing of the William T. Couch Papers at the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 26 In 1949, Hughes successfully lobbied the press to publish a supplement to the AJS, designed to help Gustav Ichheiser gain a foothold in American academia, an effort that failed dramatically (see Fleck 2015, ­chapter 4). 27 See, e.g., Hughes self-description in an accompanying letter to the then-editor of Social Problems, Howard S. Becker: ‘I publish relatively few of the things I write. My files are full of sketches, lectures, drafts’ (ECH Papers box 109, folder 4; compare Riesman (1983)). 28 It is unclear which manuscript Hughes was referring to here. The use of the title ‘Race in Industry’ is not helpful because there is a huge collection of files under this title in the Hughes Papers: Box 100: Committee on Human Relations in Industry, 1944–45. 29 See, e.g., A. Frank Reel, The Case of General Yamashita. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949. Reel’s book offered a sharp criticism of the trial, conviction and execution of a Japanese general for war crimes. Hughes would have detected in Reel’s book, written by Yamashita’s public defender, the contrasting of a We (Americans against General Douglas MacArthur and his high-handed way of behaving in Japan) against a They (ignorant militarists and adorer of MacArthur denying due process to the enemy). 30 This process was repeated 40 years later when ‘Wessis’ and ‘Ossis’ struggled much longer to become ‘reunified’ Germans. 31 Franz Alexander (1891–1964), a Hungarian, worked as a psychoanalyst in Berlin and left for Chicago in 1930. The book’s title is not mentioned in Hughes’s diary, but most probably it was the German translation of Our Age of Unreason: A Study of the Irrational Forces in Social Life (1942), which came out in Stuttgart in 1946 as Irrationale Kräfte unserer Zeit: Eine Studie über das Unbewußte in Politik und Geschichte. 32 One should keep in mind that when Hughes visited Frankfurt the exiled Institut für Sozialforschung directed by Max Horkheimer had not yet returned. Horkheimer came back later in 1949 and the Institut reopened a year later. 33 Sauermann (1905–81) lived in Germany during the Nazi regime and, in 1946, became a professor of both economics and sociology at Frankfurt where he had held an unpaid position since 1939. In the course of the Chicago-Frankfurt exchange program he spent the academic year 1949–50 in Chicago. 34 Becker finished her studies in December 1945 at Frankfurt with a dissertation about changes in consumer behaviour. In 1949 she joined there the Chicago-style Public Administration Clearing House and later was a member of both the Deutschen Frauenring and the German Sociological Association. She died in 1958. 35 In addition to the 1962 article in Social Problems, Hughes wrote a second eye-opening essay, this one dealing with the disappearance of Jews from the official German Statistical Yearbook (Hughes 1955). As well, he wrote a review of some conference proceedings (Hughes 1950) and an obituary for Leopold von Wiese (Hughes 1969). 36 See the correspondence between Hughes and Horkheimer, which goes from 1952 until 1971, at the Archivzentrum of the Universitätsbibliothek of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, UBA Ffm Na 1 Nr. 303.

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37 I did not examine the Hughes Papers for later periods. 38 ECH Papers, Box 109, Folder 4 ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ contains drafts from 1948 until 1963, in addition to letters to and from the then-editor of Social Problems, Howard S. Becker. 39 It is not a surprise that Daniel Goldhagen, who championed such an interpretation, did not quote Hughes’s 1963 paper in his bestseller, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). See below for data on the reception of Hughes’s paper. 40 Web of Science shows 66 citations of the 1963 text, JSTOR gives 78 hints toward the title phrase and Google Scholar reports 350 (retrieved June 30, 2015). These numbers are lower than the real usage of this particular paper, because quotations to any of Hughes’ volumes of collected essays are not counted even if authors refer to ‘Good people and dirty work’, reprinted therein. 41 Another paper by Hughes on a Nazi topic, ‘Die Gleichschaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook’, (1955) likewise attracted little attention, reprinted therein. 42 See the afterword to Neurath (2005) for a similar case.

References Archival Sources Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives D. Riesman Papers, Harvard University

Other Becker, Howard S., ed. 1964. The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance, Glencoe: Free Press. ———, B. Geer, D. Riesman and R. Weiss, eds. 1968. Institutions and the Person: Papers Presented to Everett C. Hughes. Chicago: Aldine. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1984. ‘Everett C. Hughes et le développement du travail de terrain en sociologie’, Revue française de sociologie 25 (4): 582–608. Coser, Lewis A. 1994. ‘Introduction:  Everett Cherrington Hughes 1897–1983’. In Everett C. Hughes:  On Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination, edited by L. A. Coser, 1–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleck, Christian. 2011. A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2015. Etablierung in der Fremde:  Vertriebene Wissenschaftler in den USA nach 1933. Frankfurt/ New York: Campus. Galtung, Johan. 1981. ‘Structure, Culture and Intellectual Style: An Essay Comparing Saxonic, Teutonic, Gallic and Nipponic Approaches’, Social Science Information 20: 817–56. Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners:  Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Guth, Suzie. 2010. ‘Everett C.  Hughes’s Journey in Occupied Germany (1948):  Black Market, Bastard Institutions and Dirty Work’. In Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology:  The Migration and Development of Ideas, edited by Cherry Schrecker, 255–66. Farnham: Ashgate. Helmes-Hayes, Rick. 2010. ‘Studying “Going Concerns”: Everett Hughes on Method’, Sociologica 2: 1–27, doi: 10.2383/32714. Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— 1950. ‘Verhandlungen des Achten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19. bis 21. September 1946 in Frankfurt a. M.’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft Bd. 106 (1): 161–63. ———. 1955. ‘Die Gleichschaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook’, American Statistician 9 (5): 8–11. ———. 1960. ‘The Place of Field Work in Social Science’. In Buford H. Junker, Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, 496–506. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1962. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’, Social Problems 10:  3–11. Reprinted in Hughes 1971: 87–97; 1984: 87–97; 1994: 180–91. ———. 1963. ‘Rejoinder to Rose’, Social Problems 10 (4): 390. ———. 1969. ‘Leopold von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau 1876–1969’, American Sociologist 4 (2): 161. ———. 1970. ‘Teaching as Fieldwork’, American Sociologist 5 (1): 13–18. ———. 1971. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1984. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. New Brunswick: Transaction, with a new introduction by David Riesman and Howard S. Becker, 2nd ed. 1993, 3rd ed. 2008. ———. 1994. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’. In Everett C. Hughes: On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination, edited and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, 180–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. ‘Innocent Abroad, 1948: Or How to Behave in Occupied Germany’, Sociologica 2, doi: 10.2383/32715. Kershaw, Ian. 1981. ‘The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 26 (1): 261–89. Kulka, Otto D. 1982/3. ‘Public Opinion in Nazi Germany and the “Jewish Question” ’, Jerusalem Quarterly 25: 121–44 and 26: 34–45. Lowie, Robert H. 1954. Toward Understanding Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neurath, Paul M. 2005. The Society of Terror:  Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Boulder: Paradigm. Raith, Dirk. 2001. ‘Wien darf nicht Chicago werden:  Ein amerikanischer Soziologe über Österreich, die Nazis und das IHS’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 26 (3): 46–65. Riesman, David. 1947. ‘Some Observations on Community Plans and Utopia’, Yale Law Journal 57 (2): 173–200. ———. (1948). ‘A Philosophy for “Minority” Living:  The Jewish Situation and the “Nerve of Failure” ’, Commentary, 6, November. ———. 1954. Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———. 1983. ‘The Legacy of Everett Hughes’, Contemporary Sociology 12 (5): 477–81. Rodnick, David. 1948. Postwar Germans: An Anthropologist’s Account. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rose, Arnold M. 1963. ‘Comment on “Good People and Dirty Work” ’, Social Problems 10 (3): 285–86. Sighele, Scipio. (1898) Psychologie des Sectes. Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière. Whyte, William F. 1943. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1955. ‘Appendix A:  On the Evolution of “Street Corner Society” ’. In Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd enlarged edition, 279–358.

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Chapter Seven THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF EVERETT HUGHES’S CONCEPT: ‘MASTER STATUS’ Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott and Deborah K. van den Hoonard

The concept of ‘master status’, which Hughes presented in his seminal article ‘Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status’ in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) in 1945, has only gained momentum over the years. It has come to be used in a range of literatures and situations. Although Hughes’s article was immediately influential in the debates of the day around status and roles, the actual term ‘master status’ was not cited regularly until the 1970s, which coincided with the fall of structural-functionalism, increased attention to the inequality of racism and rising academic interest in intersectionality. At that point, the term’s own status increased. As the academic community turned its focus to race in the late 1960s and 1970s, master status became an ideal term for understanding at least some of the dynamics of race relations. As well, however, sociologists began to apply it to character traits that were incongruent with other traits and problematic in some way, often traits that mainstream people perceive as negative. Through the 1980s, scholars continued to use the term to study race. At the same time, however, the term master status garnered attention from those studying gender. During the 1990s and after, scholars sustained use of this concept in the fields of race and gender and extended it to apply to a myriad of other traits – both visible and invisible. A Google Scholar web search finds that the literature has cited Hughes’s 1945 article 857 times, with roughly 250 of those citations in languages other than English, about 150 of those in German. We downloaded each of the English articles, along with some of the French and German articles, to Endnote. This amounted to 671 articles, in total, spanning 1946 to 2014. We read 138 of these articles, attending to whether the actual term master status was used, what status trait it referenced (e.g., race, gender, junkie), whether the term was defined explicitly and whether it was used to develop theory. We also read much of the work of Hughes’s students, whether they were cited in our search or not, to ascertain the extent to which Hughes’s article was cited and/or whether the term master status was used. Like Jaworski (2000), we found that many of Hughes’s students did not cite him directly, Howard Becker being the outlier, fittingly as Becker’s studies centre on outliers. Jaworksi (2000) identifies Hughes’s student Erving Goffman as Hughesian even

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though Goffman, as he built his reputation, hid his relationship with Hughes. We compiled these data into a spreadsheet that we could reorganize according to date, status trait, author and so on. We uploaded PDFs of articles that use the term master status in theory development into Nvivo and coded the relevant sections for themes. Additionally, we kept memos on trends that we noticed. There is some controversy about whether or not Hughes was a theorist (Helmes-Hayes 1998), perhaps because he was not a proponent of grand theory. Rather, Hughes’s interest was social process (Chapoulie 1996). In addition, as Helmes-Hayes (1998) points out, Hughes chose to write in plain language rather than more abstract and difficult language. David Riesman and Becker (1984: ix) point out that he looked at a variety of ‘encounters as a general way of seeing’ rather than adopting too narrow a focus or too grand a theory. For Hughes, social relations formed the basis of study of any institution or group (Chapoulie 1996). The concepts he developed, like master status, are useful when exploring a variety of arenas, not just the instance he discussed in his original article.1 This type of concept lends itself well to adoption by sociologists writing from various perspectives at various times. Ironically, as we argue below, its resonance made it such a familiar part of the sociologists’ everyday lexicon that its origin has been all but forgotten. In the balance of the chapter, we briefly outline the early conversations around role and status, and examine the popularity of the term in various literatures since the 1970s. We then argue that Becker’s application of the term to negative situations, specifically, the identity of the junkie (1963), was a pivotal turning point in the application of the concept master status, extending its use into the field of deviance. During the 1980s and 1990s scholars began to apply this term to both visible and invisible traits and, in the last 15 years, it has become remarkably popular. In the early 2000s people stopped, for the most part, defining the term when they used it, taking for granted that its meaning was understood. An unfortunate consequence of this development was that they likewise failed to cite Hughes.

Early Literature Theorizing about Role, Status and Identity Traits: The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s In the 1940s and 1950s, scholars were interested in the idea of roles. With families becoming more oriented toward a nuclear ideal (Jackson 1985; Parsons 1943), and gender roles changing (in part as a result of men coming and going from the war), this is hardly surprising. The main contributors to this discussion were Gerhard Lenksi (1950; 1952; 1954; 1956), William Kenkel (1952; 1959; Cuber and Kenkel 1954; Kenkel and Hoffman 1956), Emile Benoit-Smullyan (1944), and, of course, Everett Hughes (1937; 1938; 1945; 1949; 1956; Hughes and Hughes 1952). Many terms were coined, thrown about and appropriated during these early years. Below we follow the shifting development and relationship of the definitions for role and status. It is helpful to pause here to introduce other terms that frequently appear in the literature and that we use extensively in this chapter. Character traits (traits contributing to a definition of the self) can be ascribed (given by or created through the eyes of others), such as race and gender. Master identities a term used by Candace West and Don H.  Zimmerman (1987), citing Hughes, refers to ascribed identities that cut

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across situations, to categories or tropes that are popularly understood. Traits can also be achieved – that is, the status of doctor or drug addict results from the work or behaviour of the individual who bears (achieves) the trait. Achieved traits may also be subject to the influence of others, such as in defining whether the trait is positive or negative, but they are not ascribed at birth even though they might ultimately become relevant across social scenes. While our discussion begins at a time when grand theories were the norm, and status and role were considered primarily in their institutional capacities (i.e., for use within discussion around cultural-social structures as contexts), the terms gradually came to be used interchangeably and, as the interest became more micro, involved questions of individual identity and character traits.2 Hughes entered the field just over 20  years before Lenski and Kenkel and began exploring issues of status in 1938, with his work on status in a Quebec industrial community (Hughes 1943; Helmes-Hayes 2000: 130, 134, 141–2). This was soon followed by Benoit-Smullyan’s American Sociological Review (ASR) article on status types and how they interrelate (1944). Hughes immediately followed with his own ASR article in which he developed his seminal work on status and role dilemmas. In this article, Hughes famously used the example of an African-American3 doctor to address role inconsistencies according to status traits, offering master status as a way to think about how one status might trump another, given certain contexts. In Hughes’s example, each of the two characteristics, race and professional standing, would normally overshadow any other characteristic of an individual, hence making it a master status. The dilemma for ‘whites who meet such a person’, said Hughes, is deciding whether to treat them as an African-American person or a member of their profession (Hughes 1945). In 1952, Lionel Nieman and James Hughes published a literature review on the concept of role. This was right around the time that Lenski and Kenkel entered the field and began to take an interest in role and status. Nieman and Hughes list multiple definitions of role, highlighting two key contributions from Hughes’s definition of role. First, they frame his definition as rooted in an institutional approach, that is, it emerges from Hughes’s work within organizational settings. Second, they address how he connects role and status, thereby conceptualizing role as more than a dynamic aspect of status (1952: 146). Citing Hughes, they argue, Role is dynamic, but it is also something more than status. Status refers only to that part of one’s role which has a standard definition in the mores or in law. A status is never peculiar to the individual; it is historic. The person, in status and in institutional office is identified with a [sic] historic role. (Nieman and Hughes 1952: 146, citing Hughes 1937 and 1945)

Lenski and Kenkel turn the conversation toward status, concerning themselves with ‘status crystallization’ (Lenski 1954; 1956) and the status consistency or inconsistency that results from expected or unexpected character traits, that is, characteristics that accompany a particular status. Lenski was more explicitly macro-oriented, addressing the four status factors of income, education, prestige of occupation and prestige of ethnicity, while Kenkel, by comparison, often focussed on status within the context of family dynamics (1959; also Kenkel and Hoffman 1956).

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Andrzej Malewski (1963) eventually breaks up the various conversations by using a combination of George Homans and Hughes. Malewski uses Homans’s definition of individual status ‘as the complex set of the stimuli which [the status in question] presents to others (and to himself) and which are evaluated by others as better or worse, higher or lower [in prestige]’ (Malewski 1963:  9, referencing Homans 1961:  149). Malewski again follows Homans (1961) to define status factors as ‘everything which distinguishes an individual from others’ (1963: 10) and then turns to a discussion of Hughes’s observations about African-American doctors and master status. Surprisingly, Malewski does not actually cite the term explicitly, despite discussing its definition. Hughes was a leader in this conversation, although he was not always cited. Homans, however, was cited for the vague idea of role inconsistency theory, while Hughes applied and developed more practical conceptual tools to talk and think about role and status theory. Hughes was not cited as frequently as he should have been during this time, likely for the kinds of reasons that Goffman rarely cited Hughes, despite drawing heavily on him theoretically (Jaworski 2000). At this early stage of the conversation, each of the contributors was putting forward their own terms. In the end, however, master status and the 1945 article more generally became the standard and proved to have lasting influence. Hughes’s own students often cited his 1945 article, but they, like Goffman, were interested in putting forward their own terms. Becker was the only student of Hughes to consistently cite him. We discuss this development below. Articles and books on role theory and status inconsistency continued to cite Hughes, generally without using the term master status, through the 1950s (e.g., Gibbs and Martin 1958; Lieberson 1958; McCormack 1956; Wilson 1959). The exceptions are Irwin Goffman (1957), who used it as a toss-off term without defining it, and Becker and Blanche Geer (1960), who discussed auxiliary and latent identities around race. The conversation expanded into discussions of identity theory through the early 1960s (e.g., Davis 1961; Ray 1961; Ross 1961; Russell 1961). This included mention of the psychological effects of anomie resulting from identity-related status inconsistency (Simpson and Miller 1963). Conversations about status inconsistency and role theory persisted (Bauman 1968; Biddle et al. 1962; Broom and Gibbs 1964; Dickie-Clark 1966; Elton 1962; Gullahorn and Gullahorn 1963; Heffernan 1968). Following Hughes’s institutional approach, many scholars studied role inconsistency within the sociology of professions (e.g., Bernard and Riesman 1964; Colombotos 1969; Kolak 1968; Segal 1962; Weissberg 1968). The most notable of these studies was carried out by William Womack and Nathaniel Wagner (1967). They found that, for white patients reacting to the status of their African-American doctor, the doctor’s being a psychiatrist trumped his being African American. Much of the literature mentioned above continued to deliberate over two conflicting roles in its discussion of role inconsistency, such as Womack and Wagner’s (1967) consideration of the status of psychiatrist and race or Jessie Bernard and Riesman’s (1964) examination of academic women. They continued to cite Hughes’s 1945 article, but at this point the term master status had not yet assumed a position of prominence in the literature.

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The 1960s and 1970s was a period of great social unrest. The Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement in opposition to the Vietnam War, and the Women’s and Students’ Rights Movements all contributed to an upheaval in social theory. New approaches such as ‘phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structuralism, Marxism, feminism and other critical theories’ claimed to be more useful to characterize and explain contemporary society. (Kellner 1990: 11) The focus on inequality that these movements reflect provided rich ground for the use and development of a concept such as master status. Until the 1970s, scholars continue to rely on Hughes when confronting issues of status or role inconsistency, both in and out of institutional settings. Suddenly, in the early 1970s, the term caught on. There were several movements afoot within sociology at this time. Structural-functionalism (Davis and Moore 1945; Parsons 1951) seemed unable to deal adequately with social change and seemed to justify structural inequalities as functional and therefore acceptable. This view proved too conservative and prejudicial for the 1960s and by the 1970s, structuralfunctionalism had achieved a degree of infamy. At the same time, the racist toll of the Jim Crow Era, lasting until the mid-1960s, had accumulated, and by the 1970s, sociologists were attending to the inequality of racism at the individual and the systemic level. This attention went beyond the consideration of black doctors to address macro- and microlevel structures of inequality pertaining not only to African Americans but also to other marginalized groups. As identity theory began to pick up speed in earnest, there was a rising academic interest in intersectionality. It was at this point that the term master status was resurrected. When considering inequality and multiple, layered and intersecting identities, the concept of master status allows for an analysis to acknowledge how one status may be dominant and privileged by those interacting. Although Hughes did not initially intend for the concept to include negative, often-invisible statuses, when Becker cited it, first in 1963, the momentum for master status began to build.

Becker’s Application of Master Status to Stigmatized, Deviant Identities In 1963, Becker effusively praised Hughes for the influence he had had on his work. He also extended the concept of master status in three ways. First, he applied it to stigmatized identities. Rather than focussing on how being a doctor would trump a negative character trait, he shone light on how a stigmatized character trait, that is, becoming a junkie, could trump other character traits or roles in the case of status inconsistency. Second, Becker applied the concept to an identity that might not be immediately visible to others. For example, one’s race or occupational status is often immediately apparent from the context and habitus of the person in question. By contrast, it is not always immediately apparent that one is a junkie or addict of some sort. For Becker (1963), being a junkie became a master status that overshadowed all other roles, including family roles. Although the term did not become widespread until the 1970s, this was a pivotal moment for the concept. Its usefulness multiplied as it suddenly became applicable to all

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kinds of different situations where not only roles were in question but also stigmatized identities. As the turn to identity theory developed, so did the use of the term master status. Third, Becker encouraged scholars to consider the perspective of the person whose character traits were in question. In the past, the focus had been on the perspective of someone judging another person’s status. As a patient, when a doctor walks into the room with unexpected auxiliary character traits, different from those doctors usually have (i.e., white, male), then there is status inconsistency for the patient. While the doctor must interactionally negotiate the result of his inconsistent auxiliary character traits, and perhaps pre-emptively act more authoritative or dress more formally, the matter of interest is what character trait trumps the others from the perspective of the patient. In this sense, master status is a close relative of the looking-glass self (Cooley 1902). The doctor quickly learns whether the patient sees him first as a doctor or as something else. Through experience, the doctor learns that he may have to pre-emptively dress more formally to ensure that his master status, in the eyes of others, is his role as doctor. In the conversations about status inconsistency, the emphasis is primarily on how a person is received and where that person goes from there, rather than taking how a person views him- or herself as the starting point. In the matter of the junkie, the junkie him or herself recognizes that he or she is a junkie, that this is a stigmatized identity, and that, for him or her, that identity minimizes the salience of other identities. The ways in which Becker extended the term master status made it infinitely more malleable, without undermining the original intention of the term. Others studying deviance and stigmatized behaviour started to pick up on this concept. Earl Rubington and Martin S. Weinberg used it in their reader on deviance in 1968 to refer to addicts; however, they primarily cited Erving Goffman rather than Hughes for ideas around roles and identity salience. For his part, Richard Bord (1971) relied on the concept of master status to examine the identity of being mentally ill. At this point, the meaning of the term diversified to apply to an even broader range of literatures. From the 1970s on, using Becker’s extension of the definition of master status, scholars drew heavily on the term in a variety of research areas and for a variety of purposes. For example, in the 1970s scholars applied the term master status to the identity of the police officer (Balch 1972; Richman 1973), to gender (Kaufman 1977; Kidder and Stewart 1975; Lorber 1975; Tick 1973) and to being a member of the clergy (Chambers and Chalfant 1978). In addition, they continued to use it in institutional studies around the study of professions (Auster 1978; Bryen and Bartel 1973; Epstein 1970a; 1970b; Elesh and Schollaert 1972; Kadushin 1976; Kanter and Stein 1979; Shuval 1970). As well, sociologists used it not just to understand status inconsistency and to develop role theory vis-à-vis both the family and gender (Hunt and Hunt 1977; Yorburg 1974) but also in the context of more general theorizing around role salience, identity theory and auxiliary character traits (Arikado 1976; Baer et al. 1976; Berger et al. 1972; Carlton 1977; Meintel 1973; Nelson 1973; Reed 1974; Stryker and Macke 1978). The relationship between the looking-glass self (Cooley 1902) and master status weakens as scholars begin to use this term to apply to a self-identified status, rather than status conferred by the other. Robert Balch (1972), for example, uses it to describe the master

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status of being a police officer from the point of view of the officer. The officer considers being a policeman to be his master status. This is a departure from using the term to examine whether or not – in the eyes of other social actors – one’s status or role as police officer trumps additional traits the officer might possess. Balch, however, citing Becker, describes how being a police officer is a master status in the mind of the police officer, which gives him the feeling of ability to judge and/or label those whom he encounters. It is a perception of his own master status from within.

Negative Status and Visible/Ascribed versus Invisible/Achieved Status Through the 1980s and 1990s, two trends emerge in how scholars apply the term master status. First is the attachment to negative status, as Becker first applied it. Second is the application of master status to invisible statuses. While both of these are offshoots from Becker’s new application of the term, it is during this time period that the broad diversity of uses begins to fall primarily into these two categories of extension in use from Hughes’s initial formulation. Deviance theory, labelling theory and research dealing with stigma use master status to describe all manner of traits, many of which are neither auxiliary nor visible. In these literatures, scholars lessen the comparative thrust of the idea of master status and a secondary identity. For example, where previously the term was used to understand a situation in which one person had to judge another in terms of the relative salience of two statuses in competition – for example, ‘Do I respond to this person as a physician or as an African American?’ – now the term was being used to label people as some form of deviant (Elliott et al. 1982), as being, for example, mentally ill (Eaton 1980; Gove 1982). Zimmermann (1985) puts forward a review and analysis of the literature on status inconsistency in the mid-1980s. He begins by arguing that there has been insufficient empirical research on the matter and too much arm-chair theorizing. He stresses two elements that are relevant here. First, he points out that we need to consider the number of status dimensions under consideration, echoing Becker’s initial movement toward contemporary considerations of intersectionality. Second, he strongly believes that the difference between achieved and ascribed status cannot be overestimated. He emphasizes that a socially visible trait is necessary for status inconsistency to occur; otherwise, the individual in question will not experience any disjuncture of treatment in accordance with his or her master status. Auxiliary traits, such as race, must be visible in order to have an effect on status inconsistency (Zimmermann 1985). This, perhaps, underestimates the influence of self-image in interactions, but certainly adheres to the initial theoretical closeness between master status and the looking-glass self. Some scholars continued to use the term comparatively, employing it to understand the phenomenon of ‘role inconsistency’, for example in their discussions of occupational status (Broussard and Yong 1986; Zimmer 1988) and auxiliary traits (Muelemann 1985; Whitt 1983). While race still held a firm place in the sociological discussions (Anderson 1980; Jacobs and Kraft 1983; Smith and Seff 1989), the racial tensions of the forceful black power movement began to fade. Discussions around gender rose to the forefront.

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Those taking a comparative, competing-role focus examined gender in nontraditional occupations (Fine 1987): female managers (Buono and Kamm 1983; West 1982), female guards (Zimmer 1988), female doctors (West 1984) or priests (Anderson and Clarke 1990; Carroll et al. 1983; Kleinman 1984) and male nurses (Egeland and Brown 1989; Laroche and Livneh 1983). The comparative thrust of the concept, through the 1980s, begins to engage more macroconversations around structural inequality and multiple, intersecting roles, reflecting a concern with structural racism and other top-down concerns (Fine 1986; Mann 1987; Muelemann 1985; Smith and Seff 1989; Zimmerman 1985). At the same time, however, it remained the case that the term master status was increasingly used in the area of social typing or labelling (Adler 1987; Snow and Machalek 1983; Stryker and Statham 1985; Wagner and Berger 1982; Webster and Driskell 1983). Labelling theory most often focussed on negative labels or identities. It is in the 1980s that the term master status became firmly attached to negative statuses (Loseke and Spencer 1984; Page 1984): mental illness (Gove 1982; Thoits 1985), ethnicity (Driedger 1987), ‘swinger’ (Jenks 1985), runaway (Palenski 1984), homosexual (Jenks 1988; Kitzinger 1987) and alcoholic (Glassner and Berg 1984). Some of these statuses are achieved, and some ascribed. Some are visible, while some are not. For example, ethnic identities are always on display, although there may be some ambiguity about the ethnic group to which the person belongs. By comparison, most of the time mental illness is not visible. Peggy Thoits (1985) uses master status to refer to mental illness and stresses the self-labelling process. In doing so, she distances master status from its cousin relationship to the looking-glass self, allowing the self to internally decide something is a master status, rather than having master status consist of socially ascribed statuses based on the perspective of others in a given situation. Toward the end of the 1980s, the rapidly growing popularity of the term master status sparked some further theory development. Where Becker advanced the concept by applying it in a novel way, others either developed or challenged the concept. Patricia Adler and Peter Adler (1989) helped develop the concept by exploring what mechanisms generate a master status. They focus on college athletes, namely basketball players, and how these athletes developed a ‘gloried self ’ – a result of the adulation and celebrity that came with being on the team. They trace the process through which the ‘gloried self ’ develops into a master status, overshadowing all other identities. They determine that the athletes simultaneously underwent processes of self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment, during which dimensions of their respective identities were either developed or cast aside. As well, they discuss the relationship between dramaturgical roles and real selves, deepening our understanding of the process by which a master status forms and takes root. By contrast, West and Zimmerman (1987), challenge the blanket application of the term master status. In their seminal article on ‘doing gender’, they argue that to view gender as a role ‘obscures the work that is involved in producing gender in everyday activities’ (127). They also push back against the conception of gender as display, stating that ‘gender as display relegates it to the periphery of interaction’ (127). They reject the term ‘master identity’, arguing instead that roles are ‘situated identities’ that are ‘assumed and relinquished as the situation demands’ and that gender has ‘no specific site or organizational context’ (1987: 128) as most other ‘roles’, such as ‘doctor’.

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Of the articles published in the 1990s, 37 per cent applied the term master status to a visible status such as disability (Charmaz 1994; 1995) or gender (Chafetz 1997; Snow et al. 1991), and 46 per cent applied the term to an invisible status, such as criminality (Bursik 1999) or former addict (Brown 1991). From 1996 onward, 17 per cent applied the term in broader discussions that engaged both visible and invisible traits, such as work on deviance (Kelly 1996) or gender and sexuality (Carr 1999). By this point, scholars saw the term as sufficiently commonplace and well understood that only 46 per cent of the articles published in the 1990s included a definition when using the concept. The use of the term master status in theorizing and conversations around status inconsistency begins to fade in the 1990s. Scholars use the concept almost exclusively to refer to deviant and negative characteristics. Master status is used more frequently in the discussion of invisible statuses, while most of the visible statuses to which the term is applied are either negative or present a challenge (gender or a ‘race other than white’, for example, are not ‘bad’ characteristics, but they do present challenges in the negotiation of status in interactions). Identity politics gain new ground in the 1990s, particularly as a consequence of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS, in particular, brings identity politics to the forefront of not only national discourse but also sociological work and theorizing as well. While identity politics certainly overlaps with deviance (such as with drug abuse), the ideas around identity politics begin to permeate sociological discourse. The concept of master status continues to be useful in discussions of identity, even as the conversation moves away from role or status inconsistency. When Hughes first introduced the concept, and in the earlier debates around role theory, master status described the trait (usually positive) that dominated in a particular context and categorized auxiliary traits as those that might ‘problematize’ a role (Hughes 1945). One’s master status as a physician might be problematized for others by the fact one was black. By the 1990s, sociologists often apply master status to the problematic, or inconsistent, auxiliary characteristic to describe its impingement on interactions and experiences. This naturally follows from its attachment to negative statuses that might or might not be visible. AIDS itself is an example of an invisible negative status that causes problems or challenges – both for those who are ill and those who are interacting with them, and the 1990s saw a substantial amount of literature on AIDS, identity politics and master status. AIDS was first referenced as a master status in 1990. Kent Sandstrom (1990) employed it in a discussion of identity politics, claiming that people with AIDS had to negotiate both positive and negative aspects of what had become for them a master-status identity. Mark Kowalewski (1990; 1994) used it in the area of the sociology of religion and social constructionism, arguing that the master status of AIDS could be variously interpreted along a religious continuum of worth (see also Green and Platt 1997; Siegal and Krauss 1991). In short, between 1963, when Becker applied Hughes’s term in a then-novel manner, and 2000, sociologists used the term in ever more diversified ways. During this period, master status came to refer most often to negative or problematic traits that might or might not be visible. As well, it came to be used to describe self-ascribed statuses, thus distancing the term from its original meaning (e.g., Belknap and Shelley 1993; Garza 1992; Snow and Anderson 1993; Stephens 1991; Wilkinson 1991). Scholars working in

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the areas of deviance and identity applied the term enthusiastically, using it in studies of identity – music teacher (Roberts 1991), dieter (English 1993), having a deaf identity (Harris 1995). Others used it in the area of identity politics (Strauss 1997) – particularly around sexuality (Donner 1999; Laird 1999). Others used it to study stigma or ‘difference’ (Stiles and Kaplan 1996). Such studies examined, for example, being gifted (Ehmke 1995; Margolin 1993), being homeless (Anderson et al. 1994; Snow and Anderson 1993), being Muslim (Swanson 1999) and having AIDS (Sandstrom 1990).

Use of Master Status in the Last 15 Years In the last 15  years, scholars have continued the trend toward using master status to describe an internally defined status rather than an externally ascribed status. The tendency to use the term to refer to visible statuses, particularly race and gender, has continued as well. The persistent attention on invisible, internally defined statuses seems to parallel many trends in society today that privilege inward-looking, individualistic processes. In addition, when scholars apply master status to a visible category, such as race, the visible category itself becomes understood as the master status rather than as an auxiliary status. An auxiliary status challenges or is out of sync with expectations of traits that would accompany a positive or privileged master status. Viewing race, however, as the master status rather than an as auxiliary status moves the conception of master status further from the looking-glass self, as it is less contextually defined by others. The year 2002 is an auspicious one in our account of the history of the development and use of the term master status. Of the articles published in 2000 and 2001, 57 per cent defined the term. However, of those published from 2002 onward, only 33 per cent did so. If one excludes those articles using the term for theory development (and which therefore had to provide a definition), only 29 per cent of articles published post-2002 defined the term. That means 71 per cent of people who use the term assume that the reader has the meaning of master status as part of his or her common sociological knowledge. Also around 2002, people begin to use the term without citing Hughes as the source. So well is it understood, and so frequently is it used, that it has come to be a part of the sociologist’s everyday language, part of the ‘coin of the realm’. In this respect, Hughes’s term is much like the term ‘definition of the situation’, often used without being attributed to W. I. Thomas (1923). Other such concepts include ‘subculture’ (Fischer 1975), ‘sensitizing concepts’ (Blumer 1954; van den Hoonaard 1997), ‘social distance’ (Zorbaugh 1929) and ‘social construction’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Other features of the use of the term in the literature after 2002 are as follows. When researchers apply master status to a visible status, it is almost always race or sex/gender. Some exceptions are age (Calasanti et al. 2006; Gerson 2001), obesity (Carr and Friedman 2005), smoking (Moore 2005) and being a swimmer at a swim meet (Scott 2010). Of the articles published after 2002 that used the term master status to refer to a visible trait, 36 per cent referred to sex or gender and 41 per cent referred to race, while another 14 per cent referred to both, thus treating status more broadly and invoking

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intersectionality. In sum, then, 91 per cent of the articles published after 2002, referring to a visible trait, used the term master status to refer to race and/or gender. There is much more variation in the use of the term in the post-2002 articles that use master status to understand invisible statuses. The term is used to describe invisible statuses as varied as being shy (Crozier and de Jong 2012; Scott 2004), being the victim of a crime (Kenney 2002), being a single mother (Avison 2007 et al.), being a bad cop (Kane and White 2009; 2012; Manning 2009), being infertile (Birenbaum-Carmeli and Inhorn 2009; Richardson 2014), being a researcher (Sales and Murphy 2012) and being an academic failure (Colomy and Granfield 2010), among others. All of these statuses are discussed as a master status for which an individual defines him or herself as that master status, where discovery or disclosure predicates impingement on interactions. Scholars also presume that a master status is often fixed and relatively stable over time (Carpenter 2010). A new and unique use of the term comes from Barrett (2006), who refers to the ‘master status effect’. He applies master status to the status that the media ascribes to terrorism, particularly bioterrorism, rather than applying it to an individual status trait, and argues that this master status effect has distracted attention from other social lessons, such as that of smallpox, by sucking up media time, attention and bias. Scholars of deviance, stigma and labelling theory continue to rely on the concept of master status after 2002 (e.g., Alarid and Vega 2010; Becker 2003; 2008; Dobransky 2002; Kenney 2002; Mason-Whitehead and Mason 2007; Özateşler 2014; Soffer and Ajzenstadt 2010). Some continue to discuss status inconsistency (Biron and De Reuver 2012; Douglas and Saporta 2003; Samblanet 2009; Zhang 2008), but many abandon that terminology around the same time that they cease to feel the need to define master status. Indeed, the term has become so widely used and liberally applied since 2002 that it is hard to trace its use. Certainly, scholars have stopped consistently citing Hughes when using the term. In fact, so pivotal was Becker’s application and development of the term that he, rather than Hughes, is sometimes cited as the source of the concept (e.g., Armato and Marsiglio 2002; Balch 1972; Beard and Fox 2008). The current popularity of intersectionality makes a term like master status particularly useful, as Peter Aspinall and Miri Song (2013) emphasize in their discussion of whether or not race remains the ‘primary master status’. They argue that master status remains a social label, not a personal choice, but that race has been supplemented by master statuses rooted in family, religion, age, life-stage, study and work. They suggest the possibility that identities such as black feminist may function through intersectionality. They give the specific example of Britain, where ‘race’ as a source of one’s master status has been undermined by the ‘Muslim’ religious identity. Indeed, identities of all types, such as ethnicity or nationality, are more often interwoven with religious identities. Kristina Dzara (2008), as an example of focusing on describing and analysing intersectionality, explicitly uses the term master status to handle a series of variables that could potentially emerge as master statuses as they interact with each other. Likewise, Kylan de Vries (2012) uses the concept master status to advantage in his examination of intersectionality and transgender people.

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Conclusion As we traced the use and development of master status in the literature, we were struck by the breadth of scholars who use the concept and the variety of ways they have adapted it to their own interests and theoretical approaches, particularly around intersectionality. Especially interesting has been the strategy of adopting the ‘master’ half of the term master status to develop new sociological concepts. Much as the word ‘capital’, as used by Pierre Bourdieu in the phrase ‘social capital’ has been appropriated to form other concepts, such as ‘fame capital’ (van den Scott et al. 2014), so the word ‘master’ has been appropriated from some form of common knowledge around the term, rather than as a direct influence by Hughes, for example in Jane Hood’s term ‘master narratives’ (2002). Overall, the concept master status has become commonplace in the literature, no longer consistently requiring attribution to Hughes. Indeed, it may well be that many of those who use the term do not know its origin. Without question, it has transcended Hughes’s direct, personal influence, even the influence of his students. It has become an independent conceptual entity and developed considerable independent momentum. In 1996, nearly two decades ago, Hughes’s friend and colleague Anselm Strauss noted that Hughes’s ideas had become so much a part of the sociological perspective that ‘their source is more or less forgotten or so taken for granted that the source is not cited’ (280). Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Hughes’s concept master status.

Notes 1 Hughes’s concepts would often cut across different situations and contexts. He ‘used the apparently small event to illuminate larger matters in less dramatic ways’ (Riesman and Becker 1984:  viii). For example, when Becker noted that musicians hated their audiences, Hughes expanded that thinking to wonder about doctors’ and nurses’ relationships with their patients. Further, anyone in a service industry may fall prey to whatever social process was at work. This led Hughes to look toward social processes that could be humbly stated, yet used across multiple sites. 2 See Gullahorn and Gullahorn (1963) for a full discussion of the relationship between ‘role’ and ‘status’ and their shifting definitions over time. 3 Hughes (1945) uses the term ‘Negro’, as was the conventional practice in the literature of his day.

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Moore, Robert. 2005. ‘The Sociological Impact of Attitudes toward Smoking: Secondary Effects of the Demarketing of Smoking’, Journal of Social Psychology 145 (6): 703–18. Moyer, Imogene. 2001. Criminological Theories:  Traditional and Non-Traditional Voices and Themes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Neiman, Lionel, and James Hughes. 1951. ‘The Problem of the Concept of Role: A Re-Survey of the Literature’, Social Forces 30 (2): 141–9. Nelson, Edward. 1973. ‘Status Inconsistency: Its Objective and Subjective Components’, Sociological Quarterly 14 (1): 3–18. Özateşler, Gül. 2014. Gypsy Stigma and Exclusion in Turkey, 1970: The Social Dynamics of Exclusionary Violence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Page, Robert. 1984. Stigma. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Palenski, Joseph. 1984. Kids Who Run Away. Saratoga, CA: R & E Publishers. Parsons, Talcott. 1943. ‘The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States’, American Anthropologist 45 (1): 22–38. ———. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ray, Marsh. 1961. ‘The Cycle of Abstinence and Relapse among Heroin Addicts’, Social Problems 9 (2): 132–40. Reed, Paul. 1974. ‘Situated Interaction: Normative and Non-normative Bases of Social Behavior in Two Urban Residential Settings’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 2 (4): 460–87. Riesman, David, and Howard S. Becker. 1984. ‘Introduction to the Transaction Edition’. In The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers, v–xix. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Richardson, Elizabeth. 2014. ‘Is Gaining, Losing or Keeping a Self-Identified Fertility Problem Associated with Changes in Self-Esteem?’ Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Richman, Joel. 1973. ‘Police Auxiliaries  – Traffic Wardens:  Some Sociological Aspects’, Police Journal 46: 135–49. Roberts, Brian. 1991. ‘Music Teacher Education as Identity Construction’, International Journal of Music Education 18 (1): 30–9. Ross, Aileen. 1961. The Hindu Family in its Urban Setting: Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rubington, Earl, and Martin Weinberg. 1968. Deviance:  The Interactionist Perspective. New York: Macmillan. Russell, Margo. 1961. A Study of a South African Interracial Neighbourhood. Durban: University of Natal, Institute for Social Research. Sales, Paloma, and Sheigla Murphy. 2012. ‘“How Do you Get Them to Talk to You?” Interviewing Drug Sellers in the San Francisco Bay Area’, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy 19 (6): 453–61. Samblanet, Sarah. 2009. ‘Status Inconsistency among Married Couples: How Status Inconsistency and Gender Ideology Impact Perceptions of Marital Quality, Global Happiness, and Mental Health’. Master’s thesis, Kent State University. Sandstrom, Kent. 1990. ‘Confronting Deadly Disease:  The Drama of Identity Construction Among Gay Men with AIDS’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19 (3): 271–94. Scott, Susie. 2004. ‘Researching Shyness:  A  Contradiction in Terms?’ Qualitative Research 4 (1): 91–105. ———. 2010. ‘How to Look Good (Nearly) Naked: The Performative Regulation of the Swimmer’s Body’, Body & Society 16 (2): 143–68. Segal, Bernard. 1962. ‘Male Nurses:  A  Case Study in Status Contradiction and Prestige Loss’, Social Forces 41 (1): 31–38. Shuval, Judith. 1970. ‘Sex Role Differentiation in the Professions: The Case of Israeli Dentists’, Journal of Health and Social Behavior 11 (3): 236–44. Siegel, Karolynn, and Beatrice Krauss. 1991. ‘Living with HIV Infection:  Adaptive Tasks of Seropositive Gay Men’, Journal of Health and Social Behavior 32 (1): 17–32. Smith, Earl, and Monica Seff. 1989. ‘Race, Position Segregation and Salary Equity in Professional Baseball’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues 13 (2): 92–110.

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Snow, David, and Leon Anderson. 1993. Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Snow, David, and Richard Machalek. 1983. ‘The Convert as a Social Type’, Sociological Theory 1: 259–89. Snow, David,Cherylon Robinson and Patricia L. McCall. 1991. ‘“Cooling Out” Men in Singles Bars and Nightclubs:  Observations on the Interpersonal Survival Strategies of Women in Public Places’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19 (4): 423–49. Soffer, Michal, and Mimi Ajzenstadt. 2010. ‘Stigma and Otherness in the Israeli Media’s Mirror Representations of Illness’, Qualitative Health Research 20 (8): 1033–49. Stephens, Richard. 1991. The Street Addict Role: A Theory of Heroin Addiction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stiles, Beverly, and Howard Kaplan. 1996. ‘Stigma, Deviance, and Negative Social Sanctions’, Social Science Quarterly 77 (3): 685–96. Strauss, Anselm. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission’, Symbolic Interaction 19 (4): 271–83. ———. 1997. Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Stryker, Sheldon, and Anne Statham Macke. 1978. ‘Status Inconsistency and Role Conflict’, Annual Review of Sociology 4: 57–90. Stryker, Sheldon, and Anne Statham. 1985. ‘Symbolic Interaction and Role Theory’. In Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, 311–78. New York: Random House. Swanson, Gina. 1998. ‘Muslims in the United States Military: A Role Theory Analysis of Conflict and Integration’. Master’s thesis, University of Wyoming. Thoits, Peggy. 1985. ‘Self-Labeling Processes in Mental Illness: The Role of Emotional Deviance’, American Journal of Sociology 91 (2): 221–49. Thomas, William I. 1923. The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Tick, Judith. 1973. ‘Women as Professional Musicians in the United States, 1870–1900’, Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 9: 95–133. van den Hoonaard, Will C. 1997. Working with Sensitizing Concepts: Analytical Field Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. van den Scott, Lisa-Jo Kestin, Clare Forstie and Savina Balasubramanian. 2014. ‘Shining Stars, Blind Sides, and ‘Real’ Realities: Exit Rituals, Eulogy Work, and Allegories in Reality Television’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Published online before print 2 September 2014, doi: 10.1177/0891241614545879. Vries, Kylan Mattias. 2012. ‘Intersectional Identities and Conceptions of the Self: The Experience of Transgender People’, Symbolic Interaction 35 (1): 49–67. Wagner, David., and Joseph Berger. 1982. ‘Paths of Relevance and the Induction of Status-Task Expectancies: A Research Note’, Social Forces 61: 575–86. Webster, Murray. 1975. Actions and Actors:  Principles of Social Psychology. Cambridge:  Winthrop Publishers. ——— and James Driskell. 1983. ‘Processes of Status Generalization’, Small Groups and Social Interaction 1: 57–67. Weissberg, Norman C. 1968. ‘The Graduate Teaching Assistant:  A  Marginal Role’, Improving College and University Teaching 16 (3): 185–7. West, Candace. 1982. ‘Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?  An Interactional Note on Organizational Game-Playing for Managerial Women’, Work and Occupations 9 (1): 5–29. ———. 1984. ‘When the Doctor Is a Lady:  Power, Status and Gender in Physician-Patient Encounters’, Symbolic Interaction 7 (1): 87–106. ——— and Don Zimmerman. 1987. ‘Doing Gender’, Gender & Society 1 (2): 125–51. Whitt, Hugh. 1983. ‘Status Inconsistency: A Body of Negative Evidence or a Statistical Artifact?’ Social Forces 62 (1): 201–33. Wilkinson, Doris. 1991. ‘The Segmented Labor Market and African American Women from 1890–1960: A Social History Interpretation’, Race and Ethnic Relations 6: 85–104.

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Chapter Eight DISCOVERING THE SECRET OF EXCELLENCE: EVERETT HUGHES AS A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION IN RESEARCHING CREATIVE CAREERS Izabela Wagner

Introduction In this chapter I examine the lifeworlds of two elite or high-status occupations: violin virtuosos and scientists working in prestigious life-science laboratories. I do so using conceptual and methodological tools and insights developed by Everett Hughes. One of Hughes’s key concepts is the ‘career’ (Becker and Carper 1956; Becker 1970; Hughes 1971:  283–407). For Hughes, the notion of the career, a crucial concept in the interactionist approach to the study of occupations, is a broad and flexible one. It can apply just as well to one’s career as a drug addict, patient or mother as to one’s occupation. Careers are developed/played out in the context of one’s activities as one moves in and out of various institutional contexts: skid row, hospital, family.1 Hughes’s concept of the career as a multistage process constitutes the basis for my work, described below, on the socialization and professional trajectories of elite musicians and scientists. These careers are similar to one another in the sense that they are understood to be ‘creative’. The notion of the ‘creative career’ is a relatively recent concept developed in the field of creative industry studies (Mathieu 2011). The particularity of the creative career consists in the extraordinary commitment individuals display toward their chosen occupation, more specifically, their focus on the creation of the new products or new forms of old products and their involvement in daily activities oriented to ‘innovation’. In other words, creative careers are characteristic of groups

I would like to thank the editors not just for their patience but also for their inspiring comments and questions that helped me to improve this text. I wish especially to thank Rick Helmes-Hayes for his Benedictine work – the huge amount of time he took to transform my text written in ‘scientific pidgin-English’ (composed by a sociologist who has never taken formal English instruction) into a readable paper. I am grateful for his deep understanding of the situation of those for whom English is not their native language.

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engaged in intellectual and/or artistic forms of work. Creative careers are often built inside creative industries (movie, design, arts, sciences). In both studies reported here, I followed individuals who were perceived within their respective professional environments to be part of an elite – people working among the top groups in what are widely regarded as the best places for mastering and applying their exceptional skills, that is, for demonstrating ‘excellence’. One finding of my research is that while violin virtuosi and top-level research scientists are hard-working individuals, they are developing or have developed their potential in particular social environments within which backstage actors contribute substantially to the ‘excellence’ demonstrated by elite musicians and scientists. This runs counter to the conventional understanding held by outsiders that they are exceptional individuals who possess not just excellence but, often, often, ‘genius’. In this chapter I focus mainly on a particular element of the creative career – the production of excellence. I begin by analysing Hughes’s methodological heritage, highlighting the benefits that come from applying it to the study of elite professional environments. I then describe some conceptual inspiration I have drawn from studying Hughes’s work. I  conclude by reflecting on the character of excellence as a social product and by discussing the importance of the collective, backstage labour undertaken by secondary actors who produce and maintain the ‘exceptionality’ of individuals in artistic and scientific professions. However, before beginning the analysis, I would like to explain my decision to employ a Hughesian approach to my subject rather than the more classical approach traditionally used to study elite professional groups. Indeed, those knowledgeable about Hughes’s research corpus might regard my use of his approach to study elite occupations as somewhat surprising. Hughes and his collaborators and students at the University of Chicago tended to study ‘humble’ occupations such as jazz musicians (Becker 1951b), laundrymen (Siu [1953] 1987), teachers (Becker 1951a) and taxi drivers (Davis 1959) rather than prestigious professions and occupations (doctors, lawyers, professors) (see Hughes 1970). In this respect, the studies carried out by Hughes and his collaborators at Chicago differed greatly from the sociology performed at Columbia University by Robert K. Merton and his team of researchers.2 While both groups were interested in the study of work, Merton was attracted by what were perceived as prestigious, upper-middle-class professional positions, while Hughes often focused on more modest working-class occupations. As Chapoulie remarks, Hughes first creates as a methodological rule a kind of principle of distrust quite inhabitual for the sociologists of his generation toward the system of representations and justifications advanced by the members of the professions or by their spokespersons which they use to justify their status or claims […] Hughes frequently develops the idea that high-status occupations and people possess better tools than others for imposing on the social sciences their own conceptions of their activities and they resist better objectification on their part. […] This kind of approach became more common at the end of 1960s, but was rare among the sociologists of Hughes’ generation; this is in clear contrast with the respect manifested by Parsons and Merton toward the medical profession. (2001: 235, 236)

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The observational, in situ style of research employed by Hughes and his team provided a much more critical account of professionals and their work than did the survey method used by Talcott Parsons and Merton (Chapoulie 2001: 231). They revealed their different approaches as well when they turned to the study of occupational socialization. Both carried out studies of medical schools. Merton chose as his case study Cornell University, a distinguished Ivy League school (Merton, Reader and Kendall, 1957). By contrast, Hughes and his collaborators carried out their yearlong, fieldwork-based study at Kansas University Medical School, a far less prominent institution (Becker et al., 1961). In a similar vein, when Hughes, with his PhD student Rhoda Goldstein (1954; 1960), studied the hospital as an institution, they focused on nurses rather than doctors. In sum, then, there was a clear division of labour between the two universities: the Columbia researchers focused on prestigious professions, while Chicago scholars usually concentrated on lower-level employees and ordinary occupations (Chapoulie 2001).3 As Chapoulie (2001) notes, Hughes had good reasons for advising his students to investigate modest occupations. People working as professionals (attorneys, professors, physicians) develop an official professional discourse that impedes the acquisition of knowledge by outsiders.4 This knowledge, only some of which is ‘technical’, is jealously guarded and kept secret, a part of their professional capital (Noordegraaf and Schinkel 2011).5 In Hughes’s opinion, such occupations were extremely difficult to study since they were accustomed to framing themselves and their activities in the most positive light possible. As well, they could hide crucial aspects of their occupation that were negative or, at least, incompatible with the self-generated image of themselves as professionals they wanted to uphold in public. They could successfully carry out such ‘masking’ activity because they possessed the resources (personal, professional, institutional) necessary to maintain their privacy and effect closure. In this chapter, I illustrate the utility of Hughes’s approach by using his bottom-up method to study two highly prestigious professional occupations. I  investigate the lifeworlds of elite musicians and research scientists, but I  do so from the perspective of lower-level employees, that is, from the vantage point provided by the lower-status members of the group who ‘create’ the virtuoso/researcher and help produce their performance. Following Hughes’s advice, I try to understand these organizations (for that is what produces elite performers) by looking at how they work from the perspective of bottom-situated participants. To give an example from another field, in order to understand the treatment of a patient and their career trajectory in a hospital, one should analyse the work of orderlies and nurses rather than the work of physicians – especially if the investigation is based in part on interviews (now the case in the majority of qualitative studies). High-skill, high-status professions are very resistant to the analytical eye of a sociologist. Physicians draw on specific professional mythologies, which form part of their professional culture as well as other components of their professional capital, to make it difficult for an investigator to penetrate the world of patient care. In contrast, those in more modest patient-care occupations such as orderlies and nurses are more easily studied, in part because they have fewer resources at their disposal to deny or deflect

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the sociologist’s gaze. But it is especially helpful to study them because they deal more directly and more frequently with ongoing patient monitoring and care (Hughes 1951c). My decision to adopt a Hughesian approach to the study of elite musicians and scientists grows out of my training as a PhD student. One might expect that, following the binary division of the sociological field described above, that is, Columbia versus Chicago = prestigious professions versus modest occupations, I should employ the Mertonian approach. However, I completed my PhD at a French university in a school that Howard Becker has referred to as ‘the Parisian prolongation of the Chicago School’. By virtue of my PhD training, I  become a devotee of fieldwork methodology, that is, participant observation and semi-structured interviews.6 In my estimation, which is based in part on my own experiences in the world of musicians, the participant observation method (as taught by Hughes and practised by generations of Chicago-trained sociologists) is the best way to grasp not just the participants’ point(s) of view but also the ‘real’ workings of the institution/organization in question.7 This is especially the case when a social setting is not easily accessible, when its mundane, day-to-day activities are obscured by strongly held beliefs that frame the activities of participants in terms of ‘excellence’, exceptional skills, ‘genius’ personalities and achievements perceived by outsiders as exceptional, outstanding, even ‘unnatural’. This is certainly the case with relation to both of the fieldwork studies I report here, that is, in the world of musical whiz-kids/geniuses who become virtuoso public performers and the universe of people who are perceived by the public at large as ‘super-creative’ scientists. I spent over ten years investigating the process by which violin virtuosos were produced in Europe at the end of the twentieth and in the first years of the twenty-first century. Since 2003, I have been studying the world of life-science researchers working in basic research laboratories located in France, Poland, the United States, Germany and Italy.8 In both studies I used a participant observation methodology, including semi-structured interviews (over 100 talks with musicians and over 400 talks with scientists). Throughout, I have focused on aspects of career-making such as the master-disciple relationship, work in a multicultural environment and the construction of internationalized careers. In the discussion below I focus in particular on the social construction of excellence in the lifeworlds of violin virtuosi and research scientists. The two ‘worlds’ are startlingly different – one is artistic, the other scientific. Nonetheless, in each case the professed regular/main activity of the large number of people who participate in these respective worlds is the production of excellence (virtuosi/great music, exceptional scientists/great science). Using the participant observation method to understand insiders’ views and activities turned out to be the best way to understand these two social worlds.

The Power of Fieldwork The participant observation method is not easy to employ. Hughes himself wrote about the difficulties of entering the field, the apprehension that precedes knocking on unknown doors, entering unfamiliar milieux, speaking to strangers (Hughes 1960). Though I do not intend to dwell on the problems of entering into the field or the dynamics of the complex relationship between the sociologist and those being observed, I would remind

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readers that this method requires not only a huge personal investment on the part of the researcher but also exceptional adaptation skills (Whyte 1955). That said, however, the benefits and advantages of the method are invaluable (Hughes et al. 1952; Junker 1960; Becker 1996; Gobo 2008). If the fieldwork is conducted correctly, sustained data collection affords the sociologist the possibility of accumulating huge amounts of first-hand data regarding various aspects of the lifeworld in which they are immersed. The process of progressive immersion allows the researcher to learn the culture of a group being studied via direct experience. This provides a frame of interpretation indispensable to understanding participants’ behaviours. When I began my first fieldwork-based study, an examination of the world of violin virtuosos (see Wagner 2015), I thought I knew the culture of this milieu, as well as the rules of behaviour framing activity in a violin virtuoso class. It felt natural to me because I  was born into a family of musicians and was a musician myself. However, over the course of sustained observation, I came to see that the values shared within the world of musicians in general (i.e., the values that regulate activities within regular music schools/academies where not only virtuosi were trained but also regular students received instruction) were not those regnant in the particular and very competitive milieu of virtuosi. The educational environment that surrounds musical ‘whiz kids’ is closer to that of a training centre for elite athletes or the milieu one experiences at highly competitive universities (les grandes écoles; Bourdieu 1996), colloquially referred to as ‘rat races’. In the world of young virtuosi, parents play a crucial role via their involvement in the intense professional education directed at their (often very young) children who, by the age of six or seven, are already devoted to high-level competition and intense instrumental practice lasting several hours per day. In fact, I repeatedly observed the parents of young, would-be virtuosi trying to place their children at the highest possible position within the informal hierarchy in a class conducted by a ‘star’ professor in order to attract more attention from the professor. They did so because they knew that teachers would choose the best of the young candidates from their classes, label them ‘talented kids’ and provide them with additional lessons, often free of charge. For a professor, it is an investment of sorts in the future, as they can further their own career by pointing to the successes of their pupils. Thanks to the time I spent in the field observing students and teachers, I discovered another rationale for the ‘generosity’ of teachers who teach extra ‘free’ classes. Some teachers are not especially convinced of the likely future success of their students but agree to teach them extra classes because it provides them with a secondary income derived from selling prestigious instruments to their protégés. This hidden role (seller or broker in prestigious violin sales) can bring the teacher substantial financial gains. As well, professors sometimes accept students not so much because of their talent but because of the social position or the profession of their parents (television journalists, rich entrepreneurs, politicians, a sister of a governing minister of culture). Well-placed parents can provide scarce resources necessary to initiate and support ‘soloist class’ activities. For example, they can be instrumental in organizing concerts or in helping to prepare students for a competition.

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Some of this information emerged during my interviews with parents and teachers. However, several months of observation allowed me to deconstruct further the activities and processes I watched. It is necessary to spend a lot of time in the field to understand fully not just the processes that take place in elite environments but also the ethical or moral justifications for them. This is a crucial component of the fieldwork because the processes involved concern children who must be treated in an ethically responsible manner as they receive their musical education. The parents of violin virtuosi have moral and emotional expectations about three sets of interrelated phenomena: obviously, the children, because of a specific care addressed to them, which is focused on education (not hard work); the music, because everything is supposed to happen out of love for the art; and education, because it is a societal duty to act ethically when educating the next generation of professionals. In interviews with participants (professors, parents and adult musicians, that is, former child-students), some issues and behaviours were rarely mentioned, as they contravened the moral expectations listed above. Nevertheless, I managed to collect observational data that suggests children were not always treated in an ethical manner. For example, children were pushed, sometimes even physically, to practice several hours per day. Parents and teachers ignored children’s jitters and stress before and during public performances. Indeed, they overlooked obvious symptoms of physical discomfort (neck and back pain, finger injuries and other symptoms) that indicated that children were experiencing high amounts of physical and emotional stress. Participant observation provides a unique way to investigate such a closed community where one encounters problems such as those mentioned above on a daily basis but that are frequently hidden or downplayed by adult participants. Other aspects of the day-to-day life of young violin virtuosi are equally problematic. They experience social isolation. That is, they are denied the opportunity to interact with children of the same age (especially if their friends are not involved in intensive musical practice). Indeed, they are prevented from engaging in some typical children’s activities. For example, some sports (ball games, skiing, horseback riding) are judged incompatible with musical training because they are deemed too dangerous for young violinists. The outsider’s imagined sense of the world of the young violin virtuoso, a world that has an aura of fame or glamour because it involves public performance in prestigious settings, is very different from what an observer encounters in the field when examining the day-to-day life of the young performer.

Conceptual Inspirations Congruent Comparisons as a Tool for Discovering Hidden Mechanisms One of Hughes’s favourite analytic approaches was what referred to as the search for extreme comparisons, that is, comparisons that at first seemed impossible or unlikely. In his view, such comparisons help our sociological eye look deeper into the meaning of things (Becker 2010; Helmes-Hayes 2010). I  have followed this advice in my work and have found it particularly fruitful. Historically, sociologists of music who examined musical practice often focused on the hermeneutic, symbolic and artistic dimensions of music.

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However, when I  analysed the daily practices of young violin virtuosi, I  performed a double ‘transgression’. The first aspect of the double transgression was to use the perspective of the sociology of work and to look at child musicians (some younger than seven years old) as workers. I needed Hughesian energy to break through common perceptions that situate children’s work exclusively in developing countries or in marginalized, poor areas of the so-called ‘developed’ world. The second aspect of the double transgression was the decision to use these tools to understand behaviours engaged in by members of middle- and upper-class social groups (not just lower-class ones) and, moreover in areas considered to be ‘high culture’. One of the concepts I employed in doing so was ‘breaking’, a phenomenon analysed insightfully by Hughes’s student Donald Roy in his study of garment factory workers (Roy 1952). I observed and tracked several forms of breaking that young virtuosi employ in order to escape daily practice or, at least, to make it more bearable. Some strategies were quite simple: they would intentionally break a violin string. Others read the comic strips or watched television while playing. Other forms of breaking were more devious. For example, in one case a nanny who was supposed to listen to a young musician doing his exercises was unaware that the violinist was, in fact, composing/improvising a new piece instead of practicing Schradieck’s exercises. Another young virtuoso recorded his exercises and played the recording, pretending that he was practicing for his next class. Using fieldwork as an investigative approach enriched my understanding of individuals’ instrumental practice. Child musicians work, like adults, several hours per day, a number of hours roughly comparable to the standard working week in France. If one adds to that total the number of hours they do schoolwork, they have a longer workweek than many/ most adults in France.9 Another of the supplementary conceptual tools I have employed in my analyses of children’s work is the binary dynamic of work. As Hughes noted, there are two different speeds of action: the ordinary, routine pace of work and the much faster pace that characterizes emergency situations (Hughes 1951a; see also 1951b). Participants act differently in the two contexts. Some rules and rights that apply in ordinary circumstances are neglected or modified once an emergency arises. In violin virtuoso schools, parents and, with time, their children try to avoid long periods of ‘ordinary and peaceful time’ and make a concerted effort to transform ‘routine’ time into emergency mode. The artists who practice for a competition or a concert make a major effort and invest a huge amount of time in preparation. Teachers look at an approaching deadline and, to ensure sufficient practice is undertaken, organize supplementary lessons, coaching sessions and public rehearsals in order to create the best and most realistic pre-competition conditions for their young pupils. The secret is to create what amounts to an ongoing ‘emergency’; the goal is to redefine the situation so that students double their efforts and work at ‘200 per cent’. Parents, too, try to promote this definition of the situation. Observing this milieu, an outsider would readily notice that the emergency mode – a state of constant overexcitement – is made ‘ordinary’ or routine. In such circumstances, this raises a new question: what would constitute true emergency mode in this case? In soloist classes (by comparison with ordinary violin classes run by a professor), working in the emergency mode was among the most important features characterizing this specific place of

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virtuoso training. Indeed, this is one of the singularities of prestigious professions, including the world of elite artists. Routine and emergency take different forms and rhythms than they do in other working groups. Secondary Characteristics In his 1945 article titled ‘Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status’, Hughes discusses auxiliary characteristics that may prevent a given person from achieving a status they deserve or playing a role commensurate with their educational credentials. These auxiliary characteristics bear no relation to the core of their professional practice. To illustrate the phenomenon, Hughes examined the case of the ‘Negro’ physician. He posed a question: how does the colour of the physician’s skin influence his interactions with his patients and colleagues (Hughes 1945)? In the world of violin virtuosi one would expect that one’s skill as a player would determine one’s status and career trajectory. However, contrary to the widely held view that the world of the arts – and certainly the international community of virtuoso musicians – is inclusive and bound strictly by considerations of merit, that is, the capacity to play, I have discerned after several years of study that that the milieu is deeply influenced by processes of selection that have nothing to do with professional (technical) aspects of violinistic performance. Physical attractiveness, nationality, cultural/ethnical origin, attachments to a diaspora and networks of support related to places of education are crucial in determining the outcome of the process by which some musicians are chosen over others for elite careers – despite the fact that they all play at a similar level of technical excellence. To promote one person is to not select another. In this highly competitive milieu, the winner brings to the top, with him- or herself, those who made him or her a success. Insiders know very well that all of these young people possess talent, that all perform very well – as they should, given they are participants in such a difficult and competitive environment. The winners of this contest for selection tend to come from particular places. They are students of X – this or that famous violin Master who has built a school for excellent musicians – and they are, as a consequence, seen as belonging to a lineage of over one hundred years. This is a kind of musical noblesse. Their attachment to such a network offers not only excellent conditions for education (numerous concerts, intensive coaching and frequent lessons, participation in master classes, access to rare resources such as prestigious violins and the possibility of recording) but also a sort of ‘cushioning’ in moments of selection. In this world, the success of a student is perceived as a success of the Master. Likewise, the reputation of professors is built on the careers of their students. Even years after adult virtuosi complete their training, their successes provide benefits to their former Masters. Rarely are these benefits financial, as students usually stop paying their teachers when they finish their studies. However, teachers’ reputations are augmented when their former students become well known. Some professors raise the prices they charge for lessons on the grounds that they train excellent virtuosi. This strong interactional relationship, which binds careers of teachers and students, is a process I have called ‘career coupling’ (Wagner 2006). It is common as a model of career-making in the professions. I  was able to see this relation thanks to Hughesian

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methodological advice, that is, re-think the question being asked; turn the problem upside down (see Becker 2010).10 Sociologists usually look at the role the teacher plays in the forming of a student’s career. I  did the opposite. I  asked how students’ achievements would modify the careers of their teachers. My observations revealed that the professional trajectories (careers) of master violin teachers depend on the successes of their students. If they gain international recognition, teachers will be invited abroad to teach a master class or to serve as a jury member in a competition. Progressively, the Master not only trains future virtuosi but also takes part in the selection/adjudication processes by which virtuosi are identified. This shows a strong linking between the careers of Masters and their students that then translates into strong networks of support and collaboration that ultimately shape the world of classical music. My fieldwork in life-science research laboratories revealed that auxiliary characteristics were equally important in that milieu. The national origin of researchers and their scientific status (PhD, postdoctoral, visiting scholar) and formal status (e.g., type of visa) and nationality/citizenship, as well as the university at which they obtained their PhD play a very important role in determining their career trajectory. According to the ‘ethos of science’ described by Merton ([1942] 1957), which stressed communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism, we would expect to meet in life-science laboratories people working together on a project and sharing their knowledge and skills regardless their nationality, place of education, cultural and linguistic background and so on. Furthermore, only scientific knowledge, past achievements and the potential of the scientist would play a role in selection process for getting and keeping employment. However, I observed the functioning of ‘ghetto laboratories’11 in which scientists from one geographic area (usually a ‘peripheral’ country) constitute a majority of the team and work hard while signed to precarious, limited-term contracts. Such work conditions are typical for whole areas of basic research activity conducted in universities and institutes of research as well as in national scientific institutes. The past few decades have seen a progressive switch in the financial organization of basic research in several developed countries, particularly vis-à-vis the proportions of hard and soft financing (Stephan 2012). In other words, there has been a shift from stable, ongoing financial support for research toward short-term, unstable funding provided by a system of competitive grants (Stephan 2012). This change has made scientists’ careers much more precarious (Ylijoki 2010; Wagner 2011; Carvalho, Cardoso, Braco Sousa 2014). Ghetto laboratories are one manifestation of this distressing development in the world of scientific research that is now saturated with a market ethos/model. Research teams are often composed mostly of PhD students and post-docs. The number of permanent staff – senior researchers and technicians alike – has decreased. In order to improve their opportunity to find a permanent job, to pursue research work at a top level, researchers originating from peripheral countries are moving to core nations where laboratories are well equipped and where both the organization of laboratory work and financial support are more stable. The majority of scientists coming from peripheral countries finds it impossible to pursue their research in their country of origin. Their daily experiences and career perspectives are very different from those of their colleagues from ‘core’ countries who work in labs where jobs are secure and creative investigative work is done.12 And, as in the world of violin

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virtuosi where auxiliary characteristics are important, career opportunities in prestigious laboratories depend in considerable measure on elements other than scientific knowledge and technical skills (Wagner 2014). Focusing on auxiliary characteristics brings new insights to investigations of prestigious occupations in other ways as well, in part because it allows us to understand the ‘backstage’ activities of people who help to construct the ‘excellence’ that constitutes the public face of elite professional worlds. The Importance of Secondary Actors’ Contributions Hughes always underscored the importance of secondary actors (Hughes [1961] 1971: 395–6). Even though they are ‘secondary’ in the sense they perform their duties in the shadows or ‘behind the scenes’, they remain crucial to the activity of the group. To return to an example I used earlier in the chapter, in order to understand the organization of work in a hospital, it is necessary to study the work done by secondary actors such as orderlies and nurses. In the two studies I report here, I devoted particular attention to the people working in the shadows. Their contribution is particularly remarkable in the case of violin virtuosi. Onstage, virtuosi play as soloists and the public rarely realizes how many professionals and others must contribute to achieving this level of performance. Ordinarily, members of the audience think of such performances solely in terms of the talent demonstrated by the young soloist. In his book Art Worlds (1982), Becker shed light on the complex character of artistic productions (opera, movies, theatre, painting, photography). In my work I  focused on the long, drawn-out processes of socialization and technical maturation that produce excellence on the part of violin virtuosi. I showed how it takes almost 20 years, and the combined efforts of several groups of professionals and amateurs, to complete the making of a virtuoso and, thus, the making of virtuoso performances. Professors and parents are key figures in the first stage of this complex process. The second stage involves other professionals: pianists who serve as accompanists, violin makers and, frequently, sponsors who help arrange for the virtuoso to borrow a prestigious violin. The third and last stage of such training for/construction of excellence adds others to the cast: the conductor of the symphony orchestra, other musicians and one or more sound engineers, not to mention concert organizers who support and promote young candidates who seek to break into the elite level of the music world. To give one example, the modest profession of violin maker can be essential in the construction of a virtuoso’s career. The craftsman is necessary not just to maintain the violin but also to sell the next instrument.13 The violin is a working tool for a virtuoso, but what a singular tool! Musicians develop a special relationship with their instruments, especially if they play many years on the same violin. In this respect, a violinist is different from a concert pianist, who cannot take his or her own piano to the concerts and must, thus, become accustomed to performing on different instruments. In the milieu of the virtuoso, the violin is very important: its age, provenance (who made it), history (who played on it), technical condition (whether the old instrument was rebuilt from other pieces, was broken or is intact) and so forth. All virtuosi dream about owning an entirely

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original instrument, several hundred years old and of prestigious origin (the expertise is an art in itself). If in the past the acquisition of such a piece of art was difficult but doable, today it is almost impossible. Violins of the first rank are worth several millions of dollars. Thus, the majority of virtuosi perform on instruments they cannot buy. This is why the help of a real expert in old violins and a good professional violin maker (many of whom restrict themselves to repairing old pieces) is necessary. The acquisition of an excellent instrument – a condition sine qua non for excellent performances – is a major issue for a young virtuoso who aspires to play on international stages. The majority of violinists gains access to excellent instruments by participating in international competitions. In order not to be misled by formal declarations made by the judges and music professionals who claim that the winners of such competitions are ‘the best’ players, I employed Hughes’s approach to investigate major events in the process of the selection of the ‘best virtuoso’. In the competitions that I observed (these data are based on over 300 participants) all finalists in these competitions were at some point a student of one of the jury members. This strong connection between former students/competitors and members of the judging panel demonstrates the importance of the teacher-student bond. It would appear that in this case a social aspect of musical education impinges on the proper operation of the selection process. The selection of the best virtuosi should, of course, be based solely on the musicians’ performances in the competition. However, the partially subjective nature of the criteria used to evaluate artistic performance (Becker 1982) makes room for all kind of practices that can cause music competitions to operate according to principles other than those presented in the official regulations for those events. The hidden aspects of judges’ decisions/selections show how social connections and a network of support are crucial in the career of every virtuoso. The Role of Accidents in Revealing Hidden Mechanisms In Hughesian theory, the opposite of ‘routine’ is ‘accident’. Hughes claimed that accidents and mistakes afford the opportunity to understand how an organization works, who is important and who is not, what roles people ‘really’ play in the institutions and so on. Even more importantly, an accident allows the observation of hidden mechanisms. When an institution or social process is working smoothly, we do not pay much attention to the typical course of action in that process or to each actor’s contributions to the smooth functioning of the whole. However, when an accident occurs, the backstage appears with all its details (Hughes 1951a). This insight hit home for me on one occasion when I was watching a competition. A scandal broke during the gala concert. Instead of performing a virtuoso solo piece, a competitor began playing a piece of classical chamber music, accompanied by a pianist who entered the stage with her. The violinist’s decision to try to perform a piece completely different from the one preselected for her by the jury members had consequences. Had she played the original piece chosen for her, it would have hidden her exceptional skills. This accident (‘strange’ behaviour on the part of the laureate) stripped bare the mechanism of pressure and despotic treatment of the young violinist. Indeed, this serendipitous event proved to be the starting point of my book. In

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the end, it took nearly three hundred pages to explain the origins and significance of this accident. Being present in the eye of a tornado is of utmost importance for a researcher, and Hughes often stressed the value of such sources of non-habitual information. ‘Dirty Work’ in Artistic Activity and the Role of Passion in Scientific Labour I have drawn on another of Hughes’s concepts – ‘dirty work’ – that he used in two different but related ways. In the sense in which I have used it here, the concept refers to tasks that a person does not like to perform because they are boring, menial or repugnant in some way.14 Where possible, people who are supposed to carry out such tasks as a part of their normal activities frequently delegate such tasks to a person situated below them in the hierarchy of a given institution (Hughes 1951b; 1951c; see also 1962). A classic example is the giving an injection. In the past, this job was carried out by a medical doctor. Doctors now delegate this sometimes very unpleasant task to nurses. The concept of dirty work as described here is extremely useful in the analysis and understanding the practices of people such as virtuosi and scientists who are passionate about their work and profession. Playing as a soloist is a career achievement for a musician. However, if we apply analytical tools of the sociology of occupations, we discover that it involves a suite of tasks, many of which the musician usually hates to do. Perhaps the most obvious example is the need for daily practice of maintenance exercises (scales, bowing exercises, playing simple but musically unattractive pieces). But there are many others. For example, some virtuoso musicians regard taking part in competitions and playing according to the expectations of others – rather than playing according to their own desire and imagination – as dirty work. As a result, they try to avoid such tasks altogether or they try to delegate them to subordinates. For example, young European violinists often regard appearing at postconcert parties – in order to self-advertise – in this light. They find it awkward when they are obliged to look for the opportunity to play a next concert or to find a scholarship that will cover the fees of their expensive education. For research scientists another form of mundane activity – management – is often regarded as ‘dirty work’. As senior scientists in charge of a lab (and, usually, with substantial amounts of research funding), they are required to perform a large number of managerial tasks. When interviewed, they often remark that they feel considerable tension and incompatibility between managerial tasks, that is, planning and controlling the work of others, and the scientific freedom and unpredictability that is a feature of day-to-day work in a cutting-edge research laboratory. Part of the problem was the issue of hierarchy that came with being a manager (Wagner 2011). The notion of managerial hierarchy stands in distinct contrast to norms of collaborative behaviour that characterize work in scientific research teams. ‘Flat’ or collegial organizational structures, which foster trust and freedom of speech, make room for brainstorming and experimentation. Such structures and processes are widely understood to be crucial within the risky and uncertain enterprises that propel science forward. Here again the power of Hughesian thought permitted me to see and understand a noteworthy, even remarkable, phenomenon. Most

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people would regard being promoted to manager as a good thing, a welcome outcome of their efforts at work. In the case of research scientists, however, the opposite proved to be the case. Scientists regarded managerial tasks as dirty work that they would gladly delegate to others.15

The Secret of Excellence: Genius or Hard Work? Another striking feature of the two milieux I studied is the effort that was expended to maintain a mythical image of ‘genius’ (see Wagner 2013; 2015: 275–8). Maintaining the mythology is part of their professional role. The key first principle here is that genius is inherited (or obtained) at birth. Those ‘gifted’ in this way and who benefit from inherited genius are seen to be naturally better than others. When the musician’s capacity to play at an elite level is understood as the consequence of a natural ‘gift’, the reality of the child’s investment in hard work is hidden, for several reasons (see Wagner 2013: 277–8). One of the reasons is that audience members find it more attractive to believe that the little child who plays like an adult was born exceptionally gifted than that they worked for years, several hours per day without relaxing. No summer trips and lazy days, no parties with friends on the weekend. No television watching or computer games on daily basis – just violin practice and school (with the child’s general education seen as secondary to violin training). Scientists, too, cultivate and maintain the mythology of the genius. People underestimate or misunderstand the huge time investment required to learn and apply scientific theories and practices. People describe elite scientists as geniuses, refer to them as ‘excellent’ not because of the intensive work they have done over a long period of training but because of their extraordinary capacity to write very fast, to understand without studying and to solve complex theoretical problems without needing to read the ‘old stuff’. However, this is in some respects a misrepresentation of the notion of genius or excellence. Even people from outside the music world cite Arthur Rubinstein’s genius (an amazing and famous Polish pianist from the twentieth century), saying that success for a musician is based 5 per cent on talent and 95 per cent on hard work. A second famous dictum attributed to Rubinstein underlines another aspect of the necessity of permanent practice: ‘When I stop practicing, the first day nobody notices it, the second I notice and the third my public notices too’. To produce successful live performances musicians must undertake much hard training. For the majority of instruments (the violin is at the top of the list of demanding instruments), the quality of one’s performance is directly related to hours spent practicing. So, there is no secret to ‘genius’. The secret is hard work realized in the collaboration of many people. One of the most difficult aspects of the life of elite musicians is the difficulty of maintaining the vitality and dynamism of training and practice – in the case of soloists, individual practice at home. Adequate socialization that embraces daily practice constitutes the basis for all kinds of musical performances. The role of the teacher is to instil in their students the habit of daily practice. They do so by inculcating in them a need for intensive practice and guilt so that the requisite number of hours is completed. This sort of socialization – the internalization of an appropriate work ethic – succeeds far better than any system of external control and repression.

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The approach I have employed to understand elite musicians and scientists, emerging from Hughesian sociology and, thus, grounded in field data and concentrated on the observation of daily practices, puts singular emphasis on the collective – rather than individual – character of excellence. ‘Geniuses’ are not alone and they do not transform into virtuosi all by themselves, solely as a consequence of their own capacities and efforts. Even though virtuosi appear alone onstage, in the backstage of real life – the day-to-day life of teaching and learning, practicing and jockeying for position – there is an army of people who supports and works toward the success of a young musician. Behind every performer basking in the spotlight are hidden numerous people standing in the shadows. A similar phenomenon can be discerned in the world of scientists. Even some insiders to the process of scientific research perceive noteworthy, breakthrough scientific discoveries as the personal achievement of a smart individual or ‘genius’ – someone who saw what others could not see, who thought what others could not think, who did what others could not do. The reality is that such breakthroughs or discoveries usually occur as a result of multiple collaborations, teamwork in a spirit of cooperation and the fusion of tentative or partial results. The secret of scientific excellence here, too, rests in hard work, though in this field the work is not usually individual but collective. Success comes from smooth collaboration and the efficiency of supportive action among several categories of collaborators.

Conclusion Why are Hughes’s theoretical concepts and methodological orientation so fruitful? According to my experience (almost twenty years of fieldwork conducted in two professional environments), the power of Hughes’s approach rests in the variety of open concepts in his theoretical toolbox. The Hughesian toolbox offers to sociologists the freedom to create tools adapted to the field being investigated. This is much preferable to a situation where we have a precise but fixed set of concepts and a strong (even rigid) theoretical frame (like Robert K. Merton’s, concerning scientists, or Pierre Bourdieu’s, concerning habitus and the production of excellence) that are difficult to update or adapt in our efforts to understand what we see in the field. Rigid theoretical approaches/concepts lack dynamism. They are of no use in the analysis of processes under constant development. In order to understand our complex social world, we need sophisticated and adaptable tools that permit us insight without damaging the whole picture (or, to be more ‘processual’, the entire movie). These tools should allow us to gain access to the structure and meaning of activities in social worlds both familiar and unfamiliar to us, even when insiders in these worlds want to prevent us from opening their secret boxes. Sometimes, too, insiders themselves are unaware about how their world works. Hughes’s approach allows us to do all these things, if in an inevitably incomplete way. Hughes’s concepts, while sophisticated, are simple and direct. For example, he liberates and inspires his readers through e­ xamples – often extreme and somewhat shocking comparisons – rather than by developing long, abstract, purely conceptual arguments. In the cases I have discussed briefly here, I have employed what I regard as a Hughesian

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approach for understanding elite-level professions. Instead of looking for the origins and individual characteristics of ‘geniuses’ (accomplished virtuoso musicians and scientists), I focused on collective work, their own and that of others, done in part in the ‘backstage’ of their respective lifeworlds. This collective backstage work produces works of excellence or genius that outsiders tend to perceive – wrongly – as being the consequence of the efforts of a few talented individuals. Such a deconstruction of a professional mythology is possible thanks to a methodological apparatus, a set of analytical tools and a creative and inspiring creative approach developed by Everett Hughes.

Notes 1 On Hughes’s general theoretical orientation and the centrality to his perspective of the ‘institution’, see Helmes-Hayes (1998). 2 I do not discuss here the obvious methodological and theoretical differences between Merton and Hughes and their respective co-investigators. However, it is important to point out, following Chapoulie, that ‘Les archives de Hughes révèlent que la concurrence intellectuelle était très présente à l’arrière-plan de son projet et qu’il espérait montrer que sa voie d’accès à l’étude des professions et sa démarche d’enquête de prédilection, le travail de terrain approfondi, étaient plus fécondes que l’approche des professions adoptée par Parsons et Merton, associée à l’usage des enquêtes par questionnaires’ (2001: 231). 3 Likewise, in their work devoted to the scientific professions, Merton and his collaborators were attracted to the study of the prestige and success of elite scientists: Nobel Prize winners (Merton, (1968) 1973; Zuckerman, 1977). 4 Higher-status professionals are people who are perceived by their entourage as the best in their professional world (top scientists in a given specialty, top musicians). In other words, they are regarded as people who are especially successful in their professional trajectories. Their career achievements are seen as outstanding. The positions they come to occupy are seen as among the highest career goals one could aspire to achieve. 5 According to Noordegraaf and Schinkel (2011: 104), ‘Within a profession, the professional is not only educated in a technical sense. He or she is also socialized into a group as a member and really “becomes” a professional in an embodied sense. Over time he or she will develop a socially constituted capacity to act and acquire a professional habitus, a set of dispositions that influences how he or she perceives, thinks and acts. This embodiment of capital is more than subjective; it is influenced by objective social structures, not only within a (professional) field but also in society, such as class, family and (earlier) education. Professional capital, in other words, must be acquired in order to become professional, but available distribution of economic, cultural and social capital determine who is able to acquire such capital and how this is done’. ‘Professional capital’ is not a term that Hughes used in his own work. 6 I began my PhD in sociology in 1997 at a doctoral school in Paris organized as a ‘prolongation of Chicago school in France’. The school featured a team of people who introduced, popularized and practiced a sociological tradition popular at Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. The four core scholars, who were appointed at three different institutions (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, École Normale and Université Paris 8), were Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Michel Briand, Henri Peretz and Jean Peneff. Peneff, who taught previously at Nantes and Aix-en Province, introduced students in both places to American sociological traditions. Over the span of several years, this group of sociologists contributed to the formation of many PhD students according to the tradition of Chicago sociology. During their degree programs the students worked on various projects and doctoral dissertations that investigated the social worlds of institutions, schools and work organizations.

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7 Chapoulie (2001) has shown that some accounts of the history of the Chicago School overestimate the degree to which department members used participant observation. Nonetheless, it was one of the methods favoured by sociologists trained in Chicago. 8 I was attracted to the study of this occupation by a huge contradiction. On the one hand, post-doctoral researchers in top laboratories are among those people who, according to their income, belong to the category ‘working poor’ (if they have a family) and they are in the situation of holding precarious employment. On the other hand, they publish in the top journals and their contribution to the development of research places them among the best scientists in their specialty in the world. The degree of prestige they enjoy thus stands in contradiction to their financial situation. The situation of Polish university professors is similarly paradoxical. They hold a very high ranking in national assessments of professional prestige (according to a survey conducted by the biggest Polish Center for Public Opinion Measurement, 2009), but their salaries are near the national average, which, in Poland, is very low (approximately 1,000 Euros per month). It was French sociologists Moulin (1992) and Menger (2003) who highlighted the relationship between the low salaries artists received and their high level of prestige. See also the work of Boltanski and Chiappelo (1999) on the role of ‘passion’ in some occupations, especially the use made of it by employers to exploit committed employees. 9 Almost 10 hours per school day and 5–6 hours per weekend day, i.e., over 60 hours per week. In EU countries the working week is about 40 hours. 10 Ludwik Fleck was not only philosopher and sociologist of science but also a microbiologist and physician. His writings from the 1930s are particularly inspiring and in advance of his time (see, e.g., Fleck [1935] 1979). Indeed, they anticipate in some respects Thomas Kuhn’s better-known ideas outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). One aspect of Fleck’s work is his interesting and insightful discussion of ‘looking and seeing’. This particularity of scientific work (observation and interpretation of new phenomena) shows how important is the capacity of a given researcher to ‘see’ things. It is a part of the lore of laboratory work that breakthroughs come when, one day, a particular member of a team will ‘see’ something that other researchers have ignored or overlooked for years and understand that it is important. The same sort of logic applies in sociology vis-à-vis social phenomena. A sociologist will see something in a new light, something that might have been obvious but unexamined, and draw attention to how important it really is. 11 For details concerning ‘ghetto laboratories’, see Wagner (2014). 12 I employ here Wallerstein’s (1989) conceptual distinction between peripheral and core countries. 13 Unlike pianists, violinists have the opportunity to play on ‘miniaturized’ models of their instruments. They start usually at the age of three or four with a 1/16 or 1/8 version. Then, as they grow, they switch to 1/4, 1/2 and sometimes 7/8-size models. At the age of 12 to 15 years, they switch to a full-size instrument. 14 For a detailed outline of a second meaning of the term ‘dirty work’, in this case having to do with the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II, and the widespread acceptance of this behaviour in Germany, see Hughes’s essay ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ (1962). For a detailed description of the writing of this article, see Fleck’s chapter in this volume. 15 When I sent a paper on this subject to an American journal specializing in the sociology of science, one of the reviewers (probably a young scholar) immediately realized that my paper was not written by an English native speaker. He or she criticized my use of the term ‘dirty work’ and suggested replace the adjective with ‘unpleasant’. This incident illustrates the effects of losing aspects of an important intellectual heritage – here Hughes’s concept of dirty work – when earlier generations of scholars fall out of favour. Their work progressively gets forgotten if it is not being employed by new generations of scientists. I pointed out to the reviewer that this was a Hughesian term and provided them with a reference to the article. I found it very sad that my reviewer was not familiar with such an inspiring concept.

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———. 1971. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. Chicago: Aldine. ———. (1961) 1971. ‘Education for a Profession’. Here cited from Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 387–96. ———, Buford Junker, Ray Gold and Dorothy Kittel. 1952. Cases in Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Junker, Buford. 1960. Fieldwork:  An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mathieu, Chris. 2011. Careers in Creative Industries. New York, and Oxon, UK: Routledge. Menger, Michel. 2003. Portrait de l’Artiste en Travailleur: Métamorphoses du Capitalisme. Paris; Le Seuil. Merton, Robert K. (1942) 1957. ‘Science and Democratic Social Structure’. In R. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 550–61. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press. ———. (1968) 1973. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited and with an introduction by N. W. Storer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, George Reader and Patricia Kendall, eds. 1957. The Student-Physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moulin, Raymonde. 1992. L’Artiste, l’Institution et le Marché. Paris: Flammarion. Noordergraaf, Mirko, and Willem Schinkel. 2011. ‘Professional Capital Contested: Bourdieusian Analysis of Conflicts between Professionals and Managers’, Comparative Sociology 10: 97125: 97–125, doi: 10.1163/156913310x514092. Roy, Donald. 1952. ‘Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop’, American Journal of Sociology 67 (2): 427–42. Siu, Paul C. P. (1953) 1987. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation. New York: New York University Press. Stephan, Paula. 2012. How Economics Shape Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wagner, Izabela. 2006. ‘Career Coupling: Career Making in the Elite Worlds of Musicians and Scientists’, Qualitative Sociology Review 2(3). Retrieved March 2015. http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/archive_eng.php. ———. 2011. Becoming a Transnational Professional. Mobilność i kariery polskich elit naukowych. Warsaw: Wyd. Scholar Wydawnictwo Naukowe. ———. 2013. ‘What is “Genius” in Arts and “Brain Drain” in Life-Science?’ In The Chicago School Diaspora:  Epistemology and Substance, edited by Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden, 272–86. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. ———. 2014. ‘Work and Career Aspects of Ghetto Laboratories’. In Re-searching Scientific Careers, edited by Katarina Pripic, Inge van deer Weijden and Nadia Ashuelova, 145–70. Special issue Social Studies of Science by Russian Academy of Science and ESARN:  http://ihst.nw.ru/ images/books%20in%20pdf/ResearchingScientificCareers2014.pdf; accessed 4 August 2015. ———. 2015. Producing Excellence: Making of a Virtuoso. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The Modern World-System III. San Diego: Academic Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1955. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ylijoki, Oili-Helena. 2010. ‘Future Orientations in Episodic Labour: Short-term Academics as a Case in Point’, Time & Society, 19(3): 365–86. Zuckerman, Harriet. 1977. Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York: Free Press.

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Chapter Nine EVERETT HUGHES ON RACE: WEDDED TO AN ANTIQUATED PARADIGM Neil McLaughlin and Stephen Steinberg

Thus in effect, on matters of race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global dysfunctions […] producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract [1977: 18])

Everett Cherrington Hughes had his rendezvous with history on 28 August 1963, when he delivered the presidential address at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Los Angeles. His title was ‘Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination’. The thrust of his peroration was to ask why sociology failed to anticipate the civil rights revolution that had thrown the entire society into crisis. By uncanny coincidence, Hughes’s ASA address occurred on the very same day as the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Here we have a startling contrast of two iconic ­figures  – one an erudite professor, accustomed to the cloistered university that was deliberately walled off from the noise and distraction of the world outside, in this case Chicago’s South Side, one of the nation’s largest ghettos; the other a preacher and activist who led a grass-roots movement by an oppressed people, demanding the elementary civil rights supposedly restored by the Reconstruction amendments at the end of the Civil War and vitiated by the so-called Jim Crow system that were the living legacy of slavery. Thus it came to be that Hughes and King were thrust onto the stage of history in August 1963. This was a pivotal moment in the history of the civil rights revolution. After a decade of grass-roots protest, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was wending its way through Congress, and it was not clear whether there were enough votes in Congress to break a filibuster by Senate Dixiecrats, who for decades had thwarted even anti-lynching legislation. Leaders of the movement had planned a March on Washington under the banner of ‘For Jobs and Freedom’, despite President John F. Kennedy’s apprehension that the march might kill any chance of getting civil rights bills through Congress. In short, the danger was real that the civil rights revolution would come to naught. Clearly, the moral urgency of the moment prompted Hughes to address the subject of race relations. After all, he was the chair of the nation’s first Department of Sociology,

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founded in 1892, and home of the fabled Chicago School of Race Relations. Yet broaching the delicate subject of race carried risks. To be sure, most sociologists had liberal proclivities, but the holy grail of sociology was to scrupulously uphold the principle of value-free social science, as enunciated in Max Weber’s famous essay on ‘Science as a Vocation’. Weber admonished sociologists not to wade into the turbulent waters of politics but to remain as dispassionate observers, guided by rules of evidence. Hughes’s mentor at Chicago, Robert Ezra Park, once wrote that ‘detachment is the secret of the academic attitude’. According to Ernst Burgess, Park’s younger collaborator, Park actively discouraged students from becoming ‘activists or propagandists’. . . . ‘Park told them flatly that the world is full of crusaders. Their role instead was to be that of the calm detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug’ (1961: 17). In his address Hughes broached the issue of race with circumspection. He began with a factual question: ‘Why did social scientists – and sociology in particular – not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society?’ (1963: 879). Thus he did not make any normative judgement and did not wade far into the waters of controversy. His speech is arguably more important for what it did not say. Hughes barely took notice of the crisis that was tearing the nation apart, much less the historic March on Washington that was taking place that very day. Nor did Hughes seize the moment to go on record in support of the impending Congressional vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This was a missed opportunity to place the imprimatur of American sociology behind the civil rights movement as 200,000 people participated in the largest such demonstration in the nation’s history. Indeed, Hughes’s reticence to even acknowledge the events in Washington was itself symptomatic of why sociology failed to anticipate the civil rights revolution. One has to look no further than the program for the 1963 Meetings for other symptoms of organized myopia. There were only two sessions that dealt with Racial and Ethnic Relations, both organized by Seymour Leventman, a sociologist from Boston College. Three of the eight papers addressed such subjects far removed from the nation’s racial crisis: ‘Status Conflicts within a Hindu Caste’, ‘Ethnic Self-Identity in Two Eskimo Villages’ and ‘Racialism, Miscegenation and Acculturation in Africa and the Americas’. Only one paper discussed the burning issue of the day: C. Wilson Record’s paper on ‘The Politics of Desegregation’. Record was a leftist who received his PhD from Berkeley and taught at Sacramento State College. He later published Race and Radicalism (1964), a history of the relationship between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Communist Party, two groups that championed the black cause for decades and planted seeds of protest that came to fruition in the civil rights movement. Sociology was not alone in its self-imposed myopia. A study of the American Political Science Review between 1906 and 1963 found only six articles containing the word ‘Negro’ in their titles, and four with the word ‘race’ (Matthews 1969:  113). In Divided Minds:  Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, Carol Polsgrove shows that even as the black protest movement escalated in the 1950s, ‘when white intellectuals were faced with

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the challenge of racial equality, they hesitated – fearful, cautious, distracted, or simply indifferent’ (Polsgrove 2001: viii).1 In 1963 there were few blacks in sociology who might have provided a different perspective on the conflict that was tearing the nation apart. In 1967, there were only 121 Negro doctorates in sociology, a mere 1 per cent of the total. Most of these (83 per cent) came from just ten institutions, with the University of Chicago at the top of the list (20 black doctorates). Furthermore, most black sociologists were relegated to teaching at black colleges.2 This was true even of Franklin Frazier, a former student at the University of Chicago who was elected president of the ASA in 1948. Thus, we do not have to look far for the reasons that sociology was caught by surprise by ‘the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society’. What can we expect from a discipline and a subfield dedicated to the study of ‘race relations’ that was itself encapsulated in a racially segmented academy? To be sure, the fact that Hughes broke the silence with his impertinent question was an act of personal courage. It also reflected a personal commitment to social and racial justice. As Hughes (1971) once wrote in an autobiographical note, ‘I was on the right side of most social causes’. In our perusal of the Everett Hughes Papers archived in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, we found personal correspondence that revealed genuine sympathy with the cause of racial justice. Without doubt, Hughes was ‘a man of his times’ and typical of the professoriate of his generation in that they exhibited sympathy for the goals of the civil rights movement but were oblivious to the extent that their own academic domain was permeated with white supremacy. Indeed, it was the civil rights revolution and other movements of the 1960s that led social scientists to question the whole idea of value neutrality. This was the thrust of a 1967 paper by Howard Becker, one of Hughes’s eminent students, entitled ‘Which Side Are We On?’ (1967). Becker argued that taking sides was not only a moral imperative but was also inevitable since silence implied acquiescence to the racial status quo. Becker also enjoined sociologists to question ‘the hierarchy of credibility’ by looking at the world from the bottom up rather than the top down. As a pioneer of ethnography, Hughes also understood the heuristic gold mine awaiting those who would probe the experiences and innermost feelings of ordinary people and their quotidian realities. To be sure, the mere act of raising the explosive issue of race in his presidential address might be seen as a political act, one that could have led to a critical examination of the sociological canon on race. However, as we argue below, Hughes lacked the conceptual lens that might have allowed him to provide a credible answer to his own question. Indeed, the very question that Hughes posited is fraught with problematic assumptions (1963). Let us take a closer look at Hughes’s syntax:  ‘Why did social scientists  – and sociology in particular  – not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society?’ Hughes begins with an ambiguous reification of ‘social scientists  – and sociology in particular’ when he really meant ‘mainstream social science’ or ‘establishment sociology’. After all, there were people in the trenches of social science who did foresee the ‘explosion of collective

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action of Negro Americans’. Not only that, but they embraced an alternative a paradigm that did anticipate the black revolt, and grasped its sources and its ramifications. However, these mavericks were dismissed as ideologues who despoiled science with politics. Three names come instantly to mind: W. E. B. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and C. L. R. James. All three were blacks with pronounced Marxist leanings. Over against the prevailing race relations paradigm of the Chicago School, their Marxism provided them with a paradigm that allowed them to anticipate and champion the cause of civil rights, as can be gleaned from the following statements: Du Bois, in 1906, at the meeting of the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry that spawned the NAACP: We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. (1) Cox, in Caste, Class, & Race: We cannot defeat race prejudice by proving that it is wrong. The reason for this is that race prejudice is only a symptom of a materialistic social fact […] The articulate white man’s ideas about his racial superiority are rooted deeply in the social system, and it can be corrected only by changing the system itself. (1948: 462) C. L. R. James, in a speech at the Socialist Workers Party on ‘The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A.’: Let us not forget that in the Negro people, there sleep and are now awakening passions of a violence exceeding perhaps . . . anything among the tremendous forces that capitalism has creating. Anyone who knows them, who knows their history, is able to talk to them intimately, watches them at their own theaters, watches them at their dances, watches them in their churches, reads their press with a discerning eye, must recognize that although their social force may not be able to compare with the social force of a corresponding number of organized workers, the hatred of the bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among them to a greater degree than in any other section of the population of the United States. (1948)

James’s statement, bursting with palpable detail, has particular relevance to Hughes’s embrace of ethnography as a method of inquiry. Clearly, more is involved than dispatching enterprising graduate students into the field to observe blacks in their theatres, dances, churches and so on. Despite the best of intentions, to the extent that these observers enter the field with what Joe Feagin calls ‘a white frame’ (2009), they are not likely to fully apprehend the disguised and inchoate meanings that James captures in such vivid detail. James also grasps the way popular vernacular embodied the impulses and politics that led to the revolt that caught race experts by surprise. These powerful statements – infused as they are with passion and conviction – reflect a black radical tradition with a lineage across generations, far removed from the experience and knowledge of Hughes personally and the white professoriate generally. Indeed, echoes and threads of this black radical tradition permeated the scholarship of the black doctoral students at the University of Chicago (Saint-Arnaud 2009; Morris 2015). Far from failing to anticipate black insurgency, these prescient scholar-activists erred in thinking that insurgency would come sooner than it did!

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Our central point here is that along with the mainstream paradigm propagated by Chicago sociology, there was ‘a shadow paradigm’ consisting of an intersection between Marxism with its focus on political economy and threads of the black radical tradition. In short, it was an amalgam: ‘Black Marxism’ (Robinson 1983; Saint-Arnaud 2009; Morris 2015). However, this paradigm was not fully developed and not explicitly called ‘Black Marxism’ even by its adherents, but it was a distinctive epistemology that offered a critical alternative to the dominant epistemology of the Chicago School. In African American Pioneers of Sociology, Pierre Saint-Arnaud calls this ‘a peripheral sociology’, a distinctive brand of ‘black sociology’ that not only challenged many of the assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of mainstream sociology but also included a distinctive method. Indeed, through their scholarship, black sociologists helped pioneer ethnography as they sought to ‘tell the African American story’ from the bottom up. Du Bois stood alone as ‘the first generation’ of this peripheral sociology. However, as Aldon Morris demonstrates in his recent book, Scholarship Denied, Du Bois’s groundbreaking scholarship was ignored or dismissed as propaganda by the gatekeepers of the canon. Nevertheless, it did filter down to a second generation of black scholars, including Cox, Frazier, St Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, Charles Sturgeon Johnson, Bertram Doyle, Edmund Haynes, Ira de Augustine Reid and numerous others (Saint-Arnaud 2009: 118). Together, they constituted an epistemic community that challenged the knowledge claims of the dominant paradigm. Even though they endured the bitter taste of marginalization, the first and second generations of black sociologists provided a body of theory and research that came to fruition a generation later, when a civil rights revolution precipitated a paradigm crisis and opened the canon to radical and minority voices that had long been cast to the periphery (Steinberg 1995). As Thomas Kuhn writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1985), the prevailing paradigm is customarily held with such monistic fervour that discordant facts are either disregarded or stuffed into ‘preconceived conceptual boxes’. Furthermore, the gatekeepers of the canon – and Hughes was a gatekeeper par excellence – would make sure that proponents of intellectual heresy are cast to the fringes of the profession, as was patently the case when black scholars of consummate talent were not even considered for faculty positions at most universities but were relegated to teach at black colleges (Saint-Arnaud 2009: 280). The impertinent question that Hughes raised in his presidential address may be seen as an early sign of paradigm crisis, which according to Kuhn, occurs when scholars lose faith in the system of ideas and practices that they previously accepted as constituting valid science. Like Hughes, they ask, How is it that sociology missed this upheaval in thought and social action? What is wrong with our models? Like Hughes, they were not yet prepared to toss their paradigm onto the trash heap where they previously tossed biological racism. They stubbornly resisted confronting the fact that they are wedded to an obsolete paradigm that cannot explain the events on the ground and that threw the entire society into crisis. They knew enough to ask the right question, but floundered when it came to providing an adequate answer. Our point is to invert Hughes’s question: How could sociologists have seen the upheaval on the horizon, when their paradigmatic assumptions were deeply flawed and wrapped

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in the false cloth of ‘science’, while viewpoints outside the dominant paradigm were tagged as driven by ideology or dismissed as propaganda? Put another way, the adherents to the dominant paradigm don conceptual blinders that prevent them, to echo Charles Mills, from seeing the world that they themselves have made.

The Occlusion of Marxism from American Sociology When the first Department of Sociology was founded at the University of Chicago in 1892, the fledgling discipline was already deeply hostile to the Marxist tradition. In their much-neglected history of the origins of American sociology, Herman and Julia Schwendinger vividly describe the occlusion of Marxism from American sociology: For three quarters of a century since the 1890s, no important examples of a sustained systematic defense of Marxist scholarship by circles of academic scholars can be found in any subject-matter area in any of the sociological journals sponsored by professional associations of sociologists in the United States […] Marxist circles had no significant influence on the early development of sociology when Park and Burgess’ universal categories were published in 1921. (1974: 564; emphasis in original)

It is worth pointing out that this categorical elision of Marxist scholarship on race occurred at a time when Reconstruction was being dismantled and the scaffolding for Jim Crow was being erected by Southern states and imparted with legitimacy by the Supreme Court. What is even more relevant is that Marxist scholarship that focused on the role of the state as the primary instrument of racial oppression anteceded the arrival of sociology by half a century. As early as 1847, in the Poverty of Philosophy, Karl Marx wrote, ‘Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’. In one epigrammatic statement, Marx summed up the relationship of slavery to the emerging industrial economies of both the United States and England. Marx continued, It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the people. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. (1936: 94)

It is readily apparent that Marx’s conception of the economic foundations of slavery offered an alternative to the reified formulations of Park’s race relations cycle and the assimilation theory that provided the intellectual core of the Green Bible, the first textbook

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in sociology (known for its green cover) written by Park and Ernest Burgess in 1921. Just as Booker T. Washington owed much of his success and power to the fact that he provided the white establishment of the day with an alternative to Du Bois’s militant pursuit of racial justice, a hallmark of Chicago sociology was that it provided an alternative to Marxism. The University of Chicago was hostile to the Marxist perspectives from the outset. At the time that Albion Small negotiated to secure the approval of the Board of Trustees for the nation’s first Sociology Department, the Progressive movement was in full sway, with its battles against the trusts, the captains of industry, the railroads and utilities, and the corporations that were the bastions of laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the University of Chicago founded on the beneficence of John Rockefeller but its Board of Trustees also included some of Chicago’s leading corporate moguls and industrialists. In this context, the new discipline was in a weak position to buck the powerful forces of capitalism, both inside and outside the university. No one was more scathing about the role of businessmen on the governing boards of universities than Thorstein Veblen, who taught at Chicago during the period under examination. In his 1918 book, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Veblen declared that ‘their sole effectual function [was] to interfere with the academic management in matters that are not of the nature of business, and that lie outside their competence and outside the range of their habitual interest’ (66). To pass muster with the trustees, the founders had to avoid any taint of ‘radicalism’. Even the assonance between ‘sociology’ and ‘socialism’ raised suspicions (Matthews 1977: 91), as did the grass-roots activism of Jane Addams and other social workers, now celebrated for their unheralded role in the formation of ‘Chicago sociology’ (Deegan 1990). Furthermore, in the 1890s several Chicago faculty  – one within the Sociology Department  – were fired because of their ‘political agitation’ (Metzger 1955: 139). In 1896, Small published a paper in the American Journal of Sociology on ‘Scholarship and Social Agitation’, in which he ridiculed scholars as ‘shirkers’ unless they grappled with the problems that plagued the city. He soon realized that it was dangerous to run afoul with the powers that be, and announced that ‘there is so much misapprehension of Sociology as a science of reform that, although I hope to take up reform movements years hence, I am going off in my lectures into transcendental philosophy so as to be as far as possible from these reform movements and thus establish the scientific character of my department’ (1896: 8). Transcendental philosophy, indeed. In many ways – some blatant, others sub rosa, still others unconscious – faculty are impacted by the political universe in which they conduct their research. Paradoxically, the doctrine of value-free sociology itself served political ends since it treated the existing social and political order as a given. As Mary Furner shows in her study of American social science between 1865 and 1905, there was a double standard when it came to value neutrality. Acquiescence or active support of established institutions or of the prevailing racial status quo was accepted as a given, whereas challenging prevailing orthodoxies or established institutions crossed the forbidden line from science to politics (1975).

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A Tale of Two Paradigms: Marx versus Spencer According to Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1974), during the formative years of sociology, the fledgling discipline basically had a choice: between Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. This is admittedly an overgeneralized statement, but it captures the two rival currents of race discourse at the time. In this tug of war of paradigms, Spencer enjoyed hegemonic status, and as we have observed, Marx bore the stigma of forbidden fruit. Paradoxically, both Spencer and Marx advanced teleologies of history, reflecting a nineteenth-century penchant for grand theory, though in actual substance the two were in stark opposition to each other. On the one hand, Park’s race relations cycle ends with the absorption of the ‘backward races’ into the culture and body politic of the more ‘advanced races’, thus propagating new races and advancing history. On the other hand, the Marxist prophecy envisioned an ultimate revolt of the oppressed and the establishment of a new social order. The other major difference between these two teleologies concerns the role that racism and violence play in the unfolding of teleology. Schwendinger and Schwendinger write, “The degree to which Spencer’s theory was permeated with racist ideology cannot be overemphasized. He claimed that ‘savage’ and ‘semicivilized’ people represented a lower stage of biological evolution. These people were regarded as mental and moral inferiors and their sense of justice, according to Spencer, was less evolved than that of the ‘civilized’ races. He maintained further that the intermixture of different racial stocks would lead to racial degeneracy, and pointed to Eurasians in India and ‘half-breeds’ in America as examples. (1971: 99–100)

On this last point, Park and his followers part ways with Spencer, and can rightfully claim the moral high road. It is true, as we argue later, that Park’s famed race relations cycle was also predicated on a distinction between backward and advanced races. However, assimilation theory regarded this as a matter of culture rather than biology, and prognosticated that the backward races would inexorably be incorporated into the culture and body politic of the more advanced races. Thus, their teleology had a happy ending, as assimilation propagated new races and advanced history. One might say that Chicago Sociology gave us colonialism without either Marx or Spencer. Spencer’s reputation and influence declined in the twentieth century. Indeed, by the time Talcott Parsons published The Structure of Social Action in 1937, he began with a succinct and devastating question: ‘Who now reads Spencer?’ Parsons developed his theory of society around Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, leaving no room for Marx despite the dire poverty of the Great Depression and the labour turmoil of the 1930s. After World War II, Cold War hostility to the Soviet Union combined with the McCarthyism of the 1950s to further nourished an intellectual climate that was hostile to an engagement with Marxist and anti-colonial discourses within the academy. Generally speaking, sociology went along with this elision of Marxism until the late 1960s. The social work reformist orientation that took hold after the Progressive Era helped curb Spencerism, but it did not allow the discipline to fundamentally challenge the new liberal New Deal intellectual consensus that emerged in the 1930s (Matthews 1977).

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Parsons promoted grand theory and macrosociology at Harvard, whereas Park and his followers, including Herbert Blumer and Hughes, propagated the ecological theory and ethnographic method that came to dominate the Chicago School of Sociology. Whatever their differences – and they were many – they all agreed that advocacy, Marxism and militant anti-racism had no place in the sociological canon.

The Marginalization of Du Bois and Cox Chicago sociology’s claim to fame in the area of ‘race relations’ is its repudiation of the scientific racism that dominated so much of American intellectual life in the age of Social Darwinism. However, Chicago sociology also repudiated and marginalized the Black Marxist sociology developed by Du Bois and Cox. In a sense, then, the intellectual failure of Hughes’s ASA presidential address was partly self-inflicted by the very intellectual tradition that Hughes helped propagate. The civil rights movement culminated with the passage of landmark legislation in 1964–5 and evolved into a second and more militant stage, with a series of urban revolts, beginning with Watts in 1965 and reaching an explosive climax with the spasm of ‘riots’ following the assassination of King in 1968. This was the societal context in which the construct of ‘race relations’ came under challenge. A new term – ‘oppression’ – entered the discourse, drawn from Marxist discourse more than 100 years earlier. Generations of sociologists could not speak of ‘oppression’ until the late 1960s and ’70s, when it became part of the discourse of the movements of the ’60s, connected with wars of national liberation in the Third World. In sociology, the break-out book was Robert Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America, published in 1971. Together with a plethora of books published by movement leaders and front-line activists, the discourse finally shifted in a new direction. Until these new intellectual developments, sociologists had remained wilfully blind to two major insights central to Marxist theory: the focus on the exploitation of labour as central to the production and reproduction of racism, and the critique of value-free science as an obfuscation of and an obstacle to racial justice. Though not by intention, Hughes (1963) provided the last hurrah of the Chicago School of Race Relations with his presidential address at the ASA. He began by quoting Park’s definition of race relations as ‘all the relations, which exist between members of different ethnic and genetic groups which are capable of provoking race conflict and race consciousness’, one that determines ‘the relative status of the racial groups of which a community is composed’. Hughes’s language builds on Park’s by framing the problem of race ambiguously as involving negative ‘relations’ between constituent groups. Here racial hierarchy is accepted as a given, and its sources and functions are left unstated. In contrast, for Du Bois and Cox the core question unmistakably centred on racial oppression, not on troubled relations based on distorted beliefs or stubborn prejudices. As noted above, their immersion in the Marxist tradition coalesced with a black radical tradition to make a new amalgam: Black Marxism (Robinson 1983). From this conceptual vantage point, Du Bois and Cox riveted the sociological eye on slavery as an economic, cultural and political system that was the fundamental historical reality shaping the condition of blacks in the United States (Du Bois [1935] 2013; Cox 1948). According

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to Cox, ‘racial exploitation and race developed among Europeans with the rise of capitalism and nationalism, and that because of the world-wide ramifications of capitalism, all racial antagonism can be traced to the policies and attitudes of the leading capitalist people, the white people of Europe and North America’ (1948: 322). Du Bois was not an orthodox Marxist, despite his later dalliance with the American Communist Party and Stalinism. However, his famous claim that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line clearly derived from his dialogue with Marxism. Du Bois’s examination of the political economy of the slave trade, the failure of Reconstruction and the state of African-American community life in Atlanta and Philadelphia were also grounded in Marxist discourses. However, when Hughes speaks about ‘race relations’ and ‘racism’, he says nothing about the ideology and structures of white supremacy, which, for both Du Bois and Cox, are the prime determinants of the black condition in the United States. Marxist theories of colonialism and imperialism also shaped how Du Bois and Cox conceived of the world outside the United States. It was this fundamental Marxist insight about the role played by the exploitation of labour in reproducing racism that allowed Du Bois and Cox to see what most mainstream sociologists could not. ‘Race relations’ in America were not just rooted in prejudiced beliefs and actions on the part of discrete actors but also were entrenched in a larger system of white supremacy, instituted and legitimated by the powerful institutions of the state. Mainstream sociologists were also at a major disadvantage because their devotion to the idea of ‘value-free’ social science prevented them from detecting the rudimentary forms of disaffection and protest among the oppressed (Matthews 1977), something that Du Bois and Cox did with persistence. Of course, Du Bois and Cox personally experienced Jim Crow segregation and the perils of white terrorism, but it was the Marxist tradition’s powerful call to changing the world that led them to challenge the ideologies of accommodation and submission that Washington promoted. As is well known, Du Bois abandoned his position at Atlanta University to commit himself to the struggle for full citizen rights, in repudiation of Washington’s accommodationist politics. Cox powerful critique of Park’s race relations model and his forceful attack on Washington’s role as a black ‘leader’ made his view of the ‘objectivity’ of the Chicago race relations school perfectly clear (Cox 1951). For both Du Bois and Cox, Washington was a comprador with white supremacy. Both Du Bois and Cox paid the price of being marginalized in twentieth-century sociology, but it was precisely their exclusion from mainstream American sociology that left the discipline unable to comprehend the rise of black insurgency. As Morris has shown in The Scholar Denied (2015), this exclusion flowed from a deep racism embedded in American society that permeated the discipline of sociology as well. Even Du Bois’s Harvard PhD and the recognition he had gained from Weber could not protect him from American racism (Morris 2015), just as Cox’s University of Chicago PhDs in both sociology and economics and prodigious scholarship could not secure him a job at a major American research university. Cox’s macrohistorical method was a hindrance, even though he is today regarded as the primogenitor of world systems analysis (Hier 2001). Du Bois clearly paid the price for his political activism,

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particularly in his later years when his communism and pan-Africanism put him outside mainstream American politics. The ultimate irony is that their marginalization was precisely the factor that rendered their scholarship and insights unavailable to Park, Hughes and American sociology in general. To put it in the vernacular, American sociologists were clueless about the scope and depth of twentieth-century racism, which is why Hughes asked his famous question in the first place. However, Hughes was constitutionally unable to step outside of the intellectual orthodoxies dominant in the university where he spent his life, nurtured by the training and affirmed by the reputation of an elite university. The Race Relations School created by Park, in fact, was a significant part of the problem of sociology’s blinders on race, exacerbated because of the role they played in marginalizing Du Bois, Cox and black Marxists more generally. Near the end his Saint-Arnaud’s penetrating study African-American Pioneers of Sociology:  A  Critical History (2007), Saint-Arnaud asks the counterfactual question, what would twentieth-century American sociology have looked like if Park and the gatekeepers at Chicago, including Hughes during his tenure as chair, had actively and aggressively promoted the careers of Du Bois and Cox and other black sociologists (Saint-Arnaud 2007)? More to the point, what might have been, had Park and his minions not actively worked to marginalize Du Bois and Cox and their brand of Black Marxism? Needless to say, we are not suggesting that there was a nefarious racist conspiracy to marginalize black radicals. However, Morris compellingly argues that Du Bois’s Atlanta School of Sociology did path-breaking sociology on African-American communities two decades before the Chicago School became the dominant force in the study of race relations in America (Morris 2015). Yet Du Bois and black scholars at Atlanta were starved of funds, and despite their prodigious and pioneering scholarship, were cast to the margins of the sociological enterprise.

Hughes’s Blind Spot: Canadian Settler Colonialism The flaws in Hughes’s own intellectual work can be traced to his tutelage in the Race Relations model, and mars the major book that Hughes produced: his ethnography French Canada in Transition (1943), widely regarded as a classic and deservedly so since it documents the transition to modernity of rural Quebecers. Hughes is also central to the literature on the history of Canadian sociology, having been a founder of the Department of Sociology at McGill University in Montreal, where he played a key role in diffusing Chicago-style sociology at a time when the sociological tradition north of the 49th parallel was undeveloped. Furthermore, Hughes’s mastery of French and sensitivity to disadvantages faced by the French-speaking minority in British-dominated Canada even more so allowed him to contribute significantly to the development of the study of ethnic relations in Canadian sociology. However, Hughes was blind to searing questions about native people and the colonialism of both British and French settlers in Canada. Indeed, there is not a single mention of native or aboriginal peoples in French Canada in Transition. Hughes’s blind spot is partly explained by the fact that his field study for French Canada in Transition was based in the community of Drummondville, Quebec, where

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there was no conspicuous evidence of native people or the vestiges of colonialism. By the time Hughes conducted his field observations in the 1930s, the original inhabitants of the area were long gone, though the details of how this played out remain unclear. The original inhabitants of the area were most likely an Iroquoian people, who may well have been driven away or absorbed by Mohawk warriors who used the area as a hunting ground (Pedergast 1998; Trigger 1976). Hughes would never have predicted the mass uprising we are witnessing today all over Canada of Canada’s First Nation in a movement called ‘Idle No More’. There was nothing in either the theory or practice of Chicago sociology that provided a basis for theorizing resistance on the part of the dispossessed First Nations to racism and settler colonialism (but see Denis 2014). To adopt Saint-Arnaud’s counterfactual, had Hughes been reading Du Bois or Cox on colonialism, the slave trade and the exploitation of black, brown and red people, he might have asked different questions about English and French settlers and their transition to modernity in the context of exploitation and racism. And when Hughes returned to the United States in the late 1930s, he would have been better prepared to understand the mass uprising of blacks that gathered momentum in the 1950s, culminating in that August demonstration in the March on Washington. These intellectual blinders are starkly visible in his ASA speech, when Hughes draws an analogy between the condition of blacks in America and Quebecois in Canada. It is true that Quebecois people were discriminated against and dominated by the British and then the Canadian elite from the seventeenth century onward. But this pales in significance to the condition of native people throughout both the United States and Canada. There were elements in common between the mobilization of the descendants of slaves in the United States and the white French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec who were mobilizing to take control of their own affairs and renegotiate the terms of Canadian confederation – the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s that was picking up momentum as Hughes delivered his 1963 address. But this comparison breaks down in comparison to the colonialization of Canada’s First Nations. In his ASA speech Hughes also envisions different futures for African Americans and minorities in Canada. In the first instance, he argues that African Americans should and will be assimilated into the broader culture. In the case of Canada, he argues for a system of cultural pluralism for French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians but, again, does not even mention the indigenous people in Canada who were driven off their traditional land to make way for both English and French-speaking settler communities. The poverty, crime, violence and hopelessness that you see in African American and indigenous communities throughout North America today cannot be understood without an analysis of colonialism and the relentless exploitation of black, brown and red labour. In the final analysis, the race relations model that Hughes learned from Park and the broader Chicago School of sociology had no conceptual space for these historical and economic dynamics, and thus he was inevitably left mystified about the social forces that led militants and moderates alike to march with King on that historic day in 1963.

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Everett Hughes’s Conceptual Blinders As a scholar and thinker, Hughes was a Chicago man through and through. In 1923 Hughes enrolled in the fledgling doctoral program at the University of Chicago. It is noteworthy that ‘race relations’ was never a primary area of interest and Hughes chose to write his dissertation on an arcane subject: the Chicago Real Estate Board. However, his mentor was Park, the leading light in the Sociology Department after William Thomas’s fall from grace in 1918. According to Lewis Coser, ‘of the many teachers at Chicago with whom Hughes studied, Park soon became his most important guide and model’ (1994: 4). Park joined the faculty in 1914 at the age of 50, after an eight-year stint as ghostwriter and publicist for Washington, founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama. In an autobiographical note (1971 :vii), Hughes comments that he ‘was ready for a new father’ (his biological father was a Methodist minister). Clearly, Park had a formative and enduring influence on Hughes’s career. As Saint-Arnaud (2009: 109) comments, Hughes remained loyal to ‘the Parkian corpus’ all through his career. There was another member of this academic family. After meeting Helen MacGill Hughes in Vancouver, Everett persuaded her to enrol as a doctoral student at Chicago in 1925 where she wrote her dissertation under Park’s supervision on ‘News and the Human Interest Story’. According to Coser (1994: 9), Helen Hughes was very close to the Parks and lived in their house prior to marrying Everett in 1927. That same year the Hugheses moved to McGill, where Helen worked on her dissertation and assisted Everett in the research for his first book, French Canada in Transition, published in 1943. In 1938 the Hugheses returned to Chicago, where Everett rapidly climbed the academic ladder to full professor and Helen worked on her dissertation. Between 1944 and 1961, Helen Hughes was a managing editor at American Journal of Sociology, which at the time was published by Chicago’s Sociology Department. In 1961 the Hugheses left Chicago when Everett took a position as chair of the Sociology Department at Brandeis University.

Race and the Politics of Language Hughes’s deep immersion in Chicago sociology and his devotion to Park were not an asset but rather a detriment when he found himself on the stage of history at the 1963 meetings of the ASA. In searching for an answer to why sociologists failed to anticipate the civil rights revolution, Hughes began by invoking Park’s 1939 article on ‘The Nature of Race Relations’ and extensively quoted from the Green Bible. Unfortunately, Hughes went fishing in the backwaters of Chicago sociology, whose obsolescence was highlighted by the very black revolt that he sought to explain. The fatal flaw of the Chicago School of Race Relations begins with the terminology itself:  ‘race relations’ (Steinberg 2001). Upon close examination, this apparently innocent term is riddled with ideology. It reduces the problem of race to whether groups have harmonious or discordant ‘relations’. Its first assumption is that when groups ‘come together’, there is a natural antipathy that engenders conflict. However, if we see the

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problem of race, as Marxists do, as Du Bois did – as fundamentally one of oppression and exploitation – then this presupposes a totally different ‘definition of the situation’ (to invoke the term coined by W. I. Thomas). And if oppression is the root problem, then the sociological eye shifts away from discordant ‘relations’ between groups to the structures of oppression that have led to the subjugation and exploitation of an entire people for centuries. This is the proverbial elephant in the room that is studiously ignored in the Chicago paradigm. Thus, if Hughes looked baffled as he pedantically groped for answers to his provocative question, it is because the paradigm that he was schooled in provided no clue, much less a theory, of what would account for ‘the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society’. ‘Race relations’ was not merely a term but also embodied a theory of racial change that was encapsulated in Park’s ‘race relations cycle’, with its four stages: contact, competition, accommodation and assimilation. One would hardly know from this abstruse and obfuscating terminology that the race relations cycle embodied the logic of colonialism. Let us unpack the assumptions and meanings that lurk behind this deceptively innocent nomenclature. ‘Contact’, Park tells us, occurs when races are brought together by ‘migration and conquest’. Already, critical thinking smashes into a conceptual barricade. Is it accurate to conflate migration and conquest under the rubric of ‘contact’? Does this not obscure the difference between those who arrive as voluntary immigrants and those who were shackled to the bottom of slave vessels or colonized in lands they had lived on for centuries? And the difference between immigrants in pursuit of the American dream and blacks consigned to perpetual servitude! No matter, from Park’s Olympian vantage point, contact between discordant groups is the catalysing event in the race relations cycle. ‘Competition’  – another euphemism for colonialism  – totally obscures its violent character, patently evident in the merciless exploitation of black labour in the Americas over centuries. For Park, as the putatively neutral observer of global events, the result of ‘competition’ is the triumph of the stronger race over the weaker race. This is inexorably followed by a third state – accommodation – whereby racial domination is normalized in law and custom. In the final stage of this teleology, the weaker race merges biologically and culturally with the dominant race, producing new races and advancing history. In other words, whatever its flaws and travesties – and as a young reporter Park inveighed against Leopold II’s cruelties in the Congo – colonialism has a happy ending. This is ‘the pot of gold at the end of the sociological rainbow’, to borrow a phrase from Small. This teleology was not Park’s invention alone. At the time he arrived at Chicago, assimilation theory was at the centre of the reigning paradigm. Indeed, the four stages of the race relations cycle provided the organizing schema of the Green Bible. On close examination, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) is a scholarly rendering of the common justification for colonialism, which is seen as incorporating ‘backward races’ into the culture and society of ‘advanced races’. This idea was central to both academic and popular discourses, and receives a rhapsodic endorsement from an unlikely source: Washington, Park’s erstwhile patron. In his famous autobiography, Up From Slavery, Washington (or Max Thrasher, his ghostwriter) intones,

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We must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ([1901] 1966: 13)

By this reckoning, blacks should be grateful to whites for rescuing them from a life in the bush, rather than wallowing in grievance and a march on Washington! Thus, in searching for an explanation to the ‘explosion of collective action’, Hughes reverted to the Green Bible and ‘the Parkian corpus’, which provided erudite justification for colonialism. If Hughes had his wits about him – if he had not turned a blind eye to Marx, Du Bois and Cox  – he might have been able to see that the March on Washington  – ‘the explosion’ (he had that right)  – was that of an oppressed people, protesting subjugation, denial of rights, inhumane treatment. Immersed as he was in the dogma of the Chicago School, Hughes was unable to make this leap, and instead masked his audience a disquisition on ‘race relations’. Even so, simply raising the question was a rare admission of intellectual failure. In his penultimate paragraph, Hughes (1963: 890) ponders whether sociology has become ‘too professional’, and defeats itself ‘by putting candidates for the license (PhD) so long in a straitjacket that they never move freely again’. The problem here is that Hughes speaks elliptically, instead of identifying the actual discourses that constitute the ‘straitjacket’ that prevented ‘sociology’ from recognizing oppression for what it is, and instead masked it in the obfuscating language of ‘race relations’. Nevertheless, Hughes’s declaration was tantamount to an admission of a paradigm crisis, which Kuhn defines as a loss of faith in the prevailing paradigm – in its knowledge claims, in its assumptions, in its ramifications for sociological theory and praxis. Even before the tenacious civil right warriors succeeded in securing their rights, they precipitated a revolution in the realm of ideas that would impact not only sociology, but the wider society as well.

‘A Prototypical Fox’ (Coser 1994) According to Saint-Arnaud (2009: 110), after the ASA speech, ‘apart from a paper given to the 1967 ASA conference, it was the last substantial document Hughes would produce on the subject’. Indeed, except for some papers early in his career, race/ethnicity was not a major area of specialization for Hughes. As Coser (1994: 1) notes, Hughes’s major contributions were to the sociology of work, occupations and professions, fields in which Hughes had a pioneering influence. And as other contributors to this volume make clear, Hughes provided second legs to Chicago-style ethnography through his pedagogy and vigorous advocacy of ethnography, especially with respect to doctoral students in sociology at Chicago and Brandeis (Helmes-Hayes 1998; Chapoulie 1996). As Arlene Daniels (1972:  1020)  shrewdly observes, ‘What Hughes once said about Park could apply equally as well to himself: ‘Park has left no magnum opus’ (emphasis in original). Through his long career, Hughes wrote a great many essays on a wide range

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of topics. Most of his writing on race and racism, however, was published in the 1940s, though these essays were given second legs by being anthologized in two collections: one with the assistance of his erstwhile student Becker, under the title The Sociological Eye (1971); the other edited by Coser, a friend and colleague at Brandeis, under the title Everett C.  Hughes On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination (1994). To be sure, these anthologies helped extend the life of Hughes’s work, though they also run the risk of perpetuating thinking that was dated or of marginal relevance to the rapidly shifting currents of race in the post-civil rights era. Indeed, this same issue comes up in relation to an anthology of Park’s essays on race that Hughes edited and published in 1950 under the title Race and Culture. This book was published at an opportune time, given that there was remarkably little race scholarship being published in the 1950s. Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study, An American Dilemma, was published a year later. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation, it was the most ambitious and costly research project to date. Thus, Race and Culture helped fill a vacuum at a time when forces of change were evident, marked by Harry S. Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces in 1948 and a series of court rulings that led to the Brown decision in 1954. However, Race and Culture did not break new ground nor did it sell well. Though published in January, Hughes received a letter from his editor at The Free Press, dated 23 March 1950, which ruefully states that ‘at the moment sales of the volume are at a virtual standstill. This despite the ten thousand cards and the fact that we were able to place the book in a representative number of book stores’.2 According to Saint-Arnaud, ‘The golden years of Park’s race relations sociology, like those of the Chicago School itself, were now in the past. His epistemological and methodological postulates were falling out of fashion’ (2009: 107; Wacker 1995: 136). The great achievement of the Chicago School of Race Relations, mirroring Franz Boas’s groundbreaking research in anthropology, was to repudiate biological racism and Social Darwinism, which held that inequalities between the races could be traced to the genes. The new orthodoxy was that racial difference was all a matter of culture, as was trumpeted by his title, Race and Culture. To be sure, this signalled a paradigm change of historic dimensions. It meant that race was not a life sentence relegating the inferior races to languish on the margins of the social order. However, as we argued above, encrypted in Park’s assimilation theory was the language and logic of colonialism. Therefore, solving the race problem meant assimilating blacks into the culture and body politic of the dominant group. Indeed, in his 1963 ASA speech, Hughes reflected the logic of the assimilation model when he averred, ‘The Negro Americans want to disappear as a divined group; they want to become invisible as a group, while each of them becomes fully visible as a human being’ (1963: 882). The vehicle to this racial nirvana was education, through which blacks would be socialized into the culture of the dominant group (a common refrain even today). The harsh question advanced by critics is whether Chicago sociology had only substituted culture for genes. The fatal elision was its reification of culture, thereby obscuring the manifold ways that ‘culture’ is ultimately rooted in social structures that produce and reproduce racial inequalities. Alas, as important as the repudiation of biological racism

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was, the Chicago sociologists had substituted a cultural determinism that, in their epistemology, accounts for persistent racial inequalities. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Race and Culture was the last hurrah of the Chicago School of Race Relations. Notwithstanding the book’s subtitle, ‘Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary Man’, its knowledge claims bore little relevance to the events on the ground and the imminent sea change in ‘race relations’. At a time of mounting racial tensions that amounted to a second ‘war between the states’, the evolutionary optimism of the race relations cycle rang hollow. In a 1993 paper on ‘Sociology’s Resistance to a Civil Rights Orientation’, Stanford Lyman argued that generations of social theorists  – from Park to Gunnar Myrdal to Parsons – evaded or downplayed civil rights as a matter of social urgency. Instead, they advanced theoretical models that projected racial amelioration as part of an evolutionary process of societal change. ‘Since the time for teleological redemption is ever long’, Lyman wrote sardonically, ‘blacks might consign their civil equalitarian future to faith in the ultimate fulfillment of the inclusion cycle’s promise.’ Lyman minced no words in declaring that ‘sociology […] has been part of the problem and not part of the solution’ (1993: 394, 397; Steinberg 2007: 9–10).

Hughes’s Other Blinders If Hughes brought ‘a white frame’ to the study of race, so did sociology in general. But this raises an enigmatic question. As we observed earlier, the University of Chicago produced more African American sociologists than any institution in the nation. This was made possible with the philanthropy of foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rosenwald Fund (Platt 1991: 43; Stanfield 1985). The Rosenwald Fund is especially germane to this discussion, since Julius Rosenwald, one of the founders of the Sears Roebuck Corporation in Chicago, provided scholarships for African American students in Chicago’s doctoral program in sociology. These young scholars, entering a predominantly white field in an elite university, were in a precarious position. As Saint-Arnaud put it (2009:  281), ‘the African Americans had little choice other than accommodation if they were to derive maximum cognitive, economic, and symbolic advantage in the alien environment they were being admitted to’. Despite progress and Park’s progressivism, according to Saint-Arnaud (2009: 285–6; emphasis in original), ‘The color line still governed the American university system. And not only did it keep scholars physically separate, but the work they produced was codified as peripheral sociology or true sociology depending on which side of the line you came from.’ Codified or not, the second generation of black sociologists formed ‘a distinct epistemic community’. Of course, individuals differed in how they negotiated their way across the racial minefield. Without doubt, Cox was the most uncompromising and confrontational. According to Saint-Arnaud (2009: 285), ‘His exemplary punishment for his systematic attempts to discredit the leading theories of race relations and replace them with a competing sociology derived from Marxism – in essence, for the crime of lèse-majesté – was to be relegated to the most obscure institutions of the southern periphery’ (emphasis in

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original). In contrast, as Cox once said of Frazier, ‘Franklin knows how to walk the fine line (Steinberg 2007: 66)’ This meant taking a path of what Saint-Arnaud calls ‘strategic accommodation’, at the peril of putting their careers at risk. Accommodation is a two-way street, and Hughes often wrote introductions or book reviews on behalf of students. Here are three such examples that reveal the ups and downs of ‘strategic accommodation’. 1. By all accounts, Hughes was an affable man and a dignified and congenial colleague. Andrew Abbott (1999: 28) describes him as ‘courtly and gracious’. However, in 1948, Hughes wrote an uncharacteristically belligerent and acerbic review of Cox’s book Caste, Class and Race. The venue was Phylon, a journal that Du Bois founded at Atlanta University in 1940. Hughes begins on a vaguely condescending note, acknowledging that the author ‘has worked long and hard’, ‘has many good and original ideas’ and ‘expresses himself in poetically powerful language’. Followed by this vitriol, it is disappointing to find that an author of these qualities had obscured, where he claims to clarify, by the use of the utmost sophistry; that he turns his whole work, by a colossal verbal twist, into an argumentum ad hominem; that he aggravates all of this by freely using without credit such of his opponents’ ideas as he approves of, while he names them only for purposes of attack. (1948: 66)

It goes without saying that Hughes is entitled to engage in verbal battle with an intellectual adversary. But it behoves us to ask what Cox wrote that elicited such condemnation. Cox’s offence was to take issue with the argument of ‘the Warner School’ – named for Lloyd Warner, Hughes’s colleague in the Sociology Department who argued that the Negro in America was victim of a caste system like that which existed in India. Cox rejected any comparison with India, where caste was encrusted in a system of religious belief and practice, which plainly is not the case in the United States. Cox’s whole point was that in the United States this so-called ‘caste’ had vastly different origins and functions, and was developed with the prime purpose of plundering black labour. Indeed, Hughes concedes that Cox’s ‘thesis is that race relations in this country are the result of capitalist exploitation’. But instead of engaging Cox’s argument, he sidesteps it and harps on the semantic quibble between Cox and Warner. This story has a highly unusual coda. Cox broke all the rules, formal and unwritten, of academic protocol and he sent a letter to the editors of Phylon that was published in the subsequent issue. Cox denied that his arguments were ad hominem and reaffirmed his position that ‘caste’ was only an instrument for exploitation and oppression. But his main complaint was that Hughes (1948:  66)  had not fulfilled his obligation as a reviewer but merely riveted his attention on ­chapter 22 on ‘The Modern Caste School of Race Relations’, ‘with scarcely a glance at the other twenty-four chapters’. 2. In 1955 Hughes reviewed Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie in the American Sociological Review (to be exact, it was a review of the original French version, published a year before the

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English translation). In this instance, Hughes fulfils his responsibility by engaging the substance and argument of Frazier’s book, and he gives voice to the author by beginning with a long quote. Here is an adumbrated version: Among colonized people and in other racial minorities, the middle class is generally born of and depends for its existence upon the role it plays in the economic organization of these societies. But the colored middle class of the United States has lived on the crumbs of philanthropy, on the salaries of employees of the public services, and on whatever they have been able to levy upon the scanty wages of black workers. This is why ‘Negro business’, which is of no importance in the American economy, has become a myth embodying the aspirations of this class. (1955: 383)

As Hughes went on to say, Black Bourgeoisie is ‘a barbed book. A reader who thinks himself white will perhaps think the barbs are meant for people of darker skin than his own; if he thinks twice, he, too, will feel the prick. For if Frazier is accusing darker-skinned American of being vain, trivial, pompous parasites, he accuses lighter skinned Americans of having made them so (1955: 383). This is Hughes at his best, with a critical engagement of the book. Unfortunately, Hughes then veers off into an extended quibble about whether Frazier’s analysis is generalizable to middle classes in African nations. Here Hughes seems more bent on scoring a debating point, citing his recent attendance at a conference of the International Committee for Study of Different Cultures. The problem is that Hughes never engages Frazier’s core argument about the myth of the black middle class – that it is cut off from the mainstream economy, and therefore a product of segregation. Though it saves many from dire poverty, it is not the sign that Hughes imagined, of a sign of racial progress. Nor does Hughes fully appreciate Frazier’s theoretical acumen or, for that matter, his detailed ethnography, which allows him to both vividly describe the events on the ground and to connect them with larger social structures. 3. In 1962 Hughes wrote the introduction to the new edition of Black Metropolis, originally published in 1945 (Hughes 1962). Its authors, St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton were doctoral students at Chicago. The original research had been funded by the Work Progress Administration, and the Rosenwald Fund subsidized the costs of dispatching 20 students to conduct field studies. Tactfully, Drake and Cayton dedicated this second edition to ‘The Late Professor Robert E. Park: American Scholar and Friend of the Negro People’. At first glance, Hughes’s review is altogether favourable. He begins by quoting Richard Wright, who wrote a brilliant 18-page introduction in which he extolled Black Metropolis as ‘a document of the agony of black men in the white world. It has much poetry in it’. Hughes cites this passage for its literary verve, but he does not seriously engage it. Had he attempted to grasp the full meaning of Wright’s observation and the book that he was introducing, he would have been better fortified for his rendezvous with history one year later. Instead, Hughes took refuge behind the prosaic language of social science. In the opening paragraph he compares Black Metropolis to Charles Booth’s 1899 classic, Life and

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Labor of the People of London. Hughes goes on to provide historical perspective on Chicago and its Negro district. He lauds Black Metropolis as ‘a great social survey’, and he concludes by saying that ‘Black Metropolis stands as the classic study of urban Negro life’. The problem is that these are empty encomiums rather than meaningful engagement of Drake and Cayton’s penetrating study. Indeed, to echo Cox, there is little evidence that Hughes read the book, which runs over eight hundred pages. Granted, commenting on so large a volume is a daunting task, and Hughes acquitted himself by writing a graceful introduction and putting his personal imprimatur on the book. However, he makes no effort to convey the scope, complexity, nuance and passion that went into this book, now considered a pioneering example of community studies (along with Du Bois’s equally unheralded classic, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899). Nor does Hughes’s review pick up on chapters with such compelling titles as ‘Along the Color-Line’, ‘Crossing the Color Line’, ‘The Black Ghetto’, ‘The Job Ceiling’ and ‘Breaking the Job Ceiling’. Indeed, these chapters shed light on the black condition and the seething resentments that led to ‘the explosion of collective action’ that caught sociology by surprise. Given Hughes’s eminent role as a pioneer of ethnography, he might have commented on Drake and Cayton’s rich and detailed description of everyday life – of the pretensions of the upper class, ‘sex and family’ among the lower class, and the middleclass stuck in the middle. To make matters worse, in an extended digression, Hughes (1962) indulges in a personal anecdote about the day he cycled off into a peaceful middle-class area: Men were washing their cars, mowing the lawn, or painting the back porch on that Sunday morning. Women were coming and going from the shops, or could be seen dusting in the front room. All at once I saw that one industrious household had a dark complexion. Then I saw that all were brown or black. It ran counter to all stereotypes; either their faces should have been white or the district should have had a different aspect. (1962: xxxix)

What this personal anecdote reveals is an utter disconnect with black people or black communities, not to speak of poor judgement in sharing such self-incriminating small talk in the introduction to Black Metropolis. Hughes is allowed his personal foibles and his gaffes, but he missed a chance to break out of his preconceptions and the orthodoxies of his discipline. Instead of invoking Park’s theoretical abstractions that derive from another era in race history, he might have found the answer to his famous question in Drake and Cayton’s illuminating ethnography of the lives of ordinary people ‘Along the Color Line’ (Drake and Cayton 1945). Of course, none of this would be worth talking about except that Hughes personifies tendencies that were a collective phenomenon, true of sociology in general. In Scholarship Denied (2015), Morris shows how the assiduous and groundbreaking scholarship of Du Bois was dismissed as propaganda or otherwise relegated to the margins. In this paper we are examining the reciprocal process – the denier, the gatekeeper, the process of marginalization – that keeps dissident viewpoints from attaining canonical significance and relegates the producers of this ‘peripheral discourse’ to

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the periphery, denied the grants, resources, prestige and a host of other benefits and opportunities that not only assure academic success but also project their voices into the discourse (McLaughlin 1998). Chicago sociology also missed the opportunity afforded by its active recruitment, with the help of Rosenwald Scholarships, of black doctoral students. The problem is that this initiative was motivated by liberal beneficence. Just as Tuskegee had a civilizing mission for educating blacks in the South, the University of Chicago was extending this logic and mission when it admitted blacks into its doctoral program, with the expectation that they would be indoctrinated into the discourses and paradigms of ‘the science of sociology’. They did not anticipate the resolute spirit of resistance that ran through this early incarnation of ‘black sociology’.

Conclusion The civil rights revolution ‘exploded’ a half-century after the founding of the Chicago School, and here we are, a half-century beyond the civil rights revolution, in a society still saddled with the living legacy of slavery and in a profession still scratching its collective head about the depth and persistence of the legacy of slavery. The civil rights revolution has been succeeded by a counter-revolution during the last half-century that has pounded one nail after another into the coffin of the civil rights movement. And as before, major discourses in sociology continue to provide ideological cover and erudite justification for counter-revolution, by advancing new incarnations of discredited victim-blaming discourses, tailored to present circumstances. Yet to be seen is whether another ‘explosion of collective action’ will jolt sociology from its complacency and its complicity in the new Jim Crow. Yet to be seen is whether historical events will again jolt sociologists to get on with the project of decolonizing sociology.

Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge receipt of a grant from the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program, and the assistance of Li Dong, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago, for his skill and perseverance in navigating the archival maze of the Everett Hughes Papers at Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Thanks also to Gaye Tuchman, a student of Everett Hughes at Brandeis during the formative years of the doctoral program, for sharing memories and perceptions. Finally, we thank Aldon Morris for generously sharing the galleys of his book The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, prior to its publication.

Notes 1 Writing in The New Republic on 24 September 1956, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, a black historian, fired this salvo: ‘Countless editors, scholars and men of letters, in and out of the South, who personally might shrink from killing an insect, gave their sanction to the intransigence of the racists. Is it too much to say that there is a connection between the essays, editorials and

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novels of the literary neo-Confederates and the howling mob that blocks the path of little Negro children on the way to school integration?’ 2 In 1936 over 80 per cent of all black PhDs were employed at black colleges (Winston 1971). 3 Letter from Jerry Kaplan, editor of The Free Press, to Everett Hughes, 23 March 1950 (Everett Hughes Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago). In addition to Race and Culture, a second volume was published in 1952 under the title Human Communities: The Collected Papers of Robert E. Park. It received a trenchant review by Amos Henry Hawley, a prominent demographer at the University of Michigan, trained by James A. Quinn, a student of Park at the University of Chicago. Hawley wrote, ‘When removed from the historical context in which they took form, Park’s writings are exceedingly vulnerable to criticism. His readers of the next and subsequent generations may see only the profile of a mind that was unsystematic, careless of logic, reckless with analogy, and uninstructed in the refinements of empirical research. Park’s keen insight, his insatiable curiosity, his power to excite students, and his great influence on the development of present day sociology are not superficially evident in his published works’ (Hawley 1953: 364).

References Archival Sources Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago Archives

Other Abbott, Andrew. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard. 1967. ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ Social Problems 14 (3): 239–47. Blauner, Robert. 1972. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper Collins. Burgess, Ernest W. 1961. ‘Social Planning and Race Relations’. In Race Relations: Problems and Theory, edited by J. Masuoka and Preston Valien, 13–25. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Calhoun, Craig, ed. 2008. Sociology in America: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition’, Sociological Theory 14 (1): 3–29. Coser, Lewis A. 1994. Everett C. Hughes on Work, Race and the Sociological Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cox, Oliver Cromwell. 1948. Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. New York: Monthly Review Press ———. 1948. ‘Response to Review by Everett Hughes’, Phylon 9 (2): 171–2. ———. 1951. ‘The Leadership of Booker T. Washington’, Social Forces 30 (1): 91–7 Daniels, A.K. 1972. ‘ “The Irreverent Eye”, Review of Everett C.  Hughes The Sociological Eye’, Contemporary Sociology 1 (5): 402–7. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1990. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Denis, Jeffrey S. 2015. ‘Contact Theory in a Small-Town Settler-Colonial Context:  The Reproduction of Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-White Canadian Relations’, American Sociological Review 80 (1): 218–42. Drake, St Clair, and Horace R. Cayton, 1945. Black Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Bois, William E. B. 1899. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (No. 14). Philadelphia: Published for the University. ———. 1906. ‘Speech at the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry’, http://users.wfu.edu/ zulick/341/niagara.html).

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———. (1935) 2013. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Feagin, Joe. 2009. The White Racial Frame. New York: Routledge. Furner, Mary. (1975) 2010. Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hawley, Amos H.  Human Communities. The Collected Papers of Robert E.  Park. by Robert E.  Park, Everett C. Hughes. Social Forces 31 (4) (May, 1953): 364. Helmes-Hayes, Rick. 1998. ‘Everett Hughes: Theorist of the Second Chicago School’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 11 (4): 621–73. Hier, Sean P. 2001. ‘The Forgotten Architect: Cox, Wallerstein and World-System Theory’, Race and Class 42 (3): 69–86. Hughes, Everett C. 1943. French Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1948. ‘Review of Caste, Class and Race by Oliver Cromwell Cox’, Phylon 9 (1): 66–8. ———. 1955. ‘Review of Bourgeoisie noire, by Franklin Frazier’, American Sociological Review 21 (3): 383–4. ———. (1945) 1962. ‘Introduction to the 1962 edition of Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’, xxxv–xlvi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. ‘Race and the Sociological Imagination’, American Sociological Review 28 (6): 879–90. ———. 1971. ‘Preface to The Sociological Eye’. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. ———.1984. The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. Transaction Edition, with a new introduction by David Riesman and Howard S. Becker. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. James, Cyril LR. 1984. The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A., speech at the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1948. Accessed at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/ works/1948/07/meyer.htm. Kuhn, Thomas. 1985. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyman, Stanford. 1993. ‘Race Relations as Social Process:  Sociology’s Resistance to a Civil Rights Orientation’. In Race in America, edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, 370–401. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marx, Karl. (1847) 1936. The Poverty of Philosophy:  A  Reply to M.  Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty. New York: International Publishers. Matthews, Donald. 1969. ‘Political Science Research on Race Relations’. In Race and the Social Sciences, edited by Irwin Katz and Patricia Gurin, 113–44. New York: Basic Books. Matthews, Fred. 1977. Quest for an American Sociology:  Robert E.  Park and the Chicago School. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. McLaughlin, Neil. 1998. ‘How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm’, Sociological Forum 13 (2): 215–46. Metzger, Walter. 1955. Academic Freedom in the Age of the University. New  York:  Columbia University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Morris, Aldon D. 2015. The Scholar Denied:  W.  E. B.  Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Oakland: University of California Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture:  Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary Man. New York: Free Press. ——— and Ernest Watson Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: The Free Press. Pedergast, James.1998. ‘The Confusing Identities Attributed to Stadacona and Hochelega’, Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (4): 149–67. Platt, Anthony. 1991. E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Polsgrove, Carol. 2001. Divided Minds:  Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. New  York:  W. W. Norton.

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Record, Wilson. 1964. Race and Radicalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism:  The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Saint-Arnaud, Pierre. 2009. African American Pioneers of Sociology. Toronto:  University of Toronto Press. Schwendinger, Herbert, and Julia Schwendinger. 1974. The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology, 1883–1922. New York: Basic Books. Small, Albion.1896. ‘Scholarship and Social Agitation’, American Journal of Sociology 1 (5): 564–82. Stanfield, John. 1985. Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Steinberg, Stephen 1995. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in. American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2001. ‘Race Relations: The Problem with the Wrong Name’, New Politics 8 (2): 57–61. ———. 2007. Race Relations: A Critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strauss, Anselm. 1996. ‘Everett Hughes: Sociology’s Mission’, Symbolic Interaction 19 (4): 271–83. Trigger, Bruce. 1976. ‘The Disappearance of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians’. In The Children of Aataenstic:  A  History of the Huron People to 1660, vol. 2, 214–24. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 2005 [1918]. The Higher Learning in America. New York: Cosimo Classics. Wacker, Fred R. 1995. ‘The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity in the Second Chicago School’. In A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Post-War American Sociology, edited by Gary Alan Fine, 136–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Washington, Booker. T. [1901] 1966. Up From Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton. Winston, Michael R. 1971. ‘Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historical Perspective’, Daedalus 100 (3): 678–719.

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CONTRIBUTORS Howard S. Becker is an independent researcher in San Francisco. He has written on several subjects, including deviance, education and the arts. Known as a proponent of field research, his most recent books are What About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning from Cases (2013) and Evidence (forthcoming). Gary Bowden is associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick. His most recent book is The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance (2014), coedited with Jacqueline Low. Jean-​Michel Chapoulie is professor emeritus of sociology at University of Paris 1. He has done research on, among other things, the history of the social sciences in France and the United States. An expert on the Chicago School, he has edited Le Regard Sociologique: Essais Choisis (1996). Christian Fleck is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria, and chief research fellow at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies, Higher School of Economics, Moskwa, Russia. His most recent publications include Sociology in Austria (2016), Etablierung in der Fremde. Vertriebene Wissenschaftler in den USA nach 1933 (2015) and A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (2011). He has coedited Knowledge for Whom? Public Sociology in the Making (2014) with Andreas Hess. Douglas Harper is professor emeritus at Duquesne University and president of the International Visual Sociology Association. His book Good Company:  A  Tramp Life (2006), a revision of his PhD dissertation supervised by Everett Hughes, has been translated into French and Italian. Harper’s other works include the publication Visual Sociology (2012) and a documentary film, The Longest Journey Begins. Rick Helmes-​Hayes is professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His chief area of research is the history of sociology, especially Canadian sociology. He has published on key figures in the Chicago School, in particular Robert Park and Everett Hughes. His most significant publication is Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter (2010) . Jacqueline Low is full professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Among her most recent publications is The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance (2013), coedited with Gary Bowden. Neil McLaughlin teaches social theory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has written on the critical theorist Erich Fromm and sociologist David Reims, and

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has published widely on both Canadian sociology and public sociology. He is currently studying the reputation of financial speculator and philanthropist George Soros. Marco Santoro is associate professor of sociology in the Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna. He is a founding editor of the journal Sociologica: Italian Journal of Sociology online, and a member of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne Paris. He is the author of books and articles on cultural production, intellectuals, social theory, the history of the social sciences and the Mafia. In 2010, he edited the first Italian translation of Everett Hughes’s The Sociological Eye. Stephen Steinberg is Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His publications include Race Relations: A Critique (2007). Deborah K.  van den Hoonard is a sociologist and professor in the Gerontology Department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She is the social science editor of the Canadian Journal on Aging and was Canada Research Chair in Qualitative Research and Analysis, 2006–​15, at St. Thomas. Her recent books include Qualitative Research in Action: A Canadian Primer (2nd ed, 2015), By Himself: The Older Man’s Experience of Widowhood (2010) and How to Think about Ethics While Doing Qualitative Research (2013). Lisa-​Jo van den Scott is assistant professor of sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic. A symbolic interactionist, her interests include the sociology of walls, where she examines the relationship of an Inuit group to their relatively newly introduced housing. She has published work on ethics and reality television as well. Philippe Vienne is Maître de Conférences, Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences Sociales and director of the Centre de sociologie de l’éducation, Institut de Sociologie, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Everett C. Hughes, based on archival material. He has published on various aspects of Hughes’s sociological work and on his correspondence with his students, especially Erving Goffman. As a sociologist of education, Vienne has also written two books based on a comprehensive sociology of violence in inner-​city schools in Brussels: Comprendre les violences à l’école (2003 and 2008) and Violences à l’école: Au bonheur des experts (2009). Izabela Wagner is associate professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw and a research associate in the Center for the Sociology of Education at the University of Cagliari, Italy. She is an ethnographer who studies the careers of musicians and scientists. She has published several articles on scientific careers as well as a recent book focused on the career trajectories of young musicians: Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos (2015).

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INDEX OF NAMES Abbott, Andrew 12, 66, 94, 110, 126, 228 Becker, Erika 163 Becker, Howard S. 1–​4, 7, 10, 12–​17, 20, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 39, 45, 48, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 61, 64, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 93, 100, 102–​11, 116, 119, 121, 123, 124, 142, 143, 145, 147, 164, 166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 194, 196, 201, 202, 213, 226 Benoit-​Smullyan, Emile 174, 175 Blau, Peter 48 Blauner, Robert 219 Blumer, Herbert x, 5, 41, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, 65, 66, 86, 87, 102, 121, 125, 126, 219 Bord, Richard 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 18, 20, 27, 30, 31, 95, 108, 184, 206 Bowden, Gary 27 Brazeau, Jacques 117, 118 Bucher, Rue 119 Burgess, Ernest 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 56, 58, 65, 67, 144, 212, 216, 217 Cayton, Horace 65, 68, 215, 229, 230 Chapoulie, Jean-​Michel 2, 3, 15, 27, 29, 30, 73, 93, 94, 110, 111, 128, 169, 194, 195, 207 Coleman, James 48 Cooley, Charles Horton 17, 43, 65, 178 Couch, William T. 158–​61, 169 Cox, Oliver Cromwell 214, 215, 219–​22, 225, 227, 228, 230 Davis, Allison 65 Davis, Fred 65, 66, 119, 176, 194 Davis, Kingsley 177 Dawson, Carl A. 50, 51, 100, 116–​17, 120, 128 de Augustine Reid, Ira 215

Dingwall, Robert 23 Doyle, Bertram 215 Drake, St. Clair 65, 215, 229, 230 Du Bois, W. E. B. 135, 214, 215, 217, 219–​22, 224, 225, 228, 230 Durkheim, Emile 1, 60, 67, 74, 218 Elias, Norbert 18 Emerson, Robert 10, 30, 87, 119 Evetts, Julia 23 Falardeau, Jean-​Charles 112, 117–​18 Faris, Ellsworth 41, 44, 45, 64, 108 Faris, Robert E. 108 Feagin, Joe 214 Fleck, Christian 28 Fleck, Ludwik 208 Frazier, Franklin 133, 135, 213, 215, 228, 229 Freidson, Eliot 1, 10, 39, 79, 102, 112 Gans, Herbert 10, 102, 107, 112 Gardner, Burleigh 53, 54, 65 Geer, Blanche 10, 55, 104, 105–​7, 109, 111, 119, 145, 176 Glazer, Nathan 168 Goffman, Erving x, 1, 3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 18, 20, 26, 27, 30, 31, 39, 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 66, 102, 104, 108–​10, 119, 121, 123, 124, 173, 174, 176, 178 Gold, Raymond x, 7, 54, 102 Goodman, Leo 48 Gross, Ed 11, 30, 79, 80 Gross, Mary 66 Gumplowicz, Ludwig 67 Gusfield, Joseph 10, 15, 119 Guth, Suzie 168 Habenstein, Bob x Habermas, Jurgen 16, 18 Hall, Oswald 10, 65, 100, 102, 117, 118, 122 Harper, Douglas 27, 28

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Hauser, Philip 48, 66 Havighurst, Robert 53, 111, 156 Hawley, Amos Henry 232 Haynes, Edmund 215 Heath, Christian 23 Helmes-​Hayes, Rick 16, 17, 27, 31, 110, 149, 193 Holmstrom, Lynda L. 76, 138, 147 Homans, George 176 Horowitz, Irving Louis 108, 109, 111 Hughes, James 175 Hutchins, Robert M. 157, 159, 168 Hyman, Herbert H. 156, 168 Kaplan, Jerry 232 Katz, Elihu 48 Kenkel, William 174–​75 Klapp, Orrin 119 Kriesberg, Louis x, 102 Kuhn, T. 208, 215, 225 James, Cyril L. R. 214 James, William 42, 64 Johnson, Charles Sturgeon 215 Lang, Gladys 119 Lang, Kurt 119 Langlois, Simon 112, 116 Lasswell, Harold 157, 168 Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 2, 47, 48 Lenski, Gerhard 174, 175 Lortie, Dan x, 118 Low, Jacqueline 27 Luhmann, Niklas 18 Lynd, Helen 144 Lyind, Robert 144 MacDowell, Harold x MacGill Hughes, Helen 1, 8–​10, 50, 96, 99–​101, 104, 108, 109, 111, 117, 145 Mannheim, Karl 163 Marcheau, Jacqueline 118 Marx, K. 1, 65, 218, 225 Masaryk, Jan 156 McLaughlin, Neil 28, 29 Mead, George Herbert x, 1, 39, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 66, 110 Mead Margaret 51 Merton, Robert King 2, 6, 20, 30, 47, 48, 55, 66, 108, 135, 194, 195, 201, 206, 207

Mills, Charles Wright 136, 211, 216 Miner, Horace 51 Moore, Gilbert 177 Nieman, Lionel 175 Ogburn, William F. 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 56 Ostow, Robin 94, 116, 117, 118 Parsons, Talcott 1, 2, 15, 16, 18, 47, 48, 55, 63, 127, 135, 194, 195, 207, 218, 219, 227 Park, Robert Ezra ix, x, 1, 3, 5, 9, 12, 15, 18, 26, 27, 39, 41–​47, 49–​51, 53–​54, 56–​58, 59–​60, 64–​67, 94, 97–​100, 102, 104, 106, 110, 112, 117, 121, 125, 126, 133, 134, 158, 212, 216–​27, 229–​30, 232 Platt, Jennifer 3, 30, 64, 86 Polsgrove, Carol 212 Quinn, James A. 232 Rahv, Philip 157, 168, 169 Record, C. Wilson 212 Redfield, Robert 7, 41, 51, 65, 120 Reinharz, Shulamit 10, 119 Riesman, David 1, 4, 8, 10, 12, 65, 66, 82, 107, 109–​11, 115, 116, 119, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 167, 168, 169, 174 Riesman, Paul 99 Ross, Aileen 100, 118 Rossi, Peter 48 Rostow, Eugene 157, 168 Roth, Julius 66, 102, 104, 105, 111, 119 Saint-​Arnaud, Pierre 215 Santoro, Marco 3, 11, 30–​31, 110 Schwendinger, Herman 216, 218 Schwendinger, Julia 216, 218 Shibutani, Tamotsu 119 Simmel, George x, 13, 14, 17, 43, 46, 61, 63, 67, 72, 124, 126, 133, 134 Small, Albion 41, 44, 50, 65, 217, 224 Solomon, David ix, xi, 66, 111, 118 Spencer, Herbert 43, 218 Star, Susan Leigh 10 Steinberg, Stephen 28, 29 Stone, Gregory 10, 119 Strauss, Anselm 1, 10, 26, 39, 55, 66, 72, 81, 83, 86, 94, 95, 96, 98, 109–​11, 123–​25, 127, 184

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Index of Names

Thomas, William Isaac 17, 39, 41–​46, 59, 64–​67, 134, 158, 182 Thorne, Barrie 10, 12 Thrasher, Max 224 Timmerman, Stephen 23 Tuchman, Gaye 10, 12, 119, 231 Twain, Mark 168 Vallee, Frank 115 van den Hoonard, Deborah 28 van den Scott, Lisa Jo 28 Veblen, Thorstein 217 Vienne, Philip 5, 27, 31 Wagner, Izabela 28, 29 Wagner, Nathaniel 176

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Warner, W. Lloyd 7, 52, 53, 228 Warner School 228 Weber, Max 1, 72, 138, 212, 218, 220 Weiss, Robert 15, 30, 65, 76, 77, 106, 107, 111, 120 West, Candace 23, 174, 180 Westley, Bill x Whyte, Donald 115, 120 Whyte, William Foote 4, 10, 45, 48, 53, 64 Wirth, Louis x, 5, 41, 51, 52, 56, 64–​66, 102 Womack, William 176 Wright, Richard 229 Zakuta, Leo 118 Zerubavel, Eviatar 13 Zimmerman, Don H. 174, 180 Zimmerman, Ekkart 179

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INDEX OF SUBJECTS art worlds 57, 196, 202 artistic occupations 194, 197, 202, 204 Atlanta School of Sociology 221 auxiliary characteristics (or traits) 178, 179, 181, 182, 200–​2

ethnicity 6, 15, 61, 119, 120, 128, 134, 183, 225 ethnography 12, 22, 29, 30, 53, 121, 141, 143, 147, 213–​15, 221, 225, 230 ethnomethodology 177 ‘excellence’ 29, 194, 196, 202, 205–​6

bastard institution(s) 12–​14, 61, 94, 96

fieldwork ix, x, 1, 2, 12, 27, 28, 29, 30, 39, 43, 44, 48, 49, 52–​54, 56, 63, 66, 71, 77–​78, 87, 93, 94, 97–​101, 104–​7, 110–​11, 122–​24, 127, 139, 196–​98 and professions 55 fieldwork teaching 7, 8, 52, 63, 72, 79, 102, 140 ‘free association’ 14, 62, 77, 82, 94, 107, 136

career (as a concept) 17, 19, 54, 73, 78, 80, 86, 193, 194, 200, 201 creative 193, 194 Chicago department ix, 44, 48, 50, 104 diaspora 115, 121–​28 paradigm 224 in Paris (or in France) 29, 207 Real Estate Board 99 school 2, 3, 5, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 39, 42, 44, 63, 65, 72, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 133, 134, 196, 212, 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 231 Second Chicago School 16 tradition 2, 3, 29, 39, 49, 108, 127 comparison 13, 43, 79, 80, 83, 84, 94, 105, 128, 142, 222 extreme 29, 198 contradictions of status 6, 13, 133, 200 dilemma of status 6, 11, 13, 28, 133, 159, 173, 175, 200 dirty work 5, 11, 22, 26, 28, 73, 87, 109, 125, 127, 128, 134, 153, 164–​67, 204, 205, 208 ecology animal and plant 43 human 18, 27, 72, 98, 121, 124, 125 urban 45 See also ‘Interpretive Institutional Ecology’ effort (direction and/​or level) 5, 6, 55, 84, 199, 202, 205, 206, 207

gender 23, 79, 135, 138, 173, 174, 178, 179–​83 ‘Genius’ 29, 108, 194, 196, 206–​7 mythology of the 205 ‘going concerns’ 17, 31, 75, 86, 128 Holocaust 28, 166 industrialization 5, 18, 39, 51, 81, 216 industrial relations 66 institution(s) 7, 11–​14, 17–​19, 28, 31, 39, 50, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 73, 77, 82, 86, 87, 94, 95, 96, 99, 119, 127, 136, 137, 174, 196, 203, 204, 217 Chicago University as 41, 134 as the setting for, or unit of analysis 72, 73, 77, 79 E. C. Hughes as an institution 110 Hospital as an institution 195 life, stages of 78 system of institutions 138 urban 42 See also total institutions, bastard institutions institutional forces 127 institutional office 175 interinstitutional relations 18, 73

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‘interpretive institutional ecology’ 15, 17, 31, 72, 73, 124

professional status 11, 175, 193, 200 professionalization 58

language as a research concern 19, 31, 60, 74, 116, 151, 223 of social science 174, 229 license 11, 19 life-​cycle 6, 80, 143 looking-​glass self 178, 179, 182

race 29, 42, 43, 134, 136, 159, 160, 163, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 211–​16, 218–​32 Chicago School of Race Relations 224–​27 and ethnicity 6, 9, 15, 71, 128 relations 46, 66, 81, 84, 85, 153, 173, 222, 229–​30, 232 racism 164, 180, 219–​21 racket 13 reflexivity 16, 75, 95, 143 restriction of production 19, 54, 60, 73 role 83, 85, 93, 96, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 184, 201, 205, 212 of the observer 104, 139 conflict of roles 145 professional role 205 role failure 140 role inconsistency 177, 179 routine 31, 199, 200, 203 and emergency 199 and accident 203

mandate 11, 75, 82, 166 marginality 2, 14, 39, 76, 219, 221, 230 master status 26, 28, 125, 127, 128, 173–​84 Marxism 2, 133, 177, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 228 medical school 195 methods xi, 2, 7, 12, 16, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 71–​81, 86, 104, 106, 109, 110, 122, 123–​26, 128, 135, 140, 141, 143, 155, 194–​97, 206, 215, 220, 226 statistical methods 48, 52, 56, 65 teaching method 136 See also comparison, ethnography, fieldwork, visual sociology migration 30, 42, 54, 58, 136, 162, 224 mistakes at work 13, 30, 109, 127, 203 natural history 17, 18, 94 Nazism 2, 5, 155, 161, 163, 166 occupations x, 5–​7, 9, 11, 14, 22, 30, 54, 56–​59, 61, 71, 73, 80, 102, 120, 127, 128, 134, 136, 138, 180, 193–​96, 202, 204, 208, 225 high-​status occupations 193, 194 outsider 83 participant observation 87, 106, 196, 198, 208 pattern analysis 12–​14, 78, 120, 165 phenomenology 59, 177 profession(s) x, 4, 5, 6, 11, 23, 30, 39, 55, 61, 65, 81, 84, 102, 107, 128, 133, 175, 178, 194–​97, 200, 202–​4, 207, 231 artistic and scientific professions 194, 203–​5 Occupations and professions (course) 102 sociology of professions 6, 30 professionals higher-​status 207 professional education 21, 197, 198, 200 professional mythology 205–​7

science 46, 47, 53, 59, 60, 63, 73, 74, 82, 84 scientific knowledge 124, 202, 205, 206 scientific work (and professions) 194, 201, 204, 207, 208 self 139, 174, 180 processual development of 79 work and self 136 slavery 211, 216, 219, 225, 231 social class 18, 127 social movements 135, 138, 177 anti-​psychiatry 3 catholic labour 2, 151, 155 civil rights 211, 212, 213, 219, 231 course on 29 feminist 8, 9 German 14 Nazi 165 Reform of the Progressive Era 41, 217 religious 55 sociological 41 statistics 7, 30, 44, 47, 87, 123, 126 status 179 inconsistency of 176, 183 See also dilemmas of status, master status symbolic interactionism 2, 3, 23, 27, 49, 63, 121, 125, 126

  243



Index of Subjects

teaching (as method) ix, 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12, 52, 94, 98, 135, 136, 138, 147, 163 teaching as fieldwork 83 teaching institutions 55 teaching and research 56, 135 total institution (concept) 28, 31, 56, 124, 125, 128

243

visual sociology 28, 140, 142, 146, 147 virtuosi 194, 196–​204, 206 work drama of 12, 28, 64 sociology of x, 6, 11, 53, 54, 56, 57, 65, 75, 80, 105, 119, 199, 225