The Mixed Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology

This article examines the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. Because the Chicago department so dominated sociology in the 1920s and 1930s, it created the mold or template on which new departments, or the expansion of older ones, were modeled in the 1930s and in the post-World War II period. The legacy of this situation is mixed: On the one hand, the Chicago department made sociology a legitimate discipline in a hostile academic environment, whereas, on the other hand, it helped create a discipline so diversified in substantive specialties, so atheoretical, and so concerned with narrow research and quantitative methods that serious problems of intellectual and organizational integration confront contemporary American sociology.