Robert E. Park

Robert Ezra Park (born February 14, 1864 – died February 7, 1944) was an American urban sociologist, one of the founders of the Chicago School of sociology, who introduced and developed the field of “human ecology”.

Life

Robert Park was born in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, but soon after his birth his family moved to Minnesota, where Park grew up. He was the son of Hiram Asa Park and Theodosia Warner Park. After completing High School in Red Wing, Minnesota, his father decided not to send his son to college, for he thought that Robert was not good "study material". Robert ran from home and found a job on a railroad gang. After earning enough money, he enrolled at the University of Michigan. His professor there was a famous pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Park’s concern for social issues, especially issues related to race in the cities, motivated him to become a journalist.

In 1894 Park married Clara Cahill, the daughter from a wealthy Michigan family. They had four children.

After working, from 1887 to 1898, for different newspapers in Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago, Park decided to continue with his studies. He enrolled at Harvard University, in a psychology and philosophy program, for his MA degree. His professor at the time was prominent pragmatist philosopher William James. After graduation in 1899, Park went to Germany to study in Berlin, Strasbourg and Heidelberg. He studied philosophy and sociology in 1899-1900 with Georg Simmel at Berlin, spent a semester in Strasbourg 1900, and took his Ph.D. in Psychology and Philosophy in 1903 at Heidelberg under Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915). His dissertation Masse und Publikum. Eine methodologische und soziologische Untersuchung was published in 1904.

Park returned to the USA in 1903, briefly becoming an assistant in philosophy at Harvard, from 1904 to 1905. In the same time he engaged himself as an activist. In 1904 he was secretary of the Congo Reform Association, a group that advocated for rights of black Africans in Congo. Through this experience Park became more sensitive for racial issues in the USA, and he came to know Booker T. Washington, noted African American teacher and reformer, with whom he developed close relationship that will last for years.

In 1905 Park accepted Washington’s invitation to join him at Tuskegee Institute in work on racial issues in the southern U.S. He worked there first as publicist and later as director of public relation. In 1914 Park moved to Chicago to join the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, one of only few departments of sociology in the United States. He served there as a lecturer in sociology from 1914 to 1923, and a full time professor from 1923 until his retirement in 1936.

During his lifetime Park became a well-known figure both within and outside the academic world. At various times from 1925 he was president of the American Sociological Association and of the Chicago Urban League, and was a member of the Social Science Research Council.

After his retirement Park continued to teach and direct research at the Fisk University. He died in 1944 in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 79.

Work

Robert Park's career can be divided in two major parts - his early career when he was a journalist, and his later career that he spent as a sociologist.

Park as a journalist

In his early career as a journalist, Park was rather idealistic. He learned that newspapers can be very powerful tools. They can change public opinion to one side, or can influence stock market values to rise or decline. Park believed that accurate and objective reporting is thus essential for the whole society. If the news are precise and on time, society can respond to the new data on appropriate manner, without being faced with major shocks. The whole economy would thus function smoothly. Park planned a new kind of newspapers, called “Thought News”, which would present news in a more accurate manner. His plan never realized, but the whole experience had a long lasting effect on Park, and had influenced his career as sociologist.

Park as a sociologist

Park opposed the traditional, theoretical approach to sociology, in which sociologists create “big” theories from their armchairs. He rather believed in a field study as crucial for his work. He claimed that only through field experience can scientist conclude something about a subject. Park said:

Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research. [Robert Park, 1927]

He saw sociology as:

a point of view and a method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into and induced to cooperate in some sort of permanent corporate existence [called] society. (Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 1921)

During Park's time at the University of Chicago, its sociology department began to use the city that surrounded it as a sort of research laboratory. His work, together with that of his colleagues Ernest Burgess, Homer Hoyt, and Louis Wirth, developed into an approach to urban sociology that became known as the Chicago School. Chicago school was famous for being involved more with people than with methodology, going on the streets and doing research. Through that Park came in contact with city life, with its people and their problems. He coined the term “human ecology” to specify this approach of sociological inquiry.

Park was especially interested in immigrants, and has conducted numerous studies on them. He was famous for making the term “The marginal man”, to denote specific position of immigrants in the society. He writes:

The marginal man...is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures....his mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse. [Cultural Conflict and the Marginal Man, 1937]

Based on his observation of immigrant groups in the United States, Park developed his theory of group behavior. He postulated that the loyalties that bind persons together in primitive societies are in direct proportion to the intensity of the fears and hatreds with which they view other societies. This concept is developed as theories of ethnocentrism and in-group/out-group propensities. Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group.

Park proposed four universal and general types of interaction in intergroup relations: 1) Competition – type of interaction where all individuals or groups pursue their own interests, without paying attention to other individuals or groups 2) Conflict – type of interaction where individuals or groups consciously try to eliminate other individuals or groups 3) Accommodation - adjustment toward reducing the conflict and achieving the interest of mutual security 4) Assimilation – process where once separate groups acquire each other’s culture, or become part of a common culture.

According to Park, different ethnic groups coexisting in an urban area would ultimately merge into a single entity. This theory became famous as the “melting pot” theory of multiethnic integration.

Legacy

Robert Park was a pioneer in originating and developing the field of human ecology. He changed sociology from being mostly philosophical toward incorporating field study into its methodology and becoming the inductive science of human behavior. He introduced urban landscape as a valuable source of data for sociological study. His emphasis on immigrants and minorities was rather novel, revealing some data that shed new light on our understanding of the race relations, in- and out-group dynamics, social pathology, and other forms of collective behavior. Park’s approach to the study of newspapers and public opinion inspired numerous generations of scholars in the area of mass communication and education.

Bibliography

• Robert, Park E. 1904. Masse und Publikum. Eine methodologische und soziologische Untersuchung. Berlin: Lack & Grunau

• Robert, Park E. 1928. Human Migration and the Marginal Man. American Journal of Sociology, 33, 881-893

• Robert, Park E. 1932. The University and the Community of Races. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press

• Robert, Park E. 1939. An Outline of the Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc

• Robert, Park E. 1952. Human Communities: the City and Human Ecology. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press

• Robert, Park E. 1955. Societies. Glencoe Ill: The Free Press

• Robert, Park E. 1961 (original from 1937). Cultural Conflict and the Marginal Man. In Everett V Stonequist (Ed.), The Marginal Man. Russell & Russell Pub. ISBN 0846202816

• Robert, Park E. 1964. Race and Culture. Glencoe Ill: The Free Press. ISBN 0029237904

• Robert, Park E. 1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Robert, Park E. 1969 (original work from 1921). Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646041

• Robert, Park E. 1972. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646092

• Robert, Park E. 1999 (original work from 1922). The Immigrant Press and Its Control. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0781205565

• Robert, Park E. & Burgess, Ernest. 1984. (original work from 1925). The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226646114

• Robert, Park E. & Miller, Herbert A. 1964 (original work from 1921). Old World Traits Transplanted: The Early Sociology of Culture. Ayer Co Publishers. ISBN 0405005369

• Robert, Park E. & Washington, Booker T. 1984 (original work from 1912). The Man Farthest Down: a Record of Observation and Study in Europe. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0878559337

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Ballis Lal, Barbara. 1990. The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilization: Robert E. Park on Race and Ethnic Relations in Cities. London & New York: Routledge Kegan & Paul. ISBN 0415028779

• Kemper, Robert V. 2006. Robert Ezra Park. In H. James Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Sage Publications. ISBN 0761930299

• Lindner, R.; Gaines, J., Chalmers, M., & Morris A. 1996. The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521440521

• Rauschenbush, Winifred. 1979. Robert E. Park. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

External links

• An appreciation of Park – Biography in the University of Chicago Centennial catalogue

• An appreciation of Park – About Park’s work, at Brock University webpage

• Robert Park and Ernest Burgess: Urban Ecology Studies – Importance of Park’s work, by Nina Brown

• Biography of Robert E. Park - Biography on the American Sociological Association website

• Robert E. Park – Obituary in American Sociological Review

• Park - The Work - The Self and the Social Role – About Park’s work

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