# Sociology Becomes a Profession

Sociology I · Foundations and the Great Themes · https://tryals.app/learn/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession

## From the Neighbourhood to the System

Sociology became an academic profession in the United States in two distinct waves.

**Chicago** led the first wave. Albion Small founded the department in **1892** and launched the *American Journal of Sociology* in **1895**.

The city was a living laboratory. Its population leapt from 30,000 in 1850 to over a million by 1890.

Key figures outside the formal department established foundational methods:

* **Jane Addams** founded Hull House, mapping neighbourhood poverty street by street.
* **W. E. B. Du Bois** published *The Philadelphia Negro* in **1899** using systematic surveys.

The Chicago department generated major theoretical landmarks:

* **Thomas and Znaniecki** traced migration in *The Polish Peasant in Europe and America*.
* The **Thomas theorem** showed that perceived situations have real consequences.
* Robert Park, working with **Park and Burgess**, treated urban life as an ecosystem.
* Burgess introduced the **concentric zone** model of expanding urban rings.

| | Chicago sociology | Parsonian sociology |
|---|---|---|
| Scale of theory | Concepts built up from cases | One general theory of social systems |
| Typical method | Fieldwork, life histories, mapping | Conceptual analysis and classification |
| Typical object | A neighbourhood, a trade, a gang | The social system as such |
| Where the researcher stands | In the setting | Above it |

In the mid-twentieth century, theoretical gravity shifted east.

**Talcott Parsons** developed functionalism and the **AGIL** scheme. Parsons argued that all social systems must satisfy four basic functional requirements.

**Robert Merton** advocated **theories of the middle range** instead. Merton separated **manifest** functions from hidden **latent** functions.

In 1959, **C. Wright Mills** attacked this consensus. Mills argued that grand theory ignored historical conflict and urgent social issues.

> **Common pitfall:** treating Chicago sociology as purely qualitative work. Researchers combined field ethnography with statistical mapping and census rates.

## Practice questions

10 of this lesson's 15 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Arrange these landmarks in the professionalisation of sociology, earliest first.

**Answer:**

1. Hull House is founded in Chicago
2. The first American university department of sociology opens
3. The American Journal of Sociology is founded
4. Du Bois publishes The Philadelphia Negro
5. Thomas and Znaniecki begin publishing The Polish Peasant
6. Parsons publishes The Structure of Social Action
7. Mills publishes The Sociological Imagination

**Why:** Putting Hull House and Du Bois at the front changes the story. On the usual telling, empirical urban sociology begins with the Chicago department; on the dates, two of its central techniques, mapping a district and surveying it house by house, were in use before or alongside it, by people the discipline did not employ.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/arrange-these-landmarks-in-the-professionalisation-of-sociology

### 2. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro was based on a house-to-house survey of a single city ward and appeared before the Chicago department’s best-known urban studies.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** Du Bois surveyed the Seventh Ward household by household and published in 1899, two decades before *The Polish Peasant* and a quarter-century before Burgess’s zones. Aldon Morris’s *The Scholar Denied* (2015) argues the omission from the canon reflected segregation rather than any judgement about the work.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/du-boiss-the-philadelphia-negro-was-based-on-a-house-to-house-survey

### 3. The Thomas theorem states that situations defined as real are real in their consequences. Which claims follow from it?

A. Any belief a group holds must therefore be true
B. A false belief that is acted on can produce the outcome it describes
C. What people take to be the case is part of the causal story, not merely a distortion of it
D. A researcher needs to reconstruct how participants understand a situation, not only how it looks from outside

**Answer:** B. A false belief that is acted on can produce the outcome it describes; C. What people take to be the case is part of the causal story, not merely a distortion of it; D. A researcher needs to reconstruct how participants understand a situation, not only how it looks from outside

**Why:** A rumour that a solvent bank is failing produces a run that empties it: the belief was false and the consequence real. The first option makes the theorem self-refuting, since the point is precisely that a definition can be wrong and still do work.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/the-thomas-theorem-states-that-situations-defined-as-real-are-real-in

### 4. Mills attacked grand theory and abstracted empiricism together in 1959, although they look like opposite sins. Why did he think one objection disposed of both?

A. That both failed to produce generalisable quantitative data that could be tested systematically across different cultures
B. That neither recognised how psychological instincts directly determine individual behaviour within modern urban settings
C. That each had detached its procedure from the substantive problems of actual people in actual historical situations
D. That both treated human behaviour as completely predetermined by biological instincts rather than learned cultural values

**Answer:** C. That each had detached its procedure from the substantive problems of actual people in actual historical situations

**Why:** Both, on his account, had let method dictate subject matter, one by building a conceptual apparatus with nothing determinate to say, the other by studying whatever the instrument could capture. His alternative was the sociological imagination: connecting a private trouble to the historical structure that produces it.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/mills-attacked-grand-theory-and-abstracted-empiricism-together-in

### 5. Complete the account of Parsons’s and Merton’s versions of functionalism.

**Answer:** Parsons argued that every system must solve four functional problems: adaptation, **goal attainment**, integration and pattern maintenance. Merton resisted such generality and argued for theories of the **middle** range, and distinguished the intended and recognised, or **manifest**, functions of an institution from its unintended and unrecognised, or **latent**, ones.

**Why:** The latent function is the tool that outlived the theory. It licenses the sociologist to ask what an institution actually does as against what it says it does, without accusing anyone of hypocrisy, which is why it is still used by researchers who would not describe themselves as functionalists at all.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/complete-the-account-of-parsonss-and-mertons-versions-of

### 6. Sort each research practice by whether it belongs to the Chicago tradition or to structural functionalism.

**Answer:**

- Chicago tradition: Mapping a city into rings around a central business district, Living in a neighbourhood in order to describe how it works
- Structural functionalism: Specifying the functional problems any social system must solve, Building one conceptual scheme intended to cover every society

**Why:** The contrast is not qualitative against quantitative. Chicago mapped and counted heavily. It is bottom-up against top-down: whether concepts are built to fit a case and then tested elsewhere, or specified in advance for all societies and then applied. Merton’s middle range was an explicit attempt to occupy the ground between.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/sort-each-research-practice-by-whether-it-belongs-to-the-chicago

### 7. Estimate how many years separate the founding of the first American sociology department and the publication of Parsons’s The Social System.

**Answer:** 59 (within ±6)

**Why:** **About 59 years.** Sociology went from having no American department to producing a general theory of social systems inside six decades, and the two ends of that span are so different in style that they can look like separate disciplines sharing a name.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/estimate-how-many-years-separate-the-founding-of-the-first-american

### 8. Chicago sociology and Parsonian functionalism took fundamentally different stances towards empirical reality. What follows from where the researcher stands in each tradition?

A. Chicago requires researchers to observe systems entirely from above
B. Parsons rejects all systematic classification of social actions
C. Chicago builds concepts upwards from concrete empirical locales
D. Parsons limits analysis exclusively to localised urban trade groups

**Answer:** C. Chicago builds concepts upwards from concrete empirical locales

**Why:** Confusing the scale of analysis with a total rejection of empirical data misses Parsons's intent to classify total social systems. Similarly, reversing the observational standpoint misattributes Chicago's immersion in local settings to Parsonian abstraction.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/chicago-sociology-and-parsonian-functionalism-took-fundamentally

### 9. In which year was the first university department of sociology in the United States founded?

**Answer:** 1892

**Why:** **1892**, at the University of Chicago. The date is often given as the beginning of professional sociology in America, though courses had been taught elsewhere earlier and the settlement-house researchers were already at work in the same city.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/in-which-year-was-the-first-university-department-of-sociology-in-the

### 10. Parsons’s functionalism contains no account of social change, because a system in equilibrium cannot by definition change.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**, though the criticism has a real target. Parsons wrote extensively on differentiation and on evolutionary universals in the 1960s. The defensible complaint is about weight and ease: change enters his scheme as a strain to be reabsorbed, and conflict is harder to state in it than integration is.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/sociology-becomes-a-profession/parsonss-functionalism-contains-no-account-of-social-change-because