The Human Element

Abstract

A distinction is made between the core faculty and the peripheral faculty in the Chicago School. The School's uniqueness lay in the adherence of its core faculty to an approach to sociology rooted in pragmatism, particularly in the writings of Dewey, James, and Mead. In contrast to the diversity of intellectual commitments in other major departments, the Chicago core was unified in its utilization of concepts pertaining to experience as a guide to developing theory and research methodology. A tension existed between the core and the peripheral faculty, whose theoretical commitments lay outside pragmatism. Throughout the half-century of its existence, the department maintained the core by hiring its own graduates. However, changes in the discipline that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s seem to have made that strategy ineffective. Despite the fact that the department continued to recruit its own Ph.D.s after World War II, the boundary between core and periphery faded.