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Robert Ezra Park
1864-1944
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Robert Ezra Park was born on February 14, 1864 in Harveyville, Penn- sylvania. Soon after his birth his family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where the young Park grew up on the Mississippi River as the son of a prosperous businessman. Like Veblen, Cooley, and Mead, he is a product of the Middle Border. After his graduation from the local high school and despite the opposition of his father, Park went to the University of Minnesota. After one year there, he transferred to the University of Michigan.
At Ann Arbor, Park was fortunate to find an inspiring teacher, the young John Dewey, and to become a member of a group of like-minded students who discussed the social issues of the day in the spirit of the reforming ideas then spreading all over the Midwest. Dewey introduced Park to a remarkable man, Franklin Ford, who was to have a decisive influence on his subsequent career. Ford had been a newspaperman and had reported in detail on the vagaries of the stock market and the impact of news on that market. He had come to see stock prices as a reflection of public opinion shaped by the news, and was therefore led to infer that with more adequate reporting, general public opinion could be made to respond to current events in as accurate a manner as the stock market. Much like some later pollsters and survey analysts, Ford believed that if the changes in public opinion could be gauged with precision, "the historical process would be appreciably stepped up, and progress would go forward steadily, without the interruption and disorder of depression or violence, and at a rapid pace."
Ford and Park planned a new kind of newspaper, to be called Thought News, which would register as well as influence movements of public opinion by more accurate presentation of the news. The paper never reached publica- tion, but Park's views on the crucial importance of the news, the media of communication, and the influence of public opinion were largely shaped by his conversations with Franklin Ford.
From Coser, 1977:366-367.
(Special acknowledgement to Larry R. Ridener and The Dead Sociologists' Society) http://raven.jmu.edu/~ridenelr/personal/VITA.HTML
Having been immersed in a progressive atmosphere at the University of Michigan, Park decided upon graduation in 1887 not to go into his father's business but to seek a career in which he could give expression to his reforming concerns. He soon realized, however, that he differed from his Michigan friends by not indulging in utopian dreams and blueprints for reform. Most well-intentioned programs for change, he seemed to believe, were futile since they were based on insufficient knowledge of underlying social realities. Before reform could be implemented, a much greater knowledge was needed of present-day society than was so far available. Intimate acquaintance with social problems was a prerequisite for attempts to resolve them. The one career that seemed to present an opportunity for first-hand observation was newspaper reporting. So Park became a newspaperman.
From 1887 to 1898 Park worked for daily newspapers in Minnesota, Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago. He was soon given special assignments to cover the urban scene, often in depth through a series of articles. He wrote on city machines and the corruption they brought in their wake. He described the squalid conditions of the city's immigrant areas and the criminal world that was ensconced there. Constantly on the prowl for news and feature stories on urban affairs, Park came to view the city as a privileged natural laboratory for the study of the new urban man whom industrial society had created. Much of Park's later work and research interests grew organically out of his experiences as a newspaperman.
In 1894 Park married the daughter of a leading Michigan lawyer, Clara Cahill. The couple were to have four children. Four years after his marriage, Park decided that his empirical knowledge of the ways news was being created might be broadened by further academic study. He went to Harvard to study philosophy "because [he] hoped to gain insight into the nature and function of the kind of knowledge we call news." In addition, he "wanted to gain a fundamental point of view from which [he] could describe the behavior of society under the influence of news, in the precise and universal language of science.
At Harvard, Park studied psychology with Muensterberg and philosophy with Royce and James. After earning his M.A. in 1899, he decided to go to Germany for further studies. He first went to the University of Berlin where he listened to Georg Simmel and was deeply influenced by him. Except for these courses with Simmel, Park never received any formal instruction in sociology.
While in Berlin, Park came across a treatise on the logic of the social sciences, Gesellschaft und Einzelwesen (1899), by the Russian sociologist B. Kistiakowski. "It was the first thing I had found anywhere," he wrote, "that dealt with the problem with which I was concerned in terms in which I had come to think of it." According to Pitirim Sorokin, Kistiakowski expounded in this book a series of views on the characteristic tendencies of modern society that were in many respects similar to those developed by Simmel as well as by Toennies in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Since Kistiakowski had been a student of Wilhelm Windelband, Park went to Strasbourg and later to Heidelberg to study with the neo-Kantian philosopher. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Masse und Publikum, under Windelband. Returning to Harvard in 1903 he put the finishing touches to his dissertation and served for a year as an assistant in philosophy.
From Coser, 1977:367-368.
Park soon gave up his previous ambition to teach because he felt "sick and tired of the academic world, and wanted to go back into the world of men." He wrote much later that he could "trace [his] interest in sociology to the reading of Goethe's Faust." "You remember," he explained, "that Faust was tired of books and wanted to see the world."
William James once read to his class his essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." This essay greatly impressed Park. "The 'blindness' of which James spoke," writes Park, "is the blindness each of us is likely to have for the meaning of other people's lives. . . .What sociologists most need to know is what goes on behind the faces of men, what it is that makes life for each of us either dull or thrilling." James spoke of the "personal secret" that makes life boring to one person and full of zest to another. Park seems to have con- cluded after listening to James that his own "secret" consisted in his desire to alternate between active involvement in social affairs and detached analysis and social description. Having spent six years in the academy, Park resolved to return to the give-and-take of the social world which had fascinated him during his newspaper career.
The social problems of the Negro seemed to Park at the time to be the most acute in America. His interest in racial issues, which continued to be a prime focus of his concerns throughout his later career, was spurred by having met Booker T. Washington, the President of Tuskegee Institute. Park soon joined forces with Washington and became his informal secretary, accompany- ing him on his travels. He went along on the research trip to Europe, which resulted in Washington's book, The Man Farthest Down; experts agree that this account of the miseries of Europe's underclass was mostly written by Park. Park worked with Washington for nine years and had great respect for him. He once remarked to Ernest Burgess that he learned more from Washing- ton than from any of his teachers. Park seems to have been especially im- pressed by Washington's consummate skills in the strategy and tactics of social action.
Park met Washington when he was invited to become secretary and press agent of the Congo Reform Association, a group of reformers who wanted to draw public attention to the oppression, corruption, and depravity of the Bel- gian colonial regime in the Congo. He was about to go to Africa to study the situation at first hand, when Washington invited him to Tuskegee and con- vinced him that he might best start his studies of Africa in the South. As a result, Park spent seven winters, partly at Tuskegee and partly roaming about the South, "getting acquainted with the life, the customs, and the condition of the Negro people." During those years he also wrote a series of muckraking exposes of the Belgian colonial atrocities in the Congo for Everybody's Maga- zine.
From Coser, 1977:368-369.
In 1914, at the age of fifty, there came another turning point in Park's life: he embarked on an academic career. At the suggestion of W. I. Thomas, he accepted a summer appointment in the Department of Sociology at the Uni- versity of Chicago to give a course on "The Negro in America" for a fee of $500. Soon afterward he joined the department as a permanent member and continued teaching there until 1936.
Park's success at Chicago was not immediate. When he joined the depart- ment, its founder and spiritus rector, Albion Small, still dominated it, and Thomas, who had joined the department in 1896, was its most creative and forceful member. By 1920, however, when the students came back after the war, Small was nearing retirement and Thomas had been forced to resign. Park became the outstanding member of the department.
Stimulating though his lectures were, Park's reputation did not depend on them. He insisted on getting to know each of his students personally and having protracted interviews and sessions with them. Learning about their back- ground and interests in this personal way, Park then helped them map out their field of research and specific research problems. It was a time-consuming procedure, but he loved it.
Park brought his interest in the city into the university. He wrote that he had "actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man." Out of this he had gained "a con- ception of the city, the community, the region, not as geographical phenomena merely but as a kind of social organism." It was the study of this organism in all its details that he now urged upon his students. The city of Chicago was to become a great natural laboratory for research on urban man and his natural habitat.
For nine years Park taught at Chicago as a professorial lecturer with the same nominal salary. But being dedicated to his students and having some independent means by inheritance, he offered more courses than he was paid for. One day he received an official document "authorizing Dr. Park to give courses in the winter quarter without salary." The administration had finally discovered what was going on and wished to regularize the irregular. Park's appointment as a full professor came only in 1923, when he was fifty-nine years old.
Park was a colorful man, even in appearance. Leading a sedentary life while at the university, he developed a thickset and pudgy physique. His white hair was long, perhaps because he forgot to pay regular visits to the bar- ber. Living up to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, he would sometimes appear before his class with shaving soap in his ears and with his clothes in disarray. He would frequently forget where he had placed a book, and it even happened that he came to a convention forgetting to bring a copy of the paper he was scheduled to read. He once continued serenely with his lecture while a student walked to the front of the room and tied his neckwear, which had been dangling loose from his collar.
In the classroom Park had a gruff voice and manner, so he sometimes felt the need to explain that when he spoke rudely he did not mean to offend but that this was just his manner when thinking hard. Nevertheless, tears would sometimes flow when he told a student that his (the student's) ideas were not worth a damn. At times the chairman of the department, Ellsworth Faris, found it advisable to inform incoming graduate students that Park was one of the great scholars in sociology and that they should not be put off by his crustiness, thus depriving themselves of an exceptional opportunity. Once students got to know Park, and discovered the warmhearted and affectionate man behind the gruff mask he liked to present, they became exceptionally de- voted to him. Few men have had as many deeply attached and grateful stu- dents.
Park was not a very prolific writer. Ellsworth Faris said of him that he would rather "induce men to write ten books than to take time off to write one himself." Apart from his dissertation, he wrote only one book, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922). His main contributions came in a series of in- fluential articles and introductions to the books of his students, which have now been gathered in the three volumes of his Collected Papers. Perhaps his most influential publication was the pathbreaking Introduction to the Science of Sociology, which he published, with Ernest Burgess as a junior author, in 1921 and which is by far the most important textbook-reader in the early his- tory of American sociology. One other book that appeared under his name, Old World Traits Transplanted, was the result of Park's collaboration with W. I. Thomas, though it was signed by Park and a junior author. This was done because the publishers and sponsors refused to print a book authored by Thomas, who had recently been forced to resign his university position be- cause of what was then judged to be a case of sexual indiscretion.
Park received ample professional recognition during his lifetime. He served as President of the American Sociological Society (1925), a delegate to the Institute of Pacific Relations, a director of the Race Relations Survey on the Pacific Coast, an editor of a series of books on immigration for the Carnegie Corporation, an associate editor of several academic journals, and was a mem- ber of the Social Science Research Council and more than a dozen other learned societies. He was also the first President of the Chicago Urban League.
An inveterate traveller, Park, before during and after his Chicago appoint- ment, roamed all over the world, exploring its racial frontiers and studying its cities. He visited Germany and conferred with its leading sociologists; he spent a whole academic year at the University of Hawaii; he lectured in Peiping and visited India, South Africa and Brazil.
After his retirement from the Chicago faculty, Park, ever ready to share his knowledge with students, moved to Fisk University, where, right through his eightieth year, he taught students and directed their research activities. He died at Nashville, Tennessee on February 7, 1944, exactly one week before his eightieth birthday.
Perpetually curious and ever open to novel experience whether on the racial frontier or in the wilderness of cities, Park was above all devoted to training men who would be able to map the social world with precision and objectivity. He was deeply committed to reform and improvement of the human condition, but felt what was needed at that juncture were trained and disciplined observers of the passing scene. Students attracted to the area of race relations were generally strongly disposed to social action against racial dis- crimination and for Negro civil rights. Park shared their sentiments. But, in Ernest Burgess' words, he "told them flatly that the world was full of cru- saders. Their role instead was to be that of the calm, detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug."
According to Park, "a sociologist was to be a kind of super-reporter, like the men who write for Fortune. He was to report a little more accurately, and in a manner a little more detached than the average . . . the 'Big News.' But in Park's view the sociologist was no mere gatherer of facts. He gave his students, in Everett Hughes' words, "a perspective in which to see themselves and thus satisfy their curiosity. The perspective was a system of concepts ab- stract enough to comprehend all forms of interaction of men with one an- other."
Devoted to the enterprise of studying urban life and culture with the same painstaking meticulousness and attention to detail that anthropologists use when they describe primitive tribes, Park was convinced that no such study was, to use his expression, worth a damn, if it was not guided by an array of concepts that would allow the student to sift the significant from the un- essential. To the extent that he managed to convey this sense of the importance of theory to his students, and he was by no means always successful, he made them transcend mere empiricism to become true sociologists.
There is no better testimony to the impact of Park's teaching than the imposing roster of his students. Everett C. Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Stuart Queen, Leonard Cottrell, Edward Reuter, Robert Faris, Louis Wirth, and E. Franklin Frazier all became presidents of the American Sociological Society. Helen McGill Hughes, John Dollard, Robert Redfield, Ernest Hiller, Clifford Shaw, Willard Waller, Walter C. Reckless, Joseph Lohman and many other students of Park became leading social scientists. It is hard to imagine the field of sociology without the contribution of the cohort of gifted men whom Park trained at Chicago. What higher tribute can be paid to a teacher?
From Coser, 1977:369-372.
Readers who are familiar with the work of the Chicago School of Sociology and its most influential member, Robert E. Park, may wonder why a chapter in a book on sociological theory is devoted to a man most often as- sociated with research rather than theory. The fact is, however, that Park himself, although very much concerned with accurate social reporting and description, saw his major contribution in the development of a set of concepts that would allow systematic classification and analysis of social data.
The contemporary assessment of Robert Park's work roughly coincides with his self-appraisal when he wrote:
We had in sociology much theory but no working concepts. When a stu- dent proposed a topic for a thesis, I invariably found myself asking the ques- tion: what is this thing you want to study? What is a gang? What is a public? What is a nationality? . . . etc. I did not see how we could have anything like scientific research unless we had a system of classification and a frame of reference into which we could sort out and describe in general terms the things we were attempting to investigate. Park and Burgess' In- troduction was a first rough sketch of such a classification and frame of refer- ence. My contribution to sociology has been, therefore, not what I intended, not what my original interest would have indicated, but what I needed to make a systematic exploration of the social work [sic] in which I found myself. The problem I was interested in was always theoretic rather than practical.
Park not only classified, as he modestly says; he searched for relationships be- tween classified variables and thus engaged in theoretically guided research rather than merely descriptive reporting. As Everett Hughes has noted, "[Park] had no desire to form a system, yet he was primarily a systematic sociologist." It is as such that he commands our attention.
From Coser, 1977:357.
Park defined sociology as "the science of collective behavior," and this definition already suggests that while he was not unmindful of the need for analysis of social structures, he was mainly concerned with the study of more fluid social processes. In Park's view society is best conceived as the product of interactions between component individuals which are controlled by a body of traditions and norms that arise in the process of interaction. Social control is "the central fact and the central problem of society." "Society is everywhere a control organization. Its function is to organize, integrate, and direct the energies resident in the individuals which compose it." Accordingly, sociology is "a point of view and method for investigating the processes by which indi- viduals are inducted into and induced to cooperate in some sort of corporate existence we call society."
Social control refers to the variety of mechanisms by which collective be- havior is organized, contained, and channelled. The social process involves forms of antagonism, of conflict and competition, and social control serves to order these processes. Whether it be the more elementary forms of control that arise among members of a crowd, or the more elaborate forms that crystallize into public opinion and the law, social control always operates so as to regulate competition, to compromise conflict, and to harness individuals to the necessary requirements of the social order. Yet social control can never achieve a per- manent state of equilibrium in society. The fact that antagonisms are regulated by control mechanisms does not mean that they are eradicated, but only that they have become latent or have been driven into socially accepted channels "Every society represents an organization of elements more or less antagonistic to each other but united for the moment, at least by an arrangement which defines the reciprocal relations and respective sphere of action of each. This accommodation, this modus vivendi, may be relatively permanent as in a society constituted by castes, or quite transitory as in societies made up of open classes.''
For Park, a relatively stable social order is one in which mechanisms of social control have for the time being succeeded in containing antagonistic forces in such a way that an accommodation has been reached between them. But while accommodation may be reached temporarily between specific groups and individuals, there is, according to Park, every reason to believe that an overall accommodation, at least in modern society, can never be permanent be- cause new groups and individuals are likely to arise and claim their share of scarce values, thus questioning the scheme of things that has arisen from previous accommodations.
From Coser, 1977:358-359.
Park distinguished four major social processes: competition, conflict, ac- commodation, and assimilation. Competition he took to be "a universal phe- nomenon . . . first clearly conceived and adequately described by the biolo- gists" and "defined in the evolutionary formula 'the struggle for existence.' " "Competition is the elementary universal and fundamental form'' of social interaction. It is "interaction without contact whether the competition is among members of a plant community struggling for a share of sunlight or among human beings competing for prized goods or values, the individual unit is unaware of its competitors. "It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact properly speak- ing, may be said to exist.'' When this is the case, unconscious competition be- comes conscious conflict and "competitors identify one another as rivals or as enemies." Competition is as universal and continuous in human society as it is in the natural order. It assigns persons their position in the division of labor as well as in the ecological order. Conflict, on the other hand, is inter- mittent and personal. While competition is a struggle for position in the ecological and economic order, "the status of the individual, or a group of in- dividuals, in the social order . . . is determined by rivalry, by war or by subtler forms of conflict." "Competition determines the position of the individual in the [ecological] community, conflict fixes his place in society. Location, posi- tion, ecological interdependence--these are the characteristics of the [ecologi- cal] community. Status, subordination, and superordination, control--these are the distinctive marks of a society.''
Accommodation implies a cessation of conflict, which comes about when the system of allocation of status and power, the relations of superordinates to subordinates, have been temporarily fixed and are controlled through the laws and the mores. "In accommodation the antagonism of the hostile elements is, for the time being, regulated, and conflict disappears as overt action, although it remains latent as a potential force. With a change in the situation, the ad- justment that had hitherto successfully held in control the antagonistic forces fails." Accommodation, like social control generally, is fragile and easily up- set. To Park, accommodation and social order, far from being "natural," are only temporary adjustments and may at any moment be upset by underlying latent conflicts that press to undermine the previous order of restraint.
In contrast to accommodation, assimilation "is a process of interpenetra- tion and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common culture." While Park seems to have felt that the other three fundamental social processes operate in a very wide variety of social interactions, he reserves the discussion of assimila- tion more especially to the sociology of culture and to the process by which ethnic groups or races are slowly incorporated into a wider whole through assuming a common cultural heritage. When assimilation is achieved, this does not mean that individual differences are eradicated or that competition and conflict cease but only that there is enough unity of experience and com- munality of symbolic orientation so that a "community of purpose and action" can emerge.
From Coser, 1977:359-360.
Although Park hoped for the eradication of racial differences through full assimilation in the very long run, he did not think of it as a process that had much relevance to the analyses of race relations in his America. The concept of "social distance," which Park derived from Simmel, seemed to him of much greater importance for an understanding of contemporary race relations. This concept refers to the degree of intimacy that prevails between groups and in- dividuals." The degree of intimacy measures the influence which each has over the other." The greater the social distance between individuals and groups, the less they influence each other reciprocally. Such terms as race consciousness or class consciousness, Park argues, refer to social distance be- tween groups of people. They "describe a state of mind in which we become conscious of the distances that separate, or seem to separate, us from classes and races whom we do not fully understand." In American race re- lations in particular, a fixed and conventional social distance assures that the Negro is "all right in his place." As long as he keeps his place and his dis- tance, a great deal of warmth between the subordinate and the superordinate may obtain. The lady of the house may be on the closest terms with her cook, but these relations can be maintained only as long as the cook keeps her "proper distance." Similarly, interpersonal relations between Negroes and whites may be more personal in the South than they are in the North, because the southern white is assured that the Negro will know precisely how to keep the proper distance.
Park thought that what is ordinarily called prejudice "seems . . . to be [the] more or less instinctive and spontaneous disposition to maintain social distance." Prejudice in this sense was to Park by no means pathological; it was a universal human phenomenon. Men, he argued, come into the world with certain predispositions and they acquire others in later life. "A man with- out prejudices is a man without conviction, and ultimately without character." Friendships and enmities are correlative. "As it seems impossible to conceive of a world without friendship, so it seems improbable, in such a world, that life should go without enmities, for those two things are, in some sense and some degree, correlative, so that the bias with which we view the qualities of our friends makes it difficult if not impossible to do justice to the virtues of our enemies." Prejudice and social distance are therefore ineradicable aspects of human association.
Race prejudice, like caste or class prejudice, is in this view "merely one variety of a species." It can be looked at as "a phenomenon of status." "Every individual we meet inevitably finds a place in our minds in some cate- gory already defined." Every person we encounter is categorized and assessed according to his imputed status in the established order of things. And so, in racially divided American society, Negroes are assigned inferior status and they are enjoined to maintain the proper distance toward those who have superordinate status.
Racial prejudice and social distance, Park argued forcefully, must not be confused with racial antagonism and conflict. The former operate when the subordinate accepts his inferior status; the latter arise when he is not longer willing to do so. Writing in 1928, Park penned these prophetic words: "There is probably less racial prejudice in America than elsewhere, but there is more racial conflict and more racial antagonism. There is more conflict because there is more change, more progress. The Negro is rising in America and the meas- ure of the antagonism he encounters is, in some very real sense, the measure of his progress." Race prejudice refers to the normal process of categorizing individuals according to the position they occupy in the traditional order. "Prejudice is not on the whole an aggressive but a conservative force." Racial conflicts and antagonisms, on the other hand, indicate that the traditional order is weakening so that the customary accommodations are no longer effective and social distance in no longer maintained effectively. Racial conflicts are harbingers of change in the racial status order. As previous accommodations break down under the impact of antagonism and conflict, they prepare the way for a new accommodation between contending racial status groups in which the previously inferior group achieves more nearly equal status. Once this has been accomplished, the basis may have been laid for a fusion of the previously distinct groups through racial assimilation and the eradication of social dis- tance between them. Hawaii's racial situation is a case in point. The race re- lations cycle from accommodation to conflict to new accommodation and pos- sibly to assimilation is to Park only a special case of the general process of social change.
From Coser, 1977:360-362.
Park conceived of the process of social change as involving a three-stage sequence, or "natural history," beginning with dissatisfactions and the result- ing disturbances and social unrest, leading to mass movements, and ending in new accommodations within a restructured institutional order. Social unrest "represents at once a breaking up of the established routine and a preparation for new collective action." Crowds as agents of unrest were, as Park said in a discussion of the French social psychologist Le Bon, "not merely any group brought together by the accident of some chance excitement." They were "the emancipated masses whose bonds of loyalty to the old order had been broken." The crowd, in Park's view, is an elementary and rudimentary social formation. It "has no tradition. . . . It has therefore neither symbols, cere- monies, rites, nor ritual; it imposes no obligations and creates no loyalties.'' Yet religious sects and social movements have their origin in the excitement of the crowd. To the extent that leaders emerge from previously amorphous crowds, ephemeral and unreflective actions give way to more stable and per- manent forms of organization. The leaders of emerging social movements or religious organizations impose social control on the previously unstructured collective behavior of the crowd, thereby transforming it into an audience. "The crowd does not discuss and hence it does not reflect. It simply 'mills.' " In contrast, "in the public, interaction takes the form of discussion. Individuals tend to act upon one another critically; issues are raised and parties form. Opinions clash and thus modify and moderate one another." When un- thinking crowds are transformed into reflective publics, there emerge new social entities that may, if conditions are propitious, make successful claims which break the cake of custom and thus prepare the way for novel accom- modations characterizing a new social order.
The notion of "natural history" conceived as a sequence of stages is central not only to Park's account of the rise of social movements but to many other of his analyses as well. He attempted to write a natural history of the press, "not a record of the fortunes of individual newspapers, but an account of the evolution of the newspaper as a social institution. He inspired his student Lyford Edwards to write a natural history of the stages of revolution, with each stage inevitably triggering the emergence of the next. Above all, his urban sociology is anchored in his conceptualization of various stages in the process of invasion and succession through which various groups carve out their ecological niches, their natural areas, in the urban environment.
From Coser, 1977:362-363.
Taking his point of departure from the Darwinian notion of the "web of life," Park conceived of a biotic order, common to animals and plants, to which he applied the term "community." "The essential characteristics of a community," he writes, "are those of: 1) a population, territorially organized, 2) more or less completely rooted in the soil it occupies, 3) its individual units living in a relationship of mutual interdependence that is symbiotic." "These symbiotic societies are not merely unorganized assemblages of plants and animals which happen to live together in the same habitat. On the contrary, they are interrelated in the most complex manner." Within the limits of a symbiotic community, different individual units of the population are involved in a complex form of competitive cooperation leading to a spatial order in which each individual unit is assigned a niche in the environment commensurate with its ability to impose itself. Competition gives rise to the two main ecological principles, dominance and succession. "In every life-community this dominance is ordinarily the result of struggle among the different species for light." Succession, on the other hand, denotes the various stages, the "orderly sequence of changes, through which a biotic community passes in the course of its development."
Park maintained that the processes characterizing the growth and development of plant and animal communities applied to human communities as well. The spatial location of various groups in the city reflects ecological processes as much as the spatial order of an animal community. But, and this has often been overlooked, Park also argued that while human communities exhibited an ecological or symbiotic order quite similar to that of nonhuman communities, they also participated in a social or moral order that had no counterpart on the nonhuman level. Park studied the ecological order to understand better man's moral order.
The competitive struggle for economic advantage among men had many analogies, Park reasoned, with the impersonal struggle for existence among animals. "The principle of dominance operates in the human as well as in the plant and animal communities. The so-called natural or functional areas of a metropolitan community . . . owe their existence directly to the factor of dominance, and indirectly to competition.'' Similarly, the territorial succession of immigrant groups in the "natural areas" of the city can best be conceived in analogy with successions in the development of animal and plant communities. "It has been observed," Park writes, Òthat immigrant people ordinarily settle first in or near the centers of cities, in the so-called areas of transition. From there they are likely to move by stages . . . from an area of first to areas of second and third settlement, generally in the direction of the periphery of the city and eventually into the suburban area. . . . To these movements, seeing in them the effects of natural tendencies in the life of the urban community, students have applied the term 'succession.' Ò
Park argued that human groupings, insofar as they participate in biotic communities and form a distinctive ecological order, can be studied through methods borrowed from biologists who investigate nonhuman communities. Yet, if only such methods were used, one could not hope to capture that which is distinctly human, the creation of a moral order. Human societies have a double aspect: they are made up of interdependent individuals competing with each other for economic and territorial dominance and for ecological niches, but who are, at the same time, involved in common collective actions.
[Societies] are composed of individuals who act independently of one another, who compete and struggle with one another for mere existence, and treat one another, as far as possible, as utilities. On the other hand, it is quite as true that men and women are bound together by affections and common purposes; they do cherish traditions, ambitions, and ideals that are not all their own, and they maintain, in spite of natural impulse to the contrary, a discipline and a moral order that enables them to transcend what we ordinarily call nature, and through their collective action, recreate the world in the image of their collective aspirations and their common will. . . . Society . . . always includes something more than competitive cooperation and its resulting economic interdependence. The existence of a society presupposes a certain amount of solidarity, consensus and common purpose . . . [societies] grow up in the efforts of individuals to act collectively.
In the moral or social order, as distinct from the ecological order, men participate as self-conscious individuals in communication with one another and hence are able to engage in collective action. The social order softens the impact of the competitive struggle for existence through social control and involvement in common tasks.
From Coser, 1977:363-364.
Park's notion of the self is mainly derived from the tradition of William James and his followers, which has been discussed in previous chapters. What is distinctive in his approach, however, is his linking of the notion of the self with that of the social role. Park pointed out that the word person in its root-meaning refers to a mask, and that this was "a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. We are parents and children, masters and servants, teachers, students and professional men, Gentiles and Jews. It is in these roles that we know ourselves."
Self-conceptions, Park argued, are rooted in the status we occupy and in the roles we play on the social scene. The individual's conceptions of himself are anchored in the division of labor and hence in the status order.
The conceptions which men form of themselves seem to depend upon their vocations, and in general upon the role that they seek to play in the communities and social groups in which they live, as well as upon the recognition and status which society accords them in these roles. It is status, i.e., recognition by the community, that confers upon the individual the character of a person, since a person is an individual who has status, not necessarily legal, but social.
To Park the self is constituted by the individual's conception of his role, and this role in its turn is built upon the recognition others in society accord the status upon which roles are based. "The individual's conception of himself . . . is based on his status in the social group or groups of which he is a member. The individual whose conception of himself does not conform to his status is an isolated individual. The completely isolated individual, whose conception of himself is in no sense an adequate reflection of his status, is probably insane."
Park's well-known notion of the marginal man emerges directly from his views on self-conceptions as reflections of the status a person has within a group. Marginal men, like American mulattoes, Asiatic mixed bloods, or European Jews, have their anchorage in two distinct groups while not belonging fully to either; as a result, their self-conceptions are likely to be fairly inconsistent and ambivalent. The marginal man "lives in two worlds, in both of which he is more or less of a stranger." Yet this very marginality, Park argues in accord with Simmel and Veblen, brings not only burdens but assets. "Inevitably he becomes, relatively to his cultural milieu, the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint. The marginal man is always relatively the more civilized human being.'' "It is in the mind of the marginal man that the moral turmoil which new cultural contacts occasion, manifests itself in the most obvious forms. It is in the mind of the marginal manÑwhere the changes and fusions of culture are going onÑthat we can best study the processes of civilization and progress."
In his sociology of the marginal man as in the rest of his sociology, Park always focused analytical attention on those processes or situations which foster the emergence of novel forms that upset or render obsolete previous adjustments and accommodations. Durkheim emphasized the constraints that force society into predictable patterns. By contrast, although by no means oblivious to the need for social order, Park sensitizes us to the forces that break through constraints and thereby produce the new.
From Coser, 1977:365-366.
(Perdue 1986:228-233)
Perdue, William D. 1986. Sociological Theory: Explanation, Paradigm, and Ideology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Robert Ezra Park (1864-1944)
Human Ecology
Assumptions
The underlying assumption in Park's theoretical system bear the distinctive historical imprint that marked the worlds not only of Dewey and James, but of other interactionists...including Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and W. I. Thomas among others. Park was born the year before the ending of the great American Civil War and died a year before the Axis powers were defeated in the Second World War. However, his life life was shaped more by the reformist spirit and progressive politics that marked the Midwest from the latter decades of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the "war to end all wars." It was an era of explosive industrial growth, the urban-based factory system, and teeming cities fed by immigrants and migrants from the declining countryside. It was a time of muck, of muckrakers, and of publishers such as Hearst and Pulitzer who made fortunes by commodifying and sensationalizing despair. It was a winter of urban slums and rural blight, of child labor and industrial death and dying, of racist division and the privilege of the native born. But through it all, Park and his kindred spirits retained an optimism found on pluralist beliefs: The abuse of their period were only temporary aberrations; the American people when educated and informed would do the right thing; and above all, the existing society held out the promise of justice.
Consistent with the pluralist image of human nature, Park held an ambivalent view of individuals. On the one hand, men and women compete and struggle. On the other, they exhibit emotional ties, ideals, and a common purpose. Although it is true that each uses the other, the one commonly joins the many in collective action to "recreate the world" (Park 1952:178-181). Yet Park, more than modern interactionists, reserved a place for instinct. He argued that social distance, a state of mind that separates groups such as races or classes by creating conceptions of social "place," does not have to be learned. Moreover, he believed that prejudice is essentially an expression of the natural disposition to maintain that social distance. However, Park also recognized that prejudice is a conservative force for the maintenance of the status quo (Park 1950:255-260).
As to society, Park assumed an order where antagonistic elements are bound, at least temporarily, by arrangements collectively termed "social control." Thus by means of binding norms, the members of society conform rather than give vent to their different interests. This state of equilibrium is dynamic, especially in an "open class" society (Park and Burgess 1966:664-665, originally published 1921). Park's conception of society is one of constantly emerging states of accommodation, in which conflict between contending parties comes to a temporary halt. Yet he defined each new plateau as a point in a progression. As a clear illustration, Park cited the turbulence of race relations in the United States. He thought such conflicts are indicators of progressive change and that the more powerless groups walk away from such struggles with a new accommodation and improved status (Park 1950:229-235).
Park's assumptions concerning the nature of human science logically follow from the discussion thus far. Sociology was defined as the science of collective behavior. However, we would miss Park's meaning should we focus on the usual meaning of the the term collective behavior. Although Park was interested in such things as publics, crowds, and especially public opinion and the media, it is the processual meaning inherent in the collective forms of social life that entranced him. Such is evident in a dynamic theoretical language of stages, movement, transition, and forms of renewal. For Park (and other interactionists), the social reality is not static and timeless but changing and temporal. Its nature is not base, society and its means of social control are created through processes. And for Park, as with Simmel, explanatory systems in sociology must seek to identify and clarify these essentially micro-level courses of action.
Theoretical Content
In Human Communities (1952), Park pioneered with his early efforts in the field of human ecology. He conceived of the community as a "biotic" arrangement. Whether comprised of plants, other animal species, or Homo sapiens, communities share the common properties of a population distributed along territorial lines "rooted in the soil," with each constituent member or group living in a symbiotic relationship. The social community is also such a biotic order, reflecting interdependence and territoriality, which emerges from a universal struggle for existence. As with all communities, each member of society competes for position in the "spatial" order, yet each is dependent on others and the whole.
Park describes the developmental change within the community by reference to the twin principle of dominance and succession. The former refers to the competitive clash among dissimilar members or groups for standing or resources. The latter refers to an orderly process through which all biotic orders develop and change. In the metropolitan community, territorial zones or areas reflect by the social conditions of their population the struggle for power. Yet, the population of such "spaces" does not remain fixed (1952:144-155). For example, the immigrant newcomers routinely settle near the city center. City centers are typically decaying areas that are ripe for commercialization and industrialization. However, Park argued that the immigrants did not stay there. Rather, they moved, over time and generations, outward through other concentric zones toward the suburbs. This is the movement of succession (1952:221-225).
The principles of dominance and succession both stem from what Park (and his colleague Ernest W. Burgess) believed to be the most basic social process: competition. Drawing from biology, he argued that this form of interaction is universal and elementary in all natural or biotic orders. However, he identified other processes that are distinctively societal. While competition over resources and space is ongoing and impersonal, conflict is a conscious process intended to secure social status and the relative control associated therewith (Park and Burgess [1921] 1966:505-507). The third process is accommodation, which denotes a temporary end to conflict and the support of the prevailing hierarchy through measures of social control (such as law and custom) (Park and Burgess [1921] 1966:664-665). Finally, comes assimilation, in which dissimilar people and groups share their experiences and form a truly common culture (Park and Burgess [1921] 1966:729-735).
A final focal concern in Park's theoretical system centers on the relationship between self and society. The conscious conceptions of distinctive identity are based in large measure on the roles played by the human actor. For Park, such roles are bound generally to one's status and specifically to one's occupation. In Society (1955) he argued that the origin of the self is in the responses of others to one's particular status in the social order. It therefore follows that the individual simultaneously bound by two cultures with different conceptions of status and role may possess a distorted social identity. Park employed the term marginal man to describe this condition. Yet in the tradition of Simmel's work on the stranger, Park argued that marginality provides a special vantage point from which to understand and critique arrangements taken for granted by the mainstream. And in a manner reminiscent of Dewey, Park asserted that "It is in the mind of the marginal man--where the changes and fusions of culture are going on--that we can best study the processes of civilization and progress" (1950:356).
References
Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Park, Robert Ezra. 1952. Human Communities. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Park, Robert Ezra. 1955. Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Park, Robert Ezra and Ernest W. Burgess. [1921] 1966. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Of the four great types of interaction--competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation--competition is the elementary, universal and fundamental form. Social contact, as we have seen, initiates interaction. But competition, strictly speaking, is interaction without social contact. If this seems, in view of what has already been said, something of a paradox, it is because in human society competition is always complicated with other processes, that is to say, with conflict, assimilation, and accommodation.
It is only in the plant community that we can observe the process of competition in isolation, uncomplicated with other social processes. The members of a plant community live together in a relation of mutual interdependence which we call social probably because, while it is close and vital, it is not biological. It is not biological because the relation is a merely external one and the plants that compose it are not even of the same species. They do not interbreed. The members of a plant community adapt themselves to one another as all living things adapt themselves to their environment, but there is no conflict between them because they are not conscious. Competition takes the form of conflict or rivalry only when it becomes conscious, when competitors identify one another as rivals or as enemies.
This suggests what is meant by the statement that competition is interaction without social contact.. It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact, properly speaking, may be said to exist.
On the other hand, social contacts are not limited to contacts of touch or
sense or speech, and they are likely to be more intimate and more pervasive than
we imagine. Some years ago the Japanese, who are brown, defeated the Russians,
who are white. In the course of the next few months the news of this remarkable
event penetrated, as we afterward learned, uttermost ends of the earth. It sent
a thrill through all Asia and it was known in the darkest corners of Central
Africa. Everywhere it awakened strange and fantastic dreams. This is what is
meant by social contact.
a ) Competition and Competitive Co-operation. Social contact, which inevitably initiates conflict, accommodation, or assimilation, invariably creates also sympathies, prejudices, personal and moral relations which modify, complicate, and control competition. On the other hand, within the limits which the cultural process creates, and custom, law, and tradition impose, competition invariably tends to create an impersonal social order in which each individual, being free to pursue his own profit, and, in a sense, compelled to do so, makes every other individual a means to that end. In doing so, however, he inevitably contributes through the mutual exchange of services so established to the common welfare. It is just the nature of the trading transaction to isolate the motive of profit and make it the basis of business organization, and so far as this motive becomes dominant and exclusive, business relations inevitably assume the impersonal character so generally ascribed to them.
"Competition," says Walker, "is opposed to sentiment. Whenever any economic agent does or forbears anything under the influence of any sentiment other than the desire of giving the least and gaining the most he can in exchange, be that sentiment patriotism, or gratitude, or charity, or vanity, leading him to do otherwise than as self interest would prompt, in that case also, the rule of competition is departed from. Another rule is for the time substituted." [1]
This is the significance of the familiar sayings to the effect that one "must not mix business with sentiment," that "business is business" "corporations are heartless," etc. It is just because corporations are "heartless," that is to say impersonal, that they represent the most advanced, efficient, and responsible form of business organization. But it is for this same reason that they can and need to be regulated in behalf of those interests of the community that cannot be translated immediately into terms of profit and loss to the individual.
The plant community is the best illustration of the type of social
organization that is created by competitive co-operation because in the plant
community competition is unrestricted.
b) Competition and Freedom.. The economic organization of society, so far as it is an effect of free competition, is an ecological organization. There is a human as well as a plant and an animal ecology.
If we are to assume that the economic order is fundamentally ecological, that is, created by the struggle for existence, an organization like that of the plant community in which the relations between individuals are conceivably at least wholly external, the question may be very properly raised why the competition and the organization it has created should be regarded as social at all. As a matter of fact sociologists have generally identified the social with the moral order, and Dewey, in his Democracy and Education, makes statements which suggest that the purely economic order, in which man becomes a means rather than an end to other men, is unsocial, if not antisocial.
The fact is, however, that this character of externality in human relations is a fundamental aspect of society and social life. It is merely another manifestation of what has been referred to as the distributive aspect of society. Society is made up of individuals spatially separated, territorially distributed, and capable of independent locomotion. This capacity of independent locomotion is the basis and the symbol of every other form of independence. Freedom is fundamentally freedom to move and individuality is inconceivable without the capacity and the opportunity to gain an individual experience as a result of independent action.
On the other hand, it is quite true that society may be said to exist only so
far as this independent activity of the individual is controlled in the
interest of the group as a whole. That is the reason why the problem of control,
using that term in its evident significance, inevitably becomes the central
problem of sociology.
c) Competition and Control.. Conflict, assimilation and accommodation as distinguished from competition are all intimately related to control. Competition is the process through which the distributive and ecological organization of society is created. Competition determines the distribution of population territorially and vocationally. The division of labor and all the vast organized economic interdependence of individuals and groups of individuals characteristic of modern life are a product of competition. On the other hand, the moral and political order, which imposes itself upon this competitive organization, is a product of conflict, accommodation and assimilation.
Competition is universal in the world of living things. Under ordinary
circumstances it goes on unobserved even by the individuals who are most
concerned. It is only in periods of crisis, when men are making new and
conscious efforts to control the conditions of their common life, that the
forces with which they are competing get identified with persons, and
competition is converted into conflict. It is in what has been described as the political
process that society consciously deals with its crises. War is the political
process par excellence. It is in war that the great decisions are made.
Political organizations exist for the purpose of dealing with conflict
situations. Parties, parliaments and courts, public discussion and voting are to
be considered simply as substitutes for war.
d) Accommodation, Assimilation, and Competition.. Accommodation, on the other hand, is the process by which the individuals and groups make the necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been created by competition and conflict. War and elections change situations. When changes thus effected are decisive and are accepted, conflict subsides and the tensions it created are resolved in the process of accommodation into profound modifications of the competing units, i.e., individuals and groups. A man once thoroughly defeated is, as has often been noted, "never the same again." Conquest, subjugation, and defeat are psychological as well as social processes. They establish a new order by changing, not merely the status, but the attitudes of the parties involved. Eventually the new order gets itself fixed in habit and custom and is then transmitted as part of the established social order to succeeding generations. Neither the physical nor the social world is made to satisfy at once all the wishes of the natural man. The rights of property, vested interests of every sort, the family organization, slavery, caste and class, the whole social organization, in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say, limitations of the natural wishes of the individual. These socially inherited accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and struggles of previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order. All of these are forms of control in which competition is limited by status.
Conflict is then to be identified with the political order and with conscious control. Accommodation, on the other hand, is associated with the social order that is fixed and established in custom and the mores.
Assimilation, as distinguished from accommodation, implies a more thoroughgoing transformation of the personality--transformation which takes place gradually under the influence of social contacts of the most concrete and intimate sort.
Accommodation may be regarded, like religious conversion, as a kind of mutation. The wishes are the same but their organization is different. Assimilation takes place not so much as a result of changes in the organization as in the content, i.e., the memories, of the personality. The individual units, as a result of intimate association, interpenetrate, so to speak; and come in this way into possession of a common experience and a common tradition. The permanence and solidarity of the group rest finally upon this body of common experience and tradition. It is the role of history to preserve this body of common experience and tradition, to criticise and reinterpret it in the light of new experience and changing conditions, and in this way to preserve the continuity of the social and political life.
The relation of social structures to the processes of competition, conflict,
accommodation, and assimilation may be represented schematically as follows:
| SOCIAL PROCESS | SOCIAL ORDER |
| Competition | The economic equilibrium |
| Conflict | The political order |
| Accommodation | Social organization |
| Assimilation | Personality and the cultural heritage |
The distinction between competition and conflict has already been indicated. Both are forms of interaction, but competition is a struggle between individuals, or groups of individuals, who are not necessarily in contact and communication; while conflict is a contest in which contact is an indispensable condition. Competition, unqualified and uncontrolled as with plants, and in the great impersonal life-struggle of man with his kind and with all animate nature, is unconscious. Conflict is always conscious, indeed, it evokes the deepest emotions and strongest passions and enlists the greatest concentration of attention and of effort. Both competition and conflict are forms of struggle. Competition, however, is continuous and impersonal, conflict is intermittent and personal.
Competition is a struggle for position in an economic order. The distribution of populations in the world-economy, the industrial organization in the national economy, and the vocation of the individual in the division of labor--all these are determined, in the long run, by competition. The status of the individual, or a group of individuals, in the social order, on the other hand, is determined by rivalry, by war, or by subtler forms of conflict.
"Two is company, three is a crowd" suggests how easily the social equilibrium is disturbed by the entrance of a new factor in a social situation. The delicate nuances and grades of attention given to different individuals moving in the same social circle are the superficial reflections of rivalries and conflicts beneath the smooth and decorous surfaces of polite society.
In general, we may say that competition determines the position of the individual in the community; conflict fixes his place in society. Location, position, ecological interdependence--these are the characteristics of the community. Status, subordination and superordination, control--these are the distinctive marks of a society.
The notion of conflict, like the fact, has its roots deep in human interest. Mars has always held a high rank in the hierarchy of the gods. Whenever and wherever struggle has taken the form of conflict, whether of races, of nations, or of individual men, it has invariably captured and held the attention of spectators. And these spectators, when they did not take part in the fight, always took sides. It was this conflict of the non-combatants that made public opinion, and public opinion has always played an important role in the struggles of men. It is this that has raised war from a mere play of physical forces and given it the tragic significance of a moral struggle, a conflict of good and evil.
The result is that war tends to assume the character of litigation, a judicial procedure, in which custom determines the method of procedure, and the issue of the struggle is accepted as a judgment in the case.
The duello, as distinguished from the wager of battle, although it never had the character of a judicial procedure, developed a strict code which made it morally binding upon the individual to seek redress for wrongs, and determined in advance the methods of procedure by which such redress could and should be obtained. The penalty was a loss of status in the particular group of which the individual was a member.
It was the presence of the public, the ceremonial character of the proceedings, and the conviction that the invisible powers were on the side of truth and justice that gave the trial by ordeal and the trial by battle a significance that neither the duello nor any other form of private vengeance ever had.
It is interesting in this connection, also, that political and judicial forms of procedure are conducted on a conflict pattern. An election is a contest in which we count noses when we do not break heads. A trial by jury is a contest in which the parties are represented by champions, as in the judicial duels of an earlier time.
In general, then, one may say competition becomes conscious and personal in
conflict. In the process of transition competitors are transformed into rivals
and enemies. In its higher forms, however, conflict becomes impersonal--a
struggle to establish and maintain rules of justice and a moral order. In this
case the welfare not merely of individual men but of the community is involved.
Such are the struggles of political parties and religious sects. Here the issues
are not determined by the force and weight of the contestants immediately
involved, but to a greater or less extent, by the force and weight of public
opinion of the community, and eventually by the judgment of mankind.
The term adaptation came into vogue with Darwin's theory of the origin of the species by natural selection. This theory was based upon the observation that no two members of a biological species or of a family are ever exactly alike. Everywhere there is variation and individuality. Darwin's theory assumed this variation and explained the species as the result of natural selection. The individuals best fitted to live under the conditions of life which the environment offered, survived and produced the existing species. The others perished and the species which they represented disappeared. The differences in the species were explained as the result of the accumulation and perpetuation of the individual variations which had "survival value." Adaptations were the variations which had been in this way selected and transmitted.
The term accommodation is a kindred concept with a slightly different
meaning. The distinction is that adaptation is applied to organic modifications
which are transmitted biologically; while accommodation is used with reference
to changes in habit, which are transmitted, or may be transmitted,
sociologically, that is, in the form of social tradition. The term first used in
this sense by Baldwin is defined in the Dictionary of Philosophy and
Psychology.
In view of modern biological theory and discussion, two modes of adaptation should be distinguished: (a) adaptation through variation [hereditary]; (b) adaptation through modification [acquired]. For the functional adjustment of the individual to its environment [(b) above] J. Mark Baldwin has suggested the term "accommodation," recommending that adaptation be confined to the structural adjustments which are congenital and heredity [(a) above]. The term "accommodation" applies to any acquired alteration of function resulting in better adjustment to environment and to the functional changes which are thus effected. [2]
The term accommodation, while it has a limited field of application in biology, has a wide and varied use in sociology. All the social heritages, traditions, sentiments, culture, technique, are accommodations--that is, acquired adjustments that are socially and not biologically transmitted. They are not a part of the racial inheritance of the individual, but are acquired by the person in social experience. The two conceptions are further distinguished in this, that adaptation is an effect of competition, while accommodation, or more properly social accommodation, is the result of conflict.
The outcome of the adaptations and accommodations, which the struggle for existence enforces, is a state of relative equilibrium among the competing species and individual members of these species. The equilibrium which is established by adaptation is biological, which means that, in so far as it is permanent and fixed in the race or the species, it will be transmitted by biological inheritance.
The equilibrium based on accommodation, however, is not biological; it is economic and social and is transmitted, if at all, by tradition. The nature of the economic equilibrium which results from competition has been fully described in chapter viii. The plant community is this equilibrium in its absolute form.
In animal and human societies the community has, so to speak, become incorporated in the individual members of the group. The individuals are adapted to a specific type of communal life, and these adaptations, in animal as distinguished from human societies, are represented in the division of labor between the sexes, in the instincts which secure the protection and welfare of the young, in the so-called gregarious instinct, and all these represent traits that are transmitted biologically. But human societies, although providing for the expression of original tendencies, are organized about tradition, mores, collective representations, in short, consensus.. And consensus represents, not biological adaptations, but social accommodations.
Social organization, with the exception of the order based on competition and
adaptation, is essentially an accommodation of differences through conflicts.
This fact explains why diverse-mindedness rather than like-mindedness is
characteristic of human as distinguished from animal society. Professor Cooley's
statement of this point is clear:
The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole. [3]
The distinction between accommodation and adaptation is illustrated in the difference between domestication and taming. Through domestication and breeding man has modified the original inheritable traits of plants and animals. He has changed the character of the species. Through taming, individuals of species naturally in conflict with man have become accommodated to him. Eugenics may be regarded as a program of biological adaptation of the human race in conscious realization of social ideals. Education, on the other hand, represents a program of accommodation or an organization, modification, and culture of original traits.
Every society represents an organization of elements more or less antagonistic to each other but united for the moment, at least, by an arrangement which defines the reciprocal relations and respective spheres of action of each. This accommodation, this modus vivendi, may be relatively permanent as in a society constituted by castes, or quite transitory as in societies made up of open classes. In either case, the accommodation, while it is maintained, secures for the individual or for the group a recognized status.
Accommodation is the natural issue of conflicts. In an accommodation the
antagonism of the hostile elements is, for the time being, regulated, and
conflict disappears as overt action, although it remains latent as a potential
force. With a change in the situation, the adjustment that had hitherto
successfully held in control the antagonistic forces fails. There is confusion
and unrest which may issue in open conflict. Conflict, whether a war or a strike
or a mere exchange of polite innuendoes, invariably issues in a new
accommodation or social order, which in general involves a changed status in the
relations among the participants. It is only with assimilation that this
antagonism, latent in the organization of individuals or groups, is likely to be
wholly dissolved.
The concept assimilation, so far as it has been defined in popular usage, gets its meaning from its relation to the problem of immigration. The more concrete and familiar terms are the abstract noun Americanization and the verbs Americanize, Anglicize, Germanize, and the like. All of these words are intended to describe the process by which the culture of a community or a country is transmitted to an adopted citizen. Negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization and this is, in fact, the form it has taken in Europe.
The difference between Europe and America, in relation to the problem of cultures, is that in Europe difficulties have arisen from the forcible incorporation of minor cultural groups, i.e., nationalities, within the limits of a larger political unit, i.e., an empire. In America the problem has arisen from the voluntary migration to this country of peoples who have abandoned the political allegiances of the old country and are gradually acquiring the culture of the new. In both cases the problem has its sources in an effort to establish and maintain a political order in a community that has no common culture. Fundamentally the problem of maintaining a democratic form of government in a southern village composed of whites and blacks, and the problem of maintaining an international order based on anything but force are the same. The ultimate basis of the existing moral and political order is still kinship and culture. Where neither exist, a political order, not based on caste or class, is at least problematic.
Assimilation, as popularly conceived in the United States, was expressed symbolically some years ago in Zangwill's dramatic parable of The Melting Pot.. William Jennings Bryan has given oratorical expression to the faith in the beneficent outcome of the process: "Great has been the Greek, the Latin, the Slav, the Celt, the Teuton, and the Saxon; but greater than any of these is the American, who combines the virtues of them all."
Assimilation, as thus conceived, is a natural and unassisted process, and practice, if not policy, has been in accord with this laissez faire conception, which the outcome has apparently justified. In the United States, at any rate, the tempo of assimilation has been more rapid than elsewhere.
Closely akin to this "magic crucible" notion of assimilation is the theory of "like-mindedness." This idea was partly a product of Professor Giddings' theory of sociology, partly an outcome of the popular notion that similarities and homogeneity are identical with unity. The ideal of assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting alike. Assimilation and socialization have both been described in these terms by contemporary sociologists.
Another and a different notion of assimilation or Americanization is based on
the conviction that the immigrant has contributed in the past and may be
expected in the future to contribute something of his own in temperament,
culture, and philosophy of life to the future American civilization. This
conception had its origin among the immigrants themselves, and has been
formulated and interpreted by persons who are, like residents in social
settlements, in close contact with them. This recognition of the diversity in
the elements entering into the cultural process is not, of course, inconsistent
with the expectation of an ultimate homogeneity of the product. It has called
attention, at any rate, to the fact that the process of assimilation is
concerned with differences quite as much as with likenesses.
Accommodation has been described as a process of adjustment, that is, an organization of social relations and attitudes to prevent or to reduce conflict, to control competition, and to maintain a basis of security in the social order for persons and groups of divergent interests and types to carry on together their varied life-activities. Accommodation in the sense of the composition of conflict is invariably the goal of the political process.
Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. In so far as assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate participation in common experiences, assimilation is central in the historical and cultural processes.
This distinction between accommodation and assimilation, with reference to their role in society, explains certain significant formal differences between the two processes. An accommodation of a conflict, or an accommodation to a new situation, may take place with rapidity. The more intimate and subtle changes involved in assimilation are more gradual. The changes that occur in accommodation are frequently not only sudden but revolutionary, as in the mutation of attitudes in conversion. The modifications of attitudes in the process of assimilation are not only gradual, but moderate, even if they appear considerable in their accumulation over a long period of time. If mutation is the symbol for accommodation, growth is the metaphor for assimilation. In accommodation the person or the group is generally, though not always, highly conscious of the occasion, as in the peace treaty that ends the war, in the arbitration of an industrial controversy, in the adjustment of the person to the formal requirements of life in a new social world. In assimilation the process is typically unconscious; the person is incorporated into the common life of the group before he is aware and with little conception of the course of events which brought this incorporation about.
James has described the way in which the attitude of the person changes toward certain subjects, woman's sufferage, for example, not as the result of conscious reflection, but as the outcome of the unreflective responses to a series of new experiences. The intimate associations of the family and of the play group, participation in the ceremonies of religious worship and in the celebrations of national holidays, all these activities transmit to the immigrant and to the alien a store of memories and sentiments common to the native-born, and these memories are the basis of all that is peculiar and sacred in our cultural life.
As social contact initiates interaction, assimilation is its final perfect product. The nature of the social contacts is decisive in the process. Assimilation naturally takes place most rapidly where contacts are primary, that is, where they are the most intimate and intense, as in the area of touch relationship, in the family circle and in intimate congenial groups. Secondary contacts facilitate accommodations, but do not greatly promote assimilation. The contacts here are external and too remote.
A common language is indispensable for the most intimate association of the members of the group; its absence is an insurmountable barrier to assimilation. The phenomenon "that every group has its own language," its peculiar "universe of discourse," and its cultural symbols is evidence of the interrelation between communication and assimilation.
Through the mechanisms of imitation and suggestion, communication effects a
gradual and unconscious modification of the attitudes and sentiments of the
members of the group. The unity thus achieved is not necessarily or even
normally like-mindedness; it is rather a unity of experience and of orientation,
out of which may develop a community of purpose and action.
1. Walker, Francis A., Political Economy, p. 92. (New York, 1887.)
2. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, I, 15, 8.
3. Social Organization, p. 4.
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