Burgess, Ernest Watson (1909–1972)

Leading U.S. sociologist of the Chicago School

Born in Ontario, Canada, Ernest Watson Burgess received his B.A. from Kingfisher College in Oklahoma in 1908 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1913. He taught at the University of Toledo (Ohio), the University of Kansas, and Ohio State before starting a long career at the University of Chicago, where he worked from 1916 in the first department of sociology in the United States. Burgess became a professor emeritus in 1951 and continued his association with the department until his death.

In his first years at the University of Chicago, Burgess worked closely with the sociologist Robert Park. Together they edited the first major textbook of sociology, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), as well as the pioneer text of urban sociology, The City (1925). In his essay “The Growth of the City,” Burgess designed the famous concentric map illustrating the expansion of city space and the incorporation of ethnic communities into urban life. According to Burgess, any town or city expands radially from its business district. What triggers expansion and urban growth is the tendency of each inner zone to extend its area by invading the next outer zone. Like other works by members of the Chicago School, Burgess's conceptualization of urban communities exhibits a dynamic tension between a biological and a cultural standpoint. On the one hand, Burgess finds that the city and its communities produce several cultural manifestations. On the other hand, he claims that immigrant communities become urbanized through processes of “urban metabolism and mobility which are closely related to expansion” (Burgess 1925, p. 47). In this respect he is viewing the city as a physical organism whose internal laws can be explained through science and biology. Urban growth is a result “of organization and disorganization analogous to the anabolic and katabolic processes of metabolism in the body” (Burgess 1925, p. 53). In this [Page 110]process, immigrants are digested by the city, which disorganizes their communities only to create a greater urban one. Through several purgatorial stages, Burgess, like a twentieth-century Dante, moves his characters from the slum up into the area of second immigrant settlement and beyond. It is the characteristically American tale of social mobility, through which the immigrant progressively loses his or her ethnic peculiarities and becomes more cosmopolitan and thus Americanized. Yet there are passages in the essay that introduce an element of perpetual instability into Burgess's vision, as the immigrant is constantly looking to urban areas beyond the one in which he or she is living at present.

Later in his career, Burgess focused his research on other types of communities: the institution of the family and the elderly. In particular, he tried to elaborate a model to investigate marriage stability, which, he hypothesized, is reached when a steady synthesis of attitudes and social characteristics of husband and wife occurs. From his research, Burgess developed a chart to assess the possible failure or success of a marriage. His work on the elderly is concerned with the effects of retirement and the efficacy of government programs.

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