Hughes, Everett

Everett Hughes (1897–1983), an American sociologist, was a key figure in the transition period between the classical Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s and the second Chicago School. A Chicago PhD, Hughes began his career in Canada at McGill University in Montreal (1927–1938), where he had a major, career-long impact on French-and English-language sociology, chiefly via French Canada in Transition (1943), his study of the industrialization of French Quebec by British and American capital during the 1930s. In 1938, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he remained for most of the rest of his career (1938–1961). While Hughes was not generally regarded as a systematic theorist, there is in his writings a theoretical frame of reference, interpretive institutional ecology (Helmes-Hayes 1998), that was an elaboration of the classical human ecology approach made famous by his mentor, Robert Park. Interpretive institutional ecology combines aspects of Park's human ecology with the anthropological and sociological functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Émile Durkheim, George Simmel's formalism, and elements of interactionism drawn from W. I. Thomas, and C. H. Cooley. Hughes developed the approach in stages and by accretion over his career and applied it, often piecemeal, in a variety of sociological specializations: race and ethnic relations, work and occupations, education, medicine, and organizations. The significance of Hughes's approach to the history of Chicago sociology is twofold. First, in the 1940s and 1950s, the classical Chicago School split in two. Under the influence of Roderick McKenzie, Amos Hawley, and Philip Hauser, the “mapping” part of human ecology came to look more like factorial ecology and demography. At the same time, some sociologists such as symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer ignored the ecological aspect of the approach and focused almost exclusively on the face-to-face lifeworlds of individuals and groups. By contrast, Hughes's interpretive institutional ecology retained the dualistic and totalising character of the original. Second, the layered, dualistic character of the perspective allowed Hughes to strike a balance between the so-called scientific and interpretive orientations to the discipline. It also allowed him to employ a variety of research techniques (participant observation, interviews) and data sources (official statistics, archives) in his work. His preferred methodology, however, was fieldwork, and he is famous for training several generations of field workers in Canada and the United States (e.g., Howard Becker).

Interpretive institutional ecology is a multilayered, essentially mesosociological approach that focuses on the typical dynamics and processes of social interaction at three levels of social reality. Its starting point, illustrated in The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board, completed in 1928, and Boys in White: Culture in Medical School, published in 1961, is the single institution (a “going concern” or “enterprise”) or a small cluster of institutions (an “institutional setting”). Within institutions (e.g., a hospital), people interact via several sets of overlapping, competing, and complementary institutionalised social roles and relationships (doctor/patient, coworker, friend) while pursuing multiple careers—occupational and otherwise (e.g., as doctor and mother). The focus on selves pursuing careers within institutions, especially at work, but elsewhere too (e.g., medical students), is central to the analytic logic of interpretive institutional ecology. It provides an entrée both to the individual self and the structure and history of occupations, institutions, and societies.

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