Everett Hughes
Encyclopedia
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...
, aspects of a Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
-inspired analysis of class, status and political power), and elements of a proto-dependency analysis of Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
's industrialization in the 1930s (Helmes-Hayes 2000). The efforts to look for a broader theoretical framework in Hughes's work have also been criticized as anachronistic search for coherent theoretical core when Hughes is more easily associated with a methodological orientation (Chapoulie 1996, see also Helmes-Hayes 1998, 2000 on critiques of his attempts to analyze Hughes's theoretical contribution). Hughes's pathbreaking contribution to the development of fieldwork as a sociological method is, however, unquestionable (see Chapoulie 2002).
Hughes is often discussed only in relation to his contribution to the Chicago school (sociology)
Chicago school (sociology)
In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
. Therefore it is seldom noted that he was one of the early contributors to the sociological analysis of Nazi Germany. Two classical essays, Good People and Dirty Work and The Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung , meaning "coordination", "making the same", "bringing into line", is a Nazi term for the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian control and tight coordination over all aspects of society. The historian Richard J...
of the German Statistical Yearbook: A Case in Professional Political Neutrality witness of his lifelong commitment in sociology as a humanistic enterprise. In his preface to a collection of his papers entitled The Sociological Eye Hughes writes
I heard the Brown Shirts in the streets of Nuremberg in 1930 singing, "The German youth is never so happy as when Jewish blood spurts from his knife;" I wrote "Good People and Dirty Work" and used it as a special lecture at McGill University where in the 1930s I taught a course on Social Movements that came to be known as "Hughes on the Nazis." (Hughes 1984, xv).
Hughes's essays reflect his insight into German society, the developments of which he keenly followed during a long time. He spent a year there 1930-1931 when he was preparing a study on the Catholic labour movement (Chapoulie 1996, 14) and returned after the war for visits together with a delegation of U.S. scholars. He was fluent in German. He also had a keen interest in Canadian society, where his fluent knowledge of French language allowed him to develop ties to French-speaking sociology in Canada and support its development (Chapoulie 1996, Helmes-Hayes 2000).
Hughes's sociological prose is original in its avoidance of complex concepts. He never published explicitly theoretical work. However, his essays are analytically dense and he often discusses the task of sociology more broadly. In his preface for The Sociological Eye, first published in 1971 (transaction edition published in 1984), he describes his approach to sociology with reference to C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
's phrase the sociological imagination
Sociological imagination
The term sociological imagination was coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959, to describe the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology...
(Hughes 1984, xvi). In his final paragraphs to that preface he outlines his view of sociology and sociological method:
Some say that sociology is a normative science. If they mean that social norms are one of its main objects of study, I agree. If they mean anything else, I do not agree. Many branches of human learning have suffered from taking norms too seriously. Departments of language in universities are often so normative that they kill and pin up their delicate moth of poetry and stuff their beasts of powerful living profes before letting students examine them. Language, as living communication, is one of the promising fields of study; it is not quite the same as the study of languages. Men constantly make and break norms; there is never a moment when the norms are fixed and unchanging. If they do appear to remain unchanged for some time in some place, that, too, is to be accounted for as much as change itself.
Certainly, I have never sat down to write systematically about how to study society. I am suspicious of any method said to be the one and only. But among the methods I should recommend is the intensive, penetrating look with an imagination as lively and as sociological as it can be made. One of my basic assumptions is that if one quite clearly sees something happen once, it is almost certain to have happened again and again. The burden of proof is on those who claim a thing once seen is an exception; if they look hard, they may find it everywhere, although with some interesting differences in each case. (Hughes 1984, xviii-xix).
Academic career
Hughes studied at the University of ChicagoUniversity of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
under Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Ellsworth Faris
Ellsworth Faris
Ellsworth Faris was an influential sociologist of the Chicago school.Faris was born in 1874 in Salem, Tennessee. He studied at Texas Christian University, where he earned his Bachelor Degree in 1894 and Masters Degree in 1896. From 1897 to 1904, he spent time in Belgian Congo as a missionary...
, Robert Redfield
Robert Redfield
Robert Redfield was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist. Redfield graduated from the University of Chicago, eventually with a J.D. from its law school and then a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, which he began to teach in 1927...
, Ruth Shonle Cavan
Ruth Shonle Cavan
Ruth Shonle Cavan was an early American sociologist.-External links:* *...
, Nels Anderson
Nels Anderson
Nels Anderson was an early American sociologist. He studied at the University of Chicago under Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, whose concentric zone theory was one of the earliest models developed to explain the organization of urban areas...
, and other noted scholars, of whom he considered Park as his primary mentor (Chapoulie 1996). He defended his thesis, entitled The Growth of an Institution: The Chicago Real Estate Board in 1928. After his graduation he took a job at the McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
, where he, together with Carl Dawson, had the task to develop the sociology department at a time when it still was in its infancy. In Canada Hughes is recognized as one of the central figures of early Canadian sociology (Helmes-Hayes 2000).
Hughes is, however, more commonly associated with the Chicago school (sociology)
Chicago school (sociology)
In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
, as he returned to the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in 1938 and became a core figure at its sociology department (Abbott 1999). He is recognized as either teacher or mentor to numerous well-known scholars associated with the Chicago tradition of qualitative, interactionist sociology, including Howard S. Becker
Howard S. Becker
Howard Saul Becker is an American sociologist who made major contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. In addition, Becker's book The Outsiders provided the foundations for...
, Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born sociologist and writer.The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective that began with his 1959 book The Presentation of Self...
, Anselm Strauss
Anselm Strauss
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and...
and Eliot Freidson (Chapoulie 1996). In the late 1950s, the research style that Hughes represented withered in Chicago (Abbott 1999) and in 1961, Hughes accepted a position as professor of sociology at Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
, where he helped to found the school's Graduate Department of Sociology. Under Hughes's influence, the Chicago tradition of fieldwork-oriented interactionism continued in Brandeis, where scholars such as Irving Kenneth Zola came to be "changed forever" (Conrad et al. 1995). In 1968,he left Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
for Boston College
Boston College
Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...
(Chapoulie 1996).
During the years 1952 to 1961 Hughes served as editor to the American Journal of Sociology
American Journal of Sociology
The American Journal of Sociology was established in 1895 by Albion Small and is the oldest academic journal of sociology in the United States. The journal is attached to the University of Chicago's sociology department and it is published bimonthly by The University of Chicago Press. Its...
during an era when the journal remained closely linked to the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and its sociology department. During Hughes' era, the journal was traditional in the sense that double-blind review was not applied. When this was implemented in 1961 after Hughes' resignation, he strongly opposed what he perceived as a project of making sociological research appear as disembodied and detached from the social context where it was carried out (Abbott 1999, 146-147). In a letter to Peter Blau
Peter Blau
Peter Michael Blau was an American sociologist and theorist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939. He received his PhD at Columbia University in 1952, and was an instructor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan from 1949–1951, before moving on to teach...
who had taken over editorship from him Hughes expressed his view as follows:
A given piece of a man's work has to be judged not merely by itself but as one item in his complete or growing production (...) and a man's ongoing work is by the nature of the case a very personal product and by no means anonymous (quoted in Abbott 1999, 146-147).
In 1963, Everett C. Hughes was elected by his peers to serve as the 53rd President of the American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
. His Presidential Address, entitled Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination, was delivered on August 28, 1963 at the Association's Annual Meeting in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. This address was later published in the December 1963 issue of American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 28 No. 6 pp 879–890). In 1964, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. In 1974, he was awarded the Malinowski Award (see external links).The American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
, also cited him in 1982 for his contributions to education. His contributions to the training of sociologists during his time in McGill and in Chicago are well-known (Chapoulie 1996, Helmes-Hayes 1998, 2000, Abbott 1999), but his mentorship and teaching at Brandeis are also acclaimed (Homstrom 1984, Conrad et al. 1995, Weiss 1996). Indeed, he still advised students at Boston College when he was in his late seventies (Manning 2000).
Biography
Born in 1897 in Ohio, Hughes was son of a Methodist minister who came from a family of farmers. After studying Latin, French and German at Ohio Wesleyan UniversityOhio Wesleyan University
Ohio Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Delaware, Ohio, United States. It was founded in 1842 by Methodist leaders and Central Ohio residents as a nonsectarian institution, and is a member of the Ohio Five — a consortium of Ohio liberal arts colleges...
, Hughes left for Chicago in 1917. For five years he worked teaching English to a mixed population of immigrants (Coser 1994). In 1923 he enrolled in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology and Anthropology, but continued working as public park director, a job that again put him in contact with immigrant communities (Chapoulie 1996).
He was married to Canadian sociologist Helen McGill Hughes, whom he met when they had both been PhD students in Chicago. They had two daughters. In addition to some independent research, Helen McGill Hughes took part in several of Hughes's studies and also worked as managing editor for American Journal of Sociology
American Journal of Sociology
The American Journal of Sociology was established in 1895 by Albion Small and is the oldest academic journal of sociology in the United States. The journal is attached to the University of Chicago's sociology department and it is published bimonthly by The University of Chicago Press. Its...
from 1944 to 1961 (Abbott 1999). Everett Hughes died of Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease also known in medical literature as Alzheimer disease is the most common form of dementia. There is no cure for the disease, which worsens as it progresses, and eventually leads to death...
at the Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, Mass., where he had lived.
Published works
- 1943, French Canada in Transition
- 1956, The "Gleichschaltung" of the German Statistical Yearbook: A Case in Professional Neutrality The American Statistician Vol. IX (Dec., 1955), pp. 8–11.
- 1958, Men and Their Work
- 1962, Good People and Dirty Work article published in Social Problems, vol. X, Summer, 1962.
- 1971, The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers.
- 1979, The Chicago Real Estate Board: The Growth of an Institution (doctoral thesis, defended in 1928)
- 1984, The Sociological Eye. Selected Papers. Transaction Edition, with a new introduction by David Riesman and Howard S. Becker.
- 1994, On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination." Edited and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
- 2002, The place of field work in social science. In: Darin. Weinberg (ed.) Qualitative Research Methods. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, pp.139-147.
- 1952, with Helen McGill Hughes, Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers
- 1961, with Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer and Anselm L. Strauss, Boys in White. Student Culture in Medical School