Sociology's Transatlantic Shift: Europe to America

Sociology's Passage from Europe to America

The transition of sociology from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marks a shift from Europe to the U.S. Sociologists emigrated, settling in Germany and then returning to Chicago, where an intellectual movement emerged, shaped by the people who formed there.

Leading Sociologists: Late Transition and Early 20th Century

• Tönnies: Identified community with a pre-industrial society.
• Veblen: (Theory of the Leisure Class) Focused on pre-industrial social change in the field of leisure, conspicuous recreation, and conspicuous consumption.
• Simmel: Analyzed what happens in small groups, focusing on the meaning of money, fashion, etc., without focusing on the major criteria that cause social change.
• Durkheim: Wrote about social change, discussing the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, applying the scientific method.

Chicago School: Symbolic Interactionism and Urban Ecology

Around the Chicago School, two lines of thought developed:

• Symbolic Interactionism: A perspective of German inspiration that analyzes social reality through the study of interaction forms established between groups and individuals, focusing on the social construction of meaning.
• Urban Ecology: Examines the dynamics of social settings, such as why certain groups live in specific areas, using qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Schools of Oxford and Wisconsin

• Oxford School: Emphasized pluralism, influenced by the marriage site, highlighting the importance of moral consensus in the company. It considered potential conflicts as a result of clashes between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The aim was to study the mechanisms by which these groups could reach moral consensus.
• Wisconsin School: Focused on institutionalism (economic sociology), directly addressing the principles of neoclassical economics. The idea is to study the processes by which habits are created that eventually become institutions. These ideas were fundamental in the 1950s, attempting to analyze the qualities that contribute to systemic equilibrium. Critics emerged, arguing that this position framed the old conflict between enterprise and labor.

Functionalist Paradigm

Sociology in the 1920s focused on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the U.S. East Coast, giving rise to functionalism. Using quantitative methodology and drawing on the sociology of the nineteenth century, it tried to restore order by analyzing the content of a society and then examining the function of each element to maintain stability. In the 1970s, it was accused of being conservative, leading to a new way of practicing social sciences that rejected what had happened in previous years.