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This paper contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of schools. The analysis is unique in using data on the minutes of instruction per day in each of four subjects taught in the public elementary schools in Illinois. Few education production function papers have information on the amount of instruction students receive in a given subject. The results generally indicate that time spent in mathematics and English instruction pays off in terms of improved mathematics and reading test scores. There is evidence that time spent in social studies instruction raises reading and writing scores. Additionally, the data span 3 years so that individual school-specific fixed effects are estimated and found to be strongly significant. Inclusion of these fixed effects has dramatic consequences for the parameter estimates on several variables, in some cases raising and in others reducing the estimated parameter values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waves of collective mobilization, when participation increases rapidly and expectations shift dramatically, pose an important puzzle for social science. Such waves, I argue, can only be explained by an endogenous process of “positive feedback.” This article identifies two distinct mechanisms – interdependence and inspiration – that generate positive feedback in collective mobilization. It also provides a detailed analysis of one episode: the wave of strikes that swept American cities in May 1886. Although historians and sociologists have suggested various precipitants, these do not account for the magnitude of the upsurge. Focusing on events in Chicago during the months before May, the article provides quantitative and qualitative evidence for positive feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the contemporary appeal of the Chicago sociology perspective in France, and analyzes the bases of its attraction. Old Chicago sociology/anthropology was a heady and fruitful conjoining of ethnography, urban ecology and geography, interactionist social psychology, and pragmatist epistemology. Using the vocabulary of science, it spoke of the city of Chicago as its laboratory, but what this meant was that its students were exhorted to exit the library in order to roam, observe, and undertake what then were termed case studies and today, urban ethnography. The laboratory was particularly exciting because of the growth in the population in Chicago, Illinois. Immigrants had been flooding the U.S. and its urban centers throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, and Chicago was a nodal point. Within Europe of the period there had also been migrations on a lesser yet also significant scale, especially from the east to the west. In France, Europe, an throughout the world, an intense process of urbanization has been occurring. The challenge has been how to understand and describe the processes and their consequences, other than being publicly appalled. Jammed side by side in these immense cities are clusters and communities of families and peoples differing in languages, religions, ethnic-cultural origins, and social race.

This article takes up the discussion recently stimulated through the volume, A Second Chicago School? That book's connecting postwar Chicago sociology with the "Chicago approach" of mainly the 1910s to 1930s is extended, going back as far as the turn of the twentieth century and also forward to the 1990s, with a view endorsing Simmelian interactionism as opposed to Spencerian utilitarianism. Albion Small, first Chairman of the Chicago Department, introduced a Simmelian sociology to the U.S., and the question arises to what extent this legacy is being realized until today. Using Anselm Strauss as a case in point, the article has two main parts. Part One recapitulates various attempts at understanding the phases and realms of Chicago sociology. The focus is not only on the various "Chicago Schools" that may be separated, but also the differences in the work of three scholars who often are grouped together under the label of Chicago, namely Herbert Blumer, Robert Park, and Everett Hughes. Part Two recollects Strauss's intellectual biography, as life of a scholar determined to make a contribution to modern sociology, in the name of "Chicago interactionism." Strauss's work, however, came to endorse Spencerian-type utilitarianism more than Simmelian-type interactionism from the middle 1960s onwards--thereby joining in with anti-structural functionalism tendencies in American sociology.(n1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies focusing on ethnic influences on agricultural patterns have, contrary to commonly held assumptions of homogeneity, revealed variations in Midwest plains agriculture. Our study of ethnic influences emphasizes the historical context and uses data front a random sample of German, British, and Yankee centennial farina in Illinois. Hypotheses concerning both the current and the initial conditions of more than 100 years ago are tested. Though differences in the patterns between the ethnic groups are often small, they are typically in the direction predicted. Thus, over the last 100 years or more, many of the differing ethnic patterns in agriculture, though dissipating, have persisted, like echoes from the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]