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This article analyses reasons why civil servants are still attracted to ideas which are, from the standpoint of professional sociologists, theoretically anachronistic. The contemporary cities, like Chicago, Illinois have been shaped importantly by federal and municipal bureaucracies. The sociological notions which inform these policies are anything but contemporary, reveals a common patterns of bureaucratic behavior. The implication is that academics who hire themselves out as consultants are committing an intellectual form of prostitution. Following this line of reasoning, it is concluded that when civil servants in Chicago employ social scientists, they do so in order to legitimate preselected policies: social scientists' data will be distorted or ignored unless they support desired conclusions. The idea that the bureaucracy can embody a partisan viewpoint is not new, although it may be more obvious in other cultures. But bureaucrats' pretensions to a "value-neutral" expertise were among the casualties of the past decades, during which virtually all such claims were discredited in political controversy.

Between 1930 and 1945 the sociological profession suffered an identity crisis. Its origin and resolution were compounded of both academic realpolitik and theoretical dilemmas: generational conflicts and university power blocs on the one hand, and persisting intellectual obsessions on the other. Contemporary sociologists may find our current situation to be both derivative and parallel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]