Sociology and Social Policy

Essays on Community, Economy, and Society

Herbert J. Gans

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231545099
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans's wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision for sociology. Sociology and Social Policy explicates and helps solve social problems by presenting a range of studies on what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans's areas of interest—the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class—together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.

PART ONE

THE CITY

My introduction to urban sociology began with my doing several community studies both in urban neighborhoods and in suburbs. As one result, I began to wonder whether and how cities and suburbs—as well as small towns and villages—actually differed from one another, which then got me interested in what urban sociology was studying and what it should be studying.

I also became curious about two specific issues, the first being whether there is really such a thing as the city, and if not, how one conceptualizes the variety of cities.

Today’s U.S. urban sociology is mostly Big City sociology, but actually existing cities may be huge, big, average, and small. They can also be distinguished in other ways, such as global cities, national political and cultural capitals, regional centers, and industrial and market cities.

Suburbs, small towns, and villages are diverse as well, but chapter 1 offers a solution: to give up all the different names for types of places and instead begin by calling them all settlements.

If they were all called settlements, specific studies could focus on their social, economic, political, cultural, spatial, and other characteristics. Thus, a study of settlements that compared poorer with more affluent settlements could help us understand how these are similar and different, regardless of whether they are called cities or suburbs.

Describing all types of localities as settlements may also open up new questions for research. Settlements emphasizes the people and groups doing the settling, rather than the geographic, legal, political, and administrative characteristics of the communities in which they have settled.

To further stimulate new research, the chapter suggests that urban sociology could be divided into four fields, one of which would be the sociology of the city. Another could be called spatial sociology—a name that leads directly to my second issue.

It asks whether and how what planners used to call the physical environment determines social life and structures in the settlements in which people live.

These days urban sociologists write not about the physical environment but about space and place. I view space as dirt, or more politely, as the surface of the earth to which gravity has attached us since we came out of the trees.

Space becomes place when humans and the social structures in which they are embedded occupy the space, divide it into bounded lots, build on it or dig into it, live or work or play in it, or buy and sell it.

The prime empirical question should be a causal one: do space and its transformation into place cause the social structures of settlements, or do these structures determine how space is turned into place?

The best answer to this question is both, but chapter 2 argues that, more often than not, the social shapes the spatial. I wrote it mainly because I felt that, in recent years, urban sociology has paid too much attention to how space shapes place, underplaying the social, economic, and political forces and agents that determine what happens to space.

Chapters 3 and 4 can be read as case studies shedding further light on the analysis in chapter 2. Thus, chapter 3 argues against seeing the ghetto mainly as spatially different from other neighborhoods. In fact, it is usually an ordinary neighborhood about which the racially dominant population, i.e. whites, has decided that other people, distinguished mainly by their darker skin, must live there and only there.

Social policy cannot do away with ghettos by treating them as space. They can be made more livable, but they can be eliminated only through policies that put an end to racial discrimination and segregation.

Chapter 4 applies this causal argument to a critical analysis of a currently highly influential spatial approach: the concentration of poverty. It argues that poverty is concentrated when 40 percent of a neighborhood consists of people whose income is below the poverty line.

Much of concentrated poverty research is devoted to identifying neighborhood effects. Such effects include many of the problems traditionally associated with poverty, as well as the likelihood of passing these on to the next generation.

However, the concentration researchers do not sufficiently consider the possibility that many of the effects they ascribe to the neighborhood may be primarily caused by poverty. But poverty is mainly created by national and local institutions and not by neighborhoods.

The causal issues in concentration effects research might be illuminated if researchers also studied the high degree of residential concentration among the rich, but no one has yet carried out such studies.

Nonetheless, neighborhood effects research has been used to justify tearing down public housing projects, and to disperse a small number of the concentrated poor to other neighborhoods. These policies omit making available to the poor the jobs and income supports that are crucial to reducing poverty significantly.

Since concentration research spans urban and poverty issues, chapter 4 can also be read to introduce part 2 of the book, and because the research has been undertaken principally in ghetto neighborhoods, the chapter is also relevant to part 4 of the book.

CHAPTER 1

Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology

Toward a Sociology of Settlements

In 1968, Manuel Castells asked, “Is there an urban sociology?” and answered his question by noting that “after fifty years existence, only one subject for research in urban sociology remains untackled: its subject matter” (Castells, 1976, p. 59). Castells was commenting on European as well as American urban sociology, and a few years later, he wrote a book about what was now the urban question, in which he added that “from the point of view of scientific vocabulary, I could well do without…certain terms…‘urban,’ ‘city,’ ‘region,’ ‘space,’ etc.” (Castells, 1977, p. 441; see also Gottdiener, 1985).

Castells’ skepticism was belied by the massive amount of analytic work he devoted to his questions, the terms he dismissed, and the related questions he eventually answered. Now forty years have passed, and the kinds of questions he raised then still deserve to be considered.¹ My article is narrower in scope than Castells’ articles; moreover, it is limited to American urban sociology. Also, my analysis is not intended to do away with the field but to propose some intellectual reorganizing to encourage needed research and suggest a few new research questions.

Some Problems

Although American cities have long been diverse in many characteristics, in 1938, Louis Wirth unintentionally covered up that diversity by an all-embracing definition of cities as large, dense, and socially heterogeneous (Wirth, 1938).² That definition also implied a definition of the rural areas to which he compared cities as lacking this trio of characteristics, but strangely enough, Wirth failed to refer to other major kinds of communities, for example, towns and suburbs.³

Today, a majority of Americans live in the suburbs and a growing number of these are becoming larger, denser, and more heterogeneous than many cities, while truly rural communities are few and far between (Gans, 1962). In any case, Wirth’s still widely used definition and the comparison that accompanies it have lost their usefulness.

More important, today most American research in urban sociology focuses on cities, mainly very large ones. Actually, the significant portion of that research deals not with cities per se but with topics, topical issues, and problems that are located in cities, currently, for example, around race and class. However, topic- and problem-centered urban sociology is as old as the hills.

Park’s (1915) essay “The City,” which is said to have initiated empirical urban sociology in America, is actually not an analysis of the city but a survey of general sociological topics, especially of course the immigration and ethnic (or “race relations”) questions in which Park and his colleagues were especially interested.⁴ Many of these topics showed up again as chapter heads in the introductory text that Park wrote with Ernest Burgess a few years later (Park and Burgess, 1921)—a text that, incidentally, did not include a chapter on the city. However, the ecologically inclined among Park’s colleagues were interested in cities, or at least in urban growth and in the competition for space.

Interestingly enough, a couple of generations later, when ecology had long since lost its dominance in the field and the neo-Marxists had moved urban sociology toward studying the urban economy, growth was still on the agenda. Indeed, the growth machine (Molotch, 1976) continues to be a much cited concept in the field.

Park and his colleagues wrote about a Chicago that was growing rapidly, with most of the growth coming from, by WASP standards, strange immigrants. The neo-Marxist approach to the urban economy coincided with the urban financial crisis. It should thus not be surprising why today’s urban sociology is particularly concerned with issues of race and class and more recently also with spatial sociology, which reflects in part a political concern with privatization and the disappearance of urban public space (e.g., Mitchell, 2003; Kohn, 2004).⁵ Thus, I think it is fair to say that the field called urban sociology is really problem- and issue-oriented sociology in and about American cities.

Needless to say, this is all to the good, partly because it keeps sociology publicly relevant and useful, although one must add that urban sociologists do not study these topics in very many cities. Ever since its beginnings, American urban sociology has concentrated on Chicago—and especially its ghetto (Small, 2007), as well as a few other, mostly large cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and at the moment, post-Katrina New Orleans. Conversely, the field has paid virtually no attention to the suburbs, as well as the small towns and rural areas (America’s villages) that remain culturally and politically significant even if their past demographic domination has ended.

Although part of the explanation for the field’s concentration on a few cities must be the government’s and the foundations’ interest in them, one can only speculate about some of the other causes. For one thing, other fields conduct specific studies in the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, especially those easily accessible to busy scholars. For example, an immigration researcher and his urban sociologist colleague were the first to look at the suburbanization of brand new immigrants (Alba and Logan, 1991).

Furthermore, a field that studies the entire range of communities in which Americans live and work may be logistically and otherwise unworkable. Communities, whether they are big cities or villages, are immensely complicated agglomerations of primary and secondary groups and networks, as well as an array of economic, political, religious, cultural, and many other institutions and structures, most of them organized hierarchically. These are, in addition, connected ecologically and in other ways to a set of yet other interrelated hierarchies that often extend far beyond the official boundaries of the community. Urban sociologists have not fully acknowledged the extent to which their research has simplified the empirical reality with which the field is concerned.

Urban Sociology’s Illogical Typology

One form of simplification results from what I think of as the field’s four-item naming system: city, suburb, town, and rural area. This is, in addition, an illogical typology. Thus, cities and suburbs are distinguished literally by their location on other sides of the “city limits,” whereas towns are distinguished from cities and from each other mainly by their size, and rural areas refer to communities attached to a practically obsolete type of agricultural economy.

All of these communities are defined by their boundaries, which often began as cow paths or in other random ways but now have a variety of political, financial, and other functions. However, these are only the official boundaries. Economic and other institutions inside them serve market or service areas within boundaries unrelated to the official ones. Some of the market areas are now becoming global in size. Furthermore, the people who live in these communities create their individual boundaries depending on where they work and play and where they find the goods and services they prefer and the relatives and other people they visit regularly.

Each of the four community types is burdened by other definitional and measurement problems. For example, the communities that have been or that are currently called cities range from today’s versions to places once reserved for gods, priests, kings—some of them called divine—the dead, the military, and others.⁶ In size, cities have ranged from minuscule, like King David’s Jerusalem or the Troy of the Trojan war, to today’s metropoli with populations of over 20 million (Gans, 1991).

Similarly, suburbs lie not only on the other side of city limits but may also be bedroom communities, which resem...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part One: The City
• Part Two: Poverty
• Part Three: Jobs and the Political Economy
• Part Four: Race and Class
• Part Five: Ethnicity
• Appendix: Working in Six Research Areas—A Multi-Field Sociological Career