Great American Sociology

Abstract

Let me begin with my conclusion: Rob Sampson has written a great book. It is a mustread for almost all sociologists and demographers, and especially important for urbanists. Though I have written numerous book reviews and read countless others, this essay is by far the hardest one I’ve been asked to do. It is hard for two reasons: first, there is so much excellent material in Great American City to write about that it is hard to know where to begin; and second, the book is so good it is difficult to keep from being overly effusive in praising it. When you first pick up Great American City, you expect to begin reading a book about a city. But you very quickly learn that this book is much, much more than that. Early on, Sampson says that his book is “ . . . about everything, or at least everything social about the city” (p. 22). And that is indeed the case. It is a review of much of urban sociology, in fact, of sociology in general, while it is also an in-depth analysis of several important and contentious contemporary issues, namely, neighborhood effects and selectivity. Theoretically driven and methodologically sophisticated, Great American City challenges the reader in every chapter. Put another way, many will find it impossible to understand everything he’s doing in a single reading. In this, it reminds me especially of Stanley Lieberson’s classic A Piece of the Pie. Different data, different methods, different topics in every single chapter, yet all seamlessly linked by an overarching theory of context developed in the penultimate chapter. The book has 17 chapters, organized into five sections. Part I sets the stage: topics, location, and thesis. In Part II the reader learns Sampson’s analytic approach and gets an overview of the Chicago Project. In the third part community-level processes are explained and investigated, preparing the reader for Part IV, which lays out interlocking structures as they relate to place. The final section is a synthesis and revisits the themes in the early chapters. Throughout, he rejects the specialization (read narrowness) of much social science research and especially rejects the individualism that has dominated so much sociological research in the late 20th century. It is hard to imagine any reader of this essay who has not already read some of Rob Sampson’s work. At the same time, I imagine that many, like myself, will be surprised by the scope of the research reported in this book. Given that academic specialization encourages reading along subdisciplinary lines, it is doubtful anyone would have found all these pieces unless they were reading Sampson’s C.V. What Sampson calls “the Chicago Project” is really multiple parts of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), as well as the Chicago Collective Civic Participation Project