Chicago School Research Articles

Formative research and development of a referral toolkit for sexual health services linkages within chicago public high schools.

Linking adolescent students to sexual health services has been recommended to promote overall adolescent health and wellbeing. Support at the school level is needed to develop such linkages, particularly in large, urban districts. A series of focus groups and interviews were conducted in three high schools piloting sexual health services linkage efforts in Chicago Public Schools. Analytical strategy: All focus groups were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Atlas.ti. Study participants articulated two central challenges and strategies to address them. To address the first challenge - integrating and coordinating services into the school culture -valueholders suggested increasing communication among school staff members and parents and integrating providers into the school ecosystem. Strategies suggested to address the second challenge - issues of stigma and privacy around seeking services - include offering more than sexual health services, maintaining confidentiality and minimizing staff knowledge of service utilization, increasing staff capacity to meet students' needs and reduce discomfort, and finally partnering with students to disseminate information about service availability and promote utilization. A Toolkit, documenting these suggested strategies and recommendations, was developed and is currently being used to inform ongoing professional development for school staff across the district on how to connect young people to sexual health services. Lessons learned from this process are reported here as well as implications for other schools, districts, and the field.

THE CULTURAL VALUE OF THE INFANT-RAISING ROOM SCENE IN HUNAN DURING THE QING DYNASTY FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

From a historical point of view, the Infant-Raising Room in Hunan during the Qing Dynasty has an important cultural value. This cultural value can only really play a positive role under specific conditions. This paper utilizes the historical perspective and combines the “scene theory” of the New Chicago School to provide a new theoretical direction for studying the cultural value of the Infant-Raising Rooms in Hunan during the Qing Dynasty, starting from the space's symbolic significance and value orientation. Through the analysis and argumentation of the historical facts of the infant-raising room in Hunan Prefecture in the Qing Dynasty, this paper reveals that the local authenticity of the cultural connotation of the infant-raising room needs to be excavated in depth from multiple perspectives. It emphasizes the synergy and localization of different cultural elements to solve the problem of precise matching between comfortable facilities and the needs of a good life.

Expecting Robert Lucas: Revisiting the Relationship between American Keynesianism and Neoliberalism

As the paragon of Chicago school macroeconomics in the late twentieth century, Robert Lucas is closely associated with the collapse of Keynesian hegemony in the 1970s and with neoliberalism more generally. This article explores Lucas’s changing political commitments using previously unexploited archival evidence. It shows that although he often articulated his views in the form of anti-Keynesian polemic, he had a deeply ambiguous relationship with the Keynesian project. Lucas upends interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize ignorance in the face of the market, as his research program is premised on the hope that states and scholars can make the economy visible, and hence controllable, through stable policy rules. He was impressed by Keynesian successes and the technocratic worldview they made intelligible, but he remained suspicious of economists’ close collaborations with government.

Insurrection through the balance sheet

Abstract What has actually happened to the political economy of the United States over the last half-century? For too long now, ‘neoliberalism’ has been the standard answer given, yet today, the term seems to have lost both its analytic and critical capacities. Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution offers readers a fresh and productive response to this fundamental question of contemporary political economy. Cooper comes neither to praise nor bury neoliberalism but to shift from the level of generalizing accounts or polemics to the level of concrete ideas and the policies they have engendered. She directs attention away from the Chicago school and toward both the Virginia School of public choice theory and a long line of supply-side thinkers. On strictly economic grounds, these two strands ought to be in tension, but Cooper illuminates their political convergence: agreeing to constrain ‘certain kinds of public spending’, they implemented a politics committed to inflating asset values for the wealthy while holding workers’ wage growth in check. This balance-sheet insurrection, which directs the flow of capitalist value upward, stopped and reversed the potential Keynesian revolution that had been underway in the 1950s and 1960s.

Evaluating robo-advisors through behavioral finance: a critical review of technology potential, rationality, and investor expectations

The mini review assesses the value propositions of robo-advisors through the lens of behavioral finance. Despite their promise of data-driven, rational investment strategies, robo-advisors may not fully replicate the personalized service of human financial advisors or eliminate human biases in decision-making. A content analysis of 80 peer-reviewed articles and publications was conducted, focusing on the intersection of financial technology and behavioral finance. Literature was retrieved using The Chicago School University Library's OneSearch and the EBSCO host database, with key terms including “robo-advisor,” “investment behavior,” “risk tolerance,” “financial literacy,” and “affective trust.” The review identifies four key limitations of robo-advisors: (1) their inability to replicate the service-relationship of human advisors; (2) the presence of human bias in supposedly rational algorithms; (3) the inability to minimize market risk; and (4) their limited impact on improving users' financial literacy. Instead, robo-advisors temporarily compensate for a lack of financial knowledge through passive investment strategies. The findings suggest that integrating behavioral finance principles could enhance the predictive power of robo-advisors, though this would introduce additional complexities. The review calls for further research and regulatory measures to ensure that these technologies prioritize investor protection and financial literacy as they continue to evolve.

Methodological Insights About Photovoice as a Pedagogical Tool From Implementation With Graduate Students as Co-Researcher-Participants

Experiential learning is important in preparing the next generation of public health professionals to address health inequities. Students who aspire to work in community health must learn to engage with communities and advocate for change that aligns with community priorities. Learning about Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and related methodologies can facilitate students’ understanding of community engagement and community organizing. Photovoice, a CBPR methodology, provides a unique opportunity to understand the lived experiences of participants while identifying community-led solutions to address public health challenges. Photovoice has been used as a pedagogical tool to engage students as participants in reflection, critical thinking, discussion, and experiential learning. However, the peer-reviewed literature often lacks detailed accounts of methodology, and barriers and facilitators to engaging participants in photovoice. We provide a detailed account of our methodology as we co-learned with 23 graduate students as co-researcher-participants in a photovoice experiential learning project as part of a CBPR course at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. Students reflected on their experience with the methodology by completing a series of fieldnotes while participating in photovoice. Fieldnotes were analyzed using an iterative inductive coding process. We present five themes from student reflections that convey barriers and facilitators to engaging in photovoice, and share related recommendations for using photovoice as a pedagogical tool to prepare the next generation of public health professions.

Structure, Conduct, Performance (SCP) Approach & Fairness Principle in Business Competition Law in The Era of Digital Platforms

The emergence of digital platforms has led to disruptions that affect not only technological and economic aspects, but also legal aspects, particularly business competition law. The discourse surrounding the development of digital platforms within the context of business competition has been influenced by two major schools of thought: the Chicago School, which adopts an effeiciency approach (also known as the consumer welfare approach) , and the Harvard School, which employs the structure, conduct, and performance (SCP) approach. This article aims to scrutinize the shortcomings of the efficiency approach advocated by the Chicago School in addressing the issues related to business competition in the digital platform market. Additionally, it seeks to demonstrate how the principle of fairness, based on the competitive process approach and market strcture, can serve as a more comprehensive analytical tool for evaluating the health of competition in the market. The results show that the efficiency approach is inadequate in addressing concerns of fairness in the digital market. Responding to the context, global business competition authorities have begun to promote a fairness approach to bolster SCP approach which serves as a moral underpinning for upholding the principles of healthy business competition in the digital platform era. This article applied normative legal research methods with a conceptual approach for analysis.

The environmental rule of law and the protection of human rights defenders: law, society, technology, and markets

Environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) play a key role in the realization of the environmental rule of law and in strengthening social and ecological sustainability. States have the duty to protect and empower the EHRDs, while businesses, investors, and financial institutions also have responsibilities to respect human rights. Although the literature on human rights defenders is comprehensive, the article offers a theoretical analysis of the challenges facing the EHRDs by using Lawrence Lessig’s New Chicago School approach to explore the opportunities for bridging the gap between the theory and practice concerning the protection of EHRDs. The article endeavors to contribute to the literature by methodologically explaining the importance of legal regulation and State intervention for creating a safe and just space for the activities of the EHRDs. It demonstrates the effects of the four modalities in Lessig’s theory—i.e. the law, the social norms (culture), the architecture (technology), and the market—on the behavior of EHRDs, and ultimately on democracies while emphasizing the power of law as one of these modalities and being one of the imperative elements of the environmental rule of law. It argues that the adoption of international agreements, laws and policies regulating culture, technology, and markets, would empower civil society and encourage broad participation in the decision-making processes both within the States and the businesses to ensure accountable, transparent, and inclusive governance. It concludes that strengthened legal protection mechanisms for the rights of the rights’ defenders is an urgent need to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the environmental rule of law.

Du Boisian sociology after Du Bois: Frazier, St Clair Drake, and the global and comparative study of race and empire

AbstractIn this paper, I focus on two thinkers who I contend can be read as Du Boisian sociologists: Franklin Frazier and John Gibbs St. Clair Drake. I argue that both Frazier and Drake are often (mis)represented as being ethnographic sociologists of racism in the American inner city who owe their intellectual training and lineage to the Chicago School. By contrast, I argue that Frazier and Drake, while interested in race in the American inner city, both viewed American racism as only one piece in a global jigsaw puzzle; both advocated for comparative and historical sociologies of race and empire which would highlight—to quote Frazier (1973, 339)—that although racism “in the United States has many unique features, it is […] a phase of a world process.” Excavating this world process, to both Frazier and Drake, necessarily entailed studying the global color line beyond its expression only in the United States. Frazier and Drake ought to be read, therefore, primarily as Du Boisian sociologists, not simply as parochial ethnographers of the inner city. The data for this paper come from the Du Bois, Frazier, and Drake papers housed in archives at the University of Massachusetts‐Amherst, Howard University, and the Schomburg Centre.

Jane Addams and the Hull-House Maps & Papers. A Knowledge-Culture Approach

Jane Addams – social researcher, socio-political activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner – is one of those „women in sociology“ (Honegger/Wobbe 1998) who are seldom remembered today in the history of the discipline. Although Addams’ research and sociopolitical activities shaped academic and public life in Chicago significantly at that time, her work has been overshadowed by the „Men of the Chicago School“ (Deegan 1988) at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Our contribution intends to pay tribute to Jane Addams as a classic figure of problem-oriented social research and is structured as follows: We begin with a brief biographical portrait of Jane Addams (1) and then describe the Hull-House and the Hull- House Maps & Papers in the socio-historical context of the settlement movement (2). In the next step we outline the approach of sociological cultures of knowledge, in order to proceed with a knowledge-culture interpretation of Addams’ work (3). We conclude with a plea for a greater reception of the Maps & Papers and for the recognition of Jane Addams’ pioneering role in sociology, which unfolded beyond the confines of university and non-university research and the later established lines of academic discourse (4).

The evolution of judicial standards: evidence from litigated merger trials

Abstract A popular narrative suggests that, in the wake of the rise of the Chicago School, the judiciary has grown increasingly lax, making it difficult for antitrust agencies to successfully challenge mergers in court. We develop a theoretical framework to yield propositions regarding merger challenges, settlements, and outcomes under varying judicial standards. We then undertake an empirical investigation of all mergers, challenges, and litigated outcomes in the United States over 1982–2021 to test for the presence of shifting judicial standards. Contrary to the popular narrative, we find evidence that judicial standards have become increasingly pro-enforcement over the past four decades.

THE INFLUENCE OF LOUIS H. SULLIVAN ON THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Chicago has been an active city since it started to attract people for new opportunities in the 1830s. After the city experienced the Great Fire in 1871, the primary concern was to rebuild the city. The absence of fire-protective materials, fragile soil conditions, and the need for multistory commercial buildings with structural stability were serious challenges. Many prominent architects and engineers not only rose to them but also created the “Commercial Style”. Thus, the time witnessed the emergence of the Chicago School. This paper addresses the influence of Louis Henry Sullivan on the Chicago School of Architecture. Looking at the remarkable ideas in materials and construction techniques employed at the time, it is aimed to answer how a city is built on its dynamics on a different scale. It provides an in-depth analysis of the period’s problems related to building construction via literature review, drawings, and photographs. As the method of the study, tall building innovations were investigated using Sullivan’s five buildings which express the idea of contemporary high- rise buildings and technical solutions of the period. The study will contribute literature answering how these buildings’ designs responded to the theory behind the Chicago School of Architecture.

Detaching ‘neoliberalism’ from ‘free markets’: monopolistic corporations as neoliberalism’s ideal market form

ABSTRACT The article contributes to the emerging literature on neoliberalism that explicitly rejects the long-held assumption that it is fundamentally about the valorisation of free markets. This scholarship has taken a more ‘applied’ approach hitherto, leaving open the question of whether neoliberalism might be about free markets in principle. Via a wide-ranging survey of texts authored by intellectuals from the Austrian, Chicago and Ordoliberal schools, the article explores the neoliberal endorsement of monopolistic corporations. While beginning with distinctive conceptions of markets, neoliberal intellectuals occupy remarkably similar ground once they elaborate on their vision for markets. Monopolistic corporations are most enthusiastically discussed by Austrian authors and in the most qualified manner by Ordoliberals, but the effect is analogous: they represent the ideal form taken by markets. Only when neoliberalism is detached from free markets can a fully appropriate critique be mounted, enhancing the possibilities for it to be overcome.

Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows: A Du Boisian Analysis of Urban Policing

This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addressing underlying inequalities that reproduce harm. After drawing out the distinct intellectual trajectories of these two approaches, we turn to two contemporary cases of racialized police violence—Syracuse, NY, and the Antelope Valley, CA—to illustrate the theoretical and methodological significance of a Du Boisian mended windows analysis of urban policing across time and place. We conclude by considering what this approach might have foretold about contemporary movements to defund policing in favor of investing in community vitality.

Fragmented or disintegrated city? Urban models applied to intermediate Mexican cities from the perspective of geodemography

Urban models are fundamental in the theoretical and empirical discussions about cities. However, the Latin American city models proposed by German geographers have not been questioned much despite their use, and there are few studies outside the large metropolitan areas. Therefore, this article, using geodemography, seeks to identify whether there is a residential structure pattern in the intermediate cities of Mexico's National Urban System. This methodological proposal looks to use new spatial analysis tools focused on lifestyles and the study of one of the great layers that urban models have: their residential structure. The results show that, firstly, using the models and their temporalities as a kaleidoscope, it is possible to identify the multiple patterns of cities and not just a single model. Secondly, a new disintegrated pattern appears where the classical models of the Chicago School are unrecognizable, and the fragmented city is left disintegrated.

Social spaces: from Georg Simmel to Erving Goffman

Focusing on the concept of social space in the writings of three sociologists, Georg Simmel, Robert E. Park, and Erving Goffman, this article examines the classic theoretical formulations of social spaces in the tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology. For Simmel and the Chicago School, the foundation of social spaces lies in the social interactions among actors, and social entities and structures emerge from these interaction processes. This theoretical tradition emphasizes the interdependence of physical space and social space, highlighting two featured assumptions about social space: endogeneity and temporality. It also focuses on the relationship between spaces and human emotions.

Shifting Neoliberalism in US Telecommunications Policy: A Critical Reading of Chicago School Roads

Shifting Neoliberalism in US Telecommunications Policy: A Critical Reading of Chicago School Roads

“To be faithful to ourselves, we pay a price”: Jane F. Gilgun’s journey as a feminist qualitative social work practice researcher

In 2021, Jane Frances Gilgun retired after nearly 40 years on the faculty at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities, USA. This article—tracing a sliver of her rich intellectual biography—was crafted from a career interview conducted for by Debra Nelson-Gardell for QSW, in four sessions, between December 2021 and March 2022. Gilgun is known for her extensive writing on qualitative methodology in social work and its connection to the Chicago School as well as her decades-long feminist investigation of male violence. Starting from an ontological worldview in the inherent goodness of humankind, Gilgun seeks to explain deviations from that path. She has spent a lifetime at the intersecting seams of gender, violence, and abuse of power. Gilgun’s career offers lessons for a next generation. Her work reminds us of the importance of the deep historical connections between qualitative social work and the Chicago School. It illustrates the time and dedication required to seriously investigate difficult topics using qualitative methodologies. It offers a bittersweet reminder that choosing the path less traveled—or resisting dominant views in the academy—can be a solitary experience but that building intentional communities of like-minded souls serves as a protective factor. Finally, Gilgun’s career embodies the idea that serious research agendas are animated by large and important questions. Her scholarship has grappled head-on with the basic philosophical question of how evil can exist in a world rooted in goodness.

«Пригородный тренд»: первый социологический взгляд на городскую периферию

The article is devoted to a review of Paul Douglas's book “Suburban Trend” - one of the first sociological studies on the suburbs. Analyzing the early stages of suburbanization, this work is very valuable for the analysis of modern processes of suburbanization in Russia. At the same time, this book remains in the shadow of the more famous works of the Chicago School of Sociology and is almost unknown to the Russian reader.

The Chicago School of Sociology and the origins of career studies

The Chicago School of Sociology and the origins of career studies