The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

By Rick Helmes-Hayes

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes is a comprehensive and updated critical discussion of Hughes’s contribution to sociology and his current legacy in the social sciences. A global team of scholars discusses issues such as the international circulation of Hughes’s work, his intellectual biography, his impact on current ethnographic research practices and the use in current research of such Hughesian concepts as master status, dirty work and bastard institutions. This companion is a useful reference for students of classical sociology, practitioners of ethnographic research and scholars of sociology in the Chicagoan tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783085958

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The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological traditions and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner—City University of New York, USA; Australian Catholic University, Australia; and University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming titles in this series include:

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

Edited by Rick Helmes-Hayes

and

Marco Santoro

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2016 Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Helmes-Hayes, Richard C. (Richard Charles), 1951– editor. | Santoro, Marco, 1964– editor.

Title: The Anthem companion to Everett Hughes / editors, Rick Helmes-Hayes (University of Waterloo, Canada), Marco Santoro (Bologna University, Italy).

Description: London ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem companions to sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016043561 | ISBN 9780857281784 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hughes, Everett C. (Everett Cherrington), 1897-1983. | Sociology – United States.

Classification: LCC HM479.H845 A57 2016 | DDC 301–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043561

ISBN-13: 978-0-85728-178-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 0-85728-178-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword Everett C. Hughes, Great Teacher

Howard S. Becker

Notes on Contributors

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

Illustrations

Figures

0.1Total references to Everett Hughes, and to three selected books authored or co-authored by him, in ISI Web of Science, 1985–2014

0.2References to The Sociological Eye in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

0.3References to Men and Their Work in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, 1971–2014

5.1Everett Hughes in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1982

Tables

0.1References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, top five countries

0.2References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, by research areas

0.3References to Everett Hughes in ISI Web of Science, 1985 to present, by source

0.4Properties of texts citing The Sociological Eye or Men and Their Work according to Scopus, 1971 to present

Foreword

EVERETT C. HUGHES, GREAT TEACHER

Howard S. Becker

Everett Hughes, a great sociologist and a great teacher, may not be as unappreciated as the editors of this book suspect. His work continues to reverberate as new generations discover it for themselves. Equally important, more and more people discover, one way or another, that he didn’t just inspire generations of later-to-become-prominent sociologists. He did better than that. He taught us ‘How to Do It’, just as his teacher Robert E. Park had taught an earlier generation (Hughes was one of them) how to do it. I always imagined, when I sat in Hughes’s seminar, that he was reproducing, in his own style, the rambling, reflective, worldly, elegant style of thought and of imparting ideas that had characterized Park’s teaching.

As fine a sociologist as Hughes was (and there has never been a better practitioner of our trade), he was even better as a teacher. I think that many people who sat through his classes would disagree with me. Many colleagues of mine in graduate school found his classes disagreeable: rambling, without a clear point, even tedious. The first class I took when I entered the University of Chicago Sociology Department in the fall of 1946 was his class in how to do fieldwork, taken by all the incoming students in sociology, anthropology and human development. He assigned us, in pairs, to Chicago census tracts (a small area of one or two Chicago blocks) and gave us assignments to do: collect genealogies from two or three people (a bow to the anthropologists, I suppose), observe for an hour or two in a public place, attend a group meeting of some kind and interview a number of people who lived in the area about whatever he (Hughes) happened to be interested in that quarter. And write down all this ‘information’ we collected and turn it in to him each class period – which we all dutifully did.

He didn’t talk about that work in class. Instead he talked about any damn thing that came into his head, rambling in a contented way over things whose relevance to fieldwork wasn’t clear. At least, it seemed that way to us. We were bewildered. I noticed that a number of much older students – typically guys who had been in the army and were now in graduate school as a result of the G.I. Bill of Rights – would sometimes show up to listen to these monologues with great interest. I finally got my nerve up one day and asked David Solomon, one of the several Canadians who had come to Chicago to study with Hughes and a veteran of the war, what he was doing there. He wanted to know what I meant, and I said that he must know far more than what would be taught in an introductory class. He looked at me with real pity, and said, as best I can remember, ‘I can’t explain it to you now, but one of these days you’ll understand that these lectures are pure sociological gold.’

And they were. You had to be a little more sophisticated than we were then to appreciate Hughes’s way of taking a walk around a topic, noting some features you would otherwise have ignored, comparing it to other things happening in places that didn’t seem to have much in common with our census tracts and then concluding with a general remark that tied it all together. Was that sociology?

These explorations were a far cry from the polished, logical analyses so elegantly enunciated by his fellow faculty member Herbert Blumer, who explicated the complex, subtle and hard-for-us-to-grasp social psychology of one of his teachers, the philosopher George Herbert Mead. Many students thought that was the Real Thing. Nor did these explorations have the ostentatious erudition of Louis Wirth, who occasionally entertained himself by translating obscure passages from Georg Simmel instead of lecturing.

But when it was time to write a master’s thesis, some of us chose to study situations of work and were directed to see Hughes on the fifth floor of the Social Science Building (it had been Robert E. Park’s office, but none of us knew that then). And whatever kind of work you had chosen to study – and especially if, like me, you had chosen something less ‘noble’ than medicine or law – he would encourage you to get started doing some preliminary scouting around, to talk to some people in that line of work, to start your thesis right then and there without waiting for the formalities of making a written proposal.

And then you would take – sometimes for several quarters in a row – his eventually legendary seminar in what started as ‘The Sociology of Occupations and Professions’ and eventually was known as (not an innocent change, this) ‘The Sociology of Work’. So I started doing fieldwork with the musicians (of whom I was one) who played in bars and for parties, and with that ticket of admission to the class, joined a hard-working and productive rotating group, which included, among many others, Bob Habenstein (studying funeral directors), Dan Lortie (anaesthesiologists), Harold MacDowell (osteopaths), Bill Westley (police), Lou Kriesberg (retail furriers), Ray Gold (apartment house janitors) and eventually Erving Goffman (who proposed but never did a study of butlers).

The discussions were lively – always centred on what we had been finding out in our continuing field research and never allowed to stray into sterile discussions of ‘theory’ (which in those days would have meant trying to define the essence of a ‘profession’ as opposed to more mundane kinds of work), or the equally tedious questions which we liked to pester each other with about whether our samples were ‘adequate’ or not. The heated discussions always, under Hughes’s skilful guidance, led somewhere, to a new idea or direction for our inquiries, not necessarily to a solution to whatever problem we had brought up but surely to a direction to follow that would ultimately move our work along. And they led, finally, to broad hints that it was time to get on with the tedious work of actually writing a report of our research that could become a thesis or dissertation. In other words, he taught you how to do it, from the first vague ideas to a finished, written product.

And beyond that. I started working for him, interviewing schoolteachers for his research on schools, work I meant to use as the raw material for my dissertation (the master’s thesis done and accepted already). One day he looked at up me in the quizzical way he had, which I knew likely meant that there was something he’d thought up for me to do, and said, ‘Time you wrote an article. About what you wrote your master’s thesis about’ – meaning, clearly, musicians. I said, ‘Which part of it should I write up?’ He gave me one of those practical gems David Solomon had alerted me to: ‘Take one idea and put in anything you can make stick to it and leave the rest of it out.’ I did and that was my first article, published in the American Journal of Sociology.

Many other people have stories like that to tell. He didn’t teach his students his ‘theory’, partly because he didn’t have one. He had something better: ideas you could use to shape an investigation and the later report of its results. And he had ways of working that were better than ‘methods’ out of a cookbook: how to think about what you were learning in your research and use that to shape the next steps you took.

He taught you how to be a sociologist.

Introduction

INSIGHT THROUGH CRAFTSMANSHIP: THE SOCIOLOGICAL LEGACY OF EVERETT HUGHES

Rick Helmes-Hayes and Marco Santoro

He’s never been given, I think, the credit he deserves.

(Erving Goffman on Everett Hughes [Verhoeven 1993: 336])

When one reads sociology textbooks or accounts of major trends and figures in the historical development of the discipline, there is a litany of names from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman – that appears over and over again. These figures are universally acknowledged as belonging to a list of scholars who built the theoretical foundations of the discipline. More recently, figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have been added to that list.

This Anthem Companions to Sociology series is noteworthy from our perspective because it is the first time that Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) has been accorded a place in the pantheon. Hughes is largely unknown, or known by name only, to most practicing sociologists. He is rarely listed among ‘the masters’ by social theorists or historians of social thought and is usually missing from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and guides to the discipline.¹ Nonetheless, it is our view that Hughes belongs on these lists. And there is a growing community of scholars spread across North America and Europe – France and Italy, in particular – who regards him as among the most innovative and original sociologists of the twentieth century. Moreover, he was – and is – more influential than would appear to be the case. The source of his impact? His conceptual/theoretical influence on other high-profile scholars who were his students and colleagues (e.g., Howard S. Becker, David Riesman, Anselm Strauss, Eliot Freidson and Goffman) and his role in developing, nurturing and teaching the value of fieldwork.

Hughes’s contribution to North American sociology in the middle decades of the twentieth century is indisputable. Hughes, along with his wife, Helen MacGill Hughes, did his PhD at Chicago. While there, he became one of Park’s favourite students (Riesman 1983: 480). After an interval at McGill University in Montreal (1927–38), he returned and became a prominent member of the Chicago department between 1938 and 1961.² While there, he championed the teaching of fieldwork methods and, by so doing, became a crucial figure in the ‘second Chicago School’ (Fine 1995). As well, Hughes is among the most influential pioneers of Canadian sociology in both its English- and French-language manifestations. During the 11-year period he spent at McGill, he collaborated with Carl Dawson to build English-language sociology in Canada and then, from that base, helped champion sociology in French Quebec, first, by writing French Canada in Transition (1943a), one of the first classics of Canadian sociology (Hiller and Langlois 2001) and, then, by helping French-language scholars in Quebec – especially at Laval University – develop a program of social research for the province (Hughes 1943b; Falardeau 1953; see Wilcox-Magill 1983; Ostow 1984; Fournier 1987; Shore 1987; Helmes-Hayes 2000).

But Hughes’s influence as a sociologist extended beyond Northern America. In the 1940s he played a substantial role in the re-establishment of empirical sociology in (occupied) Germany following the demise of Nazism (Staley 1993; Guth 2010; see Fleck chapter, this volume). He was already familiar with Germany and its sociology, however, because he had spent the year 1930–1 in the Rhineland doing fieldwork on the Catholic labour movement (see Hughes [1935] 1971). Indeed, on the earlier trip he had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and got a foreboding of what it might become.³

However, Hughes’s ideas have spread in Europe not through these early German experiences but as a consequence of the latter-day discovery of ‘the Chicago tradition’ by European scholars in the 1980s.⁴ During this period many European scholars and political activists became disenchanted with structural functionalism on one side and Marxism on the other. Some of them, casting around for a more ethnographically rooted sociology, turned to Chicago sociology. Whether it was under the general rubric of the ‘Chicago School’, or more specific labels such as ‘symbolic interactionism’ or ‘fieldwork’, Hughes’s ideas gained currency because they appealed to new generations of sociologists looking for an alternative to both mainstream sociology – Parsons, Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld – and what some perceived as the outdated radical sociologies of the 1970s – Marxism, critical theory and so forth.

Paradoxically, Hughes’s somewhat marginal status while alive might have contributed to his rediscovery and celebration post-mortem. Hughes resisted being referred to as part of ‘the Chicago School’ (see Hughes in Lofland 1980: 276–7) and made no effort to build a coterie of followers. Nonetheless, he had a deep and abiding impact on those with whom he worked (see Harper’s chapter, this volume). This influence, sometimes revealed only indirectly in their work, becomes apparent only upon closer investigation.⁵ In fact, only recently has Hughes’s stock once again begun to rise. Crucial to his new-found prominence has been the reputational entrepreneurship of his students and former collaborators, chief among them Becker. Beginning in the 1990s, and thanks first and foremost to Becker’s mediation and support, Hughes has come to enjoy a notable reputation in France.⁶ Becker has been aided in this endeavour by several French scholars, most important among them Jean-Michel Chapoulie. Chapoulie has written a number of landmark studies on Hughes (1987; 1996; 2001; 2002; Sociétés contemporaines, 1997, entire issue) and, as well, edited the first-ever collection of Hughes’s writings translated into a language other than English. This development would have pleased Hughes, who spoke fluent French and German, taught for some years in Quebec and spent much of his early career writing about French Canada. Together, via their collective interest in the history of the Chicago tradition, Becker, Chapoulie and their colleagues have created what has come to be known as the ‘Chicago School in Paris’ (see Wax 2000).⁷

From France, Hughes’s ideas travelled to Italy, where symbolic interactionism had never gained a foothold, but where the name of Goffman – in both his ‘critical’ persona (e.g., as a major source for the anti-psychiatry movement) and his ‘scholarly’ persona – was well established by the 1960s. Perhaps the earliest evidence of this interest was a conference organized by Luigi Tomasi (Trento) in 1993 that attracted papers from three Italian scholars (Filippo Barbano, Raffaele Rauty, Margherita Ciacci) and was highlighted by contributions from Edward Shils and Martin Bulmer. Two collections of essays that appeared subsequently added Stanford Lyman, Jennifer Platt and Chapoulie to the list (Gubert and Tomasi 1995; Tomasi 1998). In 2010, a representative of a younger generation of sociologists, Marco Santoro, published an Italian translation of some of Hughes’s most influential essays (from The Sociological Eye), bearing witness to a burgeoning interest in Hughes’s ideas in the country of Antonio Gramsci – though it would be an overstatement to talk of a Hughes fashion there (Hughes 2010a).⁸ As well, translations of some of Hughes’s texts – articles not books – are now available in Spanish and Russian.⁹ However, perhaps the best sign of growing interest in Hughes’s work is the book you hold in your hands, published in a series devoted to classics in social theory. It is edited by a Canadian sociologist and an Italian one, with contributions written by scholars from France, Belgium, Canada, Austria, Poland and the United States.

This volume is not the first attempt to assess Hughes’s place in the history of the social sciences or to offer a general discussion of his legacy to contemporary social research and theory. At least two predecessors should be mentioned: the Festschrift published in 1968 with contributions by many of his students and colleagues (Becker et al. 1968c), and a special issue of the French journal Sociétés contemporaines, published in 1997, one year after the release of the first French edition of The Sociological Eye (Hughes 1996), with contributions by selected former students and colleagues as well as historians of sociology from both France and the United Kingdom.¹⁰ A third, more circumscribed assessment was published in 2010 in the English-language Italian journal Sociologica (see Helmes-Hayes and Santoro 2010; Hughes 2010b; 2010c; 2010d). It was published at the same time as the abridged Italian edition of The Sociological Eye mentioned above (Hughes 2010a). In addition to the collections of essays mentioned above, it should be noted that during the last years of his career, and especially after he died in 1983, commentaries about Hughes and his work appeared in various journals and textbooks.¹¹ The current volume builds on these previous enterprises. Among the questions our contributors ask and answer are the following: What is Hughes’s legacy 30 years after his death? How could, and should, we make use of it now without becoming victims of presentism on the one hand or historicism on the other (Stocking 1965)?

Unlike most scholars, whose legacy is largely confined to their oeuvre, Hughes’s greatest legacy may rest in his teaching and example. This is in part because Hughes never wrote either a theoretical treatise or a methodological handbook. In the words of Arlene Daniels, ‘What Hughes once said about Park could apply equally as well to himself: ‘Park has left no magnum opus’ (1972: 402; citing Hughes ([1964] 1971: 548; emphasis in original).¹² Indeed, over his long career, Hughes authored just two monographs: his PhD thesis on the Chicago Real Estate Board (1931) and his book on French Canada (1943a). The rest of his books are either collections of previously published articles (1958; 1971a; 1984) or collective research projects he directed but that were written largely by his younger collaborators (Becker et al. 1961; Becker, Geer and Hughes 1968a). However, though scattered across numerous journals and sometimes left for long periods unpublished, his essays and ideas had a major impact on scholars – students and colleagues alike – who, following his example or under his tutelage, produced a number of sociological classics: Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (1943, 1955); Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959); Becker, Outsiders (1963) to name just a few.

The study of Hughes’s work and ideas offers the discerning reader a more complex, detailed and comprehensive approach to doing sociology than what might first seem to be the case, given the often casual, folksy style of his writing. To read his oeuvre is to take a sagacious, if meandering, voyage through many of the most interesting and challenging problems with which scholars – not just sociologists – must deal as they try to understand social life.

In the balance of the introduction we

1.outline key biographical details of Hughes’s life in order to provide historical context for the rest of the book;¹³

2.identify the main principles and features of ‘Hughesian sociology’, demonstrating how it has borne fruit in the work of a distinguished group of scholars directly formed or influenced by Hughes’s teaching and example;

3.outline the theoretical frame of reference that undergirded Hughes’s thinking and research;

4.assess the contemporary relevance of Hughes’s ideas for the social sciences (in part through a brief bibliometric mapping of their current international profile) and, finally;

5.provide a synopsis of the present book.

The Trajectory of a ‘Marginal Scholar’

Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) was born in Beaver, Ohio, the son of a Methodist minister and his wife. Like many early American sociologists, he was, thus, a ‘PK’ (a preacher’s kid), a background that proved consequential both for his choice of professions and for the detached attitude he came to adopt in pursuing it. His ancestors were pious, progressive farmers who praised higher education, especially for men (Coser 1994: 2). After earning his degree from Ohio Wesleyan University at 20 years of age, Hughes moved to the Green Bay area of Wisconsin and spent five years teaching English to immigrants – an important opportunity for the would-be sociologist to come in contact with people really different from him. He entered the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Chicago in 1923 and, as Philippe Vienne notes (see his chapter, this volume) soon confirmed that he had found his niche. From that point on, Hughes recalled, he was ‘hooked’ on sociology: ‘I knew what I was going to do’ (Everett C. Hughes Papers, University of Chicago, Box 1, Folder 9: ‘Life after 60’; hereafter ECH Papers, UCHI, …). At Park’s urging, he took a part-time position as a director of a Chicago city park, which again put him in contact with migrants and others from backgrounds very different from his own. Doubtless, these early experiences shaped his view of the importance of using comparative analysis to understand the variety of human experience and belief. In 1928, he defended his PhD thesis, a study of the origins of the Chicago Real Estate Board and its search for legitimation and respectability. His adviser was Robert Park (1864–1944), then the leading light of the department.

Shortly before defending his thesis, Hughes moved to Canada to assume a position in the newly formed Department of Sociology at McGill University, an English-speaking university in (mainly French) Montreal. Hughes stayed in Canada for over a decade and became a central figure in the establishment of sociology in that country. Perhaps his most important contribution was French Canada in Transition (1943a). The volume, which became part of the canon of Canadian sociology, is a classical community study that describes and makes sense of the troubles experienced by the French-speaking members of a small, rural community as they try to cope with the impact of industrialization and modernization imposed on them by British and American industrial capitalists. As a part of his research for this project, and, more specifically, to better understand relations between Catholic French and Protestant English, Hughes spent a year in Germany doing research on the Catholic Labour Movement in the Rhineland. This experience proved to be consequential after the fall of Nazism and the occupation of Germany, when Hughes was part of a delegation of social scientists sent there to help re-establish German sociology along empirical (i.e., American) lines. Indeed, one of Hughes’s most insightful essays, ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ ([1962] 1971), came out of that experience (see Fleck chapter, this volume).¹⁴

In 1938, on the invitation of Herbert Blumer and Louis Wirth, Hughes returned to Chicago. He remained there for 23 years, during which time his name came to be firmly linked to what is now widely known as the ‘Second Chicago School’. Like Blumer and others of his cohort, he came to be a bridge between those who had founded the so-called Chicago School in the early twentieth century and newer cohorts of students who developed ‘Chicago sociology’ in ways that brought it into the modern era.¹⁵ He once again took up his interest in occupations and professions, making them privileged objects of teaching and research. In the process, he stimulated the development of a whole subfield in the discipline. As he recalls it,

In 1939, I began to teach a course on professions. People from various departments of the university and from many occupations came into the course; many of them wanted to write about the efforts of their own occupation to have itself recognized as a profession […] I soon changed the name of the course to ‘The Sociology of Work’ [in order to] include studies of a greater variety of occupations and problems […] The occupations considered included […] janitors, junk dealers […], furriers, funeral directors, taxi drivers, rabbis, school teachers, jazz musicians, mental hospital attendants, osteopaths, city managers, pharmacists, and YMCA secretaries. Others studied lawyers, physicians, and the clergy, as well as the newer professions or the newer specialties in these older professions. We studied workers, union leaders, and management in a variety of industries […] We […] got clues about how levels and directions of effort and production are determined in both lowly and proud kinds of work. Those who perform services, it turned out, prefer some customers, clients, patients, or even sinners, to others. Some tasks in any occupation are preferred over others; some are jealously guarded, while others are gladly delegated to those they consider lesser breeds, such as women or Negroes […] The contingencies which face people as they run their life-cycle, their career at work, turned out to be a constant theme. The great variety of students and of occupations and work situations studies stimulated the search for and the finding of common themes. Some of these common themes I put into an Outline for Sociological Study of an Occupation which was used by a whole generation of students. ([1970] 1971: 418–19)¹⁶

During his career, Hughes contributed to a range of subdisciplines, moving from one project to another without any apparent overall plan, taking up subjects as opportunities presented themselves. Certainly this was the case with relation to his research in work and occupations. He carried out or supervised several studies because he got a research grant or one of his students expressed an interest in a particular occupation and so forth. However, as the passage above indicates, undergirding this unsystematic body of research was a theoretical goal. By uncovering ‘common themes’, he could begin the process of elaborating a conceptual framework useful for making sense of any occupation: plumbers and clergymen, junkmen and psychiatrists, occupations both ‘humble’ and ‘proud’. The list of studies on occupations done by Hughes’s students during the period is impressive and helped establish the sociology of occupations as a distinctive field of sociological research. Indeed, Hughes was a pioneer in the field and for a long time its major advocate and practitioner – as Merton knew well when in the 1950s he began to establish an empirical tradition of research in the sociology of professions at Columbia.¹⁷

During the same period, Hughes became involved in research on ethnic and racial relations in industry – a topic he had started to investigate while in Canada. The University of Chicago established a Committee for the Study of Human Relations in Industry and Hughes became central to the enterprise, contributing a series of papers of his own and supervising research done by others. As well, he taught courses in the area. For Hughes and his colleagues, there was a substantial link between the two research fields, that is, occupations and race and ethnicity. In Hughes’s estimation, the nature and organization of work – and, therefore, occupations – were central to understanding the dynamics of modern societies, not just for nation states but also for individuals and their sense of self as well. Hughes regarded work and occupations as a privileged lens through which he could make sense of race and ethnic relations and elaborated such concepts as the ‘knitting of racial groups’ and ‘dilemmas and contradictions of status’ to do so.

It was while Hughes was engaged in research on the relations binding work, occupations, race and ethnicity that he – perhaps unwittingly – made one of the most consequential decisions of his career, that is, to become a proponent of ‘formalized’ instruction in fieldwork.¹⁸ When Hughes first arrived at Chicago, he was assigned a course in introductory sociology. Dissatisfied with traditional approaches to teaching it, he soon reorganized it as a primer in fieldwork. For Hughes, this meant, above all, the observation of people in situ. Only by studying people in their natural settings was it possible to understand the meanings of those activities for the people involved. Much other work was involved in fieldwork as well: conducting interviews with participants and informers, gathering data about the location (neighbourhood, institution, space) and so on. But even this was not enough. Hughes was, as Paul Rock has noted, a ‘methodological agnostic’ (1979: 20, 242n49) – we would probably refer to him today as a proponent of ‘multi-methods’ – who felt that field researchers had an obligation to contextualize their in situ observations by becoming familiar with official governmental statistics (e.g., census tract data) and by learning how to interpret them using quantitative data analysis techniques. In Hughes’s view it was not possible to understand the day-to-day behaviours of workers in various occupations – indeed, the workings of any neighbourhood, organization or institution – without understanding the broader web of relations – economic, political, cultural, regional, national, international – in which they were enmeshed (see Becker 2010; Verdet 1997).

After offering the fieldwork course for over a decade, in 1951 Hughes was given an opportunity to augment its profile. With anthropologists Robert Redfield and Lloyd Warner, he launched a ‘Field Training Project’ in the Department of Social Sciences, which eventually led to the publication of Cases in Fieldwork (Hughes, Junker, Gold and Kittel 1952). He was likewise instrumental in the preparation of Buford Junker’s volume Fieldwork: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (1960), and wrote the introduction. It is telling that even though Hughes had been teaching fieldwork for several years, he did not use the occasion to provide a ‘how-to’ manual for readers. Indeed, Hughes never wrote a methods text or its equivalent. His long experience as a fieldworker told him that any attempt to codify the research process would be futile – and wrong-headed in any case. Hughes regarded social phenomena and research settings as fluid, complex and often novel. In such circumstances, it was Hughes’s view that the fieldworker ‘is better equipped with a flexible theoretical frame of reference and an eclectic methodological orientation than with a formal theory to test and a set of textbook-determined procedures to apply’ (Helmes-Hayes 2010: 11). In short, as Hughes phrased it in Junker’s fieldwork book, ‘the situations and circumstances in which field observation […] is done are so various that no manual of detailed rules would serve’ ([1969] 1971: 503). In this respect, Hughes’s approach was in keeping with a view generally held at Chicago that fieldwork ‘could be learned but not taught’.¹⁹ One became accomplished at the task only through practice (Fielding 2005: 2; see also Helmes-Hayes 2010: 11).

In 1949, in recognition of his contributions to the discipline and the department, Hughes was granted full professorship. Ironically, his rise to prominence inside the department occurred at the same time that its status in the discipline declined. Chicago had lost its position of dominance as a consequence of postwar theoretical and methodological developments at Harvard and Columbia in particular. This decline in status and influence had a negative impact on Hughes’s chances of being widely read and influential beyond the bounds of his home department and university. Fortunately, the Chicago department remained sufficiently well regarded that it was able to attract a wide array of talented students and accomplished scholars (e.g., Riesman, who moved from law to sociology as a consequence of encounters with Hughes).

During his career, Hughes assumed many offices and duties in the department, in the discipline and across a smattering of other disciplinary fields. In addition to serving as chair of the Chicago department during a difficult period in its history, he served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1951–2), editor of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS; 1952–60), president of the American Sociological Association (1962–3) and president of the Eastern Sociological Society (1968–9).²⁰

Just before he would have been forced to retire from Chicago, Hughes moved to Brandeis University in Boston, where he helped establish a fieldwork-oriented graduate program in sociology (see Reinharz 1995). His final academic stop was Boston College, beginning in 1968. There, too, he introduced several cohorts of students to the virtues of fieldwork (see Ostow 1985; Holmstrom 1984). He retired from academia in 1977 and died six years later, at 85 years of age.

In recognition of his many contributions, Hughes was awarded several honours, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship, honorary life presidency of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and honorary degrees from a number of Canadian and US universities.

Helen MacGill Hughes

Before we leave this description of Hughes’s career, we regard it as appropriate, indeed essential, to reflect at least briefly on the contributions of his intellectual partner and wife, Helen MacGill Hughes (1903–92). MacGill Hughes was an extremely bright and able woman – like Everett, the recipient of a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago (1937). However, unlike her husband she never had the opportunity to enjoy a full career in academia. As a consequence of family, institutional and societal dynamics, MacGill Hughes, like most well-educated women married to male academics, worked in the margins of the discipline. She and Everett had a strong, mutually supportive relationship and, like other academic wives of the period, she helped advance her husband’s career by acting as a largely unacknowledged research assistant/collaborator and, of course, managing their home life. Hughes did nothing to change this traditional set-up (Hoecker-Drysdale 1996: 227–8, 230), but it is unlikely he would have been able to do much in any case. Overt sexism in the academy that reflected and exacerbated sexist norms and structures of opportunity that favoured men, meant that she never held a full-time teaching position. Instead, she served in ‘auxiliary’ capacities in the discipline, filling a variety of significant but poorly paid and episodic positions on sociology’s fringe (Hoecker-Drysdale 1996: 227). At the end of her career, in part as a consequence of her involvement in the feminist movement, she seemed somewhat regretful about what she had been ‘allowed’ to accomplish.²¹ There is no little irony and pathos in her remarks on this phenomenon in her essay ‘Women in Academic Sociology, 1925–75’ (MacGill Hughes 1975: 217–18).

MacGill Hughes was raised in an upper-middle-class family in Vancouver. Her father was a lawyer; her mother a feminist lawyer and juvenile court judge (MacGill Hughes 1977: 72–4). After earning a degree in German and economics at the University of British Columbia in 1925, she enrolled, with Park’s encouragement, in the master’s program in sociology at the University of Chicago (MacGill Hughes 1980–1: 27–38). Shortly thereafter, she met and married Everett Hughes. She then accompanied him to McGill when he went to Montreal in 1927 to take up his position in the Sociology Department later that year. Over the following decade, she worked as a research/teaching assistant and completed her PhD with Park at Chicago. Her dissertation