<P> The major researchers in the first Chicago school included Nels Anderson, Ernest Burgess, Ruth Shonle Cavan, Edward Franklin Frazier, Everett Hughes, Roderick D. McKenzie, George Herbert Mead, Robert E. Park, Walter C. Reckless, Edwin Sutherland, W.I. Thomas (1), Frederic Thrasher, Louis Wirth, and Florian Znaniecki . The activist, social scientist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams also forged and maintained close ties with some of the members of the Chicago school of sociology . </P> <P> The Chicago school is best known for its urban sociology and for the development of the symbolic interactionist approach, notably through the work of Herbert Blumer . It has focused on human behavior as shaped by social structures and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic and personal characteristics . Biologists and anthropologists had accepted the theory of evolution as demonstrating that animals adapt to their environments . As applied to humans who are considered responsible for their own destinies, members of the school believed that the natural environment, which the community inhabits, is a major factor in shaping human behavior, and that the city functions as a microcosm: "In these great cities, where all the passions, all the energies of mankind are released, we are in a position to investigate the process of civilization, as it were, under a microscope ." </P> <P> The work of Frederic E. Clements (1916) was particularly influential . He proposed that a community of vegetation is a superorganism and that communities develop in a fixed pattern of successional stages from inception through to some single climax state or to a self - regulating state of equilibrium . By analogy, an individual is born, grows, matures, and dies, but the community which the individual inhabited continues to grow and exhibit properties which are greater than the sum of the properties of the parts . </P> <P> Members of the school have concentrated on the city of Chicago as the object of their study, seeking evidence whether urbanization (Wirth: 1938) and increasing social mobility have been the causes of the contemporary social problems . Originally, Chicago was a clean slate, an empty physical environment . By 1860, Chicago was a small town with a population of 10,000 . There was great growth after the fire of 1871 . By 1910, the population exceeded two million . The rapidity of the increase was due to an influx of immigrants and it produced homelessness (Anderson: 1923), poor housing conditions, and bad working conditions based on low wages and long hours . But equally, Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) stress that the sudden freedom of immigrants released from the controls of Europe to the unrestrained competition of the new city was a dynamic for growth . See also the broken windows thesis . </P>

The first department of sociology was created at the university of chicago