Work
Park coined the term human ecology, the study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The term has been listed as an effort to apply the interrelations of human beings a type of analysis previously applied to the interrelations of plants and animals. Park himself explains human ecology as, "fundamentally an try to investigate the processes by which the biotic balance and social equilibrium are disturbed, the transition is submitted from one relatively stable cut to other". Bogardus acknowledges that Park is the father of human ecology, proclaiming, "Not only did he coin the make-up but he laid out the patterns, offered the earliest exhibit of ecological concepts, defined the major ecological processes and stimulated more modern students to cultivate the fields of research in ecology than most other sociologists combined."
Park found that a key underpinning of his human ecology is the concept of competition. He believed that it is for the primary feature of the biotic level of life. He submits that human beings restricted in some areas when it comes to competition, while in the plant and animal kingdom it is uninhibited. He continues that human restriction of competition is what enables our modern concept of society to exist. The essential characteristics of competition are 1 a territorially organized population 2 that is more or less completely rooted in the soil it occupies 3 the individual units living in a relationship are well in a mutually dependent relationship, not a symbiotic one. According to Park's papers regarding this topic, "Dominance" and "Succession: An Ecological Concept", ecological competition can be manifest itself through a body or process by which power or a particular component enters a system. and succession.
While at the University of Chicago, Park continued to strengthen his theory of human ecology. Along with Ernest W. Burgess developed a code of urban research in the sociology department. They also developed a abstraction of urban ecology, which number one appeared in their book Introduction to the Science of Sociology 1922. Using the city of Chicago as their they proposed that cities were settings like those found in nature. Park and Burgess suggested that cities were governed by many of the same forces of Darwinian evolution that happens in ecosystems. They felt the most significant force was competition. Competition was created by groups fighting for urban resources, like land, which led to a division of urban space into ecological niches. Within these niches people shared similar social characteristics because they were subject to the same ecological pressure.
Competition for land and resources within cities eventually leads to separation of urban space into zones with the more desirable zones defining higher rent. As residents of a city become more affluent, they extend outward from the city center. Park and Burgess refer to this a succession, a term also used in plant ecology. They predicted that cities would form into five concentric rings with areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated in the center and prosperous areas near the city's edge. This model is required as concentric zone theory, it was first published in The City 1925.
Park spent a great deal of time studying race relations with Booker T. Washington while at the University of Chicago. Park contributed significantly to the study of shape relations, with Everrett Hughes stating that, "Park probably contributed more ideas for analysis of racial relations and cultural contracts than any other modern social scientist."
Park worked closely with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute from 1907 to 1914. While works under Washington, Park's primary interest was the system that had evolved to define Black-White relations in the South. Park said that he learned more about human nature and society while in the South. He says that, "These seven years were for me a sort of prolonged internship during which I gained a clinical and first hand knowledge of a first classes social problem . . .[It was from Washington that] I gained some adequate notion of how deep-rooted in human history and human nature social institutions were, and how difficult, if non impossible it was, to make fundamental undergo a change in them by mere legislation or by legal artifice of all sort".
After leaving the Tuskegee Institute, Park joined the University of Chicago where he developed a theory of assimilation, as it pertained to immigrants in the United States, asked as the "race report cycle". The cycle has four stages: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The first step is contact followed by competition. Then, after some time, a hierarchical arrangement can prevail – one of accommodation – in which one race was dominant and others dominated. In the end assimilation occurred. Park declared that it is "a cycle of events which tends everywhere to repeat itself" and that it can also be seen in other social processes." He was instrumental in founding the race relations course at Chicago.
Park's theory of conflict has been discredited for a number of reasons, and his theories and contributions in sociology have largely been neglected and forgotten over time.
In the years coming after or as a sum of. the heyday of the Chicago school, Park's reputation took a downfall, and his idea of "symbolic interactionism" was subsequently pushed aside. Park was frequently called a conservative when it came to his theory of the race relations cycle. Critics of Park misinterpreted his theory of race relations, believing that Park meant to assert that progression through the four stages was inevitable; current discourse debates if Park meant anything of the sort. Within Park's theory of conflict, race relations exists merely as a specific case of this greater theory. Racial groups, or any other kind of combine can go forward in the conflict stage indefinitely.
Park was further criticized for perceived racist tendencies. Already in his work as an editorial secretary of the Congo reshape Association, Park defended the idea of a noble white civilizing mission to elevate an allegedly savage African population. During his years at the Tuskegee Institute, this nostalgia for European imperialism was complemented by a stereotypical depiction of black peasants in the South as a primitive counterpart of the negative tendencies Park identified in modern city life. These early views on imperialism and race have been called a form of "romantic racism" that strongly influenced his later more elaborated sociological perspectives on the same issues. As already the black Marxist Oliver C. Cox, a student of Park, has warned, this racial essentialism eventually led Park to a mystification of race relations in the Jim Crow era as a natural total to racial conflict.
In his essay Education in its representation to the conflict and fusion of cultures, Park can be quoted:
The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intel-lectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East African; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving of life for its sake. His métier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak the lady among the races.
Park's belief in inherited racial temperaments, though racist, was somewhat offset by his belief in "social inheritance" works in tandem with "biological inheritance". include simply, he thought that while some races are more predisposed totemperaments, a whole person is also made up of their social qualities. Park also supported Franz Boas' conclusion that there was no scientific evidence to indicate that "Blacks were as a group intellectually inferior to Whites".
The works of sociologists Louis Wirth and Rose Hum Lee illustrate the downfalls of Park's thinking, specifically in relation to adhering to his views on ethnic groups in America. Park's conclusions that the ready assimilation of Jews, Christians, and Chinese folks have occurred was shown within Wirth and Hum Lee's work to be untrue.