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Sociological imagination: The lessons of Everett

Hughes (1897–1983)
a
Michael Banton
a
Professor of Sociology , Bristol University
Published online: 30 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Michael Banton (1983) Sociological imagination: The lessons of Everett Hughes (1897–1983), Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies, 11:1-2, 143-147, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.1983.9975825

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.1983.9975825

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 Michael Banton
Sociological
imagination: the lessons
of Everett Hughes
(1897-1983)

No one who wants to be cheered up would turn to a book about racial relations.
Most of the writing on this topic is pretty depressing: as highlighted by the title
of a celebrated study, it provides'naught for your comfort.'
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Sociologists do have something for your comfort, but to understand quite how
much it is necessary first to step backwards in time. When Everett Hughes was
a student in Chicago after 1923, almost anything to do with racial relations was
seen as illustrating the intractability of the 'race problem'. This was thought to
arise from inherited differences in the talents and dispositions of people of
different stock. It was Hughes' teacher, Robert E. Park, who, more than anyone
else, demonstrated that racial relations were not just a projection of biological
capacities; his main technique was to show how human societies are based on
culture as well as biology, and how social patterns reveal an ecological order.
Subsequent authors have illuminated a series of further aspects of these rela-
tions explaining, for example, how patterns of racial relations are influenced by
the personality of those who are party to them, by ideologies of difference, by
the structure of labour markets, by the particular social significance vested in
selected physical differences in given circumstances, and so on.

A new model
Looking back, it seems strange that on graduating from the London School of
Economics in 1950, I should have thought that sociology was a study of aggre-
gates. I believed that (as Michael Argyle wrote seven years later):
In sociology . . . the basic unit of analysis is the group, whether it be a social class, an age-sex cate-
gory, a town, or a culture: sociologists are not concerned with individuals save as they contribute to '
an average for a social group or category.

Groups, I assumed, were based upon conforming behaviour, which in turn

stemmed from the processes of socialisation. The persistence of 'races' in a
multiracial society, however, was not to be accounted for so easily. It posed a
whole series of problems the nature of which I, and most students of these
matters at the time, did not properly appreciate. Yet Hughes had already
analysed some of them in a trail-blazing article published in 1946 and entitled
'The Knitting of Racial Groups in Industry'. In it he sought to demonstrate that
'a fruitful way of analysing race relations in industry is to look at them against
whatevergrid of informal social groupings and of relations within and between
such groups exists in the industries, departments and jobs in which Negroes or
other new kinds of employees are put to work'. He showed how, in the canteen,
the fixing room and the polishing room of a particular factory, a pattern had
been established of labour-management relations, informal seniority among
employees, and group control of individual productivity. New employees had
to conform to the existing practices or be subjected to heavy informal
pressures. Black female workers were accorded a limited degree of acceptance
by white female workers but were not admitted to the friendship cliques of the
white women. Since the black women were only partly accepted they were not
subject to the full pressure to conform to the established output norms, and
some of them had high production rates. Management insisted that workers
would be hired, retained and promoted strictly according to their individual
143
 merits. This had the effect of making all the workers, but particularly the
blacks, feel very much on trial, so that
. . . the Negro worker apparently feels and is made to feel in some situations that he (or she) has to
dissociate himself from others and be a 'solitary' in order merely to keep his job.

This essay discussed circumstances in which an industrial 'colour line' was

being breached: some black workers disliked the pressure and left; others
stayed, but did not behave in the same way as most of their white peers. To
understand this, wrote Hughes, the sociologist had first to understand the
factory and then discover in what ways customary relations were changed by
the introduction of black workers.

This may not sound remarkable today, but Hughes was the first writer to raise
questions about interpersonal relations between people of different race as
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these were acted out in institutional settings, and the first to show how such
questions could be answered. He went on to open up other previously under-
explored areas, such as the processes by which 'new peoples' appear upon the
political map, the nature of status protest in inter-group relations, the lessons
to be learned from examining behaviour towards people who, like 'blonde
Negroes', occupy an anomalous position in the structure, and the significance
of names. Of equal importance to his work in this field were the contributions
he made to the study of work and organisations. One was his famous paper
about the Germans under Hitler entitled 'Good People and Dirty Work'.
Others were essays, much respected in their time, on the 'Institutional Office
and the Person', on 'Work and the Self on 'Mistakes at Work', and upon the
concepts of licence and mandate. Hughes was a pioneer in the study of the ways
in which new occupational groups form and then organise themselves in the
pursuit of status (and, of course, higher remuneration). He put it more
succinctly, saying that such groups aimed to turn a business into a profession.

Many of Hughes' contributions have been assimilated into the body of socio-
logical knowledge, so that the modern student is insufficiently sensitive to their
originality. Hughes would not have been surprised by this. He wrote of a
student of his who read some of Park's papers and wondered why the author
had not footnoted his debts; then he noted the dates of original publication and
wondered why his favourite authors had not acknowledged their debts to Park.
Nevertheless, it is not quite as simple as this. Sometimes it is difficult to get
readers to see the merits of a new viewpoint because of their existing intellec-
tual commitments. One technique is to characterise the orthodoxy which the
innovator wishes to supersede. Keynes did this and other economists have
protested that he was unfair to the prevailing orthodoxy. In sociology, Lynd,
Sorokin and Mills have attacked accepted views in order to further their own.
In private, Hughes could be very critical of sociological orthodoxies but he
chose not to attack them in print and this made it more difficult for him to
explain his own perspective. Suspicious of any claims on behalf of a single
sovereign method, he was inclined to write only in brief, while he lacked the
talents of the expositor (who is often someone of less original outlook). I
remember over 20 years ago mentioning Hughes to his former Chicago
colleague Edward Shils, who replied with a remarkable analogy:
There are two kinds of rubber tree in Malaya. With one kind, you can make a cut, put your cup
against the tree, and it fills with rubber. With the other you have to keep a cup there all year to get
the yield. Hughes is like the second kind.

What Everett Hughes offered was not a single view of society, but a way of
looking at things that changed as his interest shifted: catch him at the wrong
moment and he might not have sorted out his ideas properly, but once he had
the result was a new view of something that turned out to be less familiar than it
had seemed.
144
 Whence comes inspiration?
Sociology needs more people like Everett Hughes, so it can be useful to look at
his career, to see if it teaches any lessons as to the ways in which creativity is
best encouraged. A preliminary point of this kind is that, after graduating from
Ohio Wesleyan University (for he was the son of a Methodist minister), he had
the good sense or good fortune to go to what was then the best graduate school
in his chosen subject. At Chicago, Park put pressure on all his students to select
a problem. Anderson's problem was the hobo, Cressy's the dance hall, Land-
esco's organised crime, Reckless' vice, Thrasher's the gang, Thompson's the
plantation, Wirth's the ghetto, Zorbaugh's the slum, and so on. Hughes, the
most original mind among the batch, was the student with no problem, no
mission. To recall another famous title, he was not a hedgehog (who knows one
thing and knows it well), but a fox (who knows many things). Hughes wanted to
to uncover patterns common to apparently different problems: one of his main
assumptions, he later wrote, was that if something has happened once it is
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almost certain to have happened again and again.

'The essence ofthe sociological imagination', he believed, 'is free association,

guided but not hampered by a frame of reference internalised not quite into the
unconscious'. In his presidential address to the American Sociological Associa-
tion in 1963 he insisted on this point, declaring his opposition to the doctrines
of commitment that became very fashionable later in that decade. The freeing
ofthe imagination 'requires a great and deep detachment, a pursuit of socio-
logical thought and research in a playful mood. But it is a detachment of deep
concern and intense curiosity that turns away from no human activity'. The
frame of reference that guided his thought was derived from a familiarity with
the works ofthe founding fathers, studied in the original French and German.
He would ask himself, 'Didn't Simmel, or Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Marshall,
or someone say something on that point?' and did much of his reading by
starting with the index.
Though his frame of reference was derived from the classical authors it also
added to them. His study ofthe Chicago Real Estate Board (the subject of his
Ph.D. thesisin 1928) began:
It is the writer's thesis that institutions are just those social forms which grow up where men
collectively face problems which are never completely settled. In various times and places men
have voluntarily met to solve p r o b l e m s . . .

The intellectual origins ofthe second sentence are easily identified, but what of
the first? It offers a novel idea which can be a fertile starting point for the study
of any social institution.
In 1927 Hughes married a Canadian, Helen McGill, who was also a student of
Park's (she became, indeed, Park's last doctoral candidate). Hughes accepted
an assistant professorship at McGill University in Montreal and, with the only
other sociologist in Canada, started on a study of unemployment. The two men
knew that the basic pattern of employment in Canada was ethnic, so it was
important that unemployment should be seen, inter alia, in terms of the
mutual adjustment of the two main ethnic groups. Hughes came quickly to
appreciate that the position of French Canadians was neither that of an immi-
grant group in process of assimilation, nor that of a national minority. A new
conceptual framework was needed. In seeking a better understanding of the
determining influences, he interested himself in the attempt to organise a dis-
tinctively Catholic labour movement. A possible parallel to industrialisation in
Quebec was to be found in the Catholic Rhineland, so Hughes sought and won
a fellowship to conduct research there. In the streets of Nuremberg in 1930 he
heard the Brown Shirts singing T h e true German youth is never so happy as
when Jewish blood spurts from his knife', so that when he returned to McGill
he introduced a course on social movements that came to be known as 'Hughes
on the Nazis.'
145
 Together with his wife, Hughes undertook field research into the social
structure of a small industrial city in Quebec. It was still incomplete when they
moved to Chicago in 1938, and was reported five years later in Everett's French
Canada in Transition. This starts with another notable sentence:
It has been a doctrine of our time that the earth's surface should be divisible into clearly bounded
territories, each occupied by a racially and culturally homogeneous people who can celebrate their
past, their present, and their hopes in common ceremony and who can act together to administer
their domestic affairs and to defend themselves from outside danger... The two great countries of
North America notoriously fail, by virtue of internal ethnic and cultural diversity, to conform to
the ideal of the nation-state.
Whilst he lived in Montreal, Hughes assumed that the future of French Canada
lay in its largest city, and could not take seriously the pretensions of Quebec
City, the province's more purely French headquarters. Yet once he was settled
in Chicago, he began to meet more people from Quebec City and went there to
be visiting professor at the Université Laval, where there was a lively group of
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young social scientists with whom he found it easy to co-operate.

Hughes' Chicago years were distinguished by the course he gave on 'the soci-
ology of work', which led to so many interesting publications, mostly by the
students. The occupations they considered included janitors, junk dealers,
furriers, funeral directors, taxi drivers, rabbis, school teachers, jazz musicians,
mental hospital attendants, osteopaths, city managers, pharmacists, YMCA
secretaries, etc., as well as the medical students and interns described in the
books published with Howard S. Becker, Blanche Greer and Anselm Strauss.
In 1952 the Free Press published Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic
Frontiers, based on a series of lectures which were tape-recorded and then
written up by Everett and Helen together. Only those previously published
papers of Everett's which were reprinted as an appendix appeared again in the
two 1971 volumes of selected papers entitled The Sociological Eye, so among
the pieces that were missed was one entitled 'What's in a Name?', in which he
maintained that in inter-ethnic situations it is always important to ask 'Who
has the naming power? Who can give a name and make it stick?' and 'What are
the attributes on which names are based?' At a time when sociologists were
insufficiently self-conscious about the labelling process, the Hugheses were
pioneers in discussing why 'people do not and perhaps cannot completely
accept for all purposes other people's systems of names but must have their
own'. Everett used to ask students 'What do you call yourself?', and then go on
to explain the social patterns which by their choice they were seeking to
influence.
United States sociologists regularly commended that quality in Hughes' work
which they called 'insight'. There is a note of exasperation in his comment that
'I cannot think what they could mean other than whatever quality may have
been produced by intensity of observation and a turning of the wheels to find a
new combination of the old concepts, or even a new concept'. Intense observa-
tion is hard work. The opportunity to use old concepts in a new and illumi-
nating way can be detected in an inspired moment, but inspiration comes only
to the mind that is already prepared for it, and that is a matter of application.
Quite what sort of notes Hughes used to keep I do not know, but certainly he
was still making them regularly on his visit to England in 1975, when he gave a
much appreciated talk to the British Sociological Association Summer School.
Teacher and students
Yet something is missing from this description of Hughes' intellectual
methods: his students. One of his addresses is entitled 'Teaching as Field
Work'. It does not do justice to the topic (as he himself noted, his titles did not
always reflect the content of his papers). Teaching for him could be field work
because he encouraged his students to describe and analyse their experience of
life, as young people brought up in homes influenced by their parents' occupa-
tions and social relations. Hughes was a good listener. He brought out what
146
 others had to offer, helped them understand it, and himself used it to develop
his own ideas. In the same way he worked out his own interpretations by trying
them out progressively on different audiences. He had declared that the sociol-
ogists who would contribute most to the fundamental, comparative and
theoretical understanding of human society were those 'so deeply concerned
with it as to need a desperate, almost fanatical detachment from which to see it
in full perspective', but this was not the way he came across. Detachment
might be necessary for intellectual work but his commitment to it could
scarcely have been deduced from the warmth of his responses as a teacher or
friend. In the post-war years at Chicago Hughes taught many of the leading
members of a whole generation of United States sociologists. In 1961 he left the
city to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to teach, first at Brandeis, a
Jewish university, and then at Boston College, a Catholic institution. He con-
tinued to teach, latterly on a part-time basis, until he was 79.
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The best way to commemorate Everett Hughes' life, and the lessons he taught,
is to help him speak to any who are unfamiliar with his work by quoting a
sample of what he had to say: for example, about death and the ways in which
humans may ease the pain of bereavement.
The modern hospital, in its anxiety to appear to be a place where all patients get well, refuses to
allow relatives to gather for a ceremonial parting from a loved one, and condemns the dying to
sanitary solitude. If there beany triumph in death, our generation will not be there to see it. As for
mourning, we are so fearful of wearing sorrow upon our sleeves, that we eat our hearts out in a
mourning which cannot be brought to a decent end, because it has never had a proper beginning. I
have had dear friends who have done it so; and so has anyone who is of that well-meaning
generation who believed that allgood things could be attained by science and all bad things avoided
by emancipation from old formulae and freedom from old distinctions; the people who got it into
their heads that anything formal is cold - not sensing that ceremonial may be the cloak that warms
the freezing heart, that a formula may be the firm stick upon which the trembling limbs may lean;
that it may be a house in which one may decently hide himself until he has the strength and courage
to face the world again.

Death is not a subject on which it is easy to offer comfort, but such a passage is
surely evidence that the sociological imagination can flash at least a flickering
beam upon fundamental features of human existence. Hughes shone a par-
ticular light upon the problems of people caught up in the relations which our
generation defines as racial and ethnic. Where his teacher, Park, had uncovered
an ecological order, Everett Hughes extended the analysis by showing in a
much more satisfactory manner how that order could give rise to social defini-
tions of roles and relationships, and how humans in turn changed patterns of
racial and ethnic relations, occasionally for the worse but often for the better.

147