The Nature of ‘Schools’ in the Sociology of Knowledge: The Case of the ‘Chicago School’

Abstract

The nature of ‘schools' as a metascientific construct is reviewed. Tiryakian's (1979a) increasingly popular construction of a school of sociology is examined and the case of ‘The Chicago School’ is considered in detail. The efficacy of a ‘schools’ approach to understanding the nature of the growth and development of scientific knowledge is called into question. It is suggested that schools, as used in the literature, tend to be convenient groupings of practitioners rather than metascientific categories and that they fail to adequately engage knowledge transformative processes.