Lloyd Warner and his associates (1963). The more well-known studies that have focused on the problem of community within large cities have included William Whyte's
Street Corner Society and Gerald Suttles's
The Social Order of the Slum, which themselves are aligned with earlier Robert Park and Ernest Burgess conceptions of the "natural community" arising within the confines of a seemingly faceless, anonymous, large city (Suttles 1972, pp. 7–9). Descriptive studies that emphasize field work and examine social structure as a spatial phenomenon are the hallmark of the highly influential Chicago School that arose and flourished under Robert Park and Ernest Burgess of the University of Chicago Department of Sociology during the 1920s and 1930s.
Robert and Helen Lynd carried out two studies (1929, 1937) involving extensive personal field work on the town of Muncie, Indiana: Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). In the first Middletown study, the Lynds spent the years 1924–1925 participating in and observing the community life of Middletown (population 36,500), and performing extensive survey work. Their objective was to address all aspects of social life and social structure of the community. A fundamental focus of the Lynds' earlier analysis concerned the consequences of technological change (industrialization) on the social structure of Middletown, in particular the emergence of social class conflicts subsequent to turn-of-the-century industrialization.
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