Rereading The Jack-Roller

I revisit one of the iconic Chicago School studies, Clifford Shaw’s The Jack-Roller. A naive reading of Shaw’s book leaves the reader with a sense of having been inducted into a mélange of what we now know as “sociology” and “social work,” but which to Shaw seems a coherent stance. I suggest that this is close to the heart of how things were, and not a temporary distortion in the distinct histories of sociology and social work. I develop and...