ABSTRACT
The Chicago School undoubtedly opened up an atypical discussion in comparison to that of the previous sociological tradition. Topics like youth gangs, petty crime, prostitution, and immigration favored the development of empirical research and the design of specific conceptual categories for a comprehensive reading of the phenomenology present within the modern city (Salerno 2007). In this regard, marginality assumed a heuristic value for the empirical study of the changing urban reality and permitted the sociologists of the Chicago School to understand the changes engendered by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration processes. However, during its development, this perspective presented a number of contradictory aspects, above all in the theoretical-research plane. As Jonas claims ([1968] 1989, 675), the discredit encountered by the most important sociological theories and defended by the founding fathers of American sociology, as well as the advance of empirical social research, certainly brought about a complete change within the framework of American sociology in the 1920s and early 1930s, leading to noteworthy advantages. This transformation, however, caused a weakening of sociological research’s ability to provide a reference framework within which to place the disparate and heterogeneous investigations of a purely empirical nature. Therefore, no development of interpretative models of high-level abstract and generalized quality took place. This is evident as regards the concept of marginality (an aspect that may be 24extended to all the categories developed at the time), which appears as an operative category, scarcely integrated in a systemic theory.
