ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the details of Everett Hughes’ interpretive institutional ecology, considers something about its intellectual roots, and offers a brief critique. It deals with a rationale for taking Hughes seriously as a ‘theorist’. The institutional level of analysis constitutes the ‘real world’ point at which individuals deal with the structure/agency theoretical question that is at the heart of sociology. Hughes did so by combining the fundamental elements of classical Chicago sociology - ecology, fieldwork, and an interpretivist’s concern with the individual and cultural meanings of objects, and events - with selected elements of anthropological functionalism and Simmelian formalism. The terms institutional and ecology highlight the specifically ecological, macrosociological side to Hughes’ approach, one which might otherwise be underestimated or missed altogether. He was critical of the tendency to reduce human ecology to a mechanical, empiricist mapping of community features and events that denuded the approach of its interpretive element.
