Chicago School and Social Disorganization Theory

Sociologists and criminologists working in the tradition of the Chicago School of sociology, which studied the city directly as a setting for social life and developed social disorganization theory, the account of how the breakdown of a neighborhood's own informal social controls, rather than the individual traits of its residents, produces concentrated and persistent crime and delinquency. This group gathers the Chicago School's own founding urban ecologists, the researchers who mapped delinquency onto Chicago's neighborhoods to found the theory, and later researchers who revived and extended it to study how community structure, collective efficacy and neighborhood change shape crime rates today. It excludes researchers whose central claim is about an individual offender's biology or psychology, who belong instead under Positivist and Biosocial Criminology, and excludes strain and subcultural theorists whose focus is the individual's or group's response to blocked opportunity rather than neighborhood structure itself, who belong under Strain, Anomie and Subcultural Theory.