More than a dozen years after his death in 1983, Everett C. Hughes is generally recognized as one of the links between the founders of “The Chicago School” – W. I. Thomas and Robert E. Park (to whom we might add Ernest W. Burgess and the philosopher George Herbert Mead) – and the group of sociologists trained at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and ‘50s, who are often labeled collectively as symbolic interactionists. 1 This group, notable for its studies of institutions, work and the professions, art, deviance, and medicine, includes such researchers as Erving Goffman (1961, 1963), Howard S. Becker (1963, 1982), Anselm Strauss (1978), and Eliot Freidson (1970), who have also contributed to making fieldwork – the ethnographic method – one of the most fruitful research approaches in the social sciences. As some of them have emphasized, their sociology, as well as their use of fieldwork, had its origin partly in the teaching and research of Everett C. Hughes at the University of Chicago.

Hughes’ position as a link between these two groups would be enough to arouse interest in his work. But that work also offers the elements of a fruitful approach to the study of such central sociological themes as work, institutions, the relations between ethnic groups, and, beyond that, a lively and reflexive conception of research on society as a collective enterprise.

Among the obstacles to understanding this current of research, one is easy to identify.