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The article analyzes merchant behavior in ghetto marketplaces. For this purpose, the article presents two position papers taking different perspectives in regard to a possible explanation for the racial-ethnic differences found through previous research. Walter E. Williams, research economist with the Urban Institute, criticizes previous articles on the grounds that they fail to suggest a behavioral model of merchant behavior and because they fail to suggest effective policy measures to modify this behavior. Williams suggests a rational behavior model: that minorities are characterized by more unemployment, higher residential mobility, and lower income, and that merchants use this readily accessible information to determine creditworthiness. Frederick D. Sturdivant, Meshulam Riklis Professor of Business and Its Environment at the Ohio State University, suggests that the economic model employed by Williams is outdated and inappropriate, that the behavioral model encourages racist stereotyping.

The article presents a pioneer study of contemporary significance in electoral behavior in reference to a paper on this issue written by Roscoe C. Martin. As far as taste is concerned there was a bias at the outset for selecting an article representing a contribution to an empirically based political science. Martin's piece certainly meets that standard. The article is an early attempt to investigate in a systematic, quantitative fashion a problem that has received considerable attention in more recent volumes of the Quarterly and other scholarly journals, the question of voting behavior in state and local elections. Martin's report of the socioeconomic and institutional factors associated with an Austin municipal election in 1933 precedes the major voting studies conducted on the national, state, and local levels by several years, even decades. But it is not enough merely to say that this study broke new ground in an era when political scientists generally took only marginal interest in studying electoral data; it is also worth remarking that Martin did so in a manner that is still significant for contemporary students of voting.

The article presents the author's reply to the comment by sociologists F. Ted Hebert and Lelan E. McLemore on his paper "The Effect of Organization Size Upon Normative Diversity." The author says that F. Ted Hebert and McLemore contend that the concept of north refers only to a widely shared set of beliefs regarding appropriate behavior, thereby implicitly suggesting that two individuals are an insufficient number of actors to develop shared expectations for behavior. Because they take issue with his definition of two or more who share a perspective and emphasize "widespreadness," in their definition, they apparently feel that two individuals can not interact, develop a shared perspective and sanction one another. Few interactional settings develop a complete consensus in expectations due to factors which isolate or segregate individuals from one another, such as size of the group, role specialization, centralization of decision making or physical separation. The proportion of actors sharing a perspective or the central tendency is not really important in his paper; instead, the concern is with diversity of expectations in an interactional setting.

The article focuses on the author's comment on the paper "The Effect of Organization Size Upon Normative Diversity," by D. Michael Betz, that appeared in the March 1972 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." Conceptually, the norm construct is weakened to the point of triviality by reasoning that "where two or more individuals share a perspective or attitude such shared perspectives represent a normative environment for those individuals and other individuals in their midst." In standard usage, the norm concept has reference to widely shared sets of beliefs regarding appropriate behavior where these beliefs are not only shared but believed to be shared and are supported by social mechanisms encouraging conformity. Betz has examined attitude diversity, not norm diversity and has shown that with respect to three questions, diversity of attitudes is more common in large organizations than in small. Only Betz's unfortunate definition of the norm concept permits labeling these attitudes norms.