Search

The article presents information on the 1965 issue of the journal "Sociological Inquiry." The 1954 and 1955 Supreme Court decisions on desegregation are the force that set in motion vast changes that are restructuring the very nature of race relations in the United States. This volume contain recent developments relating to race relations in the United States. Its nine essays touch on several of the major areas in which change occurs or in which old blemishes remain. The paper by Robin Williams, with which this issue begins attempts an overview of what has happened in the last two decades. Most of the papers in this set are themselves reports of research appropriate to Williams' contention that intergroup relations are part of the basic dynamics of modem social systems. Richard Lamanna's doctoral dissertation is concerned in part with the response of the Negro public school teacher to desegregation. Lewis Killian turns his attention to the negotiations between representatives of the white and Negro communities.

The paper reports on a study dealing with emergent regionalization among veteran settlements in Israel. Regional organization is approached in a functional way, as a social system in a process of change and is considered in its micro and macro aspects. The focus of the analysis is threefold: the function of the region as a mechanism of developmental change in terms of social integration, increased participation and redistribution, and improved mobilization; the factors which influence the process of regionalization, in its initial emergence, and in its sustained functioning; and the relationship between different regional organization and social structure and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a cybernetic model of a religious symbol system to explain the competition among Rabbinists, Hasidim, and Messianists in the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century Poland. Hasidism's ability to attract adherents is explained by the great flexibility of its constitutive belief, ‘communion with God’ when compared with Rabbinic Torah or the Messianic belief in the ‘lifting of sparks.’ This flexibility is traced through all levels of the cybernetic hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contribution of the sociologist to the planning of agricultural and rural development in Israel. The author first outlines the three levels of agricultural planning - national, regional and farm, and then provides some background to rural settlement activities in Israel. The confrontation of new immigrants from traditional societies with the technologically advanced agriculture of Israel resulted in severe social crises in the new villages, affecting also their economic achievements; and the subsequent assignment of rural sociologists to the villages to study the life-pattern of these traditional groups and provide them with counseling and instruction, whilst at the same time undertaking general research. The recommendations of the sociologists helped the development authorities to evolve suitable measures for integrating these immigrants into society as socially independent and economically successful members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper emphasises the need to give priority to supporting institutions in. attempts at mobilising local initiative for development. This policy is thought to increase the immediate response to local mobilisation efforts and make initiatives more lasting. The establishment of supporting institutions will require the direction of a great part of the developmental efforts to reforming the government apparatus at regional and national level. However, because it will seldom be possible in make many successful reforms at higher levels at the same time, concentration of development efforts on a few sectors is in most cases the only realistic policy. This is apparently incompatible with a very comprehensive, multi-sectoral approach to local development. With regard to local communities, a policy which concentrates on a limited number of activities at a time is also likely to create better chances of active popular participation in and some local diversification of the development process, as opposed to pressing overall transformation efforts which may well result in apathy and a tendency to increased dependence on the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding traditional sociological conceptions of community to include environmental considerations in community research, this paper stresses the importance of documenting both subjective and objective environmental concerns, as well as reconciling such differences as are presented and details precedence. Some recent data on the nature of social contact in high-rise ‘communities’ illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential members of the urban planning profession have developed certain ideas about new town design, including notions such as self-containment, social balance, and the neighborhood unit. These parallel, to some extent, concepts that have emerged from the field of community sociology. Efforts to put these ideas into practice have fallen Jar short of the mark. Without more sophisticated implementation mechanisms, better theories of social interaction at the neighborhood level, and new approaches to citizen participation, efforts to build new towns are likely to remain severely crippled. The aim of this paper is to summarize past efforts to translate implicit theories of social organization into actual new town designs. The possibilities of closing the gap between theory and practice through the use of more explicit forms of social experimentation are discussed in the context of the fledgling new towns program in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years numerous discussion of urban communities have given great weight to themes of disorganization and disorder. This paper critically examines several important conceptual, procedural, and substantive issues inherent in most treatments of community disorganization. To illustrate such fundamental problems as ‘overgeneralization’ and dominant group bias five specific topics—migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence—were selected for intensive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the literature on formal voluntary organizations in the urban community. The theoretical approaches that guided much of the research in this area are identified as social structural, social psychological, and organizational. Basic findings suggest that formal participation, including church membership, is a characteristic of urban life. Population characteristics, attitudes, informal interaction, and community involvement are all related to formal membership. Moreover, formal organizations attempt to integrate individuals with the larger community, and such groups, in urbanizing areas, facilitate modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the student and teacher relationship. When instructors find their classes failing to respond to lectures with the vitality and interest with which they were presented, failing to participate in discussions with measured scholarly interest, and treating assignments as unwanted tasks, they accuse their students of being unappreciative, lazy, and apathetic. The central success of any course is the coming together of interests among students and between students and faculty. This paper analyzes the problems in the normal teacher-centered class, the changes introduced in transforming it into a student-centered-structure; student reactions to the changes; and its difficulties. One case of an immanent problem grew out of an attempt to come to grips with grading procedures. Students tried to reform the course away from competitive relationships and a mystification of authority in the instructor.

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of rationality in Max Weber's sociology of religion. Three new terms: rationalism, rationalization, and rationality, are used to distinguish the different meanings Weber gives to rationality. Efficient orientation of means to ends (rationalism) is distinguished from the systematizations (rationalization). Rationality, finally, is the control of action by ideas. Rational social action is produced only by powerful irrational motives, and it holds a distinct place in Weber's sociology of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Marxist paradigm. In order to develop a coherent perspective, it is necessary for the author to go back to the work of Marx himself, to isolate its basic features and the tensions and ambiguities they involve, and then to assess the work of contemporary Marxists in the light of this heritage. While the central task of this paper is a critical review of the Marxist contribution to political analysis, such a focus must be located within the scope of Marx's theory as a whole, rather than separated out and isolated as one dimension of the theory. Therefore, the author begins with a general review of Marx's social theory and then explore his analysis of the political realm in the light of the societal problems defined by the theory as a whole.

This article presents Peter M. Hall's response to Rosabeth Moss Kanter's comments toward his article "A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Politics," published in the 1972 issue of "Sociological Inquiry." The author concludes that Kanter misunderstands his perspective by subsuming it under American liberalism. If there is anything that he is not, it is an American liberal, and if there is anything he is criticizing in American sociology, political sociology, and symbolic interaction, it is consensual, pluralistic, and liberal bias. Hall also does not deny the need to see the totality of the society, its interdependencies, feedbacks, and impacts, in short, society as a system. To settle misconceptions, Hall emphasized that his paper had a special focus and set limits as to its goals and coverage. It was not intended to be a complete analysis of politics nor a complete analysis of American politics.

Unidimensional conceptions of socioeconomic status require that alternative indicators of one's position in the stratification system have similar elects upon the consequences of socioeconomic level. We show herein that different indicators of social participation and psychological well-being are in fact associated with different indicators of socioeconomic status. Thus, any attempt to combine these indicators—educational attainment, occupational pursuit, family income, or occupational origins—into a single index of socio- economic status will prove unsatisfactory because its component parts have different consequences for the same variable. We also show in this paper precisely how certain formulations of the effects of inconsistency and mobility are wholly redundant and only represent a logically possible way of interpreting the linearly additive effects of the variables used to define inconsistency and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to clarify some of the perspectives of the discipline of sociology, to identify radical viewpoints and how they have evolved and converged, and to indicate some of the consequences of a radical sociology and its prospects. A radical sociology calls for a radical perspective, namely, a structural perspective. Such a perspective requires uncovering economic and political realities in the attempt to understand social structure. Intellectual relevance should not merely be cloaked in terms of efficacy demands which derive from state welfarism and militarism, but should be the extension of a radical and structuralist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents answer to sociologist Victor Lidz on his criticism over the research paper "Toward a Radical sociology" by Albert Szymanski. Lidz seems to Szymanski to focus on two major points: Lidz argues that corporate sociology is approaching value-freeness while radical sociology, because of its "idol-worship" is unable to be objective; and he, as a Parsonian, argues that the institutionalization of certain kinds of ethical and professional values produces objective science. Rather than picking at various minor points and insinuations made by Lidz, Szymanski attempts in this reply to answer his critique by refuting these two positions. Lidz, in arguing for a value free sociology fails to comprehend that values and beliefs have a fundamental resonance with one another. That is, that there is a strong psychological tendency for values and beliefs to fall into consistent patterns. Lidz argues extensively that the development of science hinges on the institutionalization of the value of objectivity. His argument is either trite or simply mistaken.

The article presents criticism on sociologist Albert Szymanski's research paper "Toward a Radical Sociology." Szymanski is quite direct in setting aside as an ideal the establishment of conceptual frameworks that might ensure the objectivity of sociological knowledge. Central to his position is a rejection of sociologist Max Weber's methodology based on the sharp distinction between empirical judgments and evaluational judgments, a distinction that Szymanski recognizes to be "impeccable" in logic, yet holds to be a "philosophical sophism," and on the assertion that all intellectual disciplines must give strong primacy among their commitments to the ideal of objectivity. Citing the sociology of knowledge truth that all knowledge within the social sciences is in certain respects conditioned by the historical environment within which it is developed, hence not "objective" in the sense of being free of all social partisanship, Szymanski argues that a radical sociology would not be any the less objective were it to accept the constraints of adopting certain "humanistic" commitments among its fundamental values.

The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

The article demonstrates the possibility of supplementing substantive considerations with materials developed through an analysis of intellectual systems for underlying structural dimensions. The central issue raised here concerns the character of the selected representation of the mode of thought, i.e. the property of the mode of thought that is selected to represent it. Insofar as studies in the sociology of knowledge take some substantive property of a mode of thought and seek to understand its social origin, their point of departure is not the mode of thought per se but certain of its substantive properties. Portions of two different intellectual systems are treated empirically to ascertain the manner in which their demonstrations of proof are structured. These structures are uncovered through the use of Gutmann scale analysis. While any set of branching deductions may be considered as partly ordered set, the findings reported in this paper show that the portions of the intellectual system chosen for analysis converge to an almost perfectly ordered set. Finally, known properties of Gutmann scales are assigned to the structural dimension, and implications for the sociology of knowledge are drawn.

This paper analyzes the nature of value-commitments, conceived as a generalized symbolic medium of interchange in the processes of social interaction, in this respect paralleling money, power, and influence. Commitments constitute moral obligations of units of a system of social interaction to maintain the integrity of a value-pattern and to strive toward its implementation in action through combination with non-value factors. Stability of commitments is a basic condition of the compatibility of wide moral freedom with the exigencies of social functioning. Like the other three media, commitments are not bound by a zero-sum condition, but can be expanded, especially through charismatic movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of linguistic relativity and also discusses relations between language, social stratification and cognitive orientation. The author notes that literature is still meager in the subfield dealing with linguistic correlates of social stratification. On the level of linguistic structure or language, there still has no thorough phonological, grammatical and semantic comparison of even a single pair of class dialects. The relations between language, social stratification and cognitive orientation have been studied most deeply in a series of publications by Basil Bernstein. In these papers, a distinction is made between a restricted code, speech which uses relatively limited linguistic resources and is consequently predictable to a high degree, as against an elaborated code, which allows a larger number of structural options and shows a correspondingly low level of predictability. Differences between these two codes are matters of language behavior rather than of language structure.

This paper discusses sociological issues concerning linguistically homogeneous and linguistically heterogeneous polities. The author notes that linguistically homogenous polities are usually economically mode developed, educationally more advanced, politically more modernized and ideologically-politically more tranquil and stable. Linguistically homogeneous polities tend to be smaller in area (i.e., below 75,000 square miles), to have a higher population density (i.e., above 100/square mile), to have a lower proportion of agricultural population (i.e., less than 66 per cent), and to be more highly urbanized. Highly urbanized polities are defined as those polities in which 20% or more of the population resides in cities of 20,000 or more and in which 12.5% resides in cities of 100,000 or more. Linguistically heterogeneous states tend in the opposite direction in connection with all of these variables, i.e., they tend to be large, of lower population density, of a higher proportion of agricultural population, and to be of a low degree of urbanization. According to some studies, linguistically homogeneous polities tend to have at least a medium per capita gross national product of at least 300 U.S. dollars per year, and they tend to have developed or intermediate economic status.

The article comments on sociologist James W. Loewen's research paper "Action and Sociology." Sociologists will recognize Loewen's statement for what it is worth, a polemic by presumably a "radical sociologist" someone on a continuum between a social reformer and a revolutionary in the disguise of a sociologist. The Marxist rhetors with whom Loewen apparently identifies will undoubtedly find much to please them in his piece. They will undoubtedly appreciate its these characteristics: his version of the New Left catechism, implicit and explicit; his artful exegetical distortion of what sociologist Philip M. Hauser have written; his moral fervor and righteousness; his "1984" version of the status of sociology, of the American Sociological Association, and of the sociological literature; his apotheosis of sociologist Karl Marx; his self-donned cloak of martyrdom.