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The article presents author's views regarding the research paper of Professor Wilbert E. Moore on industrial sociology. Professor Moore's paper begins with the inevitable apology apparently expected of all sociologists studying industrial phenomena. One point, which was not and which should have been more fully developed, in author's opinion, is suggested in the sentence: "The field of industrial sociology then is concerned with the application of or development of principles of sociology relevant to the industrial mode of production and the industrial way of life." The author refers here to the phase, "the application or development of principles." This, he believes, is a critical problem. Of course, a dichotomy here is to be avoided: it is not a question of either-or. But industrial sociologists should seriously consider whether or not the best interests of their field lie in "the development of" rather than in "the application of" principles. His paper repeatedly calls attention to the uses of comparative case studies.

This paper is a sociological analysis of the most radical attempt in modern history to challenge the Western standard temporal reference framework, namely the French Republican calendrical reform of 1793. This reform obliterated the existing system of units of time and times reckoning and dating frameworks by introducing a new annual cycle, new months, a new weekly cycle, a new subdivision of the daily cycle, and a new chronological dating framework. The paper first analyzes the symbolic function of the Revolutionary Calendar, namely, the representation of three main themes of the French Enlightenment: secularism., naturalism and rationalism. It then brings into focus three major factors which account for its failure: totality of the obliteration of the traditional sociotemporal order, overemphasis on secularization, and advocation of nationalistic particularism at the expense of a practical and cognitive disruption of temporal coordination on a global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper classifies alternative mechanisms for coordinating work activities within organizations into impersonal, personal and group modes. It investigates how variations and interactions in the use of these coordination mechanisms and modes are explained by task uncertainty, interdependence and unit size. Nine hypotheses that relate these three determining factors to the use of the three coordination modes are developed in order to test some key propositions of Thompson (1967) and others on coordination at the work unit or departmental level of organization analysis. Research results from 197 work units within a large employment security agency largely support the hypotheses. The findings suggest that there are differences in degree and kind of influence of each determining factor on the mix of alternative coordination mechanisms used within organizational units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personal networks and the attitudes toward clients of a unique set of bureaucratic professionals-corporate giving officers-are examined. Motivated by the finding that the corporate support of a nonprofit is a function of a firm's reputation among contributions professionals (Galaskiewicz, 1985), this paper examines the structure of these professionals' networks and tests to see if proximity results in two giving officers recognizing and/or thinking well of the same nonprofits in their community. Data were analyzed from a survey of 150 publicly-held business corporations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. The more proximate two officers were in the network, the more likely they were to evaluate prospective donees in the same way. Professional associations had an indirect effect on how giving officers evaluated nonprofits in that actors who belonged to the same association were more proximate in the contact network. Highly professionalized contributions staff in different firms tended to recognize the same nonprofits in their task environment, independent of their proximity in the network. Finally. job status had an indirect effect on how staff evaluated nonprofits. Under conditions of environmental uncertainty, or when two officers were not members of the same professional association, job status influenced proximity in the network. Thus job status, professional associations, and proximity in the professional network each in its own way had some effect on the knowledge and evaluations of giving officers in our case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with some of the general issues of the relationship between comparative research and the case study and where one can complement the other, showing specifically bow this applies to recent research dealing with the expert qualifications of operating personnel, the ratio of managers to operating personnel, and the flow of hierarchical communications in formal organizations. inferences about the flow of communications within organizations in which superiors have narrow spans of control and supervise subordinates who are highly qualified are drawn from comparative research on the formal structures of organizations and tested with observational data from case studies on the interaction of superiors and subordinates. The findings from two of these case studies are generally consistent with the argument that narrow spans of control serve to facilitate upward communication where experts are employed as subordinates. However, the analysis of a third deviant case suggests that the degree and type of differentiation of hierarchical work roles importantly affect both the needs and opportunities for communication and through them the relationship between hierarchy and expertness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate "authentically appealing" (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a "lying demagogue" (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) "common-knowledge" lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truthtelling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a "crisis of legitimacy" (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors--information access, culture, language, and gender--are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reimagines poverty governance as a labor process. Extending theories of bureaucratic fields and street-level bureaucracies, the proposed model suggests that the state manages the poor through fragmented activities embedded in horizontal and vertical relations of production. I use an ethnography of 911 ambulance operations in a single California county to advance this perspective. From plugging gunshot wounds to moving sidewalk slumberers, ambulance crews interact with a mostly impoverished clientele base by transforming spaces in bodies and bodies in spaces. This two-sided governance puts the ambulance in recurrent contact with the hospital emergency department and the police squad car. Across these institutions, ambulance crews struggle with their nurse and police counterparts over the horizontal shuffling of burdensome work, shaping the life chances of their subjects in the process. At the same time, bureaucratic and capitalistic forces from above activate a lean ambulance fleet that is minimally wasteful and highly flexible. This verticality structures clientele processing through the ambulance and fuels tensions across the frontlines of governance. In an effort to advance theory and fill an empirical gap, this article proposes a new model for understanding the management of marginality and highlights an overlooked case of poverty regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do public opinion signals affect political representatives' opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly's previously untested WUNC claim, four features of the event were manipulated: the demonstrators' worthiness, unity, numerical strength, and commitment. We argue that these protest features present elected officials with useful cues about what (a segment of) the public wants. We find that these cues affect elected officials' beliefs. The salience they attach to the protest issue, the position they take, and their intended actions all change as a consequence of exposure. The size of a protest event (numbers) and whether the protesters agree among themselves (unity) are the most persuasive protest factors. The effects of the protest signals come on top of strong receiver effects. We find no evidence that elected officials' predispositions moderate the effects of the protest features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender pay gaps likely persist in Western societies because both men and women consider somewhat lower earnings for female employees than for otherwise similar male employees to be fair. Two different theoretical approaches explain "legitimate" wage gaps: same-gender referent theory and reward expectations theory. The first approach states that women compare their lower earnings primarily with that of other underpaid women; the second approach argues that both men and women value gender as a status variable that yields lower expectations about how much each gender should be paid for otherwise equal work. This article is the first to analyze hypotheses contrasting the two theories using an experimental factorial survey design. In 2009, approximately 1,600 German residents rated more than 26,000 descriptions of fictitious employees. The labor market characteristics of each employee and the amount of information given about them were experimentally varied across all descriptions. The results primarily support reward expectations theory. Both men and women produced gender pay gaps in their fairness ratings (with the mean ratio of just female-to-male wages being .92). Respondents framed the just pay ratios by the gender inequalities they experienced in their own occupations, and some evidence of gender-specific evaluation standards emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have documented the emergence of apparently race-neutral discourses that serve to entrench racial stratification following the elimination of de jure segregation. These discourses deny the existence of both present-day racism and the contemporary effects of histories of racial oppression. Researchers posit that individuals are socialized into these views, but little empirical attention has been paid to the processes through which such socialization occurs. Focusing on the South African case study, I draw on five months of daily observations in seventeen 9th-grade history classrooms, content analysis of notes distributed in class, and 170 in-depth interviews with teachers and students to document how and why students are taught not to attend to the effects of apartheid on their society. To mitigate race-based conflict in their local school context, teachers told “both sides of the story,” highlighting that not all whites were perpetrators and not all blacks were victims. By decoupling the racialized coding of victims and perpetrators, and sidelining discussions of beneficiaries, teachers hindered students’ abilities to make connections to the present. In outlining how and why individuals are taught about the irrelevance of the past, this study contributes to literatures on race, education, collective memory, and transition to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridewealth is fundamental to marriage in Africa. Anthropological research provides substantial information regarding characteristics of the bridewealth transaction, but scholars and policymakers know little about its consequences for women in contemporary Africa. We argue that the payment of bridewealth strengthens normative constraints on women’s autonomy in the reproductive domain. We test and find support for our argument using a unique vignette experiment conducted with rural women in the Volta Region of Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This case study of a single economic enterprise, stressing a symbolic interactions perspective, examines the five tiers which make up the American liquor industry: distillers, distributors, retailers, drinkers and the legal order. Consistent with the interactionist method, attention is given to the relationships and actions that constitute the worlds of this social structure. The alcoholic beverage and the drinker-consumer relationship is a central focus of attention from level to level within the tiers of the industry. Special attention is given to criminogenic activities within and among the five tiers of this industry. The historical context and social interactions from which these activities arise are given emphasis. Finally, a tentative schema is suggested for analyzing criminogenic activities within the American liquor industry and, perhaps, within other industries as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of the New York garment district to examine and explain the "enclave effect" on workers employed in the enclave and looks at some of the advantages these workers share or don't share with the primary sector. In contrast to existing explanations that conceptualize the enclave as a special case of the primary sector, the authors emphasize the distinctive characteristics of ethnic economies, and explain the "enclave effect" using a single, consistent account of recruitment and skill acquisition processes in primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets. The authors claim that unlike other sectors of the economy,the ethnic enclave is characterized by an external, informal training system that shapes the employment relationship and increases the availability and quality of information for workers and employers. The framework rests on the concept of training systems, structures that reduce the risks of investment in skills or training by increasing the probability that firms and/or workers will be able to make productive use of the skills in which they have invested. Training systems are the mechanisms by which labor market information is circulated, workers are recruited, and skills are obtained.

The segregation of research in work and family life has paralleled the functional differentiation that occurred following the industrial revolution. Where the relations between work and family have been considered, relative salience, isomorphic tendencies, and the life cycle have been emphasized in explaining why a particular pattern prevails. To some extent a given pattern is explicable in terms of such antecedent individual attributes as social class, religion, or personality needs, but we argue that explanation of structured patterns in work-family relations is enhanced by the concept of "task." Tasks implicitly presented to individuals during critical role transitions are dealt with according to the particular combination of personal, cultural and social determinants mobilized by the individuals concerned. Where critical transitions occur simultaneously in both work and family spheres, their mutual interdependence is highlighted, allowing the greatest freedom to choose an integrative pattern. A case study is presented to illustrate the efficacy of the task accomplishment frame of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assumption, assertion and speculation can be transformed into fact in the course of transmission through the published literature. As a case study of this phenomenon, a sequence of four articles on urban residential structure, published in 1950, 1958, 1959 and 1964, is examined critically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture case study is a procedure of social-scientific research. As such, it avoids the handling of cases as though they were self-contained wholes grasped by intuition. Actually, such intuition rests on implicit rather than explicit definitions of the object to be studied; what is taken to be a whole is so taken because of a host of unavowed assumptions. Further, such intuition involves purposes other than the strictly scientific: therapeutic, esthetic, appreciative,defensive, or reformist. As the purposes vary, the intuited whole varies. Nevertheless, culture case study does deal with cases and therefore the composite term is expressly retained. In many circles, however, opinions about the ways in which cases have often been handled are distinctly unfavorable. Consequently, reference to culture case study as a valuable and frequently indispensable procedure when comparison of and generalization about social phenomena are to be undertaken must be justified in detail.

The article presents the author's views regarding role conflicts of military chaplains. In a complex society many institutions are required to satisfy the manifold needs and wants of man. This means that any given individual will play many social roles in the course of his lifetime and at any given time will be playing a number of roles simultaneously. Each person has a "hierarchy of role obligations," the relative positions of which are determined by the strength of claims made upon him by the various institutions which compete for his loyalty. Therefore, his roles may not necessarily be in harmony with each other and in some instances, where two or more institutions demand the first loyalty of a person, they may be directly antithetical. Assuming a "drive toward consistency of self" on the part of human actors in social situations, the person who finds himself playing two such divergent roles will seek some means of resolving the conflict between them. In the writer's estimation, types of solutions available can be reduced to three, these are, abandonment of one of the conflicting roles, rationalization, which may assume many different forms or compartmentalization of role behaviors. In the summer of 1952 a small scale study was undertaken in the San Francisco Bay area in an attempt to determine the applicability of the theory in a concrete situation. A population of military chaplains were chosen for the purpose.