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This paper investigates the direction and magnitude of the effects of personal, kinship, market, and contextual attributes of visa applicants on their desirability as immigrants to the United States, as judged by members of the professional staff of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Two classic sociological questions underlie this politically relevant topic: how do societies choose their members? and how do societies allocate scarce benefits? Using the factorial survey pioneered by P.H. Rossi, we obtained from the Commission staff, numerical ratings of the desirability as immigrants of fictitious visa applicants embodying the full range of potentially relevant characteristics discussed in the political arena. Although the ratings were obtained by a number-assignment technique believed to generate a continuous variable, we accommodate the variable's possible ordinality by performing all analyses twice- using both ordinary-least-squares techniques and maximum-likelihood ordered. response techniques. The results are unambiguous: although a lawful and coherent set of rules guides each respondent's ratings, leading to a personal point system for the selection of immigrants, no two staff members' point systems are alike, not even qualitatively. In the complex weave of agreements and disagreements, three conclusions emerge. First, there is unanimous support for granting preference to visa applicants who have a job offer or a United States-citizen sibling. Second, there is severe disagreement by applicant's region of origin. Third, there is a range of disagreement on other attributes, for example, on whether the United States should favor the immigration, ceteris paribus, of older versus younger applicants or of male versus female applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types—Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other than music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An assumption basic to human ecological theory, as developed by Gibbs. Hawley, Martin and others, states that a significant relationship exist: between sustenance organization and population growth or decline. The present investigation transforms this assumption into an empirically verifiable hypothesis. Several components of sustenance organization are operationalised and found to account for a substantial proportion of the variation in relative population change in the nonmetropolitan counties of the United States between 1960 and 1970. The efficacy of sustenance activities as an explanation of population change is tested against a number of competing hypotheses focusing on age and racial composition, economic opportunities and proximity to metropolitan areas. Collectively these alternative explanations add little to the amount of variation in population change accounted for by components of sustenance organization. The implications of these findings for ecological theory are discussed in some detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]