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Categorization based on sex is the most basic social divide. It is the organizational basis of most major institutions, including the division of labor in the home, the workforce, politics, and religion. Globally, women's gendered roles are regarded as subordinate to men's. The gender divide enforces women's roles in reproduction and support activities and limits their autonomy, it limits their participation in decision making and highly-rewarded roles, and it puts women at risk. Social, cultural, and psychological mechanisms support the process. Differentiation varies with the stability of groups and the success of social movements. Gender analyses tend to be ghettoized; so it is recommended that all sociologists consider gender issues in their studies to better understand the major institutions and social relationships in society. (Contains 48 footnotes.)

President of the American Sociological Society Louis Wirth is planning for a Section on Contributed Papers for the next annual meeting that is to be held in New York from December 28 to 30, December, 1947. Although this Section is particularly de- signed for those younger members of the Society, including graduate students, who have not yet had an opportunity to appear on the pro- gram in other sections, contributions from other members of the Society will be welcome. Since this Committee is working closely with the Committee on Research, it is being urged that members who have completed research papers suitable for oral presentation and which do not fall within the scope of other Sections be offered for consideration in the Section on Contributed Papers.

The study presented in this paper takes its point of departure from the working hypothesis that institutional and cultural change can be empirically observed through the growth of a number of selected variables. In his writings, social scientists, F. Stuart Chapin has demonstrated the possibility of studying the successive values of certain strategic institutional variables over a period of time and establishing the law of change by the well-known statistical method of fitting a logistic curve to the time series. Chapin has linked this time series analysis to one type of broad generalization on the cultural and social change in the social group which he calls the cycle of the social process or the societal reaction pattern. An attempt will be made in this paper to summarize some of the findings made in an empirical investigation of a number of quantitative variables related to the organizational growth of ten voluntary associations. Theoretical considerations suggest that these variables are important in understanding the processes of organizational growth and formalization which constitute the topic of this paper.

Christopher Bennett Becker, of Yale University, has written the preface and the annotations Howard Becker's Presidential address. His painstaking and scrupulous preparation of the manuscript provides both the essential substance of the address itself and a felicitous introduction in the spirit of Professor Becker's own work. Howard Becker was deeply and persistently concerned with "the historical process;" his contributions to its analysis include studies of both ancient and modern societies, hut always with a view to more realistic understanding of the present social order and of man's possibilities in shaping the future. This paper illustrates, once more, these interests. Professor Becker would have been heartened, perhaps, by the fact that his paper is one of several on social change included in this issue of the Review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the community mobilization processes following the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident, this paper presents the first empirical tests of central hypotheses derived from Olson (1965) involving both activists and free riders in a natural setting. Focusing initially on a randomly selected sample of free riders from the TMI area, we first investigate the extent of, and reasons for, this phenomenon. Free riding in an actual mobilization process is revealed to be more widespread than Olson's critics suggest, and also more complex than Olson alleged. We then compare the most politically active citizens in the TM! area with the free riders on solidarity, ideology, grievance, and other dimensions in an attempt to discern the most important correlates of social movement involvement. The paper concludes with a model which synthesizes the resource mobilization and alternative perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between theory and methods in that body of research that has come to be called "the new social history." First, an argument is made that the quantitative analysis of individual-level data that characterizes much of what is new in the recent sociohistorical literature is not only a methodology for conducting empirical research but also embodies an implicit theory of social organization that is both quantitative and individual. The power of such a theory to explain social change is limited, however, not only by technical problems associated with measurement and sampling error in historical research but also by the absence of an explicit causal component in the model. An alternative perspective, based on Marx's materialist theory of history, and which, it is argued, overcomes these limitations, is then presented. Empirical findings from research on the family in nineteenth century Los Angeles and Duncan's discussion of structural equation models, are used to illustrate how different theories of social change might be empirically tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurrent theme in the literature on modernization is the importance of Westernization in non-Western societies-the purchase of Western commodities and the emulation of Western styles. This paper critically examines this theme in relation to a negative case, the lack of Westernization in nineteenth-century China. Three different theories of consumption that have been offered to explain the nonacceptance of Western products in China-an economic theory, a cultural theory and a sociological theory_are analyzed from comparative and historical perspectives. On the basis of this analysis, it is suggested that Westernization during the nineteenth century can often be viewed more accurately as an indicator of stratificational continuity with the premodern era than as an indicator of modernizing changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process wherein persons move from disparate points in space all time one to common location at time two. Theoretical explanations of this phenomenon are reviewed and critically examined. An alternate interpretation is advanced and supported by data from a study of one non-periodic assembling process. A correlation of R =` 67 is obtained between time receipt of assembling instructions, and related a facilities, and the completion of the assembling process. We discuss time implications of these results, and the alternate interpretation for future theory' and research on the assembling process and other aspects of collective behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores changes in the number of utopian novels published in Great Britain and the United States between 1883 and 1975 from a world-system perspective. A time-series analysis indicates that the publication of utopian literature was affected by changes in the world economy and by changes in the organization of the core of the world-system. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the world-system perspective represents a promising approach for the study of cross-national cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid changes taking place in the rural areas adjacent to cities are frequently objects of comment by observant citizens as well as by social scientists. The relevant data available regarding these changes in the United States are limited in scope and widely known, local observations are frequently reported in the press. The task of developing theory has not been ignored, although such work has been overshadowed by the accumulation of a great deal of descriptive detail. Indeed, the amount of research and theorizing in recent years makes it imperative that interested persons take time to summarize, evaluate, and synthesize accomplishments to date. This paper represents one such attempt. Attention has been deliberately restricted to ecological and demographic changes taking place in the rural sectors of satellite areas, a generic term used here to encompass all varieties of suburbs, satellite cities, fringe areas, commuters zones, and other areas under the immediate influence of the central city. This restriction results from space limitations rather than any idea that other types of change or other sectors of the satellite area are of lesser importance.

Cultural traits from China have been slowly entering Europe for more than two thousand years. Some of these, such as gunpowder, the compass and paper have been of outstanding importance while others have created but passing fads. It is impossible to identify all of the influences of Chinese origin which have entered European culture during this long period. Even in the case of clearly recognized Chinese traits the records are inadequate as to many of the details of their westward journey. Despite the incompleteness of our knowledge, a brief survey of the existing in formation throws light on some aspects of European cultural history and on some of the mechanisms of diffusion. There were four main periods of contact between China and the West. The first was the era of silk trade with Rome and the ancient Mediterranean world which lasted from the first century B.C. to the middle of the sixth century A.D. The rise of the Arab Empire in the seventh century began a long period of relations between China and the Near East in which the Moslem world acted partially as a barrier but also as an intermediary between China and Europe. The Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made possible brief direct contacts of Europe with China. Modem relations of China and the West began with the Age of Discoveries in the sixteenth century.

This article presents reply of the author to comments made by Wilbert E. Moore and Robert A. Feldmesser on his article related to scientific legitimation of fallacy, published in the June 1, 1972 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." The author says that Moore's comment seems to him to focus on two complaints--firstly, the author did not read one of his books, and secondly on that basis the author unjustly unjustly criticized or misrepresented him. The author says that as the paper was not written with his own general position, but was directed at the assumptions that underlie much work on social change. The author says that Feidmesser's comment is an interesting illustration of some of the points male in the paper. His hypothetical writer assumes the intrinsic trauma of change. The author says that he has argued that no such intrinsic trauma exists. Moreover, to assert that change is normal is not to legitimate or applaud every kind of change. The argument that whatever exists has some useful purpose is a kind of vulgar functionalism, but it is not author's view.

The article presents comment on the article "Biological Models of Social Change," by Kurt W. Back, published in August 1971 issue of the Journal "American Sociological Review." One of the problems with the discipline of sociology is its vulnerability to fads. Ironically, it is often those fads generated from the best seminal ideas that create the most misleading of "pop" sociologies. "Biological Models of Social Change" is just the kind of paper that can feed into this tendency to adopt uncritically the newest and flashiest approaches to difficult problems. Uses of system approach and application of system analysis and biological models make it attractive and seductive. But it fails to acknowledge the existence of many questions that logically precede application of the approach proposed. The definition of system in this raises three crucial untreated questions: it must be shown that a set of elements comprises an entity, because an entity must exist before one can consider whether the set is a system; it must be shown that at some level, elements in an analysis of social change fulfill a definition of a system; and most important because of the choice to concentrate "not on general system characteristics but on distinct processes which have been identified in biological systems," is the extent to which relations between elements in biological systems are similar to relations between elements in societal systems.

The connection between racially prejudiced policing and politics has a long history in the United States. In the current period, police organizations have displayed unprecedented support for Republican presidential candidates, and both have organized against social movements focused on addressing racial disparities in police contact. Yet despite strong connections between law enforcement and party politics, we know almost nothing about the relationship between partisan identity and the behavior of police officers. Using millions of traffic stop records from the Florida Highway Patrol and linked voter records, the present study shows that White Republican officers exhibit a larger racial disparity than White Democratic officers in their propensity to search motorists whom they have stopped. This result is robust to an array of alternative empirical tests and holds across varying sociodemographic contexts. I also find that both White Republican and White Democratic officers grew more biased between 2012 and 2020, a period characterized by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two models of social change and several historical conditions' and social structural variables in an effort to isolate common factors that underly both the rise of revitalization movements and state building. Data were gathered from state building and revitalization movements in four Native American societies during the 1795 -1860 period. The findings indicate that given the conditions of economic and/or political deprivation that led to widespread perceptions of social deprivation, less structurally differentiated societies responded with revitalization movements, while more structurally differentiated societies responded with increased differentiation in sub-macro political and economic institutions. This finding suggests that the Wallace and Parsons-Smelser deprivation models of social change can be synthesized by specification of level of macrostructural differentiation as a precondition that influences type of societal change. State building could not be explained by deprivation and social structural arguments alone; markets that encourage economic class formation were critical to the state-building argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we, present a "routine activity approach" for analyzing crime rate trends and cycles. Rather than emphasizing the characteristics of offenders, with. this approach we concentrate upon the circumstances in which they carry out predatory criminal acts. Most criminal acts require convergence in space' and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime. Human ecological theory facilitates an investigation into the way' in which social structure produces this convergence, hence allowing illegal activities to feed upon the legal activities of everyday life. In particular, we hypothesize that the dispersion of activities away from households and families increases the opportunity for crime and thus generates higher crime rates. A variety of data is presented in support of the hypothesis, which helps explain crime rate trends in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a differential equation model of organizational change which focuses upon the mechanisms of change. The model is obtained from positing the notion of structural control. The necessary procedures for estimating the model are developed and applied to data from a panel study of bureaucracies. The model addresses Blau's formal theory of differentiation and both modifies and extends that theory. The relationship between size variables and differentiation variables is more complex than Blau's theory suggests. Moreover, some mechanisms of change are more important than others and this relative importance is detected in the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversies over busing to achieve racial integration of schools result front the intersection of social trends and prevailing values. The movement to expand the civil rights of blacks conflicts with the tradition of neighborhood schools and the residential segregation of neighborhoods. This paper examines the receptiveness of whites to school and neighborhood integration and explores the economic potential for residential integration. We find the receptiveness of whites to having black neighbors or having their children attend schools with Negroes has increased, and now a majority of whites endorse such integration. Data from the Census of 1970 reveal that economic factors account for little of the concentration of blacks within central cities, their absence front suburbia or the residential segregation of blacks from whites in either cities or suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major life changes and role transitions are often treated as stressors that create a generalized demand for adjustment by the individual. Empirically, however, these transitions have been shown to produce a wide range of effects on mental health. Two kinds of models have been proposed to explain this variation: differential access to coping resources for dealing with stressful situations, and variation in the characteristics of transitions, such as their undesirability, foreseeability, etc. This paper emphasizes a logically prior issue: the role context within which the transition event occurs, specifically, the level of pre-existing chronic stress in the social role. The model tested envisions life transition events as nonproblematic, or even beneficial to mental health, when preceded by chronic role problems -- a case where more "stress" is actually relief from existing stress. Nine transition events are studied: job loss, divorce, pre-marital break-up, retirement, widowhood, children moving out of the house, first marriage, job promotion, and having a child. Results support the hypothesis that prior role stress reduces the impact of life transition events on mental health for seven of nine events, with some differences in impact by gender. The findings provide a basic framework for interpreting the effects of varying types of life transitions, and argue against the presumption that life transitions are inherently stressful, suggesting instead a need to specify prior social circumstances that determine whether or not a transition is potentially stressful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of social citizenship via modern social policies is a fundamental macrolevel social change of the past hundred years. This paper attempts to reorient the empirical study of social policy development from its present concentration on aggregated social expenditures to a focus on the multidimensional aspects of the development of welfare states, social rights, and social citizenship. On the basis of a new data set describing the development of citizens' social rights in the main social insurance programs in 18 OECD countries since 1930, causal hypotheses derived from pluralist industrial, neo-Marxist, popular protest, state autonomy, and power resources approaches are tested. On the crucial issue of the role of left government participation in the extension of social rights, the hypotheses of the power resources approach are supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three questions regarding the dynamics of grievances: (I) Whiz: is the causal order of grievances and social movement participation (SM?)? (2) To what extent does the intensity of grievances before a critical incident, such as she reactor accident at Chernobyl. affect the extent of SMP after the incident? (3) Is the intensity of grievances related to the kind of SM? adopted? To answer these questions, 121 opponents of nuclear energy were interviewed in 1982 and 1987. The data indicate that grievances have a causal effect on SM?, but not a direct cross-lagged effect on protest. There was also a shock effect the grievances of respondents with low dissatisfaction before Chernobyl increased more than those of respondents with high dissatisfaction. An aggression effect. i.e., high discontent leading primarily to violent or illegal SMP, was not ascertained. Protesters generally chose those actions they considered most efficacious for reaching the goals of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that 1935-80 U.S. migration patterns both within and between metropolitan nonmetropolitan areas and regions and migrant/nonmigrant educational differences reflect tregional changes in socioeconomic development and settlement patterns. Gross migration flows support the mobility transition hypothesis and the idea that developmental changes in metropolitanization structure the context of migration. Since the Great Depression, socioeconomic transformations of the periphery have reduced differences in migration patterns between the periphery and core regions. While migrants still have more education than nonmigrants, their differences vary systematically by regional socioeconomic development. Specifically, migrant/nonmigrant educational differences are (1) similar at origin and destination when both are at similar levels of socioeconomic development; (2) lower at the origin if the origin is higher in socioeconomic development; and (3) higher at the origin if the destination is higher in socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of class struggle and formation are seldom tied systematically to the social movement and collective action literature. We attempt in this paper to apply some of the concepts developed first in the collective action literature to the successful efforts of U.S. capital to hinder the organizing efforts of trade unions in the years before the New Deal. Specifically, we identify the interests of capital in destroying workers' self-organization both through structural analyses of the relationships among productivity, wages and unionization and through the statements of employers themselves. We then show how capital organized and mobilized itself to struggle against unions, demonstrating that its anti-union strategies were quite successful. Our results indicate generally that formal models of collective action must include the "counter-mobilization" of movement adversaries and suggest a fruitful strategy for linking the study of class conflict to that of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science held its 130th annual meeting in Cleveland on December 26-30, 1963. The American Sociological Association participated in many of the activities of the convention, including general sessions, sectional programs and interdisciplinary symposia, as well as the two meetings of the Council of American Association for the Advancement of Science. Kingsley Davis served as chairman of the Section on Social and Economic Sciences and vice-president of American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also arranged a major interdisciplinary symposium on Biological and Sociological Research on the Effects of Human Reproduction Control and gave a paper on Sociological Consequences. The principal program sponsored by the American Sociological Association was on social change. This program was arranged by Robert A. Nisbet, who also presided. The session also consisted of papers by Irene B. Tacuber and Conrad Taeuber, "Migration, Mobility, and the Assimilation of Migrants." Kenneth E. Bock presented paper on, "Mobility and Changeability in Marginal Men" and Robert A. Nisbet on "Mobility and Conflict in Kinship Change".

Medicare was bitterly opposed by the medical profession before it became law in 1965. This paper examines how individual physicians reacted, in their behavior and in their thinking, to Medicare after it became law. The more general issue is the role of law as an instrument of social change. Interviews with a sample of New York State physicians before the law was passed and reinterviews at two points in time after the law was passed-once before the program went into effect and again about six months after it had gone into effect-make it possible to separate the direct effects of the law itself on attitudes from the effects of short-term experience with the program. There has been no evidence of a physicians' boycott of Medicare. With respect to their attitudes, the proportion of physicians in favor of the main part of Medicare, the hospitalization program for the elderly (Title 18, Part A), jumped from 38% before the law was passed to 70% ten months after it was passed, even before it was implemented, and again to 81% six months after it was implemented. Some laws, according to these results, may influence attitudes without first changing behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to re-evaluate the evolutionary perspective in sociology by analyzing the concept of "stages" of societies or institutional systems as measured by the extent of social differentiation. An evolutionary perspective makes sense only so far as at least some of the changes that are inherent in the very nature of any social system bring about institutionalization of more differentiated cultural and social spheres, and in this way extend the range of a society's environment and its adaptability to it. Recognition of this relation between change and institutionalization is tempered by several systematic considerations. First, not all processes of social change necessarily give rise to changes in overall institutional systems. Second, systemic changes that do increase the scope of differentiation within the major spheres of a society do not necessarily assure the institutionalization of a more differentiated system. Third, even when structural differentiation is institutionalized, each new institutional system evinces different potentialities for further change, for stagnation, breakdown or development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical, and indeed evolutionary, dimension is a fundamental element in alt of Durkheim's sociological work. The resent paper argues that this fact should be neither ignored nor explained away as a mere survival of outmoded nineteenth century thought. Rather, Durkheim's practice in this respect, as in others, provides an important pointer for current sociology. The historical dimension had a prominent place in Durkheim's discussion of method in sociology, especially in his insistence on comparison and on structural taxonomy. In Durkheim's analysis of social causes, both morphological and representational, the historical and evolutionary dimension provided a fundamental axis. Various aspects of his work-for example, his sociology of the family, of individuation, and of religion-are cited to illustrate the significance of history in Durkheim's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the differential class behavior in Denmark. Social class is here conceived of as a stratum or layer of society differentiated in terms of scalar social status. The basic status variable is conceived in terms of the differential deference allotted to a person by his fellow group members. Sensitivity to status differences was found to be positively related to respondents' own status. This was documented by prestige rating of 75 occupations in which respondents of higher status exhibited considerably less variation in rating than low status groups; number of social classes reported to exist in Denmark; and asserted ability to place people socially by just looking at them or listening to their speech. Although all strata showed majority agreement in asserting this ability, the percentages of asserters increased with social status. A regular and statistically significant increase was observed in percentages possessing the characteristics with increasing social status; interest in theater, painting, classical music and politics, familiarity with modern Danish literature and knowledge of foreign languages.

Sociologists of religion have devoted considerable attention to studying the relationship between the social policy of the church and the prevailing values of the secular community towards the social, economic, and political institutions of a society. Church policy on social issues is seen almost invariably as an adaptation to or compromise with the dominant secular point of view. The church seldom acts to foster social change but rather functions to preserve the status quo. Such general conceptualizations invite attempts at documentation and refinement. In a modest way, this is the intention of the present paper. The major concern of the author is the relationship between what the church has adopted as its official policy on a number of social, economic, and political issues and the prevailing climate of opinion on these same issues among the membership of the church. At the same time, we are interested in examining the position of the clergy, particularly on those issues where there is conflict between official church policy and parishioner sentiment.

Because names are symbols used by society in the assignment of statuses and roles to individuals and groups, name changing, with a concomitant greater or lesser change of identity, affords social scientists insight into such phenomena as mobility, acculturation, group identification, and self-definition. This paper is the introduction to an analysis of the significant social data on the petitions of a sample of name changers. An attempt is made to derive hypotheses about the differential valuation of certain categories of names and the social setting in which name changing takes place. This study is an analysis of certain social aspects of a sample of legal name changers and utilizes data included on petitions for the name change. Through the comparison of the characteristics of the name changers with those of the general population and the comparison of non-Jewish and Jewish petitioners, an attempt is made to derive hypotheses about the differential valuation of certain categories of names and the social setting in which name changing takes place.

Neither of the two previous papers in this series devoted any attention to the question of discrepancies between scores on St and on the various conventional indices of status which were employed. A set of personality items was previously derived each of which reliably predicted scores on objective status inventories, and which, when considered as a scale, correlated approximately .50 with such inventories in test samples. Because of the nature of these items, in distinction to the content of conventional status inventories, it was felt that all deviations between personality status and objective status measurements were not merely errors, but were, on the contrary, to some extent meaningful deviations predictive of potential changes in status position. A number of comparisons and inquiries did tend to substantiate this hypothesis. The relationship of objective-subjective status discrepancy scores, obtained by subtracting personality status from objective status T-scores, to a number of other variables was also investigated.

Social scientists are displaying increasing interest in social stratification. Since the concept is very broad, much progress cannot be made in analyzing it unless the different factors upon which it is based are singled out and their interrelations then noted. Although this has been theoretically recognized,further studies in specific areas of stratification are needed to refine stratification theory. This paper describes the status or prestige structure of a planned community and proposes an empirical method of finding the factors upon which status is built. These have been purported objects of several studies. Most of them focus, however, on small, old, stable, and integrated localities or groups. Also, they confuse general stratification with other types of stratification, or they concentrate on general "social" stratification without regarding the elements that make it up. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that many similarities are found not only in the outlines of status structures but also in the factors underlying them, such as wealth, ancestry, length of residence, occupation, ethnic factors, style of living, and so forth.

The peasant family in Mexico often has been characterized as "patriarchal." The roles of members are strictly defined by the pervasive folk culture. The concepts of acceptable family behavior are at first retained when Mexican migrants settle in Detroit, Michigan. There, however, like those of other immigrants, these concepts and the behavior correlative to them undergo transformation. It is the contention of this paper that the changes in the structure of the family, under the impact of a new social and cultural environment, constitute a highly sensitized index of the process of acculturation. The decline in status of the father, due to his failure to provide adequately for the family, was so gradual, both in the eyes of the wife and the children, that a lessening of respect was not accompanied by overt family conflict. The extent to which the father has continued to command respect is largely determined by the degree of assimilation of the non-patriarchal American culture by the wife and children. A second facet of the father's role which has undergone change in Detroit is that concerned with the exercise of moral protection over the wife and female children. The protection of girls is a function the father shares with his wife, but he alone must see that no conceivable advances are made toward his mate. No man can talk to another's wife in what passes for a suspicious manner without invoking wrath on the part of her husband.

Researcher Francesca Cancian's paper on "Functional Analysis of Change," published in the December 1960 issue of the periodical "American Sociological Review," proposes that "functional analysis" be identified with a certain logical structure or judgment of causal argument. The logical structure is that some "state G" can be maintained by either of two causal variables, and that when it is not maintained by one variable then it tends to be maintained by another. The article questions this logic of judgment as an exercise in social theory. To elaborate this argument, it compares substantive sociological results of this logical exercise with results of a work which gets rather short shrift in the paper, that of sociologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown's theory of "G states" is more powerful and based on real conditions under which lineage systems develop. The development of the discipline depends more on the development of such elegant, powerful, and economical theories, which explain a wide range of data, than on fitting these theories into various logical structures.

The International Sociological Association held its Third World Congress of Sociology in Amsterdam from August 22 to 29, 1956. There were 524 sociologists present from 54 countries, making this the largest international gathering of sociologists ever held. The general topic was "Problems of Social Change in the Twentieth Century." Special sessions were organized in the fields of economic organization, social stratification, the family, and education. In addition, there were meetings on sociological theory and research, and the teaching of sociology. The papers presented were published in seven volumes in advance of the Congress so that no papers were read, the time being given to discussion. A final supplementary volume containing summaries of the discussions has just been published. UNESCO, the Netherlands government, the city of Amsterdam, and the Ford Foundation all contributed to the success of the Congress by their generosity. The opening session was addressed by representatives of the Netherlands government and the city of Amsterdam and by the Director-General of UNESCO, Luther Evans.

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative-leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social change often takes the form of many small units, like persons or families, changing from "old-style" to "new-style" behavior, creating a behavioral trend. The rate of change is very important for the further effects. If middle-aged and old people are less likely to change, we get differences between birth cohorts at any given time and, for the population as a whole, delayed response to new conditions. Studies of rigidity and age generally support a fixation model of cohort behavior, and so do data on mobility and age. A tentative model of cohort effects is developed on this basis and the corresponding lag function shown; it implies a pattern of smooth oscillations in the behavioral time series with an average "period" of 25 years or more. The result has nothing to do with the distance between generations as customarily understood, i.e., from birth to marriage and child-bearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The apologetic attitude of sociologists on the subject of social change is unwarranted. Both empirical generalizations and theoretical derivations are available. For theoretical derivation, however, various modifications are necessary in the usual models of society employed by functionalists. Such modifications permit the identification of the sources of change in all societies. Various non-social causes and social determinisms have been rejected but other dynamic factors remain. These include both flexibilities and strains inherent in the structure of societies. it is suggested that a "pure" theory of social change, independent of substantive identification of the patterns undergoing transformation, would be uninteresting. Rather, social change can be integrated with standard theory around the very structural topics already in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrepancies between currently experienced and desired distributions of power in society indicate a preference to alter or accept a change in social arrangements. Such dispositions, even, when consciously and intensely experienced, are not necessarily incipient pressures for social change. This article reports a study of one possible determinant of preference for change in the distribution of power in the society of the U.S., the degree of status consistency. There is some support for the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the degree of status consistency and preference for change in the distribution of power. The relationship appears to be related directly to stratum position. Two lines of interpretation of this finding are suggested in the article. One stresses the possibility that mobility or other modes of adjustment to status inconsistency may account for the variation in the relationship. The other suggests that the measurement of status consistency did not take into account the simultaneous salience of status characteristics.

Sociologists B. W. Aginsky and E. G. Aginsky established the Social Sciences Field Laboratory in 1939 under the auspices of New York University, New York City, New York. The Laboratory was located in a northern California community. The Laboratory has three general aims. The first is to make a long-term study of a culture from the points of view of all of the social sciences. This involves the historical reconstruction of the past and an historical study of the future, that is, a careful analysis of culture change and culture integration as these are taking place. It will include all aspects of the area under study from the standpoint of the various disciplines, such as sociology, social work, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, economics, law, medicine, political science, and history. The second aim is to provide supervised training in fieldwork and research at the predoctoral level, and facilities for professional social scientists. Third, the Laboratory aims to test established techniques, methods, theories, and conclusions, with the possibility of refining and developing them, and arriving at new ones.

This article analyzes Martin Luther's role in spreading the early Reformation, one of the most important episodes of radical institutional change in the last millennium. We argue that social relations played a key role in its diffusion because the spread of heterodox ideologies and their eventual institutionalization relied not only on private "infection" through exposure to innovation but also on active conversion and promotion of that new faith through personal ties. We conceive of that process as leader-to-follower directional influence originating with Luther and flowing to local elites through personal ties. Based on novel data on Luther's correspondence, Luther's visits, and student enrollments in Luther's city of Wittenberg, we reconstruct Luther's influence network to examine whether local connections to him increased the odds of adopting Protestantism. Using regression analyses and simulations based on empirical network data, we find that the combination of personal/relational diffusion via Luther's multiplex ties and spatial/structural diffusion via trade routes fostered cities' adoption of the Reformation, making possible Protestantism's early breakthrough from a regional movement to a general rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the article "The Scientific Legitimation of Fallacy: Neutrilizing Social Change Theory," by Robert H. Lauer, published in October 1971 issue of the journal "American Social Review." The author says that Lauer's is distinctive only in that he levies the charge not merely at functionalism but even more broadly at much sociological thought. Labeling the assumptions of nonchange theory as fallacies, Lauer calls for a different set of theoretical premises--that change is normal; that change carries with it no intrinsic trauma; that diverse patterns of change and a range of future alternatives are open to any society; and that whether one assumes change or persistence as the basic reality has both theoretical and practical consequences of import. The author says that obsolescence must be built into roles and institutions as well as into products if commercial forces are to hold sway as they do at present. Thus, the actor in this society must be immunized against future shock; he must be socialized into the beliefs that change is normal and not traumatic and that the future holds open a range of alternatives for more satisfying conditions than those he now enjoys.

The article presents a reply of the author to the critique of his article on social change, by researcher Arthur L. Stinchcombe, published in the December 1961 issue of the periodical "American Sociological Review." The author agrees with Stinchcombe that the development of sociological research depends on the development of elegant, powerful, and economical theories, which explain a wide range of data. Many types of work are essential to constructing a valid theory; specification of fruitful theoretical assumptions, logical relations among them, and the manner of making deductions from them; identification of classes of empirical data which fit respective theoretical concepts; collection and analysis of data; and development of research techniques. However, the author argues that much confusion over the functional analysis of social change can be overruled by examining logical implications of a precise, formal definition of functional analysis. Logical relations involved in any theory must be carefully examined, specially in a theory that deals with complex relationships concerned with functionalism.

The article presents the authors comment on sociologist Wilbert E. Moore's revisitation of the functional theory of social differentiation. According to the author some of Moore's statements perpetuate the competitive fallacy of the original Davis-Moore theory. This theory is supposed to apply to certain features found in most, if not all societies, but in doing so it appeals to concepts appropriate to the atypical case: the competitive-achievement syndrome of contemporary industrialized societies. Moore points out, this theory rests essentially on two propositions: the unequal functional importance of positions" in any society, and the unequal supply of talents for filling in any society. Moore leans heavily on the proposition that social differentiation which is a universal and necessary fact of social existence. But he also notes that this proposition entails no inference whatsoever concerning social classes, strain, conflict, and change. Moore is subscribing to the popular theory of the myth of social classes.

The article presents comment of the author on an article titled "The Social Effects of Aviation," by sociologist Wilham F. Ogburn's, published in the June 1948 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." The author states that Ogburn's believes that best predictions in social trends can be achieved by breaking down a problem into its constituent elements, then making quantitative studies of trends within these constituent elements and finally attempting the soundest combination of these trends for predictive purposes. This same general method is usual in attempting to predict future population figures, by studying trends of birthrates, death rates and migration rates and by calculating what population totals will result from the combination of the most likely values for each of these constituent factors. In contrast with this approach, the present author has been exploring leads provided by such sociologists as Raymond Pearl, Simon Kuznets, Alice Davis and Stuart Chaplin. All of them have pointed out the fact that social change has shown marked tendencies to conform to two types of mathematical trends namely, logistic surges and continuously accelerating curves.

This article presents a report of the Committee on Nomination to the Society. It coverers the election of officers for the Society for 1948 and other matters for which the Committee was given responsibility. As a preliminary to selecting the nominees for the official ballot, the Committee conducted a poll of a ten per cent random sample of members. This sample was selected from a membership list arranged alphabetically by states and alphabetically by cities within each state. Envelopes addressed to members of the sample were supplied by the Secretary of the Society to the Chairman of the Committee on Nominations.

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the Axial Age concept remains controversial. Seshat: Global History Databank provides new tools for examining this topic in social formations across Afro-Eurasia during the first two millennia BCE and first millennium CE, allowing scholars to empirically evaluate the varied and contrasting claims researchers have put forward. Results undercut the notion of a specific "age" of axiality limited to a specific geo-temporal localization. Critical traits offered as evidence of an axial transformation by proponents of the Axial Age concept appeared across Afro-Eurasia hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years prior to the proposed Axial Age. Our analysis raises important questions for future evaluations of this period and points the way toward empirically-led, historical-sociological investigations of the ideological and institutional foundations of complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political opportunity theory has proven extremely generative, highlighting the importance of macro-structural shifts in making established authorities vulnerable to insurgent challenge. But as critics point out, political opportunity theory flattens both culture and agency, and has fared poorly in explaining the timing of insurgency. Re-theorizing opportunity as leveraged by particular practices, rather than independently conferring to groups, redresses these limits, revealing the proximate causes of mobilization and influence. For a strategic test, this article revisits the forging ground of opportunity theory. Why did President Harry S. Truman, initially an apologist for the slow pace of racial reform in 1945–46, suddenly become an avid advocate of civil rights? Opportunity scholars argue that macro-structural forces caused Truman to advocate civil rights, generating the opportunity for insurgency by blacks as a group. But event structure analysis reveals how Black Anti-colonialist practices leveraged opportunities afforded by the earlier Progressive Challenge to compel Truman to adopt civil rights advocacy. Civil rights advocacy, in turn, allowed Truman to repress Black Anti-colonialist practices, even while setting the stage for the Civil Rights Movement to come. Different forms of insurgent practice leveraged opportunities created by different institutional cleavages; the same opportunities did not advantage all insurgency by a social group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can protest bring about social change? Although scholarship on the consequences of social movements has grown dramatically, our understanding of protest influence is limited; several recent studies have failed to detect any positive effect. We investigate sit-in protest by black college students in the U.S. South in 1960, which targeted segregated lunch counters. An original dataset of 334 cities enables us to assess the effect of protest while considering the factors that generate protest itself—including local movement infrastructure, supportive political environments, and favorable economic conditions. We find that sit-in protest greatly increased the probability of desegregation, as did protest in nearby cities. Over time, desegregation in one city raised the probability of desegregation nearby. In addition, desegregation tended to occur where opposition was weak, political conditions were favorable, and the movement’s constituency had economic leverage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]