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Sociology faces a peculiar paradox: Every general sociological proposition is both true and false. On the one hand, one can easily find exceptions to most of the propositions which are advanced as genera! sociological principles. Yet, there are many instances in which genera! sociological principles are supported by empirical findings. As a consequence, it is not clear when some sociological principle is to be counted as false. This paper argues that a proper assessment of the state of sociological knowledge and the possibility of cumulative growth in sociology depends on resolving the true-false paradox. We argue that the paradox can be resolved if sociologists make the scope of their theories explicit. We offer a formulation of scope restrictions, demonstrate how the formulation resolves the true-false paradox, and illustrate the differences between the method proposed here and other strategies for making sociological theories conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors' reply to Michael A. Malec in response to his comments. Professor Malec takes issue with the authors over the presentation and interpretation of certain data reported in their paper "The Reward System in Science." It appears that the authors are being criticized principally for failing to report tests of significance for their measures of association. The authors ask themselves whether the association coefficients, and the partial gamma of .33 between industrial Involvement and Recognition calculated for them, affect their major conclusion, that "an industrial orientation is not an important source of internal reward." It suggests that social control in science is based on the exchange of professional recognition for contributions to science, and that scientists are accorded recognition to the extent that their contributions advance basic scientific knowledge. However, the coefficients of Table are not negligible; and the authors must account for this. The paper indicates their dissatisfaction with the index of industrial involvement, which they used as a surrogate for the social significance of a scientist's work.

This section presents a speech by Herbert J. Gans, president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), delivered at the annual meeting of the ASA in 1988. Sociology has established a presence in many kinds of policy analysis and is moving into large numbers of other practice areas, even if sociologists' ideas continue to be largely absent from U.S. political thinking. Too many people still dislike sociology or are not interested in it. Many sociologists find nothing wrong with this state of affairs. The author believes that these feelings are mistaken. Maintaining some relationship with the American public is part of sociologists as members of society and as recipients of its funds, public or private. This essay has three major parts. The first describes some of the research needed to analyze sociology's roles in the U.S. The second part discusses some ways in which sociologists can improve relations with the public. In the last part of the paper, the focus is sociology itself, offering some ideas on what sociologists can do better for themselves even as they do better by the public.

The article discusses International Sociology. International gatherings have repeatedly played an important role in the social sciences. In London, England, in 1864, sociologist Karl Marx created the International Workingman's Association. The St. Louis, Missouri World's Fair in 1904 brought the world's leading sociologists together and one can easily trace the profound influence this American experience had on Sociologist Max Weber's subsequent writings. Today's vastly improved communications all year round make periodic face-to-face gatherings less momentous events. Still, they are important occasions and their impact can probably be increased further if one reflects on what functions they do or could perform. Recent observations suggest that a systematic study of such international events could be of real service to the profession of a sociologist. The origins of formal international organizations of sociologists can probably be traced back to the International Institute of Sociology which was created in 1893 with headquarters in Paris, France. It held yearly congresses until 1910, then changed to a triennial schedule. The congresses were interrupted by the first World War (1914-1918) and not resumed until 1927. The 1939 Congress was cancelled because of the second World War (1939-1945).

The article presents the author's response to the comments made by sociologists H. Warren Dunham and David Mechanic, to his article "Societal Reactions As an Explanation of Mental Illness," published in the October 1970 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." According to the author, while he feel the societal reaction explanation of mental illness is largely incorrect, he is in agreement with Dunham that the social expectations of others are important in determining behavior, including deviant behavior. Moreover, according to the author, regarding Mechanic's comments, he would like to note that he does not consider patient flow as static, and he doubts that anyone familiar with the recent history of psychiatric hospitalization would. Probably the most drastic change in patient flow has been the recent increase in the admission rates that has been associated with the marked improvements in psychiatric treatment. According to the author, Mechanic's clarification indirectly gives further support for his position that the societal reaction perspective does not provide an adequate general explanation of mental illness.

The ubiquity and the antiquity of such inequality has given rise to the assumption that there must be something both inevitable and positively functional about such social arrangements. Clearly, the truth or falsity of such an assumption is a strategic question for any general theory of social organization. It is therefore most curious that the basic premises and implications of the assumption have only been most casually explored by American sociologists. The key term here is "functionally important." The functionalist theory of social organization is by no means clear and explicit about this term. The minimum common referent is to something known as the "survival value" of a social structure. This concept immediately involves a number of perplexing questions. Among these are: (a) the issue of minimum vs. maximum survival, and the possible empirical referents which can be given to those terms; (b) whether such a proposition is a useless tautology since any status quo at any given moment is nothing more and nothing less than everything present in the status quo.

The article focuses on American sociological criminologist Edwin Hardin Sutherland. It discusses his contributions in the field of sociology and highlights the sociological and criminological theories propagated by him. His orientation has always been that of sociologist analyzing the criminal behavior and crime from the standpoint of social processes and the impact of social organization and the cultural heritage. Sutherland who passed an active academic career held his first teaching position at the age of 21 at Sioux Falls College, South Dakota and taught in various other universities in the U.S. before moving to the University of Indiana as head of the sociology department in 1935.

Sociologists attempt to extend the ritual of natural science into fields of human experience which heretofore have been regarded as not amenable to such treatment. Sociologists are simply trying to deal scientifically with the phenomena of social systems. These phenomena exist indubitably, whether they can be described scientifically remains to be seen. Sociologists think so, many physicists, biologists, priests, and politicians doubt it, or even assert that it cannot be done. Sociologists observe that this doubt, or assertion, itself is a kind of repetitive regularity in the behavior of man. Sociologists have good grounds for thinking a societal science is possible, though as yet they have not done enough scientific work, they have talked too much. However, they have produced more valid science than most of his scientific and lay brethren recognize or will admit. They themselves are not discouraged because they know that an established science is a cultural phenomenon of slow, accretionary growth.

The article presents comments on "Chemists in British Universities: A Study of the Reward System in Science," by sociologists S.S. Blume and Ruth Sinclair. The author finds many flaws in their study. Blume and Sinclair do not report tests for the significance of gamma. Such tests might have indicated a need to re-interpret the their conclusion that "when productivity is held constant the association between recognition and industrial involvement falls substantially. They might have tried an even more appropriate strategy to determine the effect of the third variable (Productivity). James A. Davis (1967) has suggested a procedure for computing a partial gamma, a statistic that has a "proportionate reduction in error" interpretation. When computed for the data this partial gamma has a value of .33. Again, although there has been a decrease in the size of the coefficient, the original relationship has by no means been destroyed. Statistical refinement mentioned would yield plausible alternate interpretations of the data.

Many sociologists have considered the intersection of race and gender in the production of social life, but while works on "intersectionality" have offered a useful paradigm for analyzing the experience of individual persons, a model for understanding how structures interact remains unclear. Appropriating Sewell's (1992) argument that structures consist of cultural schemas applied to resources, this article develops a more nuanced approach to intersectionality. It presents the argument that because the basis of race and gender as social structures is the inscription of cultural schemas on bodies, and because racial reproduction is predicated on the continued creation of these culturally inscribed bodies, race and gender as social structures necessarily intersect at the level of biological reproduction. The study uses this theoretical insight to analyze how physicians and suffragists contested the meaning of and policy regarding, abortion in nineteenth- century America. While most histories of abortion argue that nineteenth-century abortion politics concerned gender relations, this article argues that what was at stake was Anglo-Saxon control of the state and dominance of society. Abortion politics contested the proper use of a valuable social resource, the reproductive capacity of Anglo-Saxon women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author investigates the theory, methods, and findings of animal behaviorists and social scientists studying dominance hierarchies in small groups. In both disciplines: (I) the literature argues that the explanations of hierarchy structure are based upon differences in individual characteristics among group members; (2) although critical examination reveals that these explanations require stringent conditions to account for commonly occurring kinds of hierarchies in humans and animals, the available data indicate such conditions are not met; and (3) the hierarchy-formation process has not been adequately studied. In an attempt to alleviate the current problems in hierarchy research, I present the results of a particular animal study and develop a general explanation as to how hierarchy structures arise. This approach applies to both humans and animals and serves as a model of how the cumulative patterns of interactions among individuals produce group social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the measurement and conceptualization of problems faced by sociologists. These problems or tasks require a concerted effort of scholars with diverse substantive, theoretical, and methodological interests and persuasions. The author also discusses the productive interplay between theory and research in the field of sociology. Through an examination of the implications of random and nonrandom measurement errors for data analysis and theory testing, and through frustrating efforts to make sense of the theoretical and empirical literature in sociology the author feels that conceptualization and measurement problems are much complex that he had previously thought. The author discusses the problems that illustrate the complexity of the type of analysis needed in the face of missing information. These problems are: The plethora of theoretical definitions of generic behaviors and their implications for measurement, and the confounding of measured and unmeasured variables when individuals are aggregated in macrolevel analyses. The author concludes that sociologists need to work together solve these problems.

Recent research on intelligence and delinquency suggests that (1) the relation is at least as strong as the relation of either class or race to official delinquency; (2) the relation is stronger than the relation of either class or race to self-reported delinquency. In an analysis of the history of the research on the IQ-delinquency relation, we trace the developments leading to the current textbook position that IQ is not an important factor in delinquency. This position, which came into vogue about forty years ago and is still held by many sociologists, has its roots in: (1) a medical to sociological paradigm shift in this century; (2) the failure of subsequent research to substantiate the early exorbitant claims that low IQ was a necessary and sufficient condition for illegal behavior; (3) early negative reviews of research on this question by Sutherland and others; (4) reservations about the validity of the measurement of both IQ and delinquency; (5) erroneous interpretation of research findings; (6) speculation regarding factors which might account for the relation. It is noted that many currently prominent sociological theories of delinquency implicitly or explicitly use IQ as a crucial theoretical element. We show that IQ has an effect on delinquency independent of class and race, and we argue that this effect is mediated through a host of school variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors' comments on the critique of their article "A Behavioral Model of Man: Propositions and Implications," by Penelope Greene. Green contends that our logical system, i.e., our formal model, is unsound. We take it that Greene means that the elements in the antecedent conditions are not the same and therefore the derived consequent cannot be so derived. Unfortunately, Greene has overlooked the very purpose of our calculus, which is to simplify matters so that such cumbersome procedures as she suggests can be by-passed. The special feature of our calculus permits us to substitute one activity with another. Specifically, the calculus makes it possible for us to dispense with quantifiers. As for logical consistency, any criticism of it entails several points. Greene holds that while the logical system we have defined is complete, our system is not sound because we have used formation rules which do not appear in other logical systems precisely because they do not meet these dual criteria, completeness and soundness, and hence lead to contradictions. It is safe to assume that she is referring to the rules of disintegration and absorption since they are both used in her demonstration of a contradiction in its most blatant form.

The article presents comments on John H. Kunkel and Richard Nagasawa's article "A Behavioral Model of Man: Propositions and Implications." In their article, Kunkel and Nagasawa attempted to use symbolic logic to demonstrate the utility of logical models in sociology. The logical system they constructed is unsound. They have introduced additional formation rules, which do not appear in other logical systems precisely because they do not meet the dual criteria of completeness and soundness, and hence lead to contradictions. Any unsound system precludes the acceptance of any argument it produces. That both valid and invalid propositions may be generated impels one to question all such propositions. In an unsound system, there is no logical way to sort the valid from the invalid. Hence, one finds it impossible to accept any of the propositions generated using the Kunkel-Nagasawa system. This problem is crucial, given that their aim was to construct a deductive theory. Careful examination of their system shows that they have failed to achieve this basic aim.

Twelve years ago Lenski and Leggett found that race and class factors Produced a strong agreeing tendency to one of the Srole "anomie" items. Many subsequent applications of the Srole items have failed to take into account the implications of their findings. Most of the research on the subject of acquiescence has been done on the F scale by psychologists who have explained it as a personality characteristic. The technique of comparing scale items to the same items in obverse form has been the principal research technique. The same technique is used here in a sociological perspective. One-half of a sample of poor Southern Negroes was given the Stole items and the other half was given the saint items in an obverse form. Analysis shows a strong tendency to agree with both forms despite the fact that they had opposite meanings. The implications of this for the use of the Srole items and similar scales are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the prospects of labor force as a field of sociological research. The labor force attracts attention of sociologists as it is becoming increasingly complex, increasingly fraught with problems, and increasingly significant in the political as well as in the economic and social fields. The labor force offers an unique opportunity for sociologist, both in better understanding of labor force phenomena and to a better understanding of our society, as many of our more difficult and perplexing domestic problems arise here.

The article presents information on studies concerning the relation between absence of a parent and degree of courtship behavior of college students. A study conducted by researcher Robert F. Winch found that the degree of courtship behavior to be retarded in the males with father missing. The present study found accelerated courtship for both sexes when the father is absent. However, both the study fails to give a clear picture of the effects of absence of the mother on the courtship behaviour of either sex. According to the present researchers, the scale of degree of courtship behavior used in both studies is not a very efficient measure of the effects of such absence on the courtship behavior of the offspring.

The few available studies on urban neighborhoods and neighboring focused attention either upon the neighborhood as a locality group or upon neighboring as an interpersonal process. It appears to sociologists, however, that the importance of the neighborhood as a unit of investigation lies precisely in its double aspect and that the ecological and interpersonal elements of neighboring need to be considered simultaneously. To do this, it was necessary to study the correlates of neighborliness, together with the patterns of inter-family relationship in the residential area. The pilot study, undertaken in the winter of 1948, was based upon a non-selected sample of 134 neighborhoods in the Minneapolis-St. Its major instrument was a Neighborhood Interaction Scale designed to measure the amount of informal interaction between the responding family and each of its neighbor families. Findings of the pilot study tended to support our expectations that little direct association would be found between mobility and isolation on the neighborhood level. At the same time, it raised questions, which appeared to sociologists to be of considerably greater significance than the initial hypotheses, and which seemed to involve the basic mechanisms of group formation.

Major portion of the program is devoted to the expression of hopes and fears for the post-war era. What are the prospects of realizing some small dividend in improved social relations in return for the investment of life, time, and resources. The degrees of hopefulness of such a dividend vary. On the contrary, as the military situation and all the excitement and animal emotion accompanying the fight recede from the foreground, the problems which gave rise to the war emerge through the smoke and the wreckage in no way simplified by the Roman holiday in which we have indulged. There stand the problems like the bills with interest, which you could postpone paying while on vacation, but can no longer postpone. In short, there has not been in the meantime a sufficient change in the conditions that determine a peace settlement. Social scientists today know a great deal about the requirements for a durable peace, there is absolutely no reason to believe that their counsels will be heeded.

Sociologists and other students employing questionnaire techniques for gathering data have become increasingly skeptical concerning the accuracy of the information recorded in questionnaires. Some of the cruder inaccuracies have resulted from unsophisticated questionnaire construction (the use of language not intelligible to the informants, vague or confusing directions, etc.) and from attempting to secure information of a sort unsuited to this technique. In this study, as in most, ideal considerations pertaining to technique had to be modified to fit the "practical circumstances" under which the research was carried out. "More or less arbitrarily," then, it was decided that identical questions would be submitted upon three occasions to the same persons at two-week intervals. A group of 162 students served as informants. It was intended that the informants not be told the purpose of the research and it be conducted in such a way as to conceal its purpose. Our attempt at concealment proved to be successful. Obviously, five or ten submissions would constitute a more rigorous test of consistency, but for numerous practical reasons such frequency was not feasible.