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In sociology today, as in other sciences, the professional journals serve as major channels for the dissemination of ideas and information. The papers presented in the principal periodicals reach a wide audience among sociologists, are acknowledged as the best work, and stand as models for all who aspire to success. The present writers have selected for analysis a sample of contributions to two prestigious journals, the "American Sociological Review" and the "American Journal of Sociology." Included in this survey are the 202 articles published in the two periodicals during 1965 and 1966, and the 200 papers published in 1940 and 1941. The term "substantive research" is employed to refer both to studies presenting empirical data on social phenomena and to papers reviewing past research or proposing new direct lions for inquiry. Classed under methodology are all, articles dealing with the basic assumptions of science, with the limitations and potentialities of specific methods, with the development, validity, and reliability of specific scales and measures, and with various statistical and mathematical devices and techniques.

Presents a letter to the editor on the anonymity rule adopted by the editors of the American Sociologists Journal.

This article examines the success of The Sociological Quarterly in becoming more than a regional journal in the U.S. from 1960 to 1970. The journal Midwest Sociologist was an official semiannual publication of the Midwest Sociological Society. In the late 1950s, the need for revamping the form and content of the journal in order to accommodate a flow of papers became increasingly important. Accordingly, in 1960 the Midwest Sociologist became The Sociological Quarterly. The name chosen for the renovated journal was important for two reasons. First, the transition from a semiannual to a quarterly provided a publication outlet for qualified manuscripts that had been delayed or rejected due to space limitations. Second, the adoption of the title The Sociological Quarterly signified an attempt to avoid the regional connotations of the term Midwest and to initiate a journal of general interest and utility to sociologists of varying professional persuasions from all sections of the country. During the decade, the journal has been consistently publishing manuscripts from all parts of the country and can no longer be considered merely a regional journal of limited geographical scope. Data regarding the geographical sources of published papers indicate a steady tendency toward extraregionalism.

This article is reprint of a paper published originally in Russian in a 1971 Russian journal Voprosy Filosofi; translated to English by Michael Cernea. This paper remarks on the Seventh World Congress of Sociology held September 1970 in Varna, Bulgaria. The Congress was a mosaic of almost thirty-five hundred people involved in more than one thousand papers presented during the fifty workshops and research sessions over more than six full days of meetings, not to mention innumerable discussions in the corridors. The congress revealed in the most convincing way the qualitative change in the distribution of forces in the world science of sociology during the last years, namely, a sharp increase in the weight of Marxist sociology and the sociology of socialist countries. Scholars from the socialist countries took over in Varna not merely in the quantity of their representatives but through their skill in participating in the work of the congress. Suffice it to say that they represented 40 percent of all the papers. Besides the Marxist sociologists, there are three basic groups of delegates that might be categorized by their attitudes toward Marxism, their level of professional training and their number; the professional sociologists; social philosopher sociologists; and beginners.

In a recent paper, "Recruiting Tomorrow's Sociologists," sociologist Ernest Q. Campbell states: "There is a vast void and discontinuity between sociology as given to students in basic courses and sociology as practiced at its best and most stimulating levels, more so than in most other disciplines." A significant portion of the disparity results from the fact that sociologists give their undergraduates the impression that sociology is the process of cataloging findings presented in journal articles and monographs whereas they should be giving them access to empirical data so that they can formulate and test their own hypotheses. An oversimplified view of current instructional programs in the social sciences reveals that a student's progress from introductory to advanced courses is a series of steps in which he is first introduced to concepts of terms, and theoretical perspectives. It is hoped that this brief set of comments on problem-solving computer systems in the social sciences and the hypothetical example of a student's use of the problem-solving system will alert us to the possibilities of more effective use of time-sharing systems. Social scientists should not wait for computer scientists to lead them into developing these experiments, nor should they delay starting to work on such systems until larger and more reliable time-sharing systems are operational.

During the 1973 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), the author attended a roundtable discussion chaired by Professor Robert Friedrichs. The whole meeting was devoted to discussing the possibility of sociologist B.F. Skinner's influence emerging in the U.S. sociology, a topic that Friedrichs had explored in a paper he delivered earlier at one of the ASA sessions. In reference to the Skinnerian influence on sociology, the author criticizes sociologist Donald Tarter's article published in the November 1973 issue of the periodical "The American Sociologist," which stated that Friedrichs' eminence in the discipline of sociology and the Skinnerian influence is justified. The author's intention is to point out that Tarter's article is at best naive as regards his misunderstanding of sociology and that the presuppositions underlying his argument suggest an ideological position that can only be repugnant to anyone committed to a society that is as free and open as possible. The author substantiates his indictments by first commenting on what he believes to be Tarter's sociological naivety on the basis of a passage in which Tarter writes "Behavioral complexities never before thought possible have emerged in the form of pigeons playing ping-pong or chimps breaking through the communication barrier to man."

The genesis of this paper is specific personal experience, best described as a dialectical confrontation between the thought patterns of a gray-whiskered sociologist and those of younger colleagues who see the world and sociology differently. One sees that the lecturer will spend some time on the inadequacies, methodological, theoretical, and ideological, of traditional sociology, with functionalism in particular being reserved for yet another drubbing. It takes little imagination to predict that the present status of American family will turn out to be pretty awful when subjected to searching scrutiny. Since this is radical sociology and thus not content to describe but under powerful moral constraints to prescribe, alternatives such as group marriage will receive their long neglected due. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had something to say on the family, to be sure, but scarcely enough to provide substance for a semester course.

Academic employment depends on student enrollment. The bull market in higher education in the U.S. that ran from the mid-thirties to the present has passed its crest. In fact, it appears from a recent release by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that, while college enrollments did not drop absolutely until just this year, they began to recede relatively four years ago. The proportion of white high school graduates who entered college reached 57 percent in 1968, then began to fall, until by September of 1972 it had dropped to 49 percent. This paper was specifically commissioned to suggest some changes in the training of sociologists designed to increase sociological opportunities. Another way of stating the article's purpose is to answer the question on the difference between the training for non-academic positions and training for academic positions. Far from presenting temptations to dilute academic training for sociological research, preparation for the role of non-academic sociologist would take for granted all usable benefits that conventional research training has to offer, then add to it in a number of important respects. The activities in which sociologists have hitherto been employed within non-academic institutions have been primarily in research and research will figure heavily in their activity in the future-with certain qualifications. The article, therefore, focuses on just those types and methods of research which are relevant and important to these institutions, in preparation for which current academic training needs to be substantially supplemented.

The possibility that institutional participation at the American Sociological Association meetings could serve as an index of the quality of graduate sociology departments is explored in this article. It seems reasonable to anticipate some degree of positive association between these variables because participation at this level is informally recognized by sociologists as "some" measure of individual prestige within the profession, session participation generally involves a competitive element, and session chairpersons and moderators are often among the more experienced, recognized, and productive members of the profession. Most of the studies that have been concerned with the quality of graduate sociology departments have utilized productivity and prestige indices that are time consuming to calculate and that assume the index has a history. But institutional representation at the national meeting is much easier to determine, a recurrent event, and not as dependent upon past performance.

Simulation is the act of creating a working model or a symbolic model of some real life process; the scientist studies the model rather than the real life process and thereby hopes to learn something about the real life process. One type of symbolic model is the computer simulation. Scientists have represented the real life process in the language of the computer and have let the computer generate data which describes the process being studied. This article has attempted to construct a computer simulation of the sociologist doing survey research. The first goal of this work was to mirror reality as accurately and completely as possible. As the work progressed, other objectives accrued to the simulation. One of the further objectives was pedagogical: to train graduate sociology students in research methodology. For this, the simulation was used: to construct a questionnaire, to design research, and to analyze data. Using the simulation in these ways, the sociologist was not functioning as a simulator but as a teacher of research methods. This paper reports on these experiences.

The article explores the sociological possibilities of the study of the future. An early champion of the need for modern social science to study the future was sociologist Nathan Israeli who wrote a brief paper 1930 discussing what he called "The Social Psychology of Futurism." Several years later, two other Psychologists became interested in the nature of prediction and followed his lead. This early spark of interest in the systematic study of the future was limited and never really caught on. After the Second World War, as war memories faded, pessimism and doubt regarding the future also lessened, it seemed that the political and social future could yield human betterment, the necessity of studying it emerged anew. The main purpose of the sociology of the future is to construct pictures of what the future of the world's various societies could and should be like based upon scientific study of possibilities, probabilities, preferences, and policies. It includes the study of values, so that "wished for" futures can be distinguished from undesirable futures.

Some years ago the author rejected out of hand a sociologist colleague's argument that the use of analogies or models is characteristic of insecure individuals operating in immature disciplines. This paper essays an explanation that justifies a reversal of judgment concerning the utility of analogies in sociology and social psychology. It is well to recognize, before continuing with the case against analogical analysis of sociological data, that only an extremist would argue that the very persistence of a conceptual scheme is an argument for its functional nature. The reality of these rewards makes it difficult for those employing an analogy to discern whether it has actual heuristic pedagogical value or its continued use is merely a function of rationalization designed to preserve these subjective rewards. Although not unknown in earlier periods of time, mechanistic models or analogies became much more prevalent in the seventeenth century in response to the remarkable gains of the period in mechanics, physics, and mathematics.

Because highly technical expositions of significance tests are readily available, sociologists will proceed from an elementary and non-technical statement that emphasizes the meaning and interpretation of the tests. First and foremost, a test of significance is a formal procedure for making a decision between two hypotheses about some characteristic of a population parameter on the basis of knowledge obtained from a sample statistic of that population. Either the null hypothesis or the alternative hypothesis may be derived from the substantive theory in question, though it is conventional that the theory being tested that is, the researcher's hunch, or the possibility he thinks most interesting is identified with the alternative hypothesis. This means that null hypotheses are usually set up for the express purpose of seeing if there is empirical warrant for their rejection or nullification so that the alternative hypothesis can be accepted hence the term null hypothesis. Testing for significance involves a comparison of the difference between the sample statistic and the parameter specified by the null hypothesis with a theoretically determined sampling distribution. This comparison allows estimation of how often such a difference would occur if difference were due to random errors in the sample selection process sample error.

This article presents information on the sociologist's study of the future. E. Moore has given an analysis of the factors which prompt the professional sociologists to steer clear of the activity of making projections of the future. Arthur C. Clarke, who is a science fiction writer and a serious popularizer of science, has given us one very distinguished volume dealing with projections of the future. A portion of a famous table from this volume, predicting the scientific and technological future from 1970-2100 AD, has been widely reproduced and used. Clarke's (1962) predictions are made within five basic areas of transportation, communication and information, materials manufacturing, biology and chemistry, and physics. Americans are also quite active in the area of studies of the future. A good many individual efforts along this line have appeared over the last two decades. An increasing number of social scientists are beginning to pay more attention to studies of the future. This is obvious enough from glancing at the names of those who contributed papers to the volumes issued by the Commission On The Year 2000. But they are still so few as to justify Moore's (1966) interest in trying to arouse sociologists to the importance of this field.

Presents a letter on Professor George Byran Vold, an eminent sociologist.

A thorough commentary on sociologist T.N. Ferdinand's article "On the Impossibility of a Complete, General Theory of Behavior," is difficult owing to the overall lack of specificity in Ferdinand's handling of the problem. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand the pivotal moments in his argument clearly enough to formulate specific and, sociologists feel, damaging criticisms of them. Ferdinand prefaces his argument for the impossibility of a general theory of behavior by admonishing social scientists that the generality of a theory depends upon its completeness. Although it is true, as sociologists have shown that the argument of his paper breaks down at certain critical junctures, they believe that there are more serious grounds for objecting to his position. Surely those who seek a general theory of human behavior are motivated by a desire for more effective explanation and prediction, by a desire, perhaps, to approximate the successes of the physical sciences. Whether or not one believes that a general theory of human behavior is feasible or desirable. It is clear that attacking the problem of cooperation between the behavioral sciences by transporting that problem to the abstruse plane of axiomatic is not a fruitful beginning. It is not only the content of Ferdinand's article that is discouraging but the form: the reader craves illustrations of his abstractions.

The article highlights the contribution of Louis Wirth in the field of sociology specially the related to the African-Americans and other minorities in the U.S. The article further reports the current discussion of the undermining of sociology by the "military-industrial complex" bent on the maintenance of its privileged position to the detriment of the emerging minorities, notably the African-Americans with the inference that sociology has thereby surrendered its capacity to tell the truth. When Louis Wirth came to University of Chicago, Illinois, he was already antagonistic toward religion and the sort of commerce engendered by an unbridled capitalism. He was captivated by its largely pro-Russian political climate. Under the influence of Albion Small, he saw in sociology the possibility of bringing to fruition a Marxist-Leninist version of social equality. Though his prevailing skepticism ultimately rejected such a solution, the commitment to sociology as a mechanism for action as well as generalization was born in this environment and continued to his death. His major volume, "The Ghetto" in 1928 and the paper for which he is best known, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," 1964 are also given.

Certain reciprocal relationships of the affluence, influence, and congruence phenomena in the sciences have become fairly commonplace topics in discussions of the sociology of social sciences. This paper proposes the suggestion that a yet more completely integrated view of these three aspects of the state of a science may contribute to both epistemological and empirical classification. In discussions of the relations of the economic support received by sociology and directions scientific developments in this field have taken, sociologists suggest that sociology: has suffered from a double handicap, so that it has received low and possibly economically suboptimal allocations of resources In some measure, this derives: from the economic disadvantage that sociology shares with other sciences in that their product-knowledge-is essentially a public or common good rather than distributive commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the function of women sociologists at conventions. The manifest functions of sociology conventions are (1) to present scholarly papers, (2) to discuss the profession's business, (3) to exchange job information, and (4) to hear about the activities of other departments. The convention's latent functions include seeing friends, gossiping and assessing one's status, i.e. finding out if one's stock is rising or falling on the professional market. A female sociologist is uniquely qualified to meet the psychic and intellectual needs of the male conventioneer. Study upon study has shown that the woman generalizes her role in the family of socio-emotional leader, to other institutions. As a colleague, the woman sociologist is a task expert who has been trained to participate in the same world of ideas and research as her male counterpart. She can understand and judge the worth of an idea or a piece of research. She can also reward achievement. But as a woman, she has learned how to distribute love, support, encouragement and other expressive verbal rewards. It is this combination of proven ability in the expressive area coupled with instrumental skills, which places such a premium on interaction with the female sociologist.

Sociological associations in the U.S. are generally viewed as existing on two levels: national and regional. A third level, however, does exist: the intra-regional. Even though sociologists know very little about organizing at this level, intra-regional associations may become increasingly important to the discipline because of labor market pressures, broader participation in the profession by teaching sociologists, the influence of revenue sharing on research funding and the energy crisis. Intra-regional associations are frequently referred to as state associations; however, the data indicate the former classification is more valid. The purpose of this article is to describe the organization of sociology on the intra-regional level. How little sociologists know about this level was demonstrated early in the research. A roster of intra-regional associations was not available from the national or the regional levels. Consequently, a letter was sent to the sociology department chairman at a university in each state. A questionnaire was sent to each association and it was filled out by one or more current and/or recent officers. Attitudes expressed by the respondents should be considered their own and not representative of the total membership.

Sociological research traditions vary in the degree to which their practitioners participate in a shared and codified conception of how research work is performed and how research reports are structured. At one extreme, practitioners of laboratory and experimental work share a highly routinized set of working procedures and schemes for reporting research. Drawing from physical science models of inquiry perhaps facilitates their achieving such consensus. The stylistic and organizational features of their publications reproduce the stylistic and organizational features of physical science journals in particularly striking fashion. While not nearly as shared and codified, demographic and survey practitioners still draw upon a rather consensual pool of research strategies, technical steps and standardized conceptions of the structure and content of their research reports. Moreover, one even senses a high degree of working agreement among library researchers who employ bodies of historical and substantive materials.

There are several reasons to believe that white southerners have not been active in research on topics about black Americans. Blacks themselves have certainly not been accepted with open arms when calling attention to problems of blacks. For example, in 1927, E. Franklin Frazier, a writer wrote an article in which he used an analogy comparing the mental processes of racially prejudiced persons with insane persons. Subsequently, he was chased out of Atlanta, Georgia. A study was conducted on origins of researchers on Black Americans. One of the most interesting findings is that obtaining the highest college degree in a southern state of the U.S. does not produce as much of a tendency to study blacks as do childhood socialization or institutional affiliation in the South. One hypothesis is that graduate programs neutralize a tendency to deal with blacks that other socially connected experiences seem to enhance. What seems more likely is that the restrictive social climate of the South may be responsible for the relatively meager opportunities for academic specialization at the research level in southern graduate schools. It is likely, however, that the long trend is reversing. Southern sociologists, who have been criticized for not doing enough research on blacks, have actually been doing proportionately more research in this field than in other fields as compared with their northern, including western counterparts.

This article presents the 1972 report of the membership committee of the American Sociological Association (ASA). As of May 1972, there are 14,934 members of the ASA, an increase of 349 over 1971. The following tables reflect various aspects of the membership growth during the past six years. The most noteworthy of these changes was that the Member category showed the largest increase, larger than any previous year, while all other membership categories showed a decrease. The recent changes in the classification of members has required that collapse of all categories Fellow and Active members into the present member category in order that the past membership figures will be comparable. The membership class of Foreign Associate was changed to International Associates, and certain students who became eligible for the Member classification remained in the student class if they continued as students but have rights of the Member class. The growth of the Association has certainly not been up to expectations. It has become increasingly apparent that an effective membership campaign must be at the grassroots level, i.e., regional and local contact with non-members, particularly to make membership information available to students.

In August 1974, the International Sociological Association (ISA) will hold its Eighth World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and thereby afford an accessible opportunity for many North American sociologists to participate. The reorganization of the International Sociological Association by its Council in 1970 at Varna, Bulgaria, during sessions of the Seventh World Congress of Sociology was desired to strengthen the autonomy and effectiveness of its thirty research committees. This should provide opportunity for greater involvement for individual sociologists, both in the periodic international meetings and in the ongoing work of the ISA. These organizational changes come at an appropriate period in that North American sociologists are now demonstrating a stronger interest in cross-national sociology. This article is designed to describe to the membership of the American Sociological Association the implications of the new format of the International Sociological Association for international intellectual cooperation.

This article presents data drawn from a study of university sociologists in order to answer three basic questions which concern the correlation between the quantity and the quality of publications of a sociologist, the effect of the status of the graduate department where the sociologist earned his doctorate on the recognition attributed to his research output, and the relationship between early achievement of quality publications and continued achievement of research in the career of a sociologist. Sociologists of science have been concerned with the relationship between a researcher's number of publications and the merit or excellence of a sociologist's writings. In a number of disciplines, a high to moderate correlation is found between quantity and quality of publications. The population for this study consisted of all persons listed in the American Sociological Association Directory who had received their Ph.D. degrees in sociology between 1954 and 1963 and who were members of United States departments of sociology that offered graduate training. To have included sociologists whose degree dates preceded 1954 might have meant the exclusion of the articles from the quantity index. The upper limit of 1963 was applied since it can be assumed that there is a time lag between the period when a social scientist receives his degree and publishes and between such a publishing period and the time when the work is recognized and/or appropriately cited, as in the measure for quality.

Sociology has acquired the reputation of a liberating discipline. Sociology classes are crowded with students in search of the intellectual tools with which to demolish the hypocritical. The author says that sociology should be an instrument for existential liberation of the individual. It should be a weapon in the revolutionary struggle to liberate society. The author looks at the question of sociology as a liberating discipline by way of two contradictory propositions: 1)sociology is subversive of established patterns of thought, and 2)sociology is conservative in its implications for the institutional order. In every society there is a pattern of thought that most people accept without question as being of the very nature of things. Sociology is a liberating discipline in a very specific way. There can be no doubt about its liberating effects on consciousness. At least potentially sociology may be a prelude to liberation not only of thought but of action. At the same time sociology points up the social limits of freedom.

The presentation of work at scientific meetings and the publication of work in professional journals, two important modes of scientific information dissemination, are often closely related. Much of the work which is presented at national meetings will subsequently be submitted for journal publication. It was found, for example, that prior to the 1966 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, only 22 percent of the meeting presentation material had been disseminated to national audiences in either written or oral forms, but that nine in ten of the authors of presentations at the meeting indicated plans for written dissemination of the reported work immediately following the meeting. Seventy percent indicated journal articles as the preferred publication form, and 14 per cent indicated books or parts of books. The median anticipated date for journal submission was three to four months after the meeting. The national meeting thus seemed for most sociologists who made presentations there to serve as an intermediate phase in the scientific information dissemination process, the ultimate dissemination goal was publication of the reported work in some archival form.

Recent developments in the profession indicate that there is a growing interest in the sociological meaning of certain aspects of language, particularly speech, behavior. Moreover, those sociologists who have not been working with language, and who may in some instances have been "put off" by what the ethnomethodologists are doing, tend to be somewhat skeptical about the potential contributions of sociolinguistics. Social interaction is a reciprocal process involving communication, and most human communication requires the use of language. No two men use language in precisely the same way, and some men use language in ways obviously very different from others. Thus, to state that language structure and social structure are intimately interrelated is to reiterate a fundamental fact known to all men who participate in social interaction. Correlations between speech and the characteristics of its users are easy to determine. Correlations between language structure and social structure are more subtle but can also be identified.

The article presents information on various opportunities for employment. Four year liberal arts college requires sociologist to teach courses in methodology, social theory, anthropology, collective behavior, mass communication; flexible choice of additional courses to make up total load 9-12 credit hours; MA and some teaching experience minimum requirement; salary open depending on qualifications attractive campus. Department in leading eastern liberal arts college with growing program. adding faculty at various levels; 9 hour load or less; PhD; consideration will he given to a range of specialties although interest in methods and deviance in especially sought rank and salary dependent upon qualifications.

The article presents information about employment in the field of sociology in various universities and colleges that appeared in the 1968 issue of the journal "The American Sociologist." University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Maryland,. Several positions are available for PhD or ABD at all ranks in rapidly growing discipline; specialization in theory, methodology, urban sociology sought, other areas will be considered depending on the qualifications of the candidate; teaching load in each semester is 9 hours with 2 preparations. The Council on Social Work Education maintains a registration and information exchange of current teaching vacancies as one of its many services to interested social workers; graduate professional schools of social work; and colleges and universities offering undergraduate programs in social welfare; information about teaching as a career in social work and teaching registration forms are available. Environmental Health Foundation Inc. is a research foundation, which among other things is undertaking a broad based investigation of motivational practices in preventive medicine, wants a young dynamic PhD sociologist or psychologist to direct research and conduct fieldwork.

It has more than once been suggested by researchers in the field of community decision-making that results reported by others are more a reflection of political ideology than of "actual" community decision-making processes. A tendency to perceive a more elitist, centralized type of decision-making structure has been ascribed to sociologists, at least as contrasted to their colleagues in political science departments. It has also been argued that adoption of the reputational technique for studying community decision-making will almost inevitably bias the findings toward a more centralized type of decision-making structure. The preference at least during the 1950 of sociologists for the reputational method and of political scientists for either the decisional method or some combination of methods in addition to the reputational method, has been posited as an intervening variable explaining the differences in findings between persons in the two disciplines. While the general interpretation is upheld in that the community structural characteristics were enormously more important than discipline or method in predicting the type of power structure, the particular community structural characteristics, of course, are far from deterministic of the type of community power structure.

The central purpose of this article is to demonstrate that it is both logical and necessary for sociologists to become involved in at least certain aspects of building "the good society." Since arguments for the illegitimate uses of ethical neutrality often have a certain surface plausibility, it is wise to become familiar with the relevant characteristics and tactics those who use the arguments. Although greed and sloth may account for a significant number of those who choose to remain on what they think is dead center so far as controversial social issues are concerned, the author is personally convinced that cowardice is the most important single explanation.

The article presents comments on the work of sociologists Irwin Deutscher. The publications of the sociologist Richard T. LaPiere in the late 1920's and early 1930's, though it probably played a part in the emergence of the evasive tactic known as the operational definition, did nothing to discourage the development of the paper and pencil test as the primary instrument of social investigation. Then and subsequently, contemporary sociologists and certain questioning of methodological validity ignored the findings of that study regarded as the views of a reactionary sociologist opposed to the application of truly scientific methods to the study of society. By ignoring certain findings and by proceeding on the assumption that verbal responses of subjects to symbolic situations are valid indicators of social conduct, sociological research has been able to profess a scientific objectivity and to accumulate a vast body of data about man and his affairs through the comparatively easy method of asking questions and then running responses through complex and impressive statistical analyses.

The article presents information about various associations, agencies, institutions, etc. of sociology. The First International Conference on "The Social Sciences and Medicine," will be held at Aberdeen, Scotland, September 4-6, 1968. The conference is being organized under the auspices of the journal "Social Science and Medicine," in collaboration with the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Russell Sage Foundation has appointed Lindsey Churchill as staff sociologist from Cornell University, New York, to conduct a pilot study of information exchange through questioning, interviewing, and interrogation; Hugh F. Cline as staff sociologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, California, to conduct a study of computer uses in social science research; Ivar Oxaal as staff sociologist from the University of Guyana, to conduct a study of Negro executives. The National Science Foundation has established a Special Commission on the Social Sciences. President of the Special Commission is Orville G. Brim, Jr., Russell Sage Foundation. The purpose of the new commission will be to make appropriate studies and recommendations to the National Science Foundation on uses of the social sciences.

This section presents news of sociology organizations in the U.S., as of May 1971. AAAS Socio-Psychological Prize announced the Arthur F. Bentley annual prize of $1,000 for a theoretical and experimental essay that furthers understanding of the psychological socio-cultural behavior of human beings. The prize is intended to encourage studies and analyses of social behavior based on explicitly stated assumptions or postulates leading to conclusions or deductions that were tested by systematic empirical research or to encourage in social inquiry the development and application of the kind of dependable methodology that has proved fruitful in natural sciences. On the other hand, the Alabama-Mississippi Sociological Association extended an invitation for membership to all sociologists, undergraduate and graduate students, and persons in allied fields in the two states. Meanwhile, Asian Forum is a quarterly journal providing a multi-disciplinary forum on development and interaction within and among Asian countries. Contributions dealing with Asian society and culture include articles, reviews, summaries of relevant dissertations, bibliographic essays, annotated bibliographies, and reports on projects and conferences.

The article deliberates the raging debate among sociologists whether they should take moral stands on political issues. The American Sociological Association has recently been confronted with rather strident demands to take (particular) stands on a number of major political issues. A good number of these demands have come from young sociologists who are deeply committed to their position and who are strongly oriented toward an academic career. But major opposition to these demands comes largely from older sociologists who perceive their social position as insecure and who are unwilling to commit acts that might jeopardize their personal status. If sociology takes moral stands on political issues, there will be a diminution in both the number and impact of sociologists who do not conform to the dominant political ideology of their profession. It has been argued that sociologists frequently have a moral or at least an ideological commitment to certain theoretical explanations of human behavior.

This article features the 1972 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to be held in the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., from December 26-31, 1972. Several sociologists will also participate in a session on "The Future of Collective Violence: Societal and International Perspectives," organized by Joseph Ben-Dak for the Section on Social and Economic Sciences. This Annual Meeting will also mark the point where James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University will succeed Daniel Moynihan as the elected chairman of Section K and Vice-President of AAAS.

This section presents an update on several sociological associations as of May 1, 1972. The Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand (SAANZ) has begun publication of SAANZ Newsletter. Maine Sociological Society's officers are President Frank Branceley, Nasson College, and Secretary Madeleine Giguere of University of Maine. The District of Columbia Sociological Society's slate of officers are President Dorothy K. Newman, President-elect Gillian Lindt, Secretary John Pease and Treasurer Paul Peachey. The recipient of the 1972 Stuart A. Rice Merit Award is Irene B. Tauber of the District of Columbia Sociological Society. The Society for Cross-Cultural Research is soliciting membership of sociologists. Applications may be requested from James M. Schaefer, Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana. The Clearinghouse and Laboratory for Census Data (CLCD) announces receipt of a grant from the National Science Foundation. CLCD is designed to assist researchers using census data.

This article reports on the involvement of sociologists in the recent report of the National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future as of May 1972. The reports prescribe strong medicine rather than weak bromides. The report was two years in the making and involved a number of sociologists on the process, including Otis Dudley Duncan, Margaret Bright, and Bernard Berelson as members of the presidentially appointed commission itself; Charles Westoff as executive director of the commission staff; Robert E. Park Jr. as deputy director; Peter Morrison, Norman Ryder, and Irene Taeuber as special consultants; and a legion of other colleagues as authors of commissioned research papers and general consultants. The commission's basic proposal is that the nation shift toward a more stabilized population, citing evidence of slower population growth and setting an average of two children per couple as a desirable goal. Certainly the commission's most controversial recommendation concerns the desirability of a national policy of abortion-on-demand, modeled after the new statute in New York State now undergoing attempted repeal. Here the commission was not unanimous, and the report includes minority statements.

The article focuses on the start of a new section on Sociology of Language in the periodical "The American Sociologist." The sociology of language has recently experienced a rebirth of interest among sociologists in various parts of the world. An ASA Section on the sociology of language would help further the growth of this field by providing more opportunities for the reading of papers and for the exchange of views and information at the ASA Annual Meetings, would facilitate periodic meetings between interested sociologists, linguists and anthropologists, would facilitate the preparation and distribution of a periodic newsletter listing recent publications, new courses and programs, would help strengthen the contacts between American sociologists of language and those in other countries, and would help those already interested in the sociology of language to maintain closer contacts with the rest of sociology as well as bring their work to the attention of colleagues in other specialty fields within sociology.

This article focuses on C. K. Yang of the University of Pittsburgh as the first U.S. sociologist to visit the People's Republic of China. After receiving an invitation on short notice, Yang spent roughly one month in China during last October-November 1971. During this period he returned to a number of places he had known prior to the revolution. His trip took him to six cities and two communes. Because Yang was afforded this unique opportunity to compare the present with the past, he was asked to respond to several queries for the American Sociological Association (ASA) members at large. He is presently writing at greater length on the topic, though he notes that his role was that of the tourist-sociologist rather than sociological researcher. Yang said what impressed him most deeply was the information gap between what he saw in China and the China depicted in Western literature in general, including partly his own writings on communist China during the past twenty years. The inaccurate and in some cases unrealistic impression on China poses a serious problem for educators who have a responsibility to inform the U.S. public, most especially the younger generation.

Presents a letter to the editor commenting on Afro American sociologists.

The allocation of prestige to sociology departments and the measurement of sociologists' productivity have been prominent themes in the study of the sociology of sociology. The issues emphasized have been the extent to which the allocation of publications or research output and prestige are correlated and an examination of those factors affecting the access to prestige or rewards. While the allocation of prestige, positions, and journal pages are important issues, another important dimension describing a scientific discipline is the allocation of research funding within that discipline. The concern in this article is with the distribution of the funding for sociologists across academic institutions. In the allocation of research grants, there are forces at work that would tend to enhance both stability and instability. On the one hand, as R.C. Hunt and C.W. Hunt have noted, there is a tendency for organizations to attempt to stabilize their contractual relations with other organizations over time. On the other hand, within the specific context of the allocation of research grants, there is probably increasing competition for the research funds, tending to lead to less stability.

The system of social inequality in American science has been the subject of numerous empirical investigations in the last decades. A persistent theme of such studies has been the attempt to de-mystify the social organization of academic life as supposedly exemplary of the domination of the universalistic-achievement pattern. Investigators have stressed the descriptive-like antecedents and consequences of the reputation of universities or departments as a career contingency for individual scientists. Given the various independent dimensions of the analysis, zero-order correlations were computed as a gross index of the relation among the variables, both for the year 1959 and 1970. For both time periods, standardized regression coefficients are used for art assessment of the predictive utility of each independent dimension when the effects of the remaining independent variables are removed. The model used assumes additive effects for variables in both time periods, this may be useful as a first approximation but it is, of course, conceivable, for example, that the dimension highest degree would interact with other independent variables.

When the radical caucus of the ASA got tired of merely asking for statements on withdrawal from Vietnam at Annual Meetings, and asked instead that sociologists begin to teach courses that would explore the underlying dynamics of Vietnam-type phenomena, the post World War II peace research movement was finally taken note of by the sociological profession. The sociology of the military, one of the oldest specialties in the discipline, was alive and well after the war with Morris Janowitz's studies, but was cool to the de-emphasis on nationalism that peace researchers represented. The study is intended rather as a contribution to a new dialogue among ASA members interested in this field as to how research and teaching should develop in relation to the issues of conflict and peace. Radical experiments in new ways of teaching, and off-campus experimental learning, which are important parts of some new conflict and peace studies programs, have scarcely been mentioned here.

Sociologists have begun to take their own behavior more seriously and the sociology of sociology has become a growth industry. C.W. Peek reports over 250 articles on the sociology of sociologists up to 1967 and production since that time has probably increased. Several books have appeared since then. Since it is impossible to draw a conclusion from what is obviously a process, only a final parable is necessary. What may be necessary for the future is a change in the disciplines central theological position. During the 1960s, sociologists were good Calvinists. Most interpreted the expansion as a clear sign of grace. In the 17th century, there was a reaction to the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election and irresistible grace when Jacobus Arminius suggested instead that man faced alternatives and was actually free to make choices. Instead of the grim determination of Calvin, he presented a theology of hope, even if grace was not guaranteed. It is that opportunity and those choices that sociologists face in the 1970s. They must be used effectively or else sociology may be remembered in the future as only later-day versions of the Gnostic or the Albigensian heresies.

According to Robert K. Merton people suffer the cross-pressures of both humanity and science. And once he cites the strain, he goes on to cite the functions served by this persisting behavior. Merton's attempt to bring people together between a humanity and a science overlooks the fundamental choices one must make in the act of sociological endeavor: to 1) discover social laws, 2) interpret the social world, or 3) change it? Each of these three conceptions implies a different position on the use of masters in the work of the discipline. But for graduate study, it seems only fair to confront the student with these choices. There have been no sociological revolutions in a Kuhnian sense, for no one paradigm, theory, research, and practice, has ever been universally accepted, much less discarded. The prospects for the future are the same as the past: shifts in the relative proportions of sociologists working in each paradigm, but none totally supplanting the others. But if the ascendancy of one or the other of the paradigms makes a difference in how sociology develops, or how it shapes social policy, then graduate students are morally obliged to give each paradigm a fair hearing.

The article analyzes the article "The Potential Impact of B.F. Skinner Upon American Sociology," by Robert Friedrichs. In his article, Friedrichs appears fully conscious of the possibility that his predictions will be self-defeating. Ironically, the anxiety which Friedrichs conveys about the prospects of a Skinnerian sociology is most evident at those points at which his argument is both the strongest and the weakest. On the one hand, Friedrichs, indulging in conspiracy theory somewhat, puts together seemingly disparate pieces of a puzzle to construct an essentially convincing image of a chamber of horrors-and one need not share his conspiratorial passion to grasp the integrity of his logic. On the other hand, his article seems particularly weak when he attempts to glue the puzzle he has constructed to the notion of the invisible college. Friedrichs attempts to show that the invasion of the body snatchers is in full swing based on his recitation of a number of individuals, perhaps conspiratorially linked together, but found in various departments. This does not seem totally convincing for two reasons. First, the assumption that the graduate departments he cites are monolithic research factories may be fallacious, and second, with a few notable exceptions those departments are not high producers of graduate students destined to leap into positions of power, prestige and moneyed research slots.

From the perspective of radical sociologists, there is merit to the proposition that contemporary sociology; theory and methodology alike, is an increasingly important part of the technology of repression in a managed society. There is the corollary proposition that the graduate program is so structured that today's graduate students are destined to become the functionaries who provide the corporate world with the accurate, timely, comprehensible data by which to manage the publics in tomorrow's schools, factories, political parties, markets and churches. From this perspective, central to the transformation of sociology is the transformation of the graduate program. Examining the five major components of contemporary sociology, it appears that graduate students are the most amenable to transformation in as much as they occupy the most marginal and unstructured positions in the profession. At the same time, they are the future of sociology. It is clear that graduate students are also the most vulnerable to repression. The other four components; undergraduate students, professors, research consultants and officers of the various sociology organizations are not likely to act creatively and effectively to transform sociology if past experience is any guide.

Academic sociology has vanished in the Peoples Republic of China since 1952, while it has been growing in all other nations, capitalist or socialist. This perplexing phenomenon calls for an explanation. The view advanced here is that a nameless sociology has not only remained quite alive in China today, but has also become the intellectual property of the people. Evidences in support of this view will be shown in the present article, which attempts a general review of the development of sociology in China from its beginning to the present time. The review will deal with the emergence of a Chinese sociology, critical comments on Western sociology during the anti-sociology campaign in 1957, sociological elements in Mao Tse-tungs writing and the rise of the "mass sociology." The early form of sociology as represented by the works of its founding fathers made its debut in China in 1903 when Yen Fu, an articulate interpreter of Western classics, published his translation of the book "Principles of Sociology." In the academic world, departments of sociology first appeared at St. John's University in Shanghai in 1914 and Yen-ching University in Peking in 1922 and later gained acceptance by several other major universities in Peking, Shanghai and Nanking.