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The article presents information about various conferences and academic activities in the field of sociology that appeared in the 1965 issue of the "International Journal of Comparative Sociology." The International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists had its Fifth Symposium from September 29 to October 4, 1964. The symposium was held near Quebec, Canada, under the chairmanship of professor Georges Gurvitch. The theme of the symposium was "Social Classes in Present-day Sociology." A series of papers were on social classes in tropical Africa. The Sixtieth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association was held at Chicago, Illinois, from August 30 to September 2, 1965. One came from this conference of American sociologists, with many Canadians present, a little confused, certainly so if he went with the purpose of taking it all in. For this anonymous reporter the impression was one of bigness, of complexity, and of a great bureaucracy emerging. The Sixth World Congress of Sociology will be held in Evian, France, during September 4 to 11, 1966. Communications by prospective participants are of two types official and individual. Specialists interested in an official presentation are required to contact the president of the working group in which they are interested.

The article presents brief information on various congresses and seminars on sociology. The Institute International De Sociologie held its 20th World Congress in Cordoba, Argentina, from September 5-11, 1963. 50th session of the Indian Science Congress Association was held from October 7-10, 1963 in Delhi, India, under the presidency of professor D.S. Kothan, chairman of the University Grants Commission of India. For the first time in its history, the International Congress of Orientalists was held in an Oriental country. It is particularly happy that the Government of India had taken keen interest in organizing and financing the session. The Colombian Sociological Association will sponsor the Seventh Latin American Congress of Sociology, to be held in Bogota, Colombia, July 14-19, 1964, in coordination with the Latin American Association of Sociology. A two-day Seminar on the definition of culture was organized by the Department of Social Anthropology, Karnatak University, Karnataka, India in January 1964.

The article presents some research papers in sociology. One of the papers titled "Unilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage: Some Observations on the Controversy" discusses various issues related with cross-cousin marriage. It examines socio-familial systems characterized by preferential marriage based on definite kinship relations in contrast to those, which as far as marriage is concerned are based on a transfer of wealth or on free choice. Another paper "Consensual and Legal Marital Unions in Costa Rica" comments on the prevalence of consensual unions or quasi-marital relationships in the Caribbean and Latin America. The literature on this subject is studied under two categories. In one category are grouped the demographic studies which have taken as their central concern the relationship between the nature and extent of non-legal unions and reproductive behavior. In the other category are the more sociological and anthropological investigations that tend to be concerned with whether or not these non-legal unions are normative alternatives to legal marriage.

This is a sociological study of the Indian industrial worker. The study is based on a review and discussion of the available empirical evidence and the relevant theoretical literature on the subject. There are two main objectives of this study one, to bring together whatever little empirical data exist on the sociology of the Indian industrial worker, and, two, to examine certain theories on the subject in the light of the empirical evidence. In view of these objectives, the study will, of course, be biased towards empirical data and the sociological method of analysis. It is well to recognize this fact, because the selection of material for review as well as the review itself will be influenced by this bias. For example, much of the literature dealing mainly with the history of the Indian industrial worker has been deliberately excluded from the scope of this paper. Also excluded are works, which are based mostly on what might be called hindsight or mere speculation. It is the impression of this writer that much of the literature on the subject is either not based on first-hand empirical data or, if empirical, not sufficiently well grounded in relevant theory.

The article presents information about various developments taking place in the field of sociology at the international level. A Conference for the study of British society and the problems it presents to immigrants will be held in London from April 20-22, 1966, jointly sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Institute of Race Relations. There will also be contributions from Holland, France and Germany, concerning these countries. On March 4-6, 1966, a Conference on "Interdependencies of National and International Political Systems," jointly sponsored by the committee on comparative politics of the Social Science Research Council and the Center of International Studies, Princeton University, was held at the Princeton Inn. Two papers were prepared for the conference and circulated to the participants in advance "National Political Systems and International Politics Notes on the Need for Research," by Harry Eckstein and Harold Sprout of Princeton University, and "Toward the Study of National-International Linkages," by James N. Rosenau of Douglas College, Rutgers--The State University. The Second World Conference on World Peace through the Rule of Law was held at Washington D.C., September 12-18, 1965. It was a meeting of the legal profession from different parts of the world. About 3000 delegates from 115 nations met at Washington, among them were a large number of High Court Judges and Attorneys General.

The article presents information about various international conferences and seminars, held as of September 1, 1964. A Conference on Customary Law in Southeast Asia was held in Singapore under auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning on April 27, 1964. The focus of the conference was primarily the preliminary analysis of the role of customary law in relation to the family structure, to modernization and to positive law in Southeast Asia and its environs. Convened under auspices of the Social Sciences Centre, Athens and financed by the Greek Government and UNESCO, this significant conference continued a tradition begun by the Wenner-Gren Foundation at Burg Wartenstein in 1959 and continued by the Centre in July of 1961.

The article presents various researches done in the field of sociology that appeared in the 1968 issue of the "International Journal of Comparative Sociology." In 1962, while conducting a field study of rural community councils in Saskatchewan as part of a larger study for the Centre for Community Studies, the writer attempted to test some notions suggested by Kimball and Pearsall in their study of the Talladega, Alabama, Community Council. Sociologists Solon T. Kimball and Marion Pearsall have formulated eight principles of organization, which they feel apply particularly to the community council type of voluntary association. Three of these principles are referred to here: Legitimation, Conformance, and Validation. The Pueblo of Taos is located in the northeastern portion of New Mexico on a plateau near the upper Rio Grande. It is near the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, which appears to have separated somewhat, the peoples of the Southwest Culture Area from those of the Plains. In this geographical position the Taos are the most northern of those groups of Indians residing in Arizona and New Mexico, which have been referred to ethnographically as the Pueblo Indians. The purpose of this brief paper is to comment on an aspect of the legal mechanisms and activities of the Taos.

Presents an introduction to the September 1, 1973 issue of "International Journal of Comparative Sociology."

The article presents information regarding various international organizations and their activities, as of September 1, 1964. The Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. Johns, Canada was established in the spring of 1961 to foster and undertake research into the many economic and social questions arising in Newfoundland because of its unique historical, geographical and economic position. The Anthropological Study Group was established in Holst, West Germany to bring together both professional specialists and amateurs to further the cause of scientific knowledge of man and cultures. This organization specializes in the ethnology of the original inhabitants in America. The Asia Society was started in 1957 with a view to encourage Asian studies in American schools and colleges, and to assist the newly arrived Asians in the U.S. in their adjustment process and to foster cross cultural education and understanding between Asia and the U.S. It is a cultural organization and a non-profit educational body.

In this article, the author focuses on political sociology. In a broad, general sense, political sociology may be defined as that area of human study in which the inter-actions between social and political factors, forces, ideas, ideals and institutions are mapped. The insight that there is such an area may be discovered already, though dimly and perhaps implicitly, in the great classics of the political literature of the past. But that insight was never consciously exploited and the conditions conductive to the emergence of a full-fledged political sociology have arisen only in the recent years. With the increasing ability of social man to direct his destiny, itself the result of his increasing technological resources, the possibility of Social Engineering, of directing social forces through political agencies or the possibility of influencing political institutions through social forces, have become formidable. This development must be counted among the major causes for the increasing attempts at focusing social and political studies onto common targets. The results of such collaborations have been fascinating, intellectually stimulating and sociologically illuminating.

The article focuses on population processes as measuring devices. When statistics which describe a society, a national population or an economy, are analyzed, showing either its state at a given time, or the flow of events and the changes it undergoes during a given period. There are several parallels and some useful hints not emerging from conventional expositions of behavioral measurement. Measurement requires the use of instruments, but instruments are themselves physical systems whose responses need to be studied by the use of instruments. Age-specific rates of first marriage vary with the age; typically rising to a peak value, thereafter declining. The location of the peak depends on sex, calendar period or generation, and on the population studied. The age-specific rates are obtained by dividing the number of persons entering first marriage at a given age by the number living at risk at that age in the sense of being never married. However, if one assume that some of the never married are, in fact, unmarriageable and hence not really at risk it follows that the customary rate fails to reflect the true situation, and that this might be the reason for the age-dependence of the rates.

The article discusses measures of individual modernity. The concept of modernity has been applied to a variety of social and cultural units societies, civilizations, cultures, communities and particular institutions. Sociologist Leonard W. Doob developed a set of scales for the measurement of "psychological modernization." He does not suggest that his scales should be used with other populations, although he implies that most of the eighty items come from scales developed from Western populations and expresses the belief elsewhere that less civilized people everywhere share the same attributes. Another sociologist Joseph Kahl studied modern and traditional values in Brazil and Mexico. The results of the factor analysis, together with the outcome of the test of spuriousness, leads Kahl to conclude that the syndrome of modernism posited in the theoretical literature can be demonstrated empirically. In the absence of unambiguous evidence of convergence to a modern structure and culture, the proposition that there is convergence remains an assumption, rooted perhaps in certain models of functional analysis and evolution.

Robert Park, leader of the dominant Chicago school of sociology, felt that the city, in the very process of its growth, "creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community" "In place of the simple, spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower animals to live without education and without anxiety," he argued, the city creates men "compelled to supplement original nature with special training and with more elaborate machinery until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in danger of losing all its joy." The peasant who comes to work in the city, Park held, is the proto-typical case for observing the threat to individual integrity inherent in urban life. "Man, translated to the city," he remarked, "has become a problem to himself and society in a way and to an extent he never was before." To resolve the controversy as to whether migration and subsequent modernizing experiences in developing countries are or are not deleterious to mental health, and to determine under what conditions such harmful influences as may result can or cannot be counteracted, required data in a form and on a scale not previously available The materials collected by the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Development permit a substantial advance in the assessment of the effects of migration, industrialization, and urbanization on psychic adjustment.

This article discusses the role of business management in relation to economic development. Economic development as an academic study is almost entirely the preserve of economists, yet in the whole field of the applied social sciences, it is one of the most important areas for investigation, given that nearly three quarters of mankind live in countries that can be defined as being in the process of economic development. In the past, the variable of human resources as a critical factor in economic development has received scant attention, but recent years have witnessed the emergence of a small group of eminent advocates who, in various ways, try to redress the balance in favor of a more careful consideration of what is now often called human capital.

The role of alcohol in primitive society has been the subject of much speculation, and many vague generalizations. The basis for these has often been without foundation, relying instead upon the individual's view of the primitive as childlike, or some opposite of Western man, etc. It can be seen that there are a great many connections between alcohol and religion. The main connection can be related first to the psychophysiological effects. That alcohol can help contact the supernatural world through the ecstatic states it produces. It also may reduce anxiety and thus be compatible with that aspect of religion indirectly stemming from the nature of alcohol and the mysterious way in which it is produced is a belief in its sacred and spiritual character, the belief that it has mana. As a container of mana it can find many uses. As the spirit world is composed of ancestors or spirits whose nature is like man's, alcohol is pleasing to the spirits and gains their favorable attention. Finally, as man likes alcohol, providing alcohol at religious ceremonies is the way to gather larger groups together that is essential as witnesses and participants in most religious ceremonies.

The article presents information about the city, political change and modernization in Japan. First, to hypothesize that modern, urban Japanese society-like social structure anytime, anywhere-is rooted in traditional Japanese culture is neither to state a truism, on the one hand, nor to engage in contradiction, on the other. This point inevitably demands a set of brief definitions of such terms as culture, tradition and modernization. It also calls for some grasp of concepts like cultural continuity and culture change, as expressed particularly in the form of urban environment. Culture, according to scholar Clyde Kluckhohn, is that specific quality with which anthropologists are preoccupied in a technical sense Kluckhohn refers to those selective ways of feeling, dunking, and reacting that distinguish one group from another-ways that are socially transmitted and learned by each new generation. One can, then, presumably speak of Japanese culture. The above-mentioned studies of the Great or the Littee tradition in Japan have leaned far more heavily than is admitted on the comparative sociology of sociologists Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Redfield and Robert Bellah. All begin with a primitive or elementary form of social organization, what is compared with a single-cell organism in biological evolution.

During the past decade, and especially during its latter half, historians and philosophers of science have given increased attention to the logical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. In part, this is a reflection of the growth of the disciplines so designated, in part, it is due to new developments in philosophical inquiry. Whatever the reason, several books have appeared recently wherein the social sciences are examined at length along with the physical and biological sciences. Comparisons are inevitably made, one outcome of which is a general consensus that the former have not yet produced laws of the same order, reliability, or applicability, as have the latter. This conclusion is not surprising, but some of the reasons for it deserve the consideration of those who believe that the comparison is a justifiable one. There is no intention of reviewing those reasons here. Rather, the author proposes to concentrate attention upon a particular aspect of the problem, namely, the circumstances which hamper the formulation of laws of socio-cultural change. To some extent these impediments are generally operative, some, however, are specifically related to change in human behavior. The term socio-cultural is intended to have its widest connotation. It signifies any customary or socially standardized concept, belief behavior, or artifact.

The article presents informatio on various international meetings, to be held worldwide, as of September 1, 1964. The seventh Latin American Congress of Sociology will be held in Bogota, Colombia, in July 1964, in collaboration with Latin American Sociological Association. The central theme of the congress will be sociology and the present Latin American transformation. Sub-themes to be discussed include the following sociology and national planning, sociology of agrarian transformations, sociology of education. The 11th New Zealand Science Congress will meet in Auckland, New Zealand, in February 1965.

Forces against isolation of disciplines in the social sciences work from two sides. On the one hand, there is the ineffectiveness and the non-definitive character of existing segregation or isolation of the various disciplines. On the other hand, needs of practice per se as well as needs of the active pursuance of each of these disciplines concerned tend to conspire in forcing the isolated branches of the social sciences together. The existing trend towards multidisciplinary co-operation and also towards interdisciplinary integration, is more than a response to the need for practical answers to practical problems. It is inherent both in modalities of the separateness of the several disciplines as well as in those of the mode of operation of each separate discipline. Interdisciplinary effort is as much a means towards a practical goal as a goal by itself, the goal in the latter case being the solution of some vital problems inherent in present conditions of specialization.

The article discusses sociological aspects of the prestige attached with different occupations with reference to comparative sociology. Several studies conducted in the U.S. before 1940 were apparently directed to the problem of determining whether in fact there was a general ranking of occupations which the American public would recognize. Even if Philippines society is not highly industrialized it is clear that after many years of Spanish, American, and some Japanese occupation, it is a society which is ordered in terms of a modem productive system and the same appropriate general set of values and motivations permeate the system. In a study amongst 214 graduates and students of Business Administration at the Bombay University, Bombay, India, it was found that there was a high degree of agreement in the social grading of occupations in England and India. The subject people in certain "colonial" societies, within certain limits, evaluate occupations in the same general way as respondents in more fully industrialized countries do. They do this in spite of the fact that there is usually a considerable cultural gap between the subject people themselves and their colonial rulers.

The article discusses various issues related to the field of social sciences, urbanism and planning. It would be premature to lay down a complete programme for the research projects in the area. The efforts made in France at the moment, by the General Commission for Town and Country Planning, in liaison with sociologists, demography experts and economists, are enabling people to advance to another stage. The comparison with experiments in other countries can be made gradually. But, before the lines of work are demarcated more exactly project researchers believe that sociologists must keep in front of them as their main object, the fulfillment of needs and aspirations of different strata of the population, starting with the least privileged, and having as their main preoccupation the gradual liberation of man, within the framework of an organically conceived society. Town planning should therefore be dominated by the desire to use all the available techniques to create the framework best fitted to the social structures, and not to change social structures and behavior patterns to fit a technical evolution people should no longer be able to control.

The article presents information on the social change and social structure in transitional societies. Relatively little is known about social change although it is a subject on which a great deal has been written. Social scientists stress the study of the dynamic in social systems, but few accept the risks involved in gaining the knowledge and skills needed to initiate and measure changes in functioning social systems. One is only at the initial stage of the systematic codification of the working knowledge and skills necessary for the researcher to get into and maintain himself within the social science laboratories of functioning social systems. This is a preliminary attempt to establish such a beachhead. While social scientists are not spending any sizable proportion of their time in learning how to initiate and maintain change in functioning social systems, a wide variety of practitioners are. These include at one extreme the consultants and administrators of programs of technical assistance and at the other extreme, the "grass roots" technician. Most of these men know a great deal intuitively about the problems of working with people in situations of change. Their works however, is continuously subverted by their lack of theoretical comprehension of processes of social change.

This article explores the problems of sociology in changing society in the world. The concern of sociology with social change is not new. From the time of Auguste Comte to the present day, sociologists have studied and reflected upon the phenomenon of social change. They have tried to answer the questions that men have asked about society. Sociologists have provided many theories in an endeavor to explain the cause or the direction of social change. No theory of social change has yet been accepted as satisfactorily and adequately applicable to every situation. Each theory has drawn attention to some important factor of change. The different factors that have been selected by different writers for emphasis suggest that social change results from a multiplicity of causes and appears to follow different directions cyclical, or spiral, or linear. Such a conclusion only challenges further research for more exact knowledge, and the search continues. It is one of the dominant interests of sociologists today. It should be noted, however, that Marxist sociologists do not accept this conclusion. They contend that the multiple factor theory is untenable. To them, Karl Marx has already provided a theory applicable to all societies.