Search

The article presents information on the 1965 issue of the journal "Sociological Inquiry." The 1954 and 1955 Supreme Court decisions on desegregation are the force that set in motion vast changes that are restructuring the very nature of race relations in the United States. This volume contain recent developments relating to race relations in the United States. Its nine essays touch on several of the major areas in which change occurs or in which old blemishes remain. The paper by Robin Williams, with which this issue begins attempts an overview of what has happened in the last two decades. Most of the papers in this set are themselves reports of research appropriate to Williams' contention that intergroup relations are part of the basic dynamics of modem social systems. Richard Lamanna's doctoral dissertation is concerned in part with the response of the Negro public school teacher to desegregation. Lewis Killian turns his attention to the negotiations between representatives of the white and Negro communities.

The article discusses the social sources of criminology. The author states that as a synthetic discipline utilizing the knowledge of separate branches of study, the content of criminology has been shaped to a large degree by the nature of relationships between those disciplines that provide food for criminological thought. Some of those relationships and their effects are the subject of the first part of this article. As a practical discipline oriented to applied results, the content of criminology has also changed with changes in the broader society and its mode of response to criminals, as mediated by occupational groups whose members are charged with the prevention, processing and control of crime. Relationships between the society and its agents on the one hand and social scientists on the other, can be seen in changes that have occurred in specific areas of crime studies. Some of those changes are reviewed in the second part of the article. The author points out in the U.S. the study of crime has been intimately linked with the growth of sociology. As the field was conceived in its early years in this country, sociology was to be in large part a science of social problems, devoted to the study of all those forces bringing misery to industrial man. Study of such problems occupied the center of sociological concerns.

A response is the article within the issue by author Coleman Romalis on the topic of sociology, democracy, political sociology, political science and ideology. An overview of the political left, liberalism and the Democratic political party in mid 20th century U.S. politics, including Democrats' role in the Vietnam War, is provided.

This article presents information on the approach to the study of community power. The purpose of this study did not require delineation of the local power structure. Nevertheless, for reasons not relevant here, a series of questions typical of reputational power structure studies were asked. The particular item of concern requested each respondent to name the seven most important people in the city. Obviously, in giving a large sample as many as seven choices to apply to what could have been for them an almost infinite pool, the researcher Joel Smith and Thomas Hood should expect a considerable list of names if no common factors guide individual choices, they did, in fact, remark upon the sheer magnitude of the actual list that resulted, for it reminded them the so-called reputational method has two major forms. The first takes nominations from only a relatively small panel of respondents chosen on the assumption that they are insiders who must know who gets his way or who must be considered. The second, probably with considerably less rationale, subjects a cross-sectional sample of an area population to approximately the same type of question.

The purpose of this article is to deal with four main topics pertaining to the past two decades of the history of intergroup relations in the United States. First, changes in group structures and social identities, social structure and prejudice, thirdly, the base of organized protest and finally, processes of conflict and conflict resolution. great changes have occurred in the internal structures of and the relations among racial, ethnic and religious collection. As cultural differences associated with national origins and language have been reduced as a consequence both of greatly reduced immigration and of extensive acculturation, racial distinctions have moved into a more central position in the total societal structure. Racial prejudice, both as a sense of group position and as a belief in the "difference" and inferiority of subordinates is a major norm in American society today. In the case of Negro-white relations in recent times, the conflict has been centered upon pressure for change from Negroes, versus the resistance to change from white partisans of the status quo ante.