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The purpose of the research reported in this paper is to assess the usefulness of the instrumental-expressive typology in the study of voluntary associations using data provided by university students. The hypotheses center around two basic considerations. The first one extents to which members of the two types of associations differ according to a number of significant sociological variables (e.g., the degree of involvement in friendship networks outside the association). The second consideration is the possible differences in the ways new members are incorporated into instrumental and expressive associations. The three criteria determining the differentiation between the instrumental and expressive association are given. It also discusses personal influence and associational membership. Instrumental and expressive scores of nine associations are presented in tabular form. In conclusion, the instrumental and expressive dimensions represent a sociologically significant way of classifying associations. This distinction may be more useful in some sociological research than the more common systems of classification that are not directly related to sociological theory.

The paper presents an integrative analysis of voluntary associational leadership and reputational influence. It is noted that the degree to which leadership in voluntary organizations contributes to reputational influence patterns in the general community is not an easily predictable phenomenon. It becomes clear that no "a priori" assumptions can be made about the role of voluntary groups in the general leadership of any given community. There is a need, however, to distinguish the "organizational community" from the community in which formal voluntary groups are of considerably less significance. The study results of the overlap of reputational influentials and formal leaders in four towns are given in tabular form. The factors are number of reputational individuals, number of formal leaders, maximum possible overlap, actual overlap and percentage overlap. From the point of view of influence structures, it was discovered that the larger the town the greater the number of persons who receive a given proportion of nominations as an influential. The results of the study presented in this paper justify the trend toward the use of a combination of the positional and reputational methods of identifying leaders.

This paper examines the often repeated assertion that Parsons abandoned the notion of ‘voluntarism’ in favor of ‘macrofunctionalism’ or ‘behavioristic naturalism’ and that the Parsonian scheme therefore reveals marked discontinuity. When Parsons' strategy for theory building is appreciated, this prevalent assumption proves to be incorrect. In fact, the Parsonian action scheme evidences a considerable degree of continuity from 1937 to the present. While a prevalent piece of sociological folklore is refuted by a careful examination of the Parsonian theory building strategy, a number of significant problems in following this strategy are felt to remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unidimensional conceptions of socioeconomic status require that alternative indicators of one's position in the stratification system have similar elects upon the consequences of socioeconomic level. We show herein that different indicators of social participation and psychological well-being are in fact associated with different indicators of socioeconomic status. Thus, any attempt to combine these indicators—educational attainment, occupational pursuit, family income, or occupational origins—into a single index of socio- economic status will prove unsatisfactory because its component parts have different consequences for the same variable. We also show in this paper precisely how certain formulations of the effects of inconsistency and mobility are wholly redundant and only represent a logically possible way of interpreting the linearly additive effects of the variables used to define inconsistency and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social institutions of modern technological culture often fail to provide adequate opportunity for the exchange of emotions and personal feelings of affect and esteem. The widespread development of alternative institutions such as sensitivity training can be seen as an attempt to compensate for the scarcity of this type of interpersonal communication. Reasons for this scarcity are examined in terms of a structural model of individual and societal resource differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effectiveness of sensitivity training is summarized and sensitivity training is compared to other training methods. The extent of participant involvement and learning through experience are the factors found related to the impact of four different kinds of training, and sensitivity training appears to be no more effective than other methods utilizing these factors. Other factors related to the attractiveness of sensitivity training are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to make explicit the strategic goals and the rationale of various ways sensitivity training has been used in industrial and business organizations. Much has been written regarding the design and effectiveness of sensitivity training. Instead of covering this material again, this study attempts to make explicit the strategic goals and the rationale of various ways such training has been used in industrial and business organizations. Doing this provides a basis for considering how effective such training has been indoing what it was intended to do in the organizations where it was used. A wide variety of activity is called sensitivity training. Training so called varies in length, in focus, in the qualifications of the trainer and in participant mix. Such diversity in usage of the team has led to considerable confusion, as witnessed by articles which have recently appeared in several popular magazines in which activities as different as nude marathons and in-company team development sessions are referred to as "sensitivity training." Even in technical journals studies purporting to assess the effectiveness of sensitivity training fail to specify the design of the training.

As a means of increasing the theoretical relevance of sensitivity training for sociologists engaged in evaluative pursuits, the concept of role-based sensitivity is suggested for use in an evaluative research perspective. Results of the application of a role-based sensitivity scale, as a pre-training diagnostic device, in a training program for local human relations commissioners, suggest that the area of sensitivity training has potential as an arena for the refinement of sociological role theory and hence is deserving of the increased interest of sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We do not believe that the T-group is a vital tool for refurbishing organizational life. We present theoretical reasons for believing that organizational training to improve organizational functioning must help participants to function more effectively as components of working bodies carrying out specific tasks in a particular job-setting. We present a sequence of three steps useful in interventions, drawing upon actual examples of interventions in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 25 years the sensitivity training movement has steadily expanded. Growing out of the behavioral sciences, selected interrelated concepts underlie its development and distinguish it sharply from group therapy. The central role of feedback is carefully defined and described and its impact upon individual members as well as upon the evolving group culture are explicated in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional small group concepts have been derived from experimental decision-making groups. Encounter groups not only locus on functional problem-solving but also attempt to facilitate participants' spontaneous and open expression of their authentic emotions in-situ. Through this emphasis the encounter group leader attempts to provide an antidote to role-oriented everyday societal transactions. The complex nature of encounter group interactions defy standard codification by a non-participant researcher. Recently certain small group researchers have become participants in their groups under study as a way of capturing more dynamic processes of group interaction. The small group researcher as participant and encounter group leader/researcher have become united through their use of empathic identification as an artful method in linking up abstract theoretical concepts with observed group happenings. An ethnography of a Youth Encounter Group (that I lead) is presented to illustrate the complex features of leadership in an encounter group. Through an analysis of my ethnography I attempt to show (1) how both small group researchers and encounter group researchers have presented idealizations of group process divorced from the practical features that organize and sustain the on-going group interactions and (2) how both the small group researcher as participant and encounter group leader/researcher have used the process of empathic identification as an unexplicated resource that has obscured and masked the interpretive work carried on by participants—lay and professional—during the encounter group and by researchers in their professional reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates the author's experience with eight children in a group relations training. When one came to think about it, they all were exceedingly brave, even suspiciously loyal to stay together, to stay as a group for as long and as intensely as they dig. Every Tuesday afternoon at 4:00, at 4: precisely, they dragged or bounced or hunched into the little seminar room on the second floor, flopped their coats on the backs of the chairs, sat down, jumped up again to jabber about food and then settled in for two hours of talking, joking, thinking and hard work. There were eight of them. As in a round or nursery rhyme, there was in fact a gentle but still sturdy ritual about the meetings. One never spoke in the idiom of organizations and capital government with words like, "having a dialogue" or "confrontas sessions," but there were modestly protective rituals, linguistic and otherwise, a concatenation of preparative actions, somehow required if not actually religious, purposeful and seriously intended, if not obsessively transacted.

The article describes a factor analytic study of value statements using the value profile, a general-purpose inventory of values developed for use in research on interpersonal relations. The interest of the investigators was broad, and focused to some degree on the process of interaction and its relation to various features of the situation, the task, size of the group, personalities of participants, their attitudes toward each other, and the evolve lag structure of the group over a series of meetings. The task seemed to produce a variety of interpersonal conflicts about which it would be worthwhile to know more. Eight hundred and seventy-two value statements were collected from tests of values, personality tests, theoretical treatments of values, and statements made by subjects in-group discussions. A factor analysis of 143 items representing all value positions yielded four orthogonal factors: a) Acceptance of authority; b) Need-determined expression versus value-determined restraint; c) Equalitarianism; and d) Individualism. The underlying factor space seems to be congruent with that obtained by sociologist Charles Morris, and others, and provides a means of relating existing theoretical classifications of value positions to each other.

A social-psychological perspective, used in the analysis of three cases of nonviolent direct action, combines the ‘exchange theory’ of Homans and the two and three dimensional approaches for the analysis of interpersonal behavior suggested by Leary and Bales. The three dimensions are: dominance-submission, positive-negative, and goal oriented-deviant. Once the behavior of a nonviolent actor has been identified in this three dimensional space. the expected behavior of his opponent can be predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on parent-child communication, sentiment and authority. Sociologist George C. Homans maintains that under certain specified conditions, interaction leads to positive sentiments. In elaborating this relationship he asserts that strong authority may negate this hypothesized link between interaction and sentiment. The data were obtained from questionnaires completed by junior and senior high school students from North Carolina and Ohio. The questionnaires were administered in the classrooms of cooperating schools during April and May of 1960. Teachers in the participating schools were responsible for distributing the questionnaires to their pupils. The anonymity of the respondents was assured by asking that they not sign the instruments. The communities which were sampled cover the range from comparatively rural to two cities with populations slightly over 100,000. The sample for the present analysis includes 8,770 cases. All of the respondents used lived with both of their natural parents. They were enrolled in the seventh through the twelfth grades, and all but a few were between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Protestants predominated and non-whites were excluded. Males and females are represented in almost equal proportions. Each respondent was questioned separately about his relations with his mother and with his father. The questionnaire items employed to operationalize Homans' concepts defined sentiment in terms of perceived closeness of relationship to parents.

The article discusses the development of small group. Recent advances in social psychological theory have made it possible to reduce the number of dimensions necessary to describe interaction in small groups. Earlier analyses had often used category syste

This article present an exploratory overview of the reciprocal relations between uniformation and language. Uniformation means a set of related processes whereby uniformity and similarity of practices in the various social relationships are established in time and space. And a language is a culturally contrived and socially established system of standardized and conventionalized symbols. Uniformation bears a direct relationship to language. In general, if social uniformation is occurring, it involves language; and if linguistic uniformation is occurring, it affects social processes and social structures. The uniformizing factors are so much a part of a sociocultural milieu, so omnipresent, so inherent in so many of people's daily social situations and experiences, that many of them are unaware of the degree to which they exist, the degree to which people are conditioned and controlled by them, and the degree to which forms of uniformation are voluntarily and involuntarily exemplified in their behavior.

This article focuses on linguistic forms or codes. Changes in the form of the social relation affect both the planning procedures used in the preparation of speech and the orientation of the listener. Different forms of social relations can generate quite different speech-systems or linguistic codes by affecting the planning procedures. These different speech-systems or codes create different orders of relevance and relation for their speakers. Two general types of code can be distinguished: elaborated and restricted. These codes can be defined in terms of the probability of predicting for any one speaker which syntactic elements are to be used to organize meaning across a representative range of speech. They themselves are functions of a particular form of social relationship. The pure form of a restricted code would be one where all words and hence the organizing structure are wholly predictable for speakers and listeners. It defines the form of the social relationship by restricting the verbal signaling of individual differences. Individuals mainly relate to each other through the social position or status they occupy. An elaborated code, where prediction is much less possible at the syntactic level, is likely to arise in that social relationship which raises the tension in its members to select a verbal arrangement from their linguistic resources which closely fits specific referents.

This article presents information on professor-student relations in the classroom. Two major conclusions seem justified by the findings of the present study. First, students do vary rather markedly in the type of professor-student role relationship they prefer in the classroom. A reliable instrument has been constructed to measure these preferences. Initial tests support the validity of the instrument. Secondly, the specific findings of the study are consistent with the general propositions stated at the beginning of this article. Competence in the student role, as represented by high mental potential, high creativity and low dogmatism scores, does appear to be associated with preference for a more active student role. Again, students whose parents subscribe to a number of "serious" magazines, frequently discuss issues of national and international importance and make frequent use of libraries can be seen as having at least one significant reference group tending to produce commitment to the student role. Each of these factors has been associated, in the present study, with preference for an active role in the classroom. Finally, subscription to orthodox religious beliefs and leadership in extracurricular activities of an intellectual nature may be taken, respectively, to represent styles of role definition outside the classroom which are akin to the passive and active preferences in classroom role relationships.

"Justice is the good of others," reiterated Aristotle. George C. Homans conceptualizes "social behavior as an exchange of activity, tangible or intangible, and more or less rewarding or costly, between at least two persons." Homans defines the rule of distributive justice in the following words: "A man in art exchange relation with another will expect that the rewards act each man be proportional to his costs, the greater the rewards, the greater the costs-and that the net rewards or profits, of each man be proportional to his investments, the greater the investments the greater the profit. If the statement that rewards are expected to be proportional to cost is meant to imply that the proportion is constant, it is clearly not correct, since people realize that the costs they must incur to obtain certain benefits depend on their scarcity. if this statement, on the other hand is merely meant to imply that people supply increasing rewards to others at increasing costs to themselves in the anticipation of receiving increasing rewards in return, it merely repeats the basic principle of social exchange without adding anything new.

This article discusses various issues related to interpersonal conflicts in Chulsanto, a village in Chiapas in Mexico. Chulsanto is a community of one thousand people who speak a Mayan language. It is located in the southern highlands of Mexico. The article author has observed a few types of interpersonal conflicts and the means by which they are reduced. The source of conflict in relationships seems to be a failure to meet expectations of one or both parties to an existing relationship. Each role relationship between two individuals or coalitions of individuals has a recognized range of jeopardy or imperfection of performance which is acceptable, that is, which does not require the dissolution of the relationship. The severance of some role relationships is more serious than the severance of others. The source of conflict in highly relational role is in fact functional in one's role as community member. An individual can be a bad community member and continue to be a good husband if the imperfection in his role performance is specific to the lowly relational role. Individuals are constantly coming into conflict and restoring or severing role relationships while the community at large remains essentially disinterested. Conflicts which involve role performance demonstrate various regularities.

The article presents the article author's reply in response to criticism of his article on "Nonviolent Action from a Social -Psychological Perspective." The author speaks to his three major points in the order in which he presented them. He agrees that a comprehensive scheme for the analysis of nonviolent direct action would include more than the focus on face-to-face interaction which he has taken. Concerning the application of existing social-psychological theories to the study of nonviolent direct action, he supposes that it would be fair to use any scheme, even if the original author did not have nonviolence in mind. The test of the theory would presumably be its power to organize the data and to suggest testable hypotheses concerning this type of interpersonal behavior. Critics suggests that in only a small number of the instances in which nonviolent action is used as an instrument of social change do the actors avow "love" for their opponents and seek to convert them. Thus the author's analysis of the ideology would not apply to most cases.