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Natural history, observational, and interview data from a study of two anti-pornography crusades and the social movement organizations which created and directed them are used to assess nine propositions formulated by Zald and Ash (1966) concerning the structure and dynamics of social movement organizations. The Zald-Ash propositions were formulated from the literature on national, established social movement organizations. This paper explores the applicability of the propositions to those organizations which are small and emerging. The propositions are generally supported. Discrepancies are accounted for by the significant influence of leadership orientation, goal specificity, and incentive structure in determining other structural and dynamic characteristics of small or emerging social movement organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the diffusion of innovations has, in the last twenty years, produced a plethora of research findings, which have been summarized by a number of writers (e.g., Lionberger, 1960; Rogers, 1962, 1967 and 1968; Katz et al., 1963; Jones, 1967; Bohlen, 1064). However, these summaries are basically taxonomic and programmatic rather than theoretic in nature. As the paucity of theoretical work in diffusion studies has been well recognized (cf. Bogers, 1962:300; Robinson and Bailey, 1965:332), there exists a real need for us to search for a general theory pertinent to this field. The aim of the present paper is to discuss a recurrent theme running through many diffusion studies, namely the old concept of adopter-innovation compatibility, and to show how this concept looms as highly suggestive of its utility as a theoretical approach to the studies in the diffusion of innovations and social change. The notion of adopter-innovation compatibility has been utilized in recent diffusion research in two general ways: explicitly and implicitly. We shall therefore discuss first these two different modes in which it has been used and then its implications as a general theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A source of social movement transformation which has been relatively neglected by researchers involves the effect of factors in the pre-movement environment which reemerge sporadically throughout the careers of social movements. Their reemergence may account for the direction of the transformation process and, specifically, for the differential transformations which characterize some movements at various points in their careers. A case study illustrating this effect is presented, followed by a more general consideration of when this phenomenon may be expected to occur and what movement-related factors facilitate its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manifold factors have been identified as causal mechanisms in social change, but an important one—temporality—has been neglected. Temporality is the social time that characterizes any society, and that social time is consequential for the rate and direction of change. The three dimensions of temporality are temporal pattern, temporal orientation, and temporal perspective. The differences between the Japanese and Chinese along these three dimensions help explain their differential responses to the 19th century Western challenge. Specifically, two propositions are examined in the light of the historical data: a society's temporality limits the range of adaptive responses to new circumstances, and the symbols of social time act as a mechanism of social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills attempted to point the way toward a more nearly viable sociology by identifying and defining the horns of the dilemma upon which the discipline was, in his estimation, caught. These horns were those of grand theory and abstracted empiricism. On the one hand, Mills believed, are those sociologists whose writings are on such a generalized level that they are unrelated to the sociological and social problems of the empirical world. On the other hand, are those sociologists whose work is so tied to picayune fact-grubbing that the results of their research have no theoretical orientation, are not cumulative, and, therefore, also are not relevant nor of value to the student of public affairs. The Millsian solution to the sociological dilemma was characteristic. He not only demolished its horns but also suggested that sociology could find a greater relevance in the world of affairs if it would follow an imaginative course through their remains. The sociological imagination, derived as it is from American pragmatism, became at once a method for research into empirical reality and for theoretical ordering of the data from that research. The models thus created from historical and contemporary data became open-ended ones of process, dynamic assessment, and strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]