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Elaborates on the factors affecting the process of publishing a research paper. Quality and importance of the data, analysis, implications and writing; Marketing; Costs of publishing.

This article serves as an introduction to the issue's special feature on "The Nuclear Threat." The early sociological literature on nuclear war related issues is reviewed and the dearth of sociological work in this area since the early 1960s is documented. A new call for sociological theory and research on the nuclear threat is issued and possible topics are outlined. The paper concludes with a brief review of the papers that make up the special feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postmodern discourse, sell is displaced as a central presence in experience and reappropriated as yet another personal signifier. This paper describes key postmodern views, then reframes postmodern vocabulary in terms of interpretive practice. It argues that the postmodern (raining of self is too abstract and that a distinctly modern discourse focused on the deprivatization of interpretive activity can account empirically lot features if post modern "presence." Comparative ethnographic and narrative mate- rial is offered in illustration. We conclude by suggesting how self can be retrieved for classical sociological commentary and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retracing my own research experience in creating a sociological narrative about a famous industrial engineer and mother. I describe how I began to question modernist images of self, interests, and power. As I reflected on how best to characterize Gilbreth's management of women, I began to see that my nation of how to write critical, historical biography rested heavily on a binary, modernist conceptual foundation. My research experience rocked this foundation by convincing me that we should see selves as multiple and interests as malleable, and that we should broaden our conception of power to include disciplinary power which circulates through people rather than belonging to them. The paper concludes by affirming the merits of new ways of writing about people that acknowledge their multiple selves without sacrificing the political strength of modernist language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of victimization experiences and crime-related variables on act-specific fear of crime are reinvestigated. Perceived risk and vulnerability to crime were expected to mediate the influence of demographic and crime-related variables on fear. The results of this study suggest that fear of property loss is more explainable by crime-related variables than is fear of violent victimization. Perceptual variables diminish the direct impact of victimization experiences and local crime rate on each type of fear of crime. However, particular demographic and crime-related variables have different effects on fear of property loss and fear of violent crime. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on the social determinants of fear of crime among the elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costner (1965) showed that many of the most commonly used measures of association may be conceptually interpreted as indicating proportional reduction in prediction error. But because it is verbally cumbersome, and conceptually complex for some measures, the proportional reduction in error interpretation has not been widely incorporated in research reports where appropriate. Instead, measures of association continue to be interpreted in abstract terms distinguishing between broad levels of strength. This paper demonstrates that all proportional reduction in error measures of association may be alternately interpreted as indicating the percent of variation explained. Because this interpretation is conceptually meaningful in a manner highly relevant for scientific investigation, more convenient to apply in research reports, and already familiar to most social scientists, it is argued that it be standardly applied to all proportional reduction in error measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintenance, an important concept in the organizational literature, is often assumed to be a key factor in the low levels of sensitivity to client needs and demands apparent in many human service organizations. This paper uses data from a national sample of juvenile courts to demonstrate, however, that maintenance may relate to other variables in ways that are at variance with the common assumption. The maintenance of internal organizational operations is bound closely to the development of ties to the community; as a result, strong emphasis on maintenance actually leads to high levels of sensitivity to clients when certain environmental forces demand it. This positive relation is especially strong when organizations are highly vulnerable to external pressures. Such results suggest a contingent view of the role of maintenance in organizations and imply some further directions for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of research specialization in science. The format consists of two sections. The first features a state-of-the-art review of evidence from so-called specialty case studies on definitions, measurement strategies, and representations of the relations in which small groups of researchers cohere. In the second section, a theoretical perspective on the development of specialties is formulated. This perspective incorporates demographic factors into the study of specialty structures and processes, and suggests in particular that core researchers derive innovations from the margins of their specialty. It is further hypothesized that both maintenance and realignment of social structures, i.e., communication and status configurations, depend on intellectual events that occur in the course of normal scientific progress. Finally, the notions of intellectual migration as a career research style and the prevalence of transient specialties lacking institutionalized bases are explored and recommended, among others, for empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper by Takayama and Cannon on formal polity and the distribution of power among Protestant denominations is a good example of statistical significance which either has no substantive significance or at least does not have the substantive significance attributed to it. The problem seems to be a lack of what Blumer called exploration. Blumer used the notion of exploration to stress the importance of "a close and comprehensive acquaintance with sphere of social life that is unfamiliar" to the researcher. The point is that researchers must remain in continual contact with the empirical world that they are studying, and be guided by that empirical world in fashioning their conclusions.