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Program evaluation attempts to assess the consequence of deliberate efforts to intervene in ongoing social processes. Efforts to understand and explain social processes and social change constitute social theory. The evaluation of social programs provides an opportunity both to test existing theories of social change and to discover new theory. Current notions about theory in the evaluation literature are reviewed and cues from that literature provide the basis for suggested directions in the relationship between the design of programs, their evaluation, and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology as an academic discipline has always undergone change and modification in theory, method and substance. This article addresses some of the changes in many substantive area of sociology. Some special aspects that have characterized American sociology was discussed. The diversity in styles of sociological work was recognized. In order to provide a broader context for sociological work, it is necessary to go back to the turn of the century,a period of marked social change in America. There are two major influence on how academic sociology would respond to change the development of pragmatism in American philosophy and sociologists' belief in empiricism.There are some similarities between the concerns of European sociologists of the last century and the American sociologists of the early decades of the century.

The bulk of sociological theory is based on a notion of "state": mechanical-organic solidarity, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, folk-urban, and so forth. We propose a theory that social systems consist of actors and groups in constant motion. Further, we propose that the duality of actor and society generate a system that can be understood by using the concepts of complementarity, indeterminacy and the principle of relativity. Such a system is defined and the issue of social change is addressed. Basically, change is defined as an alteration in the motion of actors relative to the motion of groups. As the number of groups increases relative to the number of actors, the velocity of actors increases and the velocity of groups decreases. The increasing disparity of these velocities indicates greater social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upper-class directors of major industrial companies are directors of more corporations than arc the non-upper-class directors, but they arc less likely to serve on executive committees of corporate boards. This may indicate that there is a class-based division of labor in which the upper-class directors are more concerned with inter-organizational relationships and with the functioning of the economy as a whole, and that non-upper-class directors are concerned with day-to-day operations of individual companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]