Search

The paper written by Professor Delbert Miller about the future direction of industrial sociology is critiqued. Miller addressed the related two related themes which are the need for sociology departments to remodel offerings to compete for students in the educational marketplace and the importance of sharpening the discipline's identity as a specialization directed at business and industry. As a result of the proposed changes in the discipline, students would become viable candidates for personnel, human resources and industrial relations positions. Miller was not suggesting that sociology departments or industrial sociologists have absolutely avoided applications. Rather, neither has sufficiently developed such programs to brake the loss of sociology majors to university units that promise more marketable training.

This paper first reviews the descriptions and structural explanations for variations, in urban population densities in the United States over several decades. The research reviewed focuses on shifts in the technology and economics of travel as being the major influences on urban density distributions. These variables appear to be somewhat less adequate as explanations of the process in recent decades. After reviewing these findings and suggesting several research questions, we attempt to assess the evidence relating variations in population density to several other aspects of human behavior. A review of the research relating high population densities to various "social pathologies" indicates that little of the variance in rates of these pathologies can be attributed to density independently of other social structural variables. Some important consequences of population density have been reported, however, and possible research directions are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not unusual, in fact, it is commonplace, that in the development of a body of knowledge a particular mode of thought, while responsible for the discovery and ordering of important facts, is at the same time responsible for the obstruction of equally important truths. This appears especially to be the case in the sociological study of criminal behavior. There has been the overwhelming conception of criminal behavior (and deviant behavior in general) as behavior that is produced by a variety of impersonal, deterministic forces rather than by voluntaristic, purposive action. The former perspective found in much of criminology today results from a particular conception of man and society. The object of this paper is to explore the possibility of an alternative conception of man and society for criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this study is that given to the review of a book in a recent issue of Commentary. It also refers to an important contemporary social movement, namely, mental illness. This is a movement that accords to irrationalism a constantly increasing respectability. An enormous increase in the kinds of conduct classified as irrational has resulted in the past few decades from the work of some of the most highly educated and intellectual students of human behavior. One corollary is a decrease in the kinds of behavior classified as rational. This has been accompanied by a violent attack upon the concepts of reason and individual responsibility, and by attempts to substitute the concepts of irresponsibility and exculpation. These attempts have been successful to a great degree. This paper will concern itself with two problems that mark this social movement. The first problem is that of definition and counting. The second is that of resolving the paradox of irrationalism. It would be tedious to summarize the studies of the past twentyfive years that show that the interest in mental illness is a social movement rather than a scientific development. One of the first, by Kingsley Davis, showed that it possesses a characteristic essential to any social movement. Its proponents conceive it to be a panacea. As a social movement it is in many respects the functional equivalent of religion in the system of traditional middle-class values. The movement is today continuing to propagate middle-class values and ethics under the guise of science. It presents the prototype of the middle-class or upper-class person as being in all important respects equivalent to that of the mentally healthy person. Thus it is not to be wondered at that when psychiatrists and other clinicians (who are professional and upper class ) interview and otherwise "examine" lower-class children, especially delinquent boys, they find that the boys are "emotionally disturbed" or "mentally ill" in some form and to some degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]