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The article presents an analysis of Robert K. Merton's appropriation of Georg Simmel's term übersehbar, or "surveyable." Merton has revealed that the purpose of his mid-1950s reexamination of Simmel's "Soziologie" was to assist his own thinking on a number of problems to be identified in these pages. It has been argued that an understanding of this theoretical development must proceed on at least two planes of analysis. First, it was argued that Merton's development of Simmel's term was influenced by the perceived need to demarcate the boundaries between "proper" and "improper" uses of the classical sociologists. Moreover, the paper identified that Merton's definition of "proper" and "improper" approaches corresponded, respectively, with Functionalist and Chicago School versions of sociology. Second, it was a contention of this paper that Merton's development of Simmel's term was shaped by the perceived need to resolve a problem of post-World War II society; the threats to democracy posed by the social structure of bureaucracy.

Political sociologists interested in corporate power have focused increasingly on the extent to which the business community is cohesive. Studies of cohesion, however, frequently contain either no definition or operational definitions with little theoretical rationale. This paper examines the uses of the term cohesion in the power structure literature as well as in classical and contemporary sociological theory. I argue that: (1) cohesion is most appropriately defined as an objective characteristic of a social structure; (2) to understand a group's power, we should focus on the extent to which its members behave similarly; and (3) the concept of structural equivalence may be as likely to capture the processes of interest to power structure researchers as the concept of cohesion. Findings from a study of corporate political behavior are presented to illustrate this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]