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The article discusses about the sociological papers for the people. In response to a challenge of this order from the Editors of the "Beacon," a series of popular sociological expositions, or, as they might be called, "Papers for the People" has been designed by the senior Editor of the "Sociological Review." Some idea of their scope and aims may be gathered from the following titles adopted for representative specimens of the projected papers. The series begins with a paper entitled "Rival Economies and Their Life Values." The first of these papers on current social evolution will appear in the January issue of the "Beacon." For the information of those not acquainted with this journal, written largely by and for men tried in the furnace of the war and found resistant to the temptation of disillusionment, it may be stated the "Beacon" is a monthly magazine devoted to the fashioning of a finer vision of life for the coming times. Now in its second year, it is edited by E. R. Appleton, assisted by Captain W. Wadsworth and Captain Ivor McClure.

The article presents abstracts of various papers related to polls and the new politics. One of the paper discussed is "The Political Functions of Public Opinion Polls in the United States," by Irving Crespi. The dilemma of democratic societies that so concerned Tocqueville, how to free men from entrenched authority without subjecting them to a more arbitrary public opinion, is particularly relevant to the analysis of tile role of public opinion polls in the United States today. Another paper discussed is "The Changing Role of the American Political Parties," by Harry S. Aslimore. The upcoming election may be the one that will finally demonstrate the significance of the shifts in United States population, and most importantly the changes in communications that have affected the political process in this country. Some other papers discussed are "Polling: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Bandwagon Effect," by John L. Perry, "New Techniques for Measuring, Analyzing and Reporting Social Change," by Samuell Lubell and "Application of Q to the Assessment of Public Opinion," by William Stephenson.

President of the American Sociological Society Louis Wirth is planning for a Section on Contributed Papers for the next annual meeting that is to be held in New York from December 28 to 30, December, 1947. Although this Section is particularly de- signed for those younger members of the Society, including graduate students, who have not yet had an opportunity to appear on the pro- gram in other sections, contributions from other members of the Society will be welcome. Since this Committee is working closely with the Committee on Research, it is being urged that members who have completed research papers suitable for oral presentation and which do not fall within the scope of other Sections be offered for consideration in the Section on Contributed Papers.

This paper argues that evolutionary processes occur in the environments of organizations. Ideal types of environment, originally conceptualized by Emery and Trist, are elaborated and extended. A review of recent literature gives evidence of the decreasing autonomy and the increasing interdependence of organizations. Four approaches to interorganizational analysis are reviewed and found inadequate to deal with present-day conditions. This paper then outlines a perspective which allows any organization, its transactions, and the environment itself to be viewed in a common conceptual framework. Two hypotheses are discussed: (I) that organizational change is increasingly externally induced; and (2) that organizational adaptability is a function of ability to learn and to perform according to changes in the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the names of winners and runners-up of the 1970 Ohio Valley Sociological Society student paper competition. In the graduate division the winner was Michael R. Mckee of Notre Dame University who contributed the paper "To Superintend the Sick: A Role Analysis of the Hospital Administrator. Among the Runners-up were Jorge A Bustamante of Notre Dame University who contributed the paper "Ethics and Methods: Some Problems Encountered in Research in Wetbacks," Robert Ladner of the Indiana University who contributed the paper "Anticipatory Socialization and Deviant Behavior: A Theoretical Examination and Edward D. Lafontaine of Ohio State University. In the undergraduate division, the winners were Gary Allan Gereffi of Notre Dame University, who contributed the paper "Dimensions of Community Power: A Study of an Unincorporated Town." The first runner-up title was went to Patricia Fleming and Mary Ellen Batiuk of Marygrove College, who contributed the paper "The Relevance of the Classical Utopic Form in Modern Social Change." The second runner-up title went to Paul L. Channels of Hiram College, who contributed the paper "The Function of Aggression in the Inner City."

This paper argues that the traditional Weberian concerns about complex organizations require refinement and extension for the understanding of organizations designed for social development. Six ideal type modes of looking at development bureaucracies are proposed: (1) that the organization is theoretically oriented; (2) that the organization is designed to provide latent structures to meet the changing contingencies of the development process; (3) that the organization is client centered and is consequently designed to work with the entire social system(s); (4) that the organization is designed to perform a socialization or resocialization function; (5) that social development organizations are ideally committed to a norm emphasizing experimental design as the primary consideration in program design; (6) and that the organization for social development is constrained by the limited alternatives for change available at any given time. In addition, brief attention is given to the great importance of community disintegration and ego impairment as critical constraints on attempts to repair and/or modernize a social system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a newly emerging function for the behavioral scientist and exemplifies its activities by describing and analyzing some recent work in the organizational change area. First, some traditional strategies of change are discussed, followed by a description and analysis of some of the newer change programs associated with the National Training Laboratories, Tavistock Institute, R. R. Blake, C. Argyris, and others. Finally, the "role strains" which inhere in this new action role are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes some adaptations made by the small town newspaper in Washington to the social and cultural changes occurring in the rural environment. Among these adjustments are: a stability in numbers has been reached, although at the expense of some loss of per capita circulation strength; a reduction in the number of two-newspaper towns; an increase in the size of the newspaper page; a shift from Saturday to Thursday as the second most important day of publication; a decreased interest in political parties and policies; a concentration on local news, particularly of persons and organizations. These trends suggest certain observations on the process of change and adaptation in social institutions, which by nature are slow to change: (1) adjustment to change is forced upon an institution by the inroads of competing agencies; (2) the stimulus to change comes from without, not from within the institution; and (3) changes in any one of the four elements of any institution, (a) rank and file membership, (b) leadership, (c) physical structure and equipment, and (d) pattern of attitudes lending sanction to the operation of the institution, will evoke changes and adpatations in the structure and functions of the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the thesis that social workers are effectively promoting social reorganization. Social workers, of course, like professors and members of other professions, have their limitations from the standpoint of promoting social change and there are conservative influences operative in social work, but these will be presented in another paper. It is the assignment of this paper to present the influence of social workers toward social reorganization. Only a few aspects of the subject, however, can be here presented. The fields of public health, housing, leisure time, and child welfare will necessarily be neglected and the major attention given to social workers in the family welfare and relief field as these have related themselves to the matter of social reorganization. Unfortunately relief is still the principal resource in this country for meeting the needs of the unemployed. Although the majority of social workers are still engaged in such relief work, they recognize it as a symptom of social maladjustment and this paper will indicate that they are generally interested in such social reorganization as will make relief unnecessary.

The study presented in this paper takes its point of departure from the working hypothesis that institutional and cultural change can be empirically observed through the growth of a number of selected variables. In his writings, social scientists, F. Stuart Chapin has demonstrated the possibility of studying the successive values of certain strategic institutional variables over a period of time and establishing the law of change by the well-known statistical method of fitting a logistic curve to the time series. Chapin has linked this time series analysis to one type of broad generalization on the cultural and social change in the social group which he calls the cycle of the social process or the societal reaction pattern. An attempt will be made in this paper to summarize some of the findings made in an empirical investigation of a number of quantitative variables related to the organizational growth of ten voluntary associations. Theoretical considerations suggest that these variables are important in understanding the processes of organizational growth and formalization which constitute the topic of this paper.

This paper explores the possibility that Catholic marital values are changing. Data are provided by the debate on marriage participated in by the Church hierarchy in the third session of Vatican II and by related documents. These data are interpreted in tenras of Burgess' conceptualization of the American family in a process of change from institutional to companionship forms. It is suggested that research is needed to determine the prevalence of companionship values in the general and Catholic populations in the United States. A number of general hypotheses consistent with Burgess' conceptualization are fitted to the case of the American Catholic family. The paper concludes that the test of these would yield further understanding of the American Catholic family itself, clarify Burgess' conceptualization, and test its predictability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A conference paper about the social responsibility of business is presented. The author notes that while the subject is not new, it is experiencing a period of increased intensity among the general public. The main concerns deal with examining what role a corporation should play in society and how corporations should go about becoming more socially responsible. The author discusses the public image of the American corporation as well as the role is plays as a social institution.

The article presents a comment on a previous article Prefatory Findings in the Sociology of Missions, by David R. Heise, that appeared in the April 1967 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Long-neglected theories of social change have undergone an extensive revival in recent years as part of the effort to explain the revolutionary transformations, which are sweeping through the traditional societies of the world. The emphasis was placed at first on "the social consequences of technical change," but more recently it has shifted to a concern for the dynamics of the change process itself. This newer emphasis has served to refocus attention on the agents of communication and persuasion which transmit change both within and between groups, and, more generally, on problems of the diffusion of innovation. The most interesting part of Heise's paper, from the vantage point of theory building in diffusion research, is his emphasis on the target unit at which change-attempts are directed. One hopes that Heise's paper will lead not only to further work along the lines but also to renewed interest, at a more macroscopic level, in the diffusion of Christianity, Islam, and other religious movements in other times and places.

The article presents information regarding proceedings of the Sociological Society. Dr. William Brown gave a lecture on "Psycho-Analysis and the Problem of Personality" on February 10, 1914. Dr. C.W. Saleeby read a paper on "The First Decade of Modern Eugenics, 1904-1914" on February 24, 1914. Frank R. Cana read a paper on "The Future of the Kaffir" on March 10, 1914. S.K. Ratcliffe read a paper on "Changing America" on March 31, 1914. Edward A. Filene will speak on "coming Business and Social Changes" on May 5, 1914. Gustav Spiller will read a paper on "Darwinism and Sociology" on May 19, 1914.

The article provides information about developments in various universities and colleges in the field of sociology. Two papers of W. A. Anderson of Cornell University on Rural Social Participation and the Family Life Cycle have been published by the Agricultural Experiment Station as Memoirs 314 and 318. They deal with the relationship of stages in the family life cycle to formal and informal family participation. He has also published a study entitled "Social Change and an Urban Fringe Area." Anderson is working with city and town officials in Ithaca, New York on problems of city expansion and fringe-area incorporation. A Study of Some Factors Associated with Family Informal Participation has been issued as Department Bulletin 36. Department Bulletin 39, "Eight Case Illustrations of Low Formal Participation," and Department Bulletin 40, "Eight Case Illustrations of High Formal Participation," are other recent publications. He has also revised the bibliography of the department. The Government of Brazil, in June, conferred upon T. Lynn Smith of the University of Florida, the Order of the Southern Cross. Smith has spent several years in Brazil, on assignment by the U. S. Department of State, as a visiting professor at the University of Brazil, and as advisor on agrarian reform to the Minister of Agriculture and the National Commission on Agrarian Policy.

Radical movements such as those of the New and Old Lefts are a particular type of social movement whose genesis, composition, and morphology can be explained by extant theory and research. The fate (or career) of radical movements in this kind of society, however, is a special process resulting from the twin forces of co-optation and repression which, in varying combinations, define the relationship between the radical movement and its host society. As a result of the interplay of these forces, any radical movement can be expected to pass through five stages: incipiency, coalescence, institutionalization, fragmentation, and demise. Such a career model is here applied to the histories of the Old and New Lefts, with explicit reference to the papers in this issue to indicate where they support the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Bennett Becker, of Yale University, has written the preface and the annotations Howard Becker's Presidential address. His painstaking and scrupulous preparation of the manuscript provides both the essential substance of the address itself and a felicitous introduction in the spirit of Professor Becker's own work. Howard Becker was deeply and persistently concerned with "the historical process;" his contributions to its analysis include studies of both ancient and modern societies, hut always with a view to more realistic understanding of the present social order and of man's possibilities in shaping the future. This paper illustrates, once more, these interests. Professor Becker would have been heartened, perhaps, by the fact that his paper is one of several on social change included in this issue of the Review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybernation is defined as the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. Enthusiasm for cybernation is likewise giving rise to myths, which may harden unless they are given critical attention. The new myths are somewhat reinforced by technocratic thinking which is often ill informed along economic and sociological lines. As myths, some of the newer convictions, which are developing, are also an outcropping of what has come to be called the Triple Revolution. In evaluating the assumptions of cybernation here the author is not declaring either that they are in error or that they are beyond the bounds of possibility. What the author wishes to maintain in this paper is that if these assumptions remain untempered by institutional realities and by some new and necessary conceptual considerations of an economic nature, they will not prove very serviceable for the task of managed social change. Furthermore, if these assumptions remain unguided by an appropriate social philosophy, a cybercultural credo will remain at best programmatic. Unless detailed blueprints for various forms of needed devotees of cybernation can work out social change, the cybercultural revolution will never enter the realm of Realpolitik. The excuse for this paper, then, will be the effort to examine critically the excesses of enthusiasm, which characterize those who are now marching under the banner of cybernation, and to suggest some critical remedies, which are in order.