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This paper applies the ideas presented by Kai Erikson (1966) in Wayward Puritans to explain a series of brutal attacks carried out by the Ku Klux Klan on the citizenry of Macon, Georgia, episodes that brought national attention to that town. What made these attacks so unusual was their victims, most of whom were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were accused by the Klan of engaging in immoral behavior. Rather than viewing the Klan's actions as deviance that was sanctioned by outside sources, this article focuses on the attacks as attempts by the Klan to eradicate deviance from within their own community. Using historical data gathered from newspapers, Klan speeches, and Congressional hearings, the article explains the Klan's drive against immorality in terms of Erikson's notions of boundary crises leading to crime waves that ultimately serve to clarify the distinctions between social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to writing, the sociological imagination generally fails. In response to this deficiency, researcher Kai Erikson introduced "The Sociologist's Craft: A Workshop on the Organization and Presentation of Sociological Materials" in the graduate program at Yale University in 1978. Now in its tenth year, this hopeful undertaking was based upon the premise that writing skills could be learned. Initially structured only by an assigned time and place, the class quickly developed a formal and informal organization peculiar to its mission. This ethnography, drawn from my own participation from 1979 to 1982, describes how the writing seminar became organized to teach sociologists to write. Regardless of the mysteries of self-selection processes and their effect on the culture, the awareness that differences may have existed between members and nonmembers is important in itself. Though enrollment was open, potential participants may have perceived that the class was open to certain kinds of people, not to everyone, as intended. Some, sensing or suspecting differences, may have stayed away. Others, attuned somehow to a subtle correspondence between themselves and seminar members, joined the class. Unwittingly, by virtue of the intangible similarities that drew them, the newcomers reinforced and perpetuated the collective solutions that were evolving.

The article presents information about sociology, history and the abstract perspective. In a recent paper, professor Kai Erikson has compared several implicit assumptions which prevail in the work of contemporary sociologists with those of contemporary historians. He concludes from his analysis that sociologists could avoid certain kinds of problems if they were to become more conscious of their immersion in historical processes and were to adopt certain of the perspectives of historians. With Erikson's diagnosis of the shortcomings of current sociological research one is in considerable agreement. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the adoption of Erikson's recommendations would do much to alter what he identifies as problematic in sociology. Indeed, one has a sense of foreboding that should his prescriptions be taken too seriously, the development of sociological knowledge would be still more thwarted than it is by the problems he locates. After restating several points in Erikson's argument, one will outline a point of view which is somewhat at variance with his and attempt to demonstrate ways in which it is responsive to the issues he raises. This point of view may be of some general interest also because it arises not from the concreteness of history, but from the abstraction of philosophy and mathematics.

Using data from a study on courtship through personal advertisements, I argue that Kai Erikson's classic case against disguised observation is flawed. Certain kinds of deception are necessary to gather certain data in certain settings. I placed bogus ads in a personal column to obtain and analyze responses. The data would have remained inaccessible-indeed, many of the responses would not have existed in the first place-without some measure of deception. While deception was used, no risk whatsoever was posed to respondents. I further argue that several of Erikson's criteria of risk do not separate ethical from empirical questions; informants use very different criteria in evaluating the risk of harm to them paced by social research that sociologists use. The question of exploitation is more complex, since it has to be weighed against how much of an effort my respondents made and hence, what it is exactly that I took from them. A "panel of judges" decided that most of my male (but not my female) respondents would not have gotten dates with my hypothetical ad placers, and that the research method I used was not especially unethical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reply to the sociologist Kai Erikson's commentary regarding the author's research on police interrogators. The author claims that Erikson misunderstands and thus misrepresents the nature of the author's research note. He claims that Erikson fails to make crucial distinctions between the types and degrees of deception in fieldwork. Also, the author claims that Erikson has taken him as representative of a larger phenomenon that he fails to name, for which he fails to provide any references or citations, and about which he offers no substantive information. Furthermore, he argues that Erikson's moral absolutism betrays a lack of appreciation for the difficulties of obtaining hidden and dirty data from deviant subjects as well as the potential social value of such knowledge. Also, the author complains that Erikson misconstrues the argument that the standards necessary to carry out the role of a morally competent fieldworker may be different than the moral standards by which one can judge human beings in daily life.

The article presents a first person narrative from sociologist Kai Erikson describing his personal relationship with colleague John Kitsuse.

The article presents various comments on the article "Problems in the Application of Sociological Method to Historical Data: A Case Example" published in the May 1969 issue of the journal "The American Sociologist." Since one of the authors is a historian and one a sociologist, the author has a special interest in the interrelationships of the two disciplines and, particularly, the use of historical data for sociological analysis. It was this interest which led them to turn so eagerly to Kai Erikson's "Wayward Puritans," especially after reading that it had received the MacIver Award. It was their hope that Professor Erikson might respond with an account of obstacles he encountered that his training had left him unprepared to handle. They had also hoped that Erikson would discuss more fully their contention that sociologists tend to handle data and the supposed existing state of the society as though the society were not facing any large-scale social change that could not be inferred from a limited set of historical data.