Search

This paper reports the results of a one-year service-learning project that excited students about sociology, and created useful analytic tools fir a modest-income African American community. In the course of deepening our understanding of one neighborhood including collecting extant demographic data, conducting surveys and interviews, site visits, and simply "hanging out," - it becomes possible to demonstrate how using formal demography and community ethnography together provide better understandings of the processes of social stratification, segregation, arid gentrification than would be possible using only one of the methodological orientations. The paper begins with an introduction theoretical and didactic challenges, proceeds in describing Lynwood Park demographically using insights derived from qualitative evidence, and then describes our eclectic means of investigating the community. The second half of the paper situates Lynwood Park demographically and ethnographically in terms of the larger Atlanta community, and then in increasingly smaller and more socially meaningful units. once we focus the demographic lens as much as possible, we must again rely on qualitative information to probe the multiple meanings of Lynwood Park. The paper closes with recommendations about how the people of Lynwood Park can use the data, and suggests how these technique can he implemented theoretically and practically in sociology as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationships of social structure and personality during a period of radical social change attendant on the early stages of the transformation of Ukraine from socialism to nascent capitalism. It does so by analyzing data secured from face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of urban Ukrainian men and women in 1992-93, together with a follow-up survey three to three and a half years later of all those respondents who at the time of the initial survey either were employed or were seeking paid employment. We found that the over-time correlations – the stabilities – of two underlying dimensions of personality – self-directedness of orientation and a sense of well-being or distress – were startlingly low, by comparison not only to the United States at a time of much greater social stability, but also to Poland at the same time as the Ukrainian study, albeit at a later stage of transition. The stability of a third fundamental dimension of personality – intellectual flexibility – was higher than those of self-directedness of orientation and distress, but considerably lower than past research had led us to expect. Still, despite massive changes in social and economic conditions and great instability of personality, the relationships of social structure with personality were remarkably consistent over time and, with the partial exception of those with the sense of wellbeing or distress, were quite similar to those of both socialist and advanced capitalist societies during times of apparent social stability. Our analyses suggest that consistency in the relationships between social structure and personality despite great change both in social structure and in personality results from the continued stability of proximate conditions of life that link position in the larger social structure to individual personality, and the continued strength of those linkages. Notable among these proximate conditions, for those people who were employed at the times of both the baseline and follow-up surveys, is the substantive complexity of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two competing orientations prevalent among social science disciplines. If one of these advocate universality, the other prefers indigeneity. But a careful analysis of even such concepts as citizenship widely believed to be of universal validity unfold, that (a) its substance varies across different polities; (b) this difference exists not only between the First, Second and Third Worlds but also among the polities within them. It has been demonstrated that the variations can be traced to the historical background, social structure and cultural patterns between polities. This has been attempted in this paper through a general comparative analysis of the three worlds and a systematic comparison of India, a multinational state and the West European countries, the cradle of nation-states. Through this comparative analysis some of the established notions in western political sociology have been interrogated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]