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Organizational life and research regularly involve having to explain specific events. This paper considers how such explanations might be evaluated. We outline a theory of causal explanations as answers to why-questions and introduce criteria to assess such explanations. The criteria are illustrated via an analysis of different explanations proposed for the remarkable success of Honda's entry into the US motorcycle market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the staples of American politics is the theory that party competition is a function of constituency diversity. In Federalist #10 (see Rae and Taylor 1970: 7; Fiorina 1974: 89-119; Sullivan 1973) Madison emphasizes that increased constituency diversity facilitates factional dispute. As diversity increases, it weakens the ability of any single faction to represent the multifarious demands of people in a geographic area (The Federalist Papers 1961: 77-83). Despite this relatively simple and normatively pleasing explanatory perspective, and despite this theory's broad acceptance in political science, the study of the relationship between constituency diversity and party competition has been one of the more elusive and sometimes contradictory research topics of the past 30 years. This article analyzes county level data from the 1970s and 1980s—the period that forms the basis of much of this literature to assess the theoretical and empirical purchase of three of the dominant operational definitions for constituency diversity and then compares these county level findings with parallel state level analyses. I find that reformulated Lieberson/Sullivan social diversity indexes and Koetzle's political diversity index produce similar results at the state and county levels of analysis. Moreover, these results are consistent with the theory that constituency diversity has a strong influence on the level of party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the capstone course. Reform of the college curriculum acquired social movement status in the mid to late 1980. Although most of the attention focused on changing general education, some critics also noted the need to revise the major. Foremost among these was the Association of American Colleges (AAC). According to the AAC Sociology Task Force Report, the capstone course should be a regular required seminar course focusing on synthesizing information and emphasize pulling the disparate pieces of the sociology major together. Students' work should bring all their preparation in the major to bear on the topic at hand and should write a senior paper or thesis or complete some other kind of professional product. The type of capstone course developed depends on how one responds to different mandates and how one views the major and the purpose of a college education. Identifying the goals of the capstone experience is the easy part. Designing and teaching the course is a continual challenge. Writing assignments are one of the most important components of the capstone course. The major writing task is compiling an intellectual autobiography. In this assignment students must assemble a portfolio of their work and must write an essay discussing their intellectual development.

The study of social indicators is valuable for understanding the role that the social sciences play in the political arena. One common pattern is for a particular social indicator to become frozen in place once it takes on political significance, and this can result in ironic consequences. This study traces out the case of indicators of aggregate productivity trends in the United States. These measures were initially developed as part of an underconsumptionist argument that was linked to the political left, but there was considerable debate over different measurement schemes. Over time, one particular measure of trends in aggregate productivity became central for wage negotiations and for government policy. This created a context in which the slower rates of growth of this measure of productivity in the 1970s helped to validate the views of those on the political right who saw the need for greater restrictions on wage gains and government civilian spending. The paper raises questions about the value of this particular measure and ends by emphasizing the problems of locking in place an "objective" social indicator when the reality being measured is in continua! flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the works of Emile Durkheim, a number of scholars have claimed that, for a given society over time and in the absence of major societal upheavals, the proportion of people subjected to punishment by the state closely approximates a constant. In this paper, we address the "Stability of Punishment Hypothesis" with data from California for the period from the opening of the prison system in 1851 to 1970. The Stability of Punishment Hypothesis is formulated through recent modeling developments in macroeconomics, with which the presence of equilibrating tendencies can be explicitly represented, and for the first time direct tests are undertaken. No evidence for the hypothesis is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of multivariate event history data with both observed and unobserved covariates usually requires strong parametric assumptions about the distribution of unobserved covariates affecting the process and the nature of the functions describing the time dependency of the transition rates. In social science applications, there is frequently inadequate theory to specify the parametric form of either the mixing distribution or the hazard fund ion. In this paper, we present an analytic strategy to describe such processes in very general terms, without having to make either type of parametric specification. The use of "fuzzy set" logic to describe the complex multivariate state for individuals enables us to make estimates without such specification. The illustrate the model, we analyze data on the use of long-term care and residential services from a large California study population followed for 4.5 years. The analysis illustrates the model`s basic structure, its ability to describe very general types of multivariate discrete-state/discrete time stochastic processes, and its ability to deal with analytic problems like dependent competing risks, missing data, and the confounding of experimental conditions in a nonrandomized selection of cases and controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many sociology departments express concern about teaching and a desire to improve services to their undergraduate students, most find that the constraints of traditional reward systems stand in the way of maximizing such efforts. The Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky has committed a full time, tenure track position to teaching and related duties. This paper describes this position, its responsibilities, and some of the benefits which have come from creating the position. By creating this position, the likelihood that the teaching program will work with the research program, rather than against it, is enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of American sociology, there have been two periods of clear theoretical domination, that of the Chicago school, from the teens until the mid-thirties and that of the functionalists, from about 1950 until the mid-or late-sixties. The remaining periods have been interregnums or "free for ails," in which no theory group or point of view has been able to establish supremacy. The article review some of the major trend in these articles and then consider what they mean for the current state of sociology. For those who may not be current on methods, new causal theory is an extension of correlational techniques, made possible by the computer and based heavily on the use of partial regression coefficients. Toward the end of the period, these articles began doubling up on themselves and bickering over methods, much as happened to the Warner and Hunter spurts. A third methodological grouping was historical sociology, which had a small but growing representation in these journals. Evidently the field of history itself, which has been switching from the qualitative study of elites to the more quantitative study of whole populations, has been quietly going sociological.

Behavioral political science has not utilized observational methods and lacks the field research tradition found in other behavioral sciences. This paper explores the potential contribution of observational methods to behavioral studies in political science and illustrates their application with data developed around oral argument in the United States Supreme Court and the first Reagan-Mondale television debate in 1984. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse around the bridging the gap debate is seen to a unique sub-set of the social sciences in the United States as applied to a unique American approach to security. This article looks beyond US National Security and the practices of the discipline of political science at US universities to address, and expand on, some specific ideas in Michael Desch's volume The Cult of the Irrelevant. We offer that an integrative assessment of how scholarly work can best inform security policies and practices requires more critical examination in four domains: consideration of how different disciplines frame key issues and speak to each other; understanding the dynamics of the policy marketplace; assessments to alternate ways to frame security and national security; and requirements to critical challenge the privilege academics have awarded themselves as the purveyors (and gatekeepers) of 'knowledge' and the 'truth'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personality trait of openness has been shown to contribute to a person's ability to function effectively. Additionally, scholars have suggested that openness to experience and foreign language experience were related to music preference. Extending from earlier scholarship, this study examined the relationship between openness to experience and the various types of musical and language experiences reported by undergraduate music majors in Turkey and the United States. Participants (N = 380) were surveyed using the Openness to Experience domain of the NEO-PI-R and an author-designed survey with questions about participants' musical backgrounds and interests, foreign language abilities, age, and sex. Results showed that U.S. students rated significantly higher in four of the five dimensions of the Openness domain than their Turkish counterparts (Wilks'λ =.57; F (5, 374) = 55.37, p <.001). Factor analysis results showed that (a) experiences in foreign languages, (b) listening to Turkish traditional, pop, and folk music, and (c) listening to American (pop and folk) and Western classical music cumulatively explained 68.49% of the variance in openness. Correlation analyses suggested that listening to Western classical, American folk, and American pop music was associated with higher openness scores, and listening to Turkish traditional, folk, and pop music was associated with lower openness scores. Additionally, the number of foreign languages participants studied correlated with four of the dimensions. Results suggest that both groups could benefit from increased, broader, and deeper exposure to different musical genres from diverse cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides information on the translations of books or articles, reviews published by the main French journals about U.S. work in sociology, as well as quotations from and references to U.S. texts which are all indications of U.S. influence on French sociology. The focus of this essay is U.S. texts translated into French or reviewed in French, in other words, texts available to a wide audience of non-English readers. Other channels of exchange and direct quotations from original texts deserves analysis, but many French sociologists are unlikely to read the original works in English. The bulk of this essay is limited in scope to translations of books over a very long period. Then the range of our observations will be broadened to reviews of U.S. books and articles by U.S. sociologists published in a selection of main nonspecialized French journals over the last two decades. While books often reach a wider lay audience, these journals are mainly meant for specialists. Selecting such a corpus implies determining who is a U.S. sociologist. In this paper, United States refers to the author's usual place of residence, a criterion sometimes difficult to apply, whether because of lack of information because some sociologists are often on the move. The choices made also imply defining sociology, and that is a more difficult issue; social and cultural anthropology are included whenever fieldwork takes place in industrialized societies; historical sociology is excluded when its main concern is about societies in the past. Approximately one hundred first translations of sociology books can be listed over the 1880-1998 period. The risk of omissions in listing these books is higher for years before 1970, since computerized library catalogues are of little help before that date. The median delay between original and French publication is nine years. The number of translated books reached its peak in the early 1970s.

Contemporary research and theory on voluntary action-both focus on individual participation and on voluntary associations as organizations-generally ignore religion and religious institutions, at least in the United States and usually elsewhere as well. The causes of this situation are to be found in historical tendencies for social science research on the sacred and the secular to be very clearly separated and in contemporary tendencies for social science research to maintain strong disciplinary and topical specialization boundaries. The negative consequences are both intellectual and practical. Intellectually, both religious research and voluntary action research suffer from and are stunted in their growth by their mutual lack of cross-fertilization of concepts and generalizations. Practically, religious institutions, their participants, and their leaders suffer by not being able to utilize voluntary action research knowledge and its practical application as fully as would be optimal in their everyday activities. Similarly, other types of voluntary associations are deprived of practically useful techniques and knowledge accumulated by religious researchers and practitioners/leaders of the religious community. Ecumenism is needed not only among religions but also between related research areas such as religious research and voluntary action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically appraises "Neofunctionalism," edited by Jefrey C. Alexander. This volume is the first entry in a projected series entitled "Key Issues in Sociological Theory." It is anticipated that further entries will appear annually with the purpose of bringing together revisions of papers presented at the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association's (ASA) yearly miniconference, held in conjunction with the ASA meetings. In bringing together a collection of articles under the rubric of "neofunctionalism," Alexander aims not merely to make generally available a number of interrelated essays by a group of contemporary scholars; he expressly seeks, in addition, to crystallize a "theoretical movement" allegedly "wide and deep" already and still "gaining momentum" both in American sociology and "throughout Western sociology", to appropriate creatively the functionalist legacy of Talcott Parsons. In this sense, "neofunctionalism" is intended as an alternative to neo-Marxism, and Alexander reports that he actually chose the former term "in conscious similitude" to the latter.

The article discusses doctoral dissertations dealing with Italian immigrants and their acculturation in the United States. Of the 156 Dissertations 43 have been published, most of the others are available in microfilm or in Xerox copies from Dissertation Abstracts. Thirty-nine were written by halo-Americans. Fifteen different disciplines are represented, ranging from Anthropology to Theatre, although the majority are in History, Sociology, and Education. During the period 1908-1924 only 6 dissertations were written, the first at Yale in 1908 and the second at Harvard in 1909. The information given for each dissertation is: author's name, title of dissertation, university and date of degree, volume and page of Dissertation Abstracts where the abstract of the dissertation is found and the order number of the dissertation. Some of the research papers discussed are "The Ethnic Factor in American Catholicism: An Analysis of Inter-Ethnic Marriage and Religious Involvement"; "The Missionary, An Agent of Cultural Diffusion"; "A Comparative Study of the Mental Capacity of Children of Foreign Parentage."

This article focuses on the implementation of a required capstone course for sociology majors. The question of whether to implement a required capstone course for sociology majors has, no doubt, been discussed in sociology departments in the U.S. Another reason some consider initiating a capstone course is out of recognition that many students do not have a clue about how the sociological pieces come together. Instead of an integrated whole, they experience a sequence of distinct components like methods, theory, deviance, gender, and stratification. Both good and bad reasons exist for initiating capstone courses. While it is true that capstone courses can be a valuable part of a formative approach to education, they often appear in response to call for curricular reform and student assessment from outside the department and the university. Capstone courses help students to reexamine critically what they previously learned in courses that comprise the major. Second, they push students to apply and integrate sociological skills and knowledge in their lives. Third, the capstone course typically is taught as a seminar. The desire to include a capstone course in a department's curriculum is one thing, but the reality of doing so is another.

Although various emphases have been taken over the years, the dominant preference of administrative reformers in the United States beginning with the early Progressive Era reform movement has been to build a strong, executive-centered, and social science-informed state. Proponents’ “search for order” has consistently been predicated on the idea that the Madisonian system cannot deal with the national domestic and international challenges facing America. This essay argues that reformers’ persistent search for “public” order through federal administrative reform has bequeathed a more private-than public-sector-dominated administrative order because of its focus on bureaucratic rather than democratic administration. This has occurred because of an emergent nexus between progressives, corporate interests, and the social sciences and their professional associations. Moreover, and quite paradoxically, the amplifying and constitutive effects of this business–social science–progressive nexus has made it more difficult to mobilize the citizen support that is critical for building the federal agency expertise that the early progressives and their heirs have deemed essential for effective governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on intellectuals who had influenced the field of sociology in the U.S. It mentions journalists who integrated social science into their stories and commentaries including Walter Lippmann. The impact of Lippmann on society and politics in the U.S. during his lifetime including his relations with several presidents of the country is cited. The author says the American Sociological Association is looking for editors including the author's successor.

The study of Chinese legal history has undergone a tremendous change in the United States since the 1990s. Antiquated views and biased opinions of past decades have been rethought and criticized to a considerable extent. At the cutting edge of this new academic trend is the UCLA research group of Chinese legal history. Their scholarship as a whole exemplifies the features of what this article calls a “new Chinese legal history”—namely, conjoining the empirical (the extensive use of judicial archives in China) with the theoretical (drawing upon and dialoguing with well-established theories in social sciences), with the intention of formulating new and illuminating middle-level concepts. Moreover, their keen “historical sense” helps us understand the historical roots of contemporary problems, thus overcoming the epistemological problem of Chinese legal history studies often being regarded as useless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the disaster readiness of community-based organizations in the U.S. The study utilizes factor analysis to expand Sutton and Tierney's literature review with empirical data gathered from ninety-three eommunity-based organizations (CBOs). It reveals that the dimensions of preparedness do not form unique clusters. It also identifies seven new preparedness clusters, which can serve important purposes in advancing the disaster preparedness of community-based organizations. The seven preparedness clusters include hazard knowledge, supportive resources, and property protection.

The effects of multicultural education on the racial attitudes of students in prekindergarten through twelfth grade are examined in this meta-analysis. Multicultural education was operationalized for this study as programs and curricula dealing with racial and cultural diversity. The effect sizes of curricular intervention and reinforcement dimensions of multicultural education in suburban and urban settings among age groups 3-8 and 9-16 were compared to see the relative effectiveness of multicultural education on students’ racial attitudes. The mean effect size of 0.488 from a total of 60 effect sizes calculated using 30 studies shows that exposure to multicultural education led to a reduction in students’ racial attitudes. However, the mean effect size of 0.645 from curricular intervention studies was higher than the mean effect size of the reinforcement studies at 0.08, indicating that the curricular intervention dimension of multicultural education was more effective in reducing students’ racial attitudes. Multicultural education was more effective in reducing racial attitudes in urban areas with a mean effect size of 0.72, than in suburban areas with a mean effect size of 0.587. Multicultural education was also more effective in reducing racial attitudes among the 9-16 age group with a mean effect size of 0.751, than among the 3-8 age group with a mean effect size of 0.208. Implications for research and for practice with emphasis on closing the achievement gap that exists among the various student subgroups primarily in under achieving inner-city public schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Corporate political activity (CPA) has increased rapidly in the United States; however, research findings are spread across several social science fields. The authors use meta-analysis to aggregate findings involving two sets of research questions: (1) what factors and to what extent do these factors influence firms to engage in CPA, and (2) does CPA, in turn, affect firm performance and, if so, to what extent? Two important contributions are made. First, the evidence suggests that, although many factors shape CPA, very few affect CPA to a large extent. Second, the results suggest that CPA is positively related to firm performance and is an important determinant of firm performance. The authors build on this evidence to suggest several future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on examples from the history and politics of Social Security in the United States, this article assesses early and more recent contributions to the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept before sketching a new research agenda on policy feedback. As argued, three new streams of policy feedback scholarship have emerged since the late 1990s. Because these new research streams have seldom been discussed together, this article makes a direct contribution to the ongoing social science debate about the nature and the role of policy feedback in advanced industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a critical review of the historical literature on the National Education Association's (NEA) 1916 Committee on Social Studies (CSS) report, the document generally believed to have launched the social studies movement in American secondary schools. The review begins with a critical analysis of the four most pervasive interpretations of the report. Drawing upon these interpretations, the author suggests that there are three central issues at the heart of these disputes. The first is over the ideological origins of the report; the second, its institutional origins; and the third, its epistemological position. It is argued that the influence of John Dewey is the key to overcoming these disagreements by suggesting that the members of the Committee agreed upon a core of shared beliefs that reflected his philosophical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimulated by social scientists' and especially social psychologists' contributions during World War II, as well as by America's post-war economic and population growth, the period from 1945 to 1970 was widely viewed as a “Golden Age” for American social science. Interdisciplinary social psychology arguably was in the vanguard of these developments. Progress since then have been variable and in some ways negative for social psychology, not only as an interdisciplinary field, but also within its parent disciplines of psychology and especially sociology, where social psychology could plausibly become extinct within twenty-five years. The decline of social psychology as a field and a broad influence on the social sciences, society, and public policy has coincided with a rise of economics to an analogous vanguard position. Understanding the reasons for and implications of these trends has been limited, with a focus on analyses of developments within particular disciplines. However, developments across the social sciences, and society more broadly, are equally or more important to understanding these trends. Future prospects also depend heavily on these broader societal forces, but the inertial tendencies of trajectories since 1970 within and between social science disciplines and fields will necessarily play a major role. The twenty-first century offers the prospect of renewed importance of social psychology in a more interdisciplinary and integrated set of social and policy sciences, if social psychologists and the parent disciplines of sociology and psychology are prepared to capitalize on and take leadership of emerging opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions enable people to navigate various political environments, differentiating familiar situations where standard operating procedures are suitable from unfamiliar terrain when more attention is needed. While previous research identifies consequences of emotion, we know less about what triggers affective response. In this article, the authors investigate what role personality has in the operation of the systems of affective intelligence. Using experimental data as well as responses from the 2000 and 2004 American National Election Studies, the authors first consider whether personality affects the activation of emotional response. Next, they explore the degree to which citizen attitudes like openness to information and compromise are explained by personality characteristics and subconscious emotional response. Finally, they consider the implications of these results for our normative understanding of democratic citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research in political science has uncovered evidence of a ‘split personality’ among Americans when it comes to racial attitudes—people express different attitudes in public than they personally hold. At present no theoretical model can account for the emergence of this discrepancy. This article proposes a simple neural model of racial attitude formation that makes an important distinction between socially shared and idiosyncratic racial attitudes. A computational model based on Kimura's (1983) Neutral Theory of Evolution predicts that socially shared racist attitudes may be able to coexist with, and eventually be replaced by, more favorable idiosyncratic racial attitudes. Results of a laboratory-based study (N = 555) involving reaction-time-based implicit measures of socially shared and idiosyncratic attitudes are consistent with the predictions derived from the computational model. The implications of the theoretical model and the empirical findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of stress shows how nondisordered people often become distressed in contexts such as chronic subordination; the losses of status, resources, and attachments; or the inability to achieve valued goals. Evolutionary psychology indicates that distress arising in these contexts stems from psychological mechanisms that are responding appropriately to stressful circumstances. A diagnosis of mental disorder, in contrast, indicates that these mechanisms are not functioning as they are designed to function. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, however, has come to treat both the natural results of the stress process and individual pathology as mental disorders. A number of social groups benefit from and promote the conflation of normal emotions with dysfunctions. The result has been to overestimate the number of people who are considered to be disordered, to focus social policy on the supposedly unmet need for treatment, and to enlarge the social space of pathology in the general culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the link between consumption and civic engagement has an important local, not just national, history and that retailers' involvement in the downtown urban renewal of American cities in the post-WWII era offers a particularly fruitful avenue of investigation. The article focuses on New Haven, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts, where Edward J. Logue served as development chief from 1954 to 1967. His record over these fourteen years, when he was a national leader in federally funded urban renewal, offers a revealing case of how consumption and civic culture intersected at the local level. Although the power given to retailers varied starkly in the redevelopment of these two cities, in both cases department stores were deemed essential to the viability of the central business district. That priority ultimately limited the success of downtown revitalization, given the department store sector's growing suburban orientation and steady economic concentration from the 1960s on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Todd Gitlin observed in his 1978 critique of Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld (1955) in that work treated consumer choices and political choices at the voting booth as methodologically equivalent. Many critics since have identified this purported equivalence as a flaw in American social science that reduces politics to consumer behavior. But is it a flaw? This article contends that consumer choices can be and have often been political; that political choices can be and often have been consumer-like; and that the distinction between citizen and consumer, intended to uphold the superiority of the citizen's role, in fact may itself be damaging to public life. It calls for a reconsideration of what the differences between the worlds of politics and consumption really are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic's degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both U.S. and Mexican sociologies allege that they are in the business of making true scientific knowledge claims about the social world. Conventional conceptions of science notwithstanding, I demonstrate that their claims to truth and scientificity are based on alternative epistemological grounds. Drawing a random sample of nonquantitative articles from four leading journals, I show that, first, they assign a different role to theories, and indeed they have dissimilar understandings of what a theory should consist of. Second, whereas U.S. sociology actively struggles against subjectivity, Mexican sociology maximizes the potentials of subjective viewpoints. Third, U.S. sociologists tend to regard highly and Mexican sociologists to eagerly disregard the principle of ethical neutrality. These consistent and systematic differences raise two theoretical issues. First, I argue that Mexican and U.S. sociologies are epistemologically, semantically, and perceptually incommensurable. I contend that this problem is crucial for sociology's interest in the social conditioning of scientific knowledge's content. Second, I suggest four lines of thought that can help us explain the epistemological differences I find. Finally, I argue that sociologists would greatly profit from studying epistemologies in the same fashion they have studied other kinds of scientific and nonscientific beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carefully conducted analyses are prepared regularly by and for U.S. municipalities providing important information on a range of issues facing these governments. A review of selected examples, along with information on the qualifications and training of beginning analysts in 50 large municipalities, suggests that much of the analysis in the field relies heavily on the application of management science techniques and basic descriptive statistics. Less evidence points toward the extensive use of intermediate or advanced social science statistics, despite the potential applicability of these tools and their prominence in graduate curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging area of social science research focuses on individual-level and contextual-level determinants of black-white adult mortality differentials in the United States. However, no research on adult mortality differentials has distinguished multiple Hispanic subgroups and explored the role of nativity at both the individual and contextual levels for small geographic areas. Using the 1986-1997 National Health Interview Survey-National Death Index linked file, we examine the effects of individual and contextual factors on black-white and multiple Hispanic subgroup (Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and "other" Hispanic) differentials in adult mortality. In addition, we use a new, innovative geographic area--the very small area--as our contextual unit of analysis. We find that excess mortality risks for all race-ethnic groups considered are associated with not only individual characteristics, but also neighborhood characteristics. In addition, percent foreign born in a neighborhood is protective of Hispanic subgroup mortality for Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and "other" Hispanic adults in the 45-64 age category. These findings indicate a need for future research to examine more thoroughly the pathways through which neighborhood factors affect multiple Hispanic subgroup mortality and the role of nativity as a protective factor for older adult Hispanic mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the impact of international music tours on the performance skills of students in the United States. Understanding of the repertoire and performance practices indigenous to a particular region; Exploration of the benefits of the international music tours; Guidelines for organizing an international music tour.

Prior research has shown that demographic similarity between supervisors and sub-ordinates shapes supervisor-subordinate relationship quality in US settings. The current study extends this body of research by comparing effects in a US production facility to effects in a Mexican facility owned by the same company. Results suggest that, in both locations, demographic similarity influences the quality of relationships between supervisors and subordinates. The specific patterns in Mexico, however, are not identical to those in the United States. Age similarity has negative effects on relationship quality in Mexico, but not in the United States. Also, gender similarity has a stronger positive impact on one dimension of relationship quality (trust) in Mexico, but it has a stronger positive impact on a second dimension of relationship quality (leader-member exchange) in the Linked States. Both the overlap and disparities between demography effects in the two regions are important considerations when attempting to transfer human resource management practices. such as diversity management programmes, across the American-Mexican border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES THE INTERPLAY OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, foreign language pedagogy, and cultural insights through the lens of the Lisa Loeb cross-cultural travel fellowship through Boston University. The participant observers were three full-time Boston University graduate students in the School of Education's Modern Foreign Language Education program who spent six weeks abroad in countries that speak the language they now instruct as full-time language educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of Broken Bloodlines: Gender Relations and the Crisis of Marriages and Families Among Afro-Americans, one of the essays that comprised the book, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries by Orlando Patterson. Patterson, a sociologist, argues that the most persistent problems of African Americans are centered around issues of gender and gender relations, and he criticizes sociologists for being conspicuously absent from public debates on these issues. He goes on to say that not only has there been censorship and denial of these problems, but there has also been a great deal of hype that has asserted the opposite of realities. One of the first claims challenged by Patterson is the notion of the double burden many black feminists have argued that black women bear. The author relied primarily on census data and other governmental data sources to document earning differences for black and white women at every educational level. He then argues that using mean, rather than median earnings, one can show that there is no gap in the incomes between black and white women. Using this analysis, he asserts that although black women continue to suffer serious gender biases in the economy, there is no double burden of race and gender in economic matters for black women.

This article considers the significant contribution of teaching to sociology. Teaching is a vital means to expand the influence of sociology. Through teaching, the largest audience can be reached. Accountability for teaching is a growing issue and is likely to remain. Legislators, administrators, parents and students in the U.S. are demanding better teaching. Teaching was by far the area in which new methods of evaluating faculty have been developed, with 69 percent of all institutions and 77 percent of all research institutions claiming this activity. Evidence of a research project's impact on teaching is being used to evaluate faculty, with 45 percent of all institutions citing this criterion. Many people argue that sociology lacks internal consistency, or, put more positively, that it is a multi-paradigm science. Expanded focus on teaching can move sociology toward greater coherence. Several faculty members in each sociology doctoral program must know enough to teach such a course, and many must be knowledgeable mentors. Progressive doctoral programs should establish positions for faculty with specialties in teaching sociology to mentor both graduate students and other faculty members.

This article discusses the ideological contradiction and the problem of closure in the sociology capstone course. The decline of sociology as a discipline of explicit academic value has been debated for year. Historically, American sociology responded to these debates by aligning with the modern positivist tradition of the social sciences. This response could be read as an attempt to disguise historic origins in critical and collectivist European social thought. One could interpret it as an ideological development based on the bias for acceptance as a legitimate profession. When speaking of contradiction, it refers to the broad disagreement over what is students should acquire from the study of sociology. The recommendations of the Association of American Colleges (AAC) reports cover a broad range of concerns, including ethical, technical, and theoretical issues. For example, the AAC reports stress the need for students to develop reflective, critical, and interdisciplinary abilities, opening the learning experience to the limits of perspectives and methods in each discipline. While both the interdisciplinary and the specialist approach are based on the enlightened traditions of liberal education, they assume different elements of that tradition are relevant.

This article focuses on the sociological capstone course at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. A capstone course in the broadest sense grows together theoretical and empirical work from disparate areas in sociology, serves as a bridge to graduate work in the discipline, and helps students to assume more active lives as citizens and consumers of knowledge. The capstone course is required for all sociology majors in the university. As preparation for this course, students will have taken an introductory sociology course, a writing course in sociology or another discipline, and a variety of substantive courses in sociology. The substantive courses provide an in-depth examination of particular subareas in sociology, such as gender, madness, racial and ethnic relations, medical sociology and social movements. Majors also are required to take a course in research methods which is part of the university's quantitative reasoning program. After completing the capstone course, they must write a senior thesis, an in-depth exploration of a particular topic. The capstone course is part of the university's oral competency program and is structured as a seminar. Enrollment is limited to 20 to 25 students, the approximate number of majors.

Drawing on recent work in the sociology of science, we propose a sociological approach for understanding the process by which statistical methods were originally incorporated into the social sciences in America. In a departure from past accounts, which have viewed early statistical developments in the United States as part of the history of separate academic disciplines, we analyze interdisciplinary relations and local institutional conditions in turn-of-the-century America to elucidate the adoption and use of statistical methods by James McKeen Cattell in psychology, Franz Boas in anthropology, Franklin H. Giddings in sociology, and Henry L. Moore in economics. We argue that these four thinkers were doing boundary work to legitimize their disciplines in a competitive interdisciplinary field, where they confronted the "newcomer's dilemma" of conformity versus differentiation in relation to other disciplines. All four innovators turned to statistical methods to demonstrate compliance with acceptable scientific models and at the same time carve out a distinctive mode of statistical analysis to differentiate their own discipline from the others. Our analysis also shows that these developments occurred only under certain local institutional conditions. Cattell, Boas, Giddings, and Moore were faculty members at Columbia University at a time when the University had gained a competitive lead in the area of statistics over rival universities. Determined to preserve this institutional advantage, Columbia provided a conducive setting for the interdisciplinary process of the incorporation of statistical methods into the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their otherwise divergent arguments, pluralist, state-centered, and neo-Marxist "relative autonomy" conceptions of political power in capitalist societies share the view that the "capitalist class" is generally incapable of unified political action. Yet, a striking feature of policy struggles in the United States between 1974 and 1981 was the dominant influence of a well-organized and unified business lobby. I examine business unity and political influence in the context of recent U.S. policy history. Tracing the legislative histories of the unsuccessful Labor Law Reform and Consumer Protection Agency bills of the 1970s, and the successful Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, a class-based, corporate power structure perspective is supported. The historical conditions fostering the political mobilization and intraclass cohesion of business in the 1970s, and the theoretical implications of the breakdown of business unity after 1981, are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research contends that when Talcott Parsons developed the substantive argument of The Structure of Social Action, he turned away from the theoretical emptiness of American social science and drew on the ideas of four European social thinkers -- Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall. Such research exemplifies the "content-fit model" of predecessor selection, which assumes that intellectual predecessors are chosen on the basis of a fit between their ideas and the project of the thinker who engages them. This model fails to explain Parsons's exclusion of the American institutionalists, most notably his Amherst teachers Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayres, whose work fit directly with the argument of The Structure of Social Action. Institutionalist work was also characterized, however, by its negative reputation, particularly at Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s, where Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber were thinkers of growing reputational standing. Examination of Parsons's involvement in the local Harvard network indicates that contemporary reputational judgments decisively affected his choice of intellectual predecessors. This analysis also brings to light the organizational and institutional conditions under which a "reputational model" is required to understand the process of predecessor selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses data on the contributions of corporate political action committees to evaluate six popular theories of business political partisanship. Two theories are supported by the data: the "Yankee-Cowboy" theory of regional political differences among U.S. corporations and the regulatory environment theory, which views the differential relationship to government regulation as a primary determinant of corporate political behavior. No support is found for four other theories of business political partisanship: the core-periphery theory, the inner-circle theory, the managerialist theory, and the domestic-multinational theory. The four disconfirmed theories are all variants of a perspective known as the theory of "corporate liberalism," which hypothesizes a tendency toward greater liberalism on the part of the more dominant or central corporations in American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of the organization of schools on individual student performance have been the focus of investigations for many years. One area of inquiry that has led to mixed results and varied interpretations is research on the effects of ability grouping within schools. The present study has several advantages over previous, research on this question. (a) It is based on a large, national sample. (b) it examines the effects of both school types (some of which serve students selected according to ability) and ability grouping within school types. (c) The analysis involves comparing students who have been separated into ability groups with those who have not been so separated. (d) The analysis and interpretation take into account the effects of ceiling and floor effects of the measures used. The results support the general hypothesis that students in high ability groups gain more and students in low ability groups gain less over a five-year period than they would be expected to gain if they had not been separated into ability groups. It is suggested that one of the reasons similarly strong effects have not been consistently observed in the United States is that we have not collected the kinds of information needed to conduct the type of analysis presented here. However, ability grouping in British and American schools may serve different functions. The several types of schools and the ability groups within them may have more clearly defined "charters" in Great Britain, the higher levels serving to "sponsor" their students' movement toward elite adult statuses more effectively than their American counterparts do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses public administration writers' faith in the power of social science to improve the practice of public administration in the United States. Vision of the state as a purposive association; Civil association; Limits on the knowledge that social science can provide for practice; Public administration inquiry.

The article presents information on the theoretical principles which are at the base of the research whose results are presented in the book "Distinction," and draw out those of its theoretical implications that are most likely to elude its readers, particularly here in the United States. Social science, be it anthropology, sociology or history, oscillates between two seemingly incompatible points of view, two apparently irreconcilable perspectives: objectivism and subjectivism. It can "treat social facts as things," or it can reduce the social world to the representations that agents have of it, the task of social science consisting then in producing an "account of the accounts" produced by social subjects. Rarely are these two positions expressed and above all realized in scientific practice in such a radical and contrasted manner. The "social reality" objectivists speak about is also an object of perception. And social science must take as its object both this reality and the perception of this reality, the perspectives, the points of view which, by virtue of their position in objective social space, agents have on this reality.

The article focuses on the factors which stimulated the social science curriculum reform movement in the U.S. in the 1960s, to its accomplishments, and to its decline. The late 1950s provided a climate favorable to social inquiry. Many educators, academicians, and professional associations became interested in relating the classroom to social realities, just as in the 1930s the depression generated interest in organizing the social science curriculum around social problems. In the late 1950s, the motivating force was the protest movement. Many students participating in the social protest movement took the American dream seriously and discovered that their pledge of allegiance to one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, was not a reality. Following the Supreme Court decision of 1954, the fight for racial equality became a national movement. It awakened the conscience of many white Americans and the self-consciousness of black Americans. The students protested against the incapacity of economic growth to bring forth social justice and equality.