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This paper describes and makes the case for sociological metatheorizing, or the systematic study of sociological theory. Three types of metatheorizing are delineated on the basis of their end products: the attainment of a deeper understanding of theory, the creation of new theory, and the creation of an overarching theoretical perspective (a metatheory). The basic problems in metatheorizing are reviewed and it is concluded that the most basic difficulty has been the lack of a clear definition of the subfield. Some thoughts on the future of metatheorizing in sociology are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the value of participatory action research (PAR) for advancing scientific knowledge as well as for solving practical problems. The article supports the argument through brief summaries of three PAR cases in industry: Norwegian shipping, Xerox Corporation, and the FAGOR group of the Mondragón cooperatives. While noting the practical gains achieved through PARJ the author concentrates particularly on the advances in substantive knowledge and theory that would have been unlikely to emerge out of more orthodox sociological research. The author suggests finally that wider use of participatory action research can have a stimulating effect upon the future development of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social construction of conflict over environmental health and safety issues (i.e., environmental risk). Four explanations for such conflict are commonly offered in the environmental policy literature. We examine the interests served by each. We hypothesize that environmental policy professionals hold definitions of conflict consistent with the values and interests of the organizations for which they work and the professions of which they are members. These definitions enhance the legitimacy of the resources those groups possess in relative abundance. Data from a survey of risk professionals are generally consistent with these hypotheses. We conclude by generalizing beyond environmental conflict to identify ways in which disputes about the nature of a social problem or conflict are often at the same time struggles to determine the value of the resources available to social movements and their opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past twenty years, the expansion and differentiation of education in the United States have been explained in many different ways, but most explanations give little or no importance to the role of government officials pursuing their own interests. And all ignore how business's and students' influence over educational policy is due less to their direct participation in policy-making than to their ideological influence and possession of resources that policy-makers covet. In this paper, I use the case of the massive expansion of occupational education in the community college to develop an alternative explanation of educational policy-making. This analysis draws on, but also critiques, recent work in political sociology on the roles and interests of the "state managers" who head major segments of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an elaboration of Stinchcombe's model of the structure of functional explanations, this paper attempts to integrate the notions of equilibrium structures, structural contradictions, and social conflicts. It proposes that two variables of an unquestionably empirical nature can account for the distinctions among the three structural forms: (1) the emergence of a double loop in the basic structure of functional systems and (2) the embodiment of systemic, mechanical forces in the intentions and actions of persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a two-fold addition to the growing body of literature associated with the analysis of stigma. First, we expand the role of exchange theory in the analysis, which allows closer attention to the motivation of actors, a more careful examination of the negotiated value of stigma, and an increased awareness of the ways in which stigmas affect all parties in the interaction (both marked and unmarked individuals) by altering outcomes. Second, we explore the use of stigma exploitation in the exchange process. Seven strategies are identified and discussed: eliciting special consideration, evoking selected aspects of a stereotype, avoiding a more serious stigma, avoiding interaction, using submissive manipulation, avoiding membership, and gaining membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the "community question" has generated several perspectives on the sources of ties to the territorial community in modern society. This paper attempts to empirically assess the utility of each model for predicting the number of ties to the local community and extra-local area, using data on voluntary association memberships in Seattle. Results indicate that the "community of limited liability" perspective is most accurate in predicting the importance of social, economic, and temporal investments for local memberships, and social position for extra-local memberships.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noting that sociology, like other disciplines, usually discusses itself as if its content-its body of knowledge-were created by a wholly intellectual process, I am adopting in this paper the approach of the sociology of knowledge by emphasizing the "existential factors" that influence knowledge. I employ the poorly developed concept of occupation, and argue that in the United States academic disciplines like sociology are best analyzed as professions, which are organized occupations. American professions sustain their present position by the functional differentiation of members into separate administrative, research or scholarship, and practice roles. Practice roles serving lay clients or patrons provide the basic economic support of the profession as a whole. The characteristic practice role of most academic arts and science disciplines is teaching. Using sociology and its special position in the under-graduate curriculum as an example, I suggest that the contingencies of teaching influence what knowledge is used, underlie at least part of the public image of the discipline, and determine some of what becomes part of the published corpus of the discipline's knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional interpretation of the "race problem" in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern "race relations" in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, hut there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by "race." A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores several conceptual problems in social deniographic studies of the status of women, including failure to recognize the multidimensionalit of women's status and its variation across social "locations," the confounding of gender and class stratification systems, and the confounding of access to resources with their control. Also discussed are some generic problems in the measurement of female status, such as the sensitivity of particular indicators to social context, and the need to select consistent comparisons when judging the extent of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most theory and research on organizations assumes that the great diversity of organizational attributes reflects variation in implementation of a relatively small number of forms. Modern conceptions of organizational form concentrate on discontinuities in distributions of either attributes or relationships with other organizations. We argue that this approach be supplemented with an explicitly dynamic one that focuses on processes that create and erode boundaries in the organizational world. This paper discusses some of the advantages of this approach and specifics a number of processes that create and erode boundaries around organizational populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactionist analyses of social organization stimulate examination of how social situations and collective activity are shaped. Meta-power, the creation and control of distal situations, and organization as a structuration of meta-power are used as tools for exploring the shaping of situations Five meta-power processes are presented: strategic agency, rules and conventions, structuring situations. Culture construction, and empowering delegates. These processes illustrate how situations are created or altered. This paper offers a view of social organization that emphasizes relations among situations, linkages between consequences and conditions, and networks of collective activity across space and time. The conclusion calls for additional research to make more explicit the nature of social organization and its social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the life and work of Everett Hughes. I discuss the similarities and differences between his writings and those of Robert Park; I describe his biographical influences and the use he made of marginality; I consider the relevance of his professional commitments for contemporary sociology and his unique vision of sociology's mission. I conclude by calling for renewed interest in his concepts and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until quite recently, questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews and the gathering and interpreting of various documents have been the main kinds of empirical research to be found in French sociology. Observation plays a leading role in none of them, even in the latter. The researchers who use it do not seem convinced of its legitimacy, because what can be expected from systematic observation does not fit the prevailing purpose of developing abstract, general theories. After having sketched out the institutional and intellectual background, this paper examines a few examples of French studies using observation. Most of them fail to clearly distinguish between indirect evidence and direct observation, between meaning as construed by the observer and that experienced by the people observed; they rarely report dated and situated facts (even more seldom behaviors than settings), and they replace the expected analyses of these messing facts with the interpretation of would-be typical or usual facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The totality of Cooley's contribution to self-theory, as reported in most sociology texts and much of the contemporary self literature, is erroneously equated with his concept of the "looking-glass self," in its passive, dependent; and chameleon form. In this paper, we highlight Cooley's own qualifications to the looking-glass self, which properly place this popular concept in the context of Cooley's broader and more assertive view of self-concept formation. These qualifications include Cooley's emphasis on selectivity and Interpretation in the process of reflected appraisals, his writings on core values and the continuity of character, and his discussion of efficacious action and appropriative activity in the early formation of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship with data from a nation with a substantially different social context, Japan. American research on suicide has been based largely on American samples. Little is known about whether the results of this work, such as the link between divorce and suicide, will be replicated for nations with substantially different institutional and cultural structures. The present paper tests the marital integration theory of suicide with data from Japan. Briefly, the marital integration theory holds that as bonds to marriage weaken, suicide risk increases. Further, the kinship system in Japan is apparently more integrated than it is in the United States. For example, in Japan 37.3% of the elderly lived in three-generation households compared to only 0.5% of the elderly in the United States. Durkheim's theory of social integration and suicide emphasizes the subordination of the individual to group life as a prophylactic against suicide. Individualism in family life was emerging as the pattern for the future at the time of Durkheim's study. It is anticipated that a rising divorce rate should affect suicide risk for several groups: divorced persons; separated persons who are contemplating divorce; married persons with severe marital problems; and the children in such families.

In the 'looking-glass land' of workers' compensation psychiatry, symptoms are not always what they seem, treatments may have little or no positive effect, and workers' claims of continued disability may puzzle and perplex. Dis- ability is in pan a social role, and a simple medical model cannot explain the complex interactions of sociology, psychology, anthropology, medicine, economics, and law characteristic of the workers' compensation system. Psychiatrists functioning within and reciprocally shaped by this semi-adversarial system will rarely encounter an 'ideal' patient. Factors in all areas of workers' lives, including those integral to the workers' compensation system, influence their movement along a health-illness, abled- disabled axis. This paper identifies a number of interacting factors that may prolong, or even subvert, the recovery process following a work-incurred injury or illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline some of the key ideas within Zygmunt Bauman's sociology; both in terms of his contribution to the creation of a postmodern sociology and his substantive texts. The critique that I develop, is that Bauman's work is assembled upon a modernist notion of `the social' which he not only accepts without question, but which undermines his attempts to devise a distinctly postmodern sociology. His substantive texts still contain many personal insights, but they need not make any use of postmodernist abstractions, which in the last analysis provide little more than a gloss over his own reflections on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational action theory (RAT) is not a highly unified intellectual entity. In the first part of the paper, varieties of RAT are distinguished in terms of three criteria: i.e. according to whether they (i) have strong rather than weak rationality requirements; (ii) focus on situational rather than procedural rationality; (iii) claim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action. In the second part, these same criteria are applied in a consideration of which version of RAT holds out most promise for use in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorfman is eulogized as the creator and curator of the definitive account of Veblen's life and work. He argued that Veblen was the archetypal marginal man and that this explains his dissenting contribution. Dissemination of Dorfman's pathography of Veblen led to its hegemony - until now. Andrew Veblen was the first to challenge Dorfman's portrait of his younger brother's life in the mid 1920s. He asserted that his family were not linguistically, socially or economically deprived. However, it was not until Dorfman's private papers became publicly available in the 1990s, that his flawed view of Veblen became more widely and comprehensively contested. An alternative appreciation of Veblen is advanced with reference to his experiences in general and the works of Bellamy, Morris and Ibsen in particular. Data sources include Dorfman's original tome, Andrew Veblen's extensive correspondence with Dorfman, and Veblen's own writings. It is concluded that Veblen's radical views are entirely congruent with his life experiences during an era of capitalist transformation. The moral of this saga is that a dose of Veblenian scepticism is essential to intellectual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mannheim's 1923 essay 'The Problem of Generations' has often been described as the seminal theoretical treatment of generations as a sociological phenomenon. Yet in practice scant attention has been paid to the sociology of generations by British sociologists. This is despite the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical time. This paper aims to raise the profile of the sociology of generations within British sociology. It is shown that Mannheim's essay can be read as a text which contributes to our understanding of key sociological issues, in addition to 'the problem of generations'. These issues include the nature of time, the relationship between biology and the social, and socio-psychological connections of language and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of social mobility has been a study of male mobility experiences. That is, not only have females been excluded by intention from these investigations, but, more importantly, it is argued that this omission is justifiable and legitimate. This is particularly so in relation to the British Isles where the heated defence of the traditional position, presently labelled the conventionalist approach, continues to rationalize and justify the exclusion of over one half of the British and Irish population. Drawing together recent North American, British and Australian research, this paper challenges both the theoretical and empirical assumptions of this conventionalist position. Arguing that a woman is neither simply a summation of domestic identities nor is her status one of complete dependency, national and international evidence on the unique and important contribution of women to the occupational attainments of husbands and children, as well as the class reproduction of families in general, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper poses the issue of distributive justice in terms of the relationship between social class, social mobility and educational attainment, in contemporary Britain. Having discussed various conceptions of justice which might vindicate class inequality, the authors investigate empirically the specifically meritocratic defence, and report survey data suggesting that the effect of class origins on class destinations is only partially mediated by educational achievement. Class privilege can compensate for educational failure. Gender is also significant since women tend to fare worse than men with similar class origins and credentials. This evidence undermines the claim that Britain is a meritocratic society and supports the suggestion that only by political intervention can equality of opportunity be rendered compatible with significant and structured inequality of outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are many interpretations of the central themes of Talcott Parsons's sociology, it is evident that the idea of citizenship played a major role in shaping the core of his mature social thought. In addition to specific discussions of citizenship in relation to black inequality and participation, of the historical roots of universal participation in the societal community, and of the political openness and pluralism of American society, the problems of universalistic participation were in fact analytically crucial to Parsonian sociology. In other words, the theme of universalistic values was not merely an empirical issue, and not merely an aspect of political questions in his occasional essays and papers, but it coloured the basic components of Parsons's work as a theorist. For example, the notion of universalism defined one possible mode of orientation to action in the pattern variables, being contrasted with particularism. The pattern variables were not merely a passing phase in Parsons's long theoretical maturation; they were fundamental to what he understood by 'modernity'. They were as a result constitutive of Parsons's understanding of social change theory and modernization processes. Indeed, this theme of universalistic participation, its dependence on the legacy of the Protestant idea of universal salvation and its peculiar role in the formation of western societies, was a co-ordinating theme in Parsons's complex theoretical legacy. In addition to its importance in his theoretical development, it was the foundation of the pressuppositional level of his general value position, because Parsons regarded American society as the culmination of the process of modernity which, as we will see, was a process of universalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of a sequence of literary frames suggests that a heightened experience of interactional reality is also anomically constructive of the frame. In each of 16 frames, Durkheimian anomie neither destroys the frame's integrity nor renders its routine grounds unintelligible, as Goffman and Garfinkel would claim it must. Paradoxically, anomie ritually intensifies the frame. The selves in the paper's sequence of highly ritualized frames are not routine selves, however. They are 'strangers to themselves.' The analysis shows how Mead's 'I' can re-emerge from Goffman's ritual thinking -- where the T is collapsed into an interactionally-bound 'me' -- as an original manifestation of great importance to interactants, and therefore to society as well. (Parenthetically it is also argued that selves need an element of rituality in order to be selflike and that it is interactional rituality which guarantees the evolution of social life beyond given frames, corpora, cultural repertoires, and collective representations.) The idea that interactants can be strangers to themselves is an advance on Goffman's and Garfinkel's accounts of interactional selfhood, but one that problematizes the prosecution of the interaction sociology that Goffman and Garfinkel pioneer, since strangers to themselves disappear in normal sociological appearances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marxian theory of social class has always been troubled by the fact that the coalitions that individuals form have not, by and large, been consistent with the pattern of asset ownership. The purpose of this paper is to add another dimension to some of the existing approaches to this 'goodness-of-fit' problem. This is done by using n-person game theory to examine the coalitions that individuals would be expected to form in a struggle over division of the surplus. This provides a partial analysis of fragmentation within the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional codes and guidelines and literature on ethical issues in social research generally subscribe to the view that open methods of research are virtuous whereas covert ones are unethical. In particular ethical conduct is assured in the acquisition of the informed consent of participants. This paper is concerned with unethical aspects of open methods. It is suggested that researchers perceive negotiations with participants as situations of conflict and normally prevail by virtue of superior and practised skills. While research subjects are told that participation is voluntary, their defences -- in particular of their privacy -- are systematically eroded. Invasion is inherent in the textbook paradigm of the interview. Consent becomes a licence and the self-esteem of the investigator is measured in terms which run counter to the interests of subjects. It is argued that consent is a procedure which protects not the participants of social research but the researchers themselves, from whom moral responsibility for adverse consequences immediately passes. One of the implications of the practices surveyed is that ethical principles for social research should be safeguarded less in prescriptions of acceptable procedures than in the recognition of moral obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To resolve the ongoing controversy over Spencer's methodological views this paper establishes that the general philosophy set out in First Principles is a philosophy of science by documenting the influence of the Whewell-Herschel-Mill canons of good science on its structure and content. Its core ideas, the law of evolution and the persistence of force, are not metaphysical principles as most Spencer scholars claim. The law of evolution is a phenomenal law which specifies the course of transformation throughout all classes of phenomena. The persistence of force is a fundamental law which, together with its corollaries, the other first principles, explains why this is the course of transformation. This proscience interpretation of Spencer's position on the science-antiscience controversy also clarifies the role of the law of evolution and the persistence of force in his sociology. They generate a distinct kind of causal explanation, ultimate-causal explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body is socially constructed; and in this paper we explore the various and ever-changing constructions of the body, and thus of the embodied self, from the Greeks to the present. The one word, body, may therefore signify very different realities and perceptions of reality; and we consider briefly how and why these meanings changed. Plato believed the body was a 'tomb', Paul said it was the 'temple' of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that it was a 'corpse'. Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cosmic: one with the planets and the constellations. Descartes wrote that the body is a 'machine', and this definition has underpinned biomedicine to this day; but Sartre said that the body is the self. In sum, the body has no intrinsic meaning. Populations create their own meanings, and thus their own bodies; but how they create, and then change them, and why, reflects the social body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high point of research investment in mobility research was in the early 1970s, when three major national surveys of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland absorbed very substantial proportions of the spending of the SSRC on sociology. Only the Oxford Social Mobility Group retained a sufficiently large team of scholars to sustain active work on the data collected, although the number of publications that have subsequently made use of the three data-sets must now be several hundred in number. The dismal economics of large-scale survey research have since prevented ant similar follow-ups of mobility per se, but there have been some smaller specialist studies and new data have been derived from other sources. Both the range of articles featured in this paper, and the secondary analysis referred to, demonstrate how the original paradigm of mobility research and has become modified. Social mobility is now not so much a single area of sociology as four or arguably five connecting clusters of work. The first, not least in terms of paradigmatic dominance, concentrates on discovering and describing large-scale flows of people between social origins and social definitions. It is this which gives rise to our knowledge about patterns and rates of mobility.

This article presents the authors' comments on the report by John Westergaard and Ray Pahl to the University Grants Committee (UGC) on the institutional state of sociology in British universities. The paper has its limitations. Both authors were members of the working group of the UGC for the subject review, and so among the signatories of the report. At the time of writing this, the report is still only in the pipeline for publication so there are no reactions yet from sociologists to either argue or agree with the report. Nor can we make we make up for possible bias from inside commitment by offering startling benefit of inside view. Not because our lips are sealed; but because we do not think there is much unexpected to expose. We have no breathtaking revelations to make, for example, about mechanisms or pressures which might have been at work to induce the subject review panel to give the report a shape or direction at odds with some of its members' views. Circumstantial pressures there certainly were; but of a kind needing no special insight to anticipate or detect. The working group's recommendations bear no doubt a clear imprint from awareness of the acute, and politically determined, shortage of funds for higher education.

This paper directs critical attention to Emile Durkheim's considerations about the crucial role of non-transferable, human talent resources within any coherent theory of social justice. It is argued that Durkheim's appreciation of this question anticipated all modern formulations of the issue, and has been insufficiently acknowledged in the contemporary literature. It is contended that Durkheim developed a theory of 'equal treatment' through a rigorous repudiation of Mill's theory of self-ownership, but tempered the sociological force of this idea by developing a parallel 'equal opportunity' theory, which established the basis of a coherent defence of the idea of equality of opportunity through the principle of proportionality. It is concluded that the ethical and sociological compromise for which Durkheim argued between these two egalitarian theories of social justice remains philosophically coherent and sociologically plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recognizes the contribution made by Robert Miles to marxist scholarship on 'race' and class in Britain but it suggests that his central thesis is flawed in that a consideration of gender and community should be as central to the analysis as that of social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using as a case study the 1914 report of the government inquiry into the pay and working conditions of the Royal Irish Constabulary, this paper will address two issues in Max Weber's writings on class and status. The first concerns the recent claim by Barbalet that market situations are ultimately rooted in actors' subjective orientations and cognitions, something which has been taken for granted with respect to social status but which runs counter to previous interpretations of Weber's work on class. Certain implications for the way Weber's notion of class is conceived follow from this, which are supported by the case study. The second issue concerns Parkin's criticism of Weber for ignoring the role of the state, and his related observation that any consideration of class and status must address how the state functions to uphold or reshape structures of inequality. The deliberations and recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry afford an opportunity in microcosm to document some of the motivations the state has for endorsing social closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase in the number of remarriages in which children are involved, stepfamilies are becoming a prevalent form of American family life. As the family is the primary socializer for adult marital and parental roles, in a remarriage the partners have received their training from two different parental family settings and the children have been partially socialized by the first parents. These factors pose a number of difficulties in role adjustment for the individuals involved. This paper examines the step-famiy literature and highlights the socialization difficulties present in this very unique adjustment process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on the article "The Seven Veils of Paranoia, or, Why Does the Paranoiac Need Two Fathers?" by Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek eschews systematic argumentation for a more impressionistic mode of presentation-which is often brilliant indeed his paper nevertheless contains an implicit argument which I will attempt to reconstruct and discuss. In fact, although he does not thematize it directly, Žižek is addressing the central problem which has plagued every attempt to appropriate scholar Jacques Lacan's work for "progressive" purposes. I am referring to the deep and structural conservatism that characterizes the latter's thinking. If psychoanalytic conservatism of the classical Freudian variety described an ontology of the drives that contained virtually no margin of freedom for individual or collective autonomy, Lacan's version of psychoanalysis envisions an ontology of the symbolic that is no less implacable in its determinism. He simply relocates the source of the repetition compulsion and the death drive from the biological constitution to the anonymous and unmasterable symbolic circuit, the big Other. Freedom is an illusion. It reduces, as Lacan puts it, to the meaningless ability to pick up the dice and threw them one more time in a game which has been decided in advance.

This paper discusses the contribution of the sociologist to the planning of agricultural and rural development in Israel. The author first outlines the three levels of agricultural planning - national, regional and farm, and then provides some background to rural settlement activities in Israel. The confrontation of new immigrants from traditional societies with the technologically advanced agriculture of Israel resulted in severe social crises in the new villages, affecting also their economic achievements; and the subsequent assignment of rural sociologists to the villages to study the life-pattern of these traditional groups and provide them with counseling and instruction, whilst at the same time undertaking general research. The recommendations of the sociologists helped the development authorities to evolve suitable measures for integrating these immigrants into society as socially independent and economically successful members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper emphasises the need to give priority to supporting institutions in. attempts at mobilising local initiative for development. This policy is thought to increase the immediate response to local mobilisation efforts and make initiatives more lasting. The establishment of supporting institutions will require the direction of a great part of the developmental efforts to reforming the government apparatus at regional and national level. However, because it will seldom be possible in make many successful reforms at higher levels at the same time, concentration of development efforts on a few sectors is in most cases the only realistic policy. This is apparently incompatible with a very comprehensive, multi-sectoral approach to local development. With regard to local communities, a policy which concentrates on a limited number of activities at a time is also likely to create better chances of active popular participation in and some local diversification of the development process, as opposed to pressing overall transformation efforts which may well result in apathy and a tendency to increased dependence on the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding traditional sociological conceptions of community to include environmental considerations in community research, this paper stresses the importance of documenting both subjective and objective environmental concerns, as well as reconciling such differences as are presented and details precedence. Some recent data on the nature of social contact in high-rise ‘communities’ illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential members of the urban planning profession have developed certain ideas about new town design, including notions such as self-containment, social balance, and the neighborhood unit. These parallel, to some extent, concepts that have emerged from the field of community sociology. Efforts to put these ideas into practice have fallen Jar short of the mark. Without more sophisticated implementation mechanisms, better theories of social interaction at the neighborhood level, and new approaches to citizen participation, efforts to build new towns are likely to remain severely crippled. The aim of this paper is to summarize past efforts to translate implicit theories of social organization into actual new town designs. The possibilities of closing the gap between theory and practice through the use of more explicit forms of social experimentation are discussed in the context of the fledgling new towns program in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years numerous discussion of urban communities have given great weight to themes of disorganization and disorder. This paper critically examines several important conceptual, procedural, and substantive issues inherent in most treatments of community disorganization. To illustrate such fundamental problems as ‘overgeneralization’ and dominant group bias five specific topics—migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence—were selected for intensive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the literature on formal voluntary organizations in the urban community. The theoretical approaches that guided much of the research in this area are identified as social structural, social psychological, and organizational. Basic findings suggest that formal participation, including church membership, is a characteristic of urban life. Population characteristics, attitudes, informal interaction, and community involvement are all related to formal membership. Moreover, formal organizations attempt to integrate individuals with the larger community, and such groups, in urbanizing areas, facilitate modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the student and teacher relationship. When instructors find their classes failing to respond to lectures with the vitality and interest with which they were presented, failing to participate in discussions with measured scholarly interest, and treating assignments as unwanted tasks, they accuse their students of being unappreciative, lazy, and apathetic. The central success of any course is the coming together of interests among students and between students and faculty. This paper analyzes the problems in the normal teacher-centered class, the changes introduced in transforming it into a student-centered-structure; student reactions to the changes; and its difficulties. One case of an immanent problem grew out of an attempt to come to grips with grading procedures. Students tried to reform the course away from competitive relationships and a mystification of authority in the instructor.

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of rationality in Max Weber's sociology of religion. Three new terms: rationalism, rationalization, and rationality, are used to distinguish the different meanings Weber gives to rationality. Efficient orientation of means to ends (rationalism) is distinguished from the systematizations (rationalization). Rationality, finally, is the control of action by ideas. Rational social action is produced only by powerful irrational motives, and it holds a distinct place in Weber's sociology of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Marxist paradigm. In order to develop a coherent perspective, it is necessary for the author to go back to the work of Marx himself, to isolate its basic features and the tensions and ambiguities they involve, and then to assess the work of contemporary Marxists in the light of this heritage. While the central task of this paper is a critical review of the Marxist contribution to political analysis, such a focus must be located within the scope of Marx's theory as a whole, rather than separated out and isolated as one dimension of the theory. Therefore, the author begins with a general review of Marx's social theory and then explore his analysis of the political realm in the light of the societal problems defined by the theory as a whole.

This article presents Peter M. Hall's response to Rosabeth Moss Kanter's comments toward his article "A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Politics," published in the 1972 issue of "Sociological Inquiry." The author concludes that Kanter misunderstands his perspective by subsuming it under American liberalism. If there is anything that he is not, it is an American liberal, and if there is anything he is criticizing in American sociology, political sociology, and symbolic interaction, it is consensual, pluralistic, and liberal bias. Hall also does not deny the need to see the totality of the society, its interdependencies, feedbacks, and impacts, in short, society as a system. To settle misconceptions, Hall emphasized that his paper had a special focus and set limits as to its goals and coverage. It was not intended to be a complete analysis of politics nor a complete analysis of American politics.

Unidimensional conceptions of socioeconomic status require that alternative indicators of one's position in the stratification system have similar elects upon the consequences of socioeconomic level. We show herein that different indicators of social participation and psychological well-being are in fact associated with different indicators of socioeconomic status. Thus, any attempt to combine these indicators—educational attainment, occupational pursuit, family income, or occupational origins—into a single index of socio- economic status will prove unsatisfactory because its component parts have different consequences for the same variable. We also show in this paper precisely how certain formulations of the effects of inconsistency and mobility are wholly redundant and only represent a logically possible way of interpreting the linearly additive effects of the variables used to define inconsistency and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to clarify some of the perspectives of the discipline of sociology, to identify radical viewpoints and how they have evolved and converged, and to indicate some of the consequences of a radical sociology and its prospects. A radical sociology calls for a radical perspective, namely, a structural perspective. Such a perspective requires uncovering economic and political realities in the attempt to understand social structure. Intellectual relevance should not merely be cloaked in terms of efficacy demands which derive from state welfarism and militarism, but should be the extension of a radical and structuralist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents answer to sociologist Victor Lidz on his criticism over the research paper "Toward a Radical sociology" by Albert Szymanski. Lidz seems to Szymanski to focus on two major points: Lidz argues that corporate sociology is approaching value-freeness while radical sociology, because of its "idol-worship" is unable to be objective; and he, as a Parsonian, argues that the institutionalization of certain kinds of ethical and professional values produces objective science. Rather than picking at various minor points and insinuations made by Lidz, Szymanski attempts in this reply to answer his critique by refuting these two positions. Lidz, in arguing for a value free sociology fails to comprehend that values and beliefs have a fundamental resonance with one another. That is, that there is a strong psychological tendency for values and beliefs to fall into consistent patterns. Lidz argues extensively that the development of science hinges on the institutionalization of the value of objectivity. His argument is either trite or simply mistaken.