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Through organizational case studies conducted at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China and Central European University in Hungary, this paper examines academic culture and citizenship in societies transitioning from communist to market-driven social and economic structures. The article presents a new model of citizenship, representing types of citizenship along the dimensions of locally informed to globally informed and individualist to collectivist. Implications emphasize the hybridization of academic culture and a reinterpretation of cosmopolitan professional identity in faculty life, expanding the concept from Gouldner's focus on disciplinary loyalty to commitments in a global sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the close resemblances evident in their major works, their critical stance and their politics, C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner have received strikingly different responses from their sociological peers, and they now occupy very different places in the collective memory of the discipline. This intriguing discrepancy provides the basis here for a comparative case study that examines both ongoing commemorative practices and historical evidence. This paper shows how the sociological community has frequently and approvingly commemorated Mills through introductory textbooks, as well as reading lists for doctoral comprehensive examinations, awards in Mills' honor and biographies of Mills, while doing much less to preserve and promote the memory of Gouldner and his contributions to the field. In an effort to attain a better understanding of such differences, I compare the prescriptions that each advocated for the discipline, especially as these are expressed in Mills' Sociological Imagination and Gouldner's Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. The analysis emphasizes how Mills explicitly sought to move beyond sociology, in a narrow academic sense, and called for well-honed empirical endeavors with relevance for a variety of publics, whereas Gouldner proceeded largely as an academic theorist who demanded sociological-theoretical reform. Unlike Mills, he did not breach the gap between academia and the general public. These findings illustrate an apparent paradox, namely, that American sociology in the twenty-first century may reserve its most esteemed positions for internal critics who advocate movement beyond its contemporary confines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines sociologist Alvin Gouldner's analysis from the standpoint of these contemporary analyses of factory life--acknowledging, of course that Marxism was much less developed at the time Gouldner was writing. In exposing different types of bureaucratic rules and elaborating them into patterns, Gouldner mounts his attack on the view of bureaucracy as a juggernaut of history, relentlessly eating away at the few remaining freedoms. Gouldner's own analysis suggests that the adoption of a representative pattern would imply a much greater harmony of interests than actually exists. He does not examine the nature of underlying conflict that leads to the withdrawal of consent and little motivation to work, which in turn necessitate rules. To put it another way, the mock bureaucracy and the punishment-centered bureaucracy are not functional equivalents, in that their conditions of existence reflect both a different balance of class forces and a different set of technological and efficiency imperatives. As Gouldner argues in his paper on Organizational Analysis, ego's continued conformity to the role expectations of alter produces system disequilibrium, because the value of conformity diminishes as alter takes it for granted. But the costs of forcing Marxian ideas into the framework of a general theory of group tensions are high indeed: for what is lost, as before, is Marx's specific theory of capitalism.

This paper critically examines Alvin Ward Gouldner's contribution to the theory of the New Class, focusing on two major propositions from The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. The place intellectuals occupy in the social structure was for Gouldner a life-long concern. These two intellectual concerns are: first, in the sociology of sociology, the question of whether objectivity is possible while reality is mediated by speech and is interpreted by a theorist who is not value free but partisan; and second, in the sociology of Marxism, the question of the effects of revolution on the role of revolutionary intellectuals. In The Metaphoricality of Marxism and the Context Freeing Grammar of Socialism, Gouldner writes about the unspeakability of the intelligentsia and their role in Marxism. In the development of the Marxist theory of classes, the critique of the Hegelian theory of the state and of the universal class played a decisive role. Thus Gouldner calls Marxism the false consciousness of the New Class. Gouldner's theory of the New Class criticizes Marx from a Hegelian perspective, but Gouldner also fashioned a critical theory from the Marxian critique of Hegel. Gouldner is among the few theorists for whom the New Class includes both technical and humanistic intellectuals.

This section introduces a series of articles on financing sociological research. The late Alvin Gouldner presented us with a fundamental paradox that those who supply the greatest resources for the institutional development of sociology are precisely those who most distort its quest for knowledge. The problem of financing sociological research is not the burden of individual researchers, it is the challenge to a discipline and a profession that must take account of a shifting cultural-political climate and be accountable to a restive public. The paper by Martin Bulmer examines the unique role of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, under the directorship of Breadsley Ruml, in distributing relatively large amounts of money for social research during the 1920s. Highlighting the entry of more direct federal government support for basic social science research, Roberta Balstand Miller's paper, The Social Sciences and the Politics of Science: the 1940s, examines the debate about the inclusion of the social sciences in the legislation that established the National Science Foundation.

This article is an attempt to evaluate the contribution of the late Erving Goffman to the field of Sociology. In doing so I have attempted to document some of the main commentaries upon Coffman's work — especially those of A. Dawe and A.W. Gouldner — and to evaluate their validity. This paper is presented within the framework of a general overview of Goffman's work and an elaboration of some of the salient themes within it. The intention of the author is to free Goffman from some of the crude overgeneralizations that his colleagues have used in evaluating his writings. In particular, I have attempted to show, in general terms, how Goffman's work is sensitive to ‘structural’ as well as ‘situational’ concerns and also to class, hierarchy and power. It is argued that Goffman's importance has been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the work of Alvin Ward Gouldner as a social theorist. The theory behind the journal Theory and Society is of what Gouldner saw as the social requisites of rational dialogues on human affairs. And this theory of what rationality requires of its human milieu derives, in turn, from what was perhaps the main empirical find in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. Now if, as Gouldner argues, personal experience is the arbiter of social theory, then the unacknowledged dogmas which pervade the experience will hugely influence the formulation and especially the acceptance or rejection of ostensibly scientific hypothesis. It was his conclusion, in other words, that total systems of sociological theory like Marxism and Parsonian structural-functionalism are so vulnerable to criticism that their passionate embrace by intelligent people is explicable not so much on logical as on sociological and historical grounds. All in all, the key question of sociology, as Gouldner saw it, was the age-old problem of theory and practice; and the first step toward solving it was creating new theoretical collectives. His work on how and why social theories are produced and accepted proceeded on two fronts: logical analysis of the problems posed by the theories themselves and sociological analysis of the specific theories and theorists in situ.

This paper examines the gradual emergence of the theory of the New Class out of sociologist Alvin Gouldner's prior work. The most striking feature of Gouldner's work, taken as a whole is its iconoclasm. Thus, he rejected professionalism in sociology, as well as the party line in Marxism and objectivism in them both. His dichotomous definition of intellectuals in The Future of Intellectuals, as both a speech community and as a cultural bourgeoise is an attempt to express this double identity at a general theoretical level. Gouldner's assessment of the repression of Marxism is implied in his early work on bureaucracy. On the whole, even given his iconoclasm, Gouldner remains loyal to the ideal of a scientific and effective sociology. By the late sixties, however, Gouldner had begun to distinguish two theoretical traditions in Marxism. One source of the reflexive impulse is doubtless the perception of a scientifically inexplicable gap between available data and accepted theory. He first begins to examine the connection between social theory and the profession of sociology in a critical way in his well-known Anti-Minotaur essay. His specific contribution to the New Class theory is his attempt to fuse this rich tradition with the sociology of professions, the sociology of science, the thesis of the managerial revolution, human capital theory and a theory of linguistic segregation.

This paper introduces a series of articles which deals with the life and work of social theorist Alvin Ward Gouldner.

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Reports of the demise of the bureaucratic form of organization are greatly exaggerated, and debates about bureaucracy's functions and effects therefore persist. For many years, a broad current of organizational scholarship has taken inspiration from Max Weber's image of bureaucracy as an "iron cage" and has seen bureaucracy as profoundly ambivalent- imposing alienation as the price of efficiency. Following a path originally sketched by Alvin Gouldner [Gouldner, A. W. 1954. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Free Press, Glencoe, IL], some recent research has challenged this view as overly pessimistic, arguing that bureaucracy need not always be coercive but can sometimes take a form that is experienced as enabling. The present article challenges both Weber's and Gouldner's accounts, arguing that although bureaucracy's enabling role may sometimes be salient to employees, even when it is, bureaucracy typically appears to them as ambivalent- simultaneously enabling and coercive. I offer an unconventional reading of Marx as a way to make sense of this ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational sociologists often treat institutions as macro cultural logics, representations, and schemata, with less consideration for how institutions are ”inhabited“ (Scully and Creed, 1997) by people doing things together. As such, this article uses a symbolic interactionist rereading of Gouldner’s classic study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy as a lever to expand the boundaries of institutionalism to encompass a richer understanding of action, interaction, and meaning. Fifty years after its publication, Gouldner’s study still speaks to us, though in ways we (and he) may not have anticipated five decades ago. The rich field observations in Patterns remind us that institutions such as bureaucracy are inhabited by people and their interactions, and the book provides an opportunity for intellectual renewal. Instead of treating contemporary institutionalism and symbolic interaction as antagonistic, we treat them as complementary components of an “inhabited institutions approach” that focuses on local and extra–local embeddedness, local and extra-local meaning, and a skeptical, inquiring attitude. This approach yields a doubly constructed view: On the one hand, institutions provide the raw materials and guidelines for social interactions (“construct interactions”), and on the other hand, the meanings of institutions are constructed and propelled forward by social interactions. Institutions are not inert categories of meaning; rather they are populated with people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with local force and significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on the so-called dangerous liaisons between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies in Israel. He tries to investigate the issue why scholars of Middle Eastern studies are heavily involved with military intelligence work and why did military intelligence, this most hardheaded and secretive of government agencies, come to draw upon the expertise of historians and philologists, with analysing possible consequences of such relationships between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies. The relations between Middle Eastern studies and military intelligence are, reportedly, made possible by the construction of a liminal institutional setting, between academia and officialdom, and on the basis of a common form of expertise shared by both academics and intelligence officers. The author discusses concepts illustrated by noted social scientists, A.W. Gouldner and Max Weber. Gouldner's concept of "cultural capital" corresponds to the normative concept of truth as autonomy and self-groundedness. Whereas, according to Weber's "Sociology of Religion" the capacity of intellectuals to wield knowledge as power no doubt depends to some degree on their capacity to restrict access to it. This strategy of social closure has been analyzed by the sociology of the professions, and it corresponds in Weber's schema to the ideal typical figures of both magicians and priests.

This article focuses on the human expression of embarrassment and Erving Goffman's idea of human nature. It supports the claim that embarrassment is rightly central to a study of human social life. It argues the criticism from Alvin Gouldner that Gouffman's model of the self describes only the self of advanced capitalism, the self of a service economy where men are indeed producing performances rather than things. It also challenges the criticism from Arthur Brittan that Goffman's image of human nature is nicely adapted to the workings of a society in which all social relationships are market oriented. and third, presents objections to Goffman's position. For Goffman, human beings are creatures whose live in the world are so completely dependent on how others view them that they avoid at all cost the dashing, or even the dimpling, of social expectations. Goffmanian men and women are driven by the need to avoid embarrassment. This critique gives Goffman's work a macrosociological frame that Goffman himself studiously avoided. It therefore provides a way for sociology to tame Goffman into a mores acceptable member of the clan, a politicized social critic despite himself. Gouldner tries to make Goffman over into his own image. But is wrong to reduce Goffman to a clinical ethnographer of capitalism. His work is clearly of more universal intent and of more universal relevance.

The article presents the author's reflections on his friendship with the late sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner. To say a public farewell to a friend is no easy thing as all of us here have cause to know. Gouldner did go on to work in what he describes as the ambience of the Frankfurt School, since this recommendation led to his working on the famous Studies in Prejudice, which among other things gave rise to the concept of the authoritarian personality. As one might suppose, letters, outlines, manuscripts, critiques and sentiments in abundance are being exchanged between us. He digs further into the fieldwork for his dissertation while doing much else and by the new year of 1951, sends along the section dealing with the Wildcat Strike. Just as the dissertation had provided both a cognitive and interpersonal linkage between us, so did its intensive rewriting--first, as a corrected dissertation and then in the form of two books. By November 1953, just about a year after the acceptance of the dissertation, I am writing Gouldner a note which extends the symbolic ties between us. Our friendship had its share of ambivalence, of both the psychological and sociological kind, with both intensified by its being a relationship between a one-time mentor and student.

The article presents the author's reflections working with sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner in the Gypsum Study and the Early Marxism Project, a study of monopoly, capitalism, Nazism, Marxism and the Soviet Union at the University of Buffalo. My first encounter with Gouldner took place when I enrolled in a summer session course on The Sociology of Fascism. We used two texts, Franz Neumann's Behemoth and Eric Fromm's Escape From Freedom. We were working within the Mertonian conception of the dialectical interplay between theory and research. Our search was for ways in which the process of bureaucratization could be tamed before it subverted the human goals of socialism. In the minds of some of the research team our Early Marxism Project and the Gypsum Study were closely intervowen. This in turn led us to question the fundamental principles of Leninist vanguardism, the political effectiveness of which, however, was quite evident. One advantage of our joint commitment to both the Gypsum Study and the Early Marxism Project was that Gouldner allowed his house to become both the headquarters and the home away from home for a few of us to such an extent that I was able to keep close watch on his reading. Our effort at understanding the devolution of Soviet socialism was accompanied by sporadic efforts at organizing nonvanguardist political groups in Buffalo, New York.

The article presents the author's opinion on the relationship of Alvin Gouldner with the Marxist tradition as a radical social theorist in America. To the extent that he employed Marxism as his own method, Gouldner resisted draping himself in the mantle of science; although, as we will note shortly, he was not entirely hostile to the scientific strain in Marxism, he saw himself as a reflexive Marxist not a scientific one. But the most fundamental and typically American absence at the heart of Gouldner's Marxism was his lack of faith in a concrete class, movement or party capable of revolutionizing society. In his controversial 1971 essay on The Politics of the Mind, published in expanded form in For Sociology, he distinguished between partisanship defined as attachment to a party or part of the larger interest and commitment, which meant an attachment to the larger interest itself. Although Gouldner always warned against any form of anti-intellectualism, there was a streak of characteristic American populist wariness about intellectual pretension in his work. Instead, Gouldner played Marxism off against the more academic tradition of sociology that dominated American mainstream social theory.

This article discusses the book "The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology," by Alvin Gouldner. This book weaves a dialectic of intellectual approaches to the questions of ideology. The sophistication of the new sociolinguistics, hermeneutics and its near relative, Frankfurt-style critical sociology, the revelations of social and intellectual historiography, some elements of traditional social science - along with reflections on the experiences and moods of the world of the movement, the counterculture, and the Watergate scandal. Sociology is more ideological and less purely scientific than it claims; ideology is more rational than its opponents give it credit for. Gouldner seems to be overstating the general significance of events and structures that may be historically specific to the late 1960s and early 70s. He overstates the importance of the media, and especially the news-print media, in 1960s. The book also argues that the stability of modern capitalism is increasingly precarious, because it depends on periodic plebiscitarian mobilization, and the old ideological equilibrium has been undermined.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the sociological study of deviance underwent a sharp break in orientation; many observers in the field began to shift their focus away from an examination of etiology to the study of social control. Examining the social construction of deviance and crime to the exclusion of crucial and unavoidable material features that cannot be defined away lead to certain conclusions that could not be sustained and were vulnerable to successful challenge from later approaches. The lives and work of Frank Tannenbaum, Jack Henry Abbott, and Alvin Gouldner, as well as the work of other labelists and Marxists, offer testimony to the limits of constructionism in the sociological study of deviance and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]