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The article presents a text of a research paper about the elite and the social system presented at the Fifth Nordic Sociological Meeting in Stockholm in 1967. A social system will be defined as a set of interacting social units, where the units in general may be either organisms or set of organisms, or sets of sets of organisms, etc. The state variables used in the research to describe the social system are as follows: size, or number of members; energy, or the amount expended or controlled; differentiation, or the division of labor; and permeability, or the relative openness of a system or subsystem. At least eight major specific elites may be identified in industrial social systems. A ninth category called general elite may be added to refer to the top categories that result from formal or informal multidimensional status measurements. The following list of elites is suggested: charismatic elite, or the popular heroes, the saints, the gods; power elite, or those that excel in power or influence; wealth elite, or the very rich, the millionaires; ascriptive elite, or the old families, the aristocracy of birth; artistic elite, or the most recognized art producers; physical elite, or the top people in sport and beauty contests; prestige elite, or the holders of top positions; scholastic elite, or the holders of academic certificates or persons of similar standing; and the general elite, or the multidimensional top people, the who is who group.

This paper explores two related problems, which have grown out of a concern with dynamic aspects of Swedish voting behavior. In trying to apply a model of voting behavior primarily designed to analyze American data to the Swedish multiparty system have raised some descriptive questions, which at least partly can be answered on the basis of some recent survey work in Sweden. The first topic concerns the relationship between social mobility and political preference. The Center Party has traditionally had its strongest support among the farmers and other rural voters but has lately made some inroads among urban voters. Now there is in Sweden, as in other industrial nations, a fair amount of intergenerational mobility. The white collar class has been growing fast during the last decades and can be expected to grow further. Many members of the new middle class come from homes where the father was a worker. These upwardly mobile people have a Socialist heritage but now belong to a class where the norm is rather anti-Socialistic.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Hollingshead Index of Social Position (I.S.P.) is correlated with class awareness and class identification, two principal components of class consciousness. Comparative data are introduced from the Hollingshead and Redlich (1958) community study of New Haven, Connecticut, and an investigation by this writer (1963) of an urban Pennsylvania community, hereafter referred to as Twin City. Both studies use an objective index (I.S.P.) to estimate positions individuals occupy in the status structure of the community, and both correlate class awareness and class identification with class placement by this index. The interviews for the present study were conducted in a middle-sized Pennsylvania city, with a population of approximately 75,000, in the summer of 1961. The number of completed interview schedules, from which data analyses were derived, was set at 1,811. The social position which individuals and families occupy in the Twin City status structure was determined according to the modification of Hollingshead's three-factor I.S.P. All of the sample households enumerated in the interview schedule were stratified by class through use of this index. The collected data used to determine the I.S.P. for each household consisted of the education and occupation of the head of the household plus the ecological location of the dwelling unit in which the respondent resided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an invitation to sociologists to take seriously the topic of fashion. Only a handful of scholars, such as Simmel (1904), Sapir (1931), and the Langs (1961), have given more than casual concern to the topic. Their individual analyses of it, while illuminating in several respects, have been limited in scope, and within the chosen limits very sketchy. The treatment of the topic by sociologists in general, such as we find it in textbooks and in occasional pieces of scholarly writing, is even more lacking in substance. The major deficiencies in the conventional sociological treatment are easily noted—a failure to observe and appreciate the wide range of operation of fashion; a false assumption that fashion has only trivial or peripheral significance; a mistaken idea that fashion falls in the area of the abnormal and irrational and thus is out of the mainstream of human group life; and, finally, a misunderstanding of the nature of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to deal directly—in an exploratory fashion—with certain variables which might be considered basic to any verification of the intellectual subsociety hypothesis, focusing primarily upon the ethnic dimension and secondarily upon the class factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of Weber's city typology in relation to the Russian urban experience and to attempt to locate the Russian city within Weber's celebrated Oriental-Occidental dichotomy. The failure of various intellectual and revolutionary groups before and in 1917 to liberalize a traditionalistic societal system is correlated to the absence of a middle class in the Russian cultural context. Kiev, Novgorod, and Pskov existed long before the Mongol conquest of Russia in the thirteenth century and were exposed to certain Western influences due to the political connections with the neighboring Western countries. Unknown before the Mongols arrived, Moskva "still in the nineteenth century before the liberation of the peasants from slavery retained all the characteristics of a great Oriental city of about the time of Diocletian of the second century A.D." In addition to being the seat of the patrimonial ruler, Moskva was a "locality where rents from possessions in land and slaves as well as income from office holding were spent." Elsewhere Weber said that the cities in Russia "never arrived at freedom in the Western sense. Everywhere the military, judicial, and industrial authority was taken from the cities." This act of taking away autonomous-autocephalous authority is probably Weber's reference to the total destruction of Novgorod and Pskov by the Russian rulers as soon as they emerged from the shadow of Mongol dependence as well as to the Russian colonial conquest of the non-Russian cities and countries in the more recent centuries including the twentieth. Seven major characteristics basic to Weber's Oriental vs. Occidental typology of urban behavior, as tentatively modified in view of the needs and the contribution of recent research, will be utilized in examining the Russian experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been almost twenty years since Davis and Moore published their famed theory of stratification. During this period, the discussions which it has engendered have been numerous and highly instructive. It is now time to address ourselves to problems which concern the testability of the theory and its experimental validity. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of one of the basic issues raised by Davis and Moore. A major proposition of their theory argues that in the final analysis, social stratification arises in a society because of differential rewards for performance in the social positions therein. These rewards can be of several types. For our purposes, two are of major importance: symbolic and economic rewards, hereafter referred to as "prestige" and "reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on transformations of class structure and social stratification in Poland. The structure of classes and strata has undergone major transformations in People's Poland. The individual classes and social strata are internally diversified and divided into various social groups, each with different socially significant traits. Although both workers and peasants are formally co-owners of the nation's property, the former, unlike the latter, work predominantly in the socialized sector of the economy, where they hold a dual position as both hired labor and collective owners at the same time. An intermediate position in the working class is occupied by so-called peasant workers, a category of people who live on private farms and work chiefly or exclusively outside agriculture either in town or country. The intelligentsia in Poland does not basically differ from the workers as regards its relation to the means of production, although certain segments of the intelligentsia (managerial groups) have a larger direct influence on the administration of means of production.

An association between doctrinal beliefs and positions on social issues is posited. This study of the clergy in an industrial city demonstrated that doctrinal orthodoxy had an independent effect on positions taken on issues related to social control, personal morality, use of power by the elite, civil liberties, minority rights, and welfare support. Absolutist clergymen with a doctrinally conservative other-worldly focus were reluctant to change society: they supported social control, personal morality, and considerable use of force by the power elite. Evolutionist, this-worldly clergymen who were more doctrinally liberal were open to change and focused more on issues such as civil liberty, minority rights. and welfare support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

central basis of social order. The former view maintains (and requires) that a value consensus exist in the empirical world; the latter assumes the existence of a ruling class which dominates the ideational institutions of the society. A preliminary scrutiny of available evidence suggests that: (1) a value consensus does not exist, and (2) there is a high concentration of wealth and economic control which appears to extend into vital political and ideological areas, thereby implying the existence of a dominant or ruling class. Based upon these conclusions, the concept of ideological hegemony is introduced as a significant component of a Marxist view of social order. The hegemonic process is described and available evidence is examined in the areas of political socialization and mass media. A pattern in which debate and discussion are circumscribed while alternative values and world views are ignored or suppressed was found to characterize these two areas. This pattern was seen to provide further support for the Marxist view that an ideological hegemony imposed by the dominant class is the ideational manifestation of a social order based upon coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the social class structure in two villages in the South-West of Finland, with special reference to the interaction between the classes. The study of social classes forms an important and topical branch of modern sociology. The choice of the most important characteristic of a class has, however, largely depended on the investigator's prejudices and research methods. Sometimes a class has denoted an occupational group, sometimes a set of individuals with the same socio-economic status, and sometimes a group of people who are treated in the same way or who have closer connections with each other than with outsiders. But it has been found that most of the variables used in defining social class are correlative. The members of the same occupational group have the same socio-economic status and hold the same opinions; they come into contact with each other more easily. On the other hand, interaction adds to the feeling of solidarity and standardizes norms and values; thus it is likely to increase the cohesiveness of the group.

Two theoretical models have emerged to account for variations in the response to imprisonment among inmate populations. One, the "deprivation model," focuses attention on the pressures and deprivations which confront the inmates. The other, the "importation model," critiques the closed-system orientation of the deprivation model and suggests that the scope of an adequate explanation must give systematic attention to factors beyond the immediate prison situation. This study provides empirical tests of several major propositions implied by the importation model. Based on the analysis of data obtained from 276 adult felons confined in a maximum security institution, the analysis clearly shows that adaptations to imprisonment are in part attributable to such extraprison influences as social class, preprison involvement in criminal behavior, frequency of contacts with individuals in the free society, and the quality of the inmates' perceptions of their postprison life-chances. These findings illustrate the necessity of broadening the scope of explanatory models in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis of status inconsistency predicts greater leftism as an interaction effect of discrepant status dimensions. Inconsistent individuals are objectively low in some dimensions and subjectively insecure in those where they hold a high position. Ensuing anxiety and frustration are likely to be translated into political opposition to the status quo. Though theoretically plausible, empirical investigations of the hypothesis report mixed results. Employing data collected among a sample of 382 lower-class Chilean slum dwellers, a new test of the hypothesis is conducted. Dummy-variable regressions are employed to isolate status additive effects on leftism from inconsistency interaction effects. Neither education-occupation nor education-income discrepancies are found to produce significant changes in the dependent variable. Identical results are obtained when age is controlled for. Limitations of these findings and their theoretical implications, as they add to a growing body of research, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the popular consciousness conflict is generally understood to mean a struggle between two opposing groups. Ossowski (1963) in his study of "Class Structure in the Social Consciousness" calls our attention to the deep historical roots of the dichotomous image of social conflict. From Biblical times on he traces the recurring tendency to perceive social structure in terms of two potentially conflicting groups—the oppressors and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled. This tendency toward the dichotomous perception of conflict is not limited to class struggles but dominates a wide variety of conflict situations. Conflict between races, religions, political factions, and regions is conceptualized in terms of two antagonistic groups. Thus we speak of conflict between Black and White, Christian and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Congress and Executive, Hawk and Dove, Church and State, Business and Labor, etc. Several correctives to this oversimplified view have appeared, including the pioneer work of Simmel (1950; 1955a; 1955b), and more recently the studies of coalition theorists such as Caplow (1968) and Biker (1962). Caplow in particular has stressed the triadic model as the most pervasive form of conflict. We agree but take exception to the conception of the third party in the triad as developed by both Simmel and Caplow. We propose that the most common form of conflict is that which transpires between two antagonists and a third party or parties—the "neutrals." In our view the neutrals are not equivalent to the third member of the triad, and the dynamics of conflict involving neutrals and conflict groups cannot be comprehended within the scheme of "coalitions in triads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the growing competition for college admittance and the greater skills required in an increasingly complex and technically oriented society, this study was undertaken to determine the importance of academic achievement as a student value in the latter 1960's. The importance of academic achievement for students was supported in terms of the most long range measure, namely being remembered as a brilliant student. In terms of the measure directed at present popularity among students, valuation of academic achievement occupied a middle position. Leaders were found to value academic achievement significantly more highly than non-leaders. Students with white collar parents valued academic achievement more highly than students with blue collar parents but results were not statistically significant in each case. An explanation for the lack of confirmation of the relationship between social class and valuation of academic achievement was ascribed to the strong college aspirations of blue collar students at the school under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, a great deal of interest has been generated in relation to Emile Durkeim's concept of anomie. Of even greater interest to American sociologists, however, has been Robert K. Merton's concept of anomie as formulated in his widely cited essay, "Social Structure and Anomie." Studies in the areas of suicide, crime, and delinquency, to suggest only a few categories, have attempted to utilize this concept empirically, focusing on it as an explanatory device. Leo Srole's anomia scale was developed as an index to Durkheim's anomie and has been used to assess Merton's theory. A careful examination of Merton's concept of anomie suggests that his emphasis is different from Durkheim's and that this difference leads to varying hypotheses. Merton's conception of anomie is one of a condition in society in which there is a disjunction between socially mandated goals and the means by which these goals are pursued. This disjunction is reflected in the great emphasis which is placed on success goals in American society and the lack of similar emphasis on legitimate means for the attainment of success. Furthermore, since access to the legitimate means for the attainment of success is differentially distributed, there is differential utilization of illegitimate means. It follows, then, that the lower the social class position, the less the access to legitimate means and the greater the tendency to deviant behavior. Thus, crime and delinquency rates could reasonably be expected to increase as social class declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tug concert of class consciousness seems to mean many things to sociologists, perhaps because they have not always agreed on the meaning of one of its elements-class. In contemporary writing the term has been used in five different ways. These, in order of comprehensiveness, are: first, the manifestation of an awareness that a system of stratification exists in society; second, the willingness of a person to designate where he feels he belongs in this system; third, the manifestation of interests in common with others who feel they belong in the same aggregate; fourth, the possession of presumedly accurate knowledge of the interests of the class to which one feels he belongs, and as a consequence, a manifestation of interests similar to these; and fifth, a feeling of solidarity with those who are identified as belonging to one's self-assigned class, and a feeling of estrangement from those not identified as belonging to one's self assigned class. The first three usages are indicative more of class identification than of class consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parsons' conceptual analysis of social stratification is representative of the several well-known functional analyses of stratification. A heated controversy has occurred over the functional approach to stratification, yet almost no analysis of Parsons' contribution appears in the literature. Since Parsons' work on stratification is beset by problems similar to other functional analyses of stratification, a critical analysis of Parsons' approach may also help to clarify some of the problems faced by other functional analyses. Our concern here, however, is particularly with Parsons and specifically with his "Revised Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification." Our task will be to examine in detail Parsons' revised theory and to offer some comments upon it. Analysis of the theory and comments will be strictly separated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]