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The article presents abstracts of the papers based on politics in Wales, that were read on May 15, 1971 at the conference held at the Polytechnic of Central London. One of the papers discussed here is titled "Aspects of Politics in Mid-19th-Century Wales." The middle decades of the last century deserve detailed study by the historian of the labor movement for the reason that these were the years when characteristic attitudes to politics among the rural and urban working classes were being formulated. The solidification of these attitudes during subsequent decades helps to explain the relatively slow development of the labor movement in Wales in the 20th century. An examination of some of the formal aspects of the structure of politics in the period 1850-70 in such a way as to expose its underlying social realities enables to understand how and why these attitudes came to be so powerful. The outstanding feature of the formal representative system in 1850 was the extent of the inequalities contained within it. Most of these can be ascribed to the working out of the arrangements of the First Reform Act, but the result of a vast increase in, and a redistribution of, population in the intervening years had been to make them far more pronounced than they had originally been. This was the case in both county and borough constituency, but was most pronounced in the latter.

The article discusses the intricacies in conceptualization of sociology. The difficulty for sociology lies in the fact that it often employs everyday words to explain a number of relatively everyday phenomena, and that, in order to do so, it seeks to give the words of everyday language a definite, restricted, and precise meaning. As a matter of fact, not everything is well-ordered within sociology. Sociology has a good deal of knowledge summing up social facts, it has a well developed technique of measurement, but its shortcoming is the absence of coherence in sociological knowledge, a shortcoming which is due to the fact that sociology has not any comprehensive, basic sociological theory. The starting-point for sociological science is the social anthropological observations that people behave habitually in certain situations, and that this habitual behavior varies from community to community in such a way that it is hardly probable that the variations have biological causes. In addition, one might call attention to the common experience that people cooperate and influence each other mutually according to a fixed behavior pattern.

The article presents a discussion on speculations regarding prospects of human survival, adapted from the transcripts of talks on "The Problem of the Survival of Human Society," during the Third Symposium on Science and Society. It clarifies that survival is connected to the structured nature of ecological systems. In addition, it cites several elements causing indeterminacy of human survival which include the deteriorating consumption-production system, knowledge pollution, and the joint production of good and bad.

The article analyzes conformity from the perspectives of task and social requirements. In experiments on conformity, the social factors in the situations are often more compelling than the object presented for judgment. Agreement with an overheard incorrect judgment is often inconsequential, whereas disagreement may carry some negative consequences. Therefore it is understandable that a subject may agree with an overheard incorrect judgment. The equipment consisted of a form board in the shape of a house front with five rectangular gaps to represent doors or windows. For each gap there was a pair of cutouts, similar in shape, one of which was congruent to the gap whereas the other was smaller than the gap. The experiment was administered to two individuals at a time, one of them a naive S, and the E's confederate who answered in accordance with prior instructions. That the social context in which the experiment takes place may affect the results were demonstrated when it was conducted off campus.

The article discusses various issues related to the husband-wife differences. The reciprocal nature of the role of husband and wife in the construction of reality is an assumption made in nearly all theoretical discussions. Authors wish to raise the question of whether feminine construction of reality, the woman's construction of her sex role constellation can exist apart from masculine construction of reality. It is the authors' attempt to investigate some of the similarities and differences in such constructions within the marital dyad. In this article the authors illustrate some of the differences they found in subjective reports of husbands and their wives involved in dual-profession marriages, specifically in cases where the wife is actively engaged in the practice of law or medicine or teaching at the university level. It seems probable that the husband or wife's perception of reality would have much effect on the spouse's internalization process. But the process is not a perfect one, making data from only one spouse most incomplete. In the case of the husband's attitude toward his wife's work, we see at least this pattern in operation in the dissimilar responses: some wives are reluctant to admit that their husbands disapprove of their activities, although their husbands may in fact be against such employment.

The article discusses sociologist Max Weber's views on the problem of objectivity in the social sciences. Weber demonstrated that the conception of objective scientific knowledge in any sense of any empirical subject matter, is indissolubly bound up with the reality both of the normative aspect of action and of obstacles to the realization of norms. Science itself cannot be methodologically grounded without reference to the value element in the relation of wertheziehung. Throughout his works, Weber expressed a concern for the nature of scientific inquiry in the social sciences, and the meaning of the relationship between scientific knowledge and social values. Weber contended that, given the nature of social reality, values are an essential aspect of the subject matter of the social scientist. Although a researcher's choice of problems for investigation is influenced by his own values and the values of his society, Weber insisted upon the freeing of oneself from the influence of implicit subjective factors. He emphasized that the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data must be wertfrei-value free. Weber was well aware of the difficult moral problems that can develop when one attempts to separate his personal life from his scientific life.

This article focuses on the hypothesis that race is given some appreciable weight in determining social reaction, although belief congruence is more important. However, when an especially high level of congruence between the communication relevant beliefs of communicators and target persons is established, target persons will react highly favorably to communicators, giving no appreciable weight to race of communicators. Individuals constituting all samples employed in the present investigation were white male and female students at a midwestern university. One hundred nineteen students were requested to rank order 17 belief statements, each of which was selected because it was known to be congruent with the beliefs of students at the university. Therefore, in a case where communicator target person belief congruence was at a high level, it was shown that for a reaction which is probably more personally and cognitively involving, as well as less subject to experimenter bias effects than "friendship choice," race was not given any appreciable weight in the determination of reaction.