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This paper describes an attempt to use a theoretical framework of social action to analyze and describe how a small community in the Lead Belt of Missouri acquired fire protection through volunteer group effort. The analysis showed that a theoretical social action model is a useful tool for studying the group processes involved in community development. The results indicate that a community development contest acts as a catalytic agent in stimulating volunteer group efforts toward the improvement of physical facilities in a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents additional thoughts about collective behavior with reference to two papers on the Kent State University incident which papers were written as applications of theory of collective behavior. The author developed this theory to establish general analytic relations among a set of variables that he had discovered to be important in the genesis of hundreds of episodes of collective behavior. One of the most original and strongest aspects of the theory was its emphasis on the behavior of agents of social control as determinants of the timing, content, direction, and outcomes of episodes of collective behavior. The author stressed social-structural aspects, but he underplayed the importance of psychological mechanisms in the dynamics of episodes of collective behavior. In this article, the author developed a few new thoughts about the psychological and organizational characteristics of collective behavior in reading the two papers. These thoughts are developed under three headings, strategies to fix blame and assign illegitimacy in episodes of conflict; the relations among different agents of social control as these influence the development of an episode; and shifts in the definition of the situation, and the implication of these shifts for the application of the value-added model.

This article seeks to provide some tentative answers to issues arising from comments on the paper "Current Folklore in the Criticisms of Parsonian Action Theory," which was written because certain features of sociologist Talcott Parsons' work have consistently been misinterpreted by the critics. According to the authors one of the purpose of this paper was to clarify what they perceived to be Parson's position on persistent theoretical issues social theory. The authors argue that critics incorrectly contend that the voluntaristic thesis has been abandoned, primarily because they fail to recognize that the analysis of emergent system levels requires the elaboration of additional concept. Critics have thus assumed that conceptual elaboration and specification represents an abandonment of the voluntaristic thesis, but in point of fact, just the contrary is true. The basic elements of the unit act-the actor, objects, orientations, informational organization, and energic constraint-have served as the general framework for subsequent developments in Parsonian theory.

In this article the author seeks to answer the adequacy of his own interpretation of sociologist Talcott Parsons' action scheme, and how to interpret Parsons. The author illustrates why conventional methods of analysis and exposition do not work well when applied to Parsons' writing, and recommends an alternative method. A proposal is made to forego the kind of critical analysis, which the author himself attempted to his own essays on voluntarism and the action scheme, to make sense of Parsons' work as a whole. The author remarks that it has been alleged that to the effect the abstractness of concepts stands in some sort of conflict or contradiction with empirical relevance. This allegation is unacceptable to the author in a general preposition. Going back to the prestigious natural sciences, such a concept as particle with its mass concentrated at a single mathematical point in Eucidean space, is exceedingly abstract, but its use in Newtonian mechanics scarcely seems to be either vague or irrelevant to empirical problems.

This paper presents a limited number of concepts that comprise social action theory. By establishing greater precision in defining the basic concepts as goals, values, norms, means, and social conditions, a reformulation of the "unit-act" is set forth. The interrelationships among these concepts for the manifestation of social volition are discussed in keeping with the voluntaristic orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the often repeated assertion that Parsons abandoned the notion of ‘voluntarism’ in favor of ‘macrofunctionalism’ or ‘behavioristic naturalism’ and that the Parsonian scheme therefore reveals marked discontinuity. When Parsons' strategy for theory building is appreciated, this prevalent assumption proves to be incorrect. In fact, the Parsonian action scheme evidences a considerable degree of continuity from 1937 to the present. While a prevalent piece of sociological folklore is refuted by a careful examination of the Parsonian theory building strategy, a number of significant problems in following this strategy are felt to remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author comments on a book by Jonathan H. Turners and Leonard Beeghleys, entitled "Current Folklore in the Criticism of Parsonian Action Theory." The author agrees that the philosophical views of the freedom of the will never did constitute the primary basis of his own conception of the voluntarism which was an essential aspect of the theory of action. The argument about the dangers of reification of theoretical schemes and the attendant fallacy of misplaced concreteness was singled out as convincing. A suggestion is made for Turner and Beeghley to come up with a specific and concrete illustration of what they mean by their allegations of vagueness. According to the author there has been an increasing conviction that autonomous action of the individual or voluntaristic action is to a degree not fully appreciated by our forebears, that freedom and hence the capacity for voluntarism is a function of organization. This organization is relevant at all lvels of the system of human action.

Social action is now receiving much emphasis in programs of community development. Hence, a sociological analysis of the process is both necessary and timely. In this paper a design for such an analysis is presented. It involves three aspects of the action process: (1) initiation, (2) legitimation, and (3) execution of the proposed action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with developing a means of studying social action, rather than attending only to structure. A county self-survey of health conditions is used as a test case. Certain assumptions and questions are specified and the flow of action is abstracted. On this basis, a model is developed. Five analytical components are seen: (1) convergence of interest, (2) establishment of an initiating set, (3) legitimation and sponsorship, (4) establishment of an executing set and mobilization of community resources, (5) fulfillment of a "charter." Each component is presented and discussed in some detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the evaluation of field projects is a new subdivision of the social sciences employing techniques derived from statistics, history, anthropology, and econometrics. Its purpose is the objective measurement of change or growth, both the quantitative ‘aggregate’ type and the process of maturation or ‘structural’ growth. Concepts, techniques, principles, administrative problems, and machine aids are discussed. The paper refers frequently to the United Nations and its Specialized Agencies, which are at present the bodies most actively calling for evaluation specialists to guide their field staffs and Technical Assistance programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to continued criticism of a previous paper of his concerning industrial behavior and attitudes. He states the criticism fails to adequately state theoretical arguments with care and in a form that is acceptable to proponents and that the criticism failed to utilize data adduced that is relevant to the testing of these arguments. He mentions that the social action approached failed by omitting a crucial detail which results in the criticism's formulation being misleading. He comments on the empirical evidence utilized in the criticism and states that the evidence, while interesting, fails to damage the assumptions and hypotheses put forward in the social action approach. He mentions the second set of findings has little relevance to refuting the arguments.

A sample of young married couples in which each husband was 19 or younger and each couple had been married a minimum of six months was studied to explore selected characteristics of teen-age marriages and to test the general proposition that a positive relationship exists between mental health (integration of the personality system) and marital integration. The results lend empirical support to selected ideas of role and social action theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the political incursions in the process of evaluation research. Researchers who undertake the evaluation of social action programs are engaged in enterprise fraught with hazards. They are beset by conceptual and methodological problems, problems of relationships, status and function, practical problems and problems of career and reward. There is also an increasing requirement to boost visibility and scope of evaluation research in recent years. The big change that is expected is that both programming and evaluation are now national in scope. Programs may actually become no more standardized in form, content and structure than they ever were, but they are funded from a common source and bear a common name, which is "community action program,".

Presents an introduction to the October 1964 issue of the periodical "Journal of Social Issues."

This article reports on the student protest movement against racial segregation, the sit-in and freedom-ride movement. It focuses upon the development of the very first sit-in in the South at Greensboro, North Carolina (NC), on February 1, 1960. It presents a description and discussion of an 18-year-old Negro student who, together with his three close friends from the freshman class at the Negro College in NC, sat-in one day at a segregated down-town lunch counter and thus began the sit-in movement in the South. It emphasizes affect, acting out, and the successful resolution of the identity crisis of late adolescence.

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumptions and method underlying sociology education and outline one approach to the development of a sociology course. Sociology in the 1960s became a firmly established university discipline. At the beginning of the decade there were only three professors in sociology. At the beginning of 1970 there existed over thirty professors. With the increase in the number of professorships there was a substantial increase in the number of students reading sociology. Indeed it can be said that to have read sociology became rather popular in the student world in the 1960s. The system of teaching and examination inevitably constrains the sociological activity of students. Thus for the most part sociology students read what they are told to. It is in this sense that the development of sociology education has been teaching rather than learning centred, and more authoritarian in its values as opposed to democratic. The values underlying the teaching of sociology have never been researched in any comparable way to the values underlying managerial behaviour.

This article focuses on the theory of sociology given by sociologist Talcott Parsons. The fate of the functional requisites in Parsonian sociology can be regarded as happy or sad according to one's theoretical predilections. It has been shown that in many respects the development and changes that have taken place in and around the concept have reflected the development and changes in Parson's theory of society. The caveat on theory-building expressed in the book "The Structure of Social Action," has held good over the years as of March 1970. This is especially the case with respect to the universal imperatives. They are not subject to change for they are not empirical realities; they are, however, real in their consequences for social systems and for the structure of social organization in terms of all human societies. Parsons has made and elaborated the important distinction between social and personality systems in such a fashion that old notions of the individual versus the society have been seen to be inadequate. This is particularly relevant here as it paves the way to an understanding of individual and social requisites of human society, though Parsons himself has not taken full advantage of the possibilities in this context.

While only a few of the many complex and challenging social psychological problems of physical disability have been discussed in this issue, and the papers presented have been on widely different levels of conceptualization, certain practical and theoretical implications for social action for the disabled appear to be justified. These include physical disability is socially neutral; physical disability is psychologically neutral; and physical disability is social psychologically negative.

The article describes methods and statistical techniques used in constructing an index of "religious group action," one phase of a study of rural churches conducted by the Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri. In addition to studying the rural church in relation to these specific functions, there was a desire to compare churches as total functioning units and to test a number of traditional hypotheses concerning the relationship of environmental variables and the functioning of churches. A review of the literature disclosed that, since 1900, numerous efforts had been made to evaluate statistically the functioning of rural churches. Since most of these studies had used single-variable measures, it was hoped that such a measure might be found to serve the present research need. However, there was little agreement among the various studies as to what a given single-factor index measures. Factor analysis was chosen as the technique to be used, because it had been successfully used in constructing the Hagood Level-of-Living Index and because of properties of the first common factor, which this technique identifies. The development of the index made it possible to test the relationship of church functioning to such environmental variables as level-of-living of the township, soil type, farm tenancy rates and population growth or decline.

The article presents information on the critical attitude and social action. He who immerses himself in his immediate responsibilities and meets them well is not an escapist, even if he does not read all the news every day. The real escapists are those who run away from their assigned tasks and rush around worrying about every trouble which they glean from their morning paper, scattering their interests, frittering away their imaginative capacity, and squandering their intellectual resources. However, concentration does not mean closing one's mind. If academic studies amount to more than professional training, they must enable one to see and weigh alternatives, to respect choices, which differ from his, and to check and re-check his premises. One cannot do so without questioning oneself as well as others, authority as well as anarchy, the claims of tradition as well as of revolution. But in doing so one has to realize that there are insoluble problems, unanswerable questions, and extra-rational forces in human affairs.

The prominent recent repetition of a widespread miscue on the date and description of Weber's magisterial Author's Introduction to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion may serve as an apt point of departure for this essay which I happily dedicate to Talcott Parsons. Apart from his other writings to which only passing reference is made in the present essay. Prof. Parsons' Structure of Social Action and his annotated translation of Weber's Protestant Ethic offered me—and offered very many others—indispensable aid in uncovering the structure and meanings of Weber's pioneering investigations into the comparative historical sociology of the world religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past fifty years, Jungian type theory has met a curious combination of neglect and misunderstanding on the part of academic investigators. Although the difficulty and abstractness of the social scientist C.G. Jung's writing contributed to this state of affairs, more fundamental reasons inhere in the basic research paradigms which have governed psychological inquiry. The functionalist, environmentalist, positivist Anglo-American psychology of recent decades failed to resonate to the possibilities of Jungian thought. Insofar as the type theory was noted at all, it was collapsed to a concept of introversion-extraversion, assimilated to quantitative, psychometric paradigms, and emerged as a family of introversion-extraversion scales having little to do with Jung's conceptualization. Recent trends suggest that this situation is changing. As psychology becomes increasingly concerned with internal experience, with cognitive and affective processes, and with qualitative aspects of behavior, a rediscovery of Jungian thought is underway. In this context, the type theory seems especially promising as a framework for inquiry since it presents a coherent model of personality which identifies an individual's basic stance toward the environment and his preferred modes of perceiving and judging experience.

The article comments on sociologist James W. Loewen's research paper "Action and Sociology." Sociologists will recognize Loewen's statement for what it is worth, a polemic by presumably a "radical sociologist" someone on a continuum between a social reformer and a revolutionary in the disguise of a sociologist. The Marxist rhetors with whom Loewen apparently identifies will undoubtedly find much to please them in his piece. They will undoubtedly appreciate its these characteristics: his version of the New Left catechism, implicit and explicit; his artful exegetical distortion of what sociologist Philip M. Hauser have written; his moral fervor and righteousness; his "1984" version of the status of sociology, of the American Sociological Association, and of the sociological literature; his apotheosis of sociologist Karl Marx; his self-donned cloak of martyrdom.

The article discusses remarks made by management scientist W.W. Daniel on the application of a social action frame of reference in industrial sociology. The author feels that Daniel's treatment contains a variety of confusions and errors which largely stem from excessively seeking critical effect. Daniel's argument, it is noted, suggests a lack of appreciation of the nature of the interplay between theory and research in developments within scientific undertakings. The author admonishes Daniel for attacking the social action approach in industrial sociology based on research methods and techniques used by its exponents and then substantiating this criticism by referencing the Luton research.

The notion is exploded that naive idealism motivates and sustains Peace Corps volunteers. Neither is the new respect for the spirit of service their sole satisfaction. Practical considerations include the opportunity to test oneself, to become independent, to search for more satisfying values, to cooperate rather than compete, to encourage the spread of democracy, and to satisfying the need to be needed and recognized. The expansion of volunteerism, as illustrated by new applications of the Peace Corps model, has powerful potential for reducing social problems in the United States and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay tries to relate work of British economist John Vaizey to the various institutional settings in which he has worked. He is both a writer and an economist; he is both a university teacher and somebody who tries to take his due place in public affairs; and all these are activities which are linked but which present choices to him. He tries to show in this study, imperfectly but as well as he can, the complexities of the matter. It has a general interest because he thinks that his own doubts and hesitations mirror a series of doubts and hesitations in the social sciences and in literature today. To describe his professional life, the author feels, would be to describe his whole life from a particular point of view and it would have to be begin a long way back. He had a passion for literature and painting, which spread at that time to the theatre, his chief concern was society. He had decided, consciously, to interpret his private misery in social terms. As a socialist, in the original and full meaning of the term, he decided that everything that happened to him, or to anybody else, had a social origin.

The article presents information on workshops and announcements related to rural sociology. The Saskatchewan Centre for Community Studies has been incorporated as Canadien Centre for Community Studies-Centre Canadian d'Etudes Communautaires. It is now an independent, nonprofit, research organization with headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario. The Saskatchewan Centre will continue as the Prairie Region Office. Four distinguished speakers, each an outstanding authority in social theory and social action, will lead a two-day Colloquium as one event marking the 50th anniversary of Western Reserve University School of Applied Social Sciences. The Colioqulum will be held in Cleveland on September 29 and 30, 1966. A grant of $20,000 from the University of Illinois Graduate Research Board has been awarded to study the impact of industrialization on a rural area in Illinois. Herbert F. Lionberger has been awarded a grant by the Agricultural Development Council to study the development and dissemination of scientific farm information in Taiwan, assisted by H. C. Chang, Research Assistant in the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri.

The article discusses the initiation of remedial action by social scientists from within the establishment. The author states that there is little training or professional experience for social scientists to prepare them for the role of administrators of programs. Yet it is here through the design and management of action programs that public policy is ultimately expressed. It is the most direct way of influencing the very social forces about which scholars write, preach and admonish. Given the danger inherent in the design and management of programs, few of the social scientists are eager to put their ideas to the test of action. Rather, it seems safer to design programs and watch from afar how others, who perhaps do not understand what these social scientists mean, play them out, founder and compromise, while the scientists register dismay from the sidelines. Even worse, perhaps, others criticize the functioning of social institutions but are silent when it comes to what to do about their inadequacies.

The article presents a comparative analysis of militant and non-militant views of the riots that took place in Los Angeles, California. The author states that in August 1965, the date of the Los Angeles riot, most Afro-American militants did not fulfill the criteria necessary to be identified as a formal political group. They did not have and did not belong to organizations having a systematic political ideology, nor did they have any articulated programs for social change. The Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panthers had not been heard from and most of the currently popular local nationalist groups were nonexistent. In the main, those Afro-Americans who are now called radical were simply militantly, that is, vigorously and aggressively, pro-Afro-American. Their militancy laid in their endorsement of Afro-American action that served to provide an image of black strength against white society. In the eyes of most Afro-American and white citizens, the Afro-American Muslims were the only exponents of black radicalism.

This article presents the author's views on the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award. The author stated that social scientist Kurt Lewin has had a profound influence on his life and work. The author has been influenced by Lewin's value orientations as well as his theoretical orientations. He believed than an intellectually significant social science has to be concerned with the problems of social action and social change and that intelligent social action has to be informed by theory and research. He rejected both a heartless science and a mindless social action. The author wishes to discuss the characteristics of productive and destructive conflict and to consider the conditions which give rise to one or another type. Although actual conflicts are rarely purely benign or malign, it is useful for analytic purposes to consider the simple cases. Doing so highlights not only the differences in the outcomes of conflict but also the differences in types of processes by which the outcomes are derived. The author is concerned with psychological or perceived conflict, that is conflicts which exist psychologically for the parties involved.

The article comments on the primary purpose of the "Journal of Social Issues." The primary purpose of the journal should be as a kind of clearing house for the presentation of social issues to scientists by persons who face these issues in their lives, and who wish to involve scientists to help in resolving the issues by performing their functions of research and consultation. Many, many such articles can be suggested in illustration. Members of the United Nations Security Council should be invited to write about the conditions of negotiation in the Council as they have experienced them. Someone in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should be invited to describe the problems of man-machine interaction resulting in the Apollo Program difficulties. They should contain facts, but may also be as deep or as inferential as the writer can manage. What they should all have in common is some kind of question and some form of invitation to scientists to contribute to the resolution of the issue. In many cases, men who are involved in social action either can not take the time to write such articles, or unable to write well enough of their own experiences.

The development of action research in community problems represents a significant change in the social participation of the social scientists. This article aims to suggest that those who are concerned with action research on community projects may with advantage consider the scope and limitations of other types of social research, and the difficulties and successes of established professional disciplines concerned in tackling human problems, particularly medical practice and social case work.

This article examines the relations between education and human relations. Attempts to undertake more fundamental work in connection with human relations in the schools and their effect on personality development meet with the resistance which is to be expected to any study which threatens the status quo. The study of these resistances and of their methods for their dissolution constitutes a major task for action research and reveals a new role for the psychologist in education. A sketch is given on the character of the school system and of the principles on which action research should rely in seeking to modify it in the direction of democracy.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Comparative empirical evidence is presented to show the basic instrumentally, of low-income urban dwellers to the existential circumstances they face. In Latin America, urban dwellers have seemingly internalized the urban/industrial values of capitalist society and, depending on the availability of jobs and other urban resources and facilities, choose the most rewarding strategy for obtaining benefits. Given the general lack of a well-established structure of secondary industry and the particularistic procedures presently most appropriate for getting jobs and other resources, the motives and basis for communal and collective action are lacking. This is seen most clearly in the example of squatting, where short-term collective action does not develop further, once the objectives of the squatters are achieved. Various forms of instrumental action are expressed in a typology based on subjective orientations and objective opportunities. In the light of the evidence cited, discussions of ‘marginality,’ ‘urban social movements’ and ‘'restructuring of community’ are misplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the decline in the relative importance of communities as bases of collective action. The author emphasizes that the relative decline in communities as bases of collective action has resulted from changes in the structure of power inside and outside communities, from shifts in the relative efficiency of concentrated and dispersed groups in mobilizing resources, and from stabilization of the claims made by communities on other groups. Urbanization played a part in the transformations and so did other changes which have been generally associated with urbanization in the Western experience, but are by no means intrinsic to urbanization.

This article focuses on contradictions of modern business. The Marxist revolutionary easily perceives the death-dealing contradictions of capitalism, but the modern economist and sociologist in the western tradition often remain unaware of them even in their modern forms. Social action theory has not come to terms with contradictions of capitalism. Instead, the economy is interpreted as an adaptive subsystem of society that functions to fulfill needs and values of the society as a whole. This theory discounts the importance of Marxian contradictions. The concept of economic goals is difficult to apply to the macrosystem of capitalism, and yet functional analysis is dependent upon an adequate appraisal of system goals. The economy itself does not prescribe or set goals since it is not organized formally as a single unit. The direction of the economy is heavily determined by corporations with profit making goals; macrosystem goals within the economic community are only an emergent phenomenon.

This article applies the theoretical model of collective behavior developed by Neil J. Smelser to data derived from diverse sources dealing with events at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In particular, it focuses on a period of two and a half hours on May 4, 1970, as it looks at events leading to and surrounding the killing of four undergraduate students and the wounding of nine other students. Smelser's system of thought is based on a set of concepts and propositions which can be used to order all variations in collective behavior. The five determinants of collective behavior are structural conduciveness, structural strain, growth of a generalized hostile belief, mobilization of participants for action and operation of social control. Smelser defines hostile outbursts as mobilization for action under a hostile belief. The analysis of the spread of a hostile outburst falls into two categories. Smelser says that any hostile outburst can be looked at as having a real and derived phase. The real or initial phase results from the build-up on conditions prior to the beginning of the outburst. In the derived phase, however, the hostility may become unrelated to conditions giving rise to the initial outburst.

Social scientists have long been interested in the conditions under which the initiation of social change will take place. It has fallen to the social psychologist in particular to attempt predictions of individual differences in behavior directed toward a changing of the social structure. The concept of internal versus external control of reinforcement may be of value in predicting social action behavior. This dimension distributes individuals according to the degree to which they attribute what happens to themselves to their own behaviors or characteristics versus the degree to which they attribute what happens to themselves to forces outside their own control. In addition to the findings from studies of expectancy changes, it has been hypothesized that individuals differ in a stable personality characteristic of whether they expect reward in a large variety of situations to be the function of external forces or their own behavior or attributes. Approaches to the assessment of individual differences along these lines with children have been developed by many psychologist.

The article tests the hypothesis that teleonomic trends tend to be evidenced to a greater degree in group-problem situations than when the individual is confronted with a conflict in a relatively private situation. This experiment made use of the matching method for determination of differential manifestation of trend characteristics in the private and group problem situations. It was expected that the verbal productions characteristic of an individual would be more successfully identified when the writing was done in the presence of social cues than when done in a private situation. To test the hypothesis that teleonomic trends are evoked and manifested more clearly in group-oriented problem situations than in similar problems encountered in private, 14 subjects responded to two moral dilemmas in the privacy of their rooms and to two in the presence of two other subjects under an expectation that their responses would be read, discussed, and criticized in the group. Descriptions of the subjects in terms of teleonomic trends were obtained from acquaintances who then arranged the trends in a hierarchy of intensity within each subject. A group of 12 matchers then matched the trend descriptions with the written behavior products.

It is the contention of this article that there has been a pronounced tendency in sociology to under-emphasize the study of values and moral issues, and that the cause of this is twofold: the cultural and organizational climate within which sociologists operate and the lack of consensus among them on a conceptual framework within which accumulative research on values could occur. The article has attempted to assess the current level of accomplishment in the field of value study and to suggest possible reasons for the apparent lack of progress. The need for an increased emphasis on this aspect of social relations is considered sufficiently urgent to warrant a renewed effort toward the achievement of a measure of consensus in theory. The premise that human social action is an integral part of a totally interrelated, determined but largely undeterminable universe of matter is offered as a possible starting point. It is hoped that the model of value change proposed might eventually prove capable of generating hypotheses concerning cultural and social change and the relation of such change to value systems.

The article presents the author's opinions on sociology. There is only one sociology and that it is functionalist. We are all functionalists now, if indeed it is society we are studying. Society in this assertion does not mean the whole society but the state of human association or interaction. I am not advocating that there is any special need to study whole societies, but that there is a special need to stay focused on social facts. In so far as anyone thinks there is a different sociological approach from the functionalist, it will be because he has been diverted from the emergent properties of social action, probably to the psychology of the actor. That is to say, he will not be making a different approach but approaching a different thing. But in so far as we try to grapple with social facts we will be functionalists. It is sometimes suggested that a theoretical task for the moment is to work out a synthesis that would reconcile functionalism with some of the other assumed non-functionalist views such as a conflict view or a balance view of order.

In this article, an attempt has been made to examine ritual action within a modified social action framework and to try to use Durkheim's theory of ritual in a way which makes it useful in the analysis of modern societies ritual activities, yet avoiding a reified organicist view of society. Ritual action will continue to be basic for religious groups in modern society for religion is 'sacred community'. The renewed stress on sacred community has importance in industrial society in preserving the value-complex of gemeinschaft-co-operation instead of individualistic competition. Religious believers in the West, Europe and the Orient, will come to be seen as deviants in terms of many of the modern worlds major values. As deviants, they may find they have much in common with the revolt of the young against the affluent societies' way of life and with the New Left movements in all countries. Part of the Church may begin to sacralize these new values and movements and to protest against the sacralizing of conventional values of particular nation-states in existing civic rituals.