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The article introduces the theme of the articles featured in the issue. The main topics in all the papers presented in the issue revolve around study of various aspects of voluntary associations. The study of voluntary associations involves three separate theoretical concerns. The first, and perhaps oldest of these, focuses on the nature and structure of society, especially industrial society. A second theoretical interest in voluntary associations is social psychological in emphasis; here voluntary associations are examined for what they can tell us about the nature of the person in contemporary society. Finally, voluntary associations may be studied within the framework of organizational theory with a focus upon associations as the units to be studied. Four of the papers in this issue are directly concerned with the problem of the contribution of voluntary associations to the society in which they exist. Most studies of voluntary associations implicitly suggest that such groups are integrative.

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.

The article describes the outcome of a research on various aspects of participation in voluntary organizations. Although there have been periodic discussions of the criteria for the category "voluntary associations," the term primarily designates a set of interests and questions rather than a special kind of organization. In addition, the literature on voluntary associations deals either with the question of participation or with the question of community function. This paper discusses participation in "voluntary associations" from an organizational analysis point of view. The research has focused on a single community of about 30,000 population. The data collected include two sample surveys, membership lists, basic identification data on most associations in the community, and full descriptive data on the associations. The aim of the paper is to report on a significant by-product of the research that may have considerable relevance for organizational analysis as well as for voluntary association interests.

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.

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]

This paper presents a two-dimensional classification of decision making baaed on two continuous variables which interact, namely, degree of subjectivity (objectivity) of attitude and degree of dissimilarity (similarity) of function of choice alternatives. On the basis of this typology two new ways of dissonance resolution are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dates of adoption of innovations constitute a basis for the analysis of innovativeness which is the main dependent variable in most diffusion studies. Rural sociologists, as a rule, ask farmers to recall when they adopted a new practice. The question arises, what is the reliability of data obtained with the aid of such a method? In this paper the findings of an experiment are reported in which respondents were re-interviewed after some weeks as to the dates of adoption. The repeatability of findings, i.e. the consistency in answers reporting the adoption dates, was accepted as one of the possible criteria of reliability. Younger age and a higher level of education tend to be positively correlated with the consistency of replies. The degree of the consistency in the answers is also affected by the nature of the given innovation. The general picture of the diffusion process, as based on the data obtained at the first and at the second stage of interviewing, is fairly similar. It is observed that even if data on irtnovativeness are biased on an individual level, they are not necessarily biased at a village level, at least not in the same proportion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

The concept of ‘generalized symbolic media of social interaction’ was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence. I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention—particularly in my own field of social anthropology—than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and to point out its relevance to certain problems in social anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the nature of value-commitments, conceived as a generalized symbolic medium of interchange in the processes of social interaction, in this respect paralleling money, power, and influence. Commitments constitute moral obligations of units of a system of social interaction to maintain the integrity of a value-pattern and to strive toward its implementation in action through combination with non-value factors. Stability of commitments is a basic condition of the compatibility of wide moral freedom with the exigencies of social functioning. Like the other three media, commitments are not bound by a zero-sum condition, but can be expanded, especially through charismatic movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study of role assimilation in the organizations by focusing on cases of naval recruit training center. It has been stated that every man who joins the Navy comes to it with a presenting culture, an elaborate set of values, beliefs, roles, norms, and expectations which require him to behave in certain ways with regard to certain perceived social stimuli. The day-to-day conduct of a civilian, guided by relative freedom of decision, cannot be tolerated in a total institution if it is to remain total. Hence, the first and major task of the training center is to remove the civilian qualities of an individual so that he could be prepared for a role in the navy. At the paper processing stage the enlistee has to go through several physical and mental examinations. After being admitted to the training program begins the process of depersonalization. The general characteristics of a total institution have been outlined based on which, the naval recruit training center has been called as a total institution.

The article presents a discussion on the reflection hypothesis, proposed by psychologist Carl Rogers. Rogers defined reflection as a type of response to the client in which the counselor tries to understand from the client's point of view and to communicate that understanding. To test this hypothesis, an investigation was made on the responses made by clinically trained and untrained people to hypothetical counseling situations via pencil-and-paper methods. Findings suggest that clinical skills have been shown to be considerably more than a simple extension of knowledge of interpersonal relations possessed by any reasonably intelligent and emotionally mature person. This appears to be the case at least insofar as one testable notion about therapy, namely, reflection, is concerned.

The article cites a recent investigation by J. Allison and D. Hunt who studied the relationship between aggression and the Edwards social desirability (SD) variable. Positing that verbal aggression is generally seen as undesirable in our culture, they tested the proposition that high SD people as measured by the Edwards Scale would be likely to express less aggression than low SD people. Utilizing a specially devised paper and pencil "Situational Frustration Test", these investigators obtained a significant inverse association between amount of aggression elicited on this test and independent SD ratings. They concluded that their results could be taken to indicate construct validity of the Edwards SD concept.

The article presents an account of the book "Person Perception and Interpersonal Behavior," by R. Tagiuri and L. Petrullo. The book is a collection of papers originally presented at the Harvard-Office of Naval Research Symposium on Person Perception held at Harvard University, Harvard, Massachusetts, in March 1957.