Search

Nations borrowing technology from more developed countries often fail to realize that much of the developed country's class structure, behavior and attitude are often implicitly built into its technology. Thus, a developing nation may be obtaining more than it bargained for in such technological borrowing. The developing country may either have to change its own class structure or partially fail in its efforts to borrow. This paper examines some of the reasons why class structures are built into technology and what some of the implications of such technological borrowing are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper began with an attempt to formalize the Davis-Moore functional theory of social stratification. It was found that the theory could be represented by a static model consisting of two algebraic equations with appropriate constraints on the functions. Then the tools of path analysis were used to evaluate the empirical adequacy of the Davis-Moore and Parsonian functional theories of social stratification as representations of cultural beliefs about stratification. Because of the likely presence of measurement and sampling errors, it was impossible to reject definitely either of the models. However, the estimated path coefficients were more consistent with the Parsonian theory than the Davis-Moore theory. This led to an inquiry into the conditions under which one model would be a better representation than the other. It was argued that the Davis-Moore scheme would provide a more accurate representation of cultural beliefs under conditions of high organizational interdependence whereas the Parsonian framework would give a better representation under conditions of low interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One significant way of viewing the life of an individual is in relation to what has been termed his life course. This has two components— life goal and career. Life goals are those aims which have highest value, can be attained only after a relatively protracted series of activities, and become the person's reason for existence. The series of activities engaged in to achieve these goals constitutes a career. The life goals give purpose and meaning to one's life, the career directs and organizes life. relatively little scientific research has been undertaken on the third and fourth stages of middle age. The present paper deals with the results of a study of the life course in middle age. The middle age adjustments described in the paper are found in the U.S. and can be shown to depend upon the nature of American culture. Two cultural factors stand out. In the first place, the social organization is mobile so that more individuals aspire to life goals which will improve their class position. In such cases, the pursuit of the chosen life course involves a good deal of conscious effort, the individual is constantly aware of the great amount of time and energy he has invested in his career.

The general theory of symbolic interaction, specifically self theory, is focused upon the importance of language as an instrument of definition and communication. People are seen as responding not directly to a resistant outer reality but to meanings of objects which are defined within a cultural system and social organization. G. H. Mead, in his discussion of the way persons develop self concepts and the accompanying ability to take roles effectively, speaks of the degree to which persons develop a "general other." This general other is an organized structure of attitudes believed to be common to all and is defined in terms of a universe of discourse growing out of the symbolic interaction of a community of individuals. Replies to the Twenty Statements Test, described by Kuhn and McPartland, display this quality. Self-identifying statements which people make fall along a rough spectrum of reference which can be broken up in various ways. The distinction which Kuhn and McPartland have reported is between what they call consensual and nonconsensual statements. Consensual statements are defined as those statements which would be generally understood by persons in the larger society without explanation. Nonconsensual statements are defined as those requiring interpretation before their social relevance can be assessed. The consensual statement is language behavior directed to the general other, while the nonconsensual statement is language directed to a more limited audience. H. S. Sullivan's contribution in developing the notion of the "significant other" consists in accounting for the fact that persons often do not seem to internalize standards and norms from the whole society but from segments of it on some selective basis. In this paper, the number of consensual statements made in response to the Twenty Statements Test will be called the locus score. Respondents are assigned to "high" and "low" locus categories as they make more or less than the median number of consensual statements. Expanding upon this frame of reference, it seems reasonable to propose that the locus quality found in self-conceptions of a given person is also characteristic of his conceptions of other objects. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the self is the core of a set of interrelated attitudes, and that the level of reference employed by the respondent in his attitudes toward the self would therefore be applicable to other attitudes as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a sociological commonplace to note that urban-industrial societies, regardless of differences in antecedent culture or in details of national history, tend to develop essentially similar social structures, and to undergo change in similar directions as a consequence of the working out of the same general processes in their specific socio-cultural settings. At the same time these specific socio-cultural differences--along with differences in resources, population societal scale and the like--produce larger or smaller differences in the detailed configuration of the basically similar structures in different societies or even within the same society from region to region, or at different points in time. Discovering the exact nature of these similarities and differences is the primary task of a comparative sociology of urban-industrial societies. But the identification of universal features common to all urban-industrial societies, and of less general features peculiar to a particular nation or a distinct stage in a process of change, requires the development of new methods of systematic comparative analysis. This paper proposes one such method, suitable for application to a limited, but important, phase of the problem: the comparative study of patterns of ecological differentiation among the residential sub-areas of urban communities.

This paper deals primarily with Australian aboriginal society and culture, and compares these with the society and culture of white Australia in the special realm of the family. It assumes that white Australia is a complex but fundamentally coherent whole, and that aboriginal Australia can also be viewed as a coherent whole, irrespective of regional variations, for comparative purposes. The major distinction between the aboriginal family and the white family is a significant difference in the relationship between social structure and culture in the context of family. The only differentiations in modes of livelihood in an aboriginal tribe were the obvious ones based on age and sex. The familial cultures of aboriginal Australia exhibited a remarkable uniformity, even from tribe to tribe, compared with the diversity of familial cultures in white Australia, but the reverse is true of family structure. Earlier works on the aborigines had over-stressed "group marriage" to such an extent that the presence of some monogamists in the tribe was ignored. A typical aboriginal family consists of a man aged 50 years old or above, two wives, and children. Each family, whether polygynous or monogamous, constituted a separate camping unit with its own shelter and fire.

The section presents a review of the paper, Changing Emphases in Social Structure, by George Peter Murdock, published in the Winter 1955 issue of the Journal of Anthropology. The paper emphasizes the change from the static to the dynamic in the study of social structure by anthropologists. The author points out that the classificatory task has been accomplished. This is shown in the finite number of delineated types of social structure agreed to by students of the field. These students are moving out of the static and descriptive part of their work, and show a common concern with dynamics or progress. Every man lives in a society, and every society has a culture, and every culture has a history. In studying this history, we can discern three progresses among those associated with culture change. These are: cultural innovation, cultural borrowing, and readjustive integration. Applying these concepts to social structure, we note that a study involves two continua: time, and the life history of the individual. Several examples are described. One deals with the union of the historical and the functionalistic approaches by several workers, beginning with Fred Eggan. Murdock remarks that our society has a upper-middle-class orientation, even though at any given time members of this class constitute a minority of the total population.

The article reports that one of the first things foreigners notice upon reading a Philippine newspaper is the large amount of space dedicated to the doings of high society and the fact that the pictures on them are always conventionally posed. The less charitable among these foreigners also notice how fat society matrons tend to be. Such candid observations are always most interesting, especially since people themselves, or at least those of them who have lived all lives within Philippine culture, never notice these things and only after personal comparison with the society pages of other countries do people accept them as facts. In any case, the "Society Page" of the Philippine paper presents an interesting object of research. One can conclude its importance in Philippine culture from the fact that next to the front page it is perhaps the most read page in the newspaper. Its columnists are among the highest paid, to say nothing of the numerous gifts that they receive from the prominent and the near prominent.

This article presents a commentary on the paper The Study of Filipino Society and Its Significance to Programs of Economic and Social Development by Robert B. Fox. The study gives considerable data on forces in the Philippine society which affect change, often making resistance to development. The ambivalence of developmental institutions is worth some analysis. The premodern or traditional social structure contained many protective features which Doctor Fox has indicated in his analysis of functions of the family. The development of the Philippines cannot be considered without reference to minorities, such as the Chinese, whose entrepreneurial role pervades the rural economy as well as the metropolitan zone. Generally speaking the study characterizes Philippine society in terms of its uniqueness, although a brief attempt is made to classify it with reference to an East-West dichotomy. Many studies of change in societies like the Philippines focus on the introduction of recognizable foreign institutions and practices related to industrialization, public administration and public health. The administrative fragmentation of local communities would precisely, by default, throw the burden of local social control to the family system, thus bringing about significant changes in kinship patterns.

The article focuses on the cross-cultural dimensions in expressed moral values. All cultures have to come to grips with clarifying certain transgressions against the social order, the control of life and property, the limits to sex and aggression. Although these problems that demand moral evaluation are similar, the particular contents of moral decisions may vary considerably. All cultures adopt certain incest taboos, for example, but the nature of these taboos differs from culture to culture. A major problem for this research is to determine if there are common elements in the determinations of specific moral decisions in different societies. Answers to this problem may point to some universal cultural values. In answering this question, however, people recognize that when no common threads exist they may be confronted with the fact that societies have either idiosyncratic values or different ways of handling common themes. The ways in which societies shape their unique moral stands are important to uncover. Therefore, an additional purpose of this research is to attempt to identify such differences.

The article focuses on the study of the destruction in Indochina after the war conducted by the Stanford Biology Study Group. The report aims to evaluate the extent and seriousness of the said destruction. The people in Southeast Asia whose area has been part of the destruction have been subjected to intense deprivation and sufferings up to this time. Social destruction concerning the ecological damage in Southeast Asia and its effect on people living there is also discussed in the study. It stresses that U.S. policies are destroying the Vietnamese culture and social organization. Long-term effects and aftermath of the said destruction were evaluated in the study.

The article examines sports as a game occurrence, as an institutionalized game and as a social system. Games are playful in that they usually one or more elements of play such as freedom, separateness, uncertainty, make-believe, unproductiveness and order. In considering sports as an institutionalized game, it should be regarding a long-lasting pattern of culture and social structure. Sports can also be regarded as a social system because it is composed of a group of persons who interact and have a certain set of relationships.

The article presents a review of several essays by anthropologists that reflected the trends of postwar anthropology with authority and distinction. These essays tackled the trends that include the shift from traditional physical anthropology to human biology, under the influence of modem genetics. Furthermore, this literature review explores the renewed emphasis on culture and culture change, the increasing concern with peasant society and urban life, the revival of psychological and philosophical anthropology, the revolutionary developments in modem linguistics, the shift in our conceptions of social structure, and the continuing search for new and better models.

Much is written about American society today--its ills are listed, described, and analyzed. Sooner or later, some suggest, the panacea for all its problems must be found in education. Education has thus become a religion of the twentieth century. Yet if faith in it is to be warranted, there must be more than preachments and listed objectives-there must be evidence that the "good life" is attainable for all. Institutional education in the United States has never charted the direction of society. Generally, it has reflected the culture of which it is a part En fact, school curricula seldom, if ever, even keep pace with the culture, let alone posit the direction of cultural change. Education has seldom dealt effectively with the burning problems of America or world culture on the urgent questions concerning mankind. There is need for concerted action and constructive programming among all professional persons interested in the conditions arising from the demands of a fast-moving society.

In terms of quantitative comparative data Middle Eastern countries report systematically the lowest female participation rates in economic activities outside of agriculture. This behavior represents a deviation from the current experience of other developing nations and from the historical experience of the now-industrialized West. Using comparative data on female employment patterns in Latin American countries which are at roughly a similar stage of economic development, it is shown that the low level and particular character of women's involvement in the work force in the Middle East can be explained by institutional arrangements contingent upon aspects of social structure. Five countries are selected for intensive analysis: Chile, Mexico, Egypt, Morocco and Pakistan. One major aspect of social organization and its cultural adjuncts is emphasized: The interplay between the volitional avoidance by women of certain occupational sectors because of the social stigmatizing aspect and the prohibition of occupational opportunities imposed by males. The combined effects of this tradition of female seclusion and exclusion are confirmed by the detailed analysis of the structure of the non-agricultural labor force: Middle Eastern women are absent systematically from occupational and industrial sectors of employment which involve public activity and presuppose contact with males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various issues related to rationality and migration in Ghana. Authors have demonstrated that migration in Ghana is responsive to income differentials. Distance is a strong deterrent to migration and undoubtedly is a surrogate for differences in culture, social organization, and language as well as for transport cost. Regions of large population are attractive to migrants. These results are similar and consistent with conclusions for Western countries. Education is negatively related to migration. There is no evidence that education causes migration except insofar as it increases income potential and lessens an individual's abhorrence of cultural and social adjustments. Urbanization and population density are important. Regions with large populations of town and city dwellers appear to be attractive to migrants and also to supply relatively large numbers of migrants. Finally, the high coefficients of multiple determinations obtained, and the significance of parameters may have special interest in view of the absence of previous work of this sort in developing areas.

In certain progressive quarters educational practice has made such marked advances in curriculum, in methods, in means of testing the results of instruction and in plant equipment that people frequently forget how much of primary-group folkways continue in the school procedure over the country as a whole. Education, of course, both of the institutionalized sort and education of the more informal, indirect, but equally significant kind, carries the culture of one generation over to the next. Much of this culture consists, today, in acquiring skill and knowledge which will fit persons for commercial-industrial world whether as farmers, business men, manufacturing and transportation personnel or as members of the older professions. It shall be the purpose of this article to show the persistence in education of the mores and folkways which date from this outworn past. In a subsequent section an attempt is made to indicate briefly some aspects of the problem of bringing education, as a social institution, into line with the present social realities.

Types of explanation can be differentiated in many ways but the typology here presented is obtained by cross - tabulating two kinds of classifications. The first one is rather philosophical. It is assumed that explanations of human behavior are given mainly in terms of either causes, habits1 or motives. As sociology focuses on groups and societies it will be assumed that the problems involved in these three kinds of explanation can be discussed by speaking of explanations in terms of social structure, social institutions and culture. The second classification or dimension is more clearly sociological. A basic distinction between different approaches in sociology concerns the assumptions they make about social change. Some approaches concentrate on ongoing change, and they will be labeled collectivistic according to a terminology adopted by Amitai Etzioni[SUP2]. The other approach focuses on guided change and is called voluntaristic. This distinction has of course important philosophical implications. It is related to the problem of how the notion of "purpose" is treated in social science. It is of course not assumed that by cross-classifying the above mentioned two dimensions and thus obtaining a six-fold classification one can discuss all important philosophical problems in social science explanation. Hopefully, however, the typology provides a reasonable point of departure, although it should be clear that there are borderline cases and that typological distinctions sometimes may blur important problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the crisis of culture in the context of social pre-conditions mass democracies and autarchies. It focuses on the systematic study of the fundamental social factors in the bearing on culture. Any discussion of the social conditions on which the existence of culture hinges must be split up into two main sections. For the social element penetrates into the sphere of culture in two diverse forms. Firstly, in the form of social organization and secondly, the effect of the social element can also be studied where, through its spontaneous movements, non-organized social life reacts upon spiritual and cultural life. Dictatorship does not imply planning, a real and effective planning of culture would plan everything. It would have to provide places where fruitful self-criticisms and the experiences of those who are affected by planning can gather and find open expression. On the other hand, there is also the grave contingency that in a large society the experiences that accumulate at different points in the course of its evolution may in the long run be passed over unheeded. It must not be forgotten that in the cultural sphere there was never an absolute liberalism in the sense that the free sway of social forces was not accompanied by any form of planning.

This article is amongst one of the three articles read at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1962. A limited number of terms which are associated with major themes of anthropological discourse, or which have been found to be necessary for concise communication between people engaged in social anthropology are considered in this article. In discussing the vocabulary of social anthropology one must begin with two key words which indicate different aspects of the subject-matter and also different approaches to it. First of such words is culture, which is the whole complex of learned behavior, the traditions and techniques and the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people. Anthropologist Radicalize-Brown defined the structure of a society as the sum total of those interpersonal relations to which social norms apply.

The article discusses judgments of merited prestige in Great Britain. Judgments of merited prestige are employed because, unlike conventional prestige ratings, they necessarily reflect the values of the judges. Interviewees were presented with the series of merited prestige choices. The result shows that consistent with the preceding generalization is the observation that occupational class differences are generally smaller in estimates of actual social standing than in judgments of merited prestige. A shift from asking for judgments of merited prestige to soliciting estimates of actual social standing produces convergence of the classes toward description of a fairly uniformly perceived social structure. Established members reiterate the culture to one another explicitly in the guise of folk wisdom and implicitly by making the culture the unspoken premise upon which their judgments and actions are based. The concept of culture further implies that communication of the standard patterns of the group is normative rather than neutral. Thus there is pressure placed on the individual member to take over the patterns of the group.

This study considers culture and social structure as, respectively, an epistemic system of graduated abstractness for defining and classifying experience, and the possible and legitimate means for coping with experience, it presents two paradigms which inquire into the nature of cultural and social structural change and stability that result when two groups come into contact. Variations in the qualitative characteristics of contact are seen as producing change or maintaining given socio-cultural systems. The variables considered in the first paradigm are the degrees of cultural similarity and oppression; the second paradigm considers the degrees of social structural compatibility and coercion. Processes of stability and persistence in culture and social structure are traced to different con figurations of the characteristics of intergroup contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case for the usefulness of the concept of basic human needs. The author suggests that it is fruitful to assume that there is a universal set of basic human needs which have attributes of their own, not determined by the social structure, cultural patterns, or socialization processes. Ways are shown in which propositions which use the concept could be tested empirically. Restoration of the concept of basic human needs into sociological theory corrects the "over-socialized" conception of man, identifies a central distinction between the industrial and the emergent post-industrial society, and bridges two divergent traditions in sociology: structural-functional analysis and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that, despite the successes of social science in mitigating the mood of natural determinism by demonstrating the relevance of sociocultural variations and learning as modes of explanation, the concept of scarcity largely retains its naturalistic status in social thought. It is time for a preliminary attempt at synthesizing the various strands of thought which point in the direction of a sociocultural theory of scarcity. Scarcity is defined as an asserted deficiency of resources allegedly functional to the concretization of any given valued end in specific situations. Observer-defined scarcity is distinguished from the scarcity consciousness of social actors. Scarcities are seen to arise out of unconcretized implications of already existing value, norm, legitimizing symbols, integrative social organization, and technics viewed as patterns of social meanings constituting a total sociocultural order. Implications can work themselves out in the form of conflict, incompatibility and obsolescence. These points are exemplified and clarified. Directions for research necessary for the construction of a sociocultural theory of scarcity are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of previous structure on the transformative capacities of modernizing societies is analyzed for China, Japan, India, and Islamic societies. The internal transformation of these great Asian societies has been greatly facilitated by autonomy of social, cultural and political institutions. Cultural autonomy has made possible the development of symbols supporting and legitimizing the new central institutions, while autonomy in the sphere of social organization has facilitated the crystallization of viable new organizational nuclei without disrupting the pre-existing order. The relatively strong internal cohesion of family groups and broader social strata, with some status autonomy and openness toward the center, has helped to develop willingness to provide the necessary support for the new centers. Where such autonomy is absent, and the social, cultural and political orders are closely identified with one another, development of viable modern structures has been greatly impeded. And where the family and other groups are closed, they are likely to undermine the new institutional centers by making excessive demands on them or by withholding resources. The relative importance of structural differentiation and cultural innovation in the transformation of European societies is also analyzed, through reexamination of Weber's thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of diffusion is defined as the (1) acceptance, (2) over time, (3) of some specific item an idea or practice, (4) by individuals, groups or other adopting units, linked to (5) specific channels of communication, (6) to a social structure, and (7) to a given system of values, or culture. The elements of this definition are treated as an "accounting scheme" in terms of which diffusion studies in the fields of sociology, anthropology, rural sociology, mass communications, etc., are reviewed and problems of research design are explicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographic data are utilized to study the relationship between cultural occasions and plurality structures in more than 1,000 social situations in the United States. New typologies for the classification of cultural occasions and of group structures are developed for the study and subjected to a test of reliability. Results indicate that significant structural differences are associated with differing cultural occasions. Structural features investigated include the size of the plurality and the distribution of its members in the discrete structural-functional units of the spatial situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hutterites offer an opportunity for a somewhat more direct study of this problem. In- group cohesion and cultural autonomy are preserved in this American minority to a high degree. When the Hutterites were studied some twenty years ago by scholar Lee Emerson Deets, he was not unmindful of areas of conflict and change.' But his study differed from similar ones of other ethnic minorities in its finding of a high degree of cohesion and social organization. For the last two years, this Hutterite reputation for social cohesion and peace of mind has been the object of an investigation of a multi-professional research team under the direction of the writer. Unlike Deets in the 1930's, the Hutterites in 1950 show some scars from the battle with their own impulses and conflicting American values. Religion is a major cohesive force in this folk culture. The Hutterites consider themselves to be a people chosen by God to live the only true form of Christianity. Like the Mennonites and other Anabaptist sects which have similarities with the Hutterites, they believe in adult baptism. They are vigilant pacifists and emphasize simplicity in every aspect of living.

This article is concerned with a description of a series of cultural characteristics associated with four strata of the social structure in a Middle Western community of some 10,000 population, which the author shall hereafter call "Elmtown." Elmtown is an all white community located near the center of the corn belt on a rich glaciated plain bisected by a navigable river. Its highly mechanized agricultural activities are integrated around corn and hogs, with the production of small grains and soy beans as secondary crops. Coal mines and three large factories give the community an industrial as well as an agricultural base. Elmtown's social structure is composed of five strata whose members understand with varying degrees of precision how each ranks in the hierarchical order. Assignment to a given stratum or class within the social structure appears to be dependent upon the possession and expression of a constellation of culture traits that are evaluated by the members of the community as appropriate to that particular stratum.

This article presents information on the sociology of international relations. Discussions of different nations and plans for their future are often carried on with too much emphasis on political and economic machinery, while too little understanding is manifest of the social structure of society. Indeed, preoccupation with political and economic factors and the spread of nationalism, attendant upon the predominance of the European culture in the last two centuries has obscured the fact that the sixty or more major nations of the world fall culturally and historically into six main categories. The European culture area is divided into a southern or Latin branch and a northern or Germanic branch the latter including U.S. and the member states of the British Empire. The Russian culture area includes the East-European and Asiatic nations which grouped around a racially Slavic nucleus, are now ideologically integrated through the doctrine of communism. The Chinese culture area includes all nations of the Far East and Southeast Asia that historically derived their philosophy, script and learning mainly from Chinese sources.

This article examines current practices in sociology and anthropology concerned with analyzing social structures as meaningful human products, and will consider in particular the work of the phenomenologists and ethnoscientists. The human sciences are not purged of common-sense rationalities by virtue of their scientism. Models of man are to be found informing much theoretical work, and debates about appropriate assumptions still consume space in the journals. Further, as sociological models have generally neglected or assumed away common-sense situations of practical choice in everyday life, and the issue of how such situations are managed, they are all implicated in implicit reification. The search to break out of this reifying model-construction has taken two distinct directions. The first is concerned with seeking out definitive answers to the epistemologically posed 'problem of meaning', the second with focusing upon formal structures of practical actions. Clearly the notion that one can discern a realm that could be called a culture's or natives' cognitive system, is akin to the old idea that language has an existence 'out there', fundamentally independent of its myriad usages, contexts, and criteria of applicability, all of which are abused, debated and so on at some stage of the conduct of everyday life.

A major element in the Spanish American rural social organization was the patron-peon pattern. Although the pattern is now in the process of dissolution, the underlying cultural values remain and create many difficulties in the adjustment and acculturation of the Spanish Americans to the dominant English-speaking society of modern New Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the features of sacred and secular societies. According to the author, a sacred society is one that elicits from or imparts to its members, by means of sociation, an unwillingness and inability to respond to the culturally new as the new is defined by those members in terms of the society's existing culture. Sociation is that set of social processes, which involves association and dissociation with others as others in and through role-taking involving the use of significant symbols. On the other hand, a secular society is one that endows its members with readiness and capacity to change. In short, a society that incorporates and sustains an impermeable value-system is sacred and the one that embodies a permeable value-system is secular. Further, in social terms, secular societies may have a wide range of organizing principles: natural rights, national welfare, humanitarianism, free enterprise, socialism, rationalism, greatest good of the greatest number, liberty under law and functional efficiency.

The article presents information about a study that discusses the conceptions in the field of social disorganization. The attempt to avoid the surface empiricism of commonsense description has led some students to the use of the term social disorganization. This approach may refer to the process of breakdown and reintegration; the integration of social structure as an existing situation; and control of the group values on the individual. In spite of this apparent methodological clarity, the technical application of this approach is more doubtful. Since sociologists are by occupational tradition mostly concerned with the Western culture complex, this approach is particularly appropriate, while the spread of this complex into native cultures furnishes interesting data.

The article focuses on the position and points out the future directions in Southwestern archaeological research in the U.S. One of the more interesting of the new directions in Southwestern archaeology has been the appearance over the past decade of a series of studies that can be described as examples of the new archaeology. There have been several studies that have focused upon aspects of prehistoric social organization in the Southwest. Some of it was summarized in a recent book specifically designed to explore the nature of social organization.

This article focuses on the textbooks in sociology of religion. There are a growing number of texts and readings available for course work in the sociology of religion. Consequently, to judge any particular publication, it may be necessary to place it in the context of what is available as well as to articulate the general evaluative criteria used by the reviewer. Two of the books are " The Church as a Social Institution," by David O. Moberg and "Religion in American Culture," by W. Seward Salisbury. Salisbury's book contains chapters on religious statistics, religious change, religion and other institutions (government, education, family, etc.), and a chapter on the clergy. Moberg's book covers about the same material; he has chapters on religious statistics (demography), religious norms and other social institutions. Moberg's book, "The Church as a Social Institution," however, seems more integrated and logical in organization because he consciously develops a functional analysis of religion.

The article proposes a theory of traditional society where continuing technical progress is occurring. The theory presents a general model of society, and deals with interrelationships among elements of the physical environmental, social structure, personality, and culture. Economic growth has everywhere occurred interwoven with political and social change. The author believes that the economic growth does not occur first and causes the political-social change. Both are mutually dependent. The author presents the case of traditional agriculture society. The typical characteristics of traditional society are: the social structure is hierarchical and authoritarian in all of its aspects--economic, political, and religious; and one's status in the society is inherited. These characteristics of the society as well as its techniques of production are traditional and change very slowly. An important factor initiating change was some historical shift which caused some group or groups of the lesser elite, who previously had had a respected and valued place in the social hierarchy, to feel that they no longer were respected and valued. This derogation in some societies consisted of explicit indication of contempt for the functions or position of the lesser elite.

The phrase art public is used frequently in singular in both the history and the sociology of art. Three different meanings have been attached to it. First, art public has been used in a singular and indefinite sense to refer to all those who come into contact with art in any way. Often applied to discussions of nineteenth-century art, this is a viewpoint that dichotomizes society into the artist, on the one side, and the public, on the other. The word public may be defined as an amorphous social structure whose members share a community-of-interest, which has been produced by impersonal communication and contact. They are not groups but they are more structured than those who may be placed together in an aggregate. When the member of a community meet each other or communicate in writing or by telephone, they have a fellow-feeling and talk each others' language. This is what makes them a social structure, though obviously a very amorphous one, rather than a logical category or term in a classification. Art publics are initially heterogeneous and unselected in composition. Those who participate in such a public do so because they believe that such participation will provide them with the means of attaining the kinds of values or satisfactions they desire. Therefore, some who attended the Armory Show may have done so out of a certain aesthetic desire to become acquainted with new movements in European art, as in the case of the collectors and the more positive critics. It is just as possible that many more attended the exhibition out of a desire to satisfy recreational needs. Thus, the show became a place in which to be entertained. It can be said that a variety of motives lie behind participation in art publics.

With the exception of urban morphology, the overall cultural influence upon cities has received inadequate attention in the field of urban geography. Yet every culture influences all aspects of its cities in a way different from all other cultures. This in turn results in modified types of cities which can be grouped according to cultural-genetic, rather than functional or economic criteria. In spite of only sporadic empirical observations in this subject, a theory of the cultural-genetic classification of cities is initiated. Future research will determine whether or not evidence in support of this theory can be produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice making is a functional requirement of a democratic society, presently thwarted by inadequate understanding of cultural requirements and the social structure. Extra-community-based organizations, the vertical dimension in the community's social structure, vie with the horizontally-oriented organizations integrating the community. Conflict makes visible the social structure, and existing information becomes useful to citizens in decision-making. The development of common understanding is aided by greater "visibility" of the community's social structure. Increased awareness of the conditions affecting social life in a complex urban environment is posited here as a function of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists can learn as much as they may teach through involvement in agricultural development. Agricultural development is a top priority today among people in many cultures. Except as a particular academic interest is pursued in a variety of cultural settings, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between truly universal principles, on the one hand, and generalizations that owe their relevance only to certain aspects of the particular social setting in which they are observed to hold true, on the other. Sociology, however defined, needs involvement in human group activities in a variety of cultural settings in order to winnow what is universal and intrinsic from that which is parochial and derivative. The author is not at all sure that social organization and interaction are any more intricate or complex for a dynamic society than for one that is relatively static, but certainly they are different. Development involves the breaking of old social patterns as well as the emergence of new ones. The problems change as development proceeds. The author know that for economics this requires differences in research emphasis and content.

This is a study utilizing a theory-based method for analyzing social systems in terms of the problem in which the investigator is interested. The problem area used here is that of information diffusion. The findings are that specific types of information are transmitted most readily within systems having particular characteristics. The method appears to be suited for replication in the same and different localities for trend analysis or cross-cultural comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Community" is defined as a number of families residing in a relatively small area within which they have developed a more or less complete socio-cultural system imbued with collective identification and by means of which they solve problems arising from the sharing of the area. The analysis of the verbal definition brings out four major variables: (1) number of actors, (2) awareness of action, (3) goal of action, and (4) recipients of action. Variables 1 and 2 are considered more relevant for the degree of "community-ness" than variables 3 and 4. By cross-classifying the four variables and weighting them, a sixteen-fold table has been developed. All actions occurring within the area of the community can be classified within the sixteen cells which are ordered along an increasing degree of "community-ness" of pertinent actions. Thus the complex phenomenon of community appears to be a continuous series of actions which can be measured along several dimensions making up the composite dimension of "community-ness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of utilizing voluntary community participation to achieve national and community goals has become widespread in technologically developed as well as underdeveloped cultures. Programs that utilize principles of involvement to obtain participation appear to have a common set of characteristics. There are three stages in the involvement process: (1) The incipient stage pertains to the recognition of problematic situations and their definition and clarification in a manner consistent with the major value patterns of the community. (2) The convergent stage of involvement depends upon a process composed of symbols and sentiments appropriate to the social order, a rational appraisal of individual ends, and a rational perception of organized ends. Involvement is based upon group goals; interrelationships with other organizations; acquaintance, friendship, and kin relationships; and ideological beliefs. (3) In the participant stage of involvement, the action roles of individuals are defined to remain consistent with the individual's positions in the community structure. Basic to an understanding of community involvement is the existence of a traditional set of beliefs and relationships which may be utilized when activating people in a program defined as for the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the importance of oriental values and technical cooperation. It notes that effective technical cooperation programs depend as much upon a knowledge of the social organization through which cultures express themselves and the values which they support as upon sound technical information. This social organization has been in existence a long time. Wherever it is possible, new organizational patterns should build on the systems the people already have. Understanding and appreciation of established ways not only raise morale and further trust but also provide a safeguard against errors, large and small, that can easily prevent a project from achieving its designated purpose.

Man is not only a tool-making animal, he is an institution-making animal. Of the three phases of culture which one has selected for analysis, social institutions remain. There have been many definitions of institutions and in a general way one knows what he means when he uses the word. Some students have found it important to distinguish between the function of an institution and its structure. A scholar has attempted an analysis of political institutions and comes to the conclusion that social structure from the psychological standpoint, is reducible to common and reciprocating attitudes of individuals and variations in such attitudes as to both content and degree of generality. Thus the structure of a social institution is reduced to a form of behavior. It is obvious, of course, that social institutions are significant as they influence or express human behavior, but the social institution is also a culture complex and this utility of characteristic human behavior and associated culture complex is sufficiently definite so that one recognize such different institutions as the family, the state, religion, industry and a host of lesser forms. In order to give body to the idea or concept of the social institution.