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This article presents information related to sociology as of April 1, 1950. The Committee of the American Sociological Society on Contributed Papers for the 1950 annual meeting consists of Robert E. L. Fans, chairman; and A. B. Hollingshead and T. C. McCormick. Papers submitted for consideration should be sent not later than June 1, 1950. Recently elected officers of the Pacific Sociological Society for 1950 are: President, Leonard Bloom; Vice-president, Southern Division, Ernest Greenwood; Vice-president, Central Division, Carlo Lastrucci; Vice-president, Northern Division, Joseph Bachelder; and Members of the Advisory Council, Robert O'Brien and Paul Wallin. Gwynne Nettler continues as secretary-treasurer. The Society's annual meeting will be held in Seattle, Washington, during April 21-22, 1950. The Twenty- second annual meeting of the Japan Sociological Society was held in Tokyo, Japan, during October 15-16, 1949. The meeting was attended by more than 250 members. Fifty-two reports were given on various aspects of social theory and social research, and three public lectures on the topic, "The Population Problem in Japan."

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss some of the outstanding problems of organization and procedure in the conduct of the accounting functions of the national government above the departmental level, that is to say, of central accounting and control as distinguished from the fiscal administration of individual operating agencies. The theme of this paper is the development of improved practices, and while few citizens are interested in forms of government as such, abstracted from the results they tend to foster, significant progress toward essential improvements in practice in this field is inextricably bound up with changes in the machinery of central financial control. Present practices are the logical result of present organization. The starting point is, then, an analysis of that system. The reorganization bills before the U.S. Congress in 1938 contained sweeping proposals deigned to meet the kind of difficulties that have been noticed here: the divorce of control and audit, vesting the one in an executive agency and the other in an independent office safeguarded as the Comptroller General now is; and the establishment of a Congressional Joint Committee on Public Accounts.

This paper focuses on a field study concerning the decision process of a computer-oriented growth firm. It states that the research method used was a field study of an organization with its headquarters in the northwestern U.S. The article presents flow charts of decision processes concerning various business projects. It examines the company's aggressive acquisition program and outlines why this was crucial for a growth firm's goal realization. It talks about the factors that influenced expectations and the valuation of a business project, including the project sponsor's need to have the project accepted, his or her external and/or internal support, and biases, as well as management's knowledge of a project and interest in it.

This paper presents a survey of practical training being conducted in the United States. All the universities known by the authors to have programs to train information scientists and all the industrial organizations known or thought to have programs for this type of training were surveyed. No qualitative assessments are made by the authors. Rather, quantitative results of the survey are presented on various program characteristics. Tables 1 & 2 summarize certain facts about the programs of the organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The maintenance of original value orientations and of pristine character is a crucial problem area encountered by institutions, particularly in the face of changing external or internal social circumstances. The tensions engendered in such conditions are clearly evident in sects, which provide a valuable institutional type for analysis, in that they have an explicit value commitment, are clearly circumscribed organizations, and are peculiarly self-conscious of their relations with the wider society. Some sects are markedly successful in the preservation of undiluted values of protest; others, notably those which gradually become denominationalized, are much less so. This paper seeks to distinguish and characterize distinctive types of sect, and to use such characterizations to determine the specific elements, and combinations of elements, which promote or retard such development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reprint of the paper "L'informatique etlepouvoir: Pouvoir dans l'entreprise et pouvoir de l'entreprise," that was published in the May 1972 issue of the periodical "Informatique et Gestion." A brief recall of the most recent concepts on the functioning of organizations will allow the potential implications of informatics for the distribution of power in a company to be better understood and will clarify the reactions of the cadres in this regard. Specialists on business administration and sociologists specializing in organizations have conducted studies in the United States and in Western Europe that have led to a company no longer being considered as a supra-individual entity, having an existence and a behavior independent of that of its members and capable to this extent of being explained and governed by referring to purely formal models. They have likewise demonstrated that a company can no longer be conceived of only as the network of interpersonal relationships--irrational and charged with affectivity--to which the theoreticians of human relations thought it could be reduced. Instead, an organization can more realistically be considered the resultant of strategic games carried out as a function of multiple, divergent, and indeed contradictory goals by the organizational actors and as a function of their adherence to a minimum of common norms.

This article analyzes the coexistence of large and small firms by studying the mechanical industries of Italy. Even a casual look at the Italian industrial picture reveals that side by aide with modem, well-equipped industrial complexes there exist small factories which differ little from overgrown artisan shops that often use backward methods of production and lack a modern managerial and sales organization - and yet manage to survive. It is this paper to explore the reasons for the survival of these small firms, and the consequences of their existence. The findings summarised in this study originates in a study of the Italian light mechanical industries, but these finding have a broader relevance. To anticipate one of the conclusions: large Italian firms are often reluctant to expand in the face of labor contracts limiting the power to workers and therefore demand remains unsatisfied and small firms fill the vacuum. The situation has its parallels in other European countries, notably in France and similar problems may arise in the United States with the introduction of the guaranteed annual wage.

Almost a hundred years have passed since the settlement house was founded in the U.S. as part of an earlier generation's attempt to do something to remove the deprivations of urban poverty. This paper examines the role of the settlement house today, and the contribution it has made-and can make-to the attack on urban poverty. The settlement house, like most other helping professions, is currently going through a fundamental and often agonizing reappraisal of its functions, an important part of which concerns its ability to reach the client. By "reaching" is meant involving the client in the settlement program and encouraging him to develop values and behavior patterns favored by the settlement staff. These professions emerged out of nineteenth-century reform movements, set up by middle- and upper-class "Yankee" Americans who not only wanted to do something about urban poverty, but also hoped to make the then ethnic poor into middle-class Americans and allies against corrupt political machines and incipient socialist organizations.

This article discusses Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) approach to sub-regional development. Tributary area development is essentially an approach which utilizes local interest and initiative, both governmental and private citizen, to carry forward a comprehensive resource development effort directed at uplifting the social and economic well-being of residents of sub-regions of the Tennessee Valley. The program concentrates on areas which have lagged behind the development pace of the rest of the Tennessee Valley, and TVA's role within this framework is to provide assistance to tributary organizations by building on and learning from experiences in earlier programs that were Valley-wide in scope. The purpose of this paper is to describe TVA's tributary area development program, review a few of its accomplishments, and suggest some problem areas for further consideration and research. TVA's first effort at working in the development of a multicounty tributary area began about 1939 in the Chestuee watershed in southeastern Tennessee.

The ubiquity and the antiquity of such inequality has given rise to the assumption that there must be something both inevitable and positively functional about such social arrangements. Clearly, the truth or falsity of such an assumption is a strategic question for any general theory of social organization. It is therefore most curious that the basic premises and implications of the assumption have only been most casually explored by American sociologists. The key term here is "functionally important." The functionalist theory of social organization is by no means clear and explicit about this term. The minimum common referent is to something known as the "survival value" of a social structure. This concept immediately involves a number of perplexing questions. Among these are: (a) the issue of minimum vs. maximum survival, and the possible empirical referents which can be given to those terms; (b) whether such a proposition is a useless tautology since any status quo at any given moment is nothing more and nothing less than everything present in the status quo.

Organization Development (OD; is an application of behavioral science knowledge that provides managers a technology for managing change in their organization. This paper describes the identifying characteristics of OD and relates these characteristics to managerial problems. It portrays OD as a collaborative process produced when managers combine their intimate knowledge of the organization with the technology of consultants. Several examples illustrate opportunities for applying OD technology and a case details the diagnostic phase of OD, illustrating how managers and consultants use their complementary skills to reach a more accurate understanding of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the administration of its farflung systems of multipurpose diplomacy the United States faces an extraordinary network of complexity. A large variety of sounds must be expected and tolerated from the playing of the many specialized instruments which comprise a democratic orchestra of power, but they must somehow produce music that is in harmony with the major themes of our objectives. The purpose of this prologue to the symposium is briefly to identify a number of the major complexities of an administered diplomacy. The basic issue of the complexity of our foreign affairs policies and operations is of course to be found in the contemporary international environment and in the varying and onerous roles the United States has been called upon to play in it. The escalated workload of the Department of State and the problems of organization raised thereby would be worthy of a separate symposium, even though important aspects of these problems are treated in the papers which follow.

In a psychological as distinguished from a Marxian sense the state in the United States seems to be withering away. The basic reality is a shift in the psychological environment in which the state, like other institutions and organizations, must function. This transformation in the psychological environment is generating a conflict in perceptions and values. This paper suggests that the state is withering away in a psychological sense because of an increase in awareness in contemporary society and a growing questioning of all authority. It also suggests the state is withering in a technological sense because of a failure to use organized knowledge to satisfy expectations and values. While noetic men have always existed, noetic man a! a major social type distinguishable from religious man, economic man, and legal man is primarily a product of 20th century technologies of communication and production. The withering of the state in the psychological order has an objective correlative in the withering of the state in the technological order, the use of organized knowledge.

The article focuses on the role of a science teacher in home defense. The problem of home defense in the times of modern wars, in target areas where bombs and gas may be expected, is particularly important. People in the U.S. think they are a literate nation and yet they are surrounded with superstition and unfounded fear of wars. Civilian defense agencies have been attempting to organize and instruct people for months. It is here that the job of teachers become so important. Their job is to inform the populace as to how it may take care of itself under conditions never experienced before. Teachers must train the members of their respective communities to fight the fear and panic of war. Science teachers by the very nature of their work can train people in understanding the fight of bombs, gas and fire. In most places, the local, state and national civilian, defense organizations are set up. The general public must understand and appreciate the function, duties and powers of such agencies and cooperate with them.

The article comments on the control policy in the television newsroom. The top management in the American television networks are, of course, in a stronger position than the publisher of a single newspaper or group of newspapers, but like the publisher, they have a company policy. Whereas the press usually has a fairly well-known editorial inclination, the TV news organization formally subscribes to balanced news, although some views are permitted. The balanced product is still in a certain consistent direction. Essentially the problem of seeing how the policy is enforced is recognizably similar for TV news. The socialization of the newsman in television, with regard to the norms of his job, differs slightly from that of his equivalent in the press. As the bulk of TV newsmen were previously trained and acquired their experience on newspapers, a double process of self-selection takes place. First to get into the journalist's profession in the press, second, to move to a TV news organization.

The article presents comments on the article "'Lifers' and 'Grunts,'" by L. F. Urwick in the December 1971 issue. In the original article, Urwick suggested that the quality of the field and general grade officers commanding battalions and larger units was of low order. The author points out that the largest complaint in his experience was that commanders participating in the Vietnam War served too short a tour of duty. He also points out that some of the facts claimed by Urwick are contrary to reality. To support his comments, the author includes an excerpt from a "New York Times" article.

The article presents information about proposed amendments to the constitution of The American Catholic Sociological Society. It informs that amendments were approved by the Executive Council of the Society and were to be voted on by the membership at the annual business meeting of the Society in Washington, D.C., on September 1, 1962. The American Catholic Sociological Society as a professional society was and has been a non-profit organization. However, there was no reference to this situation in the Constitution. An explicit statement in the Constitution that the Society was established as a non-profit organization would be very helpful for tax exemptions, postal rates, and other purposes. In order to achieve this objective the following amendment to the Constitution of the Society is proposed: Article II, that read in part, "The Society shall stimulate concerted study," was to be amended to read, "The Society shall be a non-profit organization as defined by the United States Government whose purpose it is to stimulate concerted study."

The article focuses on the plans and budgets of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) for the year 1962 in the U.S. Total income of the CEC for 1961-1962 was 184 713.41 dollars and expenditures for the year amounted to 180 162.03 dollars. The projected income for the 1962-1963 is 227 030 dollars. The CEC has established the Student Organizations Planning Committee to stimulate the interest of various colleges and universities in the CEC. The Council has also planned a student reception for the 41st Annual Convention.

This is an analysis of the origins and development of a city Youth Commission. The organization had little reason to be formed, no goals to guide it and was staffed by people who sought to insure a minimal, no-action role in the community. By virtue of its existence and broad province, however, it was seized upon as a valuable weapon by other organizations for the pursuit of their goals. In the course of being used, the Commission became a viable organization in its own right with new goals, even as its members denied that the no-action policy had been compromised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observation of the role of the research administrator in scientific research organizations doing similar work in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. presents us with certain essential differences. The Soviet administrator's function is restricted to "pure execution of policy"; he is paid less and accorded less prestige than the scientists and is expected to have training and background in bookkeeping and not science. At the same time, the Soviet scientific director asserts that he spends the greater part of his time on his own research. The role of the larger society and differences in approach to large-scale organization are suggested as factors in this difference. A comparison is made of the structure of financial support in the two countries, the controls over scientific organizations, the part played by scientists and laymen in supervisory authorities in government, the traditional prestige and autonomy of scientists in the U.S.S.R., and the rise in prestige of the administrator attending the rise of big business enterprises in the U.S.A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the key market structure characteristics and developments of the perishable bakery products industry. It is concerned with questions of how the industry performs and how patterns of organization and behavior influence performance. The approach here can also be useful in analyzing the market structure and behavior of other industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the global need to eradicate the use of atomic energy and atomic methods of destruction to achieve peace. A three nation agreed declaration on atomic energy which is comprised of the U.S., Great Britain and Canada was issued on November 16, 1945 and called for the establishment of a Commission which must be under the United Nations and is required to make certain proposals. Its list of proposals include holding out to all nations the exchange of primary scientific data aimed to achieve peace, control of the use of atomic energy and to check its use which is for attaining peace. The General Assembly created the Commission which had its first meeting on June 14, 1946.

The article presents a history of the American Association of Engineers which became popular from 1919 to 1923. In 1921, the association became the largest organization with more than 20,000 members. Engineering became a prestigious course but the apprenticeship that follows after graduation makes the students less proud of their chosen field. Worse, there was an oversupply of manpower in this field due to many graduates. Membership in the association was limited to established engineers. Frustratingly for young engineers, they could not ask for assistance from this kind of organization.

The labor relations problems of government employees are becoming a subject of increasing attention and concern, The federal government in 1962 took significant action in the form of a Presidential Executive Order to regularize its dealings with organizations representing its employees. This study delves into the development of that Executive Order, explores the events which have occurred since its issuance, and attempts to predict some of its additional consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although even the amateur student of labor history is aware that the administrative structure and functioning of the Knights of Labor differed considerably in practice from what it was supposed to be in theory, it is extremely difficult to piece together from existing literature a clear picture of the actual organization of the Knights. By dint of extensive research into ConVention proceedings and other records, Mr. Birdsall has succeeded in delineating the formal and informal structure of the Order. The idea that the Knights failed because its structure could not be adapted "to the practical needs of job-conscious workers" is found to be erroneous; actually, the Order seems to have been highly flexible in meeting the organizational requirements of its polyglot membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational goals that are pursued for the purpose of accommodating an organization to a social environment are termed adaptive goals. The purpose of this article is to test the thesis that university prestige may lead to the pursuit of adaptive goals. Prestige and goal data on universities in the United States from a larger study by Gross and Grambsch were utilized to study this hypothesis as it relates to the university as an organizational type. Size, income, ownership and financial dependence are used as control variables. Zero-order correlations indicate that prestige is negatively related to adaptive goals. Controlling for size, income, and university ownership does not substantially alter this pattern. The inverse relation between prestige and adaptive goals is also generally found to hold in private universities when financial dependence is controlled. The conclusion that is thus reached for universities in the United States is: the greater the prestige, the less the focus on adaptive goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Association of Social Workers came into being in 1955. During the preceding 40 years social workers had proliferated seven professional organizations around general and specialized interests. These were, in the chronology of their formation, the American Association of Medical Social Workers, the National Association of School Social Workers, the American Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, the American Association of Social Workers, the American Association of Group Workers, the Social Work Research Group, and the Association for the Study of Community Organization. The result was multiple membership with its drain on members' funds and time, duplication of effort in social action and public interpretation, and, the absence of a single identification so vital for professionalization. Reaction produced a move toward some sort of coordination. Negotiations toward this end among the seven associations began in 1949 and continued for six years, during which several alternative plans, including federation and integration, were widely debated. Integration won out, and in 1955 the predecessor organizations were dissolved, and the new organization succeeded them.

The article discusses the impact of phase one managerial grid training. The "Managerial Grid" has been increasingly used as a form of management training in the U.S. The author notes that, despite its popularity, little evaluation research has been published on the effects of such training. R.R. Blake and J.S. Mouton are mentioned for discussing changes in attitude among management and union personnel after training. They also researched attitude changes among Venezuelan and Indonesian trainees. In the study, Phase 1 trainees were placed in problem-solving teams based on a diagonal slice across the organization chart.

Reports on management trends, methods and ideas in the U.S. as of 1973. Group Health Inc.'s rearrangement of its workweek; Elements of a good organizational climate; Safeguards against natural perils to electronic data processing; Setting of executive incentives by objectives.

The article presents information about economics in the curricula of agricultural colleges in Canada. The article is divided into two parts. The first part describes briefly the organization of agricultural colleges in Canada, programs of studies in them and the content of economics in several programs. In the second part, some features of organization, programs of studies and course content are discussed in such a manner as to disclose prejudices by other authors who discuss the topic. The author states that an "agricultural college" is defined as an institution offering a program of studies leading to a degree in agriculture. Some institutions offer a diploma course on the completion of which students may, by arrangement, proceed to other colleges for the work required to complete a degree program. All colleges in Canada, with the exception of the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Alberta, offer diploma courses in agriculture. The degree commonly awarded is the Bachelor of Science in Agriculture. The Canadian colleges report 43 graduates pursuing postgraduate studies in farm management, agricultural economics, or economics, ten of these in Canadian institutions and thirty-three in the U.S.

The relationships between various aspects of social participation-voluntary organization members hips, church attendance, and informal association with friends--and a number of social status and social background factors are examined using data from a representative sample of residents of a suburban county adjacent to Washington, D.C. In particular, the role of direct intergenerational transmission of participation patterns in determining levels of social participation Is investigated by using the technique of path analysis to derive estimates of the effects of parents' participation patterns (for which no direct measurements are available) upon those of their offspring. For both males and females, membership in voluntary organisations appears to be at least as strongly influenced by parent's level of participation in suck organizations as by respondent's socioeconomic status. In the case of church attendance, however, a strong direct intergenerational effect is found only for females, and sot for males. Church attendance of males appears to be strongly influenced by their spouses' attendance patterns, a result which is consistent with the role of women as expressive leaders of families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to answer the following question: What does an executive's attitude toward mobility, as distinct from the fact of mobility, have to do with his administrative performance within an organization? This question represents something of a departure from two traditions in sociological research on mobility. First, the author is not concerned with mobility rates, but with the more dynamic question of what such mobility signifies for an individual's behavior. Second, the author treat as a problematic variable what is commonly assumed as a given in the U.S. society namely, the assumption that mobility motives predominate and that there is a nearly universal competitive struggle for scarce and invidious status. Few would acknowledge, perhaps, that such a mobility assumption characterizes their own work; and many would agree, as a matter of course, with the proposition that mobility commitments vary considerably among individuals. Nevertheless, the evidence of such a working assumption is not difficult to find: it appears, for example, in the readiness to impute mobility motives to those who have moved upward, or to portray in the U.S. society as a vast model of mobility Pressures; and in the readiness to base interpretations of data upon implied striving for comparative place.

This article is a test of the hypothesis that values advocated for rural youth have changed in the direction of a significant decline in individualistic achievement values; and a significant increase in affiliation and co-operation values. Few observers would challenge the assertion that the American society has become increasingly characterized by multi-level, large complex organizations. This study tests the assumption that changes in American social structure during the last thirty-five years have been accompanied by a decline in the functional utility of individualistic, achievement-oriented values, and conversely that in a society increasingly characterized by large-scale organization, values stressing cooperation and the intrinsic worth of interpersonal relations will be more suitable guides for conduct. In another sense it is an advantage since the finding of a decline in achievement values even among the rural segment of the society may be interpreted as indicating the pervasiveness of the trend. Perhaps the nature of the reference population is also part of the reason why affiliation values increased only very slightly and co-operation values not at all.