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In August 1974, the International Sociological Association (ISA) will hold its Eighth World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and thereby afford an accessible opportunity for many North American sociologists to participate. The reorganization of the International Sociological Association by its Council in 1970 at Varna, Bulgaria, during sessions of the Seventh World Congress of Sociology was desired to strengthen the autonomy and effectiveness of its thirty research committees. This should provide opportunity for greater involvement for individual sociologists, both in the periodic international meetings and in the ongoing work of the ISA. These organizational changes come at an appropriate period in that North American sociologists are now demonstrating a stronger interest in cross-national sociology. This article is designed to describe to the membership of the American Sociological Association the implications of the new format of the International Sociological Association for international intellectual cooperation.

An area of research in which sociologists and historians would seem to share a rather obvious concern is that of social change. In his presidential address before the joint meeting of the Canadian Historical and Canadian Political Science Association, S. D. Clark emphasized this. "We cannot become students of change," he said, "without becoming historians. It is only by looking at what has happened to societies of the past, and over time, that the sociologist can derive the data on which to build his principles of social change." That is to say that the study of social change requires recognition of processes in time and must deal, insofar as time past is involved, with evidence that is historical. The student of social change must become a historian and the historian, insofar as he is interested in understanding and interpreting general processes, must become a social scientist. When, however, one searches the literature for particular studies of historical social change, one's findings are meager indeed, especially if one's standards, theoretically and methodologically, are reflective of those of contemporary social science, and one's historiographical standards, of contemporary history. If, in addition, one is searching for social change studies of a particular national history, then the material is even more limited. For this reason I have expanded this review, which was originally concerned with the American nineteenth century only, to include two studies of English history, because these two studies include important theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of history and social change in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between social class structure and political institutions and behaviour has been one of the dominant interests of social scientists since the time of sociologist Karl Marx. More specifically social class structure has been the main source of theory for the explanation of voting behaviour and it is probably the most frequently investigated area empirically. The connection between some indicator of social class and voting behaviour has been amply demonstrated in many studies in many societies. However, the way in which occupation, education or income has its effect on voting has rarely been considered. The purpose of this article is to consider this large array of indicators of status and conditions of living and working, of intervening variables of social involvement, personality characteristics and attitudes. The article will demonstrate which variables should be pursued for further theoretical development and research, and which should be abandoned. The data are drawn from a larger study of voting behaviour, collected at the time of the 1968 Canadian federal election, in the province of Ontario.

The article provides statistical information regarding sociologists in the U.S. as of 1972. The U.S. Office of Education annually undertakes a survey of earned degrees in each academic field by each institution of higher learning. Their latest report includes data for 1969-70 based on a total of 1,617 institutions. The entry for sociology in this report provides one operational definition of the number of sociology departments in the U.S. As a conservative estimate, then, there are at least 988 departments of sociology in the 1,617 institutions of higher learning in the U.S. presumably, sociology is also offered in most of the other colleges and universities but no degrees were reported as conferred from these schools in 1969-70. It should also be noted that these data do not include reference to community or junior colleges. Another source of data on the number of departments can be found in the 1972-73 edition of the Guide to Graduate Departments of sociology published by the American Sociological Association. The Guide reports the number of graduate departments in the U.S. and Canada. Over the four editions, the Guide has listed the following number of departments in the two countries: 1969--169; 1970--178; 1971--184; 1972--175.