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Whereas variance in preferences is a central explanation for human behaviour in the social sciences, economists traditionally avoid using preferences to explain behaviour. Rather, change in behaviour or different kinds of behaviour are explained solely by differences in the economic restrictions imposed on an individual. Whereas restrictions have been analysed as monetary constraints in traditional economics, Gary Becker has broadened this term. In his work, he tried to integrate 'time'--the non-monetary restriction--into the economic constraints. In our paper we test empirically the effects of monetary and time restrictions on the travel-mode choice of a representative sample of the German population. We do this by means of testing some hypotheses from Becker's work on microcensus data from Germany. These data include the following variables: travel-mode choice, distance of travel, time of travel, as well as some additional socioeconomic characteristics. Results of introducing these additional socioeconomic variables will also raise the question whether it is really true that only monetary and time costs matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been observed by social scientists and, more intuitively, by those who are concerned with the practical politics of public opinion, that one function of the mass media is to confer recognition on individuals or groups. Public recognition, in turn, when it comes from a "significant other" or an important reference group, may exercise an influence on the opinions and behavior of those who receive it. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that recognition, as expressed through the mass media, played by influencing politically-significant behavior in one crisis situation—the Berlin blockade of 1948-49. Following the end of the Second World War, the city of Berlin in Germany was divided into four sectors, each of which was occupied by one of the four major powers. A full blockade of the land and water routes leading to the sectors occupied by the Western Allies was imposed by the Soviet Union in June 1948. Moscow's objective in doing this was apparently either to force the United States, Great Britain, and France to relinquish their position in Berlin, or else to obtain major concessions from them in West Germany.

Abstract This paper gives a cross-national comparison, involving West German, Dutch, and United States data, on the use of social ties in the job-search process. Data for West Germany and the Netherlands are compared with the Lin et al. research on Albany-Schenectady and Troy. The findings show that (1) there is more use of informal sources in the U.S. than in West Germany and the Netherlands; (2) informal sources do not generally lead to higher occupational prestige and income; (3) for the Dutch data (no West German data are available for this question) greater social resources, that is, a contact person with relatively high prestige, do lead to a job with a higher prestige, though effects are less pronounced than found by Lin et al.; and (4) an extension of the Lin et al. analysis shows that these social resources do not have a significant impact on income. This last finding is consistent with the recent results of Marsden and Hurlbert's analysis of Detroit Area Study data. Institutional differences that might be relevant to the explanation of cross-national differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the approach towards sociology in Europe. It lists works of several sociologists and brings out their area of study. Karl Mannheim is concerned with educational administration. He says the Germans have long speculated as to whether there is a science of sociology, while the French have placed courses and the Americans whole departments of sociology in their universities. Now Germany is convinced that there is sociology and will teach it and he offers a detailed outline of what he thinks the subject should cover. Mark Abramowitsch offers a socialist interpretation of sociology, but criticizes strongly those who do not go beyond Marx in their interpretation of society. He has much to say about the contrast between the proletarian and the bourgeois approaches to social science. Irma Goitein seeks to show Richard Hess' position between Hegelian idealism and Marxian historical materialism, and she finds that he did not seek a synthesis of these viewpoints but rather gyrated between them. Some new letters of Hess are given in the appendix.

How do Muslim institutions in Europe relate to national and European values? How do they visibly challenge boundaries that other/exclude Islam? This analysis identifies two factors that result in the acceptance or rejection of mosques, showing the boundary work at play in this process: (1) the ability of Muslim leadership to achieve a positive visibility of the mosque through the performance and staging of key German civic ideals; and (2) the role of local contexts of reception. Through ethnography, interview data, and analysis of newspaper coverage of the Penzberg Mosque and the Cologne Mosque, I argue that the strategic presentation of both form and function by Muslim communities interacts with constraining environmental factors in delineating possibilities of belonging. This leads to the labeling of mosques as "good" or "bad," evoking the "good Muslim"/"bad Muslim" binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on social sciences in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Development of social science; Analysis of the social science literature; Implementation of Dahrendorf's program; Historical context in a bibliographic analysis.

This article presents information regarding the books "Die Menschlidhe Gebellschaft in Ihren Ethnosociologischen Grundlagen," and "Economics in Primitive Communities," both by Richard Thurnwald. These volumes afford a refreshing relief after the flood of deductive, philosophical, and methodological sociology which has poured out of Germany during the last decade or two. The author is thoroughly inductive and objective. Buttressing his every statement with impressible documentation, he errs, if at all, in his caution against making premature generalizations. His data are drawn in the main from ethnography, for he recognizes very clearly that the science of society cannot arrive at valid generalizations from the study of a single civilization alone any more than a science of biology could have been built up by limiting observations to homo sapiens. Studies of primitive cultures contribute to our understanding of man in modern society much as the researches of the geneticists with fruit-flies, the biochemists with dogs, and the animal psychologists with anthropoids contribute to our knowledge of the human organism.