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This paper introduces a sociological approach to the study of art and literature and demonstrates its value as a methodological intervention in the field of comics studies. Known as the 'production of culture' perspective, this approach argues that all artistic work - including comics - is the product of collective, often routinized, human activity. Therefore, it is not sufficient merely to study the text and/or the artist to whom the work is directly attributed. Rather, to fully understand any artistic work, one must also study the larger social and organizational context of its production and dissemination. In the first part of the paper, I will provide an overview of the production of culture approach, discussing some of its foundational theorists and their respective intellectual contributions. Sociologists covered will include Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard A. Peterson. In the second part of the paper, I will present an example of how this approach may be applied in scholarly practice. Using the transnational comics publishing industry in Japan and the United States as a case study, I will show how the conditions and mode of production help to determine the particular sorts of texts that are actually created. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the production of culture approach and possible directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of the South, as a substantive area research interest, emerged during the 1800s as a means to rationalize and preserve the cultural norms of slavery era whites who would soon experience seismic social shocks including the Civil War and emancipation of enslaved blacks. The person singularly cited as the architect of this area of study is Howard W. Odum. Although Odum is identified as the person most responsible for the development of this field, archival data indicate that W. E. B. Du Bois and the men and women of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory were its first practitioners. In this paper evidence is offered to show that Du Bois's Atlanta University efforts predated Odum's North Carolina research program. Additionally, an explanation for Du Bois's marginalization in the existing sociology of the South literature is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the issue which gives emphasis on both the plenary and the presidential addresses presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association held in Little Rock, Arkansas. The success of the meeting was made even more so by these two extremely timely and thought provoking papers from Bill Catton and Marsha McGee. Both not only reflect the introspective nature of sociology and sociologists at this time, but also provide direction for the discipline. Hence, it is hoped that the quality of both the 1985 plenary address and the 1985 presidential address serves as an encouragement to those who would like to attend the 1986 annual meeting in Jackson, Mississippi.

Harry Alpert (1912-1977), the US sociologist, is best-known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation's social science programme in the 1950s. This study extends our understanding of Alpert in two main ways: first, by examining the earlier development of his views and career. Beginning with his 1939 biography of Emile Durkheim, we explore the early development of Alpert's views about foundational questions concerning the scientific status of sociology and social science more generally, proper social science methodology, the practical value of social science, the academic institutionalisation of sociology, and the unity-of-science viewpoint. Second, this paper illuminates Alpert's complex involvement with certain tensions in mid-century US social science that were themselves linked to major transformations in national science policy, public patronage, and unequal relations between the social and natural sciences. We show that Alpert's views about the intellectual foundations, practical relevance, and institutional standing of the social sciences were, in some important respects, at odds with his NSF policy work. Although remembered as a quantitative evangelist and advocate for the unity-of-science viewpoint, Alpert was in fact an urbane critic of natural-science envy, social scientific certainty, and what he saw as excessive devotion to quantitative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features sports participation as a factor for social change. Physical educators and sociologists have been almost unanimous in their claim that participation in sports will result in more positive attitudes and improved relations between culturally diverse players. The goals of the Olympic Movement are to promote the development of fine physical and moral qualities and to bring the athletes of the world together in a great quadrennial festival of sports, thereby creating international respect and goodwill and thus helping to construct a better and more peaceful world. Today, countries like the United States, Russia, and East Germany view success at the Games primarily as a justification of the superiority of their political and economic systems.

In a short paper written in the early 19MM, 'The representation of death in the American cinema', Roger Caillois theorized the representation of the afterlife in America through the Hollywood cinema of the late 1930s and 1940s. Caillois maintained that the American afterlife is fundamentally bureaucratic and represents a prolongation of the world of the living. This prolongation is understood as a negation of the separation of the sacred and the profane domains in favour of a desacralized, profane pan-bureaucracy. Caillois's essay is read in the context of a sociology of the sacred in the tradition of the College de sociologie, with special attention given to his descriptions of how the sacred tends to wane in ordinary life and to his hybrid methodological strategies. The films Caillois used as evidence are critically reviewed and the Hollywood invasion of French film markets in the 1940s and 1950s is developed as a critical historical context for grounding Caillois's claims about American 'originality'; the negation of the sacred dimension of the afterlife, the power of cinema to replace oral tradition in collective life, and the consequences of a powerful, 'exported' mythology that negates the sacred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American society has moved away from the two societies, black and white, separate and unequal that highlighted the 1967 Presidential Commission Report -- evolving instead into a profusion of worlds reflecting various combinations of races, ethnicities and classes. This paper analyzes two groups -- the black middle class and the white underclass -- that emerged and grew after the report and defy much of the theorizing sociologists have produced on race and class. It argues that the black middle class and the white underclass reflect "interlocking categories of experience" that are unfamiliar. It encourages a new understanding that captures the reality of these race/class groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban sociologists assert that community sentiments and community evaluations are important reflections of a society's social order. This paper examines the impact of personal and social attributes of urban dwellers, their perceptions of neighborhood characteristics, and their neighborhood-based social networks, as well as objective characteristics of their neighborhoods, on these two dimensions of people's local community. Using regression analysis on data collected in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, I find that locally-based social networks and perceptions of the neighborhood help explain community sentiments, whereas objective community characteristics and neighborhood perceptions are useful for explaining community evaluation. Differences between the Indianapolis and Pittsburgh analyses are used to suggest possible lines of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is claimed that most sociological studies of U.S. scientists tend to disregard black Americans. This paper seeks to provide some necessary demographic data on black U.S. scientists on which future studies may build. A sample of 557 black scientists responded to a questionnaire designed to provide demographic data. The results show that the typical black U.S. scientist is a male who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in a lower middle-class family. After graduating in the top quartile of a predominantly black public high school, he enrolled in a predominantly black college where his academic achievement was above average. When the decision was made to pursue the Ph.D. degree, the preference was a university located in the Midwest. After completing the doctorate the pattern was to return to the South to pursue a career in a predominantly black college.

The personal files and notes from Alfred Lindesmith's only excursion into the field (1935-1937) give a particularly informative view of addiction and addict mythmaking about opiates and opiate addiction. Lindesmith's work, overseen by Herbert Blumer, was the first empirical validation of the symbolic interactionist perspective and produced a theory of opiate addiction that is still respected and used by sociologists, psychologists, and substance abuse experts. The theory itself produced its own mythmaking in the attempts of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to refute and suppress Lindesmith's work and in the construction of its own euphoria mythology of addiction, addicts, and Lindesmith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a strategy for reconstructing and visually documenting social change after the change is already largely completed. The example used is the pulp-logging industry in Ontonagon County, Michigan, in which change occurred slowly until 1970-1985, when a profound transformation took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts the use of ethnographic research procedures in the study of schools in Great Britain and the U.S. It also reflects on differences between the anthropology and the sociology of education. In the course of this exploration the authors also hope to draw together much of the literature from the respective countries and disciplinary fields. There is an obvious and striking difference between British and U.S. school ethnography. Whereas the U.S. research on schools and classrooms has been conducted primarily by applied anthropologists, that in Great Britain has been done overwhelmingly by researchers who see themselves as sociologists. It is noticeable that several researchers working as sociologists were trained as anthropologists or began work in anthropology departments. Where British research has looked to North America it has been to U.S. sociology in genera--especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The article also attempts to establish that the Atlantic really does divide school ethnographers into differing traditions. It establishes the truth of the authors' claim that school and classroom ethnography in the U.S. and Canada is predominantly anthropological in orientation, while that in Great Britain is more sociological.

The article presents a discussion on the growth and development of American sociology of sport. Sport has experienced a virtual explosion in the publication of empirical investigations, and some attempts at theory generation and model building. Several literatures have focused on the description, explanation, and prediction of sport. The article also discusses the changes and the dominant value orientation current within sport sociology. The investigative paradigms used by sport sociologists are also examined.

If you are not an economist or deeply trained in economics, you may well think what mainstreamers think of as the economy is quite strange. This sociologist argues it is also misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long recognized the utility of modified forms of Monopoly as tools for teaching about social stratification within the United States. We present an adaptation of Monopoly to help instructors teach students how capitalism plays out in a liberalizing world economy. By taking on roles as CEOs of global companies based in different countries, students come to understand firsthand how and why the winners and losers of market globalization are determined by the rules of the game that are set by international institutions. Students themselves vote on whether and how these rules will change, experiencing crucial intersections of politics and economics. By the end of the game, students are ready to critically examine the governing structures of a globalizing economy, and the political outcomes these structures produce. Quantitative and experimental results suggest that playing the game increases student interest in and understanding of several key concepts of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the Progressive Era, sociology and institutional economics shared some important methodological principles and theoretical constructs. This study explores some of these similarities, focusing on the ideas and theories of Albion Small and Franklin Giddings, who were the most important sociologists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the literature on the history of the interdisciplinarity of economics and sociology is somewhat scarce, this study aims to contribute to this historiography by considering the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of early institutional economics -- mainly from the standpoint of Veblenian institutional economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologist's body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student 'studying up' among guarded cultural elites. These positions opened an analytic lens into sociological concepts of labor exploitation, value, and social hierarchy. However, in occupying an insider role within a stratified field, observant participants face risks in trying to move beyond their own experiences in order to interview informants. My changing position in the field, from subjugated worker to interviewer, highlights how power and inequality operate in the fashion world. First-person narrative illuminates these analytic payoffs of insider ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors—a researcher in Latino educational issues and a sociologist specializing in migration—collaborated to more fully understand and explain the schooling circumstances of Mexican indigenous students. After elaborating a conceptual framework of transationalism, the researchers present three types of results: (a) critical understandings about Mexican-origin migration for U.S. educators, (b) themes from a series of interviews with Mexican indigenous families and U.S. and Mexican educators, and (c) teacher research on the complex question of the language of instruction for Mexican indigenous students. The authors contend that once educators understand each country's role in U.S.–Mexican migration, conceptions of unsuccessful migrants are dispelled, and they can move to a focus on optimizing students' opportunities for success. Also, results from the family and school personnel interviews revealed a pattern of both challenges, such as extreme discrimination against Mexican indigenous students, and strengths, such as recognition of the cultural and linguistic strengths that Mexican indigenous students bring to school. The findings resulting from this interdisciplinary collaboration, along with initial results from teacher research showing promise for multilingual instruction for Mexican indigenous students, generated identification of issues for future research with a severely understudied population of multilingual students in U.S. schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses and uses survey results from students and members of the North Central Sociological Association (NCSA) about important current issues in the U.S. The aim of this article is to illustrate some of the problems experienced by sociologists in teaching about social issues in our society. The purpose of the survey is to compare the attitudes of NCSA members compared to those of students about a variety of public opinion issues. The NCSA members are concerned more about race relations and the availability and affordability of health care while students are concerned more about crime, violence, and hunger. The data in this study also have implications for the understanding of gender relations. The results of this study suggest that the society is becoming more accepting of homosexuals; however, students are still leery about homosexuals serving as members of the clergy or as elementary school teachers. The author suggests several things that will help narrow the gap between the students' views and the sociology teachers' conceptualization of problems.

Psychologists and sociologists have had a long and keen interest in whether situations or personality traits are the predominant determinants of behavior This affect control study and two earlier ones (Smith et al., 1994, 2001) are consistent with recent psychological research indicating that East Asians are more influenced by situational influences and less by internal dispositions than Americans. This implies that Japanese are less likely than Americans to invoke correspondence biases like the fundamental attribution error. The results argue for a gendered Generalized Other in Japan. Still, the Japanese setting equations share fundamental commonalities with their American cousins such as relatively large stability and behavioral morality effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the autobiographical essay of the author-sociologist in the United States. Family history; Educational and career background; Experiences as a housewife; Accounts on the transition from a housewife to a sociologist.

This address summarizes and critiques the four leading theories of poverty, arguing that the modified fair shares approach is more valid than the others. The four leading measures of poverty also are summarized and critiqued, with the quasi-relative measure singled out as more valid than the others. Modified fair shares theory and the quasi-relative measure are combined into a holistic approach which stresses structural explanations of poverty and suggests there is considerably more poverty in American than the government's "official" statistics indicate. The address concludes with a call for sociologists to use the holistic approach and to urge its adoption by the census bureau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a 1978 national Gallup poll, we test the hypothesis that social marginality is a predictor of belief in paranormal phenomena. Being female and not being married generally correlate as hypothesized with paranormal belief, but age, low education, being Black, and being unemployed generally do not. The marginality hypothesis has a questionable theoretical foundation and fails to predict a variety of beliefs consistently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on women in academic sociology in the U.S. from 1925 to 1975. The careers of two sociologists Arnold Rose and Caroline Rose has been discussed. sociologists. The Roses' professional careers spanned the last half of the period 1925-1975. To discover who and where were the academic women in sociology in the twenties and later, one should set up a research project involving polling the universities across the nation, year by year, or in token years. Such an undertaking, even if assumed, has drawbacks. There is substantial information from fifty years ago, but not in the form which yields uniform, consistent data. For this purpose there are shortcomings in all the quantitative material. Thus, for example, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education reports statistics in many cases not for sociology but for social sciences. In some surveys faculty means full-timers only. Sociologist Alice Rossi's survey of 1968 covers only the departments of sociology, which grant higher degrees. As between the National Science Foundation, the Office of Education, the Carnegie Commission, the reports of the learned societies, and numerous surveys, no straight story can be constructed.

Discusses the impact of the job crisis in higher education on sociology in the U.S. Statistic on the decline in undergraduate enrollment; Employment profile of sociology academics and doctorates; Earnings of sociologists and anthropologists.

Sociologists are being called upon to evaluate community development efforts in the United States at an increasing rate. These sociologists, as independent researchers, are working side by side with professional cornmunity development consultants. Based on an ongoing community development research project, which rests largely upon qualitative techniques, the roles of consultant and researcher are delineated. Methodological advantages and disadvantages of separating these roles are discussed. It is hypothesized that the presence of an independent research agent will likely produce four response phases on the part of the professional consultant during the course of the research project: (1) approval and support, (2) professional challenge, (3) apprehension, and (4) guarded acceptance. Suggestions are made regarding qualitative techniques that can minimize negative responses on the part of practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now almost seventy years since Max Weber visited the United States and was inspired to write his delightful and significant essay entitled "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism." (Weber, 1946). I would like to comment on what Weber had to say in that essay concerning American Protestantism, and I would also like to assess Weber's predictions about the future of American Protestantism in the light of certain events since 1904, events that Weber himself might think important to reflect upon were he to come to life again and pay a second visit to this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this article, the author briefly considers some of the changing imagery of American cities and suburbs. Today's urban imagery is no longer concerned with the imagined polarity of countryside and city, which for so long preoccupied Americans. This polarity was succeeded some decades ago by a presumed polarity of city and suburb, a polarity which followed in the wake of a vastly increased sub-urbanization of American cities, and the flight of great numbers of city dwellers to the suburbs in search of fresh air, safe and quiet streets, genuine communal life, better standards of domestic living, and, as American sociologists have so often stressed, more prestigious locales in which to live. But the imagined polarity of suburb and city is already breaking down, and new imagery is beginning to take its place. Americans are now being told in their mass media that soon they will be living in fifteen great, sprawling, nameless communities, which are rapidly changing the human geography of the entire country. They are beginning to have spread before them maps of these vast urban conglomerations, which are not cities but are nevertheless thoroughly urban: super-cities and strip cities. They are being warned that the United States' urban regions are already entering upon a new stage of development, even before most people are aware that urban regions exist at all.

The revival of Soviet sociology in the post-Stalin era is indicative of the changes in that society made possible by de-Stalinization. In a real sense, academic sociology is not possible in a totalitarian society since the need to shed light on the distribution of privileges is inherent in the very nature of the discipline. The Soviet sociologists differ, publicly at least, from their American and other Western counterparts in assuming that their society and governmental regime are in a transitional stage which will lead increasingly and inevitably to the achievable goal of real equality, i.e., communism, a system without differentiated strata or variations in reward. Unlike most Western students of stratification, they do not link the existence of inequality in their country to the desire of the privileged to maintain their superior position for themselves and their kin. Their data are rarely presented in the context of an explicit critique of some major aspect of the society. And although quantitative comparisons with the results of comparable research in non-Soviet society are rarely made, there are frequent comments in Soviet academic journals that the research findings demonstrate that the Soviet Union is more egalitarian, offers more opportunity, than the United States or the West, or that the situation is steadily improving, i.e., becoming more egalitarian.

Several studies of sociologists show that approximately one-third of sociologists who have received a Ph.D. never publish an article in a sociology journal. A sociologist who publishes an article once every three years is maintaining average productivity of his field. In the United States, only eight sociology departments have at least a productivity rate of one article per person every two years. Several factors affect sociologists' productivity. These include professional age, sex, prestige of university, size of department, financial support, administrative support, and teaching and administrative responsibilities.

United States college students' knowledge of and attitude toward about sociology were surveyed. Thirty percent were able to name the national organization of sociologists, namely the American Sociological Association (ASA). Among the mistaken efforts were 12 votes for the National Association of Social Workers. Asked to identify the principal scholarly journal published by the ASA, 22 percent named the "American Sociological Review". Only 5.3 percent could name the ASA president. 13.8 percent said "Midwest Sociological Society" in answer to a request for the name of the regional professional organization of sociologists in this part of the United States. Students who have given some consideration to careers in sociology did relatively well on several questions.