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The article points the weaknesses of Richard Bland and Roy Wallis' commentary about the essay on status inconsistency and participation in social movements. The comment began with observations concerning the status inconsistency method represented in the essay and moved to a broader criticism of the notion of status defense. However, Bland and Wallis missed the point of the essay. For instance, they defined status more narrowly than Zurcher and Kirkpatrick in "Citizens for Decency". Moreover, they accused the authors of obsessively seeking some ulterior motive among anti-pornography crusaders which could explain their participation. Finally, they offered no evidence to demonstrate that overrewarded inconsistents would be expected to engage in resistance to changes in their social environment which might threaten their over-rewarded situation.

This article selectively reviews and interprets the literature on self-concept and social change. It summarizes the view that in the 1970s the self-conception of Americans, modally considered, manifested a shift from institution to impulse, from social to reflective. The argument is made that in the 1980s the expression of impulse is becoming bureaucratized, newly formated in rationalization and modernization, effectively being institutionalized by assorted societal agents, including sociologists. Speculations arc offered about the implications of that change. Several suggestions are made regarding future research on self-concept and the broader notion of "self," particularly by symbolic interactionists and for the purpose of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the model for a poverty intervention program that purports to work largely inside the system as an organization funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, yet intends to bring together presently disparate intrasystem and extrasystem components of the community into a single program for social change. This social action approach, conceptualized here as the Overlap model, will be outlined and then for further clarification compared with Saul Alinsky's approach as summarized by Riessman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some of the dynamics and dilemmas of one poverty intervention organization (PIO) as it attempted to enact the expectations and approach the goals of the War Against Poverty. The research methods used in this study were participant observation (in the committee complex and in Topeka Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) staff activities) and unstructured interviews (with Topeka OEO staff and poor and not-poor members of the committee complex). The Topeka OEO is a specific PIO in a specific community--thus generalizations are left to the discretion of the reader. The Topeka OEO has been shown to be a PIO striving to maintain a "functional marginality" between the poor and not-poor and, employing a political organizational style, attempting to bring poor and not-poor together in order to implement on "Overlap Model" for social change. It was concluded that whether or not such organization can endure toward its defined goals, whether or not it can remain functionally marginal without becoming marginally functional, is at this point still a hypothesis being tested.