Search

Reported here are the results of a survey inquiring into the rate of acceptance of four sociobiological concepts in regard to their usefulness for future research. Included in the survey were members of four subdisciplines: animal behavior (biology), biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and developmental psychology. Three types of institutions were included: universities. four- and five-year colleges, and community colleges. A total of 1,631 responses are reported with the degree of acceptance varying from highest to lowest as follows: biology, biological anthropology, developmental psychology, and cultural anthropology. These variations are related to the central concepts of each subdiscipline.

The putting-out system has frequently been described in accounts of rural domestic industry during the European industrial revolution as a transitional form of production relations accompanying the development of full-fledged capitalism. In this article, the authors argue that the putting-out system is a relatively enduring feature of capitalist production, appearing in various times and places under conditions which can be specified through comparative analysis. To contribute to such specification, we systematically analyze the similarities and differences between the putting-out system in the contemporary hammock industry in Yucatan and in earlier European cases.

This article focuses on the power and the expression of emotion. Human beings as sentient actors are aware of their experiences and consciously respond to their feelings and the cultural expectations concerning them. The expression of emotion conveys both the depth and breadth of feelings. Similar situations may elicit roughly equivalent emotions, such as anger, but portrayal of that anger intimates the intensity and duration of the emotion. Expression refines others' understanding of experience. This in turn, gives off more information to others about ourselves and intentions. Clearly, the expression of emotion is a cognitively sophisticated capability. For much of western society and at least for fairly recent times, the expression of emotion is inversely related to power, the less powerful the person or group, the more likely is the display of emotion. Women, children, the elderly, and many racial and cultural minorities and the mentally ill are all seen as emotional. They are likewise generally perceived as being among the less powerful members of society. This raises the question of whether power relations can be established and maintained, or at least, strongly influenced, by the expression of emotion.

This article focuses on the social basis of conceptual diversity. Sociologists John Sherwood and Mark Nataupsky surveyed the psychological literature on comparative studies of Negro and white intelligence. In their ensuing research, they tested the following hypothesis: the conclusions which investigators have reached about whether or not Negroes are innately inferior to whites can be predicted from biographical and demographic data about the investigators. Placing their respondents into major classifications, one, those who concluded that blacks were innately inferior to whites in intelligence, and two, those finding that differences in black-white intelligence were attributable to environmental factors, Sherwood and Nataupsky demonstrated that a number of biographical variables were significant predictors of the research "findings" of their respondents with respect to the race-I.Q. issue. Among other things, they concluded that those psychologists who attributed observed differences in racial intelligence to heredity tended to be relatively young, to have grandparents who were native born, to have parents with relatively high levels of educational attainment, to have spent their childhood in rural areas, and to come from relatively higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

This article examines the effects of the movement toward deinstitutionalization of psychiatric services on the families of the mentally ill. Employing a sample of 92 American and Canadian families, this study explores family adaptive responses to the presence of an ex- patient in the home. It focuses attention on deinstitutionalization from a vantage point as close as possible to that of the actual participants. Data are analyzed qualitatively. Attention is given to: (1) the ongoing problems faced by families in terms of stigma, problematic role performance, and role dissensus; and (2) the role that families play in providing care and social support for their loved ones, and the positive consequences of such interaction for both ex-patients and family members. In the present investigation, while some of the social interaction between family members and ex-patients took the form of conflict and rejection, a great deal of effort was expended by relatives to accommodate these individuals and help them to be reintegrated into society. Over two-thirds of the sample (68 percent) made active (although not always successful) attempts to resocialize and rehabilitate their charges.

Relations between the presidency and the press are often fractious. This is evident in the Nixon Administration's criticisms of the press during 1969, and the more recent charges that President Reagan has leveled at the media. In this article, we first examine three competing perspectives, termed media-subordinate, moderated-effects, and media-autonomous, that explain how the press responds to criticism from the presidency. Next, we use these perspectives to generate a set of predictions about connections between the press and the presidency. We then test the predictions with data from a random sample of 843 American daily newspapers, taken in 1970. The data demonstrate that the newspapers often did change their policies in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. Second, the data show that the more professional (and therefore presumably more autonomous) the editor of the newspaper, the more likely was the newspaper's editorial policy to change in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. These findings undercut the media- autonomous perspective. By contrast, the data provide some support for both the media-subordinate and moderated-effects perspectives. The former perspective predicted changes in newspaper policy and also a relationship between an editor's ideological leanings and changes in his newspaper's policy; the data confirmed these predictions. The latter perspective predicted that changes in newspaper policy would be intermediate in size; this prediction also was supported. In our discussion, we place our findings in the context of contemporary presidency-press relationships, and suggest ways in which the three perspectives need to be developed to account for recent changes in those relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presented in this article, builds upon a series of previous works concerned with the relationship between patterns of formal, institutional relationships and the degree of conventionality-unconventionality of one's theoretical orientation. The study reported here, using a sample of interactionists, examines the relationship between the conventionality-unconventionality of theoretical orientations and one's informal, personal ties. The results parallel those of earlier studies and suggest that the more unorthodox one's theoretical perspective, the more one is bound up in a series of personal and friendship relationships with other like-minded symbolic interactionists. The sample for the present investigation was selected in the following fashion: Thirty-one symbolic interactionists who served as subjects in a pilot study for the current investigation were listed; Sociologists who authored theoretical chapters in the major published symposium on interactionism were added to the original list of thirty-one; Several authors of articles appearing in the only book of readings on interactionism available at the time of the study were selected for listing; Authors of major manuscripts or basic texts written from an interactionist's perspective were also listed; An additional list of sociologists who are considered to be closely associated with the interactionist perspective was added to the working list.