How epoch making are high technologies? The case of biotechnology

This paper is a commentary on the current tendency among sociologists to embrace the notion that high technologies will be revolutionary or epoch making. The implicit neo-Schumpeterian logic of these claims is detailed, and a preliminary framework for empirical examination is developed for the case of biotechnology. Available evidence suggests that biotechnology, because it will be applied primarily in declining sectors of the economy and is mainly a substitution technology, is unlikely to be an epoch-making technical form. The implications of these observations for sociological reasoning about new technologies and technological change are discussed.     

A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

Nationalism in America: The case of the Populist movement

As a marker of national identity, the term American is culturally meaningful but also difficult and contradictory. In the first part of this article, we develop the claim that analyzing nationalism as discourse provides a meaningful lens for the study of this boundary-making process. In particular, the distinctions between civic/ethnic and inclusive/exclusive forms of nationalism have proved nettlesome for a consideration of American nationalism. In the second half of the article, we use data from the Southern Populist movement of the late nineteenth century to provide both relational and cultural analyses of the use of the term American. Although its use was primarily civic, it had important but complex racial implications.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Adolescent Women's Recommendations for Enhanced Parent-Adolescent Communication About Sexual Behavior

Family communication about adolescent sexual health and behavior promotes adolescent health and family connectedness. However, few studies seek the perspective of adolescents regarding their recommended strategies for family communication. Findings of a survey of female adolescent family planning patients (n = 249) indicated adolescent recommendations for better family communication included treat teen as an equal, 63%; increase parental knowledge about lifestyle and peer pressures, 61%, and improve parental listening skills, 61%. There were no statistically significant differences according to age, pregnancy history, or school enrollment status for suggested strategies for improved communication with parents. Sexually active adolescent daughters expressed interest in maintaining family connectedness and support with increased time for family activities as well as increased quality and quantity of dialogue between the adolescent girl and her parents.     

Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.     

Paul Willis and the Scientific Imperative: An Evaluation of Learning to Labour

This article evaluates the methodological philosophy and strategy of Paul Willis's classic, Learning to Labour. We use King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry as a litmus test, showing how Willis's work meets, diverges from, and innovatively reconstructs good social science research. Drawing from Learning to Labour and Willis's writings on methodological issues, as well as key texts on the science of sociology, this article evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a reflexive method and the potential this method holds for qualitative work in sociology.     

The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race in American Sociology, 1937–99

We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and 1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that analysts in many fields will control for race. This pattern of usage may reinforce an implicit conception of racial differences that we call broad but shallow, in that race is expected to matter almost everywhere, but its effect can be neutralized by the addition of a control.     

Inclusive Governance and “Minority” Groups: The Role of the Third Sector in Wales

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or minority groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by minority voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral partners in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

This is my ...: How Cohabitants introduce their partners

Cohabitors were asked by questionnaire to indicate how they introduced their partners to parents, friends, acquaintances and employers. Findings from 76 male and 79 female subjects suggest that, when introducing a partner in social interactions, the relationship between a cohabitor and the person to whom the introduction is made has an effect upon the title used to describe her or his partner. The most common mode of introduction was boyfriend or girlfriend, the term lover being reserved generally for close friends. Over 10% of the remaining responses conveyed varying degrees of information concerning the emotional and physical nature of the relationship and/or the cohabitor's household.The authors wish to express their thanks to Jim Kerr, morning announcer of WPLJ-FM, for his cooperation in this study.     

Poverty orderings and welfare dominance

This paper examines the partial orderings of discrete distributions derived from various poverty indices and sets of welfare functions. The poverty ordering with respect to some indexP is the ordering obtained whenP ranks consistently over a range of admissible poverty lines. The poverty orderings derived from the headcount ratio, the per-capita income gap and another distribution-sensitive index are characterized in some detail when the poverty standard is allowed to take any positive value, and these orderings are shown to coincide with the natural interpretation of first, second and third degree welfare dominance, respectively. Additional results are then obtained for the situation in which the admissible poverty lines cannot exceed some finite upper bound.We are particularly indebted to Nick Kiefer for initial insights into the issues addressed in this paper. We have also had helpful comments from Amartya Sen, from an anomymous referee, and from many seminar audiences. Financial support from the Krannert Endowment Trust and the Leverhulme Trust is gratefully acknowledged.     

The American commune and the American mythology

While the symbolic value of community has long been recognized, most of the attention to date has focussed on the symbolic content of the American small town, taken as representing the most fundamental and lasting values and characteristics of the American Way of Life (Vidich and Bensman, 1968, Caplowet al., 1982).Here it is argued that communities existing not in the cultural center but rather on the periphery also contain symbolic potency and are so interpreted by the dominant society. As is demonstrated by the case of the Amana Colonies, such communities represent the Other within. They present both the possibility of cultural alternatives and the ultimate victory of mainstream values and structures. The tension between history and myth, community and society, is then related to interpretation of other communal societies and their relationship to the dominant American society.For helpful comments on an earlier version, I would like to thank David Bouchier and Maren Lockwood Carden.     

Interactional synchrony: Genuine or spurious? A critique of recent research

In two recent articles, McDowall (1978a, 1978b) has challenged the micro-analytic work of W. S. Condon and Adam Kendon. Specifically, he has argued on the basis of his work that interactional synchrony is not a genuine phenomenon, but rather a statistically expectable noise in social interaction. In this paper, we demonstrate that McDowall's results are inconclusive because of confusion as to what constitutes interactional synchrony. We clarify these issues and place McDowall's experiments in their proper perspective.     

Theory at risk: Accounting for the excellence movement

Amidst widespread concern about educational crisis and the need for reform, the current excellence movement places a pronounced emphasis on rigor, standards, and a core curriculum of basic studies. At issue here is whether major macro-the-oretical perspectives can account for the emergence of this movement. Functional and Marxian theories do not meet this challenge well, especially insofar as they posit a tight, rational linkage between school and economy and downplay the institutional autonomy of the educational system. A status conflict approach, emphasizing middle class mobilization, offers greater insight, though it must be complemented with a recognition of constraints imposed by capitalist organization and the institutionalization of educational myths.     

The context of correctness: A comment on rushton

According to Philippe Rushton, the equalitarian fiction, a scientific hoax that races are genetically equal in cognitive ability, underlies the politically correct objections to his research on racial differences. He maintains that there is a taboo against race unequaled by the Inquisition. I show that while Rushton has been publicly harassed, he has had continuous opportunities to present his findings in diverse, widely available, respectable journals, and no general suppression within academic psychology is evident. Similarly, Henry Garrett and his associates in the LAAEE, dedicated to preserving segregation and preventing race suicide, disseminated their ideas widely, although Garrett complained of the equalitarian fiction in 1961. Examination of the intertwined history ofMankind Quarterly, German Rassenhygiene, far right politics, and the work of Roger Pearson suggests that some cries of political correctness must be viewed with great caution.Preparation of this paper was not supported by any grant, foundation, political, or religious organization.specializing in the history of psychology and psychological aesthetics.     

The acknowledgment of literary influence: A structural analysis of a German literary network

This paper analyzes a characteristic syndrome of modern literature identified as anxiety of influence by literary critics and as mania for originality by art historians. Based on a sociological reformulation of the syndrome as it relates to the structure of acknowledged influence, the paper develops and tests several hypotheses. Data are based on a survey of West German writers and are analyzed by using clustering techniques and correspondence analysis. First, the analysis demonstrates the fragmented and non-hierarchical structure of acknowledged literary influence. Second, the different types of influence (absence distinctiveness, and clusterability) correspond to different professional and literary characteristics of writers. Results highlight one of the contradictions between the cultural code and the professional structure of modern art: at the level of ideology, greatness and genius are equated with the absence of influence and artistic uniqueness. The analysis shows, however, that the denial/absence of acknowledged influence is found among writers who are excluded from the professional networks where reputations are made in the world of literature.     

The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.     

Solidarity-Based Third Sector Organizations in the "Proximity Services" Field: A European Francophone Perspective

This article reviews the role of third sector organizations in the field of proximity services from a francophone perspective. We analyze how the new wave of initiatives inside the third sector in France and francophone Belgium can be seen as providing institutional responses to state and market failures that arise from trust-dependent and quasi-collective attributes of these services. These initiatives are often called solidarity based third sector organizations, a concept defined in this paper. A central assumption of this analysis is that the political context in which these services are delivered is especially important, particularly as reflected in the changing regulatory role of the state. This analysis takes, therefore, an economic sociology perspective.     

The development of a capacity for concern in antisocial children: Winnicott's concept of human relatedness

Winnicott's refreshing view of clinical practice includes the unique notion that delinquency is a sign of hope. Several of Winnicott's interpersonal concepts fit together to develop this thought: holding environment, capacity for concern, the use of the object, and hate in the counter transference. In this paper these four concepts are described and the case of a ten-year-old antisocial youngster is used to illustrate Winnicott's thinking and tie some of his illusive ideas into a difficult but familiar kind of practice situation. The therapeutic approach used was a mixture of case management and play therapy. What is different however is the way in which the therapist interpreted the youngster's behavior and stimulated his rich fantasy life.