The New Rugged Individualism: Modernity and Countersystem in Post-World War II Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines the work of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac as a reaction to the overarching nihilism, exhaustion and despair of modernity and postmodernity. More specifically, these works are seen through the lens of the sociological 'countersystem' model of Sjoberg and Cain, who posit that studying behavior defined as 'negative' by the dominant social system can act as a heuristic device for that system. Novelists such as Kerouac and Salinger create fictive countersystems as a means of addressing weaknesses in the existing social structure and implicitly trying to resolve them. Their countersystems are, to a large extent, a hybrid of Buddhism and Romanticism. Finally, the characters of Kerouac and Salinger are discussed as representing a return to the individualistic heroes of American premodernity, such as Huck Finn and Hester Prynne. The work of Kerouac and Salinger, among others, is termed New Rugged Individualism.     

Shaping Judicial Law in the Post-World War II Period: When Is Labor's Legal Mobilization Successful?1

We examine the circumstances in which labor is successful in the federal appellate courts when it has filed unfair labor practice charges against employers. We specifically focus on legal disputes concerning union organizing. Few studies have examined the role of class dynamics in shaping judicial law, even when labor law is studied. We find evidence that two strategies used by class actors influence judicial lawmaking. The greater the degree to which workers mobilize the law, the more likely they are to win union organizing cases in the federal courts. However, the greater the degree to which employers are organizationally mobilized, the less likely it is that judicial outcomes will favor labor. We also find that legal precedent matters in judicial decision making. We conclude that class dynamics are important in judicial lawmaking. However, we also conclude that, to a degree, judicial decisions also remain autonomous from class dynamics.     

小城镇青年的消费行为

本文通过对苏南谏壁镇进行的实地调查,从消费需要、消费观念、消费选择和消费情感四个方面描述该镇青年居民的消费行为状况,并从社会学视角加以分析.研究结果显示,苏南小城镇青年的消费行为在以上四个方面呈现理性化特征,与以往研究发现的城市青年消费行为的特点存在一定差异.     

Civic Action and Volunteering: The Changing Space for Popular Engagement in England

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The idea that volunteering and civic action may both play a role within the work of voluntary organizations has a long...     

Professionalization and Cost Efficiency of Fundraising in Charitable Organizations: The Case of Charitable Foundations in China

This study examines the effects of professionalization on the cost efficiency of fundraising organizations in a unique research context, Chinese charitable foundations. Two important professionalization measures, professionalized human resource management and accounting practices, are adopted. Using data from audited annual reports from 2005 to 2009, we find that professionalization in general enables foundations to increase their fundraising cost efficiencies. However, further analysis indicates that this positive effect only occurs in private but not in public foundations. Furthermore, the positive effect of professionalization is more significant when raising unrestricted funds than when raising restricted funds from donors.

     

War mobilization and the life course: A cohort of World War II veterans

Men experience historical events, such as wars, at different times in their lives and are thereby influenced in different ways. Using data on a cohort of veterans from World War II, this study investigates the proposition that entry into the armed forces at a relatively early age maximized discontinuity and facilitated a redirection of the life course through psychological development, a delayed entry into family roles, and greater advancement opportunity. By comparison, later entry into the service favored greater risk of family and career disruption within a pattern of life continuity from adolescence to the middle years. Results from the analysis are consistent with these expectations.     

'Race War': Black American GIs and West Indians in Britain During The Second World War

During the Second World War some three million American service personnel came to the British Isles. Among them were more than 130,000 African-Americans who were segregated and subjected to the discrimination that crossed the Atlantic with their white countrymen. However, while many of the British hosts often welcomed the African-American GIs, the American-style Jim Crow was not welcomed. But while it has often seemed that the wartime British were free of race prejudice, treatment of troops and workers from the colonies, particularly the West Indies, suggest that this was not so. This article looks at the response to black GIs and West Indians in order to demonstrate that there was in fact greater continuity between British wartime and post-war race relations than has often appeared to be the case.     

Idealism Versus Non-Idealism: New Light on Social Policy and Voluntary Action in Britain Since 1880

This paper applies the contrast between idealist and non-idealist modes of thought to an examination and categorization of ideas and practices of voluntary action in Britain in the period from the1880s to the 1990s. In particular, the paper explores: (1) idealism and non-idealism as properties of social theories about voluntary action; (2) idealist and non-idealist social thought in voluntary organizations; (3) pro-state idealist social thought in official or governmental circles on relationships with voluntary action, and changes in such thought and in government relationships with voluntary action in the 1970s; (4) innovations in the ways of classifying voluntary organizations; and (5) new approaches to the study of voluntary action. The paper also comments on voluntary action and the third way.     

Memories, vision and hope: themes in an historical sociology of Britain since the Second World War

Abstract This paper suggests in an exploratory way that an historical sociology of post-war British society should include a concern with changes in sentiment and emotion or in what following Raymond Williams is termed 'structures of feeling'. The main theme discussed is what people from different social backgrounds feel about the changes which have taken place in their lives and in the society around them and in how the future is conceived. Three issues focus this - change in aspects of national identity, in prevailing conceptions of citizenship and belonging, and in feelings towards the welfare state.     

LANGUAGE, experience and history: 'What happened' in World War II

Sociolinguistics can contribute to our understanding of history by showing how language helps to develop and maintain a sense of a communal past. This paper focuses on the referring terms for the World War II experiences of European Jews and of Japanese Americans, as evinced through various sources of public discourse (newspapers, library cataloguing systems, book titles). The analysis of linguistic form and function combines with discussion of the social and cultural history of Holocaust awareness in the U.S. to show how the word Holocaust (as a referring term for the experience of European Jews) became part of an American lexicon. A comparison of this stable term with the variety of nouns and verbal expressions used to index the Japanese American experience allows us to more fully consider how language helps to create and preserve collective memory.     

Examining Variance in Presidential Approval: The Case of FDR in World War II

Despite the substantive growth and increasing methodologicalsophistication of the presidential approval literature overthe last four decades, almost all analyses continue to focusexclusively on the mean of the approval distribution—thepercentage of Americans who approve of the president at a givenmoment. However, changes in the variance of popular supportfor the president may be as politically and substantively importantas shifts in the mean. To illustrate how a focus on variancecan enrich our understanding of changes in the president’spublic standing, this analysis examines the effects of the economyand World War II on the variance in popular support for FranklinD. Roosevelt. At the aggregate level, the study shows that highpeacetime unemployment and mounting casualties increased thevolatility of FDR’s standing among federal relief recipients,erstwhile his most consistent base of support. At the individuallevel, the analysis demonstrates that individuals with conflictingpartisan, economic, and war-related considerations for evaluatingthe president were more variable in their approval of Rooseveltthan were other respondents. Exporting a similar focus on varianceto other lines of research across the public opinion subfieldcould produce a richer understanding of the complex processesdriving opinion change over time.     

The Social Foundations of Latin America's Recurrent Populism: Problems of Popular Sector Class Formation and Collective Action

The article is an attempt to offer a 'bottom-up' explanation of political instability in Latin America by examining patterns of class formation in the region. It argues that the heterogeneous class structure characterizing the popular sectors creates collective action problems that historically have resulted in popular sector mobilization by populist elites, if not apathy or civil war. The possibility of an alternative basis for popular sector mobilization that is more favorable to democratic consolidation is explored on the basis of a neo-Marxist interpretation of class formation. By incorporating variables dealing with the state and the nature of civil society that are not directly related to the relationship of individuals or groups to the means of production, an effort is made to outline the basis of a new popular sector collective identity which offers a totalizing synthesis of this social heterogeneity. Some of the implications of this are briefly discussed in a concluding section.     

Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency

Youth, media and popular music studies have developed in separate fields of research, resulting in a lack of integration of key areas of enquiry, such as the relationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption and the role of media industries in 'framing' such a process. A more recent focus on popular music as a media culture suggest a way forward in exploring links between production, mediation and consumption of music and youth consumer practices. This article reviews three such frameworks: (i) the production of consumption, (ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of consumption, evaluating their contribution to a more integrated understanding of how youth consume music as a structurally and culturally mediated process. Controversies over youth 'download culture' and evidence of regulatory changes in the global music industry and its impact on how youth consumers can access music media, underlines the need to pursue a research integration agenda, drawing popular music and youth consumption research closer together. Yet it remains the case that both approaches exhibit a structural vs. cultural divide over youth consumption and its relationship to the global music industry, offering optimism and pessimism in equal measure.     

Unionization Matters: An Analysis of Post–World War II Strikes

Recent macroeconomic analyses of post–World War II US strikes conclude that union density during a given year does not affect the occurrence of strike activity during that same year, a finding attributed to the institutionalization of collective bargaining after WWII. However, this argument does not take into account two processes that may render new bargaining units more radical than established bargaining units and, hence, more likely to use strikes as a weapon against capitalists. Because macrolevel changes in union density are reflective of the organization or lack of organization of new bargaining units (Freeman and Medoff 1984), the effect of union density on strikes should still be present. However, given the average contract length of two years during this time period (Cecchetti 1987; Vroman 1989), this effect should be delayed by about two years by the presence of total no-strike pledges in most contracts (Perusek and Worcester 1995). An ARIMA time-series analysis confirms that union density has a two-year lagged effect on strike activity in the post–WWII time period, 1947–1977.     

Refugee children in Europe on the eve of World War II

In the summer of 1939, on the eve of World War II, Children’s Bureau social workers Elsa Castendyck visited four European countries to investigate the care of refugee children. Her report was published in the Social Service Review in December, after the German invasion of Poland and the declaration of war by France and Great Britain, and is reprinted here.