CHANGEABLE WEATHER IN A COOLING CLIMATE ATOP THE LIBERAL PLATEAU: CONVERSION AND REPLACEMENT IN FORTY-TWO GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY ITEMS, 1972-1989

This article tracks trends (early 1970s to late 1980s) in U.S.opinion for 42 General Social Survey items with liberal/ conservativeovertones. The broad question is whether the great "liberal"shift since World War II has ended; the narrow issue is therelative importance of cohort succession and intracohort shifts.Despite common impressions, the overall trend is more liberalthan conservative, but it conceals opposing "weather" and "climate"processes. Within cohorts ("weather") I find a conservativetrend between the early and late 1970s and a liberal "rebound"in the 1980s. Between cohorts virtually all items show smallbut cumulative liberalizing produced by cohort succession. Thesecohort effects are declining in magnitude because the associationbetween year of birth and liberalism is nonlinear. I find acurvilinearity such that Americans born after World War II arenot consistently more liberal than their predecessors. Thisshift is not explained by the lesser schooling of youngest adultsor by ceiling effects. Consequently, I predict lessening ofthe liberalizing "climate" produced by cohort succession. Allthese propositions are qualified, depending on the topic, andthe analysis takes heed of the notorious age/period/cohort identificationproblem.     

Making Sense of “Quality?” — Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services

This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the technical managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarchy, social managerialists recognize that outcomes are always a negotiated compromise. A majority of these authors are concerned with rendering quality initiatives more effective for management. In contrast, critical nonmanagerialists refuse to take on uncritically the assumptions and attitudes of management, and are concerned with understanding the forms and content of quality initiatives. The article provides a conceptual framework for guiding and advancing research on quality initiatives, and it offers themes and issues which warrant exploring.     

Sex and Gender in the 1970s

The late 1960s through the early 1970s was a time of profound social change both in American society and in sociology. Sociological attention shifted from social pathology to deviant subcultures and to labeling processes, shifting again by the 1990s to the study of social control. Many ethnographic studies of homosexuality were undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s in the tradition of labeling and stigma, including Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade (1970) and my Identity and Community in the Gay World (Warren 1974). Male ethnographers in particular were often stigmatized along with the deviants they studied, while the women (including me) were sometimes discouraged from doing graduate-level sociology at all. Thirty years later, the terrains of gender, sexuality and stigma have changed, yet pockets of pro-stigma resistance remain. Even in the 2000s, the stigma of homosexuality has not entirely disappeared. And, above all, the essentializing categories of homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual remain firmly entrenched in public discourse, sociological analysis, homophobia and gay activism.     

GLB + T?: Gender/Sexuality Movements and Transgender Collective Identity (De)Constructions

In the United States during the 1990s, there emerged a new form of collective political organizing and action around transgender identity. In this essay, the author depicts the dynamics of transgender activism during the mid-1990s based on original research in the form of a postmodern ethnography of transgender activism. Using data from field research, interviews, and observation, the author illustrates the way that transgender activism was characterized by simultaneous claims to a shared transgender quasi-ethnic identity and the complications thereof. In particular, the author details transgender social movement processes of identity—both processes of collective identity construction and deconstruction—demonstrating that transgender politics are not simply identity politics nor deconstructive (queer) politics. Using constructionist social movement literature, the author argues that in sexuality/gender studies we must expand our understanding of identity politics in order to understand the simultaneity of constructions and deconstructions of identity and gender/sexuality movements today.     

A comparative study of swingers and nonswingers: Attitudes and beliefs

Using cognitive dissonance theory it was hypothesized that swingers would be more liberal on items which directly relate to sex and sexual deviance. As the issues become less relevant to sex, however, this liberalism was hypothesized to disappear. Swingers and nonswingers completed a questionnaire containing groups of items ranging from directly relevant to totally irrelevant to sex. Results indicated general support for the hypotheses, with the biggest differences between the two groups occurring on the sexual items (premarital sex, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex on TV, and satisfaction with own sex life). Differences also appeared on issues related to marriage and the family (divorce, interracial marriage, and sex) and religion. Three questions relevant to women's roles produced contradictory results. Eleven items concerning political and economic issues revealed four significant differences. Here, swingers were more liberal on the legalization of marijuana but more conservative on capital punishment, welfare, and controlling business. Finally, a breakdown on all the items by sex revealed the females to be more satisfied with their friends and their sex life, and the males to be more in favor of the women staying at home.Address reprint requests to Richard J. Jenks, Indiana University Southeast, Grant Line Road, New Albany, IN 47150.     

The VFW — A case study in the “iron law of oligarchy” and goal displacement

The iron law of oligarchy is applied to the VFW. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews, membership of the VFW is dichotomized into a leadership oligarchy and a drinking membership. Opinions of members of the two groups about the purposes of the organization and about each other are documented. An historical analysis traces the change in organizational goals over time from promoting nationalism, fraternalism, and special benefits for members to political advocacy of veterans' rights.     

From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

Conclusion Woody Guthrie's ashes were spread by the wind over the water from a Coney Island, New York pier a few days after he died on Oct. 3, 1967. His wife and children, including his 19-year-old son Arlo, were present as America's greatest folksinger was laid to rest. One of the last things Woody heard before he died was Arlo's recorded voice singing the draft-dodging tale of Alice's restaurant. He must have sensed that the spirit had been passed on. Woody Guthrie died just as the second great wave of popular interest in American folk music was coming to an end. Alice's Restaurant was in many ways one of its last echoes. The symbolism could not have been more poignant. At the center of the first folk revival, Woody Guthrie was a vital source of inspiration for the second.The new generation of singer-songwriters who marked the second wave was largely composed of those with at least some contact with the new mass higher education and those multi-versities that were built to dispense it. They were neither members of a déclassé elite, as could be said of Charles and Pete Seeger and John and Alan Lomax, nor were they authentic folk singers, like Woody Guthrie. Nor could they be. By the 1960s, the conditions that had created the possibility for the first wave of the movement had been irretrievably altered. After the Second World War, with a postwar economic expansion and population explosion under way, America was a different place. Besides, the first folk revival had already claimed authenticity as its own. For the most part, if there was any aspiration toward authenticity amongst the topical singer-songwriters (those in New York City in any case), it was to be as close a copy of the first generation, Guthrie and Seeger, as possible. Purism was the second wave's answer to the authenticity of the first.Being part of an expanding generation of white, college-educated youths affected the form and content of the music that characterized the second wave. The most obvious aspect of this was the arena of performance and the audience who filled it. Gone were the union halls, the singing in working-class bars and beerhalls and at Party functions, all of which had characterized the first wave. These were replaced first by coffee shops and small clubs, either in Greenwich Village or those surrounding college campuses. The forays into the South in support of the civil-rights movement were for the most part short-lived and highly symbolic, not to say self-serving. The real mass audience arrived with the antiwar activity and was largely university centered.It was also this audience that filled the auditoriums and concert halls for the more obviously commercial performances by the singer-songwriters of the second wave. This overlapping public provided the grounds for a new mass market in folk music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang in front of many mass demonstrations in protest against the war in Vietnam or in support of civil rights, were, although they saw themselves as carrying on in the spirit of the Weavers, an entirely commercial creation. In the article from the East Village Other cited above, written just after the first big concert in America against the war in Vietnam, Izzy Young angrily notes that everybody was a part of it except the people managed by Albert Grossman - Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan. When the war in Vietnam became popular, three years later, Peter, Paul and Mary flew down to Washington, D.C. to take their place in front of the cameras.Commercial rationality was much more a factor in defining the second folk revival than the first. The possibilities were greater and the structure of the music industry was different. With a new mass market still in the process of formation and thus unspecified in terms of taste, the larger record companies could afford to take a liberal attitude and to include under their label, all the revolutionaries, as Columbia Records proudly announced in its contemporary advertising. Commercial possibilities thus were more important in shaping the musical form and content of second folk revival than politics, which were so central to the first. As opposed to the old left, the new left was a loosely organized contingent of organizations and groups with little coordination between them. In fact, many if not most of the organizations were ad hoc committees formed for a specific strike or demonstration. No one group was thus in a position to exert ideological hegemony. Following from this, at least during the period under discussion, there was little political dogmatism to be found. With no powerful organization to impose it, there was no clear political line to defend and thus to sing about. Even the notion of the people, so central to the first folk revival, was relatively absent in the second. Who were the people addressed? Certainly not the working class or even the common man. I am just a student, Sir, I only want to learn, sang Phil Ochs.During the second folk revival, the people had become the silent majority, the province of the conservative right. Neither in music nor in politics did the new left make many attempts to reach the common man in the street. The people had been massified, according to new left theory, and in the new one-dimensional mass society the grounds of political and social identity were always shifting. Besides, country music had already established itself as the musical genre of the rural, southern, western and white, common man. From a commercial point of view, there was little need to look for authenticity or the people; the market was sufficiently large and getting larger as more and more young people entered the institutions of higher education. Politically, this was not a serious problem either, as long as the aim was not revolution as it had been for the old left. It was sufficient, then, to address the masses of youngsters gathering together at institutions of higher education. If there was a revolution at foot, this was it.While the first wave practically had to invent folk music, the second could draw on the reservoir of public culture that to a large extent resulted from this invention. The networks and institutional support provided by the old left and the personal authority of a figure like Alan Lomax made possible the imposition of rather strict criteria for determining in what exactly folk music consisted. Neither networks nor gatekeepers were so determinate to the second wave. With the folksong and folksinger already invented, the new generation could pick and choose from a rather wide range of options. In addition, by the time the new left and the topical-song movement achieved at least a semblance of cohesion, folk music was already institutionally supported by radical entrepreneurs like Izzy Young and the more commercial recording industry. There were, thus, strong institutional bases for folk music outside of politics. Politics, in other words, was not the only game in town. But neither was commerce. The civil-rights movement and the new social movements that developed out of it opened for a short period a space, a public arena, in which the idea of folk music could be reinvented anew. Within this space the traditions constituted during the first wave of folk revival were experimented with and modified in light of the new social and historical context. America was not the same place in the 1960s as it had been in the 1930s and neither could its folk music be. The actors, the setting, and the songs were all different, yet still the same.In attempting to account for both this continuity and change in the two waves of folk revival we have drawn from both the cognitive approach to the study of social movements, which calls attention to the creative role of social-movement actors in the production of knowledge, and the production of culture perspective, which highlights the effects of institutional arrangements in the production of cultural goods. From the former, we have focused on the changing character of movement intellectuals, those to whom Ralph Rinzler in the epigraph that begins this article gave special place; from the latter, we have noted how, among other things, the changing nature of the recording industry helped recast the folk music revival. We hope that the foregoing has demonstrated that in combining these approaches, as well as areas of research interest, we have uncovered aspects of the folk revival others may have missed.     

From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and family imagery in American network television

Television genres must be understood within the sociohistorical context in which they are created and received. Television's classic genre, the episodic series, which is defined by the imagery of family, evolved out of the commercial imperative of the industry as well as earlier aesthetic forms. In the 1950s and 1960s, least objectionable programming strategies generated bland, consensual comedies such asFather Knows Best andMy Three Sons. With the social changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s and a shift to demographic programming, episodic series changed in form and content. Workplace and domestic family shows explored controversial issues and experimented with narrative form. In the 1980s, we see an opening out of the series both in form and content, generating a plurality of family forms. Yet this relativism is undercut by the rigidly fundamentalist nuclear families depicted in popular new comedies such asThe Cosby Show andGrowing Pains.This article is drawn from a larger project on television genres which will appear in a forthcoming collection of essays about television edited by Chad Gordon and Ken Tucker of Rice University.     

The Unmaking of Management? Change and Continuity in British Management in the 1990s

In the late 1980s, a series of reports —notably, The Making of Managers by CharlesHandy-outlined a development path for management in theU.K. This was to be based on the development of aneducation and training base and the model set by leadingcorporations. A decade later, this paper reviews currenttrends in managerial work and employment against theexpectations of the late 1980s. In doing so, it distinguishes between the objectivecondition of British management and itsinstitutionalized meaning within wider British society.It argues that recent accounts of changes in managerialwork and employment have focused solely on incremental changes inthe empirical domain and have neglected importantdiscursive shifts in the way management is understoodand enacted within organizations. These shifts have been catalyzed by the emergence of a series oforganizational initiatives-first, Total QualityManagement (TQM) and, latterly, lean production andBusiness Process Reengineering (BPR)-which aim tosystematically deconstruct management by emphasizing workerempowerment, delayering, downsizing, and theredistribution of managerial functions. In short,initiatives such as these are contributing to theunmaking of management. Managerial groups aresubject to intensification and polarization, whilemanagerial practices are diffused throughout the workprocess.     

Divergent responses to a common past: Transitional justice in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

This article addresses the question of why, despite having shared a communist regime and a revolution against it, the Czechs and Slovaks have dealt differently with that regime's former high officials and secret police agents, files, and collaborators. I argue that this divergence challenges theories of transitional justice put forward by such scholars as Samuel Huntington and John P. Moran, who respectively identify transition type and levels of regime repression as the key factors shaping a new regime's response to its predecessor. I propose that a stronger influencing factor is the level of the preceding regime's legitimacy, as indicated during the communist period by levels of societal cooptation, opposition, or internal exile, and during the post-communist period by levels of elite re-legitimization and public interest in decommunization. In drawing this link between past and more recent developments, I also argue that struggles over transitional justice issues should not be considered exclusively as the politics of the present. Finally, I examine the cases of Poland, Hungary, and Romania to assess the broader applicability and limits of my theory.     

Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program

In recent years scholars have identified racial disparities in wealth and home ownership as crucial factors underlying patterns of racial inequality and residential segregation in American metropolitan housing markets. While numerous federal housing policies have been identified as responsible for reinforcing residential segregation and racial inequalities in home ownership, little research has focused on the segregative effects of the Section 235 program. As one component of the 1968 Housing Act, Section 235 was designed to shift the focus of federal housing policy away from dispensing aid to local housing authorities for building public housing to providing direct supply-side subsidies to the private sector to stimulate home ownership for nonwhites and the poor. Archival and census data, government reports and housing analyses, and oral histories and interviews are used to examine the segregative effects of the Section 235 program in Kansas City, Missouri from 1969 through the early 1970s. Findings indicate that while the housing subsidy program allowed a vast majority of participating white families to purchase new housing in suburban areas, most participating African American families purchased existing homes located in racially transitional neighborhoods in the inner city. These findings corroborate recent research showing how the market-centered focus of federal housing policy has impaired the ability of African Americans to accumulate wealth through home ownership and reinforced racially segregative housing patterns.     

Worldviews or Social Groups as the Source of Moral Value Attitudes: Implications for the Culture Wars Thesis

Individual moral value attitudes are typically explained by reference to social experiences as indicated by social group variables. Contrary to this view, the emergent culture wars perspective claims that two worldviews that transcend social groups are ultimately and fundamentally responsible for moral value attitudes. Although this relationship has been claimed for the general population, it has not been investigated with national representative data. This paper contrasts the worldview and social group explanations by examining the relative importance of the worldviews implicated in the culture wars literature and the social groups found to be important in previous research. I find social groups to be more important than worldviews, but that worldviews also have explanatory power. I conclude with a discussion about possible clarifications of the culture wars thesis.     

THE RATE OF RETURN TO MEXICAN AMERICANS AND ANGLOS ON AN INVESTMENT IN A COLLEGE EDUCATION

Rates of return to an investment in a college education are estimated for Mexican American and Anglo male college graduates with majors in business, accounting, education and liberal arts. The returns, estimated for 1967, 1970 and 1973 graduates of Pan American University, are quite substantial for all but the Anglo education majors. The returns to the business and accounting majors substantially exceed those to the other graduates. There was no strong tendency for the rates of return to fall over time nor were there any systematic differences between the returns to the two ethnic groups. This latter result does not imply an absence of labor market discrimination against Mexican American college graduates.     

Challenging the Silence of the Mental Health Community on Adoption Issues

As traditional secrecy surrounding adoption has waned, the behavioral sciences, particularly the mental health community, have remained largely silent, particularly on postadoption issues. Reasons for this silence are suggested. Research on adoption is difficult to conduct. The mental health community may desire to see adoption as professional problem-solving and as a favor done to all involved. Problems in adoption thus represent both a failure on the part of those professionals and a favor gone bad. Fear that discussing adoption-related problems will lead to adoption itself being labeled as pathological is also likely operating to support the silence. Privacy issues for the adoptive and birth families are also important. Sexuality and childbirth have long been areas not sufficiently addressed, but with the addition of the illegitimacy common in adoption they are even more controversial. Issues of poverty, powerlessness, social class, and race also are difficult to face, as is the business aspect of adoption. Acknowledging the reasons for the silence may be the first step in addressing it. Other steps, such as continuing education programs and publication of information on postadoption issues are also suggested.     

The Sandwich Generation: Dependency, Proximity, and Task Assistance Needs of Parents

This study was designed to determine the extent of sandwiched families and the impact of dependency and proximity to task assistance provided to parent(s). Data were collected in Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Michigan from a random sample of 40–65-year-old respondents. Fifteen percent are sandwiched between needs of aging parents and financially dependent children. Respondents are much more likely to be providing assistance to mothers than fathers. Parents are most likely to live near, but not necessarily with, the respondent. Spouses and partners' parents, however, are likely to live farther away. Task assistance provided most often to aging parent(s) includes help with transportation and shopping; financial assistance was reported least often. Income of respondent and dependency and proximity of parents are significantly related to providing assistance to parents. This study offers a unique glimpse at the relationships between personal characteristics, dependency, proximity, and task assistance issues as they pertain to the sandwich generation.     

Assimilation vs. multiculturalism: Views from a community in France

A recent American survey of attitudes toward societal multiculturalism vs. assimilation has found surprisingly widespread support for maintaining heritage cultures not only among immigrant minority groups but also among most subsamples of majority host groups, black and white. Working-class whites are the one exception. This pilot study explores the same attitude domain in a contrasting European setting. Randomly selected samples of middle- and working-class families (a mother, father, and teenage son or daughter) from a small city in France were interviewed. As a group, they were neutral to slightly favorable to immigrants maintaining heritage cultures and languages rather than losing them through assimilation. On measures of attitudes toward specific immigrant groups, there were marked intergroup dyfferunces with Maghrebian Arabs rated leist favorably and Southeast Asians, the model immigrants, most favorably. Comparisons of subgroups of respondents who varied in terms of (a) political left-right orientation, (b) social class standing, (c) degree of religiosity, and (d) generational level provide the base for a more general discussion of cultural assimilation and multiculturalism.     

Global Complexity and Global Civil Society

This paper argues that recent struggles against neoliberal axioms such as free trade and open markets have led to a militant reframing of global civil society by grassroots social movements. It contests that this struggle to invest the concept of global civil society with transformative potential rests upon an identifiable praxis, a strange attractor that disturbs other civil society actors, through its re-articulation of a politics that privileges self-organization, direct action, and direct democracy. The paper further suggests that the emergence of this antagonistic orientation is best understood through the lens of complexity theory and offers some conceptual tools to begin the process of analyzing global civil society as an outcome and effect of global complexity.     

Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally

Recent research has usefully documented the contribution that nonprofit organizations make to social capital and to the economic and political development it seems to foster. Because of a gross lack of basic comparative data, however, the question of what it is that allows such organizations to develop remains far from settled. This article seeks to remedy this by testing five existing theories of the nonprofit sector against data assembled on eight countries as part of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. The five theories are: (a) government failure/market failure theory; (b) supply-side theory; (c) trust theories; (d) welfare state theory; and (e) interdependence theory. The article finds none of these theories adequate to explain the variations among countries in either the size, the composition, or the financing of the nonprofit sector. On this basis it suggests a new theoretical approach to explaining patterns of nonprofit development among countries—the social origins approach—which focuses on broader social, political, and economic relationships. Using this theory, the article identifies four routes of third-sector development (the liberal, the social democratic, the corporatist, and the statist), each associated with a particular constellation of class relationships and pattern of state-society relations. The article then tests this theory against the eight-country data and finds that it helps make sense of anomalies left unexplained by the prevailing theories.