The demise of community at high heaven

This ethnographic study will describe the rise and fall of the country's first attempt at intergenerational involvement within a campus based retirement setting. It will discuss those factors responsible for the initial limited success of the project and its ensuing failure. These include the lack of competent support staff, funding, security problems, and a change in the administrative agency. Policy statements regarding future projects of this kind are also considered.An earlier version of this paper was read at the Annual Meetings of the Southwest Anthropological Association, April, 1974.     

Huck Finn and the game model gloss

Several authors have cited the metaphor of game playing as an analytical device to study social behavior. Traditionally, the game model has been used either to promote a more strict or instrumental control upon actual social behavior or to match a formal game model construction of a social event with actual behavior in everyday life, and through this method shed light upon aspects which otherwise would be overlooked. In another connection, various authors have discussed the concept of glossing in social relations. This paper uses Mark Twain's last chapters ofThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to explicate how the game model can be used as a gloss. The game model gloss then is a unique combination of sociological conceptualizations presented through the medium of a lively literary allegory. We feel this paper extends the concept of glossing and furthers the understanding of the game metaphor in sociological theory.This paper has been presented at the Spring 1977 meetings of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, Georgia.     

Classical theory,postmodernism, and the sociology liberal arts curriculum

This article presents classical theory as a modernist endeavor to apprehend the phenomenon of “unity of disunity.” It presents the three ways that classical theory comes to grips with the problem of wholes and parts: the holism of Durkheim, the dialectical materialism of Marx, and the pluralism of Weber. It argues that postmodernism liquidates, rather than solves, the unity of disunity problem by treating “wholes” as mere appearances. The article contends that postmodernism needs to be taken more seriously than it has been by sociologists but that, ultimately, the challenge presented by postmodernism validates the relevancy of classical theory. The article concludes that the postmodernist influence has diminished sociology’s relevance to real-world problems and, as a result, made the discipline less relevant for undergraduates. It calls for a revitalized sociology of sociology with the capacity to think through the trap formed by neoconservatism on the one side and the micro politics of postmodernism on the other.     

The fate of alternative lifestyles in an era of “pro-family” politics

The pro-family movement combines religious and political motivations and organizational activities. A major goal of the conservative backlash is to restrict or control alternative lifestyles. Through single issue campaigns and political pressure, the movement attempts to influence legislative and administrative policy. The extent to which the government is an agent of pro-family interest groups is explored here. An important question is whether there is a hidden agenda in the sense that the human services orientation has been exchanged for a control orientation. Do proposals for restoring rights to the family apply only to the traditional patriarchal family?     

The longevity gender gap: are telomeres the explanation?

In this Perspective, we focus on the greater longevity of women as compared with men. We propose that, like aging itself, the longevity gender gap is exceedingly complex and argue that it may arise from sex-related hormonal differences and from somatic cell selection that favors cells more resistant to the ravages of time. We discuss the interplay of these factors with telomere biology and oxidative stress and suggest that an explanation for the longevity gender gap may arise from a better understanding of the differences in telomere dynamics between men and women.     

The ideology of “Sex Love” in postrevolutionary Russia: Lenin,Kollontai, and the politics of lifestyle liberation

This paper examines the experience of the Soviet Union just after the Revolution of 1917 when there were official, although ambiguous and inconsistent, efforts to open up lifestyle options. These efforts were based in Marxian theory, especially Engels' work,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), but most of the revolutionary Bolsheviks were not enthusiastic about activism in this area. The views of Marx and Engels, Lenin, and Aleksandra Kollontai (the leading Bolshevik exponent of lifestyle freedom), and the implications of their own lifestyles, are discussed in this paper as they interacted to form early Soviet family policy. The utopian vision of Kollontai was ousted from the official sphere with the ascendancy of Stalin in the USSR, and the discussion of the fate of these efforts provides the basis for delineating six dilemmas in developing ideology and policy in the area of the family and alternative lifestyles.     

Almost all social choice rules are highly manipulable,but a few aren't

Explores, for several classes of social choice rules, the distribution of the number of profiles at which a rule can be strategically manipulated. In this paper, we will do comparative social choice, looking for information about how social choice rules compare in their vulnerability to strategic misrepresentation of preferences.I am indebted to Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo for an invitation to present an early version of this paper at a June, 1989 conference at Valencia, Spain. Thanks for comments go to the participants of that conference, especially Salvador Barbera; also for comments at seminars at Syracuse University and the University of Rochester.