Showing papers in "American Behavioral Scientist in 1968"

Survey Research and Macro-Methodology:

Abstract: m For the last thirty years, empirical social research has been dominated by the sample survey. But as usually practiced, using random sampling of individuals, the survey is a sociological meatgrinder, tearing the individual from his social context and guaranteeing that nobody in the study interacts with anyone else in it. It is a little like a biologist putting his experimental animals through a hamburger machine and looking at every hundredth cell through a microscope; anatomy and physiology get lost, structure and function disappear, and one is left with cell biology. If we want to describe accurately the individual characteristics of a large population, the sample survey is miraculously efficient compared with a census. But there is an

Stable Unrepresentation in American Society

Abstract: 0 A democratic political system must be able to handle two great problems if it is to be maintained successfully: the danger of tyranny or domination by a minority, and the problem of responsiveness to unmet or changing needs among its citizens. The theory of pluralist democracy has the virtue of explaining how a political system can handle both of these problems simultaneously. It is an elegant model of a political system, and it has provided, for a number of years, an influential and even dominant interpretation of American politics. To the extent that the American political system approxi-

The Study of Urban Violence: Some Implications of Laboratory Studies of Frustration and Aggression

Abstract: AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a slightly revised version of a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September, 1967. The research reported in this paper has been sponsored by grants GS 1228 and GS 1737 from the National Science Foundation. N The frustration-aggression hypothesis is the easiest and by far the most popular explanation of social violence whether political turmoil, the hot summers of riot and disorder, or robberies and juvenile delinquency. We are all familiar with this formulation, and there is no need to spell out once again the great number of economic, social, and psychological frustrations that have been indicted as the source of aggression and domestic instability. Espoused in the social world primarily by political and economic liberals, this notion contends that the cause of civil tranquility is best served by eliminating barriers to the satisfaction of human needs and wants. Indeed, in the version that has attracted the greatest attention, the

The Development of a Riot Ideology Among Urban Negroes

Abstract: tween occupational groups in Watts. Whether in a whitecollar profession or unemployed, the Watts sample seemed equally militant. In Houston, however, a more complicated pattern emerged. As one might predict, the unemployed in Houston regarded jobs as their major problem more often than other occupational groups. Again, predictably, the unemployed evinced greater hostility toward the police: 44% of the unemployed as opposed to 17% of white-collar groups regarded the police as abusive. Further, only 2% of the unemployed, compared to 26% of the white-collar group, claimed never to have had contact with the police. Half of the white collar group (51 % ) believed that violence was never justified, while only a quarter of the unemployed (26% ) always condemned violence. In Watts, therefore, we may have witnessed a unification of occupational groups on basic issues, but in Houston, predictable differences in opinion between various strata continue to exist. Unification may be one effect of a major riot upon urban Negroes.

Urban Disorder: Perspectives From the Comparative Study of Civil Strife

Abstract: 48. The same as \"Demonstration,\" with the exception that \"Demonstrat ing \" refers to an indeterminate numher of continuous demonstrations taking place (either within or across coding units) simultaneously. 49. Furthermore, in multiple regression, as in the two-variable case, b’s and beta’s which appear in the regression equations represent slopes, or the amount of change in Y that can be associated with a given change in one of the X’s, with the remaining independent variables held constant. This technique, then, allows us to determine the distinct explanatory power of each of the independent variables in bringing about a change in the dependent variable, with the others held fixed.

Authority and Ideology in the Administered University

Abstract: Santa Cruz, a Monteith and hope for thebest, while the dominant interests and ideologies lead to structures that insure greater cultural deprivation and social alienation for important minorities. It is time for a new sense of effectiveness in the major universities, one that goes far beyond the annual figures of size and output and far beyond the claims to fame which are the magnified sum of the reputation of individual scholars. If we did not know it before, we know it now good scholars and good students can make a bad educational system. Everything depends on how they are put together. Unless administrators and faculty learn to ask about the quality of interaction on campus, and take that line of inquiry as basic rather than

Deprivation, Mobility, and Orientation Toward Protest of the Urban Poor:

Abstract: AUTHORS’ NOTE: The authors wish to express their appreciation to Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation which funded the larger project of which the research reported in this paper is a part. 0 Dissatisfaction breeds unrest. Dissatisfaction among the urban poor in the United States has led to protest, picketing, demonstrating, marching, and rioting. These statements are widely accepted, albeit there is lack of agreement about the sources and nature of the lack of satisfaction which leads to unrest in general, or to the unrest of America’s urban poor in particular. Perhaps the simplest hypothesis in this area is that there is a linear relationship between actual economic deprivation and protest. This hypothesis is sometimes, and incorrectly, attributed to Marx, who, in denying the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, was in effect indicating that severe deprivation did not lead to revolution, but rather to political quiescence. The lumpenproletariat were incapable of action because they could conceive of no alternative to their impoverishment. More recent theorists have emphasized the importance of felt deprivation rather than deprivation which

Looting in Civil Disorders: An Index of Social Change

Abstract: Outbreaks of looting have increasingly become one of the core concerns of communities which have undergone large-scale civil disorders in America within the past several years. Most current press reports of such outbreaks have as one of their central themes the occurrence of looting, and frequently depict looters in action. Even after-accounts of the civil disturbances or editorial polemics often emphasize stories of plunder to illustrate the "breakdown of law and order."

The New University

Abstract: Editors’ Preface ... The papers collected here share a concern with the problem of authority in the university its changing bases, uses, emergent forms, and prospects. On the orle hand, the relation of the university to society is changing; on the other hand, the internal constitution, the character of the university, is also changing. The main question is: Can a form of authority be found which will at once accommodate these changes and insure the freedom essential to teaching, learning, innovation, and communication? The authors offer no

Negro Opinions in Three Riot Cities

Abstract: AUTHORS’ NOTE: This research was funded by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA Order No. 738, monitored by the Office of Naval Research, Group Psychology Branch, under Contract No. N00014-67-A-01450001, NR 177-909. E For the past several years, we have examined the predicament of urban Negroes in America, their &dquo;style of life,&dquo; and their response to ghetto conditions. This research has taken various forms. McCord, for example, reported on the riots in Watts (1965)1 and Houston (1967), while Howard observed &dquo;on the scene&dquo; the riots in Hunter’s Point, Newark, and Detroit in 1967. We have been equally concerned with analyzing the reaction of the white &dquo;establishments&dquo; to urban conditions, the political future of American Negroes, and such social-psychological issues such as why people join the Black Muslims.2

Dimensions of Social Conflict in Latin America

Abstract: capability to meet other demands and to organize an instrument of violence which they may not be able to control. Modernization is an uneven process, and it facilitates the organizational capability of others to demand violently that the process go faster than governments are capable of controlling. Thus, neither the causation, the actors, nor the consequences of violence can be understood solely within the framework of the event itself. One of the common methods of

The Nature of Political Beliefs and the Relationship of the Individual To the Government

Abstract: political beliefs of ordinary persons.’ Such knowledge is very useful for understanding political behavior and for studying the dynamics of self government. Masses of citizens, no less than philosophers, hold beliefs about what they should do for the government and what the government should do for them, about appropriate instances for obedience to governmental authorities, and about the structure and functions of their governmental institutions.2 One might suggest that the study of the dynamics of belief formation and belief adherence is properly the domain of the psychologists since it deals with fundamental aspects of human behavior. Psychologists and psychiatrists have, in fact, contributed a good deal to our current understanding of these dynamics. But it is curious that here, too, relatively little emphasis has been given to the study of beliefs; most work has been devoted to attitudes, values, and opinions.3 It is necessary at this point to draw some distinctions between the

Three Views of Urban Violence: Civil Disturbance, Racial Revolt, Class Assault

Abstract: logical interpretations of Grimshaw, Quarantelli and Dynes, and Lang and Lang, and the political perspective offered by Nieburg. The second section includes some research findings and their interpretation, from studies conducted in Cleveland (Bowen, Bowen, Gawiser, and Masotti), Watts (Tomlinson) and a comparative project encompassing the cities of Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland (McCord and Howard). The Tomlinson paper provides a bridge to the third section, on control mechanisms. Like Tomlinson, who concludes that none of the approaches to riot control which he discusses (War on Poverty, Negro self-constraint, and the police) can foreclose the occurrence of urban riots, the two papers in this group are not optimistic. Burton Levy, an academicianadministrator close to the police situation, concludes that the urban police have too many systemic deficiencies to be effective

Unequal Peers: The Situation of Researchers at Berkeley

Abstract: 21. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1949); and Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1949). Both authors give examples of management goal-setting. At the University of California, it was actually the president, with the local campus administrators, who outlined the original policies governing the use of facilities and, in effect, the uses of the university. The evidence further suggests that the regents did not establish earlier policies. 22. By far the most significant effort along these lines has been \"The Culture of the University: Governance and Education,\" Report of the Study Commission on University Governance, University of California, Berkeley, January 15, 1968. This

Cops in the Ghetto: a Problem of the Police System

Abstract: 3. These conclusions are similar to those of Gary Marx in Protest and Prejudice (N. Y.: Harper & Row, 1967). 4. They have not occurred in the modern South or in cities with Negro mayors. The data aren’t in on the latter category yet, but they may provide a clue about the necessary change in the political structure, i.e., the assumption of political power by Negroes may be necessary to foreclose riots. Time will tell. Two things operate to maintain calm in the South: a history of repression and high out-migration of young Negroes. What this means is that there is a low frequency of the population which is most susceptible to the riot mood of the Northern Negro. Such of that mood as exists takes form in a context which has traditionally and violently inhibited its expression. There is, however, one important characteristic of Northern cities which serves to distinguish them from those in the South; they have received the influx of Negroes who have migrated out of the South and now live in the urban ghettos of the North. But the data from the riot surveys lend no credence to the notion that riots are a product of recent migrants from the South who have failed to adjust to city ways or who have brought traditions of violence. Quite the contrary, the average rioter has lived ten years or more in the city of his choice. As Barbara Williams has pointed out ("Riots and the Second Generation," unpublished report prepared for the Office of Economic Opportunity, 1967), the riot data do however support the hypothesis that rioters are typical second-generation youth. Traditional behavior by other migrant groups has seen crime rates of the first generation holding at the rate of the country of origin, but sharply increasing with the second generation. About one generation of "new" Negroes exists in this country. By "new" I mean the generation which has seen the development of the Negro drive for equality. We are now faced with the second generation who, unlike their parents, are unwilling to settle for the luxury of being an American and the token gestures of gradualism. And so instead of, or perhaps in addition to, high crime rates, we see high riot rates, and the participants

Racial Disturbances as Collective Protest

Abstract: are together declared a riot when they are so concentrated in time and space that to cope with them requires an unusual show of force. Thus, the term riot especially in the present political climate is often used indiscriminately to refer to rather different events which constitute a single category only because they evoke a similar official response. In other words, the kind of disturbance that has become almost commonplace in the United States cannot be adequately explained or dealt with simply as a pathological manifestation or as an inevitable product (and symptom) of social change. In what follows, we present a brief outline of what

A life of synthesis

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter presents various aspects related to a life of synthesis. There are two realities that any writer of a work of synthesis must face. First, unless he is an anthropologist describing a society for the first time, he will have to rely on the work of others on secondary sources. He will not be able to produce wholly new findings. His originality will at best lie in the synthesis itself. This means that he would necessarily be an intellectual parasite, and he had better be ready to tolerate the ambiguity of that role. The other reality that the writer of a work of synthesis must face derives from his purpose: to give the reader some intellectual control of a whole system. For this purpose, it is much more important to state initially generalizations that are largely true rather than to try from the first to enter all their qualifications in detail.

Urban Violence in Africa

Abstract: 1. Kingsley Davis and Hilda H. Golden, "Urbanization and the Development of Pre-Industrial Areas," Economic Development and Cultural Change, III (Oct., 1954), 6-26. The demographic histories reviewing the history of mortality in various world populations are somewhat more balanced on assessing the hazards than the histories of public health. The latter emphasize the diffusion of the innovations from urban centers, mainly seaports, to towns and villages. 2. Unemployed girls can beat this stratagem by becoming pregnant and applying for Aid to Dependent Children, which depends upon Federal funds. The social costs of illegitimate children are rarely taken into account by county authorities. 3. Recent reports from Moscow suggest that its authorities are ready to abandon past attempts to limit migration by decree and

Social Analysis and Social Action

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter presents a social analysis and social action. Most sociologists, including Amitai Etzioni, feel that such combination of theory and methods is the very foundation on which sociology as a science ought to be built and is in fact being constructed. What is lacking most is social analysis, the systematic exploration of social issues, that is, concern with the methodological questions of sociological analysis of the great issues of the present age that tend to involve the study of macroscopic units. Social analysis requires special training and distinct methods, knowledge, and a professional tradition. It requires more than a simple application of an existing body of knowledge to the study of a set of problems; it is also a question of studying the problems that application of sociology engenders.

Violence, Law, and the Social Process

Abstract: streets. The causes are complex and poorly understood, and the possible remedies challenge our intelligence, cherished beliefs, and pocketbooks. I am convinced, however, that the roots of this violence are not to be found in any instinctive aggressive drive, and that there is no easy cure in the provision of so-called &dquo;safe&dquo; aggressive outlets. The answers can only be found in careful, systematic research free of the shop-

Ecosystems, Societies, and Cities:

Abstract: Only now is he discovering that the gross application of force leads to unintended consequences that reverberate throughout natural systems, sometimes even to reversing or offsetting the effect of the original force. Man is also discovering that this applies not just to natural systems but to the social and artifact systems which are part of them. Thus man has wrought major changes in natural ecological systems by altering land forms and water courses, by building complex artifact systems from natural substances, by drawing

Reflections On My Work

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter reviews various reflections on the work of William Foote Whyte. William's style of research can be characterized in the following ways: (1) immersion in fieldwork, (2) utilization of administrative experience as participant observer, (3) combination of research methods, (4) flexibility, (5) collaboration with key informants, (6) efficiency in production, and (7) concern with application. He believed that whether research makes a basic contribution to knowledge depends not upon the motivation of the researcher but upon the potential generalizability of the research findings. The favorite among William's books is the Street Corner Society , as he has lived by the study and have several vivid memories attached to it. The book is particularly popular with students and with professors who want to introduce students to sociology, because it presents live characters and whole human situations. In the field of industry, William's favorite is Money and Motivation as it represents a milestone of quite a different sort.

Student Interests, Student Power, and the Swedish Experience:

Abstract: seen as apathy, a perennial problem (really a kind of moral failing) to be fought by exhortation and the proliferation of forums and senates that somehow will make people better, more politically involved. But there is no evidence, certainly not the tiny numbers who attend the public meetings on campus governance or curriculum reform, which carries weight against the evangelical spirit. If a campus crisis involves 1,000 students or so in a mill-in, that is taken as evidence of widespread discontent ; if a meeting on the Commission Report is attended by 100 students out of the nearly 30,000, it is evidence that its recommendations for increasing participation are needed. The Commission’s conception of the university as an &dquo;intellectual fellowship&dquo; of students and teachers continuously involved in both learning and self-governance (and to a high degree of learning through self-governance) has the attractive appeal of all arcadian Utopias which hark back to largely imaginary pre-industrial forms of life and work. The notion that men were freer, more creative, and happier before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of large organizations is a recurrent theme in modern social thought, though it is more commonly linked to reactionary rather than radical political doctrines and movements. At Berkeley the development of the multiversity at an accelerating pace since World War II has engendered very real problems, both in the relation of the university to the larger society and in its internal processes. But it is the essence of the multiversity rather than its problems that offends its radical critics its enormous multiplicity of functions and relationships, without a common overriding conception of its own character and purpose; its government by committees and administrators that coordinate rather than

Non-Verbal, Non-Numerical Models and Media in Political Science

Abstract: Dr. Dator is Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute's College of Arts and Sciences. The following paper presents his preliminary thinking on some new departures in the conceptualization and teaching of politics. Readers' comments would be welcomed by the author.

Human Ecology, Technology, and the Need for Social Planning:

Abstract: o In the geological time scale, man is a recent intruder species that has suddenly expanded in number to take control over the world ecosystem, dominating it for a brief time more thoroughly than any species before him. There is no natural precedent, but an alien ecologist experienced in the ways of nature might say: &dquo;Wait a bit to see if the experiment will be successful. Man’s unique adaptive tools could be his downfall.&dquo; The two adaptive techniques that gave ecological dominance are (a) use of technology to tap and to convert fossil fuels for vast energy resources for his machines, and (b) development of flexible and ramified social organizations-cities, bureaucracies, and nation-states. They are based on man’s capacity for culture, but culture itself expands exponentially and is in flux, especially as expressed in energy technology and complex organizations. In moving from a minor to a major place in the world ecosystem, man no longer &dquo;behaves&dquo; himself, but is destroying or disrupting natural balances that had evolved over millions of years. Distrubance of plant and animal food chains, destruction of competitor species, pollution of air and waterall are well-known from conservationists’ complaints; but what is less well-known is that these seem to be ramifying throughout the world ecosystem as magnified disturbances. The hu-

Ecology and the Political System

Abstract: We may admit all the hazards of technology and yet reject the notion that there could be a &dquo;solution,&dquo; in the sense that these hazards can be prevented. As soon as we aspire to major solutions-and nothing less would do-we are really seeking redemption on earth, and we are either reaching for utopia or indulging in bad theology. In actual life, there can only be specific solutions to specific, known problems; and there is little that can be done to avoid painful change or danger, or to take care of unknown future problems.

Violence: the Last Urban Epidemic

Abstract: AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author is indebted to the U. S. Public Health Service for use of material from a larger manuscript produced for contract No. PH-86-66-120 (\"Resource Materials on Health and Social Well-being in the Environment of the Metropolitan Region\") with the Center for Planning Research and Development, University of California, Berkeley. · Violence and disorder are the last remaining mortal threats to urbanism as a way of life. Cities, it must be reiterated, have been death traps from the beginning of history until the start of this century. If cities were not pillaged, raped, and burned, or torn asunder by revolutionaries, they would be reduced by famine, or visited by one pestilence after another, so that deaths on the average remained significantly more numerous than births. Urban centers grew primarily because the overflow from the countryside had to find some outlet, and powerful cities occupied the more accessible sites between the landless farmers and the available new land. Thus urban

Knowledge and Its Consequences

Abstract: --(1963) Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. KROUT, J. (1925) The Origins of Prohibition. New York: Knopf. LEUCHTENBURG, W. (1958) The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. MERZ, C. (1932) The Dry Decade. New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Co. ODEGARD, P. (1928) Pressure Politics. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. SINCLAIR, A. (1963) Era of Excess. Boston: Little, Brown. TIMBERLAKE, J. (1963) Prohibition and the Progressive Movement. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

World Problems in the Coming Decades

Abstract: societies with a desire to understand the sense of our times, it ought not to escape our scrutiny that they are possessed by a deep malaise. This malaise manifests itself in various forms, from the rebellious spirit pervading significant numbers of the student population who oppose the society they live in, whatever its type may be, to the chaotic development of our conurbations and the mounting tensions among the inhabitants of different race or creed; from the twilight of hitherto powerful and inspiring ideologies to the fruitless search for new stan-