Showing papers in "Sociology in 1974"

The Culture-Free Context of Organization Structure: A Tri-National Comparison

Abstract: In data in standard form on seventy manufacturing organizations in three countries, consistent relationships are found between variables of organization context or `task environment' (size, depende...

Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in 18th Century England

Abstract: Medical knowledge in eighteenth century England was characterized by the growth of numerous often contradictory theoretical systems, founded upon a common underlying analogy of bodily processes. This foundation of metaphor was derived from the ancient humoural model of classical medicine, attenuated by the introduction of concepts imported from contemporary mechanical philosophy. Medical theory may be viewed as a form of social interaction between physicians—the elite of the eighteenth century profession—and their aristocratic patients. The phenomenological conceptualization of disease, the speculative and systematic character of pathology, the psychosomatic interpretation of illness and the swingeing use of heroic therapies may be ascribed to the pre-dominance of the upper class patient in the consultative relationship. Furthermore the contemporary career system constrained physicians both to establish their credentials as members of the upper class and to advertise their services by individual display. ...

Chance and Skill: A Study of Roulette

Abstract: The paper deals with the problem of how people handle random events. Many accounts of the chance element in games and many attempts at general explanations of gambling assume that the actor accepts the events as unpredictable and passively awaits the outcome. A study of people playing roulette in a gaming club suggests that this is far from the case. Playing roulette can be seen as an exercise in `skill' which depends upon the construction and maintenance of predictive theories. One form of theorizing attributes causal efficacy to the croupier and the game becomes a contest between croupier and player. This is reinforced by the croupiers as they attempt to manipulate their working conditions and status. Players may then adopt a non-arithmetic calculus of win and loss which confirms their theorizing. Losses are the `entrance fee' to a public entertainment, whilst wins are evidence of a successful working strategy.

The state of theory and the status of theory

Abstract: ed from any kind of wider integument. Symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists, in particular, have no explicit conceptualization of the supra-situational, of social structure or culture, as societal phenomena, even less of inter-societal cross-cultural or world-systemic relations the proper macrocontext, rather than the 'nation-state'.8 In dealing with the internal ordering of society, familiar intermediate categories like 'institution', 'class', 'level', 'domain', 'primary' and 'secondary' notions widely used by 'members' are not conceptualized explicitly, though they are often smuggled in because life has a habit of spilling over the edges of inadequate theoretical boxes. Nor is there any workedout temporal framework: development, history, and evolution become nonproblems, because history has to be the history of some substantive entity, such as a society, and evolution the evolution of types of society in successive epochs . To work with a social theory that mirabile dietu has no concept of society as an entity (however much we need to avoid 'systems' theory assumptions that underplay internal inconsistency and overemphasize the liminality of external boundaries) makes it impossible to produce a sociology which can answer to most of the major problems of understanding social life. Only a decade after Homans had had to argue for bringing men back into sociology, we have to plead for bringing society back in. This is by no means to denigrate whole modes of doing sociology. Anyone who fails to respond to the fine-grained and sensitive illumination of the everyday and the interpersonal provided by Erving GofFman would be a poor human being as well as a poor intellectual, for to read him is to experience a deepening of perception. It has been a mind-stretching experience for a whole generation whom he has taught, like Brecht, to look at the familiar in new ways, and the exotic as common human practice. Yet the exploration of the devices people use to manipulate others in face-toface encounters, to present images of themselves, to detect meanings informing others' behaviour in clues and cues provided or given off, is, in the end, to work within the confines of formal sociology. The usual riposte to that kind of criticism is to assert that relations are between men, and that it is only alienated thinking that persuades us, fetishistically, that we have relations with reified 'things' or 'forces'. A second, more substantive, riposte is that this kind of analysis can, with equal effectiveness, be applied to 'high level' groups, and that the Cabinet or the Politbureau is, after all, simply a small group. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.104 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 05:57:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

A Revolution in Sociology

Abstract: In his article Goldthorpe utilizes his reading of the particular books under review to formulate a general critique of ethnomethodology as he understands it. My concern here, in the space available, will be not so much to defend the books concerned as to consider some of the central issues which Goldthorpe raises . Firstly, let us remove a couple of niggling remarks made by Goldthorpe concerning the work of ethnomethodologists. The 'privately circulated typescripts' to which he refers were, in most part, pre-publication drafts, available to anyone on request, of articles which have now been published either in the Douglas book or in David Sudnow's 'Studies in Social Interaction'.2 The practice of circulating such drafts for comment from others in the field, prior to their production as finished articles is, as most academics are aware, a common procedure and this rejoinder is the direct result of such a practice by Goldthorpe himself. The remaining unpublished materials comprise three works by Garfinkel,3 and the transcripts of Harvey Sacks' lectures which are of such a voluminous, lengthy and discursive nature that publication of them would be difficult, given the conventional constraints on, for example, journal publication format. However, Sacks is currently preparing a book which is to cover the same 'ground' as his lectures.4 As to the 'divergent' positions taken by ethnomethodologists on certain issues, Goldthorpe is of course correct. Ethnomethodology is organized round a set of concerns and is by no means monolithic in structure. Thus the Filmer book, which shows signs of having been heavily influenced by Cicourel, would not be taken by some ethnomethodologists as representing their position regarding certain issues. If it is the case, as Goldthorpe suggests, that 'it will not do' to characterize conventional sociology as being represented by Lundberg and Homans, then it may presumably also be the case that it will not do to characterize ethnomethodology by a similarly selective reading. What I want to do now, therefore, is to consider how far these initial grounds for suspecting that Goldthorpe may have misconceived ethnomethodology are borne out by the contents of his arguments. At a number of points in the review Goldthorpe implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, seems to adopt the standpoint of holding what might be characterized as a 'correspondence theory' of reality.5 That is, there is held to be a reality 'out there' which is distinct from the perceived and intersubjectively constructed reality of members. Thus we are presented with the world of 'physical states', ontology number one, and the world of ' intelligibilia ' or 'objective ideas' which, whilst perhaps the product of intersubjective phenomena, is, in some strange way distinct from it. This is ontology number three. Ontology number two is the world of mental states, the inner world which Goldthorpe seems, mistakenly, to believe corresponds to the intersubjective empirical world with which ethnomethodology is concerned.6 Ethnomethodology is not interested in 'mental states' in themselves, for empirically how is one to get at them? What it is concerned with is the communicative acts which are the givens of the intersubjective world as it is lived. One of the consequences of holding such a correspondence theory is that the purpose of any schema, set of categorizations or explanation is somehow to arrive at an approximation as to what is 'really there'. Thus the sociologist is to obtain,

A Critique of Duncan's Stratification Research.

Abstract: Duncan's interpretation of his research on the nature and process of the distribution of rewards in the U.S. stratification system is questioned. Statistical and conceptual flaws are noted in Dunca...

How Teachers Perceive First-Year Schoolchildren: Sex and Ethnic Differences

Abstract: A survey was conducted on the categories considered relevant by teachers when judging first-year schoolchildren. Six rating scales were derived and applied to 180 English children in a multi-racial urban area, yielding data on perceived differences between ethnic groups and between boys and girls. Changes occurring during the school year were recorded, and the structure of the scales was analysed using `repertory grid' techniques.Results suggest that the rating technique developed gives reliable and sensitive measures, but that teachers' judgements are highly global; two-thirds of the total variance in them was accounted for by a single Principal Component. Sex differences diminished over the first year, but ethnic ones did not, while ethnic differences in a school for educationally subnormal children were the reverse of those found in normal schools.

Lower Class Attitudes to Property: Aspects of the Counter-Ideology

Abstract: This paper discusses recent speculation concerning the normative bond which ties the lower class to the present structure of British society. It focuses on the assertions by some theorists that the normative opposition which can arise `spontaneously' within the lower class is inherently limited in scope, and that any future class based movements of a radical kind depend on the action of agencies `external' to the lower class. Some preliminary results are presented from a recent survey of council tenants in Barking, East London, some of whom were on rent strike. This evidence reveals the existence of attitudes `deviant' to dominant values concerning the ownership and rights of property.In conclusion, the nature of lower class normative opposition is reasessed and it is suggested that the lower class are not as conceptually restricted as is often suggested, and that future possibilities of radical action do not necessarily depend on the activities of the Labour Party or trade unions.