Showing papers on "Social change published in 1973"

Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study

Abstract: In our highly centralized political system, with its advanced technology and communications apparatus, it is tempting to think that legal innovation can effect social change. Roscoe Pound perceived the law as a tool for social engineering (1965: 247-252). Some version of this idea is the current rationale for most legislation. Underlying the social engineering view is the assumption that social arrangements are susceptible to conscious human control, and that the instrument by means of which this control is to be achieved is the law. In such

Person Perception in Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract: Prior to the early 1970s little was known about how children viewed others. Previous research had focused on the types of thoughts children had about others, rather than how they arrived at and how to categorize these impressions. Additionally, it was assumed that understanding the development of impression formation in childhood would prove useful for understanding impression formation in adulthood.

Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism

Abstract: Although women, as aggregates, have lower social status than men in all known societies, sex-based inequalities have not been considered in most theoretical and empirical work on social stratification. Assumptions about the social position of women, found in the stratification literature, implicitly justify the exclusion of sex as a significant variable. This paper argues that these assumptions are logically contradictory and empirically unsupported. If sex is to be taken as a significant variable, the family can no longer be viewed as the unit in social stratification. Conceptual and methodological problems are generated if the family is not considered as the unit. However, a reconceptualization which includes sex-based inequalities may lead to a more accurate and more complex picture of stratification systems.

The female animal: medical and biological views of woman and her role in nineteenth-century America.

Abstract: Social characteristics that were considered ideal for the Victorian woman--morality domesticity and passivity--were assumed to be rooted in biology. The economic and social forces which began to change social roles in 19th-century Europe and America led women to demand more education and to practice fertility control against their previous traditional role. Men within the power structure used biological and medical arguments to rationalize traditional sex roles and oppose these deviations. This is a review of the literature which reflects the imprisoning of women in their biological entities and envisions motherhood as the normal destiny of all women. It was feared that women who lived beyond their normal biologically-based roles would produce inferior offspring. The so-called weakness of American women as compared to their European counterparts was seen to be the result of too much education for girls during puberty and adolescence. Women were eager to begin practicing fertility control in earnest because of the dangers of childbirth the drudgery which too many children caused for them and their desire to move beyond the home. The often-voiced fears of "race suicide" as a result of contraceptive practice were really reflections of the social changes occurring at that time and reflections of the tensions surrounding changing gender roles.

Toward a Sociology of Social Problems: Social Conditions, Value-Judgments, And Social Problems

Abstract: Two major approaches to the study of social problems are examined: the functionalist statement by Merton, and the value-conflict view of Waller, and Fuller and Myers. The ambiguities of the relationship between the concepts “objective conditions” and “social problem” contained in the statements of these writers are identified and analyzed. Some preliminary suggestions are made to define the subject matter of the sociology of social problems as a specialized area of study.

Popular recreations in English society, 1700-1850

Abstract: This thesis is concerned with the character of popular recreations in late pre-industrial England, their place in society, and the changes they experienced during the period 1700-1850. The first chapter presents a descriptive survey of popular recreations in the eighteenth century. It focuses on two main themes: first, the principal events of the holiday calendar - parish feasts, pleasure fairs, hiring fairs, November the 5th, Christmas, Plough Monday, Shrove Tuesday, Easter, May Day, and Whitsuntide;and second, the most significant sports and pastimes of the common people - bull-baiting, cock-fighting, throwing at cocks, football, cricket, boxing, wrestling, cudgelling, and several other diversions. The second chapter examines the relationship between popular recreation and the larger society. It looks first at the social contexts of recreation and, in particular, draws attention to (a) the independent plebeian basis of some festivities, (b) the support which was often provided by genteel patronage and assistance, and (c) the recreational role of the public house. The second section of this chapter discusses some of the functional attributes of sports and festive occasions for the common people: the emphasis here is on recreations as outlets for tensions and hostile sentiments. The last two chapters are concerned with problems of change. Chapter III discusses the various attempts to suppress traditional recreations during the century before 1850. Special attention is paid to the attacks on animal sports, feasts, fairs, and football, and consideration is given to the motives and class biases underlying these attacks. Chapter IV is concerned more generally with the decline of popular recreations between the mid seventeenth and the mid nineteenth centuries. It concentrates in particular on some of the major trends which militated against the traditional practices: Evangelicalism, the increasingly rigorous attitudes concerning labour discipline, the enclosure movement, the decline of customary rights, and the breakdown of paternalistic habits. An effort is made here to relate the decline of recreations to some of the larger processes of social Change. Throughout the thesis, and especially in chapters II to IV, persistent emphasis is placed on the social relations which entered into, and gave shape to, the conduct of recreational affairs, most notably the relations between gentlemen and the common people. Recreations are seen, not in isolation, but in the context of the culture as a whole.

Radical visions and American dreams: Culture and social thought in the Depression years

Abstract: The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic catastrophe to many American writers and artists. Attracted to Marxist ideals, they interpreted the crisis as a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise that reflected the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and they advocated more sweeping social changes than those enacted under the New Deal. In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America. By placing cultural developments against the background of the New Deal, the influence of the American Communist Party, and the coming of World War II, Pells explains how these artists and intellectuals wanted to transform American society, yet why they wound up defending the American Dream. A new preface enhances this classic work of American cultural history.

Does Modernization Breed Revolution

Abstract: There are quite a few different senses in which one can imagine large-scale structural change as breeding, shaping, causing, sparking, or resulting from major political conflicts. One of the most sophisticated recent syntheses of the standard views concerning all these matters comes from Samuel Huntington. In his Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington argues that the widespread domestic violence and instability of the 1950s and 1960s in many parts of the world "was in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics, coupled with the slow development of political institutions". Modernization and social mobilization tend to produce political decay unless steps are taken to moderate or to restrict its impact on political consciousness and political involvement. Most societies, even those with fairly complex and adaptable traditional political institutions, suffer a loss of political community and decay of political institutions during the most intense phases of modernization.

My Four Revolutions: An Autobiographical History of the ASA

Abstract: There have been at least four revolutions in the American Sociological Association that I know of. In the 1920s empirical research papers were introduced in the annual programs; in the 1930s the Society declared its independence of the University of Chicago; in the 1950s, the Society for the Study of Social Problems was organized. Now in the 1970s we are having a feminist revolution. Among the contributions that this fourth revolution can make to sociology is that of filling in the deficiencies resulting from its sexist bias, helping it become a science of society instead of, as so often now, a male science of society or a science of male society. All the major paradigms call for a thorough overhauling to see to what extent they are distorted by their male bias.

Nursing and Social Change

Abstract: Preface 1. Social Change and Attitudes to Care 2. Change and Care before the Reformation 3. The Sixteenth Century Transition 4. New Approaches to Care 5. The Growth of Hospitals in Eighteenth Century England 6. The Deserving and Undeserving Poor 7. Those of Unsound Mind 8. Local Government and Sanitary Reform 9. The Influence Of Florence Nightingale 10. Nursing Reforms Extended 11. Towards a Health Service 12. Registration and the Growth of Nursing Organisations 13. Social Change and Nursing in the Inter-war Years 14. The Legacy of the Second World War 15. The National Health Service 16. Adapting Nursing to New Demands 17. New Demands on Nursing 18. Who will nurse the Patients of Tomorrow? 19. New Problems for Old in the Community 20. Mental Health Nursing 21. Health at Work 22. Nurses as Managers 23. Nursing Education - 'Reports are not Self-Executive' 23. Nursing Research 24. Reorganisation in the Health Service 25. Nursing, Economic Change and Industrial Relations 26. The Health Problems of the World 27. International and Inter-Regional Organisations Epilogue Index

Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences

Abstract: This volume focuses on key conceptual issues in the social sciences, such as Winch's idea of a social science, structuralism, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, and the concept of kinship. In particular it deals with such problems as the relationship of nature and culture, the relevance of concepts drawn from within a given society to its understanding, and the relation of theory to time.

African Women in Towns: An Aspect of Africa's Social Revolution

Abstract: The relationships between men and women are undergoing major changes in modern-day Africa This is especially true in African urban areas The urban situation and the ambiguous position of women in that situation is explained African women wishing a place for themselves in the emerging societies of Africa are capable of militancy Urbanization and militancy go together because women have enlarged opportunities in urban areas Chapters deal with: 1) the migration of women to urban areas; 2) their participation in the urban economy; 3) their participation in voluntary organizations and the political areana; 4) their social associations; and 5) marriage and parity for the "new" African woman It is noted that most urban African women operate on 2 levels: 1) a woman-woman level where competition takes place through consumption and male relationships; and 2) in the general society where women compete with men on the basis of education employment and politics

A Structural Theory of Social Exchange

Abstract: A theory is formulated with which to analyze transactions in social retationships Economic types of exchange characterized by calculation and self-interest on the part of the actors are contrasted with more "social" forms of transaction such as occur in the cases of role relationships with interlocking rights and obligations and persons strongly attached to one another. The social factors and conditions determining the types of transaction likely to occur between actors are examined in the paper. The key idea in this respect is that the structural and temporal context of interaction, including the past and anticipated character of their relationship, affects actors' orientations toward one another, their preferences, decisions and interaction patterns.

Two years' experience with a liberal abortion law: its impact on fetility trends in New York City.

Abstract: There has been a sharp decline in fertility in New York City—sharper than for the rest of the nation—since New York State liberalized its abortion law in 1970 to make termination of pregnancy by a licensed physician legOnliney available virtuOnliney upon request up to 24 weeks of gestation. There has been an even greater decline—reversing a long-term trend—in illegitimacy. We seek to study in this article what has been the actual impact of the New York Abortion Law of 1970 on fertility trends in New York City.