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The article presents abstracts of the papers presented at the 63rd annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Saint. Louis, Missouri. The meeting took place in April 1967. The paper "Defense and the Morphology of Certain Settlements in the Western Mediterranean," discusses economic growth. Another paper "Approach to a Generating Model for Climatic Statistics," discusses a set of probability models for generating climatic statistics. After a brief review of previous work on this subject, a model based on moving waves superimposed, on standing waves in the zonal winds is outlined.

The article presents abstracts of research related to geography. They include "Love, Haight and Beyond: A Geographical Exploration of the Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco," by Clark Akatiff, "People Geographies and Students' Worlds," by James P. Allen and "Variations in Viability: A Study of Economic Health in the Pacific Northwest," by Burton Anderson.

Economic development has long been a dominant topic in sociology. Since Marx' and Weber's initial insights, sociologists have been unraveling the complex relationships in this ubiquitous process. Recent conceptual work (Smelser, 1959, 1963; Parsons, 1966; More, 1964; Eisenstadt, 1964, 1965; Rostow, 1963) has attempted to isolate critical variables and relationships among them in the process of economic development. One of the consistent attempts of this literature is predicting when, where, and how fast economic development will occur in modernizing Third World nations. Drawing upon this growing body of literature, this paper will outline an analytical model of economic development. This model is especially relevant to developing Third World nations, although it is sufficiently abstract to encompass economic development in other types of historical and contemporary societies. The term model has an ambiguous meaning. In this paper, a model is a map or grid of relationships among analytically important units. The model presented here is cybernetic, denoting key feedback processes, both negative (Weiner, 1954; Nadel, 1953) and positive (Maruyama, 1963). Ideally, a model should assign differential weights to various relationships, but in the model to be presented, only general weights will be assigned to some relationships. As will be emphasized, feedback relationships among units will be considered to carry more weight than other relationships in determining rates of economic development. Beyond this, existing data do not warrant further weighting. But an attempt will be made to delineate those variables within and outside the economy affecting the weights of any particular relationship in the model. In doing so, elements in the model can begin to approximate a set of propositions in a more general theory of economic development. For the purposes of analysis, the economy can be divided into two general sectors (Moore, 1967): (1) the productive; and (2) the distributive. Production concerns those structures and processes involved in gathering resources from the environment and converting them into goods and commodities, while distribution refers to those structures and processes dealing with the dissemination of commodities throughout a social system. The model presented in this paper will focus on relationships between and within these two general economic sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, changes in the socio-economic structure in rural regions have been looked upon in the light of international migration, with special reference to the flow of labour from the Mediterranean into the northern and north-western industrialized countries of Europe. The effects of these increasing manpower movements do not always appear beneficial for both areas. The free movement of labour and capital in Europe implies a concentration and accumulation of economic activity in some few regions, and has the effect of depopulation and deprivation in many other areas. The resistance against the international planning of capital and labour distribution is still dominant among the powerful European pressure groups; also the prejudices against the countryside still operate. In order to increase the attraction of rural areas, breaking the vicious circle has been proposed through an international programme of large-scale investments in the socio-cultural sector of stagnating districts, including the areas where no industrialization may be expected. The increase of the general education level of the rural population can be one of the main stimulants in a development schema. For rural sociologists, this approach implies renewed attention to the study of the possibilities of radical change in rural communities. A successful reduction of the economic and social inequality between the rich and the poor areas in Europe should be a good exercise for the forthcoming development of the Third World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper that offers an alternative explanation for the purported inability to make better use of the expanded productive capability which provides the base for an "affluent" life style. It is suggested that inability to understand the ethical questions raised by a high rate of economic growth and failure to make the institutional adjustments that would humanize the contemporary economic process derive in part from neglected but critical developments in economic thought and social philosophy. Now according to those who are critical of the life style of affluent America, it is obvious that economic activity as carried out in contemporary society does not achieve that ideal terminus which, according to the philosophic presuppositions of classical economics, ought to be the end result of such activity. As a matter of historical fact, the economy seems to have been forced into a developmental path which permits economic activity to escape its proper subordination to the "good life" of man. Theologically, one might argue that this tendency for economic activity to degenerate into a process which degrades man is but part of that tragic train of events which entered human history as the consequence of sin.

This paper is in two parts. The first section describes the relationship of a number of variables to political status and their relationship to each other. The second section deals with the kind of predictions that might have been made with these data and the relative efficiency of one type of prediction compared to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about the effects of industrialization upon systems of social stratification. Taking societies as the unit of observation, we consider the relationships between level of industrialization and (I) the distribution of status characteristics in the population (the structure of stratification) ; (2) the pattern of interrelations among status characteristics (the process of stratification); and (3) the form of linkages between status characteristics and other aspects of social behavior (the consequences of stratification). A set of propositions is specified, a few of which are empirically well established but most of which yet require empirical testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on religious organization and economic process in Indonesia. A major by-product of the analysis of the factors making for, or impeding, economic development in the so-called underdeveloped countries of the world is the discovery of religious or other ideological forms of human motivation that shape the cultural specifics of their concepts of welfare and betterment in the production process. In that part of the world where the advanced features of the modern Western market economy and its industrial and financial ancillaries are still relatively novel imports, types of religio-familistic organization still prevail which, with varying degrees of effectiveness, dominate economic life. This paper seeks to illustrate this contention by three examples from the Indonesian sphere: the village and its various territorial and genealogical affiliations; the Islamic sacred foundations; and the altar associations of the Indonesian Chinese. Although the data are limited to Indonesia, it is believed that they have relevance for a wider area.

This article comments on some of the conclusions drawn by Riley E. Baker in respect to significant causative factors in the economic development of the Great Plains area. The economy of, and the techniques employed within, an area are a part of the aggregate economy, not isolated from it. This situation derives largely from the composite of technological developments associated with improved transportation and increased tendencies toward both individual producer and area specialization. The network of interrelationships is not an easy one to explain. Nevertheless, this difficulty does not warrant simplification merely for ease of explanation. Some passages in Baker's paper explicitly, and others by implication, indicate that he leans toward undue simplification, intentional or otherwise. There has appeared a tendency in recent years to interpret the implications of a vastly expanding technological front in terms of the impacts of a few selected techniques lifted from their functional relationships within the integrated whole. This tendency is probably the inevitable result of preliminary observations of the influences of wide technological advances upon the entire structure of an economy.

This study emphasizes the dynamism of the enterprise approach in manufacturing geography and the elusive quality of the milieu concept. It identifies the facilitating and restraining conditioning elements of the changing milieu of a large shipbuilding firm which, form 1950 to 1964, the period analyzed, comprised a major though rapidly declining part of the export base of Northern Ireland. The paper suggests that the local region provided a relatively permissive milieu for the firm, though it offered few opportunities for diversification. Competitive difficulties that arose during the period came mainly from the changing international milieu, especially movements in the composition of world demand and the appearance of Japanese suppliers. These difficulties were suggested in part to reflect the condition of the firm's internal resources, but they were increasingly assigned to the state of its national milieu. Also outlined are some of the firm's adoptive and adaptive features and the form of its adverse impact, including through multiplier effects, on the development of the local region.

Between 1857 and 1860 William Gilpin promoted a new regional concept of the Cis-Rocky Mountain West. After reviewing the earlier ideas about the area this paper traces the stages in Gilpin's formulation of his Great Plains concept. The final statement of 1857 is analyzed and appraised from several points of view: as a geographical concept. as a factor influencing settlement, and as a basis for predicting economic developments. As a geographical concept it was much more valid than its precursors. As a factor influencing settlement it provided a powerful motivating image However, as a basis for prediction it was too generalized and grossly incomplete. Nevertheless, for twenty-one years it remained the most significant statement on the region. until eventually superseded in 1878 by the more mature concepts of John Wesley Powell.

This paper presents three methods for mapping levels of economic development and applies each to the case of India. First, to provide a substantive addition to knowledge about the economic geography of India; second, to demonstrate that even within nations generally recognized simply as "underdeveloped" one can meaningfully map differential sub-levels of development; and third, to stimulate critical discussion of the various methods by which maps of economic development can be made. The chief statistical problem is how best to combine the several series of individual indices into a single set of areal ratings.

The article presents a discussion on the paper titled "Institutionalism and Economic Development," written by Clarence E. Ayres. It is a clear and more or less complete statement of the position taken and emphasis given by a distinguished and influential scholar. The author does not attempt here a detailed appraisal of this article. Once a critic of institutional economics, Benjamin Higgins notes in his introduction that Professor Ayres and his fellows, it is now clear, have long been doing the sort of thing all development economists now find it necessary to do. Perhaps equally important is the observation that Ayres has, in the article which follows, provided the basis for a "reconciliation" of his position with that of his "hostile" critics. Specifically, the author agrees that Professor Ayres' position or approach is economic, a theory of what the economy is and how it works. That is, technically, the job of an economist is to explain, describe, and predict the workings of economic systems and, therefore, Ayres is a practicing economist.