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The effects of the organization of schools on individual student performance have been the focus of investigations for many years. One area of inquiry that has led to mixed results and varied interpretations is research on the effects of ability grouping within schools. The present study has several advantages over previous, research on this question. (a) It is based on a large, national sample. (b) it examines the effects of both school types (some of which serve students selected according to ability) and ability grouping within school types. (c) The analysis involves comparing students who have been separated into ability groups with those who have not been so separated. (d) The analysis and interpretation take into account the effects of ceiling and floor effects of the measures used. The results support the general hypothesis that students in high ability groups gain more and students in low ability groups gain less over a five-year period than they would be expected to gain if they had not been separated into ability groups. It is suggested that one of the reasons similarly strong effects have not been consistently observed in the United States is that we have not collected the kinds of information needed to conduct the type of analysis presented here. However, ability grouping in British and American schools may serve different functions. The several types of schools and the ability groups within them may have more clearly defined "charters" in Great Britain, the higher levels serving to "sponsor" their students' movement toward elite adult statuses more effectively than their American counterparts do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that certain types of corporate crime are caused by a squeeze on firm profits is a common theme in the current criminological literature. This.. paper, drawn from a study of 52 "survivor" firms over 55 years of economic and criminal activity, extends this literature in several ways. First, the sources of firm profit-squeeze are expanded beyond the traditional categories of firm and industry to include macro economic influences. Second, a longitudinal design allows the estimation of changes in the extent and nature of corporate crime as a function of economic and structural changes over time. Third, the typically broad corporate crime typologies which are used to categorize illegal activities are eschewed in favor of greater conceptual and empirical refinement. Antitrust crime is decomposed into specific crime types and predicted by a multilevel economic model of profit-squeeze. The findings suggest that only certain forms of antitrust criminality are related to profit-squeeze; others occur within a munificent environment while some are unrelated to economic conditions. The implications of these findings are discussed as well as directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of social indicators is valuable for understanding the role that the social sciences play in the political arena. One common pattern is for a particular social indicator to become frozen in place once it takes on political significance, and this can result in ironic consequences. This study traces out the case of indicators of aggregate productivity trends in the United States. These measures were initially developed as part of an underconsumptionist argument that was linked to the political left, but there was considerable debate over different measurement schemes. Over time, one particular measure of trends in aggregate productivity became central for wage negotiations and for government policy. This created a context in which the slower rates of growth of this measure of productivity in the 1970s helped to validate the views of those on the political right who saw the need for greater restrictions on wage gains and government civilian spending. The paper raises questions about the value of this particular measure and ends by emphasizing the problems of locking in place an "objective" social indicator when the reality being measured is in continua! flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interfaces between pragmatism and interactionist sociology. Four tenets central to social interactionism have been selected for this study: the philosophical perspective on reality as being in the state of flux, the sociological view of social structure as emergent process, the methodological preference for participatory modes of research, and the ideological commitment to ongoing social reconstruction as a goal of sociological practice. It is argued that from the start interactionist sociologists were concerned with the problem of social order and sought new ways of conceptualizing social structure. Special emphasis is placed on the interactionists' predilection for a logic of inquiry sensitive to the objective indeterminacy of the situation. An argument is made that the failure of interactionist sociologists to address head-on the issues of power and inequality reflects not so much their uncritical reliance on pragmatism as their failure to follow consistently pragmatist tenets and to fulfill the political commitments of pragmatist philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology faces a peculiar paradox: Every general sociological proposition is both true and false. On the one hand, one can easily find exceptions to most of the propositions which are advanced as genera! sociological principles. Yet, there are many instances in which genera! sociological principles are supported by empirical findings. As a consequence, it is not clear when some sociological principle is to be counted as false. This paper argues that a proper assessment of the state of sociological knowledge and the possibility of cumulative growth in sociology depends on resolving the true-false paradox. We argue that the paradox can be resolved if sociologists make the scope of their theories explicit. We offer a formulation of scope restrictions, demonstrate how the formulation resolves the true-false paradox, and illustrate the differences between the method proposed here and other strategies for making sociological theories conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology, along with most other social sciences, is confronted with serious professional problems, including the currently poor academic job market, a further projected decline in university employment opportunities, and curtailed governmental support for research and training. At the same time, however, the discipline has failed to take advantage of applied sociological opportunities. To at least some extent, applied work could mitigate the consequences of the shrinking opportunities for sociologists in the academic labor market. In our view, however, there are, qualitative differences between applied and conventional academic work that need to be confronted, including the educational preparation required, the criteria for student selection, the ways faculty are evaluated, and the kinds of work that are valued.

This paper explores the relation of parents' status to their children's home ownership. Home ownership by parents increases the probability of a child's home ownership. Parents' income is positively associated with the value of children's homes among owners, though it has no effect on probability of ownership. The effect of parents' income on home value is mediated by the level of gifts among black households and by parents' home value among whites. It is argued that gifts may measure direct aid and parental home value may measure a young person's expectations concerning appropriate housing standards. Data are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the hypotheses, derived from the dependency/world-system literature, that the degree of penetration of peripheral countries by foreign capital contributes to the formal exclusion of nonelite political participation and to the greater frequency with which governments actively repress opposition. Analysis of cross-national data from the 1960s and 1970s provides only weak support for the first hypothesis. Furthers no direct effects of dependence on repression are found. However, political exclusion has a significant positive effect on our measure of government repression, and this leaves open the possibility that dependence increases the repressive activity of governments indirectly, through its effect on political exclusion. We discuss these results in light of Bollen's (1983) recent findings, and we point out an apparent paradox which future research must address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of adult development is in need of theoretical reformulation. It is suggested that the paradigm of scientific inquiry that underlies the dominant mode of studying adult development, the ontogenetic model, is not an appropriate foundation for its subject matter because it tends to treat the individual as a self-contained entity and fails to recognize the profoundly interactive nature of self-society relations and the complexity and variability of social environments. Major lines of developmental theory that employ the ontogenetic model are critiqued, and it is argued that sociological applications of developmental work that do not recognize the inherent limitations risk an "ontogenetic fallacy." Drawing on findings and insights from various strands of social research, some essential elements of a "sociogenic paradigm" are identified. The paper ends with a brief illustration of how a sociogenic perspective can lead to a reinterpretation of findings that have been interpreted developmentally by sociologists interested in change in adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social participation, despite its important conceptual position in sociology, has been measured inadequately in past research. Beginning with Chapin's social participation scale, this paper applies recent developments in confirmatory factor analysis in consideration of an appropriate measurement model for this concept. Using data from a sample of voluntary association members, the analysis indicates that Chapin's scale can be extended to include an additional dimension, that the con generic measurement model is the most appropriate description of the relationships of true score variance to underlying dimensions, and of true score and error variances, and that the existence of correlations among measurement errors in the indicators of participation does not seriously impact conclusions concerning the approriate measurement model of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sampling has long been central in discussions of sociological research methods. Yet, with few exceptions, recent developments on the nature of sampling bias have not filtered into sociological practice. This neglect represents a major oversight with potentially dramatic consequences since internal as well as external validity is threatened. In response, this paper undertakes a brief review of recent advances in the diagnosis of and corrections for "sample selection bias." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis of cumulative advantage is widely accepted in the sociology of science, but empirical tests have been few and equivocal. One approach, originated by Allison and Stewart (1974), is to see whether inequality of productivity and recognition increases as a cohort of scientists ages. This paper extends their work by examining true cohorts of biochemists and chemists rather than synthetic cohorts. Increasing inequality is observed for counts of publications but not for counts of citations to all previous publications. It is also shown that a mathematical model of cumulative advantage does not imply increasing inequality. When the model is modified to allow for heterogeneity in the rate of cumulative advantage, however, increasing inequality is implied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the author on the concept of interaction order. According to the author, social interaction can be identified narrowly as that which uniquely transpires in social situations, that is, environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another's response presence. "In speaking of the interaction order I have so far presupposed the term order, and an account is called for. I mean to refer in the first instance to a domain of activity--a particular kind of activity, as in the phrase, 'the economic order.' No implications are intended concerning how orderly such activity ordinarily is, or the role of norms and rules in supporting such orderliness as does obtain," says the author. Further, the author opines that as an order of activity, the interaction one, more than any other perhaps, is in fact orderly, and that this orderliness is predicated on a large base of shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints.

This paper shows how the social structuring of activity leads people to develop relationships with others who are similar to themselves. Most relationships originate in foci of activity that bring together disproportionately homogeneous sets of people. The more homogeneous these sets of people are, the more relationships tend to be with similar others. A sample survey and a study of friendships in one large factory illustrate the importance of the social structuring of activity for age similarity. It is suggested that the neglect of structural factors has led to the overestimation of the extent to which people "prefer' to associate with similar others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main and interactive effects of age, period, and cohort are not estimable. although certain combinations of those effects are. A method used to obtain estimates of the effects of these variables involves the assumption of additivity and the imposition of one or more constraints on the relative effects of particular age levels, periods, or cohorts. This method can rarely if ever be justified for three reasons: first, the possibility of interactive effects cannot be ruled out a priori; second, although a constraint on the relationship of two groups may appear appropriate on a priori grounds, even small errors in the specification can have large effects on the estimates; and third, measurement error can lead to highly inaccurate estimates even if the constrain: is precisely correct. A solution to the dilemma lies in the specification and measurement of the theoretical variables for which age, period, and cohort are indirect indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the question of whether city differences in racial occupational inequality are of sufficient magnitude to warrant sustained empirical and theoretical analysis. Using both direct measures of racial occupational inequality and log-linear techniques, we find ample evidence to support the conclusion that city differences in racial occupational inequality are pronounced and merit investigation by social scientists. Thus, we reaffirm the longstanding research tradition investigating city differences in racial occupational inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on the author's article "The Tacit Conventions of the Modernity School: An Analysis of Key Assumptions," by sociologist David Horton Smith that appeared in the October 1982 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." The author thanks Smith for the opportunity to discuss several difficult issues in the measurement of values. The three issues that require consideration are: 1. Scientific Jurisprudence; 2. Overall Modernity Indices; 3. Factor Analysis. Smith implies that the Long Form Overall Modernity (OM) indices have high reliability coefficients and that therefore they are homogeneous and unidimensional. The sound instinct is Smith's suspicion that factor analysis overestimates dimensionality. This can happen if attitudinal measures do not have a multivariate normal distribution. The OM indices are not related in any practical sense since they are too long for conventional research; they are not valid because sociologists cannot determine what a particular score means; they are not comparable since the item composition changes from one country to another. Factor analysis is very sensitive to departures from multinormality or linearity, and blind acceptance of the linearity assumption can be referred to as the second tacit convention. Quite clearly, success or failure in the use of factor analysis rests on the validity of this assumption.

The article presents a comment on the article "The Tacit Conventions of the Modernity School: An Analysis of Key Assumptions," by William C. Rau that appeared in the 1980 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." The theoretical and methodological errors made by Rau and others earlier in attempts to demonstrate the multidimensionality of individual psychosocial modernity and to disprove the unidimensionality of this hypothetical construct have roots that run deep. At work here is a broader tendency of social scientists to engage in debates over questions of unity-diversity as a result of their general failure to recognize what term fundamental intrinsic duality. In this article the author shows the nature of the argument made by Rau in his article and taking his article as, one example of a broader type of misguided criticism of modernity that others have also engaged in with less visibility. The author also refers to the factor structure of the OM-519 subscales now analyzed in some greater detail than was possible in becoming modern. These factor analysis results continue to support the case for an overall unity in the pattern of psychosocial modernity, as argued in prior publications from the Harvard six-nation project. The issue of unity-diversity in modernity measures is addressed more generally and the author suggests that the long debate in the published literature over whether modernity is unidimensional or multidimensional is fatuous since modernity is both unitary and diverse simultaneously.

The article discusses factors in the instrumental variable analysis with reference to the study undertook by James C. Cramer, a social scientist. Cramer undertook to reconcile discrepant conclusions from two studies of the relationship between fertility and female employment. Cramer criticizes the nonrecursive structural equation models analysis technique by pointing out that the choice of instrumental variables in nonrecursive models often is problematic and that discrepancies across research studies using such techniques may result from the properties of the instrumental variables used. The technique of consistency checks, using several alternative instruments separately and evaluating the similarity in results is valuable, and Cramer has employed it constructively. Cramer's consistency analyses reveal little consistency across instruments, suggesting to him some sort of specification problem. He then shifts to the level of broad causal imagery, arguing that questions regarding patterns of life-course development are more properly studied in a dynamic longitudinal framework than via the static, non- recursive approach.

Building on the works of Emile Durkheim, a number of scholars have claimed that, for a given society over time and in the absence of major societal upheavals, the proportion of people subjected to punishment by the state closely approximates a constant. In this paper, we address the "Stability of Punishment Hypothesis" with data from California for the period from the opening of the prison system in 1851 to 1970. The Stability of Punishment Hypothesis is formulated through recent modeling developments in macroeconomics, with which the presence of equilibrating tendencies can be explicitly represented, and for the first time direct tests are undertaken. No evidence for the hypothesis is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments to point out the difference between his and Sociologists' Douglas Lee Eckberg and Lester Hill's work on sociology. Also, he clarified the paradigm concept and its applicability to sociology. The author claims that his main focus is the sociology of science, particularly the sociologist Thomas Kuhn's theory. And, his major interest in this field is the paradigmatic status of sociology. Furthermore, the claims that Eckberg and Hill are virtually unassailable in their contention that the paradigm concept has been misused by those who have attempted to apply to sociology. While Eckberg and Hill are correct in both their formulation of Kuhn's perspective and in their accusation that the author ignores some of his distinction, their strict adherence to Kuhnian theory leads them to some questionable assertions about sociology. He also explains that the social behavior paradigm deals with the portion of the micro-objective world that does not involve conscious processes (behavior).

The article presents a comment by Guillermina Soltan on the article "A New Theory of Distributive Justice." That work may be regarded as an attempt to capture some notions about justice, equality, and social rank that have been around a long time and to incorporate them into an internally coherent framework that might be useful for social science. The point of departure was an empirical finding that the justice evaluation of earnings varies as the logarithm of the ratio of actual earnings to an amount of earnings considered to be just by Jasso. This empirical finding led to formulation of a general lawlike statement expressing the relations between three terms the justice evaluation, represented by the full real number line, with zero representing the point of perfect justice, the negative segment representing degrees of unjust underwear, and the positive segment representing degrees of unjust overreward.

The article presents information on distributive justice by Guillermina Jasso. Jasso's "A New Theory of Distributive Justice" is an important, imaginative and highly original contribution to sociology. Yet a number of features of Jasso's theory seem highly implausible, Though empirical tests are of course, the final ground on which the evaluation of a theory must rest, it is appropriate and useful to suggest in what way and for what reason Jasso's theory is likely to fail when subjected to such tests. In the one good case, justice evaluations are constructed in a two-step procedure. Pint, a "Comparison Ratio" is calculated. If the good being distributed is a quantity that is, if amounts of that good are measurable on a cardinal scale, the Comparison Ratio is the ratio of the actual amount of that good received by the evaluator to the amount that is perceived by the evaluator to be just. If the good being distributed is a quality that is, amounts of it are measurable only on an ordinal scale, the Comparison Ratio is the ratio of the actual rank of the evaluator with respect to possession of that good in some chosen comparison aggregate to the rank perceived by the evaluator to be just.

I examine the extent to which health-related events account for the well-established relationship between undesirable life events and psychophysiological distress. Employed in the analysis is a distress scale similar to others often used in previous research. This scale, the Macmillan Health Opinion Survey index, relies heavily on psychosomatic symptoms as indicators of distress. The analysis clearly indicates that when health-related events are controlled, other undesirable events have small and nonsignificant effects upon psychophysiological distress. Further, the analysis also shows that health-problem events are more strongly related to physiological than to psychological items on the distress scale. The results clearly suggest that previously well-established correlations between undesirable events and distress may have been inflated due to the operational confounding of health-related items on the independent and dependent variable scales. The implications of these findings for research in the Holmes-Rahe tradition-and for life-events research in general-are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the non-influence of family background on intellectual attainment. The perpetual debate in social science concerning the relative contributions of genetic inheritance and environment to individual development, in general, and to intellectual achievement, in particular, is not only intrinsically interesting but also has social policy implications. So great are the policy implications of this debate for the distributions of rewards within society that two clearly identifiable camps have emerged on the issue, despite a lack of rigorous application of scientific methodology in developing causal links and despite inconclusive data. To the degree that the impact of genetic inheritance is greater than that of environmental factors, dominant groups in society may not only be expunged of guilt for disparities in intellectual attainment with minority groups but also alleviated of responsibility for compensatory education and other environmental mechanisms to close the gaps. Throughout history, the policy consequences of this intellectually unresolved question have already been great.

In this article, the authors reply back to the professor Marcia Whicker Taylor regarding the effects of family background on intellectual attainment. Taylor, like most social scientists, seems to be familiar with the concept of family background, as it is used in the social sciences, to mean the total biasing effects of family membership on long-term outcomes of children. The focus of social science research is on how much bias, regardless of the sources of the bias. Most social scientists state or imply that family environmental differences are the source of family background effects. A common error among social scientists is the failure to distinguish genetic and environmental sources of individual differences in behavior from the necessary roles of both genes and environments in behavioral development. One cannot assess the relative impact of heredity or environment on intelligence, per se, because everyone must have both a viable gene complement and an environment in which the genes can be expressed over development.

This paper explores the theoretical validity of the confluence model in explaining the effects of sibship size and birth order on intelligence. Using a nationally representative sample the effects of age, sex, marital disruption, socioeconomic status, race, and other potentially confounding variables, unincorporated in other studies, are controlled. The results suggest that (a) the inverse relation between sibship size and IQ lessens for the economically advantaged, (b) the only child breaks the otherwise consistent linear decline between sibship size and IQ in the below-poverty condition only, (c) the nonteacher handicap for only children is questionable, and (d) close spacing, as Zajonc defines it, may have detrimental consequences for children irrespective of birth order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a proposition by economist Robert Bolin based on a series of arguments, some perhaps valid, some based on misunderstanding of points made. The explanation of reciprocal altruism by selection has proven difficult for sociobiologists. There is the question of whether sociobiological reasoning is tautological. The answer depends partly on the definition of two terms, adaptation and fitness. Interestingly, in defining these concepts, Bolin and Bolin do not quote sources identified as mainstream sociobiologists. Thus, they are able to keep the terms analytically distinct. In the definition they use, an adaptation is any genetically determined characteristic that increases an organism's ability to cope with its environment, whereas fitness refers to the contribution made by hereditary determinants to the differential reproductive rate of organisms. In contrast, the sociobiological usage confounds the two terms.

The article presents information on sociology and paradigms in evolutionary theory. Sociobiologists introduced tautological reasoning into the evolutionary model. This is a somewhat surprising charge coming from someone apparently knowledgeable in the history of Darwinian thought. It is not clear how sociobiology utilizes any tautology not present in Darwin's original formulation. The charge of tautology has been leveled at Darwinian theory, even very recently. If fitness in Darwin's sense is defined in terms of survival, the theory is reduced to a tautology. However, assertions of Darwinian fitness must always be made in reference to an organism or trait in the context of a changing environment. Darwin defined fitness as being well adapted and any trait that helped an organism to survive increased its fitness. However, sociobiologists and population geneticists do not use fitness in this very broad sense. Adaptiveness, therefore should not be equated with fitness in the genetic sense. An adaptation is any genetically determined characteristic that increases an organism's ability.

The article presents a reply to the comments made by sociologists Pat Lauderdale and Gerald Larson on their paper discussing the Marxian conflict and the sociology of law. The authors express their discontent on the comments and clarify that their paper primarily reviewed the conflict-consensus debate and the Marxian perspective on crime and law that has emerged. Lauderdale and Larson are concerned with the conclusion that the version of the Marxian perspective examined in the paper is (1) prone to logical errors, (2) largely unconfirmed, (3) often unconformable and (4) possibly quite frequently false. They argue that the charge that the perspective is unconformable raises the thorny issue of what are considered testable hypotheses within the perspective. It is opined that rather than presenting evidence on this issue, Lauderdale and Larson simply ignore it. Further, in their comments on the paper, Lauderdale and Larson are concerned that the paper has confused the external and internal validity of sociologist Anthony Platt's findings. However, it is Platt, if anyone, who confuses the issue of internal and external validity.

The article comments on a paper discussing Marxian conflict and the sociology of law, published in one of the previous issues of the journal. It is opined that although the authors of the paper address an important issue, their analysis is misleading on both empirical and theoretical grounds. The first problem with the paper is that its test of sociologist Anthony Platt's "Marxist" account of the origin of delinquency legislation and its subsequent ramifications is essentially inappropriate. The paper argues that it is the Marxian perspective which led to the production of logical errors, notably those of argumentuin ad hominem and affirmation of the consequences. While their charge is lodged against the perspective, they fail to specify anything in the perspective which makes it prone to the production of these errors. Moreover, the conclusions that are drawn from the test of Platt's hypothesis is one-sided. Also, it is opined that the direct link that is drawn between conflict theory and the Marxist perspective is too simplified, as are many of the interpretations of Marxist concepts.

This comparative study of news, advertising and fine arts photographers argues that stylistic conventions in each of three categories of photography are partly determined by basic structural processes which, in turn, shape photographers' control over technical and aesthetic aspects of the photographic process. This study provides a meaningful approach to the analysis of material culture, an area which has been investigated from points of view other than sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most persistently observed relationships within social science are those between certain social (or demographic) factors and the occurrence and outcome of psychological disorder. While it is widely assumed that there is an important theoretical message to be found in these linkages, a serious debate has developed concerning the nature of this message. This paper brings data to bear upon the question of the meaning of the well-known relationships of marital status, social class position, and work performance to psychiatric outcome as measured by time spent in hospital. The results suggest that these relationships are secondary associations deriving largely from social selection processes. More specifically, our findings indicate that marital status, social class, and probably work performance, appear to matter for outcome largely because, varying statuses on these factors reflect important differences in social competence. Some of the implications of these results with respect to competing explanatory perspectives are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern behaviorism has made significant progress in analyzing private behavior: cognition and emotion. The behavioral distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior establishes a starting point for analyzing tacit (subjective, private) knowledge and explicit (objective, public) knowledge. The present paper extends this analysis to include the issues of verstehen and erklären. One subset of tacit knowledge is verstehen. Behavioral analysis (1) describes the special qualities of this type of tacit knowledge and (2) delineates the circumstances under which verstehen will occur and produce valid understanding. Modern behaviorism makes it possible to carry out a scientific analysis of the socialization experiences through which people learn to attach meaning to their thoughts, actions and emotions. Thus, modern behaviorism can generate an erklärte understanding of the topic usually reserved for verstehen. Neither tacit nor explicit knowledge can replace the other, nor can verstehen and erklären. Both are needed and natural components of human behavior. Since both are frequently intermeshed, rarely does one encounter a pure form of either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the use of the multiple indicators multiple causes model. In a recent issue of the journal, "American Sociological Review," sociologist James Inverarity 1976 applies J&ouuml;reskog's technique for the analysis of covariance structures to a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model of lynching's which occurred in Louisiana in the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this comment is to show that a re-estimation of his parameters indicates that the model for which he suggests support exists probably, in fact, should be rejected. The basic three indicator, three-cause model proposed by Inverarity to explain lynching's in Louisiana from 1889-1896 is shown in a figure in the article. On the assumption that Inverarity views the relationship between boundary crises, Mechanical Solidarity and repressive justice as a general social process, the use of significance tests with his significance tests with his sample of 59 Louisiana parishes seems appropriate even though these cases are not a random sample from some larger population.

The purpose of the comment in this article is twofold. These are to provide some groundwork for religious leader James M. Inverarity's response and to call attention to special issues regarding statistical inference for historical data. Perhaps the most common justification in sociology for. statistical inference rests on a hypothetical model in which a very large number of probability samples are independently drawn from a population of fixed values and a sampling distribution of the resulting population estimates is constructed. Statistical inference is mandated by a special kind of stochastic distortion or error introduced by the researcher when only part of a population of fixed values is studied. Each observation can be seen as a random variable and building on the assumption of a very large number of independent repeated drawings by mathematicians and statisticians have provided the techniques with which to estimate from a single sample, the long run consequences of the sampling process.

The article presents a reply by sociologist James M. Inverarity. The five comments that have appeared in recent issues of the journal "American Sociological Review," correct and elaborate several ideas in the original article and raise several issues that merit further discussion. In the later type of society some actions are more likely to be strongly repressed than strongly reproved and, consequently, one could not expect any systematic relationship between crime waves and boundary crises. The sine qua non of repressive justice is not the object of punishment, but the diffuse, passionate, ritualistic character of the reaction against an alleged offender. Sociologists Whitney Pope and Charles Ragin identified a serious equivocation in the original article's statement that election statistics provide an index of the extent of variation in boundary crises. This makes the subsequent use of percent Democratic vote as an index of solidarity puzzling. The intended meaning of this statement was that the occurrence of elections would be the focal points of the boundary crisis and the magnitude of the boundary crisis could be approximately gauged by the magnitude of the Populist vote among states.

Papers by Cutright and Jackman test the hypothesis that democratization reduces inequality in national societies. Cutright finds a negative effect of democratization on inequality, while Jackman finds no effect. In this paper, we reanalyze and extend these analyses. We consider five issues and our findings are the following: (1) the two different indexes of democratization used are not the likely cause of the discrepant findings; (2) the different samples are not the likely cause; (3) the probable cause of the different results seems to be in the data used or coding procedures that Cutright and Jackman employed in constructing their measure of sectoral income inequality; (4) substituting personal income for sectoral income in the analysis, we find that both the Cutright and Jackman indexes have negative effects on inequality; (5) we test the alternative specification which hypothesizes that inequality has a negative effect on democratization, and then test these two different hypotheses. This analysis supports the hypothesis that inequality has a negative effect on democratization, but there is less empirical support for the original hypothesis that democratization negatively affects inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents statistical attempts to separate age, period and cohort effects. The great bulk of the literature on cohort analysis is devoted to methods or attempts to separate statistically age, period and cohort effects. The effects are named for the kinds of influences which produce them; age effects are produced by influences associated with the aging process, period effects by influences associated with each period of time and cohort effects by influences associated with membership in each birth cohort. Regardless of how cohort data are examined, two kinds of effects are confounded with one another. Age and cohort effects are confounded in cross-sectional data by age, age and period effects in intra-cohort trend and, period and cohort effects in trend data for each age level. Space limitations preclude the author's dealing with all of the literature reporting statistical attempts or methods to unconfound these effects. The author's caution that their method has limitations, but the cautions are vaguely worded and the most important of them is buried near the middle of the article.

The process of developing an adequate measure of segregation occupied the literature for over a decade and culminated in the widespread use of the Index of Dissimilarity. The inadequacies of this index, although identified by the Duncans (1955), remain with us and largely have come to be ignored. This research further explores the difficulties pertaining to limitations in the use and interpretation of the Index of Dissimilarity, demonstrates some of the systematic biases resulting from these inadequacies and provides a mathematical refinement which overcomes some of the major problems inherent in the use of this index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on the article "A Behavioral Model of Man: Propositions and Implications," by J. Kunkel and R. Nagasawa. Both the authors Kunkel and Nagasawa have proposed a set of behavioral axioms, formalized in a somewhat unconventional propositional calculus, which they claim will aid the rigorous, consistent, and fruitful application of behavioral principles to sociology. In a recent exchange with scholar P. Greene in this review, they successfully rebut criticisms of the soundness of their logical system. Several problems remain, however, which should be mentioned. These are: the gap between the discussion of the axioms, their expression in English and their formal translation; the authors' insistence that quantifier logic is "inefficient and cumbersome" compared to their propositional calculus which is simple and intuitively appealing; the overall relation between axioms, definitions and theorems in the models First, problems arise with translations from the English version of the axioms to the formal representation and back. For instance, Axiom II states that if an activity is learned through modeling, then the observer is likely to repeat it in similar circumstances.

The article presents response of the author on the comments made by scholar David Gartrell on his article "A Behavioral Model of Man: Propositions and Implications." The formalization of principles is a relatively new and infrequent endeavor in sociology, and thus it is to be expected that any such effort will elicit reactions, which eventually lead to modifications and improvements in both substance and method. Our attempt to formalize behavioral principles using symbolic logic has come under attack with respect to the utility of symbolic logic in sociology and now with respect to the calculus used for that purpose. Gartrell essentially makes three points concerning the formal version of the model: he notes the gap between the discussion of the axioms, their expression in English and their formal translation, takes us to task for insisting that quantifier logic is inefficient and cumbersome compared to the propositional calculus and questions the overall relation between the model's axioms, definitions and theorems. In our reply, we shall discuss the major criticisms under two headings: issues of logic and issues of translation and the structure of the theory. Specifically, we tall defend the calculus used to formalize the principles, acknowledge Gartrell's valid criticisms, take issue with Gartrell on the nature of reinforcement and finally suggest a modified and improved model of man.

A key problem in sociology, as in economics, is explaining why some workers earn more money than others. Sociological models of earnings have stressed the role ofa worker's occupation and have tended to ignore the conditions of the labor market in which he finds work. Economic models have stressed labor market functioning at the expense of considering the role of a worker's occupation in determining his wages. In this paper, I attempt to combine sociological models of earnings with (a) economic models of earnings and (b) concepts and findings from the sociology of occupations and professions. I argue theoretically and empirically that some similar conclusions about the processes governing Individual earnings attainment can be drawn by examining occupations in terms of labor markets and by analysis of labor markets from the standpoint of occupations. These conclusions are: (a) that labor markets tend to be fragmented along occupational lines, (b) that the processes governing wage attainment vary from one occupation to another and (c) that occupational differences in these processes can be predicted from and explained in terms of the forces which lead to occupational segmentation of labor markets. I discuss some useful implications of my analyses for the study of the relationship between worker age and worker earnings, and I perform some empirical and theoretical analyses of occupational differences in the age-wage relationship. Aim are drawn from the (IS. Censuses of 1960 and 1970 and from publications of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the central theory in the sociology of aging-disengagement theory. It asks why the last decade of research bearing on it has been so inconclusive. The answer, the author suggests, lies (a) in the overlooked flaws ha its underlying logic-the escape clause problem, (b) in the overly inclusive nature of its central variables-the omnibus variable problem and (c) in the level of reality it selects for study-the assumption of meaning problem. These three problems appear not only in disengagement theory but in much of the later research bearing on it. In an attempt to avoid these problems, the author sketches an alternative theory. This theory redefines disengagement and proposes new structural determinants of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main thesis of this paper is that Parsons' claim that the works of .Durkheim end Weber substantively converged on a voluntaristic theory of action is inaccurate and that his alleged demonstration of such convergence is grounded in serious distortions of the Durkheimian and Weberian positions. We first examine basic differences between Durkheim and We her and then consider Parsons' claim in the light of those differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Sociological Association, which provides an auspicious occasion for reviewing some if the accomplishments of the "American Sociological Review (ASR)." By examining its most influential articles, one can see ASR's remarkably consistent influence as well as obtain a glimpse if the evolution of sociological scholarship. Citation counts for ASR articles dating back to 1936 were obtained from the online ISI Social Sciences Citation index. The pattern show that the publication of high impact articles varies little from decade to decade despite the regular rotation of editors and broad historical changes in sociological theory and methods. The most frequently cited article in ASR history if Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell's essay on institutional isomorphism, with some 1,700 citations to date. The list highlights some familiar themes, such as the prominence of functionalist theory before 1970 and the rise of multivariate statistics since that time.