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President of the American Sociological Society Louis Wirth is planning for a Section on Contributed Papers for the next annual meeting that is to be held in New York from December 28 to 30, December, 1947. Although this Section is particularly de- signed for those younger members of the Society, including graduate students, who have not yet had an opportunity to appear on the pro- gram in other sections, contributions from other members of the Society will be welcome. Since this Committee is working closely with the Committee on Research, it is being urged that members who have completed research papers suitable for oral presentation and which do not fall within the scope of other Sections be offered for consideration in the Section on Contributed Papers.

The article presents information on the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the American Sociological Association to be held on December 4 and 5, 1943 at Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Papers on social research to be presented at the meeting are: "A Controlled Analysis of the Relationship of Guided Participation in Extra-curricular Activities to the Scholastic Achievement and Social Adjustment of College Students," by Reuben Hill, University of South Dakota, "Techniques of Social Reform: An Analysis of the Dry Movement," by Alfred McClung Lee, Wayne University, and "Reliability of the Idea-Centered Question in Interview Schedules," by Morton B. King, Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Papers will be followed by open discussion. Papers on Sociometry to be presented at the meeting are: "What Level of Living Indexes Measure," by Margaret Jarman Hagood and Louis J. Ducoff, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and "Some Regional Variations in Levels and Standards of Living," by Edgar A. Schuler, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This paper uses data on interlocking directorates to test three theories of corporate organization: managerialism, coalition theory, and the theory of finance capital. Findings suggest that the modern corporation is not an autonomous unit as suggested by managerialism, that firms do not form flexible alliances which pursue mutual interests as implied by coalition theory, and that the interest groups of traditional finance capital theory do not characterize the interlock network of the 1960s. Instead, the system is dominated by a handful of interconnected major New York commercial banks and insurance companies which form the center of an integrated national network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicare was bitterly opposed by the medical profession before it became law in 1965. This paper examines how individual physicians reacted, in their behavior and in their thinking, to Medicare after it became law. The more general issue is the role of law as an instrument of social change. Interviews with a sample of New York State physicians before the law was passed and reinterviews at two points in time after the law was passed-once before the program went into effect and again about six months after it had gone into effect-make it possible to separate the direct effects of the law itself on attitudes from the effects of short-term experience with the program. There has been no evidence of a physicians' boycott of Medicare. With respect to their attitudes, the proportion of physicians in favor of the main part of Medicare, the hospitalization program for the elderly (Title 18, Part A), jumped from 38% before the law was passed to 70% ten months after it was passed, even before it was implemented, and again to 81% six months after it was implemented. Some laws, according to these results, may influence attitudes without first changing behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The report of the membership committee of the American Sociological Society as of December 1950 is divided into two parts first, a record of organization and operations since the annual meeting in New York last December. Second, policy considerations calling for directives. The work of the committee was organized around three points. The planning and direction was centralized in a headquarters committee consisting of the chairman and the executive office of the society in New York. The implementation, including extensive correspondence and clerical work, was performed by the staff of the national office. National coverage was provided by a field committee consisting of regional and state members of the membership committee and committee representatives appointed for the larger institutions. More than anything else, the effectiveness of this work is due to the cooperative and efficient implementation of plans by the executive officer and the staff of the national office. In the field twenty-five members of the society served to promote the program regionally and more than one hundred institutional representatives combed the larger local markets. The response of these field members and representatives was frequently excellent and indicates the extent of the society's resources in this and other matters when adequate directives and materials are provided centrally.

This article presents a report from the president of the American Sociological Society (ASS). Preparations are now under way for the 1947 annual meeting of ASS. The tentative arrangements are to meet in New York City, from December 28-30. Specific plans will be announced at the earliest possible moment in order to facilitate the largest possible attendance on the part of the members. According to the author, this is an appropriate time to review the progress that has been made in the major fields of sociological interest and in the discipline as a whole. With this in view, the author is considering inviting a number of members of the Society who have been particularly interested in one or another field of sociology to give an account of the present state of knowledge in their respective fields of interest in the form of a comprehensive paper which will be circulated early in the year among their colleagues having a similar interest, with the object of inducing the latter to participate in a panel which would subject this field to rigorous analysis and clarify the problems and possibilities that exist.

This study examined selection effects in newspaper reports about civil disorders in the late 1960s. A comprehensive set of events recorded in newspapers across the United States was compared with the subsets of these events recorded in two national newspapers often used to construct collective event data bases-the New York Times and the Washington Post The results demonstrate that fewer than half of all disorders are covered in these two newspapers combined, and that those reported are selected on the basis of event intensity, distance, event density, city population size, type of actor, and day of the week To demonstrate the effects of these selection patterns on substantive analysis of civil disorder the authors replicated earlier studies using all reported events, and then repeated the analyses using only the events reported in the Times and the Post This procedure showed some substantial differences in results. The implications of these findings for event analyses and for substantive understandings of media selection are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of refutable implications and test their plausibility, using another data set on the network ties of all better dress apparel firms in the New York apparel economy. Results reveal that embeddedness is an exchange system with unique opportunities relative to markets and that firms organized in networks have higher survival chances than do firms which maintain arm's-length market relationships. The positive effect of embeddedness reaches a threshold, however, after which point the positive effect reverses itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study reexamines Phillips's findings regarding the linkage between the appearance of news stories on prominent suicides and the subsequent monthly rise of national suicides-the Werther effect. Extending Phillips's original data set to 1977, and employing the quasi-experimental method, it is found that stories on prominent suicides are likely to trigger a subsequent rise in national suicides. However, this rise may be related to the linkage of suicide with the business cycle, and the fact that more prominent suicides may occur in years when there is a downturn in the economy. This study analyzes suicide rate data with a multivariate time-series model and controls for seasonal effects, the average duration of unemployment and war. No significant linkage is found between the national suicide rate and stories on prominent suicides on the front page of the New York Times, Employing Boorstin's definition of celebrities, the prominent suicides on the front page of the New York Times between 1947 and 1977 are differentiated as celebrity and noncelebrity suicides. Examining only celebrity suicides, it is found that a significant rise in the national suicide rate occurs in the month after a celebrity commits suicide. Suicidal imitation by the public is more selective than originally hypothesized by Phillips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents developments related to several associations and societies. The annual meeting of the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama will be held at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, New York City during April 27-29, 1960. Contributions of books and journals published after 1945 or "standard authors" published earlier, are needed to assist Asian countries to further their educational programs, both on the secondary and college levels. The Asia Foundation will pay transportation costs. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences' committee on Monograph Prizes announces that the program inaugurated last year to award prizes of 1,000 dollars to authors of especially meritorious unpublished monographs in the humanities, social sciences and physical and biological sciences is being continued for 1960. The final date for receipt of manuscripts is October 1. A new Inter-American Program for Advanced Training in Applied Social Sciences is being sponsored with the cooperation of government of Mexico, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista de Mexico and other official organizations.

The article presents information on the migration of southern African Americans to northern cities after World War I and World War II, which resulted in a redistribution of the African American population. In his book "Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration," Otto Klineberg has written a method in which intelligence and performance tests are given to Negro children living in New York, and then a comparison is done between the groups with different lengths of residence in New York. After comparison, it was found that the earlier migrants were superior to the later ones.

This article reports on the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society (ASS), 1949. The forty-fourth annual meeting of the American Sociological Society will be held in New York City, December 28-30, 1949. The program is oriented toward the presentation of research and the analysis of problems, whether substantive or methodological, that lie near the frontiers of contemporary sociology. The paper "The American Soldier" will be subjected to analysis and evaluation as a research contribution in one meeting, while another will consider the censuses of 1950 as potential sources of data for social analysis. It is peculiarly appropriate that this meeting devoted to the frontiers of sociological research should be held under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The headquarters of both the ASS and the Rural Sociological Society will be the Hotel New Yorker, though ASS's own day meetings will be held in the rooms of the Manhattan Center. The program for the meeting and the proposals of the Reorganization Committee for the future development of the Society will be sent to all members in October.

The article presents information on the tentative program of the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the American Sociological Society to be held in New York City on December 4 and 5, 1943. Topics related to social research on which various professors will speak on December 4 include "A Controlled Analysis of the Relationship of Guided Participation in Extra-Curricular Activities to the Scholastic Achievement and Social Adjustment of College Students," "Techniques of Social Reform: An Analysis of the Dry Movement" and "Reliability of the Idea-Centered Question in Interview Schedules." Other topics include social theory, population, social psychology, community and ecology, methodology and policy. Topics to be discussed on December 5 include "Coordination of Government Statistical Programs," "Methodological Problems in Government Statistical Programs," "The Operation of a Government Statistical Program," "Attitudes of Americans Regarding Selected Foreign Countries," "The Attitude of Economic Restrictionism and Its Implications" and "American Personality Stereotyping and Its Implications."

The article presents a report of the representative to the American Council of the Learned Societies (ACLS) to the Executive Committee of the American Sociological Society. The report was presented at the council's thirty-first meeting at Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, on January 29-30, 1948. A leading paper presented in the meeting was entitled "Where do the Humanities go from Here? A Program for the ACLS." The program was in brief, that once a number of areas of council concern have been determined, panels for continuous consideration of each one be formed, in the first instance by members of the council, with the right to co-opt others as needed and that these panels be in each case activated by a member of the executive staff. The spirit of the thing presented in the report is perennially revitalizing to those who are striving to reconcile scholarship and action in a dynamic and perplexing world. Still more specific were reports on the work of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the participation of scholars from the U.S. in international intellectual cooperation, a highly informative account of prospective procedures for utilization of funds made available under the Fulbright Act and a description of the program for translation and publication of important works obtained from Eastern Europe.

What drives local decisions to prohibit industrial land uses? This study examines the passage of municipal ordinances prohibiting gas development using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in New York State. I argue that local action against fracking depended on multiple conceptions of the shale gas industry. Matching these alternative conceptions with prevailing spatial models of public response to industrial land uses—“not in my backyard,” “not in anyone’s backyard,” and “please in my backyard”—improves our understanding of where local contention might emerge and how it contributes to policy change. Results from event history and logistic regression analyses show, first, that communities lying above favorable areas of the shale did not pass anti-fracking laws because opposition to fracking was counteracted by significant local support for development. Fracking bans passed primarily in a geographic sweet spot on the periphery of targeted regions, where little or no compelling economic interest in development existed. Second, as fracking became the subject of a highly politicized national debate, local opposition increasingly reflected mobilization by political liberals. This trend is reflected in the increasing rate of ordinance adoption among Democratic-leaning communities outside the geographic sweet spot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor’s surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests. Party promoters, mostly male brokers, appropriate surplus value from women in four stages: recruitment, mobilization, performance, and control. Relational work between promoters and women, cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies, frames women’s labor as leisure and friendship, and boundary work legitimizes women’s work as distinct from sexual labor. When boundaries, media, and meanings of relationships do not appropriately align, as in relational mismatches, women experience the VIP party less as leisure and more as work, and they are less likely to participate. My findings embed the labor process in a relational infrastructure and hold insights for explaining why people work for free in culture and technology sectors of the post-Fordist economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earl H. Bell, professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, was born at Shelirock, Iowa, on March 27, 1903. He died at Syracuse, New York on October 17, 1963. After engaging in public educational activities in various Iowa communities in the 1920's he served as assistant in sociology and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin from 1928 to 1930. He received his Ph.D. degree under the direction of Kimball Young in 1931. Bell was Instructor in Anthropology at the University of Nebraska during 1931-1932, and Assistant Professor from 1932 to 1940. After serving as Director of the University of Nebraska Archaeological Survey from 1932 to 1940, he worked with the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture, as rural sociologist. In this connection he conducted, among other things, a survey of a rural community which is reported in "The Culture of a Rural Community: Sublette, Kansas," one of a series published by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. He was author of the book "The Life and History of the American Indian," "Social Foundations of Human Behavior," and the co-author with O. J. Scoville of "Part-time Farming."

This article draws on more than 15 years of research to analyze “Black Mexicans,” phenotypically “Mexican-looking” youth who identified as Black during adolescence, used this identity to become upwardly mobile, and then abandoned it in early adulthood. Black Mexicans are potentially iconic cases among emerging varieties of U.S. ethnic and racial life, given Mexicans’ status as a key, usually negative, case in assimilation theory. Most such theory posits that assimilation into Black, inner-city culture leads to downward mobility. To explain how and why this did not happen for Black Mexicans, I propose a sensitizing framework using the concepts of conjunctural ethnicity, emphasizing analysis of racial and ethnic identity in local, historical, and life course contexts; and operating identity, which analyzes identities in interactions and can accommodate slippage in informants’ understanding or use of ethnic and racial categories. Some Mexicans used a Black culture of mobility to become upwardly mobile in the late-1990s and early-2000s in New York, adopting a socially advantaged operating identity that helped them in ways they felt Mexicanness could not in that historical conjuncture, especially given intra-ethnic competition between teen migrants and second-generation youth. This article uses case-based ethnographic analysis and net-effects analysis to explain why and how Blackness aided upward mobility among Black and non-Black Mexicans, but was left behind in early adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hypotheses about police presence and police action at social movement protest events in New York State between 1968 and 1973 are tested with the aim of understanding the broad mechanisms of social control used by authorities during this cycle of mass protest. Contrary to the popular perception of overzealous police repression of protest in this period, results show that police presence using logistic regression analysis indicate that the best predictor of police presence at a protest event was how threatening the event was--police attended larger protest events and those that used confrontational tactics. Tests (using mutlinomial logistic regression) of explanations of police action, given police presence at an event, indicate that extreme forms of police action were also triggered by threatening characteristics of events. Events in which subordinate groups and social movement organizations participated were also more likely to draw police action. Novel contributions include the comparison of dominant explanations of protest policing and methods that move beyond the tradition of examining repression through police presence or absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Censorship raises the question of how an object is deemed art or obscenity. Although sociologists have studied how cultural objects are interpreted according to the cultural frameworks of the larger society, little has been written on what makes one interpretation more compelling than another. I analyze the controversy that arose in New York City in the late nineteenth century when an eminent art dealer was arrested by Anthony Comstock, leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, for selling photographic reproductions of nude paintings. I contend that arguments draw on cultural schemas that constitute, and are in turn constituted by, social structures. Simultaneously, powerful interpretations construct an appealing identity for adherents to the arguments. While Comstock had been supported by New York's upper class when he claimed that pornography threatened elite children, the arrest of a leading art dealer for selling the photographs cast doubt on the moral purity of the upper class itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of the New York garment district to examine and explain the "enclave effect" on workers employed in the enclave and looks at some of the advantages these workers share or don't share with the primary sector. In contrast to existing explanations that conceptualize the enclave as a special case of the primary sector, the authors emphasize the distinctive characteristics of ethnic economies, and explain the "enclave effect" using a single, consistent account of recruitment and skill acquisition processes in primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets. The authors claim that unlike other sectors of the economy,the ethnic enclave is characterized by an external, informal training system that shapes the employment relationship and increases the availability and quality of information for workers and employers. The framework rests on the concept of training systems, structures that reduce the risks of investment in skills or training by increasing the probability that firms and/or workers will be able to make productive use of the skills in which they have invested. Training systems are the mechanisms by which labor market information is circulated, workers are recruited, and skills are obtained.

A method for the quantitative analysis of change is developed, and demonstrated by a study of changes in the socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics of 89 Long island suburban communities 1960-1970. Three theoretical models in the literature on suburban change are shown to be related to statistical measures of change of the mean, change of dispersion and positional change. Because of failure to recognize that there are three mathematically independent dimensions of change, high correlations between measurements of a status characteristic at two points in time were formerly misinterpreted to mean a lack of change. Also, previous studies probably erred in generalizing from only one indicator of suburban SES, educational attainment, in this study, three SES variables, education, occupation and income, are shown to have different patterns of change on the three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been decided by the Administration Committee of the American Sociological Society that the 1949 meeting will be held in New York City, New York, on December 23-30, 1948, in connection with the Allied Social Science Group which includes the American Economic Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Statistical Association and several others. The Committee's decision thereby to ignore the advisory vote of the Executive Committee in favor of a meeting in Denver, Colorado, was strongly influenced by the fact that a report of the Reorganization Committee is expected to come before the Society at this meeting and it was felt that attendance at a Denver meeting would be so small that major policy decisions of the Society should not be taken under such circumstances. The Committee did, however, feel that a meeting west of the Mississippi should be arranged in the near future, probably in 1950. The Program Committee has decided to organize the program about the topic "Frontiers of Research in Sociology."

The most consistent demographic finding reported in social psychiatric field studies is an inverse relation between social class and psychological disorder. This relationship has been interpreted on the one hand as evidence of social causation, with low status producing disorder, and on the other as evidence of social selection, with pre-existing disorder determining social status. This substantive issue could turn on a simple question of fact: whether Negroes and Puerto Ricans in New York City have higher or tower rates of disorder than their class counterparts in more advantaged ethnic groups. The facts, however, are not available from existing research. The results of field studies contain clues to group differences in modes of expressing distress, including some that involve problems of response bias, but the evidence is far from clear about the relation of the symptoms reported to the underlying psychiatric condition of individuals. It would seem that the substantive issue of social causation vs. social selection must yield precedence to resolution of the central unsolved problem of psychiatric epidemiology--the measurement of untreated psychological disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study report concerning social status, life-styles and behaviours of middle classes of the societies based on the survey conducted among residents of two similar apartment houses in upper middle-class in New York City, New York. The survey revealed that differences in life style between residents of the two buildings were small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction; more impressive were the differences among subgroups of the downtown population based on age and marital status. The uptown and downtown groups suggestively differed in their residential origins, satisfaction with the neighborhood, and plans for future moves. The survey support the position that the importance of the distinction between city arid suburban residence lies mainly in the selectivity of these areas with respect to social class, ethnicity and family status, major statuses already recognized as important in social area analysis and similar approaches.

The article focuses on a study which determines whether infant mortality rates, particularly neonatal mortality rates, vary by racial and ethnic neighborhoods when socio-economic status is held constant. The study included four racial and ethnic populations in Syracuse Negro, Native White, Italian, and Polish that have neighborhoods in the lowest socio-econornic area of the city. A socio-economic status score, derived for each census tract, is a composite of five factors representing occupation, education, and housing characteristics of the population. Specifically, the variables are: First, percentage of persons in the combined occupational categories of operatives, service workers and laborers; Second, median school year completed by the adult population over 25 years of age; Third, average monthly rental; Fourth, average market value of own homes;and Fifth, percent of single-family dwelling units. For the total city, principal causes of death during the neonatal period were congenital malformations, complications associated with prematurity, and injuries at birth.

This article presents proceedings of the 55th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held at the Statler Hilton Hotel, New York City from August 28-31, 1960. The first meeting of the 1960 Council was called to order on August 28, 1960 by Vice-President Wilbert Moore. Members of the 1960 Council present in the meeting included Reirihard Bendix, John Clausen, W. Fred Cottrell, Robert Faris, William Goode, George Homans, Rex Hopper, Seymour Lipset, Charles Loomis, Walter Martin, Robert Merton, Wilbert Moore, Charles Page, and John Riley. Three resolutions pertaining to various aspects of the certification problem were received from the Ohio Valley Sociological Society and it was voted that these matters be studied by an ad hoc committee consisting of Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton and Guy Swanson and their findings reported to the first meeting of the 1961 Council. Regarding the site for 1963 meetings, the Council reaffirmed the earlier decision to meet on the West Coast with the detailed arrangements as to place and facilities being left in the hands of the president-elect for that meeting, the Secretary and the Executive Officer.

In spite of the fact that considerable literature exists concerning the relationships between migration and mental illness, this body of work is characterized by inconclusive results. The recent study by Benjamin Malzberg and Everett S. Lee shows that the rate of first admissions of foreign born to mental hospitals in New York State (from 1938 to 1941) does not greatly exceed the rate for the native born once the proper corrections are made for age differentials in the two populations. This finding does not completely support the earlier conclusions of O. Odegaard and of Robert E.L. Faris and H. Warren Dunham, which indicate a pronounced higher rate of first admissions among the foreign born. The data in the study clearly indicate that the southern Negro migrant population is under-represented and that both the northern migrants and Natives are over-presented in the statistics on first admissions. These results remain evident when comparisons are made according to sex and age groupings.

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York is beginning a research study which would be a longitudinal study for seven years, on a nationwide basis, seeks to test the comprehensive hypothesis that chronological, abrupt, mandatory, involuntary and unplanned forms of occupational retirement accelerate physical and mental morbidity and mortality and aggravate the symptoms of senescence among gainfully employed workers upon their retirement. The overall research objective is to measure and to determine the reasons for differentials in morbidity and mortality between retirants and non-retirants. Retirants are being further specified and the dependent variables in the study, in short, are physical and mental morbidity and mortality, determined by the state of physical health, longevity, and psychological adjustment to retirement and old age. The independent variables are the occupational and retirement factors. Intervening variables are personality, background status, values, activities and social participation.

This article focuses on civil marriage in New York State apart from New York City. A considerable, though indeterminate, number of men and women who had been divorced, could not be married in a church because the religious faith of one or both forbids the remarriage of a divorced person. Some couples belonging to different faiths, as indicated by their national origin as well as some of the other facts in the marriage documents, compromise by not observing the rites of either. Older persons, especially those who had been widowed, occasionally find a simple ceremony in the chambers of a judge as fitting and sufficient for their emotional needs as a church wedding. This also holds for some of the men and women who are not formally affiliated with any church. Then there are the hasty or runaway couples whom the general public and even some trained observers often associate with civil marriage. Such couples are undoubtedly represented among the 5,178 investigated in this article, but it is not at all evident that they are numerous.

The article presents information related to the field of sociology. Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales of the National University of Mexico is publishing a series of little books under the general title, "Cuadernos de Sociologia." These compact little volumes give to North American sociologists an intimate glimpse of the thinking, teaching and research of their colleagues in Mexico. Carnegie Corp. of New York has provided $260,000 grant payable over a two-year period, to the Social Science Research Council for area training fellowships and travel grants. Carnegie continuing its support of the national area fellowship program set up by the Council in 1947. $50,000 has been granted to New York University toward support of an experiment in educational method in the Graduate Division of Public Service. Pi Lambda Theta, National Association for Women in Education, announces two awards of $400 each, to be granted on or before August 15, 1950, for significant research studies on "Professional Problems of Women." The 1950 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society will be held on April 22 and 23 at Boston University.

The most prominent research investigations of leadership relations currently making scientific progress appear to be sociometric studies. But despite their contributions, sociometric studies seem to be seriously hampered, in terms of integrating diverse patterns of leadership, by an inadequate theoretical orientation. The adequacy of this orientation stems primarily from the inability of "socio-criteria" to comprise a system of related leadership categories but also from the proponents' questionable claims that: leadership is based on harmonious group support; the correct research method to determine leadership is to proceed by means of "respondent authorship" through the "reality test"; and leadership positions should be determined only by sociogram inspection which not only becomes progressively more difficult as the size and scope of the community increases, but also denies the validity of qualitative treatments. To develop an alternative research treatment which would eliminate the limitations of the sociometric approach and provide a possible basis for a more generalized theory of leadership relations, a New York rural community, comprising about 4,000 residents, was studied in 1946-1947.

The article focuses on attitudes of minority youth. The author states that in studying attitudes of minority youth, a number of methodological questions come to mind. Without in the least attempting to be exhaustive, the article presents some of those, which occurred to the author during a recent investigation into cultural interests of Jewish and Negro youth in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn, New York City. The focus of the article is as on cultural consciousness, mainly of Jewish but also of Negro youth in the area. The term "cultural" is used, in this connection, not in the all-inclusive anthropological sense of the word, but in the more specific and limited sense in which it is generally employed. In other words, cultural interests means interests in leisure-time activities other than those in food, dress, games and sex. It is hoped that the article will provide a limited and tentative answer to the questions how Jewish and Negro youth look at themselves, how they look at each other and how they formulate, upon this basis, their cultural and intercultural interests.

This article presents news and announcements related to various organizations in the U.S. as of June 1949. Rural Settlement Institute, founded in 1941, announces its incorporation, under the laws of New York, which took place in December 1948. The name of the institute has been changed to Group Fanning Research Institute. The activities of the institute include field studies, contacts with interested groups, grants-in-aid, and publications. A new non-profit research organization, known as Rand Corp., has recently been established with head-quarters at Santa Monica, California. The objective of the corporation, as set forth in its charter, is to further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the U.S. Eastern Sociological Society held its nineteenth annual meeting on April 23 and 24, 1945, at the Hotel Commodore, New York City. Over three hundred persons were in attendance. The first morning session was devoted to reports on research projects.

The article presents information related to sociology. It states that the second International Congress is to be held in Paris, France, in 1950. Although the exact date has not been set, the Congress will follow the sessions of the International Psychiatric Congress. Professor H. Donnedieu de Vabres is Chairman of the Committee on Organization. The Congress will be particularly concerned with international consideration of research, with the problem of a distinctive methodology for criminology and with the proposal of establishment of an International Center of Criminology. Sociologist H. Donnedieu de Vabres is Chairman of the Committee on Organization. It also states that financial resources and leadership of Carnegie Corp. of New York, one of the largest foundations in the U.S., are being increasingly devoted to critical problems of human relations, world affairs and the revitalization of democratic values. Charles Dollard, president of the corporation, states in the Corporation's thirty-seventh annual report, that reflecting the corporation's growing concern with these problems, grants amounting to $3,421,000 were made in fields of social science and world affairs during the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, 1948.

The purpose of this article is to determine, from the biographical material contained in socially important marriage announcements, what characteristics are common to the group assumed to be at the top of the social system in New York City, and what, if any, are the integrating standards of the group. The information used was taken from a total of 413 marriage announcements featured by the social editors of "The New York Times" in lead articles. The period of time covered was 1932-1942, and the material was limited to Sundays in June of these years. Marriage announcements have come to follow a stereotyped form and consistently include certain information regarding the bride, the groom and their families. In addition to descriptions of the costumes of the bridal party and of the marriage ceremony, the announcement, as a rule, contains a brief summary of the background of the bride and groom and facts concerning their families, notably, residence, and social and occupational distinction of the families.

The article discusses a farm family in the New York State. A classic picture of the early farm family in New York State has been worded by litterateur James Mickel Williams. The figure in his portrait is an English puritan family reaching New York via New England, gradually reshaped by the conditions of pioneering, but with basic patterns enduring throughout the period of subsistence farming and continuing even into the recent periods of commercial agriculture and contemporary metropolitan dominance. The pioneer American family was large, biologically vital, and of strong social texture. It was "the beginning and the end of rural social organization." Family groups were geographically isolated, economically self-sufficient and socially sell-contained. Parents were often "the school, the church, in extreme cases, the state. Fathers were austerely dominant. Wives were obedient, faithful, subordinate in person and in law. Strict obedience was required of children. Actually the subjection of wife and children to the father exemplified their common submission to natural processes, never completely understood, always uncertain. The common and paramount interest of family members in the outcome of the farm enterprise necessitated agreement on all matters.

The article reports on the committee of the American Sociological Society appointed at its annual meeting held in December 1935 in New York City to study the question of affiliation with the International Federation of Sociological Societies and Institutes. Between March and June, 1936, a preliminary report was prepared and distributed by the chairman, based upon extensive correspondence and conferences with various members of the Society. The report asserts that L'Institut International de Sociologie was founded in 1893 by René Worms, who served as its Secretary-General and executive head till his death in 1915. The organization was patterned in some degree after the French Academy, and as originally conceived was designed to constitute a distinguished body limited to 300 of the world's leading sociologists. In 1909 L'Institut was given greater stability and prestige by being incorporated under the government of France, from which it receives a small subsidy. Later La F&eacutedération Internationale des Soci&eacutet&eacutes et Institus de Sociologie, as distinguished from L'Institut was established for the intellectual co-operation for scientific study of sociological problems of all regular associations of sociologists, whatever their nationality.

The article presents reply to James P. Pitts in response to his comments on group disorders in the public school by Sociologists Pual Ritterband and Richard Silberstein. The authors say that in "Group Disorders in the Public Schools," they set out to understand and explain the distribution of two related sets of events in the high schools of New York City. The article was not set out to explain inequality in the schools nor did it attempt to describe the ways in which schools sort people into the general social structure. The authors did not and do not feel that every sociologist who deals with questions of race has to recapitulate the history of inequality. On the most primitive empiricist level, the authors were able to show that the distribution of non-political disorder was relatively random in the New York City High School context during their study. They deny inequality in school resources and achievement. They demonstrated that more money is spent on black pupils in New York City than Puerto Ricans or Whites, though the way the money is spent makes no dent in the educational problem.

The exploration of antecedent-consequent relationships or probable causation is facilitated by use of the ex post facto experimental design. In the present study, it was assumed that rentals may be taken as a rough index of a bundle of social and economic factors causally related to crowding in dwelling units. There is empirical evidence from previous studies of the relationship of crowding to certain social and structural factors, including rental rates. Empirical results suggest the hypothesis that there is an inverse relationship or correlation between rentals and crowding. This measure of relationship correlates rentals and crowding for a single date and does not measure antecedent-consequent relationship. For the borough of Manhattan, New York, using census tracts as units of area, a correlation of rental r = -.31 was obtained between changes in rentals and associated changes in percentage crowded from 1934 to 1940. This correlation, based upon changes between two dates, approaches more closely to an analysis of possible cause and effect relationships, but of course, it offers no proof of cause and effect.

The Section on Methodology held its first business and council meetings at the time of the American Sociological Association meetings in New York City last August. At the annual meeting last year in New York the Section sponsored a panel discussion and two other sessions. Three sessions have been planned for the coming annual meeting. The Publications Committee was requested to obtain additional information on the cost of publishing a journal on methodology. Criteria for membership in the Section were discussed at the annual meeting and it was decided that any voting member of the Association who pays Section dues shall be admitted to the Section. There was also discussion of the function of the Section and some question as to its constitutionality. The present officer of the section are Daniel O. Price, Chairman, Robert F. Mcginnis, Secretary-Treasurer. The committees that have been appointed for the year 1960-61 were Program Committee, headed by Robert McGinnis; Nominating Committee, headed by Leslie Kish; and Publications Committee, headed by William S. Robinson.

This article presents a proceeding for the meeting of the Executive Committee of the American Sociological Association held on March 25, 1960 in New York City. Decisions regarding the location of the association's offices, and change in administration were taken. Issues like budget allocation for revision of the index, membership directory and address lists, subscriptions to other journals, certification of social psychologists, journal of educational sociology, new bulletins, and the 1960 criminological conferences were also discussed. Further in line with the recommendation of the committee on the profession, the association's president was asked to write a strong letter to the U.S. Civil Service Commission in support of a ruling that a social psychologist with a Ph.D. in sociology be recognized as qualifying for the title of social psychologist in the psychology series. The executive committee also took note of the recommendation of the committee on the profession and approved its establishment of a new sub-committee on professional ethics.