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In early 1933 Jay Catherwood Hormel proudly described his rule over the George A. Hormel & Company packinghouse in Austin, Minnesota, as a "benevolent dictatorship." Laborers for the Hormel Company agreed that Hormel's rule was dictatorial, but they disagreed with his use of the adjective "benevolent." In fact, the term "sheer tyranny" was more often used by workers to describe Hormel's labor relations policy within the giant meat packing plant. But in the eyes of local businessmen Hormel's benevolent dictatorship was both economically wise and just. Meat packing was the industry of Austin. In 1933 Hormel employed 2700 of the town's 17,000 residents. Four years later Fortune magazine observed that should Austin ever lose the Hormel payroll "the town would wither away to a few roadside stands and retail stores for farmers." The thought of Hormel moving even a part of his family enterprise from Austin haunted local businessmen. As a result, the town's business establishment provided a worshipful captive audience for Jay Hormel's pronouncements on labor relations. George Hormel attributed his success to a passion for perfection which inclined him toward the use of instructional maxims for his employees whenever he observed them wasting time or materials. Labor relations difficulties were not among George Hormel's management problems. A principal reason for this was Hormel's friendship and openness with many workers, who in turn did not hesitate to discuss their grievances and difficulties personally with him. He shared the humble origins of many of his laborers.

The plight of New York City's poor has been an ever-present problem. Their rapid increase accompanied New York's accelerated growth during the post-Revolutionary years. This condition, in turn, imposed new responsibilities for public welfare upon the municipal government. Public provisions for the relief of poverty in New York began with a provincial poor law of 1665-one year after the British assumed control of the colony. This measure and succeeding legislation of the colonial period, based upon the principles of the Elizabethan poor laws, made local communities responsible for their own poor and stipulated that taxation would be the source of relief funds. The economic and social dislocations produced by the American Revolution imposed obvious strains upon New York's local welfare system. Each year thousands of others came to depend on public outdoor relief and the city's charitable societies. As the number of publicly supported paupers rose, so did municipal expenditures for poor relief, which soon became the most costly item in the city's annual budget.

This study addresses itself to the problems of "cultural difference" through a semantic feature analysis of the lexicon of the hard-core poor. The hard-core poor are an internally organized, often highly resourceful, deviant subculture, the members of which do not share common societal values and do not wish for social mobility. They have their own ideology concerning the middle-class striver, considering him "sick" and his values inimical. Although other types of slum residents appear to lack integrated social systems for surviving in conditions of economic marginality, the hard-core poor do not. Their neighbors refer to them as "the self-contained society." They have developed their own adaptive institutional forms, including those for religious expression, economic survival, and social aid. This subculture has its own economic strata (not all of the hard-core group are economically poor), as well as its own elites, its own methods of communication, and highly efficient system maintenance and group insulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of the mass media, or at least the potential for widespread use of them, is one of the major factors that makes the development setting of today's poor countries radically different from that of the developed countries a century ago. This has been widely recognized and has led to attempts to integrate communications factors into general theories of development. It has resulted in what may be called positive, negative, and neutral orientations or theories, that are held implicitly and sometimes simultaneously by media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideology of self-help and free enterprise has had as one of its consequences the fact that businessmen and other citizens have come to take for granted a host of ancillary services on which their enterprises depend, whether these be the law courts or fire departments or the customs offices on the one hand, or many "private" activities on the other hand which provide advice, maintenance, and other supports to a Durkheimian "organic" division of labor. To be sure, uneasiness as to whether one is really a self-made man may be an element in the attraction of radical right-wing thought for some corporate businessmen who are dimly aware that they are not as independent as their frontier outlook would demand of them; certainly, they do their best to conceal from themselves the support they derive from the governmental and corporate infrastructure. Such men in their civic capacities are apt to demand asceticism from governmental and other nonprofit institutions, while being themselves not at all reluctant to accept the perquisites of what they regard as their personal achievements, and in their corporate capacity to dress their institutions with the luxurious trappings of success, such as handsome modem air-conditioned buildings, college-educated and "charming" receptionists, and all other conceivable appurtenances for making the doing of business pleasant and at times even expeditious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]