Arthur J. Vidich

Participant Observation and the Collection and Interpretation of Data

The social role of the participant observer and the images which respondents have of him have a decisive influence on the character of the data collected. In this light the tactical situations of conformity or nonconformity and identification, or the lack of it, with groups, causes, or issues are to be re-evaluated, as are also problems connected with the formulation of prearranged categories, the imputation of motives, the study of social change, and the validation of data.

Belonging in America : reading between the lines

The author asks why American culture draws the lines it does - between home and work, family and friends, or humans and animals. Throughout the book she attempts to point out the systems of meaning through which contemporary Americans create social order and define their relationships.

The end of the enlightenment and modernity; The irrational ironies of rationalization

Marxist social thought holds that class is the product of the owner? ship of the means of production and of the relations of production, and asserts that the ownership of the means of production and the relations of production would become the decisive factor in a class-segmented universalization of culture. In the Marxian expectation the conflict be? tween capitalists and workers would ultimately result in revolution on a world-wide scale. From a cultural point of view, again in Marxian terms, the ruling ideas of any given era or epoch are the ideas of the ruling classes, and the dominant ideas of a given culture or civilization would be those of the ruling classes. With this logic, Marx established a con? nection between capitalism and culture. At the same time, the contradic? tions of capitalism would tear away the veil of ideology, laying bare the false consciousness that it produces in order to disguise the emergence of class consciousness on the part of the proletariat. . . now more fre? quently referred to as the workers. This Marxian expectation is a perspec? tive that still has currency among some academicians in the West, and until recently it represented the orthodoxy of major socialist states in? cluding Russia and China. The rationality implicit in the Marxian projection and in its counter? part the enlightenment and liberalism appears to have been a faith in reason which in praxis has been unfulfilled everywhere.

The new American pluralism: Racial and ethnic sodalities and their sociological implications

Historically in American society, ethnicity was something to be overcome. America’s dominant Anglo-Protestant groups expected the immigrant to “melt” or, more accurately, to assimilate to their norms, values and cultural styles. This metamorphosis was encouraged not only by routine discrimination against those whose accents, names, or styles of dress revealed the taint of another heritage, but sometimes also by more forceful pressures, such as the many Americanization movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the anti-hyphen and prepardness movements associated with World War I. However, such pressures were seldom needed to spur most immigrants toward assimilation and, indeed, they were usually nurtured much more by the insecurities of America’s dominant groups than by the recalcitrance of its ethnic minorities. This is not to suggest, of course, that the various ethnic and racial peoples in America were possessed of some uniform orientation toward assimilation.

American Democracy in the Late Twentieth Century: Political Rhetorics and Mass Media

The population of the United States is composed of a vast mix of multi? ethnic, religious, racial, class and status groupings and congeries. At the level of competitive economic interests, it is divided by region, industry, foreign or domestic investment and trade, labor and management, stock and commodity markets, advantages or disadvantages to be accrued by inflationary or deflation? ary prices, and by claims on the federal budget made by the defense industry, welfare agencies, agriculture, highway construction and a multitude of other spe? cial interests. The nation as a whole is divided and subdivided into thousands and thousands of groups and interests, all in competitive struggles with each other. Given this social, economic and political heterogeneity, the fabric of the nation as a moral community is stretched to the limits of its elasticity. The differentiation of American society into units that frequently cut across and through distinctions of race, religion, class and economic position leaves little or no way to formulate universal political appeals. Appeals tailored to meet the claims of specific groups are likely to alienate other groups who have other interests. There would appear to be no single set of political symbols that can embrace and simultaneously appeal to the social, economic, political, ethnic, racial and religious diversity of the population. This ideological deficien? cy poses a political dilemma for contemporary American democracy; and it is the solution to this dilemma that distinguishes the political character of the late 20th century American democracy from its earlier versions. While older 18th and 19th century religious and political ideals and ideologies continue to be a source of supply for the motifs of late 20th century political rhetorics, they are exploited by information technologists and managers, political specialists possessing rational mastery of the means of

Changes in the Life-Styles of American Classes

As Max Weber noted in his essay “Class, Status and Power,” capital, wealth, and income are not by themselves sufficient as indices for specifying the life-styles of classes. Within given income levels, the way in which income is spent involves elements of choice. Life-styles may thus take a variety of forms within the same income categories, depending upon the character of consumption choices.1

INFLATION AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE: THE UNITED STATES IN AN EPOCH OF DECLINING ABUNDANCE*

The analysis focusses on the market situations of the upper classes, the middle class, and some economically marginal groups, and attempts to answer the following questions: 1) Which groups and classes are most apt to bear the burden of unemployment, inflation and decreases in the rates of economic expansion? 2) What kinds of tensions and conflicts—and social resentments and hostilities—are apt to arise as a result of the differential distribution of the economic burden? What are likely to be the social and political responses—domestic and international—of the U.S. to a situation in which it can no longer assume an autonomous national economy?

Toward a rational grasp of irrationality: Some gaps in social and economic theory

In the aftermath of World War I, an international intellectual commu? nity of social scientists was animated by an effort to understand and explain the central problems facing 20th century capitalism. They sought to under? stand this epoch from both sociological and economic perspectives, and they hoped thereby to provide rational policy solutions that would avert the possibility, as they say it, of worldwide political instability. The phenomena to which their attention was drawn included the fol? lowing:

Intelligence agencies and the universities: Further implications of the thesis advanced by sigmund diamond inCompromised Campus

Compromised Campus is a study of the collaborative relationship existing in the United States between universities, philanthropic foundations and governmental intelligence agencies such as the F.B.I., O.S.S., C.I.A., National Security Council and State Department. Professor Diamond focuses his research on Harvard and Yale during the years between 1945 and 1955, but his findings extend beyond that time period and those specific cases; they apply to the university system as a whole. He shows that the co-operative relations between universities, foundations and intelligence agencies were not a ColdWar aberration, but part of an ongoing working relationship. The hysteria associated with cold-war anti-communism--and, inter alia, with Senator Joseph McCarthys attack on Communists and homosexuals in universities and the State Department--merely served to facilitate and enhance the willingness of university personnel to accept F.B.L surveillance. In one important respect Harvard and Yale were special cases because of the role they played in staffing the O.S.S., C.I.A., N.S.C. and State Department with their graduates. Those particular inter-institutional connections have long been an American tradition and have been part of the class culture of the New England establishment. Historically, the F.B.I. was not part of that classs culture, recruiting its agents from largely Catholic universities. Diamonds data show how the exigencies of the Cold War and Senator McCarthys inquisitions led to a new spirit of covert cooperation between Harvard, Yale and the F.B.I., and suggest how this pattern of cooperation became characteristic of the American university system. During that period procedural codes and operating principles governing the relations between universities and intelligence agencies were formalized. Diamonds in-depth and fully documented case studies are valuable both because they describe the rules of inter-institutional codes of etiquette and

Social theory and the substantive problems of sociology

The history of sociology indicates that social theory may be formu? lated from a great variety of perspectives and can have many sources and social functions. Regardless of the ideological standpoint from which it may be written, theory reflects the historical period of the author who has for? mulated it and reveals what its authors thought were salient problems for sociological investigation. In this sense, the sociological literature of a period is bound to its own historical content. From one perspective or another, all 19th and early 20th century theorists focussed upon issues that were connected with the decline and transformation of feudal society and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Some of these theorists focussed on the decline of liberalism and the ap? pearance of centralized, mass, bureaucratic society and the secondary social problems resulting from these developments. Thus, our images of the ear? lier history of the institutions of the modern capitalistic order are provided for us by those authors who attempted to analyze the then emerging social order of modernity.