Graham L. Staines

Sex Disertmznataon Against the American Working Woman

The concept of discrimination is inextricably linked to a particular ideology or set of values. Ideologies delineate desirable social conditions; discrimination refers to departures from ideological prescriptions. More specifically, discrimination may be defined as the withholding of rewards or facilities on the basis of allocative criteria inconsistent with a particular ideology. Discrimination refers to providing individuals with fewer rewards or facilities than are legitimately deserved; favoritism, to providing more rewards or facilities than are legitimately deserved. Of specific concern here is occupational sex discrimination. The discrepancy between ideology and reality with

The Politics of Analyzing Social Problems

Issues which become public are selected from among the social problems which parts of the population may perceive. Groups differ in their definitions of social problems in accordance with their self-interests and their ideology. For a social problem to become a public issue, a complex political process develops around the activities of major institutional actors: the media, officialdom, and private interest groups. Yet conflicts arise not only over what is to be a public issue, but also over how the problem is to be diagnosed and responded to. A somewhat different set of institutional and social actors are more intimately involved in the conflict between competing diagnoses of publicly recognized social problems. That is, official authorities, underdog partisans, privileged partisans, policy advisors and planners, and ideologues, all tend toward their own distinct set of attributions. The parties may handle the conflict by confronting each other, directly or indirectly. Alternatively, or in addition, they may attempt tacit bargaining over tangible matters such as economic resources and power, and reality negotiation over the symbolic matter of different problem definitions or diagnoses. Legislation provides a third way of handling the conflict. Whatever the strategies used, the conflict generates significant political outcomes for the policy process and the various parties concerned.

Problems Facing Campbell's "Experimenting Society"

In his article leading off this issue of Urban Affairs Quarterly, Donald T. Campbell has advocated an experimental approach to social reform: &dquo;an approach in which we try out new programs designed to cure specific social problems, in which we retain, imitate, modify or discard them on the basis of apparent effectiveness on the multiple imperfect criteria available&dquo; (p. 133). Initially, this experimental approach does not sound radically different from a long-standing tradition of pragmatic management and public administration. Three points, however, distinguish Campbell’s position from the traditional one: (1) his assumption that social scientists should take an active part in designing and evaluating reforms, in order to assure more objective and methodologically adequate evaluation; (2) his excellent attempts in recent years (e.g., Campbell, 1957, 1963, 1968; Campbell and Stanley, 1963) to provide social scientists