John C. Leggett

Caste, Class, and Deference in the Research Interview

To test the influence of the defence norm on low-status respondent when questioned by middleclass interviewers, a cross-section of Detroiters were asked their views concerning two mutually contradictory propositions used at widely separated points in the interview. As predicted, the norm led in nearly 8 per cent to agree with both statements despite their highly contradictory character. This raises serious questions concerning the validity of the A-scale and concerning the interpretation of the F-scale. This study serves as yet another reminder that the research interview invariably creates a social relationship with consequences of importance forthe interpretation of data.

Economic Deprivation and Extremism: A Study of Unemployed Negroes

A study of two Negro neighborhoods and several white and Negro natural areas in an industrial community gives preliminary support to the proposition that groups hard hit by economic deprivation will come to view violence as a plausible concomitant of economic depression. These expectations are more frequent when deprivation increases for the whole community and when respondent have radical views on governmental intervention in the economy and are unemployed themselves. The form of violence anticipated appears to be related to the pattern of political organization of the neighborhood group.

Working-Class Consciousness, Race, and Political Choice

A study of 375 Detroit blue-collar workers focused on voting in the 1958 gubernatorial election. Workers were classified according to degree of working-class consciousness, race, and union membership, as well as their voting preferences for either the reform or conservative candidate. Class consciousness failed to differentiate the voting choices of Negro workers to a significant degree, since race proved to be the overrinding factor. Almost all Negro voters, regardless of militance or union membership, supported the reform candidate. However, class consciousness and union membership had a predictable impact among white workmen.

Book ReviewsThe Myth of Green Marketing: Tending Our Goats at the Edge of Apocalypse. By Toby M. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. ix+187.

Robert Merton and Karl Mannheim would applaud this work as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge. It is an effort to show how current day progressives, and the idiocies of false consciousness, are rooted primarily in material circumstance. For those of us weaned on the existential ties between base and superstructure, this book is trailblazing. It takes up dimensions of working people’s consciousness and gullibility. For a good contemporary example, consider the many blue-collar and lesser white-collar Riverside, California, residents who are sickened by pollution but lack the power to rename haze for what it is—smog. Working people must live with omnipresent green haut-bourgeois advertising copy produced to obscure the brown pall by bagging it with imperial scent: “The Inland Empire.” The metaphor constitutes a positive transfer which helps to anesthesize some people to the hideous ecology. However, there have emerged protestors against this green marketing hucksterism. And Smith has a lot to say about dissenters and radicals, plus their clever tormentors—the bourgeois green-thumb environmentalists. The latter class fraction distracts and dissuades through manufacture and distribution of myths around production and distribution of toxins. In a brilliant dissection of the two-page IBM advertisement headed. “In a Changing World Some Things Deserve to Remain Just the Way They Are,” Smith details how the IBM green productionist discourse has been smudged by IBM reluctance to clean up its soil and groundwater pollution that exposes many thousands of residents to carcinogens. Given the toxic chemical threat, many laborers are awake and fighting to save themselves and their families, as in central New Jersey, where workers both female and male have tackled Johns-Manville, Union Carbide, and American Cyanamid. Traditional discussions of unionized working people’s consciousness have neglected the fight-back ecological attitude as part of an informed, militant, blue collar mentality. Smith shows how those who oppose the corporate ideologists have accumulated a lot of information from day-to-day conflicts against the bosses. In fact, there may be several material and ideational dialectics at work within the same objective situation: (1) owners versus working class, (2) extractive working class versus progressive middle-class environmentalists, (3) environmentalists versus the slick green thumbers, (4) the clever framers of the summary counter-conceptualization against most of the rest of us. Thanks to Smith, we can detail more clearly the attempts of the corporate elite to construct ecological hegemony. Remember, these are only attempts, not complete successes. Green thumb bour-