Joseph R. Gusfield

Social Structure and Moral Reform: A Study of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union

Analysis of WCTU journals and reports and interviews with current leaders reveal a pattern at variance with theories of an adaptive process in social movements. In pre-Prohibition periods humanitarian reform was the central theme in WCTU doctrine. Temperance was viewed as the solution to problems of underprivileged groups. Since Repeal, the WCTU has ceased to represent dominant social classes, and its doctrine has become the expression of moral indignation toward upper-middle-class life. Analysis of local leadership from 1885 to 1950 indicates a shift toward lower areas of the socioeconomic scale.

Occupational roles and forms of enterprise

An analysis was made of the work histories of a random stratified sample of 195 professional, managerial, sales, and trained laborers in a medium-sized city. Differences in the number of jobs and of occupations and in the shapes of careers were related to differences in occupations and to differences between determinate and indeterminate occupations. No differences were found between those employed in large-scale corporate organizations and those in small local organizations.

Book ReviewRisk and Misfortune: A Social Construction of Accidents.By Judith Green. London: UCL Press, 1997. Pp. x+222.

lines, we can write detailed field notes on comportment and expression. After interviews, we can comb subjects’ detailed narratives of prior experiences without immediately going with or against the moral of their story. And we can repeatedly review videotapes of naturally occurring, socially situated behavior. In these ways we may reach “deep” or qualitatively distinctive aspects of emotional experience, not by some metaphysical trick by which we probe “within” subjects’ minds or experiences, but by observing the practices that people carefully keep in the background as they produce expressions of self to take effect on the foreground of social interaction.

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One of the arguments for colonial rule has been that it brought the benefits of science and western technology to peoples who had neither. In his evaluation of this view in The Science of Empire, Zaheer Baber eschews the argument, and he has made a useful contribution to a better understanding of the impact of science, both pure and applied, on India. Baber, a sociologist at the National University in Singapore, has written an historical account of Indian science and technology in pre-British eras and during British domination. His major assertion is that the development of science and technology in colonial India resulted from complex processes involving the state of scientific knowledge in precolonial India, Indian institutions, colonial imperatives, and the active role of both Indian and British scientists, engineers, and health personnel. The book contains three distinct sections. The first, and introductory chapter, contains an excellent account of the current constructivist approach to the study of science. However the bulk of the study is of institutional and macroelements. In a second part of the book, the author draws on a variety of sources in Indian history to describe the indigenous institutions and scientific knowledge in ancient and medieval India. There were a number of instances of a scientific and inventive character that belie the view of “ignorance” which some, if not many, colonialists entertained. Examples are such matters as irrigation canals, Ayurvedic medicine and medicines, astronomical observatories, and, of course, the invention of the number zero. There was a two–way street, albeit narrow, between Western scientists and Indians in which each influenced the other. Approximately the last two-thirds of the book are devoted to the colonial period. Baber devotes much attention to the technological and engineering feats which the British developed and supported, such as agricultural improvements, rail transportation, and the development of antimalaria medicines. He shows how many of these were responses to the imperatives of colonial rule as means to solve economic problems in Britain, improve the health and productivity of the Indian population, or protect and retain the health and safety of the British in India. Scientific research was often a solution to problems posed by colonial needs. Baber also shows how the British drew on the indigenous technical culture of India and how the Indians, especially the middle class, sought and utilized scientific education for self-advancement. Much of the final chapter is a history of the ways in which needs for scientific and technical