Stanley Lieberson

Leadership and Organizational Performance: A Study of Large Corporations

Leadership influence in large complex organizations, though commonly assumed to be greatly significant, is normally not studied in terms of the variance accounted for in organizational performance. The leadership effect is viewed here as a product of an organizations environmental constraints and its leadership variance. Based on sales, earnings, and profit margin data for 167 large corporations over twenty years, we compare the impact of leadership changes with yearly, industry, and company influences. Industry and company account for far more of the variance in two performance variables than does leadership, but not for profit margins after lag effects are considered. It appears that the importance of external restrictions, and hence the maximum possible leadership influence, may range widely between specific performance criteria. The second phase of the study considers industry characteristics that appear to be associated with high and low leadership influences. These results suggest a perspective on organization performance that may be applied to the leadership influence in other large organizations and political bodies, like cities, states and nations.

Ethnic Segregation and Assimilation

An ecological conceptualization of the processes of immigrant adjustmen permits a demonstration of close correlations of residential segregation and centralization with selected indicators of assimilation, socioeconomic status, and social distance ranking of ethnic groups. Changes in residential patterns in Chicago between 1930 and 1950 were in the direction expected on the basis of a positive relationship between assimilation and lenghth of residence; but such changes did not disrup a pattern of differential segregation and spatial separation of ethnic colonies, this pattern exhibiting remarkable stability over the twenty-year period.

Children's First Names: An Empirical Study of Social Taste

Data on births in New York State between 1973 and 1985 are used to analy gender differences in naming patterns. In a relatively rigorous way, the authors infer how seemingly idiosyncratic expressions of tastes in names are in general affected by underlying cultural themes. For example, the results suggest that long-standing stereotyped role assignments still have a subtle but major effect on the naming process. Two major parental characteristics-education and race-modify these general patterns. In turn, taste differences in subpopulations reveal their general esthetics dispositions. The authors present these results as the first large-scale systematic comparison of educational differences in naming patterns in the United States.

A Societal Theory of Race and Ethnic Relations

It should not be implied, of course, that the general model to account for residential mobility developed in this article has adequate empirical foundation. The relevant studies to date have differed sufficiently in general purposes, in populations studied, and in methodological detail to make it possible that the differences in their findings are artifacts thereof. Yet a theoretical scheme including both life-cycle and career pattern variables is in accord with the general complexity of social relationships and threatens the integrity of neither Rossis analysis nor the present study. Further, consideration of complaints as immediate pre-condition for mobility places independent, intervening, and dependent variables in the potentially most fruitful relation to one another.

Temporal Changes and Urban Differences in Residential Segregation: A Reconsideration

Residential segregation is most commonly measured with the index of dissimilarity, an indicator that eliminates or at least minimizes the effect of group size. An asymmetric measure of isolation is described here, one which takes composition into account. Although it taps the same process in part, the measure provides a different way of approaching segregation and is found not to be a simple product of a composition variable coupled with the index of dissimilarity. Earlier conclusions about intercity differences and temporal changes in segregation between 1960 and 1970 are reconsidered. Centrain features of segregation are indicated that hitherto were unappreciated. Recognition of them yields some radically different conclusions about the segregation process, shifts over time, and differences among cities. The asymmetrical approach also explains why racial and ethnic groups have different perceptions about the magnitude of and the trends in segregation.

Rank-Sum Comparisons between Groups

A common and deceptively simple step in research is making group comparisons in terms of some ordered characteristic such as age, income, occupational prestige, and the like. Ideally these comparisons are best made graphically, with the entire frequency distribution presented for each group. However, summary measures are generally used because it is impractical to present a large number of graphs and because quantitative measures allow the results to be correlated with other attributes of the groups. Thus researchers usually turn to such well-known measures of central tendency as arithmetic means and medians or to such dis-

Einstein, Renoir, and Greeley: Some Thoughts about Evidence in Sociology: 1991 Presidential Address

It is relatively easy to determine if evidence supports or does not support a given theory or conclusion, but a central problem in sociology is our inability to go beyond this and develop truly convincing evidence about a theory. Several changes in current practices are vital, including the cessation of nonproductive assaults between sociologists on the evidence used in the discipline. More fundamentally, theory should not be viewed as one pole of a continuum with research on the other end. A probabilistic view of theory is proposed such that a theory may be correct even if there is negative evidence. This leads to a different way of evaluating evidence, a different view of the role of examples, a distinction between explanations ofparticular events as opposed to evaluations of theories, skepticism about the possibility of developing theories that accountfor long complex chains of events, and a sharp differentiation between the evidence used in applied as opposed to basic research. A new sociological specialty should concern itself with epistemological issues that arise in determining the verifiable propositions that are the basic building blocks to sociological knowledge.

The Location of Ethnic and Racial Groups in the United States

The distinctive regional and urban locational patterns of thirty-three ethnic groups in the United States are analyzed from two different perspectives. First, who are the numerically important groups in each region? Second, from the perspective of the groups themselves, where are they spatially concentrated? We hypothesize that the forces generating distinctive ethnic locational patterns are strongest at the time of the initial settlement; thus the longer a group has been present in the United States, the less geographically concentrated it will be. This is found to be true for most ethnic groups except blacks and American Indians, whose specific social and political situations explain their particular concentrations. However, the early settlement patterns still affect the ethnic makeup of various areas of the nation, even though the concentrations have diminished over time. Moreover, although the 1975–1980 patterns of internal migration (analyzed through a Markov Chain model) are tending to reduce some of the distinctive geographic concentrations in the nation, this will still not fully eliminate distinctive ethnic concentrations. Groups differ in their propensities to leave or enter each area in a way that reflects the existing ethnic compositions of the areas. Thus even with the massive level of internal migration in the nation, there is no evidence that the substantial ethnic linkage to region is disappearing.

An Empirical Study of Military-Industrial Linkages

Military-industrial relations are examined from both the elistist and pluralist perspective on power. Neither theory readily accounts for all of the empirical data. On the one hand, elist theory explains the relatively high level of military spending after World War II as well as the deep dependence on military expenditures among some large corporations. However, both the regresion and input-output analyses indicate that the economy does not require extensive military outlays. Indeed, there is some evidence that most corporations would be more prosperous if the government shifted to nonmilitary expenditures. These discrepancies suggest that a third interpretation may be in order. Based on the assumption that a growing division of labor leads to increasingly specialized needs and vested interests, the hypothesis of compensating strategies is presented. Under this notion, political decision that run counter to the interests of the majority will occur even if the government is not dominated by a small number of elite interest groups. Rather, such a pattern may result from a process in which the diverse interest groups seek to maximize their net gains. This alternative perspective is illustrated by the composition of Senate committees.

The Course of Mother-Tongue Diversity in Nations

The course of mother-tongue diversity is abstracted from longitudinal data gathered for 35 nations. The Greenberg A index is used to measure diversity in each nation, and the magnitude of change is determined through a procedure proposed by Coleman. Diversity declines over time in the majority of cases, but there is considerable variation between nations and in 14 cases diversity has increased. Accordingly, various national characteristics are considered to see whether they help account for the magnitude and direction of change observed among nations. Two factors, the spatial isolation of language groups and official educational policies, have fairly high correlations with changes in diversity. In addition, several geopolitical factors have affected diversity change in the past: age of nation, boundary changes, forced population movements, and World War II. Two specially puzzling results are the comparatively rapid rate of mother-tongue change in the United States and the failure of national development to have much bearing on the course of mother-tongue diversity. A theoreticl approach accounting for these events is described.