Humanity & Society

Ray P. Cuzzort (1926–1999) was a well-known and highly regarded member of the Association of Humanist Sociology during his career. His book, Using Social Thought: The Nuclear Issue and Other Concerns received the 1989 Association of Humanistic Sociology Award. On the 25th anniversary of this prestigious award, it is most appropriate to revisit his contributions to the field. Cuzzort was a humanistic sociologist. He decried the paradox that we are more capable of dealing with the mysteries of the universe than we are with the complexities of ourselves and our social systems. This article gives an overview and a sampling of R. P. Cuzzort’s contributions to humanism and sociology. I had the rare privilege of being his colleague, friend, and coauthor for three decades. This memorial article recalling Ray Cuzzort seems all the more fitting in this second decade of the twenty-first century and the 25th year of his honor from the Association.

The corporation is implicated in a wide range of activities that are profoundly deleterious to human well-being. The Holocaust, as organized and carried out by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP; the Nazis), is arguably the outstanding example of organized malevolence in modern times. Beginning with the realization that the corporation and the Holocaust are both organizational phenomena, the present research mines a wide range of literature on the Holocaust and the corporation to identify similar practices and then analyzes those practices to discern how they contributed to the Holocaust and may contribute to the various adverse consequences associated with the corporation. Important similarities are identified and analyzed in respect of organization; relationship to unskilled and low-skilled labor; the involvement of professionals, scientists, and engineers; the pervasive use of secrecy and deception; and fascism. These similarities produce their adverse effects both individually and collectively. Collectively, they disempower or eliminate potential countervailing forces and thereby augmented the capacity of the NSDAP, in one case, and may augment the capacity of the corporation, in the other, to carry out destructive acts.

Protest events present portraits of social problems—people, through collective action, send a message to society through their performance of opposition. The purpose of this study is to examine the distribution and diversity of specific activities taking place at protest events in the United States from 2006 to 2009. We empirically examine these activities by drawing on preliminary data from a sample of nearly 2,500 protest events reported in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. To more clearly understand our contentious repertoire, we build upon coding protocol developed by the Dynamics of Collective Action Project and examine over 60 specific activities utilized by activists. What we show—in addition to the fact that protester actions, while sometimes confrontational, are overwhelmingly nonviolent—is that the majority of all protester activity at protest events during the period under study involves literally symbolic, aesthetic, and sensory qualities. In this article, we present a typology of six broad activity categories and propose directions for future research.

Throughout the twentieth century, food production in America drastically changed in conjunction with social and historical events. The ramifications of America’s agricultural endeavors are evident in polluted waterways, soils, and air, along with myriad health problems like diabetes and obesity linked to highly processed foods. Over the last three decades, sustainable agriculture, seen in the form of farmers’ markets, organic food, and local food, has swept across America. The desire by an ever-growing population to see food production become more localized and tangible is witnessed in the increasing amount of literature dedicated to the topic of sustainable agriculture. Although critiqued by some as a step backward in the progress of agriculture, sustainable agriculture continues to gain momentum (Beus and Dunlap 1990; Gardner 2002; Vogeler 1981). Drawing on literature, documents, and semi-structured interviews with sustainable farmers in the Western United States, I explore why farmers choose to farm in a sustainable manner and how their philosophies of sustainable farming drive their everyday practices.

We examined the usefulness of mindfulness practices for developing understandings of the intersection between the individual and social milieu. After incorporating mindfulness practices in a sociology course, we conducted open-ended surveys asking students’ understanding of mindfulness practice and its usefulness to their learning. We asked students to describe their experience in a sentence of “Who, does what, to what or whom, when, where, how, and why.” Students identified themselves (39.4 percent), class (40.9 percent), and the instructor (19.7 percent) as the leading actor (“who”), and each group showed varied understanding of mindfulness practices. This finding suggests that it is important to consider the instructor-led nature when incorporating mindfulness in courses. Second, our data show that nearly all students reported mindfulness practices as positive experiences to their learning. Students’ enhanced self-awareness was a crucial part of their experience, which led them to developing appreciation about differences in perspectives and a sense of social connectedness. This finding suggests that mindfulness practices have great potential to help students develop sociological understanding of intersections between individuals and society. We argue mindfulness is worth further consideration as an educational tool to integrate the factual and mechanical aspects of learning and the deeper and holistic facets in sociology education.