Sociological Perspectives

Recent sociological studies of power in organizations, although oriented toward practical ends, offer promise for a general sociological theory of power. Empirically grounded organizational studies examine social life as practiced by actors and preserve the tension between structure and action. Exchange theory and structural theories of power, in contrast, are abstract and theoretical; by asserting the primacy of structures (structural theories) or action (exchange theory), they cannot account well for the dialectic of human agency and structural constraint. We suggest the theoretical implications of organizational analysis and compare this perspective with traditional sociological approaches to power.

This article analyzes one corporate boundary at which legitimation problems may arise: The relation between the corporation and the local community. I indicate how ideology and a form of symbolic behavior, corporate giving, may work as a strategy of social control for corporations. This analysis leads to a theory of corporate giving as one form of corporate civic involvement. In the theory I specify the characteristics of firms and features of their environments that make corporate giving a rational strategy for increasing corporate legitimacy. The theory is presented in the form of 10 multivariate propositions. Where it exists, the research evidence on corporate giving is used to indicate the empirical plausibility of the hypotheses.

Recently sociologists have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of rapid community growth and change on social relations and social integration, adding to a long tradition of scholarly concern with the social effects of urbanism and modernization. As was characteristic of much of the traditional literature on urbanization, the recent discussions of rapid community growth have tended overwhelmingly to assert various “social disruption” consequences, including a deterioration of the importance of neighboring as a source of both primary interaction and localized informal social support. In this study we examine data on neighboring phenomena from three small towns in the western United States that in recent years have experienced substantially different rates of population growth. Although the results suggest that rapid population growth in small towns is indeed accompanied by an apparent decline in reliance on neighbors as sources of social support, the data indicate no support for the hypothesized deterioration of neighboring as a form of primary interaction in rapidly growing small communities. We conclude by noting the consistency of these findings with alternative interpretations of the effects of urbanization on localized social interaction and social support.

Bluestone and Harrison's Deindustrialization of America (1982) focuses on the consequences for communities of industrial change. We explore this concern by examining the income implications of the dramatic shift in American industry from urban to rural settings. Using data from all existing counties in the United States, industrial change is examined during the 1960s—a historically important decade of unprecedented affluence and unprecedented change in rural-urban manufacturing employment. Regression analysis of shifts in median family income shows that although small towns benefit somewhat from the migration of industry or the expansion of existing facilities, these benefits are less than the income lost from a decline in manufacturing jobs in large metropolitan areas. The findings are consistent with Bluestone and Harrison's contention that industrial change results in a net loss of income to American workers. A major conclusion is that at the same time many American sociologists were celebrating alliances between business and labor, forces were at work undermining worker income and prosperity. Importantly, these forces were at work during a decade of widespread prosperity and prior to the recent difficulties in the American economy.

This is a report of a study that examined the social and academic climates of two American law schools, concluding that the environment in which legal education takes place is not conducive to significant socialization. The diminution after 7 months of law school of the expectations of first-year students to work as professionals after graduation in attaining justice and establishing social reforms was due largely to rational cognitive processes, inasmuch as there were no significant changes in basic motives and attitudes. The study supports adult socialization theory that holds that adult individual rationality is a powerful inhibitor of attempts to bring about fundamental affective changes.

The validity of the primary source of data on the occupations of immigrants to the United States (Immigration and Naturalization Service reports) has been severely criticized. In fact, the “substantive meaningfulness” of results based on this data has been questioned. In this article we empirically investigate the nomological validity of these occupational data using a time series analysis. We find, at least on an aggregate level, that the results provide fairly strong support for the validity of these data as a measure of the distribution of those in blue-collar and white-collar occupations for the major regions from which people immigrate to the United States.