Sociological Perspectives

Based on a five-year follow-up survey of sociology departments in the Pacific Sociological Association region, we report trends in the representation of women and minorities among faculty members and graduate students. Although men continue to predominate at all but the lecturer/instructor level, women are increasingly represented on faculties overall, in tenured positions, and among the higher academic ranks. Proportionally fewer men and women are now in entry level positions than in 1979. Except for Asians, minority faculty continue to be poorly represented. Women now make up the majority of graduate students at both the masters and doctoral levels, but both the proportion and number of minority students have declined in five years. Still, despite sharply contracting enrollment, both women and minority graduate students receive a larger share of financial assistance awards than they did five years ago.

In commenting on the results of the five-year follow-up study of minorities and women in sociology in the Pacific region, policy considerations and research needs are cited. The need for regular systematic surveys, exploring equity in employment of sociologists outside academia, and other methods of studying the issue are discussed.

The boomtown scenario has, over the last decade, become closely associated with energy-related development in the western United States. The model based on this scenario has been generalized to other energy-related production activities, notably offshore oil and gas development. The basic mechanism underlying the boomtown model is the rapid growth of population that occurs as individuals move into an area to take advantage of employment opportunities in the energy production sectors of the economy. In contrast to western energy development, the structure of employment in the primary sectors of offshore oil and gas production allows individuals to commute from considerable distances rather than relocate. Without relocation and the corresponding population growth, some of the negative social and economic impacts generally associated with boomtowns do not occur. Thus the traditional boomtown model is limited in its appropriateness as a tool for energy-related impact assessment. In the present article, the original boomtown model is modified to provide greater flexibility and comprehensiveness, not only with respect to offshore oil and gas production in the gulf coast but for other areas of rapid development as well.

This article modifies resource mobilization theory to emphasize interaction among social movements, countermovements, and government agencies. The framework developed for tracing social movement-state relationships gives special attention to movement and countermovement agency alignments. There are six stages of movement-state relationships illustrated with an analysis of the contemporary environmental movement.

This article studies the origins and development of the economic success of Hong Kong. After pointing out the problems of the free-market explanation and the authoritarian state explanation, this article turns to the world-system perspective for new insights. It is argued that the historical development of Hong Kong is shaped both by the capitalist world-system and by the interactions between socialist China and the capitalist power bloc between the 1950s and the 1970s. This article contributes by showing how these world-system dynamics have affected the Hong Kong political economy over the past three decades.

Symptomatic of social forces is the character of the relationship between the individual and society; study of that relationship is central to sociology, a part-whole problem shared with other social sciences. A number of sociological concepts have been developed at least in part to examine this relationship. In the past couple of decades, sociologists and other social scientists have borrowed from niche theory in biological ecology, applying niche in a number of ways. In this article, the Hutchinsonian revolution in niche theory is stressed to establish that adaptations of niche into sociological human ecology are based on misleading analogies and are derived from a failure to recognize the implications of changes in niche theory. The difficulties issue in part from “the species problem” and from unclear differentiation between niche and more established sociological concepts, particularly role and status. These differences are specified and clarified prior to a radical reorientation of niche in human ecology. The reorientation resolves the species problem, updates and reinforces ties with biological ecology, and enlarges the potential for study of the linkages between individual and society and between micro and macro in complex systems.

Suggesting a typology of musical listeners, Adorno (1976/1962) invites his readers to refine his proposed schema and to apply it to their real-world observations. This study takes up his invitation. It uses Adorno's typology to examine the responses of jazz critics and their implied audiences at a moment of profound innovation in the development of jazz, the introduction of Caribbean-influenced Cu-bop.