Sociological Perspectives

Drawing upon the writings of Adorno, Barthes, and Gadamer, this essay exposes the popular lonely-hearts column as a form of modern discourse. Parallels are established between lonely-hearts ads and other forms of advertising, as well as between the lonely-heart ad and other forms of popular media (e.g., the astrology column). The ads themselves are placed within a modern discursive practice whereby technical and instrumental motives and designs are seen to dominate. The discursive practice that supports such ads is analyzed in terms of its instrumental and technical features and its illusory claim to straightforward speech.

This study uses ordinal regression analysis to examine the impact of gender on work values, after controlling for various organizational variables. The analysis is based on a complete enumeration of women in a large Australian organization, together with “representative” and “matched” samples of male employees. When organizational variables are controlled, women are shown to place greater importance on working relations, men on salary, job status, and prestige in the community. Type of work has a significant impact on work values, as does the interaction of gender and type of work, thus supporting the argument that the array of occupations studied may be an important factor in explaining conflicting prior findings concerning the influence of gender on work values. While gender differences in some work values remain after a variety of organizational variables are considered, a model based on work experiences may still be appropriate for explaining such observed differences.

This article examines data on Japanese Americans in Arizona in terms of the model minority thesis and addresses the question of whether or not this image is a myth. Occupation and income return from education, based on the 1980 census data, are examined for Japanese American males in Arizona. The findings suggest that the model minority thesis does not apply for the Japanese Americans in Arizona; for example, white males are more than two times as likely to be in managerial positions as Japanese American males, and the latter receive less return from education than the former. It is suggested that further studies explore in depth cultural and structural factors in relation to mobility, income, and occupation for Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans.

This article attempts to investigate patterns of association between primary relationships (in both kinship and neighborhood relations) and social participation in voluntary associations in a Korean metropolitan city. Two alternative hypotheses, that is, an incompatibility hypothesis positing a negative relation between primary relationships and social participation and a reinforcement hypothesis positing a positive relationship were derived. The data were collected from 1,047 households and housewives through self-administered questionnaires. Multiple regression analysis was applied to assess the hypotheses, controlling for 7 individual variables. The results lend strong support to the reinforcement hypothesis, indicating the positive influences of primary relationships on social participation. Finally, this article discusses some probable mechanisms underlying the findings in Korean urban contexts.

This article examines a structural symbolic interactionist approach to the process of ethnic identity formation among black and white college students. This approach, termed identity theory, considers an ethnic identity (like all identities) to be a portion of the self that contains shared understandings of what it means to be a member of a given ethnic group. Within the framework of identity theory, ethnic identification is hypothesized to be related to self-esteem, identity salience, identity commitment, and other structural characteristics. Using the Burke-Tully method, a black-white ethnic identity dimension is developed and used to measure ethnic identity among a sample of college students. The nature of this identity dimension is discussed and its relation to the other self variables is investigated. The study confirmed that identity salience, commitment, and self-esteem, as hypothesized by identity theory, are related to ethnic identity among students. However, it was also noted that these ethnic identity processes seemed to work somewhat differently for blacks and for whites as a result of differences in dominant and minority position.