European Social Class: Stability and Change. by Bernard Barber; Elinor G. BarberReview by: Werner CohnSocial Forces, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Mar., 1966), pp. 432-433Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2575857 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 17:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.22 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 17:44:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

432 SOCIAL FORCES

rights in an important sense were always there. What was needed was a strategy for bringing them to light." Whereas one's particular value orien- tations may lead to agreement on this "always there" point, the crucial matter (clearly emphasized in Kalven's study) is the actual litigation and the resulting active role of the judiciary in shap- ing these rights. One is struck, for example, by the fact that practically the same governmental techniques earlier ruled constitutionally valid when used to "control" (i.e., attack and repress) al- leged subversives are now held unconstitutional when employed to restrict activities of the civil rights movement. Indeed the author himself com- ments at the outset that, "we may come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the Communists seemed to have lost for us."

Evident throughout the book is the fact that the Court's action clearly involves an important element of response to crucial social changes re- cently taking place in American society. And there is little doubt that this response will in turn have a significant impact in reinforcing those changes, and will also (as in these free speech decisions) establish precedents covering a broader range of behavior than that directly involved in the civil rights movement. While some readers without legal background may at times find it difficult to follow the rather intricate elaboration of legal doctrine (the author himself refers to the "dizzy doctrinal ballet" generated by one case), nonetheless this concise and thought-provoking work merits the attention of sociologists.

EDWIN M. SCHUR

Tutfts University

THE CHURCH AND RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION: A CASE STUDY OF AN OPEN HOUSING COVENANT CAMPAIGN. By Henry Clark. New Haven, Con- necticut: The College & University Press, 1965. 254 pp. $5.00.

As the Negro population of northern cities has grown in recent years, due principally to in- migration, and as that population has been shifted and shunted around in these cities, due mainly to urban renewal and freeway construction, a stead- ily intensifying demand for an open-housing market has developed. In many cities one main initial thrust undertaken to explore the support for and the opposition to open housing has been the covenant-card campaign. This simple pledge card device is an educational tool to probe the sensitivity of a community, to ascertain its readiness for fur- ther social action toward the open-housing market, and to highlight the significance of the housing problem among minority group members.

On its surface this book is an. analysis of one such covenant-card campaign in a small northern industrial town of about 35,000 people. With skill the author discusses the pro and con forces in the community of Newfield in 1959, the way in which the card campaign originated and how it

turned out. This dimension of the book is cer- tainly interesting for those particularly concerned with launching comparable covenant-card cam- paigns elsewhere. There are many practical sug- gestions worth noting, e.g., the importance of per- sonal follow-up on the original invitation to sign the cards.

A somewhat broader aspect of the book is its value as an analysis of a social-action campaign to secure covenant-card signatures. This is a wider focus on the social-action process itself, whether it be for covenant-card signatures or legislative enactment. Here, too, there are valuable sugges- tions that must be learned by those who would win in the social-action arena. The imperative of joint planning and the pertinence of proper timing are two points Dr. Clark underscores in his analysis of this particular social-action effort.

The most vital dimension of this book, however, was not the two just noted. It was rather the role of the clergy of Newfield in initiating, encourag- ing, and promoting the covenant-card campaign. With delicate insight Dr. Clark has investigated the social psychology of the clergy in its involvement with the whole civil-rights issue. Although the covenant card campaign was not a crisis issue, it did deal with the very sensitive matter of Negro- white relationships and the even more touchy sub- ject of residential living. Within the framework of the two concepts of the social gospel and Chris- tian realism, Dr. Clark lays bare the tragic ir- relevance of the church in the everyday affairs of men. He sees the essence of that irrelevance not alone in the church's failure to stand up and be counted as firmly against racial injustice, but even more acutely in "n-eglecting to preach and to in- carnate in its own life as an institution and as a force in society the word of God's grace." Until the church becomes relevant again to the lives and issues of men, as it has shown some spark of doing in very recent months, this book will serve as an excellent exposure of its malady. When the church regains its relevance, the book will still be worth reading as a good historical review of its former inner tensions and difficulties, from which it emerged inclusive and universal.

MEL RAVITZ Wayne State University

EUROPEAN SOCIAL CLASS: STABILITY AND CHANGE.

Edited by Bernard Barber and Elinor G. Barber. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965. 145 pp. $1.50. Paper.

This little pamphlet is one of a series entitled Main Themes in European History. The series as a whole, and certainly this particular pamphlet, seems directed mainly to students of history. The unusual thing about this volume, however, is that it is edited by a sociologist and deals with ma- terials of great interest to sociologists.

While the focus is just a bit hazy-something to be expected from a collection of so many

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.22 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 17:44:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 433

different contributors-there is nevertheless in al- most all the pieces a concern over the relation- ships among social classes in the Europe of the eighteentlh anld nineteenlth centuries. Most of the discussion deals with aristocracy and "bourgeoisie." (There is intelligenlt consideration of the mean- ings of both of these terms.) I found most in- triguing, however, the excerpts from J. Jean Hecht's book on the Domiestic Servanit Class in Eightcct1h Ccnttury Elnglanld. As the Barbers point out in their introductory essay, there is much more material about the higher classes in history than there is about the lower ones, and the care- fully collected information about the English servants is a welcome exception.

The pieces in the book were written for maniy occasions with many different aims. With but one apparent exception, they are very much shortened versions of originlal work. Reading a few pages from a book here, a few excerpts from an article there, and then again a statistical appendix from another book, is not exactly an exhilarating intel- lectual experience. One's appetite, however, is certainlly whetted for a thoughtful and systematic exalmination of the historical sources of our con- temporary social classes and class-determined values.

The introductory essay by the Barbers men- tions much of the information which a sociologist would require from a historical treatment of Euro- pean social class. Unfortuniately, the excerpts in the volume wrvere on the whole nmotivated by different considerationis. A book-length study by a so- ciologist who is trained also in the methods of the historian would seem to be required for the task at hand.

The introductory essay contains some unfor- tunate dogmatic formulations of the kind which have given fulctiolnal analysis a bad name. We read, for instanlce, that "in all societies there is differential evaluation of the occupational roles that men have to fill as a normal and necessary part of their daily lives" (p. 2).

There is i1o index. WERNER COHN

Un;iiversity of British Colitwmbia

SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION. By Kaare Svalastoga. New York: David McKay Company, 1965. 174 pp. Tables. $2.25. Paper.

Social Differenltiatioi by Kaare Svalastoga is in general an intelligently conceived book. Its value lies in large part in Svalastoga's effort to bring together and apply mathematical formula- tions to the findings of 25 years of research in Europe and America, in order to help develop a soulder theoretical foundation for the somewhat protean area of social stratification. It is a pleasure to watch someone with so much methodological finesse scrutinize the murky, and what again- has proven to be always fatal, area of what is called the theory of social classes. In examining the re- lationship betweeni class and life style, for ex-

ample, a subject usually hanidled descriptively, he coustructs a Guttman scale with the four mliajor stratification variables-wealth, iuformation, power, alnd defereuce used througlhout the book to classify social classes according to value emphasis. An- other attractiou of this volume is the author's consisteult attempt to utilize iuteraction in ex- plaining social status. Svalastoga believes that in essence interaction determiues social status, and is, therefore, its most relevaut nmeasure.

It is the area of mobility that is Svalastoga's forte. Here he explores the variability of intra- and intergenerationial mobility over time and the degree to wlhich positious are filled without respect to the social origiu of individuals. This latter dimenseion1, whiiclh gives meaniug to inter- societal comparisonls of mobility, is called perme- ability.

In some detail he shows how Markov chain aualysis cau be useful in revealing the effect of a giveu rate of intragenerational mobility after a. geuerationls. He also proposes the use of Leoutief's iuput-output model for mobility analysis. This type of inventiveness nmakes the book valuable to the specialist of social stratification, but precludes its general use in undergraduate teaching.

Most of the imperfections that can be found with Svalastoga's analysis stem from his failure to dis- tinguislh between social differentiation and social stratification. By not seeing the former as a generic term referring to social positiolns and the latter as referrinlg to collectivities, Svalastoga does not build a bridge betweeni the two, and gets caught up in the same type of insidiousiness as the manly others whlo have not made the distinctioln. Thus, lhe accepts the dlubious presupposition that occupa- tions are rewarded on the basis of their difficulty and functional inmportanice. He argues that "Un- der more normal condlitionls, a positive relation- ship between social input anld individual output variables would be expected" (p. 8). Carrying the explanationl of why occupations are unequably re- warded further thanl most respectable American sociologists, he outlines the five conditionls tenclinlg to increase remuileratioin (disagreeableness, im- probability of success, etc.) offered by Adam Smith in The Woalth of Notion1s. This in spite of amiiple conltradictory evidenlce in Chapter III.

Furthermore, as a consequelnce of not focusing on social strata, Svalastoga does not make suffi- cient use of the broad-rainged and insighltful work of those wlho have dealt with stratification on a societal level. T6nnies and Mills are not men- tioned, and Pareto and Veblen are virtually ig-- nored. Marx and Weber are circumspectly re- ferred to, and are misunderstood or disregarded. Although at one point the difference between status groups and classes is noted, it is not adhered to, and social class is characterized in terms of social status. The economic variable is discounted throughoujt the book, and at the end it is pre- dicted that in the future "the economic factor may tend( to become deemphasized" (p. 145), which is

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.22 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 17:44:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions