SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

VOLUME 35 • NUMBER 4 • DECEMBER 1981 605 THIRD AVENUE. NEW YORK, N.Y. 10158

Explaining the Postwar Baby Boom

EACH CHANGE IN FAMILY LIFE since the depression seems to have taken scholars by surprise. The dismal employment situation of the 1930s forced single people to postpone marrying and forced married couples to postpone having children. Worried experts warned that the low rate of births, if sustained, would lead to a drastic decrease in population. In 1933 a presidential panel predicted that the American population would peak at between 145 and 190 mil­lion and then decline. 1 Today it stands at more than 226 million and is still rising. Even as late as the end of World War II, respected demographers were sticking to their pessimistic projections.

The postwar baby boom

What no one foresaw was the postwar baby boom. The young men and women of the late 1940s and 1950s married earlier and had children faster than did their parents' generation. Observers of family life in the 1950s, somewhat taken aback by this sudden shift, looked around for explanations. Some com­mentators proposed that in the aftermath of depres­sion and war, Americans had begun to place a higher

* The author is an assistant professor of social relations at The Johns Hopkins University. This article is adapted from pages 3~44 of his Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, Massachu­setts: Harvard University Press, 1981), which is the first book in a series entitled Social Trends in the United States, sponsored by the Council's Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indi­cators, Washington, D.C. The book is Copyright © 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; this adaptation is published by permission of the Harvard University Press.

DECEMBER 1981

An analysis of the work of Komarovsky, Elder, and Easterlin reveals the interac­tion of period and cohort effects

by Andrew]. Cherlin*

value on marriage, children, and home life. Yet it was often unclear from their writings how and why this tendency had developed. In any case, during the 1960s the divorce rate began to rise very steeply, fertility fell once again, and young adults again post­poned marrying.

From the vantage point of the 1980s, it is possible to see in these ups and downs some patterns of cause and effect that may have been difficult to discern ten or twenty years ago. New scholarship has suggested ways in which historical circumstances have shaped trends in family life since the depression, although

1 Harold F. Dom, "Pitfalls in Population Forecasts and Pro­jections," jOUT7UJ,l of the American Statistical Association 45 (Sept. 1950):311-334.

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE 57 Explaining the Postwar Baby Boom-AndretU]. ellerlin 63 Interest Groups and the Governability of European

Society-Suzanne Berger 68 Conference of Fellows in Employment and Train­

ing-Robert W. Pearson

72 Social Trends in the United States-Robert Parke 73 Current Activities at the Council

-Social structure and the life course -The culture of fear -Effects of the Great Depression on Latin America -Inventory of longitudinal studies of middle and old

age -Biosocial perspectives on parent behavior -Indicators of organizational change -Meeting of area committee chairmen -Merger of two China committees -American scholarly research in China -Order and anomie in South Asia -South Sulawesi

78 Newly-issued Council Publications 79 Other Recent Publications: A Selection

57

there still is disagreement among scholars about the causes of the trends, and the disagreement becomes more pronounced the closer we look to the present. It is possible, nevertheless, to draw some reasonable conclusions about the forces behind the trends in marriage, divorce, and remarriage since World War II. And because of the close connection between trends in fertility and in marital formation and dis­solution, I also examine the reasons for the rise and fall of the birth rate.

The generation that came of age after World War II differed from generations before or since in its pattern of marrying, divorcing, and childbearing. This difference suggests two possible explanations for the trends of the 1950s. First, the attitudinal climate or the economic situation of that decade may have differed from other periods in ways that encouraged young men and women to marry and have children. Second, some shared set of childhood and adolescent experiences, some special characteristics these cohorts carried with them into adulthood, may have influ­enced their behavior in the 1950s.

After nearly a decade of depression and four terri­ble years of war, Americans finally had prosperity as they entered the 1950s. And, except for the more limited Korean conflict, they finally had peace. Mil­lions of men and women had been forced to postpone marrying during the hard times of the 1930s and the austerity and separation brought about by the war. It was not surprising, then, that they married in record numbers in the late 1940s and that the birth rate soon rose dramatically. What was surprising was that years after this pent-up demand for marriage and children should have been satisfied, the birth and marriage rates remained high. As late as 1956, the Bureau of the Census estimated that nearly half of all young women who would ever marry would do so before they reached age twenty.2 Moreover, the annual birth rate rose steadily in the 1950s, reaching its peak in 1957. Had the birth rate remained at the 1957 level, the average woman would have given birth to about four children before the end of her childbearing years. 3 (In fact, the birth rate fell sharply in the 1960s and 1970s.)

The retreat to traditional values

Looking back now to the 1950s, we can see how unusual this pattern of marriage and childbearing was. What produced this surprising turn of events? One common explanation is that there was a general shift in Americans' attitudes toward marriage and childbearing, a shift that caused many young adults to

58

begin forming their families sooner. Nearly all ac­counts of the 1950s stress the great importance at­tached to home, family, and children. Many popular commentators ascribed this shift to what they saw as a great national exhaustion: emotionally drained from their battles against an economic collapse and a mon­strous enemy, Americans supposedly shunned the great issues of the day and retreated into their per­sonal lives.4 Indeed, widely read authors and com­mentators and well-known political leaders in the 1950s all extolled the virtues of a traditional family life.

The role of the suburbs

And nowhere, according to the popular view, was the increased emphasis on home and family more noticeable than in the expanding suburbs. With the help of government-guaranteed mortgages, millions of families purchased single-family homes beyond the borders of the cities. The family-centered life in the suburbs came under sharp attack from social critics. The new suburban communities, according to the critics, were centered around children and run by the mothers. The long commute to work, they said, kept husbands away from early in the morning until night. Meanwhile, the mothers supposedly were engaged in an endless round of activities on behalf of their chil­dren, chauffeuring them to nursery school, ballet les­sons, and Little League games. 5

Early marriage and working mothers

Yet it is easy to exaggerate the extent and im­portance of the attitudinal shift in the 1950s and the family-centered style of life. At the same time that the media were announcing a shift toward traditional values, more and more married women were taking jobs outside the home. Moreover, many commen-

2 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, series P-20, no. 349, "Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1979" (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), Table A.

3 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, bicentennial ed., pt. 1, series B-ll (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975).

4 See, for example, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), chap. 8.

S See John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and Elizabeth W. Loosley, Crestwood Heights (New York: Basic Books, 1956); A. C. Spectorsky, The Exurbanites (New York: Lippincott, 1955); and William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

tators in the 1950s talked about the four- or five-child family, as if families this large had once again become common. But we now know that there was not a return to large families in the 1950s. Much of the increase in the annual birth rates can be traced to two developments: a greater proportion of young women had at least two children, and women tended to have their children sooner after they married. There was also an increase in the proportion of women who had three or four children, but there appears to have been a decrease in the proportion who had more than four. 6 The prevailing image oflife in the suburbs was based on studies of only one type-the upper­middle-class suburbs surrounding major cities. By the early 1960s scholars were discovering much more di­versity in suburbs than the critics had contended; not all resembled a Westchester County exurb full of ad­vertising executives who commuted to Manhattan. In working-class and lower-middle-class suburbs--which did not receive as much attention from social critics and the media-life did not appear to be much dif­ferent from working class and lower-middle-class city neighborhoods. 7 This discovery cast doubt upon many of the stereotypes of suburbia promulgated by its critics in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, attitudes toward personal life in the 1950s probably did differ to some degree from atti­tudes in the preceding and succeeding decades. His­torian John Modell, for instance, reported that in a 1957 opinion poll Americans gave as an "ideal" age for getting married a younger age than was given in 1946 or 1974 polls.8 Yet it doesn't necessarily follow that the change in attitudes caused people to change their behavior. Rather, it may have been that young people changed both their attitudes and their behav­iors at about the same time in response to other de­velopments. Modell suggested that the postwar eco­nomic boom was the stimulus for the changes: the better job market made it easier for young couples to marry, and this lessening of constraints influenced people to reconsider-and often lower-their esti­mate of the ideal age at which to marry.9In some cases attitudinal change may have occurred well after the associated behavioral change. For example, changes in attitudes toward women working-a related dimen­sion of people's values about family life-appear to have lagged well behind changes in women's work behavior. In fact, there is little evidence to support (or refute) the popular belief that a society-wide change in attitudes brought about the family patterns of the 1950s. It is a theory that seems to make sense to many people who lived through the period, but it is difficult to demonstrate whether the shift was a cause or an

DECEMBER 1981

effect of changing patterns of marnage and childbearing.

Growing up in the depression: Mirra Komarovksy

If a general shift in attitudes were the only expla­nation proposed for the trends of the 1950s, I would be more inclined to overlook its shortcomings. There is, however, another explanation, which emphasizes the lasting effects of the childhood and adolescent experiences common to the cohorts born in the 1920s and 1930s.

Growing up in the depression often meant be­longing to a family in which the father was unable to find steady work--or in many cases, any work at all. When the father was unemployed, the family'S in­come plummeted, and wives and teenage children, especially teenage boys, were forced to get a job if they could. A man who had been a reliable breadwin­ner before the depression might watch helplessly as his wife and children became the family's only wage earners. In this situation the father lost not only his income but also his authority. Mirra Komarovsky re­ported on the breakdown of the unemployed father's status at home in her classic study, The Unemployed Man and His Family. She wrote about one man who had been on relief for three years:

Mr. Brady says that while the children don't blame him for his unemployment, he is sure that they don't think as much about the old man as they used to. "It's only natural. When a father cannot support his family, supply them with clothing and good food, the children are bound to lose respect."IO

Mr. Brady's seventeen-year-old son Henry was the only employed member of the family, earning $12 per week. He told Komarovsky:

"I'm my own boss now. Nobody can tell me what to do or how to spend my money. Working makes you feel independent. 1 remind them who makes the money. They don't say much.

6 Norman B. Ryder, "Recent Trends and Group Differences in Fertility," in Charles F. Westoff, ed., Toward tM End of Growth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 57-68; and Judith Blake and Prithwis Das Gupta, "Reply," Population and Development Review 4 Oune 1978):326-329.

7 See Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley: Uni­versity of California Press, 1971); and Herbert J. Gans. The Levit­towners (New York: Random House, 1967).

8 John Modell, "Normative Aspects of American Marriage Timing Since World War II," Journal of Family History 5 (Summer 1980) :21~234.

9 Modell, "Normative Aspects." 10 Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New

York: Dryden Press, 1940), p. 98.

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They just take it, that's all. I'm not the one on relief. I can't help feeling that way."

Henry said that seeing his father so discouraged and without ambition made him lose respect for him. "He is not the same father, that's all. You can't help not looking up to him like we used to."1I

Once, when the family was almost finished with dinner, Henry walked in. There were no extra chairs, so Mr. Brady got up and relinquished his seat to his son. Henry took his father's place at the table in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were his due.

The depression generation: Glen H. Elder, Jr.

Did the experiences of Henry Brady and other adolescents from homes hit hard by the depression influence their later patterns of marriage and family life? One scholar who has begun to answer this ques­tion is sociologist Glen H. Elder, Jr. His study of children born in Oakland, California, in 1920 and 1921, Children of the Great Depression, traces the long­term effects of the depression on some of the children who· grew up during it. 12 The Oakland Growth Study, as it was originally called, was begun in 1932 as a study of the physical, intellectual, and social devel­opment of 167 children who were then eleven years old. The researchers reinterviewed these subjects pe­riodically until the mid-1960s. Elder divided the sub­jects into middle-class and working-class groups, and he also divided them into "deprived" and "nonde­prived" groups. Persons were considered deprived if their families had suffered an income loss of more than 35 percent between 1929 and 1933. By this criterion, slightly more than half of the middle-class children and about two-thirds of the working-class children were classified as living in deprived homes.

Elder demonstrated how independence increased and what the consequences of this were for adolescent boys. When Oakland families were hit by the depres­sion, teenage sons were sent to work to help compen­sate for their fathers' lost earnings. The sons' incomes increased their independence from parental control, as Komarovsky showed in the case of Henry Brady, and their jobs gave the boys a chance to extend their network of friends and acquaintances. They often became more actively involved with their peers, they went out on school nights, they dated earlier.

While the boys were sent to work, their sisters were required to help more around the house. According to the Oakland study, girls from families that had suffered a large loss of income did more domestic chores than girls from more fortunate families. Con­sequently, at an early age girls became heavily in-

60

volved with the tasks that make up the traditional adult female role of homemaker or housewife. In addition, according to Elder, deprived families were marked by a more distant and dissonant relationship between father and daughter. He characterized the overall experiences of the deprived boys and girls during the 1930s as "the downward extension of adultlike experience." Boys became more involved in the kind of work adult males typically do, and girls took on more of the work adult women typically do.

Most of the Oakland children married during or just after the war and had their first child soon thereafter. Women from the deprived families, Elder found, married earlier and placed a higher value on family activities--as opposed to work, lei­sure, or community activities--than did women from the nondeprived families. Among the deprived women, Elder believes, the distant relationships with their fathers and the stronger socialization for the role of homemaker led to an earlier age at marriage. The Oakland men from deprived families also valued family life highly, particularly the chance to have and rear children.

In general, family life was more highly valued among those Oakland men and women whose families had suffered most from the effects of the depression while they were growing up. Perhaps, as Elder suggested, these children of the depression came to view strong families as valuable resources that were all the more desirable because of their scarcity during the years of economic hardship. Perhaps children were seen as a wise investment by !Den and women who had seen their own parents subsist only with the aid of the money that children brought home. Or perhaps the absence of a warm, loving relationship between the father, on the one hand, and the mother and children led some of these children to build their own secure family re­lationships as soon as they could. Whatever the pre­cise mechanism, the Oakland study leaves little doubt that the experience of growing up in a deprived family during the depression influenced the atti­tudes of men and women toward marriage, family, and children.

These attitudes and values may have affected the trends in family life that occurred when those who grew up in the depression were young adults in the late 1940s and the 1950s. An earlier age at marriage, a greater proportion ever marrying, a higher birth

11 Komarovsky, Unnnpluyed Man, pp. 100-101. 12 Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1974).

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

rate, and a stable divorce rate all are consistent with the social-psychological effects outlined by Elder and other students of the depression. Even a study as intensive as Elder's, however, doesn't firmly establish the connection between attitudes and subsequent behavior. Moreover, it is possible that the men and women in the Oakland sample were different some­how from most others born in the early 1920s. Yet the study, with its thirty-year scope and detailed in­formation, creates the strong impression that the trends of the 1950s may well have evolved, in part, from the experience of being a child of the Great Depression.

The demographic impact of the depression: Richard A. Easterlin

Elder and other sociologists who have studied de­pression life have emphasized the social-psychological effects of economic hardship; economist Richard A. Easterlin has also considered the demographic ef­fects. 13 The birth rate dropped during the 1920s and then plunged even lower during the depression, to the point that some eminent demographers predicted that the United States population would soon decline. The relatively small size of the cohorts born in the 1920s and 1930s at first made little difference in their lives; but according to Easterlin, this factor was later a distinct advantage. For as it turned out, these men and women had the good fortune to begin to marry and to have children in the late 1940s, when the American economy started its sustained postwar boom. The demand for young workers was high, and , because of the small size of these cohorts, the supply was low. This imbalance made it easier for young adult males to find a satisfactory job. By and large, their earnings were high compared to those of young men during the depression.

Even the relatively good employment picture in the 1950s, though, didn't necessarily ensure that couples would marry younger and that births would increase. It could have happened, Easterlin points out, that single young men would spend their larger paychecks on themselves and that young couples would use all of their extra money to buy bigger houses, more furni­ture, and the like. That they didn't do so, he con­tends, was the result of one of the psychological ef­fects of growing up in the depression. A person's standard of living, Easterlin maintains, is determined by the material conditions he or she experiences during childhood and especially during adolescence. Consequently, the children who grew up during the

DECEMBER 1981

scarcity of the depression developed a modest taste for material goods. When they reached adulthood, the favorable employment situation for young men meant that they could marry, satisfy their desires for material goods, and still have money left over to cover the costs of having and raising children. Thus their relatively favorable employment situation, in con­junction with the modest material standards these men developed while growing up, resulted in a trend toward earlier marriage and more childbearing. In addition, the same favorable situation led to less con­flict between spouses and a smaller rise in the divorce rate than the long-term trend would have indicated.

The interaction of period and cohort effects

Easterlin's explanation for the trends of the 1950s is consistent with the implications that can be drawn from Elder's work. Both believe that the experience of growing up in the depression influenced people's values in important ways. Elder points to the greater emphasis on family and children; Easterlin notes the development of a modest standard of living. To these psychological effects, Easterlin adds the effect of belonging to a small cohort: better job opportuni­ties.

Yet at least one difficulty arises when we use these cohort-based explanations to account for the trends of the 1950s. As Elder's study suggests, and as Easter­lin has noted, the psychological impact of the depres­sion probably was stronger for adolescents than for younger children. Komarovsky made a similar dis­tinction: many of the unemployed fathers in her sample appeared to lose authority over their teenaged children, but they were more likely to report an im­provement than a deterioration in their relationships with children under twelve.14 Those who were teen­agers during the depression years, of course, had to have been born by the early 1920s. It is unlikely that the lives of children born in the 1930s-who reached adolescence after the war-were touched by the de­pression in the same way as the Oakland cohort of 1920-1921. The cohorts of the 1930s were too young

13 Richard A. Easterlin, "What Will 1984 Be Like? Socioeco­nomic Implications of Recent Twists in the Age Structure," De­mography 15 (Nov. 1978):397-432; and Richard A. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

14 Richard A. Easterlin, Population, Labor Force, and Long Swings in Economic Growth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 124; and Komarovsky, Unemployed Man.

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to have shared fully in the downward extension of adultlike experience, and they may have been too young to have had their standard of living influenced by the hardship around them. Thus we cannot easily extend Elder's analysis to the men and women born in the 1930s, nor can we assume that they developed a modest taste for material goods. Yet when the cohorts of the 1930s reached adulthood in the 1950s they continued, and even advanced, the trend toward ear­lier marriage and faster childbearing.

Elder's study of men and women born in the early 1920s, therefore, helps us to understand the behavior of only some members of the parental generation of the 1950s. And Easterlin's model also works better for people who were born in the 1920s than for those born in the 1930s. Still, an important part of Easter­lin's model does apply more generally: both the 1920s and the 1930s cohorts were small in size; in fact, the number of births was lower in the early and mid-1930s than in the 1920s. If relative cohort size influ­enced the marriage and childbearing pattern of young adults independently of material aspirations, then Easterlin's explanation may apply to most of the new parents of the 1950s.

In sum, I have described two explanations for the trends of the 1950s. Partisans of the first explanation claim that there was a society-wide change in attitudes about home and family in that decade, a change that was either a reaction to the disruption of war or a consequence of postwar prosperity or both. The al­tered climate of opinion, according to this view, en­couraged young adults to marry and to begin having children. The scholars who have developed the sec­ond explanation emphasize the distinctiveness of the cohorts coming of age in the 1950s. They point to the long-term effects of growing up during the depression on people's values and to the relatively favorable labor market position that the small cohort size en­sured.

These two perspectives correspond to two general types of explanation for change over time in human behavior-"period" and "cohort" explanations. Pe­riod explanations refer to the consequences of events that occur during the period studied. The view that patterns of marriage and childbearing changed as a result of a contemporaneous, society-wide shift in values can be considered a period explanation of the 1950s trends. Cohort explanations refer to the conse­quences in later life of the early experiences or shared characteristics of particular birth cohorts. The view that the psychological impact of growing up in the depression--or the size of one's cohort-influenced one's later family life can be considered a cohort ex-

62

planation for the trends of the 1950s. Since each cohort lives in a different period and therefore is subject to a different set of period-based influences, it is difficult to determine whether social change from generation to -generation is produced by the differing characteristics of the cohorts involved or by society­wide changes during the time period studied. Period-based and cohort-based effects, in other words, are often confounded. 15

It may well be that accounting for the trends of the 1950s requires giving credence to both period and cohort explanations. Easterlin and Elder have tried with some success to place their cohort-based arguments on a firmer empirical foundation than have the advocates of period-based explanations. 16

But I have noted the limitations of trying to explain all of the changes in marriage and childbearing using just the cohort-based approach. Moreover, much of the evidence for Easterlin's model rests on inspection of the relationships among national trends in relative cohort size, birth rates, unemployment rates, and the like. Research on the behavior of individuals over time offers less support for his thesis; one recent study of a group of high school seniors who were followed for several years found little evidence that their income position, relative to their parents' in­come, influenced their timing of marriage and childbearing. 17 In addition, I don't believe we can ignore the many reports of a widespread change in values among adults of all ages in the 1950s. Nor can

15 "Age" explanations constitute a third general class: those that refer to the effects of the aging process. An older population, for example, will produce fewer babies each year than will a younger population. In the case of marriage and divorce since World War II, however, large changes have occurred in the experiences of comparable age groups; married men and women in their twen­ties in 1980 had a much higher probability of divorcing than did married men and women in their twenties in 1960. Therefore, no age explanation can account for more than a small part of the changes in marriage and divorce in recent years.

18 Other cohort-based explanations for postwar changes in family patterns have been proposed recently by Jean Bourgeois­Pichat, "La Baisse Actuelle de la Fecondite en Europe S'Inscrit­elle dans Ie Modele de la Transition Demographique?" Population 34 (March/April 1979):267-306; and Elwood Carlson, "Divorce Rate Fluctuation as a Cohort Phenomenon," Population Studies 33 (Nov. 1979):523-536.

17 Maurice M. MacDonald and Ronald R. Rindfuss, "Earnings, Relative Income, and Family Formation, Part I: Marriage," un­published manuscript, Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980; and Ronald R. Rindfuss and Maurice M. MacDonald, "Earnings, Relative Income, and Family Formation, Part II: Fertility," unpublished manuscript, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980.

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

we overlook the evidence that changes in marriage and childbearing during the 1950s occurred not only among the cohorts born in the 1920s and 1930s but among older Americans as well. The annual rate of childbearing also increased in the 1950s for women who were in their mid- to late thirties or early for­ties. 18 I would argue that both the period- and cohort-based effects were operating and that, in fact, they reinforced each other, thus strengthening the trends of the 1950s. The childhood and adolescent experiences of many of the men and women born in the 1920s predisposed them to place a greater value on home and family and, possibly, a lower value on material comforts; when the general shift in values about family life occurred in the 1950s, they may have been in the vanguard. Moreover, the small size of the cohorts of the 1920s and 1930s worked to their ad­vantage during the postwar economic boom. Their. relatively favorable economic situation, in turn, may have made it easier for them to achieve the kind of family life they desired.

From all of the studies reviewed here, one gains the impression that the lives of the men and women born in the 1920s and 1930s were shaped by a series of events beyond their control. The depression brought the older among them economic hardship as chil­dren, but it also provided many with experiences that proved valuable later in life. For instance, Elder found evidence that middle-class men from deprived families were more successful in their careers than were middle-class men from nondeprived homes. After the war, in which many of the men fought, and some died, came the postwar economic boom, which finally brought a change in these people's luck. It provided the prosperity that allowed them to satisfy their desire for stability at work and at home. One result of this remarkable sequence of events was the trends in marriage, divorce, and childbearing that marked the 1950s. 0

18 Abbott L. Ferriss,lndicattrrs of Trends in the Status of American Women (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), pp. 348-349.

Interest Groups and the Governabilityof European Society

THE MEMBERS OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON WEST­ERN EUROPE are from different countries and disci­plines and are of very diverse methodological and political persuasions. By the early 1970s, we were all experiencing certain common difficulties in carrying out research with the prevailing paradigms. These troubles plagued both those who had been working within the framework of assumptions dominant in American social science of the 1960s and those working along lines suggested by Marxist social analysis.

* The author is a professor of political science at the Massachu­setts Institute of Technology. This article is based upon her "In­troduction" to Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Ctrrporatism, and the Transftrrmation of Politics, edited by Suzanne Berger (Cambridge University Press, 1981). Copyright © by the Cambridge University Press. The book is a collection of essays that grew out of discussions at meetings of the Joint Committee on Western Europe, sponsored by the Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, and is the first collective product of the committee. In addition to the editor, the contributors to the

DECEMBER 1981

by Suzanne Berger*

Societal problems and the problems of social science

The catalyst for the recognition of these theoretical problems was undoubtedly the series of social, eco­nomic, and political shocks experienced by all ad­vanced industrial capitalist nations from the end of the 1960s. As a result of this unanticipated break in a postwar period characterized by economic growth, prosperity, and low levels of social tension, the fun­damental assumptions on which Western industrial

volume are Gerald D. Feldman, University of California, Berke- ' ley; Gudmund Hernes, University of Bergen; John T.S. Keeler, University of Washington; Jurgen Kocka, University of Bielefeld; JuanJ. Linz, Yale University; Charles S. Maier, Harvard Univer­sity; Claus Offe, University of Bielefeld; Alessandro Pizzorno, Harvard University; Charles F. Sabel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michele Salvati, University of Modena; Phillippe C. Schmitter, University of Chicago; and Arne Selvik, Institute of Industrial Relations (Bergen).

63

societies had lived for 25 years were suddenly called into question. The energy crisis, the end of rapid growth, inflation, high unemployment, and rising so­cial conflict challenged common conceptions of how industrial societies operated and of how they were evolving. The inability of the social sciences to illumi­nate these new realities suggested the weakness of current theories.

One explanation for this difficulty is that the ex­planatory power of the theories was limited to a spe­cific and rather brief historical period: the postwar years. But another view is that we had all along been seriously mistaken in our analyses of the advanced industrial countries. As Hernes put it at an early meeting of the committee: "We need to confront both a crisis in sociology and a sociology of crisis."

The difficulties that individual committee members faced in their research reopened debate on three great themes: the characteristics of the societies of advanced industrial, capitalist countries; the nature and role of the state in these countries; and the course of the trajectory along which these societies are mov­ing. The committee began general discussion of these issues and of alternative paradigms for conceptualiz­ing them in 1975 and soon came to focus on interest groups.

Interest groups

There are several reasons why interest groups moved to the center of the committee's concerns. First, theory on the nature and role of groups that mediate between society and state has been critical to the development of several of the social sciences. In American political science, for example, debate over interest groups, pluralism, and sovereignty marks the beginnings of the modern discipline. Even in fields like economics, in which group theory has not been central, there have been recent attempts to append some account of the presence and significance of or­ganized interests to the basic models of the discipline. And the problems of integrating these patches into more systematic views have become more and more vexing. Given the centrality or, at least, the troublesomeness, of interest groups in contemporary social science, it was hardly surprising that every member of the committee had carried out research on some aspect or another of interest groups. The group's discussions pushed members to consider the theoretical implications of the difficulties they had experienced in accounting for the results of empirical research with the old paradigms of their disciplines. These essays thus reflect new questions posed to re-64

search that was initiated or even substantially com­pleted before the group was constituted.

"Ungovernability," inflation, and stagnation

It was, however, not only the theoretical centrality of groups that mediate between society and state that turned discussion to the representation of interests; it was also the apparent relevance of these groups for understanding major new problems of "ungov­ernability," inflation, and economic stagnation. As Schmitter explains in his essay, organized groups in industrial societies have recently been singled out as the principal source of the declining authority of gov­ernment as well as of the increasingly heavy burden of demands placed on it. Even those who reject this account of the apparent breakdown in governmental authority have to explain how transformations in the groups that mediate between society and the state affect the capabilities of government and the nature and intensity of social demands on government.

Co~ncil Committee on Comparative Politics

Nothing makes clearer how far-reaching the impli­cations of the views of interest groups that emerge from this collection of essays are for understanding advanced industrial states than a comparison of this effort with one carried out 20 years ago--also under the aegis of the Council. At a 1957 research planning meeting of the Council's Committee on Comparative Politics (1954-1972), the group decided on an inves­tigation of the ways in which interests are articulated, aggregated, transmitted to government, and translated into policy in various countries. In that project, as in ours, the purpose of looking at interest groups was to approach broader issues about societal functioning and change.

Interest groups as reflections of society

The view of society that emerges from these studies of the late 1950s and early 1960s is one in which social structures and the economic system give rise to de­mands and interests. Interest groups form as spon­taneous emanations of society. The boundaries be­tween them correspond to what may be regarded as the "natural" divisions of society, that is, those gener­ated by different roles in the economy and statuses in society. The claims that these groups make are, in Gabriel Almond's terms, the "raw materials" or "un­aggregated demands" which-at least in the Anglo-

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

Saxon democracies that provide the model for the theory-are then "processed" or aggregated by politi­cal parties. In "raw form," the interests present and organized in societies at the same stage of develop­ment are the same. Where the interest group's system is not independent of the political party system, the demands expressed by a socioeconomic group may be quite different from those expressed by the same groups elsewhere, for the parties have distorted them. But in the most highly developed systems, that is, in the United States and Britain, the two stages of the political process remain distinct, and organized groups autonomously express the interests of society. Their demands were conceived in these earlier dis­cussions as the essentially un mediated demands of socioeconomic groups themselves. The earlier an­swer then to the questions of why different interests are present and organized in various societies and of why from country to country the same groups may conceive their interests quite differently lies in the greater or lesser autonomy of interest groups from parties and not in the process of interest formation itself.

In this view, the various routes that Western na­tions followed to modernization and industrialization-the specificities of national traditions and values-have not created different interests from society to society. Rather, the interests of industrial societies at the same stage of develop­ment differ mainly insofar as conditions in som~ countries made it possible for interests to emerge and organize freely and in other countries to subordinate interest group formation to ideological politics, thereby deforming the expression of the pragmatic needs, the "real" interests, of society.

The origins of interest group formation

In contrast to this earlier view, the common points of departure of the essays in the new volume are the 'observation that societies contain an indefinite number of potential interests and the question of which interests organize in a given society in a par­ticular period. None of the contributions argues that socioeconomic and market factors by themselves de­termine the composition, forms, or modes of opera­tion of a system of representation. Although all the authors accord significant weight to such factors, each essay relies on some other line(s) of explanation to account for the fact that in societies with basically the same set of "raw" materials, different patterns of interest group organization exist.

DECEMBER 1981

Social and economic determination of group formation

There is broad agreement among the authors on the ways in which socioeconomic structures shape interests. First, the division of labor and certain other "natural" social divisions-ethnic, religious, genera­tional, and so forth-create as many points of op­portunity around which groups may organize. These points of opportunity reflect the location and clus­tering of social, economic, and political resources, which are very unevenly distributed across society. As individuals or groups seek to maintain or improve their position relative to others, they locate them­selves with reference to these clusters of resources. The principal means of improving one's lot in this process is to exploit those resources of which one has the most or to which one has the easiest access. "Interests," then, are determined by the structures of industrial societies to the extent that their technologies, forms of ownership, labor markets, and social systems create particular clusters and distribu­tions of resources that recur from society to society, making it equally rewarding in all these societies for groups to coalesce at the same locations on the social map.

This formulation, however, still leaves interests un­determined in two ways. First, socioeconomic location does not provide an unequivocal answer to an indi­vidual's (or group's) problem of identity. How does the man who owns a small farm and grows grapes in Corsica locate himself on the map of the distribution of resources and figure out which group he should join to advance his fortunes? Each of his coordinates suggests a different interpretation of his situation, that is, a possible and alternative formulation of his interests. How he defines himself will determine which group(s) he joins: a specialized winegrowers' association or a farmers' union or a Corsican re­gionalist movement or a national political party? Each of these organizations has a particular conception of the interest it defends and a different strategy. Thus, the winegrowers' association argues that winegrowers' fortunes are determined by the market for wine, competition from Third World producers, the prices of inputs, distribution networks, and so forth. A winegrower has, therefore, more in common with another winegrower anywhere in France or the European community than with anyone else. And the right strategies for collective action are lobbying the bureaucracy and parliament in Paris and Brussels. The Corsican regionalist movement argues that every Corsican-winegrower or shopkeeper or worker or

65

industrialist-has problems that stem from one and the same cause: living in a region with a peripheral and colonized position in the nation. Therefore, a Corsican has more in common with another Corsican than with anyone in his own trade or class elsewhere in the country; and the only real solutions are re­gional development, political autonomy, and so forth. The contradictions between the conceptions of inter­est and the strategies of alliances promoted by these two organizations are so great that although the Cor­sican winegrower is a potential candidate for any as­sociation, he could hardly be an active participant in more than one.

The essays in the volume go beyond the partial explanation that socioeconomic structures provide to analyze (1) the specificities of national historical expe­rience, (2) the role of the state, and (3) the instabilities inherent in the operation of a representational sys­tem. Individual essays emphasize one or another of these variables, but the overall sense of the volume is that socioeconomic structures, history, politics, and organizational transformation provide complemen­tary accounts of the process of interest formation and not rival and mutually exclusive theories.

National historical experience

Compared to the earlier literature, these essays re­flect a far greater concern with history. The chapters by Maier, Pizzorno, and Schmitter develop general theories of the transformation of representational systems from the beginnings of industrialization to the present and distinguish several phases within this period. Their conceptualizations vary considerably, but each identifies an "initial" phase of estate repre­sentation in which interests coincide with the social system, a "liberal parenthesis" in which representa­tion was organized on an individual basis and associa­tion was entirely voluntary, hence fragmented and unstable; then, finally, a period from the end of the 19th century to the present, characterized by the presence of mass parties and by stable organized interest groups with multiple objectives, professional leaders, and bureaucracies. The most significant dif­ferences · among the authors lie in their charac­terizations I)f the latter period, principally in the de­bate over whether the period as a whole is a pluralist one in whIch relationships among parties and orga­nized interests change, but within stable parameters, or whether a fundamental discontinuity separates a period characterized by a voluntaristic pluralist mode of association that ends around World War I from a 66

corporatist pattern of interest formation that prevails in most of the advanced industrial societies today.

The essays stress not only the common trajectories of industrial societies but also the significance of the specificities of national experience for interest group formation. The great transformations that industri­alization and democratization brought about in 19th century Europe left in place societies which, although similar in their socioeconomic systems and in the ac­cess to full citizenship of all the male population, were still substantially different. As the chapters by Feldman, Kocka, and Maier indicate, the paths to modernity in European societies retained and rein­forced important elements of the past; the pattern of incorporation and elimination-as well as the original stock of materials-varies considerably from country to country. In Germany, for example, the preserva­tion of a powerful aristocratic landed elite, the vitality of feudal values, and the precocious flourishing of the bureaucracy created a template for interest organiza­tion very different from the one that shaped groups elsewhere. Thus, as Kocka's chapter shows, the "feudal-bureaucratic" nexus in Germany not only shaped the forms of white-collar organization and aspirations; it in fact created a white-collar class, carving a social category with sharply defined boundaries out of a mass of socioeconomic materials that elsewhere produced white-collar groups that were broader and more porous.

The role of the state

Among the specificities of national experience that have shaped interest group formation, one stands out in the essays as particularly important: the timing and characteristics of state intervention. The differences among national patterns of interest organization re­flect significant variations in the substance of social and economic programs and in the sequence of the adoption of policies. In response to new policies, groups organize to protect themselves against the state or against other groups. They organize as well to gain access to new advantages that require lobbying or even direct participation in decision making. The appearance of new groups in response to legislation or decrees stimulates further proliferation, as still other groups form in imitation of or reaction against the new organizations.

The 1950s and 1960s literature on interest groups also stressed the impact of government on interest groups; the notion, however, was that different policies, personnel, and channels of access would af-

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

fect organizational forms and strategies. In the pres­ent essays, although the issue of "packaging" or forms is taken up, the claim is a stronger one: that the state has a significant part in shaping the content and definition of interest itself-not only organizational tactics and strategies. Offe, for example, defines two categories of interest groups: class organizations and "policy takers," the latter a set of groups stimulated into formation by their stake in the decisions and policies of a national government.

In addition to the impact of the state through the content and sequence of its policies, the essays con­sider two other ways in which the state shapes inter­ests: through the incentives that particular regime types provide for particular patterns of organization and through the authoritative attribution of public status to interest groups, that is, through the incen­tives for corporatism.

There is substantial disagreement among the au­thors on the origins of corporatism, as there is in the considerable literature that has appeared on this topic in the past decade. Pizzorno and Schmitter develop theories of corporatism very different from Offe's. They see the origins of corporatism in liberal demo­cratic countries as deriving from changes in society or from internal transformation of the system of representation--corporatism from below. Thus, Schmitter writes of "societal corporatism" as emerg­ing "largely but not exclusively, as the result of inter­associational demands and intraorganizational processes--from below, so to speak, rather than from a conscious effort by those in power to mold the type of interest intermediation system." In contrast, Offe argues that the initiative and incentive for the estab­lishment of corporatist arrangements lie with the state.

The impact of representational systems

The authors depart from work on interest groups of 20 years ago in their perspective on the relation­ship between interest group systems and political and economic stability. The earlier literature analyzed pluralism as a system of representation that sup­ported political legitimacy and stability by fragment­ing conflicts into specific, pragmatic, hence negotiable differences of interest. Over the past decade, this optimism h~ been greatly eroded by reflections from all points of the political spectrum on the sources of the "ungovernability" of advanced industrial societies. The thrust of these arguments has been that the effec­tive enfranchisement of previously excluded seg-

DECEMBER 1981

ments of society has increased political participation, multiplied the number of organizations competing in the pluralist system, and increased the volume of de­mand beyond any level that government can satisfy. The dynamics of political systems in which parties regularly outbid each other in electoral promises feed a process of escalating interest group demands; and no effective equilibrating mechanisms come into play. Governments buy time with the ever softer currency of inflation and the potentially explosive recourse to unemployment.

The essays accept these conclusions, in part at least; they see pluralism as an unstable system of interest representation, with a destabilizing impact on politics and the economy. But here the analyses that point to these conclusions focus not on the volume of de­mands generated by pluralism but on the impact of its operating modes on the legitimacy and effectiveness of the political system.

The mechanisms of pluralism-intergroup compe­tition and bargaining; voluntary membership, hence weak organizational control over members; multiple and overlapping organizational jurisdictions; the nar­row definition of group goals; the exclusion from the system of those with too few resources to reach the organizational threshold-all of these allow a wide representation of interests and opinions, but at a price. The costs are of two kinds: those that diminish the political system's efficiency-its capacity for iden­tifying and ranking problems and for making and im­plementing policy; and those that dimimish its legitimacy-the extent to which its personnel and policies are perceived as operating for the public good and not only for private or sectoral or class advantage. The advantages of pluralism are thus most evident (and its characteristic dysfunctions are least damaging) in states that are very affluent and relatively noninterventionist, for in these cases the "waste" and friction of pluralist modes of representa­tion matter less. Similarly, pluralism works well in political systems in which consensus depends on common and deeply rooted political beliefs and not primarily on assessment of the system's performance and output. Although the delegitimating effects of pluralism may then erode confidence in particular interest organizations or particular representatives, the legitimacy of the state is not sapped. In sum, pluralism may be reasonably compatible with political stability as long as it is not required to add to the state's capabilities or to its general popular accep­tance.

Viewed from this perspective, democratization and higher levels of political participation make pluralism

67

increasingly less workable not so much by adding to the load of demands to be processed as by changing the character of the issues at stake in politics. The new goods demanded may be of a kind that pluralist sys­tems of interest representation have never provided. Some of the authors in the volume argue that insofar as these new demands require more social and eco­nomic coordination to augment the system's regula­tive capabilities, corporatism is more compatible with "governability" than pluralism.

But it may be, as others argue, that what lies at the origin of the current crisis is an erosion of old political values and beliefs and that no measures to increase the efficiency of the system can compensate for this loss-indeed, that the effectiveness of the state cannot be increased precisely because of a decline in political legitimacy. For those who identify the source of the "ungovernability'" of advanced industrial states in this way, corporatism appears to be a solution that is irrel­evant or perhaps even more destabilizing than pluralism. Irrelevant, because in countries where there are major challenges to the legitimacy of the political system, corporatism is largely absent. Corpo-

ratism flourishes in the Social Democratic regimes of Scandinavia and cannot get a foothold in France or Italy. (Indeed, as pointed out by Salvati, in France once the legitimacy of the state had been reinforced by triumphant elections, it was quite possible to re­store efficiency without any corporatism; whereas in Italy, in the absence of any such increment of political authority, it was impossible to make the system more effective-despite the considerable willingness of unions and employers to move to quasi-corporatist modes of bargaining.) Finally, corporatism may be destabilizing insofar as it is likely to generate conflicts that exacerbate problems of legitimacy. Precisely those features of corporatism that stabilize representation-the organizational monopolies, the clearly defined jurisdictions, the exercise of public authority by private groups, the possibilities for orga­nizational control of members, the bureaucratization of interest groups-all widen the gap and harden the lines that separate the represented from the ex­cluded. For the latter, the state appears as the prop­erty of particular interests and not as the agent of the general interest. 0

Conference of Fellows in Employment and Training

ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1981, THE COUNCIL sponsored a conference in Washington of recent recipients of its fellowships in employment and training. These fel­lowships support the dissertation research of gradu­ate students who have completed all requirements for the doctoral degree except for the dissertation, or who will have met these requirements before the award becomes effective. Recipients in recent years have earned degrees in such fields as economics, educa­tion, political science, psychology, and sociology. The program is supported by funds provided by the U.S. Department of Labor.

* The author, a political scientist, serves as staff to the Council's Committee on Dissertation Fellowships in Employment and Training. He is also a staff member of the Council's Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators, 1755 Massachu­setts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

68

by Robert W. Pearson*

Present at the conference, in addition to the fel­lows, were guests from the federal government, from universities, and from other organizations with an interest in employment and training research.

The purpose of the conference was to provide an opportunity for fellows to discuss issues affecting em­ployment and training policy, to meet with people who influence employment and training policies, and to gain an appreciation of the wider significance of the research in which they are engaged. Presentations were made by William A. Niskanen, Council of Eco­nomic Advisers; Greg Duncan, University of Michi­gan; Michael Borus, Ohio State University; John T. Dunlop, Harvard University; Robert Schrank, Ford Foundation; and Robert L. Kahn, University of Michi­gan. Fred Romero of the Employment and Training Administration and Robert Parke of the Council wel­comed fellowship recipients and guests to the confer-

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

ence. Hylan Lewis, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Sar A. Levitan, George Washington University, chaired panels of fellows who described their dissertation research.

The Reagan Administration and employment

Conference participants first heard a presentation by Mr. Niskanen, a member of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, on the implications of the Reagan Administration's economic policy for em­ployment and unemployment in the decade ahead. In the course of introducing Mr. Niskanen, Kenneth Prewitt, president of the Council, pointed out the special nature of the fellows in attendance. He noted that this very promising group of young scholars had entered a new phase of their careers. Previously, their work had been reviewed and certified by their own university faculty; now, in order to become fellows of this program, their work had been reviewed by a national committee on scholars appointed specifically for this purpose. The present conference of fellows, Mr. Prewitt noted, reflects this national certification.

Mr. Niskanen devoted his talk to the fellows and guests to a description of three mechanisms that the Administration believes will foster changes in em­ployment levels and unemployment rates in the fu­ture: fundamental demographic changes, adminis­trative policies specifically intended to affect em­ployment and unemployment, and changes in the tax code. Changes in the age structure of the American public are expected to affect employment indepen­dently of the direct and indirect consequences of public policy. For example, the decline in the size of the 18-21 year old population will of course reduce the number of employed youth in this age group; it will also reduce the rates of unemployment for this age group, since there will be less competition among those seeking employment. An increase in the popu­lation over 65 is expected, under existing policies, to increase the costs of transfer payments (e.g., retire­ment benefits) and to contribute to the decline in the average labor force participation rate of this age group.

The economic assumptions of the Administration concerning the general growth of the economy were described by Mr. Niskanen more as targets than as forecasts. In the 1981 midyear budget review of the current administration, real GNP was targeted to grow at 2.5 per cent in 1981 and 4 to 5 per cent in the years 1982 to 1986. Unemployment in the fourth quarter of this year at that time was expected to be 7.7 per cent and to decline to 7 per cent in 1982,6.2 per DECEMBER 1981

cent in 1984, and 5.4 per cent in 1986. Largely be­cause of changes in the age structure of the American population, unemployment rates for the 1980s were expected to average 5.5 per cent.

Mr. Niskanen then described current and proposed policies and programs of the Administration that will affect-both directly and indirectly-the future level and rates of employment and unemployment in the United States. A reduction in unemployment bene­fits, for example, is expected to reduce the number of claimants to such benefits and thereby encourage people to return to work. The elimination of the national extended benefit trigger (i.e., a program that extends an extra thirteen weeks of benefits to the unemployed of a particular region when the national unemployment rate is high) is likely to reduce the role of the federal government in the labor market with corresponding short-term consequences for unem­ployment rates. And approximately 300,000 public service jobs are to be eliminated because they do not appear to help people find unsubsidized work, al­though the expectation of the Administration is for those immediately affected by these cuts to obtain employment in the private sector.

Changes in taxes will also affect employment in the decade ahead. An extention of targeted job tax cred­its (i.e., tax incentives for employers to hire less skilled workers for a particular set of jobs) will help increase employment of low-skill groups in the private sector. And the elimination of the "marriage penalty" will reduce the incentives for women to leave the labor force as they reach childbearing age.

The Administration expects real wages to increase in the 1980s, reversing the trends of the late 1970s. Returns to employment in the private sector are ex­pected to increase at the same time that attempts are made to reduce federal employment and the number of people receiving welfare benefits. Budget cuts are expected to affect the composition of the labor force, whereas tax cuts are more likely to affect the level of employment.

Use of panel studies

Following a discussion of Mr. Niskanen's remarks, there was a discussion of research designs in the em­ployment and training field; in particular, of the use of panel studies in the analysis of the dynamics of social and economic behavior. Ronald P. Abeles, Na­tional Institute on Aging, chaired a discussion on the results and promise of two major panel studies: the Youth Panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of

69

Labor Market Experience (NLS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Michael Borus, Ohio State University, described the breadth of both sam­ple and subject matter of the NLS, and noted some of the results from its initial analysis. For example, in 1979, 70 per cent of all 1~21 year olds were in the labor force during periods other than summer; 25 per cent of this age group worked the entire year. Sixty per cent of all high school youth were in the labor force, and the NLS recorded 1.25 million more unemployed youth than did the Current Population Survey (CPS)-a survey that provides the nation's of­ficial statistics on monthly labor force participation (i.e., the number of people in and out of the work force and the number of unemployed). According to the NLS, differences in the level of black and white youth unemployment appear not to be related to differences in aspiration, willingness to work, or at­tempts to find a job. On the contrary, black youth report being more willing than white and Hispanic youth to accept a job at a given wage rate.

Greg Duncan, University of Michigan, described the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), now in its 14th year of data collection at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. A great deal of analysis remains to be conducted and, to date, most analysis of the PSID has not drawn on the conceptual and analytic promise of its panel design for the study of the dynamics of change. Mr. Duncan pointed out that this is especially unfortunate inasmuch as the picture of change or stability one gets from repeated cross-sectional designs can be misleading. For exam­ple, in the 1960s, approximately 20 per cent of all families in the United States were classified as falling below the poverty line. In 1970, the proportion dropped to 10 per cent; subsequently, it has remained at that level. The inference that some people draw from this level is that there is a fairly substantial proportion of "hard core" poor in the United States--although there is some rotation in and out of the poor popUlation each year. Those who draw in­ferences about the dynamics of poverty from a series of snapshots of America's economic conditions often claim that the economic conditions of poor families tend not to change over time: the poor tend to remain poor for an extended period of time. The PSID paints a considerably different picture of the dynamics of change in poverty. Only half of the people classified as poor in any year during the 1970s were poor during the following year. Conversely, as much as one-fourth of the entire population lived in a "poor" family during at least one year during the decade.

70

Understanding changing patterns of welfare use through longitudinal panel designs provides another example of the inappropriateness of conclusions abou t change which are based on cross-sectional re­search designs. It is a widely shared belief that de­pendence on welfare is passed on from generation to generation; the idea of a "culture of poverty" con­tributes to the stereotype of welfare dependency. The growth of case loans and expenditures for social wel­fare programs are interpreted as indicators of the pernicious effects of this dependency. But the un­derlying assumption of this conclusion is that there is no movement onto or off the welfare role. Again, the PSID paints a different portrait.

Approximately 10 per cent of all American families received welfare payments during any year in the 1970s, and nearly one-quarter of all families received those benefits at least one year during the decade. But only 1 to 2 per cent of all families were persistently dependent on welfare throughout the decade. Most recipients of benefits receive payments for a short period of time, usually following a major disruptive event in their lives (e.g., divorce, death of a family member, the loss of a job) and stop receiving benefits soon after they adjust to these changes (e.g., find an­other job or remarry).

Perspectives on scholarship in economics

Burt S. Barnow, U.S. Department of Labor, intro­duced John T. Dunlop, Harvard University, who spoke to the conference about the field of economics and the need for young scholars to turn to subjects with perspectives that current scholarship too often ignores. For example, our understanding of eco­nomic sectors is at least as important as our under­standing of more aggregate economic units such as the nation. Mr. Dunlop expressed the view that the quest to understand institutions is as important as the acquisition of technical and mathematical proficiency, and that young researchers should try to understand political, as well as economic, forces at work in society. Scholars should focus on the art of the possible as well as on the world of elegant theoretical models of social and economic behavior. Furthermore, scholars should recognize that the nation's problems are in­ternational in scope and that there are few things one can accomplish through prescription and no end to the things one can accomplish through persuasion. Mr. Dunlop also asserted that economists should rec­ognize that a number of important questions are not

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

well understood in a framework of markets; the labor market is a special kind of market in which problems are often resolved through negotiation.

Panel presentations by fellows

Panels composed of Council fellows in employment and training presented the findings of their disserta­tion research. The first panel, on groups with special employment problems, was chaired by Hylan Lewis, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Ruth Milkman, a fellowship recipient from the University of California, Berkeley, began by describing her re­search on the dynamics of job segregation by sex in the automobile, electrical, and steel industries in the 19~Os. Marilyn K. Spencer, from the University of Arizona, spoke about her research on how Hispanics seek jobs and what wages they earn when they find them. Abdelmagid M. Mazen, Purdue University School of Management, described research in prog­ress on the vocational preferences of women cur­rently employed in traditionally male occupations and Lisa Marie Ehrlich of the University of Pennsylvania discussed fertility behavior and labor force and occu­pational choice based on evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women. The second panel of fellows, chaired by Sar A. Levitan, George Washington University, was on the topic of labor markets. Kathryn L. Shaw of Harvard University dis­cussed the income effects of occupational change; Harry J. Holzer of Harvard University discussed the determinants of the duration of black youth unem­ployment; Stephen M. Colarelli from New York Uni­versity discussed his research on methods of acquir­ing job information and subsequent reactions to the job; and Patricia Gwartney-Gibbs of the University of Mi~higan discussed her work on married women's work intermittency.

DECEMBER 1981

Worker participation and productivity

The final session of the conference, chaired by Paula E. Stephan, Georgia State University, ad­dressed the role of worker participation in promoting productivity in the United States. Robert Shrank, Ford Foundation, noted that the decline in the rate of productivity in the United States is more appropri­atel~ attributed to a lack of investment in capital eqUIpment, the cost of raw materials, the failure of the market, and the decline in the quality of products than to an absence of worker participation in the fi~m's decis~on-making process. It should be recog­nized, he SaId, that schemes for increasing the role of workers in the decision-making process involve ele­ments of paternalism which the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s struggled to eliminate by estab­lishing contractual agreements that enumerated the rights and privileges of both workers and manage­ment. Robert L. Kahn, University of Michigan, briefly summarized the conclusions of research on worker ~articipation. Workers want to participate in deci­sIOns that affect them. Participation is associated with worker satisfaction and this relationship differs ac­~ording to the personality of the worker. Participation IS related to the effectiveness of the group or unit, and the quality of decisions arrived at by groups is superior to those decisions arrived at individually-at least insofar as laboratory studies have been able to study decision making.

Other research has shown that participation is pos­itively related to the implementation of a decision, but participation takes time. Its benefits are not cost-free and the time required to arrive at a decision increases with the size of the group involved in making it. In conclusion, Mr. Kahn observed that, in practice, worker participation schemes in the United States are often restricted to trivial decisions (e.g., where the company picnic is to be held) or involve false or token participation on real issues.

The conference succeeded in introducing the fel­lows to each other, to some leaders in the field, and to new aspects of the field itself. It is planned to hold a sim.il~r conference next year for the new fellowship reCIpIents. 0

71

Social Trends in the United States

OVER 50 YEARS AGO, Herbert Hoover established the President's Research Committee on Social Trends to study social changes. The committee's report, Re­cent Social Trends in the United States, edited by William F. Ogburn and published in 1933, was a landmark in the study of social change and a model for com­municating the results of academic research to the general public.

In the half century since that time, social scientists have collected data on a great variety of statistical time series which measure changes in American society. These data permit tracking, with high standards of reliability, the changing attitudes, behavior, and living conditions of the population. Concurrently, we have developed concepts, such as cohort analysis, and statistical tools, such as methods for the simultaneous analysis of many variables, which greatly increase our ability to make inferences from data. Finally, we have produced a stock of findings, empirical gener­alizations, and theories of society and its changes which guide inquiry and the ordering of observations.

These developments have offered challenges as well as new resources to those who would describe and understand the changes taking place in American society. The accumulated data can be overwhelming, and findings that rely upon new analytical concepts and sophisticated statistical methods can be difficult to communicate even to colleagues.

Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage is the first volume in a series by leading social scientists who will write about continuities and changes in the society in a manner that can be understood by those without advanced technical training. (An excerpt from this book is pub­lished in this issue of/terns, starting on page 57; a brief

* The author, a sociologist, serves as director of the Council's Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. This arti­cle is adapted from pages vii-ix of his "Foreword" to Andrew 1. Cherlin's Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, Massachu­setts: Harvard University Press, 1981), which is the first book in this new Council series. The book is Copyright © 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; this adaptation is pub­lished by permission of the Harvard University Press.

72

Announcing a new series of Council books reporting recent scholarship to the general public

by Robert Parke*

review appears on page 78.) The series, Social Trends in the United States, is designed to present to the general public recent scholarship on and current analyses of topics of broad interest and concern. We hope that our colleagues will find these volumes accu­rate and responsible treatments of topics of scientific as well as public importance.

The series is a project of the Social Science Re­search Council's Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators. The center was established in 1972 with funding from the Division of Social and Economic Science of the National Science Foundation for the purpose of enhancing the contribution of the social sciences to the development of a broad range of indicators of social change in response to demands from the research and policy communities. Staffed by a small group of social scientists, the center operates under the intellectual guidance of the Council's Advi­sory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators: Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Yale University, chairman; Erik Allardt, University of Helsinki; Richard Berk, U ni­versity of California, Santa Barbara; Richard H. Bolt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (retired); Martin H. David, University of Wisconsin; James A. Davis, Harvard University; Gudmund Hernes, Uni­versity of Bergen; Kenneth C. Land, University of Texas; William M. Mason, University of Michigan; John Modell, University of Minnesota; Stephen H. Schneider, National Center for Atmospheric Re­search (Boulder, Colorado); and Nancy B. Tuma, Stanford University.

The concept of this new series was developed by Philip E. Converse, University of Michigan, when he was chairman of the committee from 1975 to 1978. The committee's interest in social reporting and its ideas about this series owe much to Otis Dudley Dun­can, University of Arizona, the first chairman; to Eleanor Bernert Sheldon, formerly president of the Council; and to former members of the committee: Richard A. Easterlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Leo A. Goodman, Robert M. Hauser, Gary C. Koch, Stanley Lebergott, Mancur Olson, Arthur Stinchcombe, Leroy O. Stone, Natalie Rogoff Rams~y, Wolfgang Zapf, and Harriet Zuckerman. 0

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

Current Activities at the Council

Social structure and the life course

The Committee on Life-Course Per­spectives on Human Development seeks to encourage an integrated interdiscipli­nary perspective on the study of human development. A meeting to examine contrasting and complementary perspec­tives on the life course as provided by d:fferent social science disciplines­anthropology, demography, economics, social history, and sociology-was held at the Council on October 1-2,1981. While. the disciplines represented at the meeting differ greatly in their perspectives on the life course, they have in common an em­phasis on explaining life-course decisions and life-course trajectories by social and economic processes, including the op­portunities and constraints created by the social structure. These approaches, there­fore, contrast with the dominant per­spective on life-span human development that comes from cognitive and social psy­chology. Social science disciplines other then psychology tend to see the cognitive and motivational processes that are of concern to psychologists as intervening and mediating variables in life-course events and decisions, and emphasize the social and economic sources of constancy and change over the life course. The mi­croeconomic approach to life-course deci­sions provides, in fact, a direct challenge to the psychological approach by positing a "purposive actor model" with constant tastes and preferences over the life cycle as the basis for generating predictions and explanations of life-cycle processes.

The various social sciences differ both with respect to the topics of analysis in dealing with life-course processes and with respect to modes of explanations. At one extreme, macrosociological ap­proaches emphasize the role of social in­stitutions in defining life-course trajectories as they impose patterned con­straints on individuals' life-course deci­sion making. These constraints limit indi­vidual choice, and in doing so, coordinate the life-course trajectories of individuals. Major theoretical traditions provide dif­ferent explanations for the sources of constraints and opportunities. For exam­ple, a Marxist perspective emphasizes the dominance of one class in society, while a

DECEMBER 1981

functionalist explanation emphasizes the contributions of social institutions to societal maintenance. In contrast, eco­nomic approaches to the life course em­phasize the optimizing and maximizing behavior of individuals in realizing stable preferences. From this perspective, Iife­course decisions are often conceptualized as decisions about various types of time use-for leisure, for work, and so forth. Of particular importance for the timing and sequencing of life-course transitions are the choices between investment and consumption decisions where the finite lifetime of an_ individual imposes a par­ticular age grading on schooling, training, and other human capital investments. The coordination of life-course decisions and the resulting life-course trajectories will in the economic perspective be pro­vided by a market that provides both real and shadow prices and hence imposes opportunity costs on various types of time usage.

The empirical topics of analysis differ among the various social science disci­plines. Sociologists have been occupied with the study of educational and occu­pational career and attainment processes and with the integrational transmission of resources in these areas. Also a concern for the family has been of importance in sociological research. This interest is shared with anthropologists and social historians, especially in the study of his­torical changes in family structure and processes. Demographers, of course, em­phasize the major life-course decisions and events: birth, family formation and dissolution, migration, and death. De­mography has also provided the use of cohort comparisons as a vehicle for the study of historical change in life-course processes. Finally, economics has in par­ticular emphasized life-cycle changes in human capital acquisition and in em­ployment. Also, economic models have been applied to a number of topics in the study of the family.

The several social science approaches to life-course processes have few unifying themes, except, perhaps, for the study of social and economic attainment processes and the study of the family. Important topics for interdisciplinary research from a life-course perspective have received surprisingly little attention. An example is

the impact of government programs, either directly (as in public assistance and pension programs) or indirectly (as in educational programs), on life-course trajectories. A main goal of the confer­ence was to identify such areas of new research and scholarship.

The agenda consisted of the following presentations and discussions: "Institu­tional Representations of the Life Course," presented by John W. Meyer, Stanford University, and discussed by Orville G. Brim,Jr., Foundation for Child Development (New York); "Historical Change in the Life Course," presented by Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michi­gan; "The Impact of Industrialization on Coresidential Processes," presented by David I. Kertzer, Bowdoin College, dis­cussed by Barbara Laslett, University of Southern California; "Decision-Making Over the Life Course from Economic Perspectives," presented by Robert T. Michael, National Opinion Research Center, discussed by Jacob Mincer, Co­lumbia University; and "Political Aliena­tion, Tuberculosis Mortality, Compara­tive Analysis of Human Fertility-and Cohorts," presented by William M. Mason, University of Michigan, discussed by Robert J. Willis, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The meeting was chaired by Aage B. St$rensen, University of Wisconsin, a member of the committee; David L. Featherman, University of Wisconsin, and Walter Muller, University of Mann­heim, led the discussions. Other partici­pants, in addition to members of the committee, were John F. Myles, Carlton University; Harold L. Wilensky, Univer­sity of California, Berkeley; and Viviana A. Zelizer, Columbia University. Bruce Christenson, University of Wisconsin, served as rapporteur.

Members of the committee are Paul B. Baltes (cochairman), Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (Berlin); Glen H. Elder,Jr. (cochairman), Cornell University; Orville G. Brim, Jr., Foundation for Child Development (New York); David L. Featherman, University of Wisconsin; Caleb E. Finch, University of Southern California; George M. Mar­tin, University of Washington; John W. Meyer, Stanford University; Walter Mul­ler, University of Mannheim; Matilda

73

White Riley (adviser), National Institute on Aging; Martin E. P. Seligman, Univer­sity of Pennsylvania; M. Brewster Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz; Aage B. S~rensen, University of Wiscon­sin; and Franz E. Weinert, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research (Munich). Lonnie R. Sherrod is staff to the committee.

The culture of fear The Joint Committee on Latin Ameri­

can Studies initiated a research planning project on the long-term impact of fear and anxiety produced by chronic political violence and repression on individuals and groups within society. Juan Corradi, a sociologist at New York University, was asked by the committee to coordinate a series of seminars on "The Culture of Fear", to which scholars residing primar­ily in New York and neighboring states would be invited.

Mr. Corradi began the series of semi­nars on October 9th by reviewing the ini­tial phases of the project, which was originally co-coordinated by a political scientist, Guillermo O'Donnell, Center for the Study of State and Society (Buenos Aires). Mr. O'Donnell's original proposal was to study how, in those situa­tions in which fear becomes paramount in political transactions, different groups experience social stress. The problem of how people cope with fear has several behavioral and philosophical ramifica­tions which O'Donnell hoped to explore. How do individuals adjust to the im­poverishment of social life, the pervasive­ness of violence and fear, and the disin­tegration of a forum for the exchange of ideas? What are the transactions that take place between the "fear mongers" and their victims? Moreover, how can per­sonal values and integrity be maintained under such conditions? These questions were to open perspectives on the pro­cesses by which individuals and social groups struggle privately or publicly, in­dividually or collectively, not only for their own survival but for the redemo­cratization of society.

After reviewing the original project proposal, Mr. Corradi opened the discus­sion to seminar members to determine their range of research interests and those aspects of the original proposal that participants wished to pursue. Many people expressed the need to study the consciousness and political culture of

74

those who become victims of state ter­rorism and violence. Several participants raised questions about the comparative and historical, class and sexual dimen­sions of fear when an outside force begins to regulate the interaction between an in­dividual and the state according to rules that the individual neither understands, condones, nor shares. It was suggested that comparisons be drawn among several societies in the Southern Cone and/or in Europe, where civil life is (or has been) permeated by fear of state repression. Questions were also raised about the manifestations of fear and the mech­anisms of the "distribution of fear" among members of the middle class as opposed to workers and peasants, who have more often been vulnerable to ran­dom state-perpetuated violence.

The discussion generated two related themes. First, participants raised ques­tions about the social and psychological moment or conditions under which indi­viduals "turn fear around" and take ac­tion to recover their political and civil rights and to resist repressive measures. What are the forms of discourse and the tools of action that people use in different confrontational situations? And in what contexts does individual resistance by members of the middle class turn into mass opposition movements? Second, questions were raised about the mech­anisms and the discourse of state repres­sion and the process of legitimizing new forms of state terrorism. Participants also posed questions about the masking of re­pression and the role of international collaboration (e.g., using the services of U.S advertising firms for image building through the mass media).

Participants in this series of seminars include Maria Helena Moreira Alves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Marcelo Cavarozzi, Yale University; Juan E. Corradi, New York University; Joan Dassin, Fordham University; Ralph Della­Cava, Queens College, City University of New York; Patricia Weiss Fagen, San Jose State College; Richard R. Fagen, Stanford University; Jean Franco, Stan­ford University; Hugo Friihling, Harvard University; Elizabeth Hansen, Rockefel­ler Foundation Fellow; Albert O. Hirschman, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey); Anna Maria Jaguaribe, United Nations Center for Sci­ence and Technology (New York); June C. Nash, Graduate Center, City Univer­sity of New York; Kurt H. Wolff, Bran-

deis University; Victor Zaslavsky, Memo­rial University of Newfoundland; Luisa Valenzuela, New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University; Brooke Larson, staff.

Effects of the Great Depression on Latin America

The Joint Committee on Latin Ameri­can Studies project on the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s on Latin America held the first of two meetings at St. Antony'S College, Oxford, on Septem­ber 21-23, 1981. Rosemary Thorp, St. Antony's College, coordinated a confer­ence of economists who gathered to dis­cuss and reassess earlier interpretations of the impact of the Great Depression on Latin America. In their classic studies of industrialization in Latin America, Celso Furtado and Andre Gunder Frank, for example, argued that the sharp decline in the international prices of primary prod­ucts and the collapse of many Latin American export-oriented economies after 1929 ushered in a period of relative economic isolation from the advanced in­dustrial countries. An acute shortage of foreign exchange provided an incentive for many domestic manufacturers to produce commodities that once were im­ported from Europe and the United States. The purpose of this conference was to test these earlier suppositions about patterns of economic change against empirical case studies of individ­ual countries and to deepen our under­standing of the experiences and economic performances of Latin American nations during the 1930s.

Two principal themes emerged in the discussion. First, participants considered the degree to which national economies achieved industrialization through im­port substitution and examined the ca­pacity of different Latin American economies to recover from the world crisis. For example, a comparative study, "The Effects of the Great Depression on the Economies of Peru and Colombia," by R. Thorp and C. Landono, revealed a sharp contrast in the economic policy and performance of these two nations during the 1930s. In Colombia, the government's countercyclical spending policy en­couraged industrial growth in advance of the upturn in agricultural export prices. Although Colombia had a weaker indus­trial base than Peru during the 1920s, it recovered more rapidly from the world

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

depression in the late 1930s. Peru, on the other hand, essentially let recovery come of its own accord via increased interna­tional prices and it experienced a slow growth of industry and little impon sub­stitution. Drawing on other studies of in­dividual countries, participants compared the fiscal and monetary policies of gov­ernments that encouraged or stifled i m port-su bstitu tion i nd ustrialization. They also discussed the importance of examining diverse economic perfor­mances in the 1920s (e.g., the growth or absence of an industrial base, patterns of export economies, and the size and inte­gration of domestic markets) to explain why only some countries were capable of recovery in advance of and independent of world economic recovery. Some par­ticipants, however, underlined the need to explore more fully the constellation of social and political forces behind eco­nomic policy decisions and performances. This issue proved to be especially impor­tant in the case of postrevolutionary Mexico, where the Great Depression coincided with but did not precipitate major economic reforms.

Participants also analyzed the burdens and costs of the economic crisis in dif­ferent countries. Even in those countries which substituted imports with home manufacturers in the late 1930s, there was a time lag after the collapse of the world market. Questions were raised about the immediate impact of this col­lapse on savings and investment in dif­ferent nations and about the degree to which subsidiary firms of multinational corporations in certain Latin American countries absorbed some of the shock of the Depression. Participants also dis­cussed real wage trends and the heavier economic burden that workers and/or peasants were forced to bear in the af­termath of the crisis.

By the end of conference, it was clear that the participants were not overturn­ing earlier interpretations of industri­alization in Latin America, but rather were deepening our understanding of the complexities and unevenness of that pro­cess through comparative analysis. Par­ticipants will now revise their essays to address more directly the central themes that emerged from three days of discus­sion. A second meeting will be held at the Congress of Americanists in Manchester, England, on September 5-10, 1982.

Scholars who were invited to present papers included Marcelo Abreu, Federal

DECEMBER 1981

University of Rio de Janeiro; Victor Bulmer Thomas, University of London; Enrique Cardenas, Yale University; Car­los Diaz Alejandro, Yale University; Juan Jose Eschavarria, Fedesarollo (Bogota); Albert Fishlow, Yale University; E.V.K. Fitzgerald, Institute of Social Studies

. (The Hague); Jorge Fodor, Modena Uni­versity; Oscar Munoz, Corporacion de Investigaciones Economicas para Latinoamerica (CIEPLAN), Santiago; Jose Antonio Ocampo, Centro de Es­tudios Sobre Desarrollo Economico (CEDE), University of the Andes; Arturo O'Connell, Instituto Di Tella (Buenos Aires); Gabriel Palma, University of Cambridge; Rosemary Thorp, University of Oxford; Eugenio Tovzar, Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia Economicas (CIDE), Mexico City; and Flavio Ver­siani, University of Brasilia.

Biosocial perspectives on par~mt behavior

The committee held its first meeting on October 20-21, 1981, in New York, to organize a two-year program to examine developmental interactions of parents and offspring, employing cross-cultural and cross-species comparisons. A confer­ence on school-age pregnancies and par­enthood was scheduled for May 24-26, 1982, in order to bring together findings and theory on this topic from cross­cultural studies, laboratory and field ani­mal research, historical and evolutionary approaches, and human developmental studies; by so doing, the conference will explore the many different facets of a very complex phenomenon. Consid­erations from the different perspectives represented at the meeting will include the interaction of gynecological and chronological age; the interrelationship between school-age parental behavior and the biological, cognitive, and social developments of adolescence; the devel­opmental consequences for infant and parent of early ("off-time") parenthood and their interaction with the social and economic context. This broad, multilevel, interdisciplinary approach should con­tribute to an understanding of the recent increase in school-age pregnancies in the U.S. and of consequences for the school­age parent and hislher child's develop­ment.

In addition to the committee, Michael E. Lamb, University of Utah, participated

Inventory of longitudinal studies of middle

and old age The Committee on Life-Course Per­

spectives on Human Development has sponsored the collection of an inven­tory of longitudinal studies of middle and old age. (A companion inventory of longitudinal studies of childhood is in preparation.) Information on 77 studies, carried out both in the United States and abroad, is summarized in a booklet published and distributed by the Council. To obtain a copy, write Lonnie R. Sherrod at the Council, en-. closing a check or money order for $2.00 to the Council to cover postage and handling.

in the committee's first meeting. The committee members are Jane B. Lancas­ter, chairman, University of Oklahoma; Richard J. Gelles, University of Rhode Island; Kathleen R. Gibson, University of Texas, Houston; Beatrix A. Hamburg, Children's Hospital Medical Center (Boston); David A. Hamburg, Harvard University; Melvin J. Konner, Harvard University; and Charles M. Super, Har­vard School of Public Health and Judge Baker Guidance Clinic (Boston). Lonnie R. Sherrod serves as staff.

Indicators of organizational change

The Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators sponsored a confer­ence on December 3-4, 1981, in Wash­ington to explore indicators of organi­zational change. The conference, orga­nized by Gudmund Hernes, University of Bergen, and AlbertJ. Reiss, Jr., Yale Uni­versity, and supported by a grant from the Division of Social and Economic Science, National Science Foundation, examined organizations as actors in social change, considered appropriate units 'of analysis, and reviewed time series measures that could prove useful in research.

The papers presented included "Ori­gins of Organizational Forms: Births, Deaths, and Transformations," by How­ard Aldrich and Donna Fish, Cornell University; "Inutilities of Utilitarian Indi­cators for Measuring Change in Collec-

75

tivities," by Albert D. Biderman, Bureau of Social Science Research (Washington, D.C.); "A Theoretical Framework for Social Indicators of Organizational Change," by James S. Coleman, Univer­sity of Chicago; "Life Cycle Fluctuations in Organizational Birth and Death Rates," by John Freeman, University of Califor­nia, Berkeley, and Michael Hannan, Stan­ford University; "Changes in the Re­lationship Between Parliament and Bu­reaucracy in Norway," by Mr. Hernes; "The Changing Relationship Between Individuals and Work," by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Yale University; "Interfaces," by Harrison C. White, Harvard University; and "Class and Organizational Indica­tors," by Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin.

Participants included Murray Aborn, National Science Foundation; Richard Berk, University of California, Santa Barbara; Peter Carrington, University of Toronto; Shirley Kallek, U.S. Bureau of the Census; Kenneth C. Land, University of Texas; Richard Larson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bruce Mayhew, University of South Carolina; Marshall Meyer, University of California, River­side; Richard Nelson, Yale University; Mancur Olson, University of Maryland; Robert Parke, Social Science Research Council; John Padgett, University of Chicago; Robert Peabody, The Johns Hopkins University; Robert W. Pearson, Social Science Research Council; Henry Peskin, Resources for the Future (Wash­ington, D.C.); Richard C. Rockwell, Social Science Research Council; John Sprague, Washington University; James R. Wetzel, U.S. Bureau of the Census; and Oliver Williamson, University of Pennsylvania.

The conference identified five con­ceptual frameworks as having some promise as guides to data collection, analysis, and interpretation. These are (1) traditional organizational theory and re­lated work in organizational psychology and operations research; (2) organi­zational ecology models, which take a view of the birth, growth, and death of organizations as processes of natural selection; (3) models that view organi­zations as sites for individual and collec­tive action; (4) mathematical models which relate individual and organi­zational action and try to encompass con­cepts of power and interests; and (5) models that focus on interfaces among organizations and between organizations and individuals.

76

Meeting of area committee chairmen

In order to encourage collaborative ac­tivities among the foreign area commit­tees that the Council sponsors jointly with the American Council of Learned Societies, a meeting of the committee chairmen and staff was held at the Coun­cil on November 23, 1981. There were discussions of the future of the interna­tional predoctoral fellowship and post­doctoral grant programs; of research

on topics that cut across national and re­gional boundaries; of mechanisms for in­creasing cross-committee communica­tion; and of sources of funding for inter­national training and research .

The area chairmen and staff who par­ticipated in the meeting are listed in the adjacent box. Also present were Robert M. Lumiansky, president, American Council of Learned Societies; and Kenneth Pre­witt, president, and David L. Sills, execu­tive associate, Social Science Research Council.

Meeting of Area Chairmen November 23, 1981

Participants

Area Africa

Contemporary China

Eastern Europe

Japan

Korea

Latin America

Near and Middle East

South Asia

Southeast Asia

Western Europe

* Unable to attend.

Merger of two China committees

Chairman

John M. Janzen University of Kansas

Michel C. Oksenberg University of Michigan Harold B. Segel* Columbia University

John W. Hall Yale University

Chae-Jin Lee University of Kansas

Richard R. Fagen Stanford University Robert J. Lapham Nati()OOl Research Council

Myron Weiner Massachusetts Institute

of Technology

James C. Scott Yale University

Charles S. Maier Harvard University

Staff Martha A. Gephart

Sophie Sa

Jason H. Parker

Ronald Aqua

Ronald Aqua

Brooke Larson

Robert A. Gates

David L. Szanton

David L. Szanton

Robert A. Gates

The presidents and boards of the Council and the American Council of Learned Societies have accepted the rec­ommendation of the Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization of the ACLS and the Joint Committee on Con­temporary China that the two committees be merged into a new Joint Committee on Chinese Studies.

the humanities and between studies of post-1911 China and the social sciences. While the separate committees have made notable contributions to the study of China, the members of the two commit­tees feel that a single committee charged with research planning and development for the entire field will promote even greater growth and vitality. The two Councils, in accepting the recommenda­tion for merger, signify their strong en­dorsement of that belief. The existence of the two committees

has meant a temporal and disciplinary di­vision of responsibilities, as well as an as­sumption that there is a correspondence between studies of pre-1911 China and

It is expected that the membership of the new committee will be announced in early 1982. The first meeting will be held in March.

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

American scholarly research in China

The Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Joint Commit­tee on Contemporary China held a special joint session on October 3, 1981 in con­junction with their regular committee meetings to discuss the subject of Ameri­can scholarly research in the People's Re­public of China.

Intended to review the broad range of issues relating to research opportunities for Americans in China and to formulate recommendations for exchange pro­grams regarding some of the specific con­cerns of the American community of China scholars, the meeting was particu­larly timely for several reasons. Chinese Vice Premier Fang Yi was to arrive shortly to take part in a meeting of the United States-People's Republic of China Joint Commission on Scientific and Technological Cooperation in Washing­ton, D.C. A delegation of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (CSCPRC), led by its chairman Charles H. Townes, University of California, Berkeley, was scheduled to leave in November to review CSCPRC programs with such Chinese in­stitutions as the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the Ministry of Education. A meeting of the presidents of more than a dozen Ameri­can universities with major exchange pro­grams with the PRC is scheduled to take place in early 1982 under the auspices of the CSCPRC to discuss matters of com­mon interest. In addition, recent devel­opments in the PRC were threatening to place greater restrictions on field re­search by foreign scholars.

Specifically, the meeting addressed the following broad topics: (1) the prepara­tion of American researchers going to China-with a focus upon its adequacy in terms of language competency, cultural familiarity, and political understanding; (2) modes of intellectual and scholarly exchange-and the importance to be placed on different modes of exchange and how they might be enhanced to de­rive maximum benefit; (3) research access in China-the level of access available to American scholars in archival and field research, and how might greater access be obtained; and (4) the overall balance of American research in China-what con­stitutes an appropriate balance of re­search and personnel and what role

DECEMBER 1981

should the two committees take in insur­ing such a balance.

Also discussed was the appointment of an Academic Advisor to the U.S. Embassy to succeed John Jamieson, who had just completed a two-year term in Beijing, as well as the larger issues of American scholarly representation in China and the involvement of scholars in setting policies relating to scholarly programs.

Underlying the day's discussions was the awareness of a need to develop and promote continuing dialogue among the various groups involved in intellectual ex­change with the PRC, so that there may be mutual sharing of information, expe­riences, and concerns.

I n addition to the members and staff of the two China committees, participants at the meeting included Beatrice S. Bartlett and Terry Sicular, both of Yale Univer­sity, and Margery Wolf, Stanford, California, all of whom had recently re­turned from extended periods of re­search in the PRC. Also attending were John Jamieson, University of California, Berkeley, and Mary Brown Bullock and Robert B. Geyer of the CSCPRC.

Order and anomie in South Asia

The Joint Committee on South Asia, with support from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation, sponsored an initial conference on Order and Anomie in South Asian Society and Culture at the Indian Institute of Man­agement in Ahmedabad, India, on De­cember 16-18, 1981. The conference represented the first phase of the third component of the Committee's South Asian Political Economy Project (SAPE). The participants included Paul Brass, University of Washington; Veena Das, University of Delhi; Meghnad Desai, London School of Economics and Politi­cal Science; Paul Greenough, University of Iowa; Inderjit Khanna, Indian Insti­tute of Management; Kuriakose Mam­koottam, University of Delhi; T. N. Madan, University of Delhi; James Manor, University of Leicester (unable to attend); Ashis Nandy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi); D. D. Narula, Indian Council of Social Sci­ence Research (New Delhi); Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University; and V. S. Vyas, Indian Institute of Manage­ment. David L. Szanton and Veena Oldenburg served as staff.

The conference included papers on the politics of famine in Bihar, famine relief in R-uasthan, the fragmentation of the Congress Party, political and natural crises in 20th century Bengal, approaches to the study of violence in South Asia, and the rise of new cults in urban Sri Lanka.

South Sulawesi

The Joint Committee on Southeast Asia sponsored a conference on South Sula­wesi, Indonesia, at the Centre of South­east Asian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, December 9-11, 1981. The participants included Leonard Andaya, University of Auckland; Harald Broch, University of Oslo; Elizabeth Co­ville, University of Chicago; Shelly Er­rington, University of California, Santa Cruz; Jacqueline Lineton, Social Science Research Training Station (Ujung Pan­dan, South Sulawesi); Willem Makaliwe, Hasanuddin University (Ujung Pandan); Campbell Macknight, The Australian National University; W. Donald McTag­gart, Arizona State University, Tempe; Christian Pelras, Centre National de la Re­cherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris; An­thony Reid, The Australian National University; Kathy Robinson, Macquarie University; Toby Volkman, Documentary Educational Resources (Watertown, Mas­sachusetts); and Shinji Yamashita, Cor­nell University. David L. Szanton served as staff.

Three conference papers addressed historical issues: the rise of agriculture before 1600, the origins of the Makassar state, and the economic foundations of the Bugis and Makassar states in the 17th and 18th centuries. Other papers focused on contemporary issues of ethnic identity, ritual, and healing, as well as on current interpretations of socioeconomic change in this culturally complex area.

77

Newly-issued Council Pu bl ications

/ Accident at Three Mile Island: The Human Dimensions, edited by David L. Sills, C.P. Wolf, and Vivien B. Shelanski. Papers from a conference sponsored by the Council, held on September 7, 1979. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1982. xviii + 258 pages. Cloth, $20.00; paper, $12.00.

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility near Middletown, Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979 was as much a social systems failure as it was an engineering failure. It raised questions not only about the regulation and man­agement of nuclear power plants but also about the effects of nuclear accidents on the community, on society at large, and on the public controversies surrounding the use of nuclear energy. It also raised questions about the risks implicit in a high technology society and of public percep­tion of these risks.

At the request of the President's Com­mission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (the Kemeny Commission), the Council commissioned a group of social scientists to prepare reports on the social science aspects of the accident. The pa­pers were first presented to members of the Commission and its staff at a meeting held at the Council on September 7, 1979, prior to the publication of the Commis­sion's report, The Needfor Change: The Leg­acy of TMI. The present volume presents these papers, in revised and expanded versions, together with a comprehensive bibliography of published and unpub­lished social science research on the acci­dent and its aftermath.

In addition to the editors, the contrib­utors to the volume are Richard S. Bar-

78

rett, Organizational Sciences Associates, Inc. (Hastings-on-Hudson, New York), "The Human Equation in Operating a Nuclear Power Plant"; Malcolm J. Brookes, Human Factors/Industrial De­sign (New York), "Human Factors in the Design and Operation of Reactor Safety Systems"; Shelton H. Davis, Anthropol­ogy Resource Center (B~ston, Massachu­setts), "Emergence of Community Doubts at Plymouth, Massachusetts"; Steven L. Del Sesto, Cornell University, "Social As­pects of Nuclear Regulation"; Bruce P. Dohrenwend, Columbia University, "Re­port of the Task Group on Behavioral Effects" (with Barbara Snell Dohren­wend, Columbia University; Stanislav V. Kasl, Yale University; and George J. Warheit, University of Florida); Russell R. Dynes, American Sociological Associa­tion, "The Accident at Three Mile Island: The Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Evaluation of Emergency Prepared­ness and Response"; Cynthia Bullock Flynn, Social Impact Research, Inc. (Seattle, Washington), "Reactions of Local Residents to the Accident at Three Mile Island"; Roger E. Kasperson, Clark Uni­versity, "Institutional Responses to Dif­ferent Perceptions of Risk" (with C. Hohenemser,J. X. Kasperson, and R. W. Kates, all of Clark University); Todd La Porte, University of California, Berkeley, "On the Design and Management of Nearly Error-Free Organizational Con­trol Systems"; Cora Bagley Marrett, Uni­versity of Wisconsin, "The President's Commission: Its Analysis of the Human Equation"; Robert Cameron Mitchell, Re­sources for the Future (Washington, D.C.), "Public Response to a M<\ior Fail-

ure of a Controversial Technology"; Dorothy Nelkin, Cornell University, "The Role of the Expert at Three Mile Island"; Elizabeth Peelle, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee), "Community Attitudes Toward Nuclear Plants"; Charles Perrow, State University of New York, Stony Brook, "The Presi­dent's Commission and the Normal Acci­dent"; David M. Rubin, New York Uni­versity, "The Public's Right to Know: The Accident at Three Mile Island"; Allan Schnaiberg, Northwestern University, "Who Should Be Responsible for Nuclear Safety?"; and Paul Siovic, Design Re­search, Inc. (Eugene, Oregon), "Psycho­logical Aspects of Risk Perception" (with Baruch Fischhoff and Sarah Lichtenstein, both of Design Research, Inc.).

)Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, by Andrew J. Cherlin. A volume in a series, Social Trends in the United States, spon­sored by the Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators, Social Sci­ence Research Council. Cambridge, Mas­sachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981. xiv + 142 pages. $14.00.

This volume is the first in a series de­signed to communicate findings from current social science research to readers without technical training in the social sciences. The author examines family changes since the Second World War, in­cluding the "baby boom," increases in di­vorce and remarriage, and differences in the marital patterns of blacks and whites.

An excerpt from a chapter in Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage begins on page 57 of this issue of Items. The series is described by Robert Parke in an article on page 72.

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 4

Other Recent Publications: A Selection

The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, edited by Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates. Papers from a conference spon­sored by the Joint Committee on Con­temporary China, held at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, August 18-25, 1976. Stanford University Press, 1981. xi + 491 pages. $30.00.

Causality and Classification in African Medicine and Health, edited by John M. Janzen and Gwyn Prins. Special issue of Social Science and Medicine, 15B:3 (August, 1981). A publication of the Joint Com­mittee on African Studies. Exeter, Devon, England and Elmsford, New York: Per­gamon Press. (Available from Pergamon Press, Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford, New York 10523.)

China's Four Modernizations: The New Technological Revolution, edited by Richard Baum. Papers from a workshop sponsored by the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1980. xx + 307 pages.

China's Develop'ment Experience in Comparative Perspective, edited by Robert F. Dernberger. Papers from a conference sponsored by the Subcom­mittee on Research on the Chinese Econ­omy of the Joint Committee on Contem­porary China, January 31-February 2, 1976. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har­vard University Press, 1980. vi + 347 pages. $30.00.

The Chinese and the japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, edited by Akira Iriye. Papers from a con­ference sponsored by the Joint Commit­tee on Contemporary China held at Portsmo~th, New Hampshire, June 24-27, 1976. Princeton University Press, 1980. 368 pages. Cloth, $25.00; paper, $9.95

Dictionary of Chinese Law and Govern­ment (Chinese-English), by Philip R. Bilancia. Sponsored by the Joint Com­mittee on Contemporary China. Stanford University Press, 1981. xv + 822 pages.

DECEMBER 1981

Elites in the Middle East, edited by I . William Zartman. A publication of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980. x + 252 pages. $21.95.

The Entertainment Functions of Televi­sion, edited by Percy H. Tannenbaum. Papers based on a conference organized by the Committee on Television and So­cial Behavior, held in New York on Octo­ber 24-25, 1975. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980. ix + 262 pages. Cloth, $19.95.

Humanistic and Social Science Research in China: Recent History and Future Prospects, edited by Anne F. Thurston and Jason H. Parker. A collaborative publication of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China and the Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization of the American Council of Learned Societies. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1980. 175 pages. No charge.

Indicators of Crime and Criminal jus­tice: Quantitative Studies, edited by Stephen E. Fienberg and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. A publication of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice Statistics of the Council's Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators. Washington, D.C.: U.S Department of Justice, ~ureau of Justice Statistics, 1980. Approximately 180 pages. (Distributed by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service: Doc­ument NCJ-62349.)

japan Before Tokugawa: Political Con­solidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650, edited by John Whitney Hall, Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura. Papers from a conference sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, held on Maui, Hawaii, August 28-September 2, 1977. Princeton Uni­versity Press, 1981. xiv + 392 pages.

Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, edited by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. Papers from two conferences sponsored by the Joint Committee on South Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. xxv + 342 pages.

Korean Family and Kinship Studies Guide, by Hesung Chun Koh. Developed and published with the support of the Joint Committee on Korean Studies. New Haven : Human Relations Area Files, 1980. 568 pages. $150.00.

The Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President, by Thomas E. Patterson. A publication spon­sored by the Committee on Mass Com­munications and Political Behavior (1974-80). New York: Praeger Pub­lishers, 1980. xvi + 204 pages. Cloth, $21.95; paper, $8.95.

Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics, edited and with an introduction by Suzanne D. Ber­ger. Published by the Joint Committee on Western Europe. Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 1981. x + 426 pages. $37.00.

Political Opposition and Local Politics in japan, edited by Kurt Steiner, Ellis S. Krauss, and Scott C. Flanagan. Papers from a conference sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies held in Wilmington Beach, North Carolina,June 24-27, 1976. Princeton University Press, 1980. x + 486 pages.

Quantitative Measures of China's Eco­nomic Output, edited by Alexander Eck­stein, with an introduction by Robert F. Dernberger. Papers from a conference sponsored by the Subcommittee on Re­search on the Chinese Economy of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, held at the Brookings Institution, Wash­ington, D.C., January 17-18, 1975. Uni­versity of Michigan Press, 1980. 443 pages. $26.50.

Science Indicators: Implications for Re­search and Policy, edited by Harriet Zuckerman and Roberta Balstad Miller. Special issue of Scientometrics 2 (5-6):327-448. A publication of the Sub­committee on Science Indicators of the Advisory and Planning Committee on So­cial Indicators. Elsevier Scientific Pub­lishing Co., Amsterdam, and Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 1980.

79

Other Recent Publications (Continued from page 79)

The Silence of Love: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry, edited and with an intro­duction by Peter H. Lee. Based on a con­ference sponsored by the Joint Commit­tee on Korean Studies held at the U niver­sity of Washington in June 1978. Hon­olulu : The University Press of Hawaii. 1980. xix + 348 pages.

Social Cognitive Development: Frontiers

and Possible Futures, edited by John H. Flavell and Lee Ross. Papers based on seminars organized by the Committee on Social and Affective Development During Childhood. New York: Cambridge Uni­versity Press. 1981. ix + 321 pages. Cloth. $32.50; paper. $12.95.

Studies on Korea: A Scholar's Guide, edited by Han-Kyo Kim. Published with the

support of the Joint Committee on Korean Studies. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. 1980. xxii + 438 pages.

Zaigai Nara Ehon (NaTa Ehon Abroad). by Barbara Ruch et al. Published in con­nection with the activities of the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. 1981 . v + 533 pages + plates. 24.000 yen.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL 605 THIRD AVENUE. NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016

Incorporated in the Stale of Illinois, December 27, 1924, for the purpose of advancing research in the social sciences

Directors, 1981-82: VINCENT P. BARABBA, Eastman Kodak Company; STEPHEN E. FIENBERG. Carnegi~Mellon University; CLIFFORD GURTZ. Institute for Advanced Study; CHARLES O . JONES, University of Virginia; MICHAEL KAMMEN, Cornell University; ROBERT A. LEVINE. Harvard University; GARDNER LINDZEY. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; ELEANOR E. MACCOBY. Stanford University; MARC L. NERLOVE. Northwest­ern University; DWIGHT H. PERKINS. Harvard University; KENNETH PREWITT. Social Science Research Council; MURRAY L. SCHWARTZ, University of California, Los Angeles; DONNA E. SHALALA. Hunter College. City University of New York; SIDNEY VERBA. Harvard University; IMMANUEL WALLER­STEIN, State University of New York. Binghamton; FINIS R. WELCH, University of California. Los Angeles; WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON. University of Chicago. Officers and Staff: KENNETH PREWITT, Presitknt; DAVID L. SILLS. Executive Associate; RONALD AQUA. ROBERT A. GATES. MARTHA A. GEPHART. BROOKE LARSON. ROBERTA BALSTAD MILLER (on leave), ROWLAND L. MITCHELL,jR., ROBERT PARKE, ROBERT W. PEARSON. PETER B. READ. RICHARD C. ROCKWELL. SOPHIE SA, LONNIE R. SHERROD, DAVID L. SZANTON; RONALD j. PELECK, Controller.

80 VOLUME 35. NUMBER 4