Family, Life Course, and Society Commons^™

Doctoral Dissertations As Liminal Journeys Of The Self: Betwixt And Between In Graduate Sociology Programs, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The sociology dissertation process is a liminal journey, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world of power. authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the “liminal self who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unrefexively adopt “technical formulas” for success and …

Edith Abbott (1876-1957), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Abbott was the first woman dean of a graduate school in an American university and, simultaneously, the first dean of the first graduate school of social work in the nation. Her leading role in social work overshadowed her deep roots in sociology, in which she was a major scholar of her day. She was a prolific author (Marks 1958) and specialized in the study of women's rights and wages. Her life was dedicated to the eradication of social inequality facing blacks, immigrants, people in poverty, and laborers. Abbott championed the use of statistical data at the University of Chicago during …

Review Of The Gypsy Scholar: A Writer’S Comic Search For A Publisher, By S.S. Hanna., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This fascinating, humorous, frequently insightful, and well-written book simultaneously illuminates the difficulty and trials of searching for college and university employment and instructs new teachers in strategies for publishing their first non-fiction book. With humility and hurnor, Hanna recounts his personal odyssey as a "gypsy scholar" in marginal teaching positions in small, denominational schools in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Pennsylvania. Hanna's story is a "life-history document" in the best tradition of autobiographical sociology. Beginning teachers and first-time authors will find this book "a good read," and today's part-time instructors and "freeway flyers" will recognize in Hanna a stalwart and sympathetic colleague.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Harriet Martineau authored the first systematic methodological treatise in sociology, conducted extended international comparative studies of social institutions, and translated Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive into English, thus structurally facilitating the introduction of sociology and positivism into the United States. In her youth she was a professional writer who captured the popular English mind by wrapping social scientific instruction in a series of widely read short novels. In her maturity she was an astute sociological theorist, methodologist, and analyst of the first order. To the extent that any complex institutional phenomenon such as sociology can have identifiable founders, Alice …

Hattie Plum Williams (1878-1963), Michael R. Hill, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The professional life of Hattie Plum Williams unfolded on the geographically isolated Great Plains of eastern Nebraska. She is the first woman known to chair a coeducational, doctoral department of sociology, and as the author of major studies on Russian German immigrants, she made significant disciplinary contributions to sociology. As a woman caught between changing definitions of the division of labor in sociology during the 1920s, she often is characterized as a social worker, although her professional allegiance remained to sociology. Williams epitomized the first generation of professional women sociologists on the Great Plains.

Teaching Sociology: An Approach To Pedagogy, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The central emphasis in my classroom approach, regardless of the substantive content of a given course, is on “learning to think sociologically." Teaching students to think as sociologists is an uphill struggle in this psychologically-oriented culture. Thinking sociologically involves, for most students, the acquisition of a new point of view to which many students are ideologically hostile. This hostility does not emerge fundamentally (although it often appears overtly the case) from the students' location on the political spectrum (i.e., from conservative to liberal), but derives from deeply held (and often conflicting) convictions about the nature of science and religion, freedom …

Toward Rigor In The Undergraduate Sociology Curriculum: Some Thoughts On Change And Innovation, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

CHANGE IS OVERDUE in undergraduate sociology. The present situation is too often dominated by classroom charlatans, textbook sophistry, and mental torpor. In a science which confronts complex intellectual puzzles and deeply problematic social issues, we bore the average student nearly to death, we chase the brightest scholars from our midst, and we reward one-dimensional rote memorizers with good grades and glowing letters of recommendation. Given this stifling state of affairs, a change toward intellectual rigor in the undergraduate curriculum would indeed be a welcome and revolutionary development.

By asking for “rigor,” I do not mean more sociology statistics courses or …

Review Of Becoming Mature: Childhood Ghosts And Spirits In Adult Life, By Valerie Malhotra Bentz., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Bentz's work will appeal to many sociologists, including those with interests in contemporary theory, family studies, clinical sociology, and research methodologies. This useful and intellectually stimulating volume appears in the Communications and Social Order series, edited by David Maines. Peter Manning provides the foreword (pp. xiii-xvi).

Bentz builds on an impressive foundation of classical and contemporary theorists, including George Herbert Mead, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Schutz, Jiirgen Haberrnas, and Norman Denzin. Some readers will be outraged by Bentz's conscious joining of symbolic interactionist concepts with ideas from psychoanalytic traditions. But readers who admire Haberrnas' recent transformations of …

The Centennial Ethic And The Spirit Of Archivalism, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

My thinking about the possible relationships between centennials and archives was prompted first by my own work on archives and archival methodology (Hill 1989, 1990, Forthcoming) and second by the upcoming centennial of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. It is to the centennial of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas, however, to which I owe the specific impetus to prepare this paper. I am very pleased, as a neighbor from Nebraska, to celebrate with you the founding of the world's very first department of sociology at the University of Kansas (Sica 1983). We are, of …

Alice S. Rossi (1922 – )., Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Alice S. Rossi is a Renaissance scholar. She is a leader in several specialties within sociology and between sociology and other disciplines. Her studies of women, occupations, the family, the life course, sociobiography, and socialization bring together work and ideas from sociology, biology, history, psychology, and anthropology. Her far-ranging academic interests are matched by her influence in the wider society and within professional circles.

Roscoe Pound And Academic Community On The Great Plains: The Interactional Origins Of American Sociological Jurisprudence At The University Of Nebraska, 1900-1907, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The turn-of-the-century academic community at the University of Nebraska differed sharply from today's highly stratified, bureaucratized, multiversity setting. The campus, the student body, and the instructional staff were, of course, considerably smaller in number than now. But, beyond this obvious demographic observation, there was a pioneering spirit and a sense of scholarly community that fostered remarkable intellectual creativity. In particular, the Nebraska campus provided the collegial setting from which Roscoe Pound's American version of sociological jurisprudence sprang forth in a resounding critique of the U.S. legal establishment at the 1906 meetings of the American Bar Association (cf., Pound 1906; Harding …

Lucile Eaves (1869-1953), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Lucile Eaves was a research and applied sociologist, a professor, and an activist. She was fired by a desire to change women's status and that of laborers, anticipating the contemporary concern with the structural ties between class and sex. She worked in the South Park Social Settlement of San Francisco, and as a faculty member at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska, and Simmons College. Her work for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union generated numerous quantitative studies of women's lives in a variety of contexts. She is one of the first sociologists to study medical sociology, especially women with …

Review Of The Role And Nature Of The Doctoral Dissertation, By The Council Of Graduate Schools, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This brief, impressively sponsored report overflows with Machiavellian subtexts, bureaucratic rationalizations, and mendacious platitudes. While concluding that the doctoral dissertation "defines the essence of the PhD degree" (p. 31), the overall message is that doctoral dissertations have become all things to all disciplines and that-further-this diversity of options is legitimate and virtually inexorable. The shock to my academic sensibilities on reading this official policy statement of the Council of Graduate Schools is the realization (once again) that some of our colleagues in several of the engineering, natural, and physical sciences have thoroughly subverted the doctoral process, turning it into a …

Review Of David And Judith Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique Of A Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, Nj, 1973), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Mainstream sociology, tvpically qrounded in data generated by survey questionnaire techniques in tandem with systematic statistical analysis of correlations between ad hot, arbitrarily selected (or, at best, very loosely rationalized) variables (i.e, empirical categories) is the very opposite of genuine (i.e., logically rationalized and philosophically defensible) scientific research. In essence, the Willers argue from a formalist platform standard sociological methods and statistics courses are scientifically worthless and that the novice sociologist who hungers after the “latest statistical techniques” and/or longs for a "good data set to analyze" is fundamentally an idiot who will nonetheless be showered with grant money and …

The Pre-Paradigmatic Ideology Of Explained Variance In Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This discussion was originally conceived for presentation in one of the several MSS sections on quantitative methods. My project, however, was the only one for which the organizer of the quantitative sessions could not find a slot. In fact, he neither told me my proposal was rejected nor communicated my name or abstract to the MSS program chair. It. matters to me little whether this was by design or accident -- the result was the same. Were it not for Susan Wright.'s active response to my belated inquiries about the status of my participation in these meetings – and her …

Selected Quotations From Harriet Martineau, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.