Sociology Commons^™

Mentoring, Paradigmatic Change, And Institutional Structure: Charles E. Bessey And The Origins Of The Seminarium Botanicum At The University Of Nebraska, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The Seminarium Botanicum was a student scientific club that originated at the University of Nebraska during the closing years of the nineteenth century under the supportive eye of botanist Charles E. Bessey. The “Sem. Bot.” (as the club was known popularly) provided a mainspring for the paradigmatic development of the American school of plant ecology (Tobey, 1981). Based on archival materials at Harvard University, the State Historical Society of Nebraska, and the universities of Nebraska and Wyoming, this paper identifies the interpersonal dynamics and institutional matrix by means of which the “Sem. Bot.” became a catalyst for intellectual inquiry. The …

Sex, Lies, And Goffman: Embodiment And Fabrication In The Age Of Aids, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The frequently inexorable fatality, pansexual communicability, and lengthy period of asymptomatic latency of HIV combine to form biological realities and ecological dangers that are individually and socially problematic at very deep levels. How can we think sociologically about the AIDS epidemic? Talcott Parsons’ concept of “sick role,”2 a venerable and productive staple of medical sociology, gives us little to work with here, precisely as sexually active, HIV-positive but undiagnosed and asymptomatic persons do not see themselves as “sick.” Nor, importantly, do others, including: sexual intimates, friends, family members, employers, and health professionals. The interpersonal face of HIV is often trusted, …

A Comparison Of Adaptive Strategies And Patterns Of Victimization Among Homeless Adolescents And Adults, Les B. Whitbeck, Ronald L. Simons

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

One hundred and fifty-six homeless adolescents and 319 homeless adults interviewed directly on the streets and in shelters were compared for backgrounds of abuse, adaptations to life on the streets, and rates of criminal victimization when on the streets. Homeless adolescents were more likely to be from abusive family backgrounds, more likely to rely on deviant survival strategies, and more likely to be criminally victimized. A social learning model of adaptation and victimization on the streets was hypothesized. Although the model was supported for both homeless adults and adolescents, it was more strongly supported for adolescents than adults, and for …

Woman As Cat Monster: Sax Rohmer And The Green Eyes Of Bast, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Monsters fill our nights with nightmares, cause us to shiver in terror and look over our shoulder when we walk down dark streets. In other words, monsters are fun. Famous monsters are often men of despicable shapes and minds: e.g., Count Dracula, Frankenstein, the mummy whose tomb has been violated, the werewolf, and Mr. Hyde. The world of female monsters, like their female human counterparts, is often populated by women who depend upon men for their status. Dracula picks beautiful women to become his bloody mates, and Frankenstein tries to take a "bride." More frequently, however, women are seen as …

The Americanization Of Ritual Culture: The ‘Core Codes’ In American Culture And The Seductive Character Of American ‘Fun.’, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Modern life in the USA is driven by four “core codes” of oppression and repression which structure a wide range of cultural patterns, from fleeting, face-to-face interactions to enduring, large scale social institutions. The four codes (sex, class, bureaucratization, and the commodification of time) also give recognizable contours to modern American cultural rituals (participatory as well as media-constructed) and contribute to the seductive character of “fun” which these rituals typically generate. American “fun” provides short-lived, incomplete escapes from mundane routine, and simultaneously strengthens and reproduces the core oppression and repressions of everyday life.

American “fun” provides its consumers with ritual …

Review Of Aspen, A Documentary Film By Frederick Wiseman, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Frederick Wiseman's most recent documentary was heralded in the New York Times (December 29, 1991, pp. 27,36) with considerable fanfare, but for this reviewer Aspen is a sociological disappointment. Wiseman's unusually keen documentary grip on the subtleties and institutional complexities of Western society has momentarily slipped in his presentation of the collage of institutionally disjointed images offered in Aspen. Visually excavating the social nexus of community life as a whole is a worthy objective for filmmakers of Wiseman's stature and experience, but sociology instructors who hope that Aspen might serve as an institutionally sophisticated community study will have to …

The Gunman Downstairs, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

EXACTLY 24 HOURS ago, in this building, nearly two dozen of your fellow students fled from Room 112, downstairs, in mortal terror of being murdered by a classmate in a senior-level actuarial science class. Newspaper accounts of this event present a particularly vivid example of the frame concepts that Erving Goffman explicates in Frame Analysis. In particular, Arthur McElroy’s entrance into Room 112 was a “guided doing” by which he willfully intended to kill at least a few, if not all, of his classmates.

“For a second,” said a student in the class, “I just sat there in a daze.” …

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 …

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 …

Parenting Factors, Social Skills, And Value Commitments As Precursors To School Failure, Involvement With Deviant Peers, And Delinquent Behavior, Ronald L. Simons, Les B. Whitbeck, Rand D. Conger, Katherine J. Conger

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Elements of social control theory were combined with social learning theory to construct a model of delinquency which specifies the manner in which parenting factors, social skills, value commitments, and problems in school contribute to association with deviant peers and involvement in delinquent behavior. The model was tested using a sample of 61 families, each of which included a seventh grader. Questionnaire responses and coded videotaped family interaction were employed as measures of study constructs. The results largely supported the proposed model.

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.

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 …

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 …

Selected Quotations From Harriet Martineau, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 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 …

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.

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 …

Dimensions Of Ethnic Assimilation: An Empirical Appraisal Of Gordon's Typology, J. Allen Williams Jr., Suzanne T. Ortega

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Researchers often begin by acknowledging that ethnic assimilation is multidimensional, but rarely examine more than one type of assimilation. As a result, studies have used quite disparate indicators of assimilation and have yielded contradictory results. The authors of this study empirically test Milton Gordon’s classic statement on the seven types of assimilation. Results of factor analysis indicate that Gordon’s seven dimensions can be reduced to three- structural, cultural, and receptional.

Media Stereotyping: A Comparison Of The Way Elderly Women And Men Are Portrayed On Prime-Time Television, Joetta A. Vernon, J. Allen Williams Jr., Terri Phillips, Janet Wilson

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This content analysis of 139 programs and 2,211 characters updates and extends previous research on the way elderly people, and especially elderly women, are presented on prime-time television. Findings indicate that females and the elderly continue to be significantly underrepresented. Comparisons of elderly men and women showed patterns of traditional stereotypes, with men more likely to be depicted positively on 7 of 9 desirable traits and women more likely to be depicted negatively on 6 of the 7 undesirable traits which showed a gender difference. However, the proportional differences for specific characteristics typically were neither large nor statistically significant, suggesting …

Bureaucracy, Institutional Change, And Deegan’S Theory Of Core Codes And Liberating Rituals, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In American Ritual Dramas: Social Rules and Cultural Meanings (Greenwood Press, 1989), Mary Jo Deegan presents a theory of core codes and communitas that implicitly challenges the present organization of sociological practice in bureaucratic structures such as universities. The rituals of modern academic sociology are permeated by the same core codes that Deegan finds in many modern participatory and media-constructed rituals, specifically: the codes of oppression (class and sex codes) and the codes of repression (bureaucracy and time codes). Sociology remains little more than a rationalization for repressive and oppressive social control mechanisms unless it convincingly demonstrates and acts upon …

Excavating Underappreciated Sociologists: A Survey Of Assumptions And Strategies In Archival Research, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Archivally-based research in the history and sociology of sociology (especially the recent work of Mary Jo Deegan on Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918) powerfully demonstrates the central epistemological importance of excavating and rehabilitating the contributions of sociologists who have long been ignored by historians of sociology. Archival experience reveals that uncovering the unknown, the unwritten, or the unrecognized in the history of sociology frequently requires reversing the conventional wisdoms of sociological research. Ten archival research strategies are identified. These approaches are best adapted to long-term rather than short-term research programs. It is concluded that. the …

A Theory Of The Sociology Of Women, Helen A. Moore, Jane C. Ollenburger

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Feminist theories present a number of options for organizing a model of inequality for women. At times, these present mutually exclusive concepts or definitions, or even causal factors. Patriarchal theories will not be used because they do not perceive women's oppression. Without an assumption of sex stratification and oppression, women's reality cannot be accurately described. Along with these patriarchal models, sex role socialization theories have been criticized for having (1) an emphasis on finding a singular universal truth and verification method, (2) a commitment to objectivity and observer neutrality, (3) dichotomous classification and primarily causal models, (4) ahistorical views, and …

Labor Force Participation Of Rural Farm, Rural Nonfarm, And Urban Women: A Panel Update, Jane C. Ollenburger, Sheryl J. Grana, Helen A. Moore

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we analyze the paid labor force participation rates and continuity patterns of rural farm, rural nonfarm, and urban women. Specifically, we trace the labor force participation of a panel of approximately 800 women in Nebraska from 1977 to 1985. This paper has a twofold purpose. First, we examine changes in the work status of the cohort of Nebraska women during the farm crisis years. Second, we identify individual factors influencing labor force participation and continuity, contrasting all three residential groups of women.

A loglinear model isolates differences in participation rates for rural and urban women as well …