Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

32
SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL VOLUME 37 • NUMBER 1 • MARCH 1983 605 THIRD AVENUE. NEW YORK, N.Y. 10158 Experimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Production, Culture, and Governance in Western Europe SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1975, the Joint Committee on Western Europe has defined its purpose primarily in terms of research planning. It has sought to influ- ence the agendas of social scientific inquiry on that part of the world by exploring topics which its mem- bers regarded as neglected or misspecified by existing scholarship and which its members felt were promis- ing and tractable enough to warrant the concerted attention of a small group of North American and Western European scholars for a protracted period. During its first phase of activity, the committee fo- cused on the issue of "Organizing Interests"; its product, edited by Suzanne Berger,! has already had a considerable impact on several social science disci- plines. "Changing the Boundaries of the Political" was the next topic chosen; Charles Maier is currently put- ting the finishing touches on the product of that ef- fort. * The author is currently professor of political and social SCI- ences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, on leave from the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. He serves as chairman of the Joint Committee on West- ern Europe (see box on page 2). 1 Suzanne D. Berger, editor. Organizing Interests in Western Europe. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. A new program of the Joint Committee on Western Europe lly Philippe C. Schmitter* Planning for the third phase Faced with the difficult task of continuing such a tradition of successful innovation, a small planning group was formed to explore possible topics for the third phase of the committee's existence. After two long discussions (Washington, D.C. in May 1982 and Airlie House, Virginia in October 1982), the partici- pants identified a core theme which they believe will be able to attract and retain the attention of a larger, CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE Experimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Production, Culture, and Governance in Western Europe-Philippe C. Schmitter 8 The Council's Role in Research on Child Devel- opment-Lonnie R . Sherrod 17 Perspectives on Latin American Population Re- search-Thomas W. Merrick 22 Recent Activities of the Committee on Life-Course Per- spectives on Human Development 25 Current Activities at the Council -The measurement of occupation (page 25) -Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) (page 26) .,-Survey of dissertation fellows in employment and training (page 27) -Reviews of African research (page 28) - Latin American research (page 28) 30 Personnel -John W. Hall honored by Japanese government -Staff appointment 31 Newly-issued Council Publications 1

description

 

Transcript of Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Page 1: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

VOLUME 37 • NUMBER 1 • MARCH 1983 605 THIRD AVENUE. NEW YORK, N.Y. 10158

Experimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Production, Culture, and Governance in Western Europe

SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1975, the Joint Committee on Western Europe has defined its purpose primarily in terms of research planning. It has sought to influ­ence the agendas of social scientific inquiry on that part of the world by exploring topics which its mem­bers regarded as neglected or misspecified by existing scholarship and which its members felt were promis­ing and tractable enough to warrant the concerted attention of a small group of North American and Western European scholars for a protracted period. During its first phase of activity, the committee fo­cused on the issue of "Organizing Interests"; its product, edited by Suzanne Berger,! has already had a considerable impact on several social science disci­plines. "Changing the Boundaries of the Political" was the next topic chosen; Charles Maier is currently put­ting the finishing touches on the product of that ef­fort.

* The author is currently professor of political and social SCI­

ences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, on leave from the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. He serves as chairman of the Joint Committee on West­ern Europe (see box on page 2).

1 Suzanne D. Berger, editor. Organizing Interests in Western Europe. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

A new program of the Joint Committee on Western Europe

lly Philippe C. Schmitter*

Planning for the third phase

Faced with the difficult task of continuing such a tradition of successful innovation, a small planning group was formed to explore possible topics for the third phase of the committee's existence. After two long discussions (Washington, D.C. in May 1982 and Airlie House, Virginia in October 1982), the partici­pants identified a core theme which they believe will be able to attract and retain the attention of a larger,

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

Experimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Production, Culture, and Governance in Western Europe-Philippe C. Schmitter

8 The Council's Role in Research on Child Devel­opment-Lonnie R. Sherrod

17 Perspectives on Latin American Population Re­search-Thomas W. Merrick

22 Recent Activities of the Committee on Life-Course Per­spectives on Human Development

25 Current Activities at the Council -The measurement of occupation (page 25) -Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)

(page 26) .,-Survey of dissertation fellows in employment and

training (page 27) -Reviews of African research (page 28) - Latin American research (page 28)

30 Personnel -John W. Hall honored by Japanese government -Staff appointment

31 Newly-issued Council Publications

1

Page 2: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

multidisciplinary group of scholars and which is both sensitive to historical trends and relevant for current policy choices. They have tentatively labeled it: "Ex­perimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Pro­duction, Culture, and Governance in Western Europe"-continuing the committee's established penchant for gerunds. This article attempts to reflect the conclusion of the two discussions, but the author is solely responsible for the present formulation.

The point of departure in these discussions was the need participants felt to raise questions about the units which scholars have been using in theory to analyze economic, social, and political events and trends and to draw attention to changes in the units which European actors have been using in practice to organize their economic interests, their cultural iden­tities, and their political authority. While Europe ap­pears in many ways to be peculiarly fixed in its spatial, functional, cultural, and proprietary demarcations by well-established law and custom-compared with the "new nations" of Africa and Asia or even with the "middle-aged" ones of the Americas-it has long been recognized that a distinctive feature of this part of the world has been its extreme "crowdedness" and "inter­connectedness." Nowhere else are so many and so different units of economic production, social exis­tence, and political choice so near each other physi­cally, so sensitive to each other's actions and ideas, and, at least until recently, so dangerous for each other's survival.

All attempts to order or manage this overlapping mosaic through centralized means have failed­whether attempted by force of arms, by unity of reli­gion, by similarity of culture, or by integration of markets. These unsuccessful attempts at forging uni­formity or congruence have left "bloody but un­bowed" an astonishingly resilient system of national states, economies, and societies, themselves further divided into highly diverse sets of territorial, func­tional, and cultural subunits.

North Americans are accustomed to thinking of their own systems as pluralistic, but if one considers Western Eu~ope as a whole (or even parts of i~ in detail), the pattern of identities, interests, and au­thorities is even more complex and a good deal less congruent. Imagine the automobile worker in Stuttgart, the artichoke grower in Morlaix, the cloth­ing manufacturer in Prato, or the social worker in Birmingham, and the puzzling array of sentiments and choices he or she faces:

• Between loyalty to communities, ranging from the immediate neighborhood or village, to the sur-

2

Joint Committee on Western Europe Members and Participants 1982~J

The Joint Committee on Western Europe is spon­sored by the Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Its current members are:

PHILIPPE C. SCHMITTER, European University Insti­tute (Florence), CHAIRMAN

PETER A. GoUREVITCH, University of California, San Diego

GUDMUND HERNES, University of Bergen PETER J. KATZENSTEIN, Cornell University CHARLES S. MAIER, Harvard University FRITZ W. SCHARPF, International Institute of Man­

agement (Berlin)

Jose Maria Maravall, University of Madrid, was a member until the October election in Spain; he re­signed from the committee when he received a ministerial appointment. Other participants in the 1982 Washington, D.C. and Airlie House, Virginia discussions were Arnaldo Bagnasco, University of Turin; Victoria de Grazia, Rutgers University; Ronald F. Rogowski, University of California, Los Angeles; Charles F. Sabel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; L. J. Sharpe, Nuffield College (Oxford); and Carlo Trigilia, University of Cosenza.

rounding metropolitan area, the region, the nation, or even to Europe as a whole

• Between representation, through formal organi­zations of widely differing functional domain, ter­ritorial scope, hierarchical position, ideological conviction, and strategic connection

• Between obligation to regulations, coming from the immediate local agents of authority, themselves implementing, at least in part, rules of national government agents, who in turn are presumably following guidelines established by the European Community, while attempting to cope on their own with supra-European market forces and transnational regimes

Add to this the possible fact that the actors he or she has to deal with may speak different languages (or at least different dialects), may operate within dif­ferent legal and administrative traditions, and may re­spond to different appeals or threats-one can get a general idea of the complexity facing Europeans today. It is arguable that the vast increase in intra­European commercial transactions, production in­terdependencies, information flows, tourism, etc. has

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 3: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

not only brought our imagined German worker, French farmer, Italian industrialist, and English civil servant into much closer contact with each other than ever before, but it has destroyed virtually any possi­bility that the unit or constituency within which he or she establishes identity, pursues interests, or obeys authority will be the same as before.

Under these conditions, social scientists must give up their cherished pretense of dealing with self­contained units separated by affect, product, and law, and develop new concepts and theorems for under­standing an increasingly incongruent reality. In Western Europe, in particular, it has become difficult for analysts to ascertain what unit is "really" responsi­ble for making policy choices, what constituency is "really" capable of mobilizing action, and what com­munity is "really" likely to command loyalty. For ac­tors and citizens situated in this confusing mosaic, it has become virtually impossible to hold any specific unit accountable for its actions, to determine where sovereign authority lies, and even to locate the boundaries of one's own collective interest or identity. As a result, Western Europeans have experienced a growing sense of powerlessness to solve their present problems-"loss of fate control," as one of the par­ticipants phrased it.

Concepts and themes have been creeping into vari­ous social sciences disciplines in a diffuse attempt to label and, therefore, to "problematize" this growing confusion about the nature of units and their inter­relationships. Consider a few of these concepts and themes:

• International division of labor • Center-periphery relations • Internal colonialism • Economic interdependence • Organized complexity • Diffusion processes • Fiscal federalism • Politikveiflechtung • Territorial devolution • Transnational phenomena • International regimes • Micronationalism • Neolocalism

New protodisciplines or interdisciplinary fields such as regional science, peace research, international integration theory, theories of the local state, and world-systems analysis have emerged to deal with analyzing situations in which the units of interest, identity, and authority have become increasingly in­congruent, and with describing the efforts which have

MARCH 1983

been made--or should be made-to readjust spatial boundaries, redistribute functional competences, re­structure productive systems, and redefine collective images in order to cope with this new reality.

The committee will attempt to bring out more sys­tematically the links between this rich, if bewildering, variety of concepts-without pretending, however, to create yet another protodiscipline. It will do so by concentrating on relatively circumscribed problems of Western Europe, where "experiments with the scale" of economic, cultural, and political ar­rangements by a wide range of public and private actors are, or have been, a frequent response to a growing overlap and ambiguity of units within it.

Principal themes

"Experimentation" may seem an unusual emphasis for a working group on contemporary Western Europe. After all, this is supposed to be the part of the world where critical choices and crucial experiments-some glorious successes, others cata­strophic failures-were made long ago. Moreover, "the silent revolution" in values and practices after World War II seemed to many scholars to point toward a more consensual and less problematic fu­ture.2 Protracted economic growth across all of West­ern Europe, vast increases in commercial interdepen­dence, unprecedented flows of persons and informa­tion across (and within) national boundaries, the emergence of multiple regional institutions for policy coordination, the decline of imperial power for some, and of international hegemony for the continent as a whole-all this was supposed to lead inexorably to a homogenization of objective life situations and sub­jective group identities for Western Europeans. The emergent imperatives of what came to be called "postindustrialism"--capital and knowledge-intensive technology, professionalization of the occupational structure, widespread diffusion of management and marketing techniques, and increasing economies of scale-were expected not only to homogenize, but also to narrow the range of choices available to individual citizens, economic elites, and political decision makers.

The "new middle class," which was supposed to be emerging to predominance under the auspices of this "technostructure," was presumably free of such atavisms as nationalistic or localistic sentiment, willing

2 See the essays in Stephen R. Graubard, editor. A New Europe7 Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964.

3

Page 4: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

to move about without regard for territorial or cul­tural constraints, committed to pursuing careers within large, bureaucratic institutions, and dedicated to a common goal of rational efficiency. Under these conditions, the historically diverse local and national units of Western Europe would become irrelevant­doomed either to disappear or to be transformed into categories of mere administrative convenience.

These assumptions have proven, with hindsight, to be largely ill-founded. After several decades of pre­sumed homogenization, Western European countries and their respective social, cultural, and territorial subdivisions seem as varied as ever. In some cases, the saliency of these differences has increased rather than decreased. Instead of facing an ever narrower agenda of similar problems and being forced to resolve them in a concerted, ever more encompassing fashion, policy makers persist in responding in quite diverse ways. Technology, interdependence, and subordinate status in the world system do not seem to have de­prived European countries of either the capacity to choose or the will to experiment. The present pro­tracted crisis in economic performance throughout the region has, if anything, strengthened rather than weakened the trend toward divergent responses by both public and private actors.

One way Europeans have coped with such com­plexity has been to experiment with the scale of con­stituent units. Faced with situations in which existing units of production, culture, and governance were no longer capable of meeting member expectations and producing predictable outcomes because of the growing incongruence between the spheres of inter­est, identity, and authority embodied in them, Euro­pean actors have reacted in diverse ways:

• They have sought to go beyond and beneath their own nation-states

• They have enlarged the scale of their industry and sought refuge in smaller enterprises

• They have committed themselves to a more cos­mopolitan "regional" image and revived some parochial loyalties long thought to be extinct

• They have adopted many aspects of mass culture and consumption coming from the United States and rejected "Americanization" as inappropriate for their fragmented and differentiated cultures

The most obvious response has been the attempt to create overriding regional institutions such as the European Community to reap the benefits of an in­creased volume of exchange and an expanded scale of production, presumably while regulating the en-

4

suing behavior of external and multilocal actors through standardized norms and harmonized policies. Not only have several European countries opted out of this formal process-Austria, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, for example-and not suffered appreciably for having done so, but many of those who chose to join have, in fact, contin­ued to interpret and implement Community norms and policies in a highly selective and particularistic manner.

Nor is it clear that the widening of market oppor­tunities as a result of regional integration and the general liberalization of international trade and in­vestment flows has necessarily entailed a concomitant shift upward in the scale of production. In some countries and industrial sectors, concentration in the ownership of enterprises and an increase in the size of productive units have indeed occurred and reached unprecedented levels-in part as the result of explicit government policies for promoting so-called "Na­tional Champions." More recently, there has even been talk of jointly encouraging the development of very large scale "European Champions" to meet the challenge of competing with gigantic combines from the United States,Japan, and the newly-industrialized countries. Elsewhere, however, the strategic response has been quite different. Taking advantage of pecu­liar local conditions and decentralized public and pri­vate incentives, small scale and highly specialized units have proliferated in certain parts of Western Europe. They have even created whole new systems for the social and physical organization of production and have often been strikingly successful in exploiting distinctive market niches.

Looking at Western Europe as a whole, one is struck not only by the failure of regional integration to "spill over" into ever more important areas of pol­icy formation and ever more sensitive areas of politi­cal community, but also by the increased rather than decreased relevance and salience of smaller units of interest, identity, and authority.

Precisely in response to the development of more homogenized opportunities and standardized norms, people have become more aware of the persistence of cultural differences and the threat to local ar­rangements. Transnational production and distribu­tion undermine the efforts of national authorities to control outcomes; European Community norms clash with established local community restrictions and tastes; intersocietal mobility brings in foreign workers and tourists with different forms of social organiza­tion, standards of behavior, and preferences for con­sumption. Perhaps the phenomenon which has most

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 5: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

captured the attention of Europeanists has been the resurgence of peripheral or micronationalist movements-if only because they have posed the most vocal and, at times, most violent challenges. C.onsider the Basques and the Catalans, the Corsicans and the Bretons, the Scots and the Welsh, the Flem­ings and the Walloons. Somewhat less visible have been the experiments which several European states have undertaken to devolve authority for certain matters to smaller units of governance, either by in­terjecting new intermediate layers of provincial or regional government such as in Italy and Spain, or by enhancing the powers of existing localities such as is presently being done in France. Again, the pattern across Western Europe has hardly been uniform. While in southern Europe the trend has been toward experimentation with decentralization, countries of the center and north-Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and West Germany-have responded with a consolidation of existing national subunits.

Even where formal reshuffling of authority across territorial units has not occurred, governments have been experimenting with a wide range of less visible arrangements for coping with new interdependen­cies, externalities, and overlapping competences. So­cial scientists in different European countries have begun to label these arrangements, e.g., "cooperative-" or "functional-federalism," "policy overlap (Politik­veiflechtung)," etc., but have yet to analyze their distri­bution or evaluate their importance comparatively.

"Experimenting with scale" has not been just a matter of objective problem solving-say, of finding a profitable way of responding to market changes or an efficient means for implementing public policies. It has been deeply conditioned by subjective factors such as the importance attached to community, the definition of political accountability, the sharing of common symbols, the perception of status in the world order, and so forth. The size and boundaries of units have always been infused with enduring cultural and social meanings and this, of course, is one of the reasons they have been so resistant to changes dic­tated only by calculations of economic efficiency or administrative convenience.

This is not so say that these meanings are not them­selves subject to change. In the past, Western Europe has gone through periods of extensive experimenta­tion during which whole schemes of territorial domi­nation were imposed, uniform conditions of legal and political status established, standardized forms of so­cial behavior and economic organization created, and new symbols of natural identity forged-all in the face of strong resistance from members of smaller com-

MARCH 1983

mum tIes and the defenders of traditional customs. The diverse outcomes of these struggles over scale during the "heroic" period of European nation, state, and enterprise building provide the baseline upon which present day experimentation is taking place­and a possible historical analogue for understanding outcomes in the future.

More recently and less contentiously, there have been dramatic internal changes in the mutual im­agery of hostility as well as external changes in the relative status of the region as a whole. For a long time, perhaps since World War I, Western Europe suffered from a persistent sense of inferiority in scale vis-a-vis the United States, which seemed to embody the advantages of massive economic production and homogeneous cultural consumption. Much of the impetus for a "United Europe" after World War II came from the perception of a need to catch up with the more dynamic and efficient Americans and a de­sire to emulate their federal institutions, seen as more balanced and uniformly dispersed than the hodge­podge of authorities in Western Europe. In more recent years, this imagery of scale seems to have al­tered. To many, the United States no longer seems such a formidable, if paradoxical, combination of ef­ficiency and accountability-of centralized large-scale production and decentralized small-scale governance. Contemporary "experiments with scale" in Western Europe are perhaps less haunted by the specter of Americanism and Americanization than they were in the past.

Possible topics

The successful exploration of such a general theme as "Experimenting with Scale" demands that it be broken down and translated into much more concrete and tractable topics. The experience of the commit­tee's first two phases shows clearly that this depends in large measure upon the on-going research activi­ties of the social scientists and humanists who become its members. Given the limited resources at its dis­posal, the committee 'cannot simply commission and fund research on topics it believes should be accorded priority. It has in the past and will in the future invite outside scholars to present papers and participate in discussions on specific topics. From these discussions among scholars from a wide range of academic disci­plines will come, hopefully, a more comprehensive vision of the theme and a more consistent set of con­cepts for analyzing its multiple manifestations. In the process, the participating scholars may be expected to modify the approach they take to their own work and

5

Page 6: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

the eventual publication of their essays may perform the sort of research agenda-setting function described above as the primary purpose of the committee.

Because so much depends on the composition of the committee and because its ranks have yet to be filled, it is difficult to specify what specific topics will be taken up. The planning group, in fact, is interested in receiving suggestions from social scientists and humanists who believe their current research ad­dresses in some way the theme of "Experimenting with Scale."

At its second meeting last October, the group did begin discussing some areas of inquiry which it thought should be included. For example, partici­pants felt that at least two historical baselines should be established: one focusing on the critical period from 1860 to 1890 when a major revision of the units of production, culture, and governance throughout Western Europe was accomplished; the other center­ing on the 1920s and 1930s, when the threatening specter of "Americanization," with its popular culture and mass production, explicitly posed the issue of scale to the fragmented, heterogeneous, and de­moralized institutions of Western Europe. Both of these seemed to offer interesting analogies for the analysis of post-World War II developments.

For the more contemporary period, the group dis­cussed several potential topics linked to critical choices involving the scale of units at the level of economic production and industrial policy making. Rejecting the assumptions of technological deter­minism and regional homogenization, it was felt that an effort should be made to explain why some coun­tries and sectors had opted for a strategy of concen­tration of ownership (including state ownership) and increased scale of production, as, for example, has been the case in France, while others, such as the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany in Italy, had moved in a quite different direction. Was this the result of market forces interacting with the structural conditions of particular territorial units or industrial sectors, or was it the outcome of deliberate and dis­crete policy incentives, themselves influenced by local class relations and political configurations?

At the macropolicy level, the issue arose of the alternatives open to countries of differing geographi­cal location, physical size, natural resource endow­ment, installed industrial plant, etc. Is it possible to specify a range of responses, say from neoliberalism to neomercantilism via neolocalism, then to explain through a "sociology of policy preferences" why some would be preferred over others, and eventually to

6

trace the consequences of such choices for the scale of economic, social, and political units?

Underlying these choices between alternative policies is the question of longer-term alliances be­tween sectoral interests. During the founding period of modern Europe (1860--90), mentioned above, the infamous "Pact of Rye and Iron" between pro­tectionist forces in agriculture and basic metal pro­cessing provided important support for both au­thoritarian rule and defensive policies in Imperial Germany, and a less conspicuous "Pact of Pasta and Textiles" played an analogous, if weaker, role in the case of Italy. Are new sectoral interest alliances of comparable significance emerging in contemporary Western Europe, and, if so, at what level? For exam­ple, one could imagine a resurgence of defensive protectionism based on national quotas and cartels in artificial fibers and steel, or a more open competitive alliance built around redimensioned Europe-wide high technology industries such as electronics and aerospace, or even a series of dispersed, subnational arrangements bringing together small-scale pro­ducers of specialized machinery and luxury goods. To what extent are these possible alliances incompati­ble with each other, and, if Europeans are being forced or are going to be forced increasingly to choose among them, what will be the impact upon national political outcomes and processes of regional integration? Are large, relatively autarchic European countries (e.g., France, West Germany, the United Kingdom) at an advantage or disadvantage in their strategic choices in comparison with small, interna­tionally penetrated ones (e.g., Austria, the Nether­lands, Switzerland)? Are the former more or less free to engage in experimentation?

One topic on which participants did agree that a great deal of experimentation has occurred was that of the territorial distribution of political authority and administrative competances. What forces lay behind these contradictory trends toward centralization and devolution? Were these changes induced by motives of efficiency, accountability, or authenticity? What impact have they had, or will they have, upon the units of production and cultural identity within or beyond their governing unit? How do these subna­tional redistributions of authority relate to Europe­wide patterns of policy coordination and economic interdependence? Is there some general logic of unit transformation which encompasses both the devel­opment of a more integrated core area for Western Europe as a whole, and a more dispersed set of iden­tities and authorities for its periphery?

VOLUME 37, NUMBER I

Page 7: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Two themes kept appearing in the discussion of the planning group but were not explored further be­cause of the absence of more specialized knowledge about what was being done on them or what could be done to study them from another perspective. The first involved questions about possible changes going on in the microunits of Western European society­those units of personal affect and social reproduction such as the couple, the family, the neighborhood, the circle of friends, etc., and the extent to which these had been affected by coordination, standardization, and concentration at higher levels of production, culture, and governance. The second looked at the problem of scale from the opposite end: what has been the impact of developments in global interna­tional security relations upon constituent units within Western Europe? More particularly, has detente en­couraged a greater experimentation with scale, both at the regional and the subnational level, and now that a "new chill" had settled over East-West rela­tions, would this be echoed through lower levels of the respective systems?

Finally, the planning group agreed that one sub­theme running through all these concerns with the changing size and scope of units was that of democ­racy, or better put, democratic theory and practice. Only a few of these experiments with scale of recent years have been carried out ostensibly in the name of democracy, but all have been affected by its underly­ing elements of social equality, citizen accountability, popular responsiveness, and partisan competitiveness. In turn, shifts in unit boundaries and functions have affected the legitimacy and viability of democratic governments. They help determine the level at which citizen preferences get aggregated and they condition

MARCH 1983

the way in which citizen services get provided. It was felt, in other words, that these important changes in constituent units have been affecting democratic practice but have remained largely ignored by demo­cratic theory, and that Western Europe offered a uniquely privileged site upon which scholars could reflect on this lacuna, given the great vitality and variety of experience with democracy in that part of the world.

The committee proposes to make "Experimenting with Scale: Changes in the Units of Production, Cul­ture, and Governance" its central theme for the next few years. It recognizes that the trends underlying this issue are hardly unidirectional, nor are the out­comes yet clear. There is divergent movement "be­yond" and "beneath" those venerable European nation-states. Ironically, at the very moment that so many social scientists and humanists are rediscover­ing "the state,"3 the committee will be attempting to capture the changes in interest, identity, and au­thority which are undermining, circumventing, and transforming, as well as enhancing the state. Western Europe is currently in the midst of large- and small­scale adjustments in its interested constituencies, its cultural identities, and its sovereign authorities. By focusing concerted, multidisciplinary attention on these growing incongruences among units and the diversity of efforts being made to cope with them, the committee hopes it will be able to make more sys­tematic sense not only of what has been happening but also of what is likely to occur in the future. D

3 See, for example, Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: A Report on Current Comparative Research on the Relation­ship Between States and Social Structures." Items, 36(112): 1-8, June 1982.

7

Page 8: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

The Council's Role in Research on Child Development*

SINCE THE COUNCIL'S INCORPORATION IN 1924, its re­search planning committees have examined many critical issues in the study of child development. As the field of child development has grown and pros­pered, the Council's committees have included more and more activities with an explicit focus on develop­ment during childhood. Throughout the Council's history, some committee programs have pursued dif­ferent topics on children's development; these activi­ties are cited in several sections of this history. In other cases, committees have explored issues of child development as part of a larger agenda. Overall, the sweep of Council activity in child development during the past 50-plus years has been broad and diverse. The following description of this history, represent­ing a sampling of relevant activities assembled from Council records and publications, documents the sub­stantial role which the Council has played in advanc­ing research in this relatively young field.

BIOLOGICAL BASES OF BEHAVIOR AND DEVELOPMENT

Nature versus nurture

Perhaps one of the longest-standing traditions of research on child development involves questions of the hereditary versus environmental bases of individ­ual and group differences in behavior and develop­ment. Council efforts have both applied these ques­tions to specific topics such as ethnic differences and have contributed to the refinement with which such questions are addressed. A Committee on Interracial

* This article is based on a proposal submitted to the Founda­tion for Child Development (New York) for general support of the Subcommittee on Child Development in Life-Span Perspec­tive. The author is indebted to two earlier reviews of the Council's history: Elbridge Sibley, SSRC: The First Fifty Years. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1974, and M. Brewster Smith and Gardner Lindzey, "Research on Social Behavior: Impact of Council Committees," Items, 28(1): 4-8, March 1974. Orville G. Brim, Jr., Peter B. Read, and M. Brewster Smith are acknowl­edged for their valuable assistance.

** The author received the Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University; he serves at the Council as staff to the committees on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior, Cognitive Research, Life-Course Perspectives on Human Development, and its Sub­committee on Child Development in Life-Span Perspective.

S

by Lonnie R. Sherrod**

Relations (1925-1930) was concerned with compara­tive studies of the effect of hereditary and envi­ronmental factors on the development of black and white children. Continuing similar concerns, a Com­mittee on Social Adjustment (1940-1942) sponsored Robert S. Woodworth's (Columbia University) critical review of studies of twins and foster children. l This monograph represented a significant advance in the sophistication with which the nature-nurture issue was handled. Only three decades later did similar questions resurface in the Council's agenda. In 1971, a Committee on Biological Bases of Social Behavior (1966-1979) undertook a comprehensive survey of the relevant research and policy questions concerning the scholastic achievements and intelligence test scores of white and nonwhite children. The survey was initiated at a time when reports were emerging that school desegregation had not been successful in influencing scholastic and intellectual performance. The volume sponsored by this committee remains a definitive statement in this area of research.2

Behavior genetics

During the 1960s, behavior genetics was emerging generally as a scientifically promising and socially irri­portant field and as a powerful perspective, with spe­cific tools, for studying child development. Recog­nizing that studies of child and human development specifically, and social behavior generally, must move to more precise questions regarding biology than the broad nature versus nurture formulation, the Council appointed a Committee on Genetics and Behavior (1961-1966). This committee sought to encourage research in this interdisciplinary area and to facilitate communication between geneticists and social scien­tists.

I R. S. Woodworth. Heredity and Environment: A Critical Survey of Recently Published Material on Twins and Foster Children. Bulletin 41. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1941. (Sponsored by the Committee on Social Adjustment.)

2 John C. Loehlin, Gardner Lindzey, and J. N. Spuhler. Race Differences in Intelligence. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1975. (Sponsored by the Committee on Biological Bases of Social Behavior.)

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 9: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Because few social scientists were equipped to work in this interdisciplinary area, the committee gave high priority to providing basic biological training to social scientists, particularly developmental psychologists. The committee, and its successor with a broadened charter, the Committee on Biological Bases of Social Behavior, sponsored a number of summer training institutes over a lO-year period. These institutes sub­stantially extended the biological competence of able young social scientists in behavior genetics, popula­tion genetics, neurobiology, and psychophysiology. Through conferences and workshops on topics in the same areas (population biology, neurobiology, and psychophysiology) these two committees also en­couraged research examining the contributions of genetics to the study of social behavior.

At the same time, a Committee on Comparative Developmental Behavior (1961-1966) was concerned with advancing comparative studies of the develop­ment of early social behavior. Chaired by Harold W. Stevenson (then at the University of Minnesota), this committee employed comparative studies of animal behavior to examine potential biological contributions to behavioral development. It organized activities on topics such as learned and nonlearned behavior in immature organisms; its final statement was pub­lished in a volume of essays.3

Biological foundations of behavior

The work of the committees mentioned above has contributed notably to current views of development that recognize the interdependence of biological and social factors, and it has stimulated new research on more precisely defined questions, examining the contributions of specific biological and social factors to development. Current Council activities reflect some of the directions which have emerged from this research.

A Committee on Biosocial Science (1976-1980), following the tradition of the earlier Committee on Comparative Developmental Behavior, established a working group to use cross-species and cross-cultural comparisons to examine biological contributions to parental behavior and early offspring development. This working group has expanded to become a Committee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Be­havior (1980-present). The committee is employing

3 Harold W. Stevenson, Eckhard H. Hess, and Harriet L. Rheingold, editors. Early BehavWr: Cumparative and Developmental Approaches. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. (Sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Developmental Behavior.)

MARCH 1983

cross-species as well as cross-cultural and cross-time comparisons to examine current issues in parent­child behavior. The committee wishes to examine the family as the social institutional context through which humans fulfill their reproductive potential and to consider reproductive biology in conceptualiza­tions of parental and family behavior. The biosocial perspective is used to pinpoint areas in which con­temporary human parental behavior involves radical departures from human history and to identity con­tinuities in patterns of human kin relations and in the biological bases of social behavior. Identification of discontinuities between current practice and past be­havior may illuminate why adults experience difficul­ties in parenting and/or why children undergo less than optimally healthy development. The committee believes that such discontinuities and their possible costs should be examined in order to assess the bene­fits or costs of modern circumstances.4 The biosocial perspective, therefore, is used to extend our under­standing of parental behavior, sensitizing us to pat­terns in current use as well as highlighting parental practices that have been abandoned during human history. Both the range of options and the basis for makingjudgments about these options are expanded.

As part of its activities on the measurement of emotions, the Committee on Social and Affective De­velopment During Childhood (1976-present) has considered the psychophysiology of emotions, focus­ing on developmental neuroendocrinology and the implications of psychophysiology for measuring emotions in infants.5

The Subcommittee on Child Development in Life­Span Perspective (1981-present) of the Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Human Development (1977-present) is examining adolescence as a period of intense interaction of biological, social, and cogni­tive development. Adolescence, which is charac­terized by dramatic endocrinological changes, the ex­pansion of the social world, and transitions in the nature of reasoning and logical thought, provides an ideal opportunity for examining biobehavioral in­teractions. One conference has been held on pubertal

4 Alice Rossi. "Parenting, Kinship, and Adult Development: A Research Agenda to Test Kin Selection Theory." Presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1980, New York. (Prepared during her tenure on the Working Group on Parenting and Offspring Development of the Committee on Biosocial Science.)

5 See, e.g., Carroll E. Izard, editor. Measuring Emotions in Infants and Children. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (Sponsored by the Committee on Social and Affective Develop­ment During Childhood.)

9

Page 10: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

and psychosocial change (see pages 23-24 in this issue) and a series of workshops in this area is being considered.

The Committee on Giftedness, Development, and the Learning Process (1980-present) is planning ac­tivities to encourage more research on the organismic basis for extraordinary performance--to explore the ways in which certain individuals might be biologically predisposed to attain exceptional levels of achieve­ment.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIALIZATION

Cultural influences on personality and development

Council activities in personality development and in adult and child socialization began in 1930 with the appointment of the Committee on Personality and Culture (1930-1940). This committee's activities of­fered direction to research within the "culture-and­personality" tradition during the 1930s and 1940s, facilitating investigations of the sociocultural bases of personality and turning social scientists' attention from speculations about "racial" types of personality. This redirection represented an important step in the refinement of research on personality development. The successor Committee on Social Adjustment (1940-1942) tackled similar interdisciplinary areas, and its Subcommittee on Motivation sponsored a monograph by Robert R. Sears, then at Yale Uni­versity. This book was the first to bring Freudian theory-which was then capturing the attention of psychologists-under scientific scrutiny.6 It thus is a significant contribution to the study of children, al­though it is not focused specifically on child develop­ment.

The Committee on Social Behavior (1951-1956) was formed to continue interdisciplinary work on person­ality, culture, and social behavior. The committee fo­cused on a variety of topics, including interpersonal communication and influence, public communica­tion, community studies, and social integration. It developed major interests in childhood socialization. Reflecting the committee's commitment to develop­ing a systematic cross-cultural approach for under­standing socialization processes during childhood, a Subcommittee on Socialization was appointed under John W. M. Whiting's (Harvard University) chairman­ship. This subcommittee employed cross-cultural studies of personality development to examine the diversity of socialization variables or practices and to 10

differentiate normal variations in behavior patterns from actual deviance. In 1954, the subcommittee was reconstituted as the Committee on Personality Devel­opment; it participated in the planning and prepara­tion of a field manual for the collection of systematic observational data. This manual was employed in a coordinated study of child rearing in six cultures. A still-influential volume, Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing, resulted 7; the manual, following some re­visions, was published a few years later.s Several monographs on child rearing in particular cultures were also published. This classic research contrasted with the more qualitative and clinical orientation of the earlier "culture-and-personality" studies by rely­ing on quantitative methods.

The current Committee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior is continuing the cross-cultural examination of childhood development, focusing on its interaction with the adult development of parents. In this case, cultural comparisons are being used in the context of a larger framework, applied to such topics as pregnancy, the birth process, and infant development. Contemporary cultures which are be­lieved to be similar to societies that were important during early history (e.g., hunter-gatherers such as the ! Kung) are examined in order to capture a glimpse of the evolutionary past underlying contem­porary behaviors. The Committee on Social and Af­fective Development has also recognized the need for incorporating a cross-cultural perspective into the study of children's emotional and social growth. It has sponsored activities in which anthropologists repre­senting different approaches to the analysis of idea­tional structures compare findings and address com­mon theoretical issues. The committee has related these emerging anthropological conceptions of cul­ture and their acquisition to recent psychological re­search on similar aspects of childhood socialization.9

6 Robert R. Sears. Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Concepts. Bulletin 51. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1943. (Prepared for the Committee on Social Adjustment.)

7 Beatrice B. Whiting, editor. Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rear­ing. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963. (Sponsored by the committees on Social Behavior and on Personality Development.)

8 John W. M. Whiting, Irvin L. Child, William W. Lambert, et at. Field Guidefor a Study of Socialiwtwn. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. (Revision of a field manual originally sponsored by the Committee on Social Behavior.)

9 Richard Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, editors. Conceptions of Culture and Its Acquisitwn. Forthcoming. (Sponsored by the Committee on Social and Affective Development During Child­hood.)

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 11: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Socialization

Council work in socialization continued during the 1960s, emphasizing socialization as a lifelong process. A Committee on Socialization and Social Structure (1960-1967) was appoi~ted under the chairmanship of John A. Clausen (University of California, Berke­ley). In a now classic volume, members of the com­mittee described new interdisciplinary perspectives on socialization research which had been developed during the program. to The family, the school, and other institutions of the community at large were examined as contexts for socialization, understood by the committee to extend also into adult life. Moral development was a newly active research topic and was used to examine competing theories of personal­ity development and socialization. ll Interactions be­tween socialization and emerging views on cognitive development were considered.12 The committee es­tablished good communication with those doing rele­vant research in France, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

The Committee on Sociolinguistics (1963-1978) ex­amined socialization from the perspective of language development-focusing particularly on rule- and role-learning at various stages of life, including child­hood. This committee's program reflected the view that linguistic and social competences are learned on a lifelong basis, and this learning goes beyond the simple picking up of supplemental lexicons (involv­ing, e.g., the learning of professional jargon). A proj­ect of this committee under the direction of Allen D. Grimshaw (Indiana University) concentrated on adolescence and early adulthood and brought to­gether anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and others to explore this little-known aspect of socializa­tion.

!he Committee on Work and Personality in the Middle Years (1972-1979), under the chairmanship

10 john A. Clausen, editor. Socialization and Society. Boston: Lit­tle Brown and Company, 1968. (Report of the Committee on Socialization and Social Structure.)

11 See, e.g., Martin L. Hoffman. "Development of Internal Moral Standards in Children," in Merton P. Strommen, editor, Research on Religious Development. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971; and justin Aronfreed. Conduct and Conscience: The Socializa­tion of Internalized Control Over Behavior. New York: Academic Press, 1968. (Sponsored by the Committee on Socialization and Social Structure.)

12 Lawrence Kohlberg. "Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive­D~velopmental Approach to Socialization," in David A. Goslin, editor, Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. Chicago: Rand-McNally and Company, 1969. (Sponsored by the Commit­tee on Socialization and Social Structure.)

MARCH 1983

of Orville G. Brim, Jr. (Foundation for Child Devel­opment), employed the middle years to continue the study of socialization as a lifelong process. Its suc­cessor, the current Committee on Life-Course Per­spectives on Human Development (originally on Middle and Old Age, 1977-present) has formed a Subcommittee on Child Development (1981-present). The appointment of this subcommittee represents the beginning of another era in the study of personality development and childhood socialization at the Council. During earlier phases of child socialization research, child rearing has generally been viewed as the discipline and caretaking that mothers impose on their young children. Typical images of family up­bringing have slighted the father's role, the socializa­tion experience of older children and parents, the reciprocal nature of social interaction, and the educa­tive dimension of family influence. The acquisition by parents of knowledge about how to raise children entails a process of interaction between parents and children. Hidden behind this simple notion is a new concept in the largely age-specific world of child de­velopment: the notion that child socialization and de­velopment proceed interactively with the socialization and development of parents. Current research is putting an end to the premise that children can be understood without knowledge of the developmental experience of parents, or that adults can be under­stood apart from the children in their lives.13 Thus, one objective of the subcommittee's program is to employ the work of its parent committee and the predecessor Committee on Work and Personality to interconnect knowledge of adult development and aging with socialization research on childhood. Like its predecessors, the subcommittee's program in­volves European researchers.

The Committee on Social and Affective Develop­ment During Childhood has recently initiated a series of workshops to examine the socialization of specific affects. One of the least understood aspects of emo­tions is their evolution from physically nonverbal ex­pression into emotional experiences that possess complex verbal and cognitive components, a process that is shaped largely through interaction with family, teachers, and peers. The committee is convening small interdisciplinary groups of researchers to ex­plore the nature and progress of this development for

13 Glen H. Elder, jr. Manuscript in preparation for Glen H. Elder,jr., editor, Life-Course Dynamics: From 1968 to 1980's. (Spon­sored by the Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Human Development.)

11

Page 12: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

several specific emotions, including anger, fear, joy, sadness, and guilt.

Television and social behavior

In the early 1970s, a great deal of concern arose about the potential impact of television on children's development-particularly in light of the increasingly "violent" content of prime time programming. A Committee on Television and Social Behavior (1973-1979) was appointed to assess the state of re­search in the area. A portion of the committee's pro­gram was the evaluation of TV as a socialization in­fluence, specifically reviewing research on the effects of TV's violent content on children's aggressive be­havior. The committee recognized the difficulty of analyzing the content of television programming and recommended the development of a multidimen­sional profile of violence portrayal on television. In its final report, the committee drew upon concepts and research domains within various disciplines in an at­tempt to show how these concepts might be enriched by their application to television and its interrelation­ships with social behavior: it sought to extend con­cerns beyond violence and from childhood to adult­hood. I4 A parallel volume examined the psychologi­cal and social psychological nature of TV as an en­tertainment medium. IS

COGNITIVE AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Cognition, perception, and learning

Reflecting research trends in psychology generally and in the study of childhood specifically, personality and personality development have been foci of atten­tion through most of the Council's history. Interest in the cognitive development of children entered the Council's program later, with the appointment of a Committee on Intellective Processes Research (1959-1964). It was the impact of Jean Piaget's work, more than anything else, that catalyzed an interest in

14 Stephen B. Withey and Ronald P. Abeles, editors. Television and Social Behavior: Beyond Violence and Children. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980. (Sponsored by the Committee on Television and Social Behavior.)

15 Percy H . Tannenbaum, editor. The Entertainment Functions of Television. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980. (Sponsored by the Committee on Television and Social Behavior.)

12

cognitive development in the field of child develop­ment. Appropriately, the first in a series of committee publications dealt with Piaget's monumental contri­butions to the study of cognitive development during the first six years of childhood, examining his theory and observations in relation to other existing theories of child learning and cognition. 16 The Committee on Intellectual Processes Research, chaired successively by Roger Brown (Harvard University) and William Kessen (Yale University), played an important part in giving both coherence and momentum to research in this area. The committee published numerous con­ference reports on such topics as language acquisition in children, mathematical learning, learning to read, and transcultural studies of cognitive systems. I7 The committee also strengthened the international net­work of scholarly communication, which is particu­larly important to research in this area.

The Committee on Learning and the Educational Process (1962-1971) pursued a program com­plementary to that of the Committee on Intellective Processes Research, examining interactions between educational systems and cognitive development. The topics explored by this committee ranged from pre­school learning and early education to learning by discovery, computer-assisted instruction, and com­pensatory education. A variety of activities was orga­nized, resulting in several important publications. I8

A new generation of workers in cognitive research has been emerging during the past decade, placing

16 William Kessen and C1ementina Kuhlman, editors. Thought in the Young Child: Report of a Conference on Intellective Development, With Particular Attention to the Work of Jean Piaget. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Serial No. 835). Lafayette, Indiana: Child Development Publica­tions, 1962. (Sponsored by the Committee on Intellective Pro­cesses Research.)

17 See, e.g., John C. Wright and Jerome Kagan, editors. Basic Cognitive Processes in Children: Report of the Second Conference Spon­sored by the CfJTTImittee on Intellective Processes Research. Monographs of the Society for Research on Child Development, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Serial No. 86). Lafayette, Indiana: Child Development Publica­tions, 1963. (Sponsored by the Committee on Intellective Pro­cesses Research.)

18 E.g., Robert D. Hess and Roberta M. Bear, editors. Early Education: Current Theory, Research, and Action. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968; Wayne H. Holtzman, editor. Computer-Assisted Instruction, Testing, and Guidance. New York: Harper & Row, 1970; and Eleanor E. Maccobyand Miriam Zell­ner. Experiments in Primary Education: Aspects of Project Follow­Through. New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich , 1970. (All spon­sored by the Committee on Learning and the Educational Pro­cess.)

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 13: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

developmental interests in a broader framework. As a consequence, an interdisciplinary Committee on Cognitive Research (1972-prestmt) has examined in­formation processing models of perception and cog­nition, as well as theory and research on the nature of categories used by children in describing the natural world. 19 Subsequently, this committee has moved to consider cognition in natural settings and to ask how experimental and laboratory studies of cognition, in­cluding both adult and childhood cognition, explain daily cognitive behavior in settings such as schools, homes, and occupations. The committee has also asked how research on cognition must be modified to generalize to these natural settings. A recent publica­tion sponsored by the committee, for instance, ex­amines problems specific to cross-cultural studies of cognition.20 Another example of this work is repre­sented by a project on reading comprehension, in­volving issues such as the representation of the end product of the successful comprehension of a text, the identification of the skills and capabilities the reader must bring to a text in order to comprehend it, and the nature of "taking a reading test" as a cognitive activity. The focus of the project was on the com­prehension of text material as a naturally-occurring cognitive activity.

Likewise, the Subcommittee on Child Development in Life-Span Perspective will continue the tradition of examining childhood cognition within a broadened framework by exploring plasticity in cognitive devel­opment. Research aimed at studying the range of cognitive development capable by the individual child and the conditions for optimizing individual cognitive development can be subsumed under the heading of plasticity or intra-individual modifiability. The suc­cess of compensatory interventions aimed at op­timizing cognitive functioning has varied according to age. The relationship between age and plasticity must, therefore, be considered. The subcommittee wishes to examine such research and to explore issues such as the design of intervention studies, the mea­surement of intellectual functioning, the definition of

19 Herbert L. Pick, Jr. and Elliot Saltzman, editors. Modes oj Perceiving and Processing Infonnation. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1978. And Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, editors. Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Law­rence Erlbaum Associates, 1978. (Both sponsored by the Commit­tee on Cognitive Research.)

20 Michael Cole and Barbara Means. Comparative Studies oj How People Think: An Introduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. (Sponsored by the Committee on Cognitive Re­search.)

MARCH 1983

"endpoints" of cognitive development, and the con­cept of "cognitive reserve."

Social cognition

Within child development and psychology, there has been in recent years a renewal of interest in the study of social and emotional development. One par­ticularly active area involves investigations of interac­tions between cognition and social development. The Committee on Social and Affective Development During Childhood has recognized that childhood is an ideal period in which to study such relationships and has sponsored a series of activities on social cog­nition. Indeed, such explorations have formed much of the core of the program of the committee ap­pointed in 1976 to examine neglected areas of re­search in child development. One central, social cog­nitive interest of this committee has been the child's conception of self. While there has been considerable research on the concept of self at points in adoles­cence and adulthood, relatively little work has fo­cused on the young child's development of a sense of self. There are many reasons for this neglect, includ­ing a fundamental difficulty in developing methods which operationalize the self concept. especially in children. The committee is encouraging new work on the development of self that will address the following issues: (1) the measurement of self, including self reports, physiological measures, and behavioral mea­sures; (2) a study of the categories which children use to think about themselves, and the influence of cul­ture, social class, and experience on these categories; and (3) the role of self in emotional, cognitive, and social development. The committee is sponsoring a series of publications describing its activities in social cognition.21

More recently, the committee has turned its atten­tion to affect and emotional development. Much of this attention has emerged from studies of cognition: ways in which cognition and affect necessarily inter­act. This research indicates that cognition and affect may be far less independent systems than some theories propose or some scholars espouse. The committee is planning a number of activities in this area.

21 E.g., John H. Flavell and Lee Ross, editors. Social and Cogni­tive Development: Frontiers and Possible Futures. New York: Cam­bridge University Press, 1981; and Tory Higgins, Diane Ruble, and William Hartup, editors. Social Cognition and Social Develop­ment: A Socio-Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge Univer­sity Press, in press, 1983. (Both sponsored by the Committee on Social and Affective Development During Childhood .)

13

Page 14: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Giftedness and creativity

The 1960s and 1970s represented a time marked by increased scholarly interest in improving the lives of socially and economically disadvantaged children through a variety of intervention programs. Little attention was paid, however, to the highly gifted and talented. In 1975, the Council appointed a Commit­tee on Gifted Children (197~ 1980) to study the devel­opment of intellective giftedness and artistic and mu­sical creativity during childhood. This committee con­sidered methods for identifying the gifted at early ages and began exploring whether there might be optimal periods for the establishment of particular learned skills. The committee gradually recognized the need to examine the development of giftedness in a broader context, involving the interplay of biologi­cal, social, psychological, and historical factors. Thus, i~ 1980 the committee was reorganized by the Coun­al to become the Committee on Development, Gifted­ness, and the Learning Process. A major concern of this new committee is to encourage research on giftedness that accounts for the nature of abilities that are unique to specific domains. While there has been considerable research on the nature and devel­opmental course of giftedness as general cognitive functioning, there have been few attempts to investi­gate the nature and maturation of exceptional abilities within specific domains such as music, artistic expr~ssion, and writing. The committee is conducting a senes of workshops focused on domain-specific performance.

LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

The Council has a long history of activities involv­ing linguistics and the social sciences.22 A number of these activities have involved considerations of child­hood linguistic competences and the acquisition of a primary and a secondary language. The Committee on Intellectual Processes Research (1959-1964) exam­ined children's first language acquisition by sponsor­ing a conference, the proceedings of which were pub­lished in 1964 in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.23

One interest of the Committee on Sociolinguistics (1963-1978) was "microsociolinguistics," the study of

22 See, e.g., Susan M. Ervin-Tripp. "Two Decades of Council Activity in the Rapprochement of Linguistics and Social Science." Items, 28(1):1-4, March 1974; and Allen D. Grimshaw. "Sociolin­guistics at the Council, 1963-1979: Past and Prologue." Items, 34(1):13-18, March 1980.

14

face-to-face interaction. The committee adopted a cross-cultural approach to studies of the acquisition of communicative competence. The program in­volved three foci: cross-linguistic study of semantic phonological, and grammatical development in chil~ dren; the development of the social functions and rules of language in children-child sociolinguistics; and th~ study of the nexus of beliefs and practices regardmg language which are the milieu of the child's l~nguage learning-the ethnography of communica­tion. The program of activities in this area involved t~e prep.aration of a field manual, the preparation of dlssert~ttons based on studies in field sites in eight countnes, and summer workshops bringing together students, field workers, faculty, and visiting scholars for intensive study. ~he comm~ttee also examined the process by

whIch early chIldhood language acquisition is affected by who talks to children and how. The special fea­tures. of parents' and other caretakers' speech that may mfluence the course of children's acquisition of their first language and the general forms of baby t~lk a.s w~ll as theoretical considerations of linguistic slmphcatton are considered in a recent volume.24 Fi­nally, the committee also sponsored activities on pr?blems of communication in the classroom, post­chIldhood modification of social interactional lin-. . ' gUlStlc and sociolinguistic rules, and similar topics.

SOCIAL INDICATORS AND CHILDREN'S WELL-BEING

The Council's primary mandate is the advancement of basic research. Nonetheless, concerns for chil­dren's well-being and for the usefulness of research in contributing to the improvement of children's well­being frequently flow through Council activities in the area of child development. A few examples are particularly noteworthy.

Social indicators

An interest in indicators of the well-being of chil­dren and families has existed throughout the Coun-

23 Ursula Bellugi and Roger Brown, editors. The Acquisition of Language: Report of the [Third] Conference Sponsored by the Committee on Intellective Processes Research. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Serial No. 92). Lafayette, Indiana: Child Development Publications, 1964. (Sponsored by the Committee on Intellective Processes Research.)

24 Catherine Snow and Charles Ferguson, editors. Talking to Children: Language Input and Acqui5ition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. (Sponsored by the Committee on Sociolinguistics.)

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 15: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

cil's history. Council work in the area of social indica­tors achieved coherence and integration, under the Council presidency of Eleanor Bernert Sheldon, who in 1972 initiated the formation of the Council's Cen­ter for the Coordination of Research on Social Indi­cators, located in Washington, D.C. The Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators (1972-present) has sponsored a number of subcommittees and advisory groups. An Advisory Group on Child and Family Indicators (1979-present) was formed to pursue activities directed toward improving the data base, research, and reporting related to the current and changing well-being of children and their families. The group has now prepared a major report that provides a detailed assessment of measurement in specific child and family areas.25 The report offers a framework and a classification scheme for for­mulating indicators of child and family well-being. The current status and progress of work on child­hood social indicators is summarized in areas of health, socioemotional development, moral and ethi­cal attitudes, and intellectual functioning, and a series of recommendations is offered for maintaining and improving data collection and archival efforts.

The Subcommittee on Child Development in Life­Span Perspective is currently preparing an inventory of longitudinal research on childhood. Though not directed specifically to social indicators, this inven­tory, when published, will provide a resource for as­sessing the status of data bases on children.

Developmental psychopathology

The Committee on Social and Affective Develop­ment believes that research on developmental psychopathology could benefit from. a sharing of knowledge between practitioners in clinical settings and those researchers who study children in the labo­ratory, home, and school. Several clinical approaches to the treatment of troubled children that have emerged in recent years focus on aspects of develop­ment that are of considerable interest to nonclinical researchers, and there is a growing body of important clinical research and documented observations. For example, just as nonclinical researchers have become more interested in the total family system, an in­creasing number of clinicians has realized that treat­ment must include a consideration of "transactional

25 Harold W. Watts and Donald J. Hernandez, editors. Child and Family Indicators: A Report with Recommendations. Washington, D.C.: Social Science Research Council, 1982. (Sponsored by the Advisory Group on Child and Family Indicators.)

MARCH 1983

contexts" or "patterns of interaction" among all fam­ily members.

Clinical practice now may include entire family units, but there is a paucity of research on affective communication among family members. Often, ef­forts to detect and prevent social and emotional mal­development are not grounded in conceptual frame­works that distinguish discrete concepts and variables. Clearly, clinicians and researchers could learn much from each other about developmental psychopathol­ogy and the committee is organizing activities to con­tribute to this objective.

Problems of parental behavior

The Committee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior is employing its approach to examine the etiology and the developmental consequences of par­ticular failures or potential problems of parental behavior-e.g., school-age pregnancies and par­enthood26 and child abuse and family violence. The committee believes that the biosocial perspective may have an especially important contribution to make in these areas. Emergence of such problems may be related to changes across human evolutionary history in the size and nature of the family, the birth spacing of children, and the households in which families live. Examining the issues in terms of the evolutionary history of the species and the biological roots of be­havior while at the same time maintaining a devel­opmental perspective may cast these problems in a new light and lead to increased understanding with unique recommendations for policy.

Approaches to developmental interventions

The Committee on Development, Giftedness, and the Learning Process will consider those individual characteristics and contextual factors that facilitate the maturation of giftedness into productive adult expression. For domains of giftedness, there may be a critical period in the development of exceptional abilities, often during adolescence, when the individ­ual transforms these abilities into a productive career. For some, this transformation does not occur. The transition may involve the connection of exceptional abilities with a sense of purposefulness, identity, and the capacity for reflective abstraction. At the same

26 See, e.g., Beatrix A. Hamburg and Jane B. Lancaster, editors. School-age Pregnancies and Parenthood: Biosocial Dimensions. In preparation, 1983. (Sponsored by the Committee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior.)

15

Page 16: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

time, there may be certain social and environmental conditions that can accelerate or impede this transi­tion, conditions that may occur naturally or be inten­tionally structured through training efforts. The committee is exploring such possibilities.

The Subcommittee on Child Development in Life­Span Perspective plans to examine various theories of and approaches to early childhood intervention in both cognitive and social areas. For example, cogni­tive training seems to carry more success with the aged than with children; one needs, therefore, to question whether this result pertains to age-related limitations on the individual's potential for change or is a function of variation in the intervention strategies and techniques employed at different ages. Several hypotheses regarding intervention and its effects have emerged in child development in recent years. The subcommittee wishes to examine these in the context of our knowledge of child and adult devel­opment.

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

Committee activities in child development have frequently involved contact and collaboration with scholars outside the United States; Child Develop­ment in Life-Span Perspective, Intellective Processes Research, Learning and the Educational Process, and Socialization and Social Structure are all examples. Additionally, several of the foreign area committees have examined issues of child development-either as committee projects or in collaboration with a relevant research planning committee. In 1973, the Commit­tee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (1966-present)-sponsoredjointly with the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Academy of Sciences-arranged a visit to the People's Republic by an American delegation on early childhood development. 27 The joint Com­mittee on japanese Studies (1967-present) has spon­sored conferences and other activities comparing early childhood socialization in japan and the United States-in collaboration with members of the Com­mittee on Social and Affective Development-and is organizing a series of workshops to examine the fam­ily and its role in life-course development in japan

27 William Kessen, editor. Childhood in China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. A report of the American delegation on early childhood development, which visited the People's Republic of China under the auspices of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, November 15-December 5, 1973.

16

and the United States-in consultation with members of the Committee on Life-Course Perspectives. These activities are examples of the Council's contribution to the inclusion of child development research in the increasing internationalization of the social sciences. 28

CHILDHOOD AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

The preceding sections suggest the extent to which the Council's half century-long substantiv~ agenda has involved topics and issues central to research on child development. The most recent of the projects described in previous sections of this report represent yet another major development of the field-the in­corporation of childhood into a broader, multidiscip­linary view of human development. During the past few years, scholars of human development have begun to examine child development as a prologue to subsequent development in adulthood and old age. Historical and evolutionary influences on child devel­opment, along with age-graded factors, are being ex­plored. Nonnormative as well as normative events in children's lives are viewed as important contributors to developmental sequelae during childhood and throughout life. 29 This perspective is most explicitly represented by the formation in 1981 of the Sub­committee on Child Development by the Council's Committee on Life-Course Perspectives. But a view of child development which recognizes its interdiscipli­nary nature and life-long implications is characteristic of all current Council programs in the field. This approach has emerged from several decades of re­search on child and human development, and its be­ginnings can be traced back through Council activities at least as far as the Committee on Socialization and Social Structure. The implications of this broadened outlook on child development are now being articu­lated through Council activities and research on child and human development across several disciplines.

28 Kenneth Prewitt. "Annual Report of the President, 1978-79." In Social Science Research Council, Annual Report, 1978-79. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1979.

29 See, e.g, Paul B. Baltes. "On the Potential and Limits of Child Development: Life-Span Development Perspectives." Newsletter of the Societyfor Research in Child Development, Summer 1979: 1-4; and Paul B. Baltes, Hayne P. Reese, and Lewis P. Lipsitt. "Life-Span Developmental Psychology." Annual Review of Psycholof5jl, 31:65-110, 1980. (Both sponsored by the Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Middle and Old Age, now on Human Develop­ment.)

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 17: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

During its 60-year history, the Council has played a significant role in child development scholarship. The future holds promise for a continuation, if not even an expansion, of this role. Current Council commit­tees remain active in the child development area. The Subcommittee on Child Development in Life-Span Perspective will attempt to develop an interdiscipli­nary view of childhood, attending to events in chil­dren's lives and to the influence of the historical con­text on child development. The Committee on Devel­opment, Giftedness, and the Learning Process will examine the development of exceptional abilities in

particular domains. The Committee on Social and Affective Development During Childhood will ex­plore the early socialization of emotions. The Com­mittee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior will examine the contributions of evolutionary history to child development and parent behavior. These ac­tivities, and others to come, by incorporating exami­nations of concept, theory, and methodology across disciplines and by the involvement of junior and senior scholars from the United States and abroad, should contribute to the continued growth and re­finement of the study of child development. D

Perspectives on Latin American Population Research

IN 1978, the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies decided to support population research proj­ects that are not confined to demographic questions but rather consIder populatIon structures and pro­cesses within the larger economic, political, and social context of the region. A working group consisting of investigators with a wide range of Latin American population research experience was formed to con­sider and recommend innovative approaches that would guide the parent committee's future research support. 1 The working group addressed both sub­stantive and methodological issues that it saw in re­cent Latin American population trends.

On the substantive side, the working group's inter­est centered on relationships between population and health, morbidity and mortality, mobility of labor, and the significance of social inequality, with the link between individual, family, and household behavior, on the one hand, and broader social and economic

* Thomas W. Merrick, a demographer, is director of the Cen­ter for Population Research at Georgetown University.

1 The working group was composed of Eduardo Arriaga, U.S. Bureau of the Census; Jorge Balan, Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES, Buenos Aires); Elsa Berquo. Brazilian Cen­ter of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP, Sao Paulo); Hariey Browning. University of Texas; Brigida Garda. El Colegio de Mexico; Mary M. Kritz. The Rockefeller Foundation (New York); Thomas W. Merrick, Georgetown University; Axel Mundigo, The Population Council (Mexico City); Alberto Palloni. Univer­sity of Michigan; Zulma Recchini de Lattes, Center of Population Studies (CENEP, Buenos Aires); T. Paul Schultz. Yale University; and Maria Elena de Trinidade Henriques, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Funda~ao IBGE. Rio de Janeiro).

MARCH 1983

by Thomas W. Merrick*

structural determinants, on the other, as a common thread running through each topic.

As the working group continued, communication across the diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions that were represented ("mainstream" eco­nomics and sociology, formal demography, Marxian and structural-historical approaches to name a few) proved to be a problem. While there was shared interest in the themes described above, there were quite different perceptions of both the substantive and methodological significance of what it was to link individuallmicrolevel behavior to macrolevel structure and change.

As an outgrowth of the working group's experi­ence, several of its members planned a followup con­ference, which took place in Ixtapan de la Sal, Mexico, in August 1982, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of the con­ference was to increase cross-disciplinary communi­cation about ways in which various research traditions approach the task of relating individual and house­hold level behavior to broader social and economic structure and change-the links between "micro" and "macro" level approaches. Authors of invited papers, who included researchers with Latin American experience as well as those with relevant experience in other regions, were asked to illustrate how their particular research tradition used its theory and evi­dence to draw conclusions about relationships be­tween individ ual and household level demographic processes and the societal level. The conference par­ticipants are listed at the end of this report; the co or-

17

Page 18: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

dinators of the conference were Jorge Balan, Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES, Buenos Aires), and Thomas W. Merrick, Georgetown Univer­sity.

The meeting sought to stimulate innovation in re­search, not in the sense of discovering an overriding synthesis to substitute for previous approaches but rather with the idea that effective cross-disciplinary communication on the question of micr<r-macro links would enrich existing approaches by revealing how others derive their insights and by making it possible for investigators to draw more effectively on such insights in the future. It was also trying to come to grips with what it recognized as a particular ambiguity in the field of demography about levels of under­standing. Demographic events (birth, death, migra­tion, marriage) are experienced by individuals, while their outcomes are measured in aggregates (birth and death rates for communities, socioeconomic groups, nations). Some would argue that the appropriate level at which demographic change should be interpreted and explained is the community level, but the advent of large scale surveys and of computers with software packages for multivariate statistical analysis of these surveys made it possible to approach the explanation of demographic change on the basis of individual and household level observations rather than community level averages, and attracted the interest of disciplines whose approach to empirical analysis ran along these lines. The rapid rise of interest in demography dur­ing the 1970s among microeconomists and quantita­tive sociologists is illustrative.

The entry into demography of new or alternative approaches has been comparatively easy, because ex­planation in the field has not required commitment to anyone of the traditional social science disciplines in the way, for example, that a sociologist or historian would need to know and be willing to work with the basic tenets of microeconomic theory before being taken seriously by economists in an effort to delve into the economic side of a question. In demography one finds sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and economists, all in a variety of stripes, practicing the trade, with disciplinary boundaries less rigorously en­forced by the economist-, sociologist-, historian­demographer than in other branches of their fields. While this offers increased opportunity to enrich the explanation of demographic change by drawing on a variety of approaches, it also increases the risk of misunderstanding and confusion if cross-disciplinary communication is poor.

While the conference agenda concentrated on

18

practical questions about how researchers in different traditions determine the appropriate level for mea­surement and analysis, the role of theory, and links to other disciplines, rather than more fundamental epistemological questions about the nature of the re­search enterprise, it was hard to avoid the latter in dealing with a number of points. It surfaced in the discussion of a paper by John C. Caldwell, P. H. Reddy, and Pat Caldwell, "The Micro Approach in Demographic Investigation: Toward a Methodol­ogy." Participants discussed the tension between the positivist approach, in which theory provides a clear­cut conceptual framework that guides the assessment of factual evidence by generating falsifiable hypothe­ses from theoretical models, and the phenomonologi­cal approach, which starts by trying to see the world on the actors' terms before moving to explanations of their behavior.

In defense of the latter, Caldwell expressed con­cern that a great deal of existing factual data has been collected by government agencies and institutions that present ethnocentric perspectives, so that the investigator faces the fundamental problem of plac­ing evidence in context and avoiding distorted per­ceptions of individual behavior imposed by the categories of available data. The experience described in the paper by Caldwell et al. suggests the need for a healthy skepticism about survey research that is undertaken without quasianthropological or micro­level investigation as a prerequisite. This micro approach is both a method of collecting data and a theory about what kinds of data are relevant in the analysis of demographic behavior. The cost is a sub­stantial increase in the investment of investigators' time in field work, first in getting to know and gaining the confidence of the study population, and then in using the "play-back" method to test one's own per­ceptions of demographic processes against those of members of that population.

·The distinction between phenomenological and positivist approaches also revealed different percep­tions of the meanings of the terms "micro" and "macro." The Caldwell et al. paper used "micro" to describe a method of collecting data, while those with a positivist orientation, particularly economists, de­fined it in terms of the level at which decision pro­cesses are examined, with "micro" referring to the fundamental decision-making unit (individual, fam­ily, household), and "macro" to aggregates of those units and to the institutional environment that pre­scribes limits that the fundamental unit takes as given. Social scientists from other disciplines were less com-

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 19: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

fortable with the notion of the household or family as a fundamental decision-making unit because it failed to account for intrahousehold dynamics.

Those dynamics were the topic of Elisabeth Jelin's paper, "A Microsocial Processing of a Life Style: the Organization of Expenditures Among Domestic Units of the Popular Sectors." She used a micro­approach (in the Caldwell sense) to follow re­sponse patterns within domestic units to inflationary pressures in Argentina. Changes in expenditure pat­terns observed at the household level masked a com­plexity of negotiation and adaptation among house­hold members about whose needs and what needs would be adjusted for the budget squeeze, with out­comes that appeared to be irrational, when viewed at the household level, making much more sense when understood in the perspective of intrahousehold bar­gaining and power relationships.

The family history approach to linking macro- and microlevel behavior was described in Tamara Hare­ven's paper, "Synchronizing Family Time and His­torical Time: The Workings of Family History." Drawing mainly on evidence from her studies of the American family during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she departs from conventional life-cycle ap­proaches to the family and recommends the life-course approach. Its main feature is to emphasize the timing of transitions in family life, and it is in the synchroni­zation of family and individual transitions with exter­nal (period) changes that Hareven sees the main op­portunity for linking micro: and macro level change. Reaction to the paper focused on difficulties in defin­ing transitions in the case of more complex house­holds, particularly in the developing countries, and in the limited accounting for demographic processes in Hareven's account of the effects of broader social and economic change.

The logic with which household economic theory explains demographic change was outlined in T. Paul Schultz's paper, "Extending Economic Research Using Household and Community Data," which also described research strategies that could help economists to enrich their analyses of micro level be­havior by incorporating community level evidence rather than assuming that macroconditions (e.g., market wages and prices) are exogenous at the indi­vidual and household level. Since empirical work in household economics is heavily geared to economet­ric analyses of individual and household level obser­vations in survey data, Schultz outlined an approach that would modify the specification of micro models to include community level variables. He drew on his

MARCH 1983

own studies about the effects of public health pro­grams on child health to suggest how such a modifi­cation might be accomplished, but cautioned in the discussion that since economic analysis starts with the household in a equilibrium state, the economist is faced with a constant struggle in trying to account for changing external forces as well as the internal dynamics of the household.

Yoram Ben Porath pointed out that economists are not all of one mind on how adequate an accounting of household economic and demographic behavior the microeconomic theory of the household can provide. Historically, political economy was largely concerned with broade,r social and economic change and recog­nized few of today's disciplinary boundaries. While modern neoclassical theory has had comparatively little to say about intrahousehold dynamics, economists working on household demographic be­havior have begun to adapt their thinking to account for what happens within households. He cited Becker's effort to incorporate family ties in utility theory and discussed his own work with the F­connection, which draws on transaction theory.2 He has been examining the hypothesis that larger house­holds are an advantage when markets are not devel­oped because transaction costs will be lower owing to the household's control over greater stocks of capital and labor. He noted that while the approach is still basically deductive, it represents an example of how insights can be enriched by drawing on descriptive evidence from research that is more phenomenologi­cal in orientation.

Modern Marxian theory belongs to the tradition of political economy. It is also basically deductive in ap­proach, although critical of neoclassical economics because of the latter's apparent blindness to structural issues in its concentration on individual rationality, optimization, and equilibrium. Jane Humphries' paper on Marxian approaches to micro- macro links, "The Family and Economy: Notes Toward a Relative Autonomy Approach," spoke in terms of strategies adopted by families in response to institutional and structural changes: for example, changes in the sex­ual division of labor in response to the proletarianiza­tion of labor. She introduced the notion of relative autonomy as an attempt to provide space for mi-

2 Gary Becker. A Treatil"e on the Family. Cambridge, Massachu­setts: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Yoram Ben Porath. "TheF-Connection: Families, Friends, and Firms and the Organization of Exchange." Population and Devel­opment Review, 6( 1): I-3~, March 1980.

19

Page 20: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

crolevel responses to the macroforces that are traditionally emphasized in Marxian theory. Concern was expressed in the discussion about the validity of Marxian categories in the peasant economies of the developing countries, in contrast to Western Europe, where many of the ideas first emerged.

One example of research in Latin America whose design was guided, at least in part, by the framework of Marxian political economic theory, is the study of Brazilian reproductive behavior conducted by the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEB­RAP). Prior to starting their field work to gather individual-level reproductive life histories, the CEB­RAP team examined a wide range of evidence on Brazilian economic and social change in order to es­tablish typologies of geographic settings that corre­spond to differences in modes of production and modes of insertion into the national and international economy and which might have had a differential impact on demographic behavior at the individual level. On the basis of these contextual studies, surveys were conducted in each of nine settings representing different modes. Circumstances prevented a CEB­RAP participant from attending the meeting, which would have permitted greater discussion of how CEBRAP investigators used their contextual infor­mation to draw conclusions that are not obtainable from conventional survey data.

Partial insight into how the CEBRAP data could be utilized to link micro- and macrolevels of analysis was provided in the paper by Brigida Garcia, Humberto Munoz, and Orlandina de Oliveira, "Family and Work in Different Structural Contexts," since they discussed their work with data from two sites in the CEBRAP study (Sao Jose dos Campos and Recife, along with data on Mexico City) to illustrate an ap­proach to relating family economic behavior, par­ticularly female labor force participation, to dif­ferentials in structural contexts. Labor market char­acteristics 'and recent population dynamics were the key structural features studied in the three cities in the study, each being examined with a view toward learning how individual behavior was conditioned by the structural context, with the family and household playing a mediating role.

Discussion of the Garcia, Munoz, and Oliveira paper focused on an issue that surfaced often during the conference: where to draw boundaries around the family-household-domestic unit in moving from individual to societal levels of analysis. Their study provided a good example of the need to deal with the limitations imposed by available data, in which co-

20

residence (a housing unit being the primary sampling unit) in fact settles the issue, even though theoretical interests suggest that support systems based on kin­ship and/or neighborhood proximity, interfamily transfers of income and services, and intrafamily in­teractions may be more pertinent to the story being told. Again, it was recognized that the kind of partici­pant observation practiced by anthropologists and recommended in the Caldwell et al. paper should be a prerequisite to survey work when survey data are used in such circumstances and that these circum­stances may be the rule rather than the exception in developing countries.

The Garcia, Munoz, and Oliveira paper also touched on another theme that has interested Latin American social scientists working in both the Marx­ian and structuralist traditions. This one relates household level demographic responses to societal level change in terms of "survival strategies." The survival strategy literature was reviewed by Marta Tienda in her paper, "Household Structure and the Division of Labor: Linking Demographic Responses to Social Change." According to Tienda, a "survival strategy is the process by which households actively engage in decisions and behaviors to allocate scarce resources among a range of potentially competing demands and in light of changing social and eco­nomic arrangements." While the definition sounds very similar to a description of the content of the economic theory of household demographic behav­ior, proponents of the survival strategy concept argue that it focuses much more explicitly on the exogenous factors than do the economic models.

Critics of the survival strategy approach were troubled by the ambiguity of the words "survival" and "strategy" in describing household behavior. Strategy suggests an orderliness that may miss much of the haphazardness in what families do, and also appears to ignore intrafamily conflict. If survival implies more than biological survival and includes living standards, the term is laden with a great deal of historically and culturally determined relativity, which, indeed, is part of the story which the survival strategy approach is trying to tell. The example in Jelin's paper of the link between meat in the diet and the preservation of a sense of self worth among working-class Argentine families is illustrative, since her research showed the lengths to which these families go to maintain a par­ticular standard of living in the face of inflation and declining real incomes. While it was recognized that the process being described is similar to the one ad­dressed by standard microeconomic theory (decisions

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 21: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

at the margin about allocation of scarce resources, given preferences), few noneconomists were willing to settle for recounting the story without the political nuances about income inequality and, for Marxists, class struggle, from which neoclassical economists abstain.

Jorge Dandier's paper, "Household Diversification and Labor Processes," illustrates an approach to household responses to social change in terms of a structure of options rather than survival strategies. Land was the crucial variable for the Andean peasant households that he studied. Household demographic behavior is viewed as a dynamic element in changing control of land in that all three components of demo­graphic change (fertility, mortality, and migration) as well as marriage both produce and are affected by such change, through retention and loss of household members. Macroprocesses condition. household re­sponses, particularly through penetration of peasant areas by nonagricultural activities from the capitalist sector, which proved to be closely interrelated with the diversification of peasant household organization.

The issues on the agenda of the conference were not new ones. Social scientists have continued to pon­der the questions of the appropriate level at which linkages between social, economic, and demographic structure and change should be studied and how those linkages should be specified. It was an oppor­tune time for students of Latin American demogra­phy to rethink those questions: the region has experi­enced significant changes during the last two decades and the rapid increase in the stock of survey data and analytical tools to work with these data have chal­lenged investigators to develop research strategies that provide an adequate understanding of such change.

It was clear from both the papers and discussion during the conference that there are various useful approaches to "telling the story," and that no single account can claim a monopoly on significant insights. Issues that came into clear focus in a microlevel optic were blurred in those that brought broader structural questions into view. It was tempting to think of equipping investigators with multidisciplinary bi- or tri-focal research lenses, but participants agreed that

MARCH 1983

it was more practical to recognize the validity of disci­plinary specialization as a starting point and to con­tinue working against narrowness of vision through on-going efforts at cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication.

Participants and their presentations included Yoram Ben-Porath, The Hebrew University, "Notes on the Changing Role of Economics in Demography"; John C. Caldwell, The Australian National Univer­sity, "The Micro Approach in Demographic Investi­gation: Toward a Methodology"; Jorge Dandier, Center for the Study of Socioeconomic Reality (CERES, La Paz), ':Household Diversification and Labor Process: Some Anthropological Perspectives on the Andean Peasantry"; Tamara Hareven, Clark University, "Synchronizing Family Time and Histori­cal Time: The Working of Family History"; Jane Humphries, University of Cambridge, "The Family and Economy: Notes Toward a Relative Autonomy Approach"; Elizabeth Jelin, Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES, Buenos Aires), "Mi­croprocessing of a Life Style"; Orland ina de Oliviera, El Colegio de Mexico, "Family and Work in Different Structural Contexts"; Paulo Paiva, CEDEPLAR, Uni­versity of Minais Gerais (Brazil), "Notes on the CEBRAP-CEDEPLAR Study of Fertility Change in Brazil"; T. Paul Schultz, Yale University, "Extending Economic Research Using Household and Commu­nity Data"; and Marta Tienda, University of Wiscon­sin, "Household Structure and Division of Labor: Linking Demographic Responses to Social Change in Latin America."

Commentators included Carlos E. Aramburu, Catholic University of Peru; Harley L. Browning, University of Texas; Mead Cain, The Population Council (New Yo~k); Axel Mundigo, The Population Council (Mexico City); Joseph E. Potter, El Colegio de Mexico; Richard Smith, SSRC-Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Society (Cambridge, England); Verena Stokke, Autonomous University of Barcelona; and Charles Wood, University of Florida. The coordinators were Jorge Balan, Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES, Buenos Aires), and Thomas W. Merrick, Georgetown University. Brooke Larson served as staff. 0

21

Page 22: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Recent Activities of the Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Human Development

Conference in Berlin

The committee sponsored an International Con­ference on Life-Course Research on Human Devel­opment at the Max Planck Institute for Human De­velopment and Education (Berlin), from September 16-21, 1982. The conference was made possible by funding from the Volkswagen Foundation (Han­nover).

The conference was designed to present research on human development throughout the life course from a variety of disciplines and on both sides of the Atlantic. Nine sessions were held, consisting of one or two presented papers with two or three commentaries by discussants; each session was organized to incorpo­rate both interdisciplinary and transatlantic perspec­tives. (The affiliations of committee members are given at the end of this report.)

Session One: The Development of the State and the Structure of the Life Course Karl Ulrich Mayer, University of Mann­

. heim , and Walter Muller Discussants: Hartmut Kaelble, Free University

of Berlin; Gudmund Heroes, University of Bergen

Session Two: Life-Course Patterns of Women and Their Men, 16th to 20th Century Arthur E. Imhof, Free University of Berlin

Discussants: Abner Cohen, University of Lon­don; Matilda White Riley

Session Three: Conflict and Stress as Organizers of the Life

Session Four:

Session Five:

22

Course Hans Thomae and Ursula Lehr, University of Bonn

Di.~cussants: Erhard Olbrich, University of Giessen; Glen H. Elder, Jr.

Social Organization and Subjective Con­struction of the Life Course Martin Kohli, Free University of Berlin

Discussants: John W. Meyer; M. Brewster Smith

Senile Dementia of Alzheimer's Type: Clini­cal, Genetic, and Pathogenetic Aspects Carl G. Gottfries, University of GOteborg

Discussant: George M. Martin Senile Dementia of Alzheimer's Type:

Epidemiological and Psychosocial Aspects Klaus Bergmann, Maudsley Hospital (Lon­don)

Discussant: Brian Cooper, Central Institute for Mental Health (Mannheim)

Session Six: Huntington's Chorea: Clinical, Genetic, and Pathogenetic Aspects Heinrich Oepen, University of Marburg

Discussants: Friederich Vogel, University of Heidelberg; Caleb Finch

Session Seven: Personal Control and the Life Span Martin E. P. Seligman

Discussants: Ellen Shinner, Max Planck Insti­tute for Human Development and Educa­tion (Berlin); John Teasdale, The Waroeford Hospital (Oxford)

Session Eight: Achievement and Motivation Through the

Session Nine:

Life Span Heinz Heckhausen, University of Bochum

Discussants: Sigrun-Heide Filipp, University of Trier; Orville G. Brim, Jr.; Aage B. S~ren­sen

Developmental Variations of Memory Per­formance and Memory-Related Knowl­edge Across the Life Span Franz E. Weinert

Intellectual Development During Adulthood and Old Age: Propositions Toward Theory Paul B. Baltes with F. Dittmann-Kohli and R. A. Dixon, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (Ber­lin)

Discussants: Rainer H. Kluwe, University of the Federal Armed Forces (Hamburg); David L. Featherman

Paul B. Baltes and Glen H. Elder, Jr., as cochair­men of the committee, presented concluding remarks and chaired the final discussion session of the confer­ence. Other participants included Ronald P. Abeles, National Institute on Aging; Hans Jiirgen Andress, University of Bielefeld; Margret M. Baltes, Free Uni­versity of Berlin; Peter Burgard, University of Saar­briicken; Irene Burtchen, University of Munich; An­selm Eder, University of Vienna; John W. Riley, Jr., Washington, D.C.; Alfred Schmidt, Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover); Kari Skrede, Institute of Applied Social Research (Oslo); Kerstin Steiner, Uni­versity of Mainz; and Lonnie R. Sherrod, staff.

The committee met in business session for one day following the conference to assess the meeting, plan subsequent activities, and plan a volume from the conference, to be edited by Aage B. S.0rensen, Franz E. Weinert, and Lonnie R. Sherrod. The manuscript will incorporate many presentations from the confer-

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 23: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

ence, several discussions that will be expanded into independent contributions, and new chapters from committee members and consultants who have worked with the committee over several years.

Attributions in mothers and children: A life­span approach

The first in a series of workshops to be organized by the Subcommittee on Child Development in Life­Span Perspective will focus on emotional develop­ment and attributions of causality in young children and their parents. A planning meeting for a first workshop was held on October 15-16, 1982, in Philadelphia. Participating were Judith Dunn, Uni­versity of Cambridge; Carol Dweck, Harvard Univer­sity; Glen H. Elder, Jr.; Christopher Peterson, Vir­ginia Polytechnic Institute; Martin E. P. Seligman; M. Brewster Smith; and Lonnie R. Sherrod, staff.

A workshop is scheduled for December 8-11, 1983. The objective of the meeting will be to use existing data sets containing transcripts of mother-child con­versations to address such questions as: What is the earliest age at which children make causal attribu­tions? Is there an attributional style in preschool chil­dren? How does the formal structure of causal attri- · butions and attributional style change over time? What is the relationship between a mother's and a child's attri­butions? Subsequently, members of the subcommittee and other participants in the workshop will examine continuities and changes in attributional processes from early childhood through adulthood and search for contextual influences on the development of at­tributional style.

Although in recent years there has been some re­search examining attributions of causality, the style of attributions, and relationships to cognitive and emo­tional development in children eight years and older, there is relatively little attention to children at younger ages. As a result, little is known about the age at which attributions emerge or about the origins of the childhood attributions. The instruments which have been developed to measure attributions in older children are simply not appropriate for preschoolers. During the planning meeting, participants examined transcripts of mother-child conversations from one study of preschoolers (Dunn's longitudinal study of siblings), and determined that such materials do allow the analysis of mothers' and preschoolers' attribu­tions. Transcripts from several studies will be ana­lyzed as one part of the workshop agenda, and prob-

MARCH 1983

lems of analysis and interpretation and topics for subsequent research will be discussed.

Senior participants in the workshop will include Paul B. Baltes; Judith Dunn; Carol Dweck, Harvard University; Christopher Peterson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute; and Martin E. P. Seligman. At least an equal number of participants will be invited on the basis of applications submitted to the Council.

Research scientists at the advanced graduate stu­dent and any postdoctoral level who are already doing research or are interested in beginning research ex­amining young children's (2 to 8 years) attributions of causality are invited to apply for participation in the workshop. Access to mother-child transcripts is de­sirable, but not mandatory. Interested persons may apply by sending a 1-2 page letter describing their interests, background, and opportunities for research in this area, along with a curriculum vitae to Lonnie R. Sherrod at the Council.

Materials should be received by June 1; a partici­pant list will be assembled by July 1. Travel, lodging, and other expenses will be paid for all invited partici­pants.

Pubertal and psychosocial change

The second conference sponsored by the Subcom­mittee on Child Development in Life-Span Perspec­tive was held on December 10-11, 1982 in Tucson, Arizona.

The major objective of the subcommittee's pro­gram is to examine possible interactions between theories of and research on child development and the life-span approach to studies of human develop­ment. This meeting was organized to examine the contributions of the life-span perspective, with its emphasis on developmental change as a potentially life-long phenomenon and its contextual view of the person, to the study of the multiple transitions that occur during adolescence-in biological, cognitive, and social domains. During the past decade, there has been an increased interest in adolescence, so that one aim of the conference was to review existing research, employing a life-span approach to explore major findings and identify areas where further conceptual or empirical work is needed.

The meeting was organized by subcommittee members Glen H. Elder, Jr., E. Mavis Hetherington, Richard M. Lerner, and Ross D. Parke. The agenda consisted of the following presentations and discus­sions:

23

Page 24: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Introductory Session: Adolescence in Life-Span Perspective Glen H . Elder, Jr.

Session One:

Session Two:

Pubertal and Psychosocial Change Richard M. Lerner

Biological and Psychosocial Influences on Puberty, chaired by Richard M. Lerner

Onset of Puberty: Developmental Crisis or Transactional Phenome­non? Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Educational Testing Service (Princeton, New Jer­sey)

Endocrinological Factors: Overview and the Example of Precocious Pu­berty Gordon B. Cutler, National Institute of Child Health and Human Devel­opment

The Nature of the Effect of Puberty on Early Adolescent Development Anne Petersen, Pennsylvania State University

The Impact of Puberty, School Type, and Sex on Adjustment Roberta Simmons, University of Min­nesota

Discussants: Orville G. Brim,Jr. and Ross D. Parke

The Experience of Puberty: Individ­ual, Familial, and Sociocultural Factors, chaired by Paul B. Baltes

Behavioral Correlates of Early versus Late Maturation Ruth T. Gross, Stanford University

Psychosocial Development in Adoles­cence: Continuities With Young Adulthood Richard Jessor, University of Colorado

Cultural Links Between Gender Roles and Identity John W. Meyer

Discussants: Glen H. Elder, Jr. and E. Mavis Hetherington

Other participants included Margret Baltes, Free University of Berlin; Merrill Carlsmith, Stanford University; Gary Jensen, University of Arizona; Matilda White Riley; and Lonnie R. Sherrod, staff.

A number of directions for further work were out­lined during the meeting, and the subcommittee is considering a variety of subsequent activities. For example, attention to development over age periods

24

before and after adolescence may be particularly use­ful, and it may be especially important to compare the adolescent's development to that of other "transition" periods which also seem to be characterized by rapid and multiple changes and by change in several domains--e.g., school entry at ages 6-7 years and male and female "midlife crises" during the middle years. Furthermore, adolescence may be a particu­larly important age period for examining the impact of social change and of nonnormative life events. One can cite factors such as the increases in adolescent suicide and teenage pregnancies, the drop in age of puberty, trends in societal body shape preferences, and increases in the divorce rate and ask how these interact with the individual level changes that occur during adolescence. A report of the meeting is avail­able from the Council.

Committee members, 1982-83; Paul B. Baltes, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Edu­cation (Berlin); Glen H. Elder,Jr., 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 Miiller, University of Mannheim; Matilda White Riley, National Institute on Aging; Martin E. P. Seligman, University of Pennsylvania; M. Brewster Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz; Aage B. S.orensen, University of Wisconsin; Franz E. Weinert, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research (Munich).

Subcommittee members, 1982-83: Paul B. Baltes, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Edu­cation (Berlin); Orville G. Brim, J r., Foundation for Child Development (New York); Judith Dunn, Uni­versity of Cambridge; Glen H. Elder, Jr., Cornell University; E. Mavis Hetherington, University of Vir­ginia; Richard M. Lerner, Pennsylvania State Univer­sity; Ellen M. Markman, Stanford University; John W. Meyer, Stanford University; Ross D. Parke, Uni­versity of Illinois; Martin E. P. Seligman, University of Pennsylvania; M. Brewster Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz; Franz E. Weinert, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research (Munich).

Lonnie R. Sherrod serves as staff to the committee and its subcommittee. 0

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 25: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Current Activities at the Council The measurement of occupation

In 1980, the Council's Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators and the U.S. Bureau of the Census jointly appointed a Subcommittee on Compara­bility of Occupation Measurement. The instigation was the adoption by the fed­eral government of a substantially revised occupational classification system for its various statistical programs, including the 1980 Census of Population and Housing. Unless steps are taken to restore the over-time comparability of occupation measurement, this change will seriously disrupt one of the data series that has been fundamental to research on social mobility, lifetime career changes, labor force behavior, vocational choice, and so­cioeconomic differentiation. This disrup­tion will also reduce the usefulness of cen­sus occupation data for carrying out the employment and training activities of businesses and governments, including affirmative action programs. Projections of occupational structure will be affected.

The occupation data from the decen­nial censuses provide part of a basic em­pirical foundation for analyses that link long-term social, economic, demographic, and occupational change. Census sources of occupation data are particularly im­portant for these analyses because of the scope, size, and continuity of the census. The census provides much more geo­graphic detail than most other data sources, in some cases providing statisti­cally reliable data for small subgroups of the population for which other data sources are usually inadequate because of their small samples. Finally, the census data series extends much further back than most other series; public use samples have been produced from the 1900, 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1970 censuses. In addi­tion, tabulations of census data are widely available in public libraries and can be fairly readily and inexpensively used. These were all reasons why the scientific community expressed concern that steps be taken to ensure that the occupation data from the 1980 and succeeding cen­suses can be compared with data from prior censuses.

The disruption of data series is not new to those accustomed to working with oc­cupation data, as well as to other students

MARCH 1983

of change. It is a continual problem with roots in the very phenomena studied. The changes that are themselves objects of study require that modifications be made in the measuring instruments used to study those changes (Parke 1979, page 5). With each census it has been necessary to make at least minor modifications in the occupational classification scheme; major changes were made in 1940, 1970, and 1980. As occupations emerge, they must be represented in the classification; as they disappear, they must be removed or absorbed into other categories. Many modifications involve aggregating or dis­aggregating existing categories. For example, the census of 1960 had no spe­cific category for computer pro­grammers; in 1970, computer pro­grammers were counted as one of three categories of computer specialists. In 1980, the computer programmers of 1970 were split into two categories. An unchanging classification would be of lit­tle use for research or policy purposes. Accordingly, students of occupation are faced with the continuing task of cali­brating new measures against old ones.

The calibration of occupation measures may be particularly difficult, since there is an unusually wide variety in the responses to census questionnaires. In the 1980 cen­sus, more than 50,000 different responses to the occupation questions had to be coded into 503 separate categories. Few of these categories could be defined with absolute distinctiveness, since many occu­pations tend to have characteristics in common with others. The traditional method of calibrating data series that have been disrupted by a change in classifications has been recoding of the data according to both systems, but the very large size of the data set (the public use samples for 1980 include five per cent of the entire population) makes this a mammoth undertaking.

The Subcommittee on Comparability of Occupation Measurement was charged to find a technical means of meeting the needs of researchers for data that can be used to study changes in the occupational structure of the United States. Recogniz­ing that the traditional approach (clerical double coding) seemed likely to be quite

expensive, the subcommittee considered several options for imputing the 1980 codes by some statistical procedure that would not require clerical intervention. The Census Bureau conducted a small­scale experiment in the most promising of these techniques: a procedure that calcu­lates regression models which may be used to estimate 1980 occupation codes from knowledge of 1970 occupation codes and variables found to be associated with occupation. These models are cal­culated on the basis of a small double­coded sample, and may then be applied to large public use samples, thus resulting in the assignment of 1980 codes in addition to 1970 codes at less cost than clerical procedures. However, the imputation of a single code for each case would be mis­leading, because it would overestimate the precision of this statistical procedure. In order to permit an assessment of the error resulting from imperfect models, it seems to be necessary to provide multiple imputations of the 1980 occupation codes. A method for producing multiple imputations that will yield valid infer­ences is now available (Rubin 1978) and will receive its first large-scale test in an evaluation study that has been recom­mended by the subcommittee.

In the subcommittee's opinion, this method of recalibrating the disrupted oc­cupation data series warrants a trial be­cause of its potentially general applicabil­ity as well as because of significant cost savings. The method is probably applica­ble to certain other points in the occupa­tion time series, particularly to the cali­bration of the 1960 data with 1980 (cleri­cal recoding may be preferable for earlier censuses). More generally, the method has promise of application to a variety of other needs for calibration, including in­stances in which classifications have changed over time or differ between data sets. With the encouragement of the sub­committee, two of its members are seek­ing funding for an evaluation of the 1970-1980 calibration. The subcommit­tee will interpret the results of its com­parison oflogistic regression and multiple imputation with clerical recoding, and will make further recommendations re­garding the preparation of public use

25

Page 26: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

files containing comparable occupation data.

The subcommittee has prepared an interim report to its sponsors which states the problem of noncomparability of oc­cupation measurement, describes the method of imputation as an alternative to traditional approaches, and proposes a trial of imputation. The document further recommends that research be conducted on other topics, including coder consistency and the conceptual bases for classifying occupations. Copies of the report, Altematnle Methods for Ef- ' fecting the Comparability of Occupation Measurement Over Time, may be obtained by writing the Social Science Research Council, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Please in­clude $5.00 for postage and handling. An abbreviated early version was presented at the 1982 meetings of the American Statistical Association (Nam, Parke, and Scopp 1982). Inquiries concerning the subcommittee's work should be directed to Richard C. Rockwell at the Council's Washington office.

Charles B. Nam, Florida State Univer­sity, serves as chairman of the subcom­mittee. The other members are William T. Bielby, University of California, Santa Barbara; Clifford C. Clogg, Pennsylvania State University; Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie- Mellon University; William H. Form, University of Illinois; Robert M. Hauser, University of Wisconsin; David L. Kaplan, U.S. Bureau of the Census (retired); Ann R. Miller, University of Pennsylvania; Mary G. Powers, Fordham University; Donald B. Rubin, University of Chicago; James G. Scoville, University of Minnesota; and DonaldJ. Treiman, Uni­versit.y of California, Los Angeles. Richard C. Rockwell serves as staff.

References

Nam, Charles B., Robert Parke, and Thomas Scopp. "Historical Comparability of Occu­pation Statistics: Report of a Project." In ProctedingJ of the Social Statirtical Section, 1982 MeetingJ of the American Statirtical A.rJociation. Washington, D.C.: American Statistical As­sociation, 1982.

Parke~ Robert. "Population changes That 'Af­fect Federal Policy: Some Suggestions for Research." Items, 33(1):3-8, March 1979.

Rubin, Donald B. "Multiple Imputations in Sample Surveys-A Phenomenological Bayesian Approach to Nonresponse," pp. 2~28 in Proceedings of the Suroey Methods Section of the American Slatirtical Association. Washington, D.C.: American Statistical As­~ociation, 1978.

26

Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)

For many years, the Annual Demo­graphic Supplement to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) has been the chief source of na­tional data on the economic situation of persons and families in the United States. It is expected that this role will be as­sumed by the new Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) when that survey begins in the fall of 1983. The new survey will collect intrayear information on various sources of money and non­money income, taxes, assets, and liabilities, and will enable social scientists to produce improved estimates of income distributioJl, poverty, and wealth. The survey will also collect information on labor force status, participation in various government transfer programs, house­hold composition and expenses, dis­ability, pension coverage, and work his­tory and expenses. The SIPP has been designed as an ongoing series of national panels with interviews taken at intervals within each year and recalled income data collected for each month. This design permits the study of intrayear changes in income and their relationship to partici­pation in government programs, changes in household composition, and other factors.

Because the SIPP's longitudinal design and wide range of economic and social data will make it an especially important source of information for research on American social conditions and trends, the Council's Advisory and Planning Committee on Social Indicators is spon­soring activities intended to enable aca­demic social scientists to participate in de­signs for data collection and plans for methodological and substantive research. In October 1982, the committee spon­sored a conference on "Technical, Con­ceptual, and Administrative Lessons of the Income Survey Development Pro­gram (ISDP)." The ISDP was a devel­opmental project which undertook re­search on data collection and data pro­cessing strategies and instruments for the SIPP. Following the conference, the committee appointed a working group on the Survey of Income and Program Par­ticipation as an interim arrangement to help ensure that the research potential of the SIPP remains high.

The ISDP was jointly sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Bureau of the Cen-

sus. Field tests and other efforts were well under way for an anticipated Febraury 1982 start of the SIPP when funding was abruptly withdrawn. The conference on the ISDP was first conceived as a salvage operation, an attempt to ensure that some of what had been learned from the in­tellectual and financial investment in the ISDP ($12,750,000 between 1977 and 1982) was recorded and available for the future. Participants, most of whom had been members of the ISDP staff in Washington or in field sites, were asked to reflect on and evaluate the results of ISDP research, to say where further re­search was needed, and to generalize what they had learned for application in other data collection programs. Between 1977 and 1980, the ISDP collected data in four major field tests, ending in a 1979-1980 panel study that provided nationally reliable estimates of many aspects of in­come and program participation. Re­search on these data had already yielded a ~umber of positive findings, some of which served to cast doubt both on con­cepts of annual income and on estimates of th!! prevalence of poverty.

By the time the conference convened, the salvage operation had taken on an entirely different cast: during the sum­mer of 1982, the Congress appropriated funds so that the SIPP could initiate data collection in 1983. Conference partici­pants were asked to consider what the new measures would add to existing mea­sures, their problems of validation and aggregation, and issues of longitudinal analysis and the linking of survey and administrative data. Panels were con­vened to consider four questions: (I) What aspects of the ISDP can and should be integrated with the Consumer Ex­penditure Survey and the CPS? (2) How effectively does the ISDP deal with intra­annual income? (3) What agenda and priorities should be set for further re­search on the ISDP? (4) How do we build a unified data base when agencies have overlapping or conflicting mission state­ments? The conference was organized by Martin H. David, University of Wiscon­sin, who is presently an American Statisti­cal Association Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census and a member of the Coun­cil's committee on Social Indicators. The chair was Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie-Mellon University, who is a member of the Council's board of direc­tors.

Fifteen research papers were prepared as background reading for participants.

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 27: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Following the conference, Mr. David prepared a summary statement, "Measuring Income and Program Par­ticipation." The conference proceedings will be available this spring and may be ordered (include $5.00 for postage and handling) from the Social Science Re­search Council, 1755 Massachusetts Ave­nue, N.W., W~shington, D.C. 20036.

As Mr. David observes in his summary, the conference recognized a need for a strong institutional mechanism for mon­itoring the design and content of the SIPP and for arbitrating decisions about how this important scientific resource is to be used. Participants observed that the pro­grammatic importance of the SIPP is so great-the survey will be used as a basis for evaluating activities of federal and state governments that redistribute in­come and provide services-that discus­sions about the SIPP should be quite gen­eral and not limited to the parochial needs of particular agencies. The role of the Office of Management and Budget in statistical policy was noted. One aspect of the needed discussion is consideration of the still-evolving concepts and tools for data collection, data processing, con­struction of measures, data distribution, and analysis that are required for the SIPP. Another aspect is planning and or­ganizing new research on the ISDP (which could address many methodologi­cal and substantive questions that have not yet been answered) and basic and applied research on the data collected in the first waves of the SIPP.

These concerns are on the agenda of the Council's working group on the SIPP, which was appointed in November 1982, with funds provided by the National Sci­ence Foundation. Martin H. David serves as chairman; the academic members in­clude Philip E. Converse, University of Michigan; James A. Davis, Harvard Uni­versity; Daniel G. Horvitz, Research Triangle Institute (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina); Graham Kahon, University of Michigan; and Harold W. Watts, Columbia University. The group is assisted by Richard C. Rockwell, a staff associate at the Council. Inquiries should be directed to him at the Council's Washington office.

Survey of dissertation fellows in employment and training

In the fall of 1982, the Council con­ducted a survey of a 1968 cohort of re-

MARCH 1983

cipients of dissertation fellowships in the field of employment and training and of a more recent cohort who completed their dissertations in the years 1979 to 1981.* Currently administered by the Council under a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, the program was administered by the National Council on Employment Policy in 1979 and 1980 and by the De­partment of Labor between 1966 and 1979. The survey was primarily aimed at describing the employment status, job characteristics, fields of employment, and scholarly and administrative contribu­tions of these recipients to the fields of employment and training. Although the results of a brief inquiry of former recipi­ents can only be suggestive, the survey does provide a vehicle to reflect on the utility of dissertation programs of this kind.

The responses of former fellowship re­cipients suggest that dissertation awards of this kind serve several important func­tions. Most importantly, they enable re­cipients to complete a higher quality and more timely dissertation than would have otherwise been possible. Recipients noted that the award provides resources for data collection, coding, computer ex­penses, and typing which allow them to complete analysis they would otherwise not have been able to do and to devote greater attention to the development and presentation of research, rather than hone their skills as typist and keypuncher.

In addition to timeliness and quality, fellows noted that: (1) writing the pro­posal helped organize the dissertation; (2) the award provided confidence and moti­vation to complete the dissertation; and (3) the process provided experience in preparing proposals. The fellowship pro­gram requires graduate students to ar­ticulate research goals clearly and briefly and to work with grants or contract of­fices within their respective universities; there may be few such requirements for many graduate students.

The award also plays a modest role in the recruitment and retention of scholars in the field of employment and training.

* Of the 42 members of the 1968 cohort whom we attempted to reach, 24 returned completed questionnaires (a completion rate of 57 per cent). Eighty-one members of the more recent cohort totaling 105 did so (a completion rate of 76 per cent). The completion rate for the more recent cohort was substantially higher, apparently because of the more com­plete and accurate record of addresses.

Because dissertation awards in employ­ment and training are available only to those students who have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. except the dissertation, one would expect few stu­dents to alter the choice of their disserta­tion field because of the availability of such support. Yet four per cent of the recipients judged the availability of the award to have been critical in their choice of field and 23 per cent thought it was the primary reason, among other factors. And 81 per cent of the respondents indicated they were presently employed in a posi­tion related to employment and training (84 per cent of the most recent cohort and 71 per cent of the older group). Although we know of no comparable data, these retention rates appear large, given the career flux that characterizes much of academia. It is possible-although the data cannot conclusively demonstrate this-that the continued involvement of these recipients in the field of research is attributable to the investment, rewards, and accomplishments which followed their receipt of the award.

It is somewhat more difficult to assess how the fellowship contributed to the field of research itself, but 65 per cent knew of specific instances when the re­sults of their dissertation research were used by others. The survey also revealed that former recipients are actively in­volved in teaching, research, and admin­istration. Seventy-one per cent of the re­spondents are employed in four-year ac­ademic institutions; 79 per cent of the academically employed older cohort hold tenured positions while 90 per cent of the more recent cohort hold tenure track ap­pointments. Twelve per cent of the re­spondents are employed by a local, state, or federal government agency and eight per cent work for a private business or are self-employed. The most frequently noted primary and secondary work activ­ities are teaching and basic research (59 per cent teaching and 51 per cent con­ducting basic research).

In sum, recipients of dissertation fel­lowships in employment and training tes­tify to the value and benefit of the fellow­ship award. It provides resources and motivation for many to produce better dissertations in a shorter period of time than they would have been able to do in the absence of such support. The disser­tation fellowship was a critical factor for several fellows in their choice of field; many scholars, long after the receipt of the award, continued to devote their pro-

27

Page 28: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

fessional careers to research and admin­istration in the field of employment and training.

Reviews of Mrican research In order to stimulate a dialogue that

will assess the state of social scientific and humanistic research on Africa, the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council has begun to sponsor research overview sessions at the annual meetings of the Af­rican Studies Association. The committee initiated these sessions at the October 1981 meeting of the Association, at which commissioned review papers were pre­sented on "Africa and the World Econ­omy," by Frederick Cooper, University of Michigan; "Household and Community in African Studies," by Jane I. Guyer, Harvard University; "African Ideology and Belief," by Wyatt MacGaffey, Haver­ford College; and "States and Social Pro­cesses in Africa," by John Lonsdale, Cam­bridge University. These commissioned papers were presented together with prepared commentaries at special plenary sessions as the basis for open debate and discussion on the state of theory and re­search on those topics. The revised pa­pers were subsequently published as a special issue of the African Studies Review, 24(2/3): 1981.

At the 1982 meeting of the African Studies Association, the committee com­missioned and presented a research over­view paper on "Ecological Change and the Politics of African Land Use," by Paul Richards, University College, London. The revised paper together with a critical essay written by MichaelJ. Watts, Univer­sity of California, Berkeley, will form the core of a special issue of the African Studies Review, 26(2): 1983.

For presentation at the December 1983 meeting of the Association, the committee has commissioned review papers on "Af­rica and the Agrarian Crisis," by Sara S. Berry, Boston University; "The Social Study of Health in Africa," by Steven Feierman, University of Wisconsin; and "Labor History," by William Freund, Harvard University. Topics of papers planned for 1984 and 1985 include Afri­can Philosophy; Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism; African Oral Traditions and Literature; Peasants and Rural Social Protest; and The Visual Arts.

28

The decision of the committee to initi­ate this series of review papers arose from a clear need for sharper, more penetrating definitions of the basic conceptual and empirical issues and debates in the frag­mented and increasingly disparate field known as "African Studies." Topics have been selected which bridge disciplines and which have been addressed from di­vc;rgent theoretical perspectives and with a variety of methodologies. In commis­sioning the review papers, the committee has asked scholars to consider major is­sues and trends in scholarship on the topics, including shifts in theory and method, new paradigms, changing issues, and changing definitions and treatment of old issues. The papers are to highlight bodies of cumulative research and to identify major gaps. Authors have been asked to consider existing tensions be­tween different disciplinary perspectives, including the issues they raise, and the methods they employ. As a series, the pa­pers are intended to address sys­tematically questions regarding the im­pact of paradigms employed, questions asked, and answers given upon the devel­opment of social science and humanities research on Africa.

The 1982-83 members of the commit­tee are Allen F. Isaacman, University of Minnesota, chairman; Jane I. Guyer, Harvard University; Bennetta Jules­Rosette, University of California, San Diego; Thandika Mkandawire, Z.I.D.S. (Zimbabwe); V. Y. Mudimbe, Haverford College; Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, EI Co­legio de Mexico; Harold Scheub, Univer­sity of Wisconsin; and Michael J. Watts, University of California, Berkeley. Martha A. Gephart serves as staff.

Latin American research Thanks in part to a new three-year

grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foun­dation, and continued support from the Ford Foundation and the National En­dowment for the Humanities, the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies initiated a number of new research plan­ning projects over the course of 1982 and early 1983.

Markets, coercion, and responses in the An­dean world. Following a planning meeting in October 1981, the committee approved support for a project on the effects of market expansion and labor policies of the state on indigenous societies in high-

land Peru and Bolivia, and the initiatives and responses of Andean people to those outside pressures. Much recent research in Andean history has proceeded from structural analyses of native Andean societies transformed during the late 16th century under the impact of Spanish co­lonial rule and the imperatives of a domi­nant mining economy oriented toward the world market. In contrast, social and ethnohistorians of the Andes have tended to place more weight on the distinct ecological and cultural contexts within which Andean people have responded to or imposed their own conditions on the wider commercial and coercive forces at work. A central aim of this project is to bring historians and anthropologists rep­resenting these different perspectives to explore indigenous responses to and in­tervention in the mercantile economy in specific historical periods.

The first conference, to be held in July 1983 in Bolivia, will provide a forum for anthropologists and historians to discuss the ways in which mercantile capitalism has reshaped rural Andean society since the Spanish conquest. Specifically, par­ticipants will examine Andean patterns of subsistence organization in southern Peru and Bolivia and how peasants adapted to the changing pressures of extractive in­stitutions, such as tribute and forced mi­gratory labor, as well as to market forces. They will also explore how the participa­tion or non participation of Andean people in the market economy altered the terms of exchange and affected the very nature of commercial enterprise and political economic organization over the course of colonial and republican rule.

Political parties and democracy in the Southern Cone. Following a planning meeting held in July 1982 in Buenos Aires, the committee decided to sponsor a project on contemporary political parties in Brazil and the Southern Cone. The project's aim is to study comparatively the political parties of these four countries and to seek, on the basis of the historical context, a new approach to the theory of political parties.

The project speaks to the needs of the field in two ways. First, the prevailing lib­eral and Marxist conceptual frameworks are ill-equipped to deal with the fact that in these societies parties do not only com­pete among themselves, but also must compete-usually in zero-sum fashion­against alternative modes of political or­ganization associated with authoritarian

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 29: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

regimes. Second, recent literature on the struggle for democracy in Southern Cone countries has underemphasized the active role played by political parties in the tran­sition from authoritarian rule.

At two conferences, planned for late 1983 and 1984, participants will address the ways parties and the systems of party representation were associated with the breakdown of the old (populist­reformist) order; the effects that societal transformations under authoritarian rule have had on parties; and the limits and potential of the actions of political parties in the eventual reconstruction of democ­racy.

Social transfonnation in small, peripheral economies in the Caribbean basin. Two plan­ning workshops held in the summer and fall of 1982 produced a proposal for a conference on the problems facing small countries of the Caribbean basin (includ­ing the rim countries of Central America) which have recently experienced political upheaval and are in the process of social transformation. These problems are compounded by the historic hegemony exercised by the United States in the re­gion.

A central aim of the project is to ex­amine the military and strategic interests of the United States and how those inter­ests are threatened by and may in turn condition and impede political and eco­nomic change in the region. Participants will discuss, for example, how global is­sues (external debt, the cold war, inter­capitalist competition) are concretized in specific U.S. policies in the region. An­other set of issues will speak to the prob­lems of transition, such as the disintegra­tion of the region's common market and trade policies, that are peculiar to the Caribbean basin.

Popular culture, political resistance, and everyday life in Latin America. The purpose of this project is to outline some theoreti­cal and methodological approaches to popular culture and political resistance in Latin America, in order to go beyond empirical studies and the theoretical lim­itations posed by the term "cultural im­perialism." Prevailing notions of cultural imperialism have tended to regard the popular classes simply as passive recipi­ents of foreign-imposed values and norms. This project proposes to reexam­ine popular culture as a dynamic, con­tradictory process in which the state exploits, reworks, or deploys forms of popular culture for its own political or

MARCH 1983

ideological ends. At the same time, popular culture also defines the limits of state power-the point at which it is chal­lenged, parodied, or forced to introduce reforms.

The dynamic relationship between popular culture and modern states will be explored in different national and politi­cal contexts. Attention will be paid, for example, to the use of television by au­thoritarian regimes in Brazil and Chile to incorporate the masses into the politics of the regime. Participants will also focus on how popular resistance deVeloped outside the official culture and areas of surveil­lance, spreading along informal networks of women's activities, story telling, gossip, etc. In "open" societies, such as those of Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, the social contradictions between the values of consumerism, reified by television, and the scarcity and intensified economic crisis of those countries, will also be ex­plored.

At a preliminary meeting, to be held in the summer of 1983, a small group of scholars will assess the contribution and limitations of recent literature on popular culture and identify the critical issues for a more searching, interdisciplinary in­quiry into popular culture in contempo­rary Latin America.

New approaches to Latin American labor history. A planning meeting, to be held in October 1983, will bring together a small group of scholars to take stock of recent advances in the field, identify the m;uor issues of controversy, and assess the re­lationship of Latin American labor studies to current research on labor his­tory in other parts of the world. Above all, the workshop is intended to provide a forum for a critical discussion of new and alternative ways to conceptualize and re­vise the standard evaluation of the role of organized (and unorganized) labor in 20th century Latin America.

On the basis of their own research, in­vited participants will address the fol­lowing issues: (1) the problems associated with a "world-systems" approach to Latin American labor history; (2) the usefulness of applying to the field concepts and methods drawn from the new social his­tory; (3) the problem of defining the scope of Latin American labor history, that is, whether to include organized and unorganized workers and the rural and urban proletariat; and (4) and the re­lationship of studies of working class and popular culture (including class con-

sciousness itself) to the more traditional political and institutional concerns of labor history.

Social inequality and gender hierarchy in Latin America. Two workshops, to be held in the fall of 1983 and in late 1984, are being organized around the issues of ideology and gender relations in societies undergoing social and economic transformation. The different rhythms and forms of capitalist expansion in Latin America during the late 19th and 20th centuries offer the possibility of compar­ing the continuities and discontinuities in gender relations and their historical roots. While much recent research has focused on the effects of capitalist penetration on the sexual division of labor, little compar­ative research has yet been done on the relationship between local economic change and values, consciousness, and so­cial meaning that define and inform so­cial relations between men and women. This project intends to explore the impli­cations of culture, ideology, and values for understanding gender relations, par­ticularly under historical circumstances of political and economic transformation.

Agrarian production relations. A proposal for a planning conference on agrarian production relations in Latin America was discussed and approved at the Octo­ber 1982 meeting of the committee. There is a growing body of research on agrarian change in different national and regional contexts which often addresses similar issues and problems without the benefit of an overarching comparative framework. Yet much debate centers around the current status of the rural population in Latin America, which has experienced rapid industrialization over the past several decades. This debate usu­ally focuses on the degree to which peas­ants engage in rural or urban wage work and its meaning for the decomposition, on the one hand, or the economic viabil­ity, on the other, of the peasant house­hold economy.

This project will bring together schol­ars to discuss, on the basis of their own empirical research, the variety and pre­dominance of specific types of production relations in different agrarian settings. The project will try to harness the new research on peasant household dynamics and the role of women in the work force to map the various configurations of pro­duction relations among peasants and rural wage workers. In addition, the proj­ect will explore the relationship between

29

Page 30: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

agrarian production relations, on the one hand, and policies of agrarian re­form, social welfare, and rural union or­ganization, on the other. A planning

John W. Hall honored by Japanese government

John Han, the A. Whitney Griswold professor of history at Yale, and chair­man of the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies, has received one of the highest awards of the government of Japan, the Second Class Order of Sacred Treasure, for his contributions as a scholar of Japanese history and for his work in promoting Japanese-American relations.

Mr. Han received the decoration of the Order at a special ceremony in the Japanese Embassy in Washington on November 30, 1982. This award of the government of Japan honors leaders in other countries who have contributed to a better understanding of Japanese culture. Mr. Han is one of two Americans selected this year; the other is S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

In decorating Mr. Hall, Yoshio Oka­wara, ambassador of Japan, cited his schol­arly work and his leadership in national and international organizations dealing with Japanese studies. Mr. Hall was chairman of the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies when it was first ap­pointed in 1967; he became chairman again in 1981. From 1968-71 he was

30

meeting is tentatively scheduled for late fall 1983, where a half dozen participants will identify the major conceptual issues of common concern and the state of re-

Personnel chairman of the U.S. Panel of the U .S.­Japan Conference on Educational and Cultural Exchange initiated by the gov­ernments of the two countries. From 1975 to 1980, he was the first chairman of the Japan-United States Friendship Com­mission, created by the Congress to pro­mote Japanese studies in America and American studies in Japan. He is a member of the American Advisory Committee of the Japan Foundation, and in 1967-68 he served as president of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author or editor of 12 books on Japanese history ,and is currently one of the general editors of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Japan.

The Joint Committee on Japanese Studies is sponsored by the Council and the Americ"an Council of Learned Societies. In additon to Mr. Hall, the members for 1982-83 are Susan B. Han­ley, University of Washington; Jeffrey P. Mass, Stanford University; Earl Miner, Princeton University; T. J. Pempel, Cor­nell University; SusanJ. Pharr, University of Wisconsin; J. Thomas Rimer, Wash­ington University; Seizaburo Sato, Uni­versity of Tokyo; Gary R. Saxonhouse, University of Michigan; Patricia G.

search on those issues in different Latin American countries.

Steinhoff, University of Hawaii; and Masakazu Yamazaki, Osaka University. Theodore C. Bestor serves as staff.

Staff appointment Thedore C. Bestor, an anthropologist,

has joined the Council as a staff associate. He will serve primarily as staff to the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies and the Joint Committee on Korean Studies. Mr. Bestor received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University in 1983, as well as an A.M. in East Asian studies from Stanford in 1976. He received his B.A. from Fairhaven College in 1973. His doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of the social organization of a Tokyo neighborhood, focused particu­larly on the relationship between com­munity concerns and the municipal gov­ernment. He has taught courses in an­thropology and in Asian studies at Stan­ford and at the Experiment in Interna­tional Living's program in Japan. His major research interests include compar­ative urban social organization, modern­ization and social change, and contempo­rary Japanese society and culture.

VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1

Page 31: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

Newly-issued Council Publications

An Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Social Be Behavioral Sciences, edited by Lyle V. Jones, Gardner Lindzey, and Porter E. Coggeshall. A publication of the Confer­ence Board of Associated Research Councils. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1982. xii + 249 pages. Paper, $10.50.

This is a publication in a series spon­sored by the Committee on an Assess­ment of Quality-Related Characteristics of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States, a project of the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils. Other publications are on programs in Mathematical and Physical Sciences, the Humanities, Engineering, and the Life Sciences. The Conference Board is com­prised of representatives of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ameri­can Council on Education, the National Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council.

With this series of volumes the Confer­ence Board continues a tradition pioneered by the American Council on Education, which in 1966 published An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education, the report of a study conducted by Allan M. Cartter, and in 1970 published a Rating of Graduate Programs, by Kenneth D. Roose and Charles J. Anderson. The Cartter and Roose-Anderson reports have been widely used and frequently cited.

The volume is available from the Na­tional Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20418.

Karma: An Anthropological Inquiry, edited by Charles F. Keyes and E. Valen­tine Daniel. Papers from a project spon­sored by the Joint Committee on South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, ix + 313 pages. Cloth, $27.50.

MARCH 1983

Ideas of karma and rebirth are funda­mental to millions of Buddhists and Hin­dus living in South and Southeast Asia. The papers in this volume are concerned with the practical implications of these ideas for the daily life, decision making, and understandings of social existence in these cultures. Together with the prior committee-sponsored volume on histori­cal theories, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, edited by Wendy O'Flaherty, this new volume represents part of a general effort by the Joint Committee on South Asia to explore and develop the social-analytical utility of con­cepts and models indigenous to the cul­tures of the region.

Drawing on intensive field research on myth, folk tales, ritual fasting, kinship relations, astrology, and village disputes in North and South India, Thailand, and Bali, and among Tibetans, the authors in the volume suggest how people think about and use karmic ideas and how these ideas are related to other ideas in their conceptual worlds, and to other bases for individual and social action.

The contributors include Lawrence A. Babb, Amherst College; Brenda E. F. Beck, University of British Columbia; James A. Boon, Cornell University; E. Valentine Daniel, University of Wash­ington; Sheryl B. Daniel, University of Chicago; Lawrence Epstein, University of Washington; Paul Hiebert, Fuller Theological Seminary; Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington; David Lichter, Stanford University; Judy Pugh, Univer­sity of British Columbia; and Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University.

Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Aian Thought, edited by David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside. Papers from a project sponsored by theJoint Committee on Southeast Asia. Yale University South-

east Asia Studies Monograph Series No. 24,1982. vii + 421 pages. Paper, $16.00.

Much of the recent historical schol­arship on Southeast Asia has attempted to go beyond earlier tendencies to focus on the colonists and colonial policies and im­pacts, and to deal with the internal socio­economic and political histories of the countries themselves. Nevertheless, al­most no attention has been given to the types, forms, and nuances of Southeast Asia thought itself. In an effort to redress this imbalance, the Joint Committee on Southeast Asia convened a small work­shop and then a conference on Southeast Asian intellectual history, held at Cornell University in August 1978. .

The papers in this volume result from that conference and draw on a wide vari­ety of documentary materials-law codes, philosophical essays, religious epics, his­torical chronicles, folk tales, and poetry-from Burma, Cambodia, Java, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. They all demonstrate that beyond the broad philosophical and religious traditions of the region, specific individu­als can be identified who helped to for­mulate 18th and 19th century under­standings of the moral order, social forms, and social trends, and the various internal and external pressures for change in the countries of the region. At the same time, the essays question the common Western presumption that in­tellectual creativity can only be demon­strated through the labor of individual thinkers.

The contributors include Michael Aung Thwin, Elmira College; David P. Chandler, Monash University; Anthony Day, University of Sydney; Reynaldo C. Ileto, University of the Philippines; and Alfred W. McCoy, University of New South Wales; Alexander Woodside, Uni­versity of British Columbia; and David K. Wyatt, Cornell University.

31

Page 32: Items Vol. 37 No.1 (1983)

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL 605 THIRD AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10158

Incorpomt,d in th, Slnt, of Iffinoi~. D,umb,r 27, 1924, for th, purpO.l, of advancing m,arch in thr .locMl .lci,nc,.1

DiTrcWTS, 1982-83: STEPHEN E. FIENBERG, Carnegie-Mellon University; HOWARD E. GARDNER, Veterans Administration Hospital (Boston); CHARLES O.jONES, University of Virginia; MICHAEL KAMMEN, Cornell University; ROBERT W. KATES, Clark University; ROBERT A. LEVINE, Harvard University; GARDNER LINDZEY, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; ELEANOR E. MACCOBY, Stanford University; MARC NERLOVE, University of Pennsylvania; HUGH T. PATRICK, Yale 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; STEPHEN M. STIGLER, University of Chicago; SIDNEY VERBA, Harvard University; IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, State University of New York, Binghamton; WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, University of Chicago.

Officer.l and Staff" KENNETH PREWITT, Presidmt; DAVID L. SILLS, Executive Associate; THEODORE C. BESTOR, MARTHA A. GEPHART, BROOKE LARSON, ROBERT PARKE, ROBERT W. PEARSON , PETER B. READ, RICHARD C. ROCKWELL, SoPHIE SA, LONNIE R. SHERROD, DAVID L. SZANTON; RONALDj . PELECK, Controller.

32 VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1