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1941

Kenneth Bock

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.

I do not really belong in this group, for my degree from the University was in Social Institutions, not Sociology. Because the Department of Social Institutions soon disappeared in 1946 (mine was the last degree I believe) I was left homeless. It was my good fortunate, then, to be received as a faculty member in the new Department of Sociology and allowed to teach and write in the field of history of ideas for more than 45 years. The many friends among students, faculty, and staff that I made during those years remain fresh in my memory.

Dissertation: The Comparative Method

Biography submitted on: 2002-12-26 10:22:33

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1942

Lewis P. Kohrs

Lewis P. Kohrs has passed away.

Dissertation: The Social Theory of Sir Matthew Hales' "The primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (1677)"

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1944

Cesar Grana

Cesar Grana has passed away.

Dissertation: Intellectual Alienation and Middle-Class Rule

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1946

Jelle C. Riemersma

Jelle C. Riemersma has passed away.

Dissertation: Dutch Institutions and Economic Change, 1550-1650

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1947

Dorris W. Goodrich

Dorris W. Goodrich has passed away.

Dissertation: The Making of an Ethnic Group: The Eurasian Community in India

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Robert P. Rankin

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, California State University, Chico

Dissertation: Religious Ideas and Church Administration: A Sociological Study of Methodism

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Charles E. Woodhouse

Emeritus Professor,University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Dissertation: A Study in Professional Ideology: City Managers and Public Housing Officials

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1948

Dorothy A. Mariner

Director, Ontario County Arts Council

Dissertation: The Museum: A Social Context for Art

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1949

Waldo W. Burchard

Waldo W. Burchard has passed away.

Dissertation: The Role of the Military Chaplain

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Robert C. Hanson

Lives in Boulder-check univ.

Dissertation: Confirmation and Social Research

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Frank W. Howton

Dissertation: The Changing Self-Image of the American Businessman

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Norman R. Jackman

Emeritus-Sociology-CSU Hayward

Dissertation: Collective Protest in Relocation Centers

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Clark E. Vincent

Clark E. Vincent has passed away.

Dissertation: Sociological Factors in Psychosomatic Illness

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Irving M. Witt

Emeritus Professor, College of San Mateo

Dissertation: Liberalism and Conservatism in Zionist and anti-Zionist Ideologies

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1950

Robert R. Alford

Robert R. Alford passed away on 2003-02-14 00:00:00

Robert Alford died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003, just months before his 75th birthday. There was to be a celebration at his parents? ranch in Avery, California in the Sierras. Bob grew up near here at Angel?s Camp, the site of the Calaveras jumping frog contests fabled by Mark Twain. Bob loved to walk the forests paths that radiate out across the property, past the pond dense with water lilies and an apple orchard with forgotten species of fruit. The lupine and the Indian paintbrush would have been in bloom. Bob was a huge man who loped gracefully and could walk for miles. He thought best walking, which was how we worked out the structure of the Powers of Theory (1985), through hours and hours of movement.

A socialist radical with a Wobbly heritage, he dropped out of UC Berkeley in 1951, opposed to the McCarthy loyalty oaths, and went to work and to organize as member of the Labor Youth League in an International Harvester truck factory. Robert Blauner was a fellow worker and cell-member there. After Khrushchev?s ?secret? speech to the 20th Party Congress leaked out, a speech detailing Stalin?s ?crimes,? his incarceration and execution of spies and enemies who were, in fact, loyal Communists, Alford, like many others, including Blauner, returned to the university. The state?s promulgation of information that was, in fact, disinformation, or outright lies, would later become a theme in his work.

A graduate student of Seymour Martin Lipset, his 1961 doctoral dissertation on class voting was subsequently published as Party and Politics, distinguishing between determinants of the class distinctiveness of parties and the partisan distinctiveness of a class in Anglo-American democracies. The young quantitative political sociologist left for the University of Wisconsin, where, together with Michael Aiken, he led the Social Organization program until 1974. In this multivariate citadel, a generation of young students fired by the new-left enabled Bob to return intellectually to the home terrain of his politics, and indeed to leave behind the econometric rewriting of the social. In his turn Alford took his students through a critical re-engagement with the classic debates with Marxism as the way forward. It was at the seminar table, through a combination of withering critique and an overwhelming sense of care, that Bob shaped generations of sociologists who learned from him that a statement of a problem, the choice of an indicator, the settling on a particular level of observation, could have fateful consequences. His objective, as he put it, was ?to unpack? a student?s approach to a problem. Doctoral prospectuses, chapters, seminar papers all merited copious, typewritten comments. His seminars were always charged, overcrowded zones of engagement. We all foolishly thought that this was how academic life was lived everywhere. Teaching for him was a kind of wrestling, a loving combat. Sometimes after Bob?s ?unpacking,? you just wanted to go home and get in bed for the indefinite future. But you knew he knew you could go farther. And you did. His students didn?t just admire him; we loved him. In 1997, he was given the ASA?s Distinguished Contribution to Teaching award.

Bob left Wisconsin to return home to California in 1974, taking on the direction of the sociology program at UC Santa Cruz. In 1975, he published Health Care Politics: Ideological and Interest Group Barriers to Reform. In that work he showed the ways in which displays of rationality and rituals of rationalization were forms of symbolic politics, part of a political process by which interest groups, organizations and the very structure of the system blocked substantive reform. The volume won the C. Wright Mills award.

This work on politics as aesthetics, beautiful form as substitute for interested transformation, was later followed by work on the politics of aesthetic production. Music was Bob?s first passion and the piano a life-long gift, one whose pleasure was later denied him by a congenital ear defect that steadily rendered him deaf. I think music was, in fact, the template by which he understood the practice of sociology, the imagination and construction of a beautiful structure, a disciplined passion, an enchanted reconstruction of the world. And it was from music that he learned the problematic of technique. A gifted teenage pianist, he had hitchhiked from Angels Camp to San Francisco just to hear Artur Rubinstein play. If you asked him, forty years later, he would still talk about Rubinstein?s piano-playing technique. Bob discovered that concert pianists, as well as other types of musician, often experienced bodily pains, sometimes quite extreme, indeed even leading to permanent injury. This pain, however, was not a necessity, but a taken-for-granted cost of an institutionalized technique. Bob wrote about it with Andras Szanto in ?Orpheus Wounded: The Experience of Pain in the Professional Worlds of the Piano? (1996, Theory and Society). He had wanted to write much more, but his own pain at not any longer being able to hear the music ended that research.

Bob used to take out his dog-eared copy of The Sociological Imagination and read passages out loud to me like a catechist. C. Wright Mills had felt that he arrived when he finally made it to Manhattan. Bob had fallen in love with New York City as a result of doing research there for his health care politics book. Like Mills, in 1988 Alford, too, finally made it to Manhattan, where he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. At CUNY, he spent most of his time working with students crafting their dissertations. Sociologically speaking, Bob was a committed Trinitarian. Everything came to him in threes?home domains, theories, levels of analysis, modes of inquiry, classical theorists, and as it turned out, academic homes. His last major book The Craft of Inquiry: Theories, Methods, Evidence (1998), an exploration of historical, quantitative and interpretative modalities, developed out of decades of doing what he did best--working through the design, the genre, the technique by which one sought to apprehend the social. Bob was the master of the master class. There are hundreds of scholars out there whose craft was learned at his table. And for this we give thanks.

Roger Friedland

Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, UC Santa Barbara





Tributes to Bob Alford from David Peerla and Neil McLaughlin, and Marc Renaud can be found at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/current.html





REMEMBERING BOB ALFORD:

A Friend for Fifty Years

By Bob Blauner


Bob Alford died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003,after a very brief illness. Because of his incredible vitalityand the fact that his father had lived to 90, Bob's death, only months before his 75th birthday, and its very suddeness,came as a terrible shock to his family and to his legion of friends. In this remembrance I recount how we first met in the early 1950s and why of all my old friends, the breadth and range of Bob Alford's humanity was unparalleled.



I first saw Bob Alford in the fall of 1952. He was wearing goggles to protect his eyes and a gray apron or smock over his work clothes to collect the metallic dust coming from the machine he was operating. The punch press was even taller than Bob's six foot plus frame. I watched him pull down the lever and the press made holes in the piece of sheet metal Bob was feeding it. Those holes were needed so that the fenders and other parts he would drill in Department 12 (Sheet Metal) could be assembled onto the chasses of truck frames, after the gray metal parts had been primed and spray painted. Add to each frame a diesel engine and a cab for the driver to sit in and a brand new truck would roll out the door.

There were only 150 blue-collar workers at our International Harvester plant in Emeryville, California in 1952. And yet three of us were Communists, or at least members of the party's youth group. The late Bill Lowe was the party's youth organizer in the East Bay then and it was Bill who told me about the other two guys at IHC who had also quit college "to go into industry". Our goal was to radicalize the working class, for according to the Marxist theory of the time, the proletariat ensconced in such heavy industries as steel, auto, and rubber manufacturing, was the only stratum that had a revolutionary potential. College students, the group each of us had abandoned, was the last---and I mean last---social group that could be expected to shake up American society.

I stood by Bob's machine several minutes before he noticed me. I was fortunate to have gotten a job in parts, which gave me the chance to move from one department to another, sometimes while rolling tires twice my size, a lucky break, since only a few months earlier, while working in an Oakland transformer plant, I had gotten panic attacks from remaining in front of the machine all day. Bob shut off his press, I introduced myself, and told him that Bill Lowe had suggested that the two of us, along with Burt, should start meeting every week as a club in "the League," meaning the Labor Youth League, the party's youth organization.

For four years the three of us would meet regularly at each other's houses talking about the factory, how we were getting along in making friends and influencing people---"contacts" was the word we used---and how we could push our extremely conservative local of the United Auto Workers in a more progressive direction. As you can imagine, given that the industrial concentration strategy was misguided to begin with, and to make matters worse, we were trying to colonize what was sadly one of the more conservative sectors of the society, the American working class, and add to all that the fact that it was 1952, the height of the hysteria brought on by McCarthyism and the Korean War, it's not surprising that we got absolutely nowhere. The best we could point to were the friends we had made in the plant, who once in a while---but only a rare while---consented to go to a union meeting with us.

What workers care most about in deciding whether to accept a new man in the informal work group is how good he does his job---and I say "man" and "he" because we were all men on the shop floor at International Harvester then. And Bob did excellent work on his punch press, and at times on another machine, the shears. He wasn't quite as loose in shooting the breeze as Burt was, but he still earned enough respect to serve as his department's shop steward. And as I walked by his work station, I could see that he was on very friendly terms with several of the young Mexican American workers, namely Johnnie Rivera and Johnnie Mena. Whether they visited back and forth at each others homes as Burt and I did with several of the plant's Negro workers, and I also did with a white guy from Arkansas who had befriended me, I no longer remember.

I used to think that of all my comrades from the 1950s, Bob Alford was the least likely to have become a Red. I thought that because he seemed to be---and was---a normal, well-adjusted, and happy person. Without any of the deep core of alienation that in my case had come from growing up in an unhappy family with a silent withdrawn father. That may be so, but as I recently learned from Roger Friedland, Bob's grandfather had been a lumber worker and a Wobbly, that is a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, perhaps the most authentically American---as well as Western and militant--radical movement American society has known.

Today I believe that Bob's becoming a Communist is best explained by one over-arching quality, his essential goodness. Bob Alford was the most unequivocally good human being I've ever known. His growing radicalism didn't come from a wild-eyed youthful idealism. It went deeper than that. It came, instead, from a an urgent desire to do good, to make the world a better place. So that even when we all had to admit that our early efforts to change the world had not borne fruit, Bob never ceased trying to do good, in politics, in community and university affairs, and above all in his work as a professor and as a father to his three children.

After graduating Angels Camp's Bret Harte High School in the heart of Northern California's gold country, where he was already active politically, Bob came to Cal in 1946. It was one year after the end of World War II, so he had missed being drafted to fight in that conflict by a mere year. At Berkeley he would become first active in, and then the president of, Stiles Hall, the campus YMCA, at the the time its leading liberal organization. As part of our "boring from within" tactics, communists worked in such "mass orgs" as the Y, looking for potential recruits and it was there that Bob met the man who brought him into the Labor Youth League. But as he told me two years ago when I was interviewing old friends about why they had become Reds in the 1950s---a most unlikely time---what most influenced Bob was not any one person or group of people. Nor was it ideology. It was music.

What made music such a fitting vehicle is that it speaks to the heart. And Bob was a man with a big heart. He was also a fine classical pianist, played regularly in the 1950s in a Berkeley chanber group led by a brilliant cellist, Dick Anastasia. But it was folk music that would move him politically.

The late 1940s was the beginning of the folk music revival in America. Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie were gaining big followings on college campuses. Bob heard their music sung by Pete Seeger, but it was the songs of Earl Robinson that most influenced him. Robinson's "The House I Live In" was brought to a mass national audience by two great singers, who couldn't have been more different, Paul Robeson and Frank Sinatra.

Bob graduated Cal and went on to work for an M.A. in sociology during the height of the Loyalty Oath controversy. President Harry Truman had set the process in motion in 1948 when he ordered that federal employees must sign affadavits that they did not belong to the Communist Party or any organization advocating the forcible overthrow of the U. S. government. A year later the State of California followed with an oath for its employees, including professors at Berkeley and UCLA. The oath was universally despised as a blatant violation of academic freedom. But except for a few brave souls, who years later were exonerated when the law was overturned, most of the faculty caved in and signed.

The oath settled it for Bob. Knowing that if he went on for his Ph.D he'd have to sign just to work his way through school as a teaching assistant, he finished his master's degree and left Cal.

Bob never regretted the years he spent at Harvester. We both felt that there was no other place that could have taught us so much about American society. But by the beginning of 1956, with almost four years under our belts, we were getting restless. The work had gotten old and it had become even more clear that we would never be successful in organizing our fellow workers. And there were all the ambitions to make something of ourselves, to become successful in a profession, that we had put to rest for so long.

And then in February 1956 came a bombshell, the report that Kruschëv had made a "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a speech in which he revealed that Stalin had been a criminal monster. The same Stalin who in my first year at IHC had made me feel safe, even as a group of right-wing Irishmen were baiting me as a "Jew-Communist," because with him at the helm in Moscow, all was right with the world.

Stalin's death in March 1953 would in time lead to a thaw in the Cold War. Tensions eased measurably when the Korean War ended that summer. At home McCarthyism would be dealt a death blow a year later when the Senator from Wisconsin's hearings into subversive activities in the Army backfired.

Years later I would learn that Harvester knew all along that we were communists, but had considered us too harmless to get rid of. Our more politically minded fellow workers also knew what we were up to. Bob may have been red-baited less than I was, because he didn't stand out as a Jew. Our comrade Burt took the most flack, because he was not only a "Jew-Communist like me," but was also married to a Negro woman. But Burt was so unapologetically matter-of-fact about his wife, and also his politics---although none of us ever revealed the full extent of our radicalism---that he was probably the most accepted and the most politically effective of us.

Burt's wife Bru and Ginny, to whom I was then married, were as died-in-the-wool true believers as their husbands. But Gloria never bought into our illusions that the Soviet Union was a workers' paradise or that socialism in America was virtually around the corner. Her healthy skepticism undoubtedly gave Bob a somewhat greater sense of political reality than was typical among Communists and fellow travellers in the 1950s. But reading Kruschëv's speech that spring devastated Bob as much as it did the rest of us.

Everything we had believed about the Soviet Union, everything we knew to be true about the world, came down crashing like a house of cards.

For weeks we talked about the Report and what it meant for us. Meanwhile our friends and comrades were beginning to leave the Party and the LYL. First in trickles, then in droves. After a while, as the shock wore off, Kruschëv's words began to look like an act of deliverance. For people like Bob and myself, it meant we had a second chance. The same American society which, only a few years earlier, might have locked us up in concentration camps---for the 1954 McCarran Act had actually provided for the rounding up of dangerous subversives in a national emergency---was now saying that our future was open.

Although I was admitted to Berkeley's Sociology Department that September, Bob decided to wait six months to save up money for his Ph. D. studies. Harvester's union-scale wages were high and hard to give up.

For two years in the late 1950s Bob and I ate lunch together every day, sitting in the sun in front of the Campanile. We were often joined by others in our cohort, Ken Walker, Ralph Beals, Lloyd Street, and Harry Nishio. Bob and I still packed the same black metal lunch boxes we had used in the factory, but it was what was inside Bob's that provoked the same wonder and jokes that it had at Harvester. With an enormous appetite, he always ate three or four sandwiches and several pieces of fruit.

Our return to Berkeley came at an opportune time. A new department was being built by Herbert Blumer that would soon be the best in the country. Blumer and his former student Tam Shibutani had a huge following of grad students interested in social psychology that included Tom Scheff and Arlene Caplan Daniels. The other major segment was political and industrial sociology, with such luminaries as Reinhard Bendix, Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Bill Kornhauser. Along with Bob and I, the political and industrial students included Bill Friedland, Art Stinchcombe, Pat McGillivray, Amitai Etzioni, Fred Goldner, Günther Roth, and Gayle Ness.

The curriculum for students of class, social movements, politics, and work at the time couldn't have been more tailor-made for Bob and me. The books on the Ph. D. core reading list---and the others our profs recommended---were books that helped us make sense of our recent political and industrial experiences, answering questions that we were finally ready to face, questions about capitalism and socialism, the Soviet Union, and the politics of the working class. The books Bob and I read would influence our outlooks forever: Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Selig Perlman's Theory of the The Labor Movement, Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and perhaps the biggest eye-opener of all, Roberto Michels' Political Parties. Art Stinchcombe turned me on to Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and I also learned a great deal from the anarchist theorists, Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Although I became an industrial and Bob a political sociologist, we both soon found ourselves Marty Lipset's star students. The year after I was Marty's research assistant for a book on social mobility, Bob became his leading assistant, doing much of the spade work, and even some of the writing, for the classic text Political Man.

What strikes me now as remarkable, looking back over 45 years, is how we remained good friends, indeed comrades, without falling prey to a competition that would have been natural, given that our relation to our mentor made us virtually sibling rivals. And given also the dog-eat-dog nature of the academic world. I attribute that mostly to Bob and his impressive inner security---he never needed to feel better than someone else to feel good about himself.

After eight years in which we had seen each other practically every day, Bob left the Bay Area to teach at the University of Wisconsin. A dedicated and selfless teacher, his career took off at Madison and he was the first of our peer group to be promoted to tenure. Still, we managed to see each other at least once a year, at ASA meetings, or when he arranged for me to be invited to Madison to deliver a talk.

As a man with such deep roots in California and the West---his favorite novelist was Wallace Stegner---Bob might have been a bit envious when I became the first Ph.D. in a generation to have been invited back as a regular faculty member in sociology. But he returned himself a few years later, as a full professor at UC Santa Cruz.

My feelings about sociology changed dramatically in the mid-1970s. Involved in primal therapy I became focussed on personal experience and much less interested in work and the profession. My contacts with many old sociology friends dropped off as I began to find many academic people---especially men---too involved in their work for my taste, too consumed with ideas, too much "in their heads," if you will.

Bob was the great exception. Even though he himself remained involved in the field, active in professional associations, with his circle of friends and colleagues constantly expanding, whenever we met he was always first and foremost a human being, a man with feelings, I never hesitated to ask him to read whatever new non-sociological manuscript I was working on. His comments on a memoir about my struggle with depression were especially thoughtful.

He was also much more grounded in the earth than any other professor I've known. A lover of nature, he spent every summer and every Christmas holiday at the family ranch near Avery, California. There in a hundred acres of semi-wilderness, he constructed trails so that he and his friends could go on long and strenuous hikes, reach ponds to swim in, and he also did much of the work himself in building an office where he could work and a home for him and his companion Noll Anne Richardson.

Unlike most of my old friends and colleagues, he became as close to my wife Karina as he was to me. Whereas other academic people usually showed little interest in her work and who she was as a person, after all she was not a sociologist or a professor but a mere artist, Bob was as curious about her projects and her reactions to events, as he was to mine. So that whenever he brought food over to our house for lunch---his hearing deficit having gotten so bad that restaurants were too noisy---he positioned himself at our table with his good ear next to where Karina was sitting. And then halfway through his time with us he would move closer to me. * * *

Bob Alford made important contributions to sociology in a number of areas: politics, health care, music, theory, and methodology. As a teacher he guided scores of graduate students in dissertation research and to professionial success, teaching with a selfless dedication that earned him their respect and love. But having said all this, Bob excelled even more in two areas: as a father and as a friend.

Bob was an unusually nurturant father when his children were young and they remained his number one priority after they were grown up. At his 70th birthday celebration, Heidi, Jonathan, and Elissa each made a moving tribute to their father, who was always available at every turning point or crisis in their lives.

Along with his family and students, Bob was invested in a rich circle of friendship. And he knew that friendships have to be continuously cultivated, so that he would not think of passing through the Bay Area on the way from New York to his ranch in the gold country without coming over to visit with us.

A number of qualities made him a great friend: loyalty, being a good listener, modesty, and sensitivity to others. He never boasted about his many accomplishments, so that I had to read Roger Friedland's obituary to learn he had been awarded both the C. Wright Mills Award and a Distinguished Teaching prize from the American Sociological Association. Did he not tell us out of modesty? Or out of a sensitivity that came from knowing that I had regrets about almost winning the first and never having been nominated for the second?

It must have especially pained him that his cancer progressed so rapidly that he did not have the chance for fimal meetings with his friends. Still, on the day he died, barely able to speak, he dictated an e-mail to Noll Anne, so that she could forward his goodbyes to us.

I can still see Bob walking through our door with Noll Anne, placing our deli lunch on the table, to free his arms for the big hugs he would greet us with. And then finding his place at the table, ready with his everpresent curiosity, to ask us about our lives. Exuding as always a vitality that makes it hard to believe that he won't be coming any more.

Dissertation: Class-Voting in Four Anglo-American Countries

Biography submitted on: 2003-03-27 19:48:45

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Bennett M. Berger

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UC, San Diego

I got my Ph.D. in 1958 with a dissertation on suburbia under Reinhard Bendix and Bill Kornhauser. UCPress published it unchanged in 1960 and 1968. After year lecturing at Berkely, my first ladder job was at the University of Illinois which gave me tenure in 1962. In 1963 I moved to UC Davis as Chair of its then rapidly expanding dep't. While there I began studying and writing on youth and was eventually given a large grant by NIMH for field research on child rearing in Hippie communes. That research produced several Ph.D.s by my students and ten years later my book The Survival of a Counterculture which will soon re-appear in a new edition. In 1971 a collection of my essays was published. In 1973 I moved to UC San Diego. In the late 70s I was Editor of Contemporary Sociology. At San Diego I chaired the committees of several first class Ph.Ds (some mediocre ones too) and continued writing lots of reviews and review-essays. In 1990 UCPress published Authors of Their Own Lives, my collection of 20 autobiographical essays by American sociologists and in 1995 my last book An Essay on Culture. I retired in 1991 and don't do much sociology anymore though I continue to write a lot, mostly not for publication.

Berkeley shaped my way of thinking by its theoretical diversity which prevented me from ever becoming a partisan of a particular "school of thought." Pierre Bourdieu was the first theorist I ever read who thought like I did. I doubt that "my" sociology has shaped the world in any way. The poet Auden is often quoted as saying "poetry makes nothing happen" (an exaggeration of course, which makes it quotable). Sociology also seldom makes anything happen, maybe because its structural way of thinking is deeply offensive to American individualism which is why economics (which knows perhaps even less than we do) has become the dominant social science.

Dissertation: Working-class suburb; a study of auto workers in suburbia

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-12 12:59:59

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Alex Garber

Alex Garber passed away in 1984

Alex Garber came to California State University, Sacramento as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the fall of 1964. He had been on the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his BA and MA in sociology from the University of Chicago and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He was promoted to associate professor and then full professor during his tenure. He chaired the department from 1968 to 1974.

Upon arriving in Sacramento, Alex introduced three courses to the curriculum: Political Sociology, Soviet Society, and Arab-Israel Conflict. He also taught theory and social organization, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. He always had a group of students, both undergraduates and graduates, who followed him around and who were greatly influenced by him. He was an imposing figure. He could talk on and on about many topics, always giving an insightful analysis, even when discussing baseball statistics! He retired in 1982 at the age of 70 and died in Los Angeles in 1984 at age 72.

Alex was extremely bright, very well read, a macro sociologist in the best tradition of those graduating from the sociology department at Berkeley in those days. He knew history, read history and combined his historical knowledge with the sociological perspective. In that sense, he was I would guess a product of the Teggart-influenced department at Berkeley.

Alex did not publish much, but took his passion and considerable erudition into the areas union organizing and politics, especially his involvement over the years with the Democratic Socialists of America. He was a close friend of Michael Harrington, for example. He helped organize the first faculty union on the campus. He was one of the original seven members of the founding AFT chapter. Garber was interested in both the professionalization of faculty and the unionization of faculty. For him this was not a contradiction. Through professionalism faculty gained a voice in running the university in ways they thought were best for students and for themselves, and through unionization faculty gained support for increased resources such as graduate TA's, travel money, assigned time for research, etc.

When I came to CSU Sacramento in 1964 as a young man just out of graduate school, it was the first time in my life that I was in a position to interact with faculty members as a peer. Alex was older and wiser. I learned a great deal from him, as he was one of my early mentors.

Fond memories, Dean Dorn.

Dissertation: The Ideological Dimensions of the Historical Explanations of the Russian Constituent Assembly, January 18, 1918

Biography submitted on: 2004-05-04 12:12:12

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Robert E. Kantor

Robert E. Kantor has passed away.

Dissertation: Sociological Dimensions In Schizophrenia

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Irving Krauss

Emeritus Professor, Northern Illinois University, De Kalb

My 1962 Ph.D was preceded by an M.A.from the University of Chicago, and prior to that a B.A. in Communication and Public Policy at Berkeley. My first teaching position was at the University of Hawaii, for ten years, and then Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, for the next 16, including a stint as department chair. I retired in 1985, and live in Alpine County, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 40 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. The county has the smallest population in the state, about 1,000; our local community, Woodfords, has some 150 residents.

My perspective was shaped by my experiences as a child in the Great Depression, which included observing a broker negotiating with people who would return to sell their gold fillings and crowns, after removing them from their mouth; working the swing shift as a turret lathe operator in the industrial part of Chicago while attending classes during the day, and participating in the labor movement in the places where I lived. Berkeley?s radical groups and activities influenced a socialist orientation. Classes with Herbert Blumer and Tamotsu Shibutani, especially Blumer?s social movements work, suggested ways of achieving change to improve people?s lives.

Because of a talent in art?I began at Berkeley as an art major?my early career goal was a political cartoonist, and while an undergraduate I was Art Editor of the Daily Californian. However, the realization that few newspapers would appreciate work highly critical of capitalism led me to abandon that goal. The Berkeley milieu encouraged a reorientation, and a key influence which eventually led to graduate work in sociology was one of Marty Lipset?s classes. While a Ph.D candidate at Berkeley I was president of the sociology graduate students association and one of the founders and first editor of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology

My main interest continues to be stratification and class, and was reflected in my teaching and research, with special concern for the underprivileged. As a faculty member and citizen I have tried to apply sociological knowledge to improve conditions in academe and the community. In Hawaii I was head of the campus chapter of the ACLU and a board member of the congressional campaigns of Representative Patsy Mink, co-author of Title 9 of the Voting Rights Act. I was politically active in DeKalb as well as in Alpine County upon retirement. In Alpine, as an elected member of the county school board, I was responsible for establishing a voting district containing most of the county?s Native Americans. For years none was on the school board, even though a quarter of the population was Native American as were half the students. For many years I was a board member of the county arts commission, and presently am on the boards of the historical society and the Alpine County Democratic Central Committee. Thus, in a sense, my interest in art, sociology, and politics has come full circle.

Dissertation: The Determinants of Individual Social Mobility

Biography submitted on: 2003-06-02 10:25:34

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Cy W. Record

Cy W. Record has passed away.

Dissertation: The Role of the Negro Intellectuals in Contemporary Racial Movements

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1951

Irving P. Babow

Irving P. Babow has passed away.

Dissertation: Secular Singing Societies of European Immigrant Groups in San Francisco

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James W. Carroll

Dissertation: Flatheads and Whites: A Study of Conflict

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Stanley M. Honer

Dissertation: The Theory of Cultural Differences

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1952

Harry Brill

Sociology-Univ. of Mass. - Boston

Dissertation: Black Militancy: A Case Study in Ego Politics.

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Arlene K. Daniels

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

UC Berkeley was a terrific opportunity in the late 40?s. I came to Berkeley, to get away from home. I was poor, but it only cost twenty - five dollars a semester. As an undergraduate English major, I stumbled into graduate school through my admiration for Tamotsu Shibutani. Fortunately, a characteristic of the department at that time was benign neglect. You prepared to take the exams anyway you wished, with the list of great books of sociology as your guide.

When I received my PHD in 1960 I was thrown on my own, searching for grants, interrupted by a brief stay at SF State College. But I made a happy landing at Northwestern University in l975 as a full Professor where I spent the next twenty years. I found I could use what I had learned, primarily from Shibutani and Blumer, especially abut the Chicago School, but also from Selvin, Bock and Nisbet, in my research and teaching.

I made my way in professional circles as editor and President of Social Problems, as council member and secretary of the American Sociological Association and as a founder and then president of Sociologists for Women in Society.

I valued my colleague and the opportunity to work with graduate students and produce Ph Ds at Northwestern. I produced a modest canon, using the qualitative and analytic methods learned in graduate school, to study the field of occupations and professions, and, the place of women in work.

Dissertation: Ideological Response to Social Pressures on the Professions: A Study of Dentists

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-05 10:05:02

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Shoi B. Dickinson

Shoi B. Dickinson has passed away.

Dissertation: The Significance of Interaction Between Status Levels: A Case Study of a Major Department Store

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Ritchie P. Lowry

Sociology, Boston College

Dissertation: Who Runs this Town? A Study of the Quality of Public Life in a Changing Small Community

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Gayl D. Ness

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan

I came to Berkeley first as an undergraduate in 1950, after doing three years in Forestry at Oregon State College (now University) in Corvallis. In those first three years, I found myself becoming more interested in people than in trees. As a Berkeley undergraduate I gravitated to Sociology through the influence of Wolfram Eberhard, Robert Nisbet and Kenneth Bock. On graduation, I was drafted into the US army in February 1953, destined to serve in the Korean War. But apparently the powers that were wanted to win that war, so they sent me to France. I served out my term, met a fine French woman who became my wife, and then on discharge, won a Fullbright Fellowship to study in Copenhagen. There I continued work I had done for my BA honors essay on the US and Scandinavian cooperative movements. Organizational sociology had got into my blood. In 1956, with French wife, a new baby and University of Copenhagen degree, we returned to Berkeley to resume graduate studies.

Those were heady times. All of us had been out between undergraduate and graduate studies, and some before, mostly in some kind of protest movement. Friedland, Stinchcombe, Alford, Blauner, Daniels and many others were part of that cohort. Someone mentioned benign neglect. That was certainly the faculty orientation toward us at those times. If there were brown bags, we students organized them. If there was something for those fine visiting professors like Rene Koenig, we students organized it. Faculty had offices without names on their doors. We could see them 2 hours a week in the ?bull pen? where open desks found them at obligatory ?office hours.?

Four of us accidentally formed a ?sub-seminar? at the beginning of one of Shibutani?s classes. Bill Friedland, Dorothy Anderson (now Mariner), Ernest Landauer and I fell in together and met regularly every Wednesday evening for the rest of our studies. We taught each other a great deal; I wonder if it was more or less than we learned from our professors. Our professors were superb scholars: Bendix, Eberhard, Lipset, Selznick, Smelser, and I learned economic development from Chou Ming Li, later Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They did inspire and they imparted knowledge, but it was our peers who provided a far more fundamental kind of intellectual sustenance.

On graduation I was fortunate to receive a four-year post-doctoral grant with the Institute of Current World Affairs. This was primarily the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who seems now in retrospect to have been the only professor even thinking about students? next steps. By this time my wife and I had a second child and we spent the next four years steeping ourselves in Southeast Asia and having a third son.

From Malaysia we came to Ann Arbor, to the University of Michigan. I was hired sight unseen and became one of Michigan?s 13 new assistant professors in 1964. Michigan proved to be something of an antithesis to Berkeley. There, we were roughly 200 graduate students left to fend for ourselves. There were three teaching Assistantships and one department fellowship. At Michigan I found 200 graduate students all supported by department grants. Faculty at Michigan entrepreneured for their students, finding foundation and government grants to support graduate students. I?m not sure which was best. At Berkeley we were all old organizers, so the lack of faculty leadership was no problem. We organized and learned. At Michigan students were drawn in and shepherded through their studies. I see advantages and disadvantages at both ends, and have no idea how to produce a net effect.

At Michigan I found a fine Sociology department, with great resources, superb colleagues, and support for whatever I wanted to do. I also found the single best university in the world to study Asia, and have been involved there ever since. I have maintained work in Southeast Asia. This would have been impossible had I returned to Berkeley when I had an offer in 1965. Remember that then even Bendix had to leave the department due to the intense and acrimonious disputes, where, as he put it, ?there was no milk of human kindness.? Michigan was less radical and less destructive. The Vietnam War tore Berkeley apart. At Michigan it produced a highly creative form of protest, ?the Teach-Ins.? This provides a good question for organizational analysts: why destructive protest in one university and constructive protest in another. (Michigan is older, of course, and with Harvard in the 1890?s was at the forefront of another national protest in the Anti-Imperialist League.)

And so I stayed, teaching courses in the sociology of economic development; taking organizational analysis into national and international development organizations, into international population planning, policies and organizations, and finally into the intricate realms of population-development environment analyses. I have continued to work in Asia, even in retirement.

Berkeley gave me the joy of the sociological imagination, as we called it then; it gave be Wolfram Eberhard who led me into the rich life of Asian societies; it gave me fellow students who taught me much and have remained life long friends. That it a heady mixture indeed.

Dissertation: Central Government and Local Initiative in the Industrializaiton of India and Japan

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-08 10:08:02

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Thomas J. Scheff

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UC, Santa Barbara.

At Berkeley, my basic approach to sociology, social psychology, and social science grew out of my contact with T. Shibutani. My contact with Goffman and his work was also influential, even though it was many years before I felt its full effect. From Shibutani I learned the importance of integrating theory and empirical work, and of attempting to develop an integrated social science, especially combining the social and the psychological. Later in my career, I began to understand Goffman's work in this way also, even though he himself took care not to develop these themes explicitly.

The two major areas in my sociology have been the societal reaction to deviance, on the one hand, and shame and the social bond, on the other. My theoretical and empirical work on labeling has been influential in many fields and has had considerable impact on the actual treatment of the mentally ill. In particular, my Being Mentally Ill (1966; 1999) was one of the key sources of the reform of the mental health laws of California in 1970, and subsequently in all the other states.

My work on shame and the social bond, begun in the mid-1980's, has also been influential, particularly in two areas, protracted conflict in families and between large groups. This influence is still a work in progress, however, since it requires integration of many different approaches and perspectives. In particular, it formulates links between individual psychology, interpersonal relations, and social institutions.

Dissertation: Staff Resistance to Change in a Mental Hospital

Website: www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-12 10:12:02

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1953

Harry R. Doby

Harry R. Doby passed away in 1966

Dissertation: A Study of Social Change and Social Disorganization in a Finnish Rural Community

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Kian M. Kwan

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, CSU, Northridge

I left China, my native country, when I was a child to join my father in the Philippines. As a resident alien who had been through the difficult World-War II years and other hardships in the Philippines, I developed a deep interest in race and ethnic relations. This central interest led me in 1954 to the graduate program in sociology at Berkeley. Professor Tamotsu Shibutani, my dissertation adviser, invited me to work with him on a special project after I received my Ph.D. in 1958. Ethnic Stratification: A Comparative Approach, published by Macmillan in 1965, was the product of that collaboration.

I began my teaching career at Ohio University. My second academic appointment, at California State University, Northridge, lasted from 1965 until June 2000 ( except for a visiting engagement in 1972-73 at the University of Hawaii).

Individuality and Social Control: Essays in Honor of Tamotsu Shibutani (JAI Press, 1996) - a collection of mostly original papers by nineteen contributors -- was some form of personal repayment to my longtime associate and benefactor. I wrote a 23-page "Foreword" to the Festschrift -- offering selective interpretations on (1) Darwin's Evolution Theory, (2) Peirce's Scientific Logic, (3) Founding of Chicago Pragmatism, and (4) Rise of Chicago Sociology. The preface concluded: "These two distinguished Chicago alumni [Tamotsu Shibutani and Anselm Strauss] and many of their associates and students have faith that generations of young men and women will discover anew the verities of their intellectual heritage, build on what they have done, and make further advances." Guided by these great traditions -- Darwinian natural selection, American pragmatism, and a renewed Chicago Sociology -- I hope to make additional contributions in the future.

Dissertation: Assimilation of the Chinese in the United States: An Exploratory Study in California

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-10 10:10:02

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Charles B. Perrow

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Yale University

After a quarter at the U. of Washington, two years at Black Mountain College in N.C., a year bumming about in NYC, and a brief stay at Reed College, I entered Berkeley as an undergraduate, reclaiming one year's worth of credit, and plowed through to the PhD. My personal turmoils matched that of the department, which was gutted by the loyalty oath issue but resurrected by Blumer. An undergraduate course with Bock on the Idea of Progress stabilized my direction; I was not going to write the great American novel, sociology was easier. Then came Selznick , Lipset, Goffman, Kornhauser, Shibutani and so on. With an equally stunning group of fellow graduate students to learn from, and Bendix (MA thesis) and Selznick (PhD thesis) as mentors, I drifted into organizational analysis because there was almost no literature to read (I still am a slow reader). Berkeley student unrest broke out just as I left for my first job at Michigan; we had been the silent generation, but the leftist urges were all about me. Graduate student life at Berkeley, of course, was idyllic, compared to that of an assistant professor in the Michigan department, which encouraged me to leave after five years. Since then I have had to leave Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, and Stony Brook, finally serving out my sentence at Yale. My cohort was good, but the market was even better as universities, sociology, organizations, and organizational theory grew; it was easy to be tenured, easy to move on.

Berkeley encouraged my critical stance toward my field and toward society; Michigan didn't, but when I was tenured at Wisconsin I could say what I pleased and had the freedom to leave that university in protest over its repression of anti-Vietnam war activities. Happenstance, almost a "normal accident," immersed me in the Three Mile Island story and vectored my career for over a decade. But last year I finally published a cherished project on the origins of U.S. capitalism and its corrosive power.

Dissertation: Authority, Goals, and Prestige in a General Hospital

Biography submitted on: 2002-11-29 11:29:02

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T. L. Skelton

Dissertation: Relation Between Poltical and Ideological Changes in Contempoary Japan

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Samuel J. Surace

Emeritus Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

I entered graduate school in Berkeley in 1953 and received my MA in Sociology from UCLA in 1952 working with Ralph Turner. In Berkeley, I studied with Reinhard Bendix, William Petersen, and Herbert Blumer. I was greatly influenced by the global outlook of Reinhard Bendix who wrote the forward to the publication of my thesis by UC Press.

I taught at UCLA from 1961 to 1989 and was also a visiting Professor at the University of Rochester. I have been a guest lecturer at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a symposium on modern Italy at Columbia University, and keynote speaker at a conference at Alma College. Swiss National Radio interviewed me on social change in America. I have taught courses in formal organizations, sociology of deviant behavior, social change, social theory, social structure and economic change, and political theory.

My research positions have included research assistant to Clark Kerr, one of principal investigators on the Mexican American project of patterns of work and settlement, and principal investigator of internal migration in Italy. I was a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio Italy, received two Ford Foundation fellowships, and research grants from the American Philosophical Society and the UCLA Committee on Research.
,br> My publications include several studies on Mexican Americans, and work and modernization in Italy published in different Italian and American journals. I have been a manuscript consultant for several presses and journals.

Today, I spend much time renewing my guitar repertory from my former jazz musician days and writing new songs in my own special style.

Dissertation: The Status Evolution of Italian Workers, 1860-1914

Biography submitted on: 2003-07-10 08:32:23

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1954

Harley L. Browning

Latin American studies specialist at UT-Austin

Dissertation: Urbanization in Mexico

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Richard M. Colvard

Professor Emeritus, Southern oregon University

Dissertation: The Foundation and the Colleges: A Study of Organizations, Professions, and Power in the Arkansas Experiment in Teacher Education

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Fred H. Goldner

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, CUNY, Queens

I have one thing left to do-----. Up to now, in a career that went back and forth between academia and executive experience I have written articles or chapters based on my research or experience in such divergent organizations as Ford Aircraft, IBM, Kaiser Cement, HSA, New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., the priests of the New York Archdiocese, Sanus (an entrepreneurial start-up of an HMO, and NYLCare, its large corporate successor). In each I attempted to do what I was challenged to do: from Blumer -- to thoroughly understand the continual emergent nature of their world as perceived by organizational participants; from Bendix -- to understand the structural, historical and ideological processes involved in these organizations; from Selznick -- the role of power, politics, and the "imbuement" of values involved in organizational units. Out of this came materials on pronoia, demotion, boundary roles, delegitimation of the non-profit sector, professionalization as a control device, the growth or cynical knowledge in the priesthood, rhetorical reticence in politics, the role of beliefs about market processes and organization structure, and power and conflict as inherent organizational processes. And then there was my plea in 1975 at an ASA session to stop ignoring the flow of money as a key to understanding organizational behavior. And now -- I will attempt to do just that in a comparative study of those above organizations in order to explicate relations between personal experiences and organizational processes in such issues as money flow, blame, centralization/decentralization, etc. Wish me luck.

Dissertation: Industrial Relations and the Organization of Management

Biography submitted on: 2003-01-23 12:12:12

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Ida R. Hoos

Retired Researcher and Writer

UC Berkeley was an important step in the way sociology influenced my career. My undergraduate years at Radcliffe, under the wonderful inspiration of Gordon Allport, had already provided the template to guide me. thus, 5 years out of Radcliffe, I founded and ws director of a then-unique social service organization, Jewish Vocational Service, which is still flourishing and is still a major force in occupational guidance, trainng, and placement in the Boston area. With many branches and myriad activities, it is recognized for its service to the entire community.

Marriage to Sidney S. Hoos, on leave from UC Berkeley to the War Department OQMG (?) in Washington, put a temporary end to my work in Boston along with my part-time graduate program at Harvard. My main focus was Fannie Farmer and Dr. Spock, with Kuchen and Kinder all-important, while our two daughters grew up and Sid kept the armed forces in the far-flung theatres of war supplied. After the war, we returned to Berkeley, Sid much honored for his service and greatly advanced on the academic ladder.

A sabbatical at Harvard for Sid meant a refresher at the Pierian Spring for me. A return to ivy-clad Emerson Hall inspired me to desert Girl Scout cookie sales. Gordon Allport exhorted me: You just mustn?t stay graduated.? Herb Blumer smoothed all the administrative hurdles. My thesis, ?Implications of Electronic Data-Processing for the Clerical labor Force?, became a book, Automation in the Office, published by Public Affairs Press and was translated into German. I wrote and delivered the series ?Office Automation in America? for the Voice of America. My sister commented that if only I had titled my work ?Sex and Automation?, it would have attracted more attention!

With our two daughters now 12 and 16, we took our first sabbatical abroad, this time a year (for Sid) under the joint sponsorship of the Ford Foundation, the Italian government, and UC. Our year in Naples was a high point. When we returned to Berkeley in September 1961 I was considering another PhD?in Romance Languages, just for the fun of it?but but the Institute of Industrial Relations, under Art Ross and Peg Gordon, invited me to join their research program, ?Unemployment and the American Economy? and, always interested in adjustment to technological change, I designed a study of retraining programs. My book, Retraining the Work Force was published by the UC Press and ran through two editions.

Technological advance was evident on every front. Not only the more mechanical aspects of handling data but the very process of managerial thinking were becoming subject to new concepts and theories. The ?dominant paradigm? embraced only the quantitative. What you could not count did not count. The social and human aspects were systematically avoided in the rush to be ?scientific.?

Dissertation: Automation in the Office: A Social Survey of Occupational and Organizational Changes

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-24 10:24:02

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Howard M. Vollmer

I can claim few, if any significant contributions to academic sociology. After my dissertation on ?Employee Rights and the Employment Relationship? was published by the U.C. Institute of Industrial Relations and a subsequent book on the sociological process of Professionalization was published by Prentice-Hall, and after some futher graduate level course work in management, my career turned toward applied research and development and then into administration. Initially I served for 13 years at Stanford Research Institute (Now SRI International) in charge of management development and organization development projects. Our clients for such work included federal government agencies such as the U.S. Air Force (projects on the organization of research laboratories and the nianagement of scientific personnel): state agencies (design of the new Department of Ecology for the State of Washington); Indian reservations such as economic and social development programs on the Colville, Crow, and Navajo reservations and many other applied projects. For a two-year period thereafter I served as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the American tJniversity, Washington, D.C..during which time I also participated in the design of a new College of Public Affairs at that university.

After returning to California (San Francisco), I became corporate manager of management development programs at Bechtel Corporation, an international construction firm. Then after several years of independent consulting work on organizational design, I became Director of Extended (Continuing) Education at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo California for 11 years. More recently, I?ve served on several boards of directors of non-profit corporations. At times during the above years, I taught sociology courses part-time to adults at Pennsylvania State University, University of Alberta-Calgary, University of California Extension, Stanford University, University of San Francisco, and Antioch University-West.

For me, the U.C. Berkeley graduate program in sociology provided a strong foundation for my lifelong work, especially in classical sociological theory (e.g., Weber, Durkheim. and other authors of the ?75 great books?). The fact that sociology (along with inputs from other disciplines) can provide a significant foundation for practical applications in ?the world? I believe is illustrated by the variety of involvements I have had in my own life.

Dissertation: Employee Rights and the Employment Relationship in Manufacturing Industries

Biography submitted on: 2003-07-10 08:00:00

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1955

Laile E. Bartlett

Writer and Researcher, Walnut Creek

My biography is in some ways the reverse of the usual assumptions. In short, my Sociology Ph.D. works as much or more as a legitimation of past activities rather than a preparation for future ones. More specifically, I was the Sociology instructor at two Ohio colleges (three years in all) and general utility instructor for three years at the University of Washington in Seattle - teaching a broad cross section of courses from Criminology to Race Relations.

My main emphasis both at UC Berkeley and afterwards, however, was the Sociology of Religion. I taught a summer course in this at Berkeley after getting my degree.

My post Ph.D. activity, however, has been research and writing: four books by major publishers, two published by organizations, and four books that are still in manuscript form. Much of my writing has a Sociology of Religion orientation. My most recent manuscript, Making Sin Legal, is an overview of gambling in America.

Dissertation: Unitarian Fellowships: A Case Study in Liberal Religious Development

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Patrick J. McGillivray

Patrick J. McGillivray passed away in 1993

Dissertation: Social Organization and Employee Rights

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Hubert W. Oppe

Professor Emeritus, West Texas A & M

Dissertation: Processes of Change in Generation Sequences

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Guenther H. Roth

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

I came to the United States in 1953 from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research to finish a denazification study with Kurt Wolff at OSU. From 1955 until 1958 I was a full-time research assistant under Reinhard Bendix for the Ford Project on Labor in Economic Development housed in the Institute of Industrial Relations. A part-time graduate student in the Soc. Dept., I picked up my Ph.D. in 1960 with one of the first dissertations in historical sociology. For many of us assistants in the interdisciplinary Institute the apprenticeship nature of research was more important than disciplinary study, since we could look over the shoulders of our masters. For some of us our first teaching experience was in the Social Science Integrated Course. What all of this meant to me I have tried to recollect in Bennett Berger?s Authors of Their Own Lives (UC Press 1990), where I also recount my growing up in Nazi Germany and surviving the war.

I retired from Columbia in 1997 to finish my last book, a historical lesson for German readers, Max Weber?s Anglo-German Family History 1800-1950 (in German, 2001). I document Weber?s descent from one of the wealthiest Anglo-German families in the 19th century and suggest counterfactually that a stronger cosmopolitan bourgeoisie might have helped prevent the catastrophes of the 20th century.

Dissertation: The Social Democratic Labor Movement in Imperial Germany

Biography submitted on: 2003-01-30 10:23:34

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Dorothy E. Smith

Emeritus Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

My years at Berkeley were in many ways the unhappiest of my life, but I learned a lot inside and outside the formalities of academic instruction: I learned a kind of sociology (including survey methods and mathematical sociology) that I was fundamentally at odds with though I didn?t realize this until later; I learned George Herbet Mead from Tamotsu Shibutani?s brilliant course; I learned a lot I could have done without about North American sexism (I?ve always been grateful to John Clausen who did not share the pervasive sexism of other departmental faculty of the time); I learned a great deal from the Free Speech and Anti-Vietnam War movements on campus though I did not participate very actively because I was not an American citizen and didn?t want to be deported as an English friend of mine had been; I learned a radically different conception of poetry from once hearing Alan Ginsberg recite at Sather Gate; I discovered by accident in the university bookstore a copy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty?s The phenomenology of perception that furthered the intellectual transformation that originated with Shibutani?s course. I resolved when I taught my first undergraduate course in sociology that I had to find a different way of doing sociology. These experiences at Berkeley were foundational to the step I took as I became active in the women?s movement (three or four years after I left) to start writing a sociology that would know how to begin in the actualities of people?s lives.

Dissertation: Power and the Front Line: Social Controls in a State Mental Hospital

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-21 10:21:02

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William R. Smith

William R. Smith has passed away.

Dissertation: Police Control and the Black Community in Richmond, California

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Arthur L. Stinchcombe

Emeritus Profesor of Sociology, Northwestern University

Art Stinchcombe is retired, and spends most of his time in a library carrel working on the sociology of federalism. He plans to be in his office every Thursday, from roughly 9-5 except for coffee, perhaps lunch, colloquia usually 12:30-2 during term time. And he will erratically answer e-mail at other times when he is sick of what he is doing, and answer phone messages if he notices at 1(847)491 5536, or at home evenings about 7-10 1(847)491 9186.

Dissertation: Social Sources of Rebellion in a High School

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-10 10:10:02

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Kenneth N. Walker

Dissertation: Comparative Analysis of Student Political Behavior in Colombia and Argentine

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1956

Robert Blauner

Emeritus Professor, UC, Berkeley

I returned to graduate sociology at Berkeley after five years working in factories where I had been a total failure at revolutionizing the working class. I say return because I spent one semester in 1951 in the department. Then I had absolutely no interest in sociology, because as a communist (Stalinist variety) I had all the answers already and I was in school only for a deferment to keep me out of the Korean War. Reinhard Bendix was not at all impressed with my term paper arguing that Soviet workers were not alienated because they owned the means of production. So that in early 1956 I was afraid that C grade would prevent my getting back into the department. I asked my friend Tom Shibutani if he could help, and maybe he did.

Shibutani had been my main M.A. advisor at Chicago for a 1950 thesis on the social psychology of personal names. But because of my years as a worker and a communist I was now more interested in industrial and social psychology. It was almost as if the new chair, Herbert Blumer, had built a department tailor-made to my needs, which was to make sense of my experiences, and to answer questions about the politics of the working class (Selig Perlman), the similarities and differences between socialism, communism, and capitalism (Schumpeter), why revolutionary parties and movements ossify (Michels), and the appeal, for someone like myself, of ideologies and utopias (Mannheim). Not only did I have great teachers like Kornhauser, Lipset, Selmick, and Bendix (whom I never dared ask if he remembered me), but we had a fantastic cohort, as other bio writers have attested to. My best pal was the late Bob Alford, who had worked at International Harvester with me: other recent local proletarians included machinist Lloyd Street and railroad switchman John Spier, and from Detroit's auto plants, Bill Friedland. At the Institute for Industrial Relations, where I TA?d for Marty Lipset, we had a chess rivalry that included fellow grad students Amitai Etzioni, Guenther Roth, Pat McGillivray.--perhaps the most erudite and knowledgeable of all of us -- and Fred Goldner; a few years later my friends in grad school became Bill and Dorothy Smith. (Dorothy's bio is available, but not Bill's, who after a series of teaching jobs, including one at the University of Pittsburgh, gave it all up to become a plumber before dying from cancer in 1986.)

The comradeship and solidarity in graduate school was unbelievable---I've not yet mentioned Harry Nishio, Ernest Landauer, Art Stinchcombe, Gayle Ness, Walt Phillips, my good friend Ken Walker, and dozens of others I learned from-- in fact it was so good that I wasn't prepared for what I would meet when I began teaching. First at S. F. State, then at Chicago, finally at UCB, my fellow assistant professors were almost the opposite of my grad school peers: closed off, ultra-competitive, or perhaps just afraid that you'd steal their ideas.

My dissertation on factory workers was informed by my industrial experiences, but didn't draw directly on them. But Alienation and Freedom made my career. It got me a job at Chicago which permitted me to be hired back at UCB---the first Ph.D. to return since Ken Bock. It also got me tenure at Berkeley. I am indebted to Selznick, who made me rewrite a draft on the sociology of industries into a more theoretical version.

During the year that I did my M.A. at Chicago Blumer had been like a father figure for me. Though mostly from a distance as I sat in his seminars and marveled at everything about the man. That 15 years later the secretaries at Berkeley would be mixing up our mail is something I never would have dreamed of. It was great to see the Blumer renaissance in the 1960s, for after a period when he had been marginalized, the New Left grad students took to his theories and he gained a new following. But it was too late for Shibutani, who like Blumer himself, was not really respected by the very political and industrial sociologists who were my mentors, and who had been -- most unfairly in my view -- denied tenure.

Sometimes I've regretted that I only stayed one year at S.F. State, because I loved San Francisco, and also, in large part because of pressure from my second wife who hated Chicago, I left my alma mater after only one year. Another regret is that I flitted around in terms of research and writing, from workers to the sociology of death to Black-white relations. Each time I changed fields I had to learn a whole new literature. I would have had a less "disorderly career" (Wilensky) had I just stayed in the area of work, and then as I got inspired by the civil rights movement, studied race relations in the context of the factory.

Had I stayed in Chicago, where the department and the city was much more conservative than Berkeley, it's quite likely that neither my sociological writing nor my personal politics, would have become as radical as they did in the late 60s. I would probably have stayed in Freudian psychoanalysis rather than going through those four years of primal therapy in the '70s, an experience that was life transforming. It led to four years of no writing or research, followed by the decision to work on experiential projects (like Black Lives, White Lives) rather than theoretical ones. And it was the motivation for a change in my teaching style from the lecture format to discussion and an emphasis on personal experience. I am proud of the fact that I was one of the first to offer a course on men's lives, which I taught from 1975 through 1995.

Retiring in 1993 was my best career move ever. Even though teaching got easier over the years, it was never natural for me in the way writing is. As a retiree at UCB you get a cheap parking permit and all the time you want to write. Like Bennett Berger, my writing is 90% non-sociological these days and 90% unpublished. Exceptions are a collection of essays on race (Still the Big News, Temple 2002) and an anthology of men 's writing on the death and lives of mother (Our Mothers' Spirits, Harper Perennial, 1995). I'm quite excited about my current project, a memoir of growing up in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s that is part social history, part family history and coming of age story, with a lot of baseball (the Chicago Cubs) thrown in.

Dissertation: Alienation in Work: The Diversity of Industrial Environment

Biography submitted on: 2003-05-05 18:25:56

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Paul M. Blumberg

Emeritus-Sociology-CUNY-Queens

Dissertation: Workers' Management in Comparative Analysis

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Sethard Fisher

Emeritus Professor, UC, Santa Barbara

Dissertation: Social Organization in a Correctional Residence

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William H. Friedland

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UC, Santa Cruz.

Three factors shaped my history: family, 14 years of political and union activism, and Berkeley: family provided fundamental direction; activism provided an understanding and grounding in organization, politics, people, stratification, social analysis, especially Marxism; Berkeley gave me social science discipline.

Initially I followed a standard academic trajectory -- African studies and appointment at Cornell -- until the upsurge of the mid-1960s reactivated me. This led to a search for ways to survive within the university while engaging in social change teaching and research. I began at Cornell but found less academic bureaucracy and a willingness to experiment at UC Santa Cruz where I became the founding chair of Community Studies, an undergraduate department training students for activism by preparing them for six months fulltime field study followed by a senior thesis. Since 1969, teaching in Community Studies provided fine usage of my sociological and anthropological training geared at social change.

Activist research was more problematic. Agricultural interests brought me to research the UC's role in agricultural mechanization. This culminated in a decades long suit against the UC (we won, but lost on appeal). Bumping into rural sociologists in the late 1970s after finding zero interest in agriculture in the ASA, I found a supportive milieu. Mostly what I've tried with my rural sociology colleagues is convince them that gemeinschaft and rurality no longer exist in agriculture; modern agriculture consists of many discrete industrial systems. While it has been somewhat of an uphill struggle, it has had its rewards and satisfactions.

Dissertation: Institutional Change: A Study of Trade Union Development in Tanganyika

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-06 22:33:43

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Toyomasa Fuse

Professor Emeritus, University of York, Toronto

Dissertation: A Sociological Analysis of Neo-Ortodoxy in American Protestantism: A Study in the Sociology of Religion

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Warren O. Hagstrom

Sociology-Wisconsin-Madison

Dissertation: Social Control in Modern Science

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Stanford M. Lyman

Stanford M. Lyman has passed away.

I entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1951, three months after graduating from George Washington High School in San Francisco. I remained in Berkeley until 1960, obtaining a BA (sociology and social institutions, 1955); MA (political science, 1957); Ph.D.(sociology and social institutions, 1961), and serving as lecturer in the Department of Speech from 1955-1960. During my undergraduate years I switched to sociology as my major after doing a year as an economics major and finding that subject boring. My courses with Blumer, Bendix, Selznick, Kornhauser, Lipset, Shibutani, Grana, and Bock provided me with a broad and deep knowledge of the discipline and its several contending schools of thought. I was especially attracted to the historical sociology that was being espoused by Kenneth Bock. He would serve as my graduate adviser, outside man on my MA thesis, and chairman of the oral examinations committee for my Ph.D. Thinking of my self as a "political sociologist", I decided to take my MA in political science. With the blessings of the sociology department, and with the assurance that I would return to sociology for my doctoral studies, I went across the hall of "Old South" and studied with Ernst B. Haas, Paul Seabury, Sheldon Wolin, and other political scientists. My MA thesis, "The Impact of Germany on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization" was chaired by Professors Haas, Seabury, and Bock. (Thirty-eight years later, It was published as Germany And Nato: A Study In The Sociology Of Supranational Relations, [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995] and awarded "honorable mention" in the "distinguished book award" competition conducted annually by the Mid-South Sociological Association). I returned to the sociology department and, with the supervision of Kingsley Davis, Franz Schurmann, and Edward A.N. Barnhart, completed my doctoral dissertation, The Structure Of Chinese Society In Nineteenth-Century America, in 1961. (Twenty-five years later, it was published as Chinatown And Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, And Community Among Chinese And Japanese Immigrants In America, [Millwood, NY.: Associated Faculty Press, Inc., 1986).

Since the completion of my doctoral studies my career has been peripatetic. I taught in the department of anthropology and sociology of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, from 1960-63; directed the Liberal Arts Extension Division of The University of California, Berkeley, 1963-4; founded and chaired the sociology department of Sonoma State College [now University], 1964-68; served as vice-chairman of the department of sociology, University of Nevada, Reno, 1968-70; joined and taught in the sociology department, University of California, San Diego, 1970-2; accepted the invitation to become Professor of sociology and, later, of Asian Studies, and department chair, Graduate Faculty of Social Science, New School for Social Research, New York City, 1972-85; and was named Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and Professor of Social Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, 1985-present. I have also served as Senior Member, Linacre College, Oxford University, 1976; Fulbright Lecturer, Ryukoku Daigakuen and Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, 1981; Visiting Foreign Expert, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Peoples Republic of China, 1986; Co-director International Colloquium on Social Structure and Social Stratification, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 1986-present. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, I have lectured in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa. I presented papers at two of the World Congresses of Sociology in Mexico City and Montreal.

My published researches include 25 books and about 100 articles in refereed journals, educational reports, essays and book chapters. I have received four Distinguished Book Awards and two Honorable Mentions from the Mid-South Sociological Association, the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and recognition awards from the Chinese Historical Society of the United States, The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, The Japanese American Citizens League, and the American Association for Ethnic Studies. I am one of the founders of the Section on Asian/Asian American sociology of the American Sociological Association. I have served as President of the Mid-South Sociological Association.

I believe the comprehensive education that I received at Berkeley provided the groundings and the bases for the development of my career in the discipline. For this I shall be always grateful.

Stanford Lyman died of pancreatic and liver cancer on March 10, 2003.



TRIBUTES TO STANFORD LYMAN



From Armand Mauss ? An Anecdote of Inspiration

I will always remember Stan with gratitude for serving as the catalyst for my very first publication. At the annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association in 1965, I presented a paper in a session where Stan was present. Afterward, he undertook to offer me some criticisms. As a complete rookie, I immediately became defensive in the belief that he was trying to shoot me down. However, in response to my defensive reaction, he softly replied, "Hey - I think it's a publishable paper already - I'm just suggesting some improvements!" Stunned, I recovered long enough to ask how one would go about getting a paper published. He pointed to the then-editor of the Pacific Sociological Review across the room (now Sociological Perspectives) and said, "There's the editor of the PSR over there. Go and ask him". I did so, and "the rest is history." I went on to publish four score papers or more, plus three books. Stan started it all off for me. Without him, I might have stayed with my junior college job indefinitely and never published anything. I had no idea that publication was possible for ordinary mortals like me! Thank you Stan, wherever you are : "May flights of angels bear thee to thy rest!".



From Ivan Light ? Nomination Letter for the Distinguished Career Award in International Migration

1-15-03

Roger Waldinger, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Dear Roger,

This letter nominates Stanford Morris Lyman for the IM Distinguished Career Award. Technically, it is not needed because Lyman was nominated last year. Therefore, he is automatically renominated in a successive year. In fact, Lyman was our number two candidate last year whom we passed over in part because, at 67, he is younger than Milton Gordon, last year's award winner. Nonetheless, aware that documents are often lost from one year to the next, I have taken the liberty of recompiling Lyman's record for nomination.

My compilation focuses only upon publications that deal with Asians in America. These publications constitute the core of Lyman's contribution to the sociology of international migration. The attachment ("Lyman.S") lists Lyman's publications on the topic of Asian Americans. The earliest is dated 1961; the most recent 1997. The list contains his seminal doctoral dissertation, nine books, and one article. I have listed the chapters in four books separately as articles in order to display their Asian American content. These chapters were originally published as articles in refereed journals; but they were subsequently combined in edited books to facilitate access. There is really only one article that was never published in book form.

The chronology shows that Lyman's interest in Asian Americans has been continuous throughout his professional life. True, in the last 20 years, many others have shared this interest. Prior to that, however, Lyman was the first sociologist who undertook serious historical and theoretical scholarship on this topic. Of course, he had able forebears. Frank Miyamoto's Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (1939) was a great community study that made sociological sense of the Japanese community, probably for the first time. The accomplishment was the more memorable in view of the war clouds that were then gathering. Rose Hum Lee deserves credit for providing a historical account of Chinese in America. But Lee's main publication, The Chinese in the United States of America, was principally interested in bringing Chinese American contributions to American history to the attention of Americans of Chinese descent. Paul Siu's superb 1953 dissertation on the Chinese laundryman brought this then common American icon under the theoretical umbrella of Chicago School sociology. That was a splendid contribution, but Siu's ambitions were limited. In contrast. Lyman's massive 1961 dissertation, much later published in book form as Chinatown and Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, and COmmunity among Chinese and Japanese Immigrants to America (1986)analyzed the social organization of nineteenth century Chinese and Japanese communities in the USA in a work of prodigious, comparative scholarship. Drawing on Park, Weber, and Simmel, this scholarship put the comparative historical experience of Chinese and Japanese Americans on the serious research agenda of American sociology in a way that previous efforts, very meritorious in themselves, had not accomplished. It is no exaggeration to observe that Stanford Lyman was the father of Asian American studies, but that statement does not do justice to his contribution to the field of international migration. It is not simply that Lyman's work opened up the unexplored history of Chinese and Japanese in the United States for research and scholarly analysis; Lyman framed this historical experience in terms that improved the general level of scholarship on immigration. His interest in structures of community opened the way for subsequent inquiries into non-Asian immigrant communities. The strategic role of what current Mexican American research now calls "home town associations" was first fully explicated in Lyman's 1961 dissertation on Chinese and Japanese.

Because he was such an early pioneer of Asian American research, Lyman confronted a professional sociology that did not then understand the importance of his historical and theoretical contribution. Now we do; then we did not. It is easy now to study and research that subject; then it was not easy. Moreover, that we now understand the importance of Asian American immigration owes much to the shoulders of Stanford Lyman onto which later sociologists climbed for a better view. It is, of course, true that the immigration of Asians to the USA since 1970 has increased the visibility and salience of Asians in American society, thus increasing the significance of their history. Without that real and current immigration of Asians, Lyman's comparative studies of nineteenth century Chinese and Japanese communities would have less practical significance now than in fact they do. On the other hand, thanks to Lyman, when Asian immigration resumed after 1970, and sociological interest accelerated, sociology had a superb understanding of the early history of the Chinese and Japanese in America. This strong base permitted research to proceed apace in response to renewed interest. For many years Lyman's work was the arcane source, known to the cognoscenti, from which departed what we now identify as classic research into Asian American society.

One should recall that in 1961 when Lyman's career began, there were few persons of Chinese or Japanese descent who were professional sociologists. Now there are many; then there were few. Lyman was, however, neither a tourist nor a curiosity seeker. Although a non-Asian, Lyman actually began his research into Asian American history and sociology as a student in San Francisco's Galileo High School, which is still Chinatown's public secondary school. Hanging around with Chinese and Japanese friends after school, Lyman acquired a knowledge of, interest in, and love for them and their communities. This basis sustained and animated his subsequent professional rendez-vous with their history. This human interest story offers a little vignette of American history that I happen to know as a result of conversations with Stanford Lyman, and I am glad that it can now be recorded in the official record as a small counter-weight to the otherwise lamentably common American practice of marginalizing Asian Americans.

When IM makes a distinguished career award, we evaluate the scholarly impact of the nominee's scholarly work. This is a job only scholars can do as they alone understand where the ideas came from that now bedeck and adorn the mentality of journalists and media pundits. John Maynard Keynes once remarked that crackpot ideas spouted by "madmen in authority" were originally deposited on the page by unknown scribblers. As scholars, it behooves us to note that scribblers sometimes have good ideas too. If we ask, where would the sociology of immigration be today without Asian American studies, we conclude appropriately that it would be depleted and inferior. In that sense, Lyman's seminal contribution to Asian American sociology has earned our gratitude as well as this official IM recognition, the distinguished career award.

Yours truly,

Ivan Light Professor of Sociology UCLA

Dissertation: The Structure of Chinese Society in 19th Century America

Biography submitted on: 2002-12-22 12:22:02

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Gianfranco Poggi

Professor of Sociology at University of Trento.
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia and European University Institute

I was born in Italy, in 1934, and educated there. In 1956, shortly after graduating in law at Padua, I became a graduate student in sociology at UCB. In 1957-58 I worked in Rome as an assistant on an American political science research project, returning to Berkeley the following year, and leaving after two years to work on my doctoral dissertation on Italian Catholic Action. I studied chiefly under Lipset, Bendix, Kornhauser, Lowenthal. I returned to Italy in 1961, and received my Berkeley PhD in 1963. In 1964 I joined the sociology dept. newly founded by Tom Burns at Edinburgh, and remained there 24 years (though during this time I also taught in the US, Canada, and Australia). In 1988 I joined the sociology faculty at the University of Virginia, which I left in 1965, returning to Italy in order to teach at the European University Institute (Florence). My current (and last!) post is at the University of Trento. My two main research and teaching fields are modern political institutions (I have published two books and several essays on the state and related subjects) and the ?classics? (I have published on Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel).

Dissertation: Italian Catholic Action: A Case Study of a Sponsored Organization

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-21 10:21:02

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John F. Scott

Dissertation: Prolegomenon to a Theory of Moral Learning

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David W. Swift

Sociology-University of Hawaii-Manoa

Dissertation: Latent Functions of Progressive Education

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1957

Charles G. Allyn

Dissertation: Manpower, Education, and Mobility in the Modern Society

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Ralph C. Beals

Dissertation: Bureaucratic Change in the Mexican Catholic Church, 1926-1950

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Robert L. Brannon

Psychology-CUNY Brooklyn-?

Dissertation: The Production of Care: The Hospital Industry and the Nursing Labor Process

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Orville A. Collver

Emeritus-SUNY Stonybrook

Dissertation: Birth Rates in Latin America: New Estimates of Historical Trends and Fluctuations

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Adnan B. Daoud

Emeritus Professor, San Jose State University

Dissertation: The Military as an Agent of Social Change in Underdeveloped Countries

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Joan P. Emerson

Dissertation: Social Functions of Humor in a Hospital Setting

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Amitai W. Etzioni

Professor and Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, George Washington University

When I arrived in the United States in January 1957 to study, I enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. It was a renowned department of sociology, whose stars at the time included several sparkling senior scholars -- S.M. Lipset, Reinhard Bendix, Philip Selznick, Kingsley Davis, Nathan Glazer, and Leo Leventhal. Herbert Blumer was ending his teaching years. Even several of the young professors had already acquired a name for themselves (including Erving Goffman, William Kornhauser, and Martin Trow). Visiting scholars added to the department?s luster (especially a seminar by Talcott Parsons). Even the students were a choice lot, including Robert Blauner, Fred Goldner, Juan Linz, David Matza, Guenther Roth, and Arthur Stinchcombe.

My first challenge was managing with the $300 total I had to my name, the maximum loan a relative could afford. I also had a sealed note from a professor at the Hebrew University, S.N. Eisenstat, introducing me to Berkeley professor, S.M. Lipset. I prayed it would deliver me a part-time job. I dutifully handed the letter to Lipset, who read it, grunted something I could not understand, and invited the next student into his office. I was sure my days at Berkeley were numbered. To stretch their number, I joined a co-op, which in exchange for my attention to massive piles of dirty dishes and other equally unattractive kitchen chores, provided room and board.

A few days later, I attended Lipset?s first class. At the end of the class he handed me a huge manuscript, some eleven hundred pages. He invited me to examine the work and drop by to discuss it. After struggling through the magnum opus for two long days and much of one night, I knocked on his door. Mindful of what my Israeli friends had said about American manners, I allowed that the book was ?indeed a fine one, a masterful work of sociology, a tour de force of political theory.? Lipset grinned: ?Come on, what do you really think?? I let loose a small barrage, as maybe only a young Israeli, right off the boat, could: ?Although the book has immense potential it is much too long and incredibly repetitious; at the same time, in places it is crying out for more documentation. Above all, the arguments need straightening out.? When I left the office I had a part-time job as Lipset?s research assistant. I helped Lipset some as he re-worked his manuscript together with another assistant, Juan Linz. The book that grew out of this manuscript, The Political Man, was published to great success. Its acknowledgment notes my role such as it was, but it does not mention that without it, I would not have been able to pay my way at Berkeley. Nor does it note that I learned at least as much from the exercise as I contributed to it.

Another major hurdle I faced was my poor command of English. The first book I was assigned was Samuelson?s thick introduction to economics. It took me well over half an hour to struggle through the first page, constantly consulting a dictionary. I was sure that soon I would be found out, unable to follow, and be sent packing. It took all my willpower to learn the peculiarities of this foreign tongue. My American friends were surprised at the great difficulties I had in learning English, and a bit annoyed when I kept asking them why words were spelled in one way and pronounced in another, until they recalled their experiences in acquiring French or German, let alone Hebrew.

Having secured my livelihood and mastered some of the secrets of English, I worked long hours at the Berkeley library on my PhD. I paid little mind to the Berkeley around me. I never got to the top of the Campanile, the tower in the middle of the campus, a leading tourist attraction, from which you can admire the striking San Francisco bay. I missed practically all the rallies that harbingered the Free Speech movement. I earned my PhD in 18 months (three semesters and two back-to-back summer sessions, to make for the required two academic years). I was able to complete my degree in record time, in part because I had brought with me piles of data on the organizational structure of Kibbutzim and in part because I worked longer, and maybe a bit harder, than many graduate students.

While some of my fellow students were involved in various counterculture experimentations, my main diversion for that year and a half were items that cost nothing. These included occasionally playing chess with other research assistants, or watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights at the home of a fellow student, Fred Goldner. But I could negotiate the library?s stacks blindfolded.

Our first son, Ethan, was born shortly before I was awarded my PhD. Hava and I lived on the wrong side of the tracks in a small room, in which Ethan?s hand-me-down baby carriage doubled as his bed. I could not wait to hold a full-time job. Academic life was dandy, but I had been a student for too long.

As I was completing my dissertation in the first months of 1958, Lipset was placing phone calls to help me land my first academic job. Columbia University was one of the places that showed some interest. None of the others universities that responded came close to Columbia in terms of their sociological standing.

Professor William J. Goode (whom everyone called Si), a highly respected sociologist of the family and stratification, (he later developed a sociological theory of his own), was doing the recruiting for Columbia. He asked me to write him a several page letter laying out my plans for the future, above all ?revealing? myself, so that he could ?get a feel for what you are like.? This request stuck in my craw; he might as well have asked me to disrobe. Aside from feeling awkward and believing that the request was not legitimate, I had brought with me from Israel a bit of an ?in-your-face? attitude. ?Hell,? I said to myself ?I am not going to talk about my inner self; this is none of his God damn business.? I continued to fume. ?Goode wants a tell-all letter? Here is what he is going to get: a detailed description of my research ideas, the grand and not so grand subjects I plan to study in the coming years. Period.? I wrote a letter about my plans to develop organizational sociology, which I discovered while working on my PhD did not really exist. There was industrial sociology, I explained, and studies of governmental bureaucracies, but no attempt to pull together the features of all or even most organizations. I guess I was about to become a true academic: making distinctions where none previously existed, arguing that there are significant tools in bettering our understanding, and so on. With the letter off, I waited.

Nothing happened; weeks ticked by and turned into long months. In those days, appointments were usually not made after mid-May. April was grinding to an end, and still there was no word from Columbia, which continued to be by far the most coveted job of those open to me. Lipset called and Goode explained in his inimitable style: ?I asked the guy to write something about himself; he sent me this piece of shit.? Well, Lipset took me by my lapel, sat me down, and insisted that I compose a long letter about my inner feelings. I hated every minute of it. It took me longer, and I had to toss out more drafts, than most anything I had written to date. But I did get my first academic job. The move to New York City was an easy one; we had little packing to do.

Adapted from My Brothers Keeper: A Memoir and Message, published by Rowman & Littlefield, May of 2003

Dissertation: The Organizational Structure of the Kibbutz

Biography submitted on: 2003-04-10 15:26:35

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Elizabeth D. Huttman

Emeritus Professor, CSU, Hayward

Dissertation: Stigma and Public Housing: A Comparison of British and American Policies and Experience

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Arthur S. Lipow

Dissertation: Study in Authoritarian Anti-Democratic Ideological Currents in 19th Century American Reform Movements

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David Nasatir

Applied Researcher and Visiting Professor at UC, Berkeley.

With hubris nourished by degrees from MIT, Stanford and a fellowship at the Merrill Palmer Institute for Human Development, I arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1957 with wife, child and not a clue about how we would support ourselves.

It took almost a decade for me to finish my Ph.D. I was having such a wonderful time as a graduate student. I taught in the department, was deeply immersed in research at the Survey Research Center (under the direction of Charlie Glock) and eventually became director of the International Data Library and Reference Service.

My involvement in the social science data archive movement and early consulting jobs eventually led to work with organizations as diverse as the Berkeley Board of Education, the United States Postal Service the Ford Foundation and the Government of Chile. My 1973 monograph for UNESCO, Data Archives for the Social Sciences helped establish the first international standards for this activity.

Applying perspectives and techniques learned from Herb Blumer, Marty Lipset, Hanan Selvin and Marty Trow involved me in efforts to assess the effects of such diverse policies and activities as school integration, the creation of a regional transportation system, college drinking policies, and the feasibility of transforming rice farmers to fish farmers. Trying to develop the resources, and demonstrate the potential of ?social impact analysis? using survey data has taken me to West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, Europe and back to Berkeley.

Dissertation: Social Sources of Academic Failure: A Contextual Analysis

Biography submitted on: 2002-10-07 10:07:02

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Harry K. Nishio

Harry K. Nishio has passed away.

Dissertation: Political Authority Structure and the Development of Entrepreneurship in Japan, 1603-1890

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Valerie K. Oppenheimer

Emerita-Sociology-UCLA

Dissertation: The Female Labor Force in the U.S.: Factors Governing Its Growth and Changing Composition

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Lloyd C. Street

Dissertation: Abusive Families

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1958

Jay J. Demerath

Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

I left Berkeley for Madison in 1962, following the lead of Warren Hagstrom and Bob Alford in previous cohorts. I finally finished my dissertation in 1964, and then, because Wisconsin had no sabbatical system and its salaries were low, its promotions were quick. By 1970, I was a Full Professor needing a break. I served two-years as Executive Officer of the ASA, with every intention of returning to UW, where I had been elected Chair. At the last moment, however I turned down this three-year administrative rotation in what had become one of the country's best departments to take the Chair at one its newest at UMass, Amherst. I have been here ever since. After serving two five-year stints as Chair in my first fifteen years, I gave up administration for full-time research and teaching. My teaching portfolio continues to include theory and culture, but my primary interest over the last twenty years has involved religion and politics, both at home (e.g. "A Bridging of Faiths," Princeton, 1992) and abroad ("Crossing the Gods," Rutgers, 2001). These are two of a dozen books on a vita that also includes a reasonable 40-year yield of papers and presentations, scholarly awards and fellowships, and association presidencies and other offices -- though the brass ring of an ASA Vice-Presidency proved too much of a reach. Finally, you ask of my self-estimate for posterity. Alas, posterity will probably little recall the author of a great Presidential address to the Ohio Valley Soc. Society whose survey showed that sociologists were inclined to feel that they themselves would be remembered quite well, thank you, but when asked to identify a long list of names, they drew a blank on most of these former Presidents of the American Sociological Society/Association [cf. F. Westie, Sociological Focus 5(4) 1972, 1-25]. For me, posterity is next semester. At this point, I am 66 years old and have begun to look deeply and suspiciously into the eyes of colleagues who say they don't want me to retire.

Dissertation: Social Class and American Protestantism

Biography submitted on: 2003-01-29 01:29:03

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James O. Haehn

Emeritus-Cal State-Chico

Dissertation: A Study of Trade Unionism Among State College Professors

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Carlos E. Kruytbosch

Former Director, Science & Engineering Personnel Group, National Science Foundation

Dissertation: Research Organization in the University: The Case of Non-Faculty Research Employees

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Robert M. Martinson

Robert M. Martinson passed away in 1980

Dissertation: Treatment Ideology and Correctonal Bureaucracy: A Study of Organizational Change

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Armand L. Mauss

Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Religious studies, Washington State University

I taught in the public schools and junior colleges of the California Bay Area 1957-67 while working toward Ph.D. Moved to Utah State University, Logan, UT, as Associate Professor of Sociology, 1967-69. Then I went to Washington State University 1969-99 and retired there as Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies. I had eight children with wife of 50+ years, Ruth, plus 21 grandchildren, and so far 3 great-grands. I am currently living in Irvine, CA, among some of these descendants.

My areas of specialization for research and teaching are deviant behavior, social problems, social movements, and the sociology of religion. I have been active and periodically an officer in several professional societies related to those special fields, but mainly the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Religious Research Association. I was editor, 1989 through 1992, of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and associate editor of several other journals. I was founding officer of the Mormon Social Science Association, 1976 and officer and president of the Mormon History Association (1,000 members), 1995-2000. I was also author or co-author of around 100 articles and reviews in various refereed journals, especially in JSSR; Sociological Analysis; Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; Social Problems; Journal of Alcohol Studies; ASR, and AJS. Author of four books : Social Problems as Social Movements (Lippincott, 1975); Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1984, with Lester E. Bush); The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (University of Illinois Press, 1994); and All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

My interests in graduate school focused mainly on the sociology of religion, survey research, and social movements, so naturally my chief mentors were Charles Glock and Neil Smelser. I redirected what I learned from Smelser more toward social constructionism and somewhat away from the functionalist tradition, and thus my 1975 book was a social constructionist "merger" of social problem theory with social movement theory. Underlying all of this was an abiding interest in the sociology of religion, with particular reference to the rise and evolution of new religious movements. Focusing particularly (though by no means entirely) on the Mormons was a natural product of my own background. Inspired by Charlie's work on religion and prejudice, I have tried, with some success, to use sociology as a vehicle for constructive change within the Mormon tradition.

Dissertation: Mormonism and Minorities

Biography submitted on: 2002-12-10 12:10:02

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Ingeborg B. Powell

Ingeborg B. Powell has passed away.

The late Ingeborg Powell, who became Inge Bell, was a graduate student in the department between 1958 and 1965, during which time she was active in CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). We do not know when or how she died. She wrote her dissertation on CORE and then published it as a book, ?CORE and the Strategy of Non-Violence? (1968). She later published ?This Book is Not Required? (1983) which pursued her vision of Buddhist Sociology, taking a critical look at undergraduate education. The following extract is taken from the preface, but you might want to turn straight to the last paragraph:



This is a book that invites you to look at your college education: what it could be, and what, alas, it often is. It is a book which suggests to you what you can make of this opportunity, given the resources at your disposal. If you want to become truly educated, you will have to educate yourself, and at times you will have to do it in spite of the academy. Perhaps this is good, because knowledge which comes too easily doesn't train one to be an independent thinker, and only an independent thinker is ever truly intelligent.

We will not look at these four years merely in terms of the formal world of classes and professors. We want to look at the larger experience: at your whole environment and your whole life during these four years, because some of the most important learning is always done outside the classroom.

I have tried to make this a survival manual for undergraduates: emotional survival and intellectual survival. I will even say that it speaks to the issues of spiritual survival, if by "spiritual" we mean the capacity to live in harmony with oneself and with the universe.

You will undoubtedly disagree with parts of this book. It is only one person's view. But if it connects with your life at any important point, I shall feel that it has served its purpose for you. I have tried to give you the broadest possible picture of your position as a student in the academic world and in the larger society of which you are a part. To do this, I have had to use a large brush, and I have undoubtedly made mistakes. But I have always considered this broad perspective more important than the fine attention to detail given by the academic specialists.

This is not an academic or scholarly work. It is a very critical look at academia by one who has been through it from freshman to full professor. Occasionally, I will suggest a book which I think you might like. But you will not find an ibid. or an op.cit. littering these pages.

In my years as a college teacher, I succeeded in what was ever the chief ambition of my career: to keep my students awake. Of course, there were always a comatose few who hadn't gotten to bed until four in the morning, or had mononucleosis, or where merely in love. But on the whole, I succeeded because I discovered that students always came awake when I laid aside academic sociology and talked to them about their lives as students -- about the academic institutions in which they labored, and the how and why of how those institutions functioned; about the competition and anxiety created by grades; about their ambitions and difficult choices of major and career; about the travail of those who came from minorit