The history of an urban squatter settlement in Bogota, Colombia, and the author's experiences with its residents in the last ten years are summarized. Topics covered include the unfriendly relationship between the government and squatter settlements; the history of the relationship between the government and this particular barrio; the demography…

The actuality of black kinship bonds and the sense of extended family are exemplifications of the sense of Africanity in black families.. (Author)

This bibliography on urban sociology cites studies which discuss the structures and processes of urban society from an historical and comparative perspective. Although it includes studies that discuss population growth, decline, size, and density, the prime concern of this bibliography is not with urban demography. After a brief look at some…

Advocates that the structure of American society be changed to reward support for integration, noting that although interracial schooling has advanced to the point where Southern public education is far more desegregated than Northern public education, interracial housing has declined, making school integration in urban areas impossible without…

The complex mosaic of cultural and racial heterogeneity in America throughout the twentieth century has given rise to various sociological perspectives to interpret the evolving interaction patterns and to give clues to the direction that policy decisions should take. The major theoretical frames of reference have been assimilation and cultural…

This document is a commentary on a report by the Quebec Ministry of Education on the problem of educating the disadvantaged. One basic criticism of the report is that it is not enough to decry the failure of the schools and propose a strategy of compensatory education to solve the problem of disadvantagement. It is necessary to realize that the…

A comparison of the social structuring of birth and death in modern American society is proposed as a new area of study: cosmic status passage. The author compares the two events as cosmic, universal transformations. The similarities of the experiences are explored in six categories. First, the role of the birthing or dying individual is…

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FAMILY, SCHOOL, AND COMMUNITY AS INFLUENCES ON ACHIEVEMENT OF LOWER-CLASS NEGROES WERE STUDIED IN AN ALL-NEGRO SUBURB OF A LARGE NORTHERN CITY. THESE VARIABLES WERE EXAMINED WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF CURRENT HYPOTHESES OFFERED IN THE LITERATURE ON CULTURAL DISADVANTAGE. THE FOCUS OF THE STUDY WAS ON THREE RESEARCH AREAS--(1)…

Noting that societies are inherently elitist in their structuring, this paper argues that a greater understanding of society and the communication process can be gained by comprehending the nature of communication among the elite and from the elite to the nonelite. It attempts to provide a theoretical foundation for the investigation of elite…

Rural development literature yields three images of improved social well-being--economic technical growth, human-interpersonal growth, and environmental-quality protection. While the economic growth dimension of rural development has received much attention, little is known about the structural conditions in the social organization or the kinds of…

Culture learning includes the study not only of the highest artistic expression of a people, but also of the everyday patterns of communication and behavior. Recent sociolinguistic studies take the view that social rules, rights, and duties are properties not of individuals but of interaction itself, and are constantly changing. This implies that…

The cardinal aim of this paper is to demonstrate interrelationships between patterns of social behavior and patterns of terminology. The author postulates that the terminology significantly symbolizes behavioral patterns and proceeds to examine the relationship of Russian kinship terminology and social structure in the context of a pre-industrial…

The Technical Committee for NC-90, sponsored by the Agricultural and Home Economics Experiment Stations of 13 states (Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) and in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has compiled a basebook which identifies…

The purpose of this study was to examine conjugal decision-making and decision-implementation in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan samples of low-income blacks and to explore variables which may be related to the observed decision-making structures. The nonmetropolitan sample was drawn from 2 rural villages and a small town in East Texas. The…

Two crucial processes are discussed: (1) that through which social problems become public issues; and (2) that through which conflicts between competing diagnoses of, and responses to, publicly recognized social problems are resolved. Regularities in these transformations are conceptualized as follows: groups differ in their definitions of social…