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12 - Germany – West and East
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 12 July 2019
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Summary
I must tell you from the start, that although I have had a long-standing interest in Germany, especially its language and its literature, I did not do a study there. By a wonderful coincidence, I was invited to be a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Institut für Bildungsforschung und Humanentwicklung (Institute for Educational Research and Human Development). My interest in Germany began with my favorite junior high school teacher, Miss Lillian Limbacher, who taught us German by teaching us how German grammar differed from English grammar. It continued on to Deep Springs, where Kurt Bergel had me translate Goethe and taught me the wonders of German literature, including that of his favorite poet, Rilke. It seemed a gift from heaven when the directors of the Institut invited me to be a member of its International Advisory Committee, with my way paid to Berlin for annual meetings every spring. In time, I learned that the heavenly gift was facilitated by the recommendation of a member of that board, Urie Bronfenbrenner, my former teacher, who recommended me as an advisor for sociology.
This appointment held huge advantages for me. For one thing, I was beginning to be involved in research in Poland, and the Germans offered me a way to get as far as Berlin, from which I could readily take subsidized trains from East Berlin to Warsaw (two socialist states with subsidized railway fares, second class, of course), thus making it more feasible for me to travel to Warsaw within my means – as I did for eight years, every spring. For another thing, West Germany was a center of sociological research, and I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to travel in West Germany and to lecture at many of the leading German universities – and thereby to learn of the research being done at those universities. For a third thing, I was fascinated by the split between West and East Germany, and became ever more interested as I learned how disinterested the West Germans were in learning anything much about what was happening in East Germany. And, most important, I was fascinated with German culture, German sociology, German food, all things German, and here was my golden opportunity to ingest them all.
Preface
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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In the course of a very long career as a sociologist, I have written or coauthored, with my collaborators, nine books in English and a multitude of articles about our research. I had thought when I published the last of these books, Adventures in Sociology: My Life as a Cross-National Scholar, a few months ago, that I could now at long last retire and catch up on reading new books and rereading old ones. But that was not to happen quite yet. As I thought about my professional life, it seemed to me that it had been given largely to the development of a theory about the relationship of social structure and personality. I thought I had done a reasonable job of presenting this theory in the memoir, but I concluded that I still had more to do to reach my goal of presenting a fully developed theory.
Adventures in Sociology had been different from all its predecessors in that it was a true memoir, the autobiography of a social scientist. I had tried to present my life and my work together, showing how my personal relationships and the institutions in which I worked influenced my work. I had also discussed at length my conflicts with my two prominent enemies, Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. I was very proud of presenting my life and my work in the same book.
I had also made an early decision that Adventures in Sociology would be a book written not only for my colleagues in sociology but also for a lay audience. I made a small but highly significant change of tense in my writing. In the original publications, I had used the present tense, i.e. American respondents (obviously, at the time of some particular study) value this or that characteristic for their children, while Italian parents (obviously, at the time of that study) value this or some other characteristic. In my memoir, all of this was changed into parents in some country at some time valued some characteristic, at other times valued this or some other characteristic. I did not assume that people's values never change.
8 - Poland under Communism
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 43-52
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One could say that my life as a cross-national sociologist began with my 14 months’ sabbatical in Norway, and one would not be far off. Or one could say that it began when I was Len Pearlin's sidekick on the subsequent Torino study. But I like to think that my truly becoming a cross-national scholar began one day in 1970, in Varna, Bulgaria, the day I first met those incredible Poles.
We were at a convention, my first, of the International Sociological Association (ISA). One session of the program especially appealed to me, a session with a title like “Social Stratification in Socialist Society.” It had been organized by the Soviet Sociological Society and I was extraordinarily eager to attend. What were the Soviets doing speculating about social stratification in their own society?
That session turned out to be a sparring match between Soviets and Poles, with Hungarians joining in support of the Poles and East Germans playing supporting roles in subservience to the Soviets – almost all of it in English, as if for my benefit. This was a time of imposed orthodoxy in Eastern Europe, and the head of the Soviet delegation, a commissar named M. N. Rutkevich, was an especially severe imposer. The Soviet line – I caricature it here, but only slightly – was “Yes, we do have some occupational differentiation in socialist societies, but not social stratification – that's impossible under socialism.” The Polish response, put forward by their leading Marxist scholar, Wlodzimierz Wesolowski, in essence was, “We've read our Marx too, but we have also done surveys, and our findings come out remarkably similar to those of the West Europeans and the Americans. In socialist Poland, we certainly do have social stratification, and our system of social stratification is not much different from that of capitalist societies.” This response infuriated Rutkevich and his followers. Their reaction seemed to spur Wesolowski and his compatriots to the energetic pursuit of what I later learned was the Poles’ favorite indoor game, baiting the Soviets.
Who are these incredible people? I had to find out. Under the constrained circumstances of the Varna Congress, the best that I could do was to move to where the Poles were sitting and exchange what Americans called “business cards” and Japanese more appropriately called “name cards.” These gestures were followed in later weeks and months by exchanges of books and reprints.
4 - Men Employed in Civilian Occupations in the United States
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 19-22
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The inspiration for this study came from the fourth paper in the series about Washington, with its speculations about why social class bore so striking a relationship with parental values – and with values and orientations more generally. The key, I speculated, was in the opportunities (or lack thereof) for exercising self-direction in one's work. When a recently hired colleague, Carmi Schooler, read my proposal to do this research, he came rushing into my office, shouting, “this is great stuff, we've got to test those ideas.” We joined forces. I had with a nearly complete lack of advance knowledge thus acquired a lifelong collaborator in Carmi Schooler. We planned a huge, expensive, but eminently worthwhile study.
The new study, in effect, was my collaborators’ and my reward for the success of our study in Washington, DC, and for Len's success in his study of Torino. Our small-scale, inexpensive studies had been eminently successful, and we were as a result given the resources for a national study of men employed in civilian occupations in the United States. It was to be a huge study of more than 3,000 men representative of all men in the contiguous United States employed in civilian occupations. We could with such a large sample generalize our findings to the entire country, a vast improvement over being able to speak only of the (atypical) Washington community.
I hasten to add that we would have much preferred an even larger study, one of both men and women employed in civilian occupations in the United States. But we settled for a study of men, for now, with every intention of adding women at some later stage when we had analyzed our sample of men. In retrospect, we might better have settled for a smaller sample of men and a comparable sample of women, but we did not have the foresight to see that newly invented statistics would soon make possible the efficient analysis of smaller samples. In any case, the large numbers proved invaluable for later detailed analyses.
We now experienced a gigantic change in our conditions of work. We shifted from a small-scale, local study, in which we employed “young people” as interviewers in the study of a local community, to contracting with a splendid nationwide research organization, the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, to do the fieldwork for us.
Contents
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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11 - Japan
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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For much of the time that we were working on the US–Polish comparative study, my collaborators and I were also working on a comparative study of Japan and the United States. It came about this way. A noted Japanese sociologist, Ken'ichi Tominaga, had decided that he would develop such a comparative study of Japan and the United States. He secured the funds to do so from Japanese sources, drew up preliminary plans, and arranged to travel to the United States to meet potential US collaborators. I was one of the Americans to whom he wrote. I gladly responded that my collaborators and I would welcome him and his colleagues.
Tominaga brought along two colleagues, one of whom, Atsushi Naoi, was to be the actual investigator. Tominaga wanted only to be the advisor to the study. The survey was to be geographically limited, to the Kanto plane, a fairly large area that included Tokyo. We would have preferred a national study, but we were willing to settle for this more limited geographic area, which was all that they could afford. In any case, the idea of being able to add a democratic Asian society to our comparison of a capitalist society and a socialist one was immensely appealing. We could take into account not only the formal organization of society but also an East–West dimension to the cultural differences already under consideration.
A considerable potential problem, which we fully recognized from our early challenges in Torino, was that the Japanese had no National Opinion Research Center, like NORC in Chicago, nor any institution, such as the Polish Academy of Sciences, staffed with experienced survey researchers, to actually carry out the surveys. Naoi was to carry out the study himself. He already had experience conducting first-rate surveys, though, so with some misgivings, we decided that we would gamble on his competence. The study was to be owned by the Japanese, but so were the US and Polish studies formally owned by their own people; the crucial factor was that we would cooperate in the analyses.
Here I had to admit, that although I was certainly prepared to participate in the analyses, the amount of time that I could devote to the study was limited by my commitment to the Polish study, my administrative duties as a lab chief, and my growing involvement in political activities.
18 - The Theory I Propose
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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I do not for a moment think that my collaborators and I have studied every type of country, under all conditions of life, and over time. But we have studied several very different countries, under radically different conditions: Capitalist and socialist; under conditions of social stability and of extreme change; representing American, European, and Asian cultures. We have interviewed rigorously selected samples of employed men in all these countries, some of them in longitudinal studies, and the wives of these men or representative samples of women in some of the countries. (It would take 10 or 20 times the number of countries to be able to claim that we have studied every possible combination of factors, but I propose that in a long career, I have studied a diverse set of countries, with conclusions on which I base the following hypotheses for further examination.) I would be the first to acknowledge that further studies of more countries or at later times would lead to some modification of my hypotheses. But here is as good a start as I can offer at this time.
Now I want to review the many studies I have conducted of social structure and personality, not from the perspective of how I had seen the studies as we had conducted them at the time, but from the perspective of how they now appear – what these studies have contributed to our full understanding of the relationships between social structure and personality.
In particular, I want to review each cross-national inconsistency that we have found, to see how that discovery added to the total picture of how crossnational inconsistencies make us rethink the relationship of social structure to personality. I also want to consider whether each discovery matters for only one aspect of personality, particularly distress, or for several or even all aspects of personality that we have been able to study. And I will always be concerned with whether the culture of the country is American or European or Asian.
Before we ran into even the first instance of a cross-national inconsistency, we had focused on the United States.
2 - Social Stratification and Parent–Child Relations in Washington, DC
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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My wife and I were now in Washington. We had a warm welcome from my new associates, mainly young sociologists – Manny Rosenberg, Len Pearlin, Erving Goffman, and others soon to arrive.
I knew what I wanted to do: A study of social stratification and family relationships. I was not thrilled at the idea of doing such a study in Washington, DC, because Washington was so atypical a city. But I had little choice in the matter, and Washington was not a bad place to begin such research. Our budget was limited. Basically, I could hire a few young people as my staff, and that was it. It was enough. The young people were wonderful – enthusiastic, quick to learn, and cooperative.
Numerous studies of social stratification and parent–child relationships appeared before ours, mainly by psychologists, all of them focused on particular parental practices – bottle-feeding or breastfeeding, and the frequency of using particular disciplinary practices when their children misbehaved. I had tried my damnedest to make sense of this literature and had given up in despair. My former teacher and close friend, Urie Bronfenbrenner, outdid me, though, and made eminently sensible descriptive sense of the entire body of literature. He arrayed the studies, not in sequence of their dates of publication, but of their dates of fieldwork, and discovered that there had been great changes over time in the practices that parents followed, from restrictive to permissive. Middle-class parents had led the way, always about several years ahead of working-class parents. I questioned Urie regarding his further interpretation, that the reason middle-class parents led the way was because of their greater education. I suggested, instead, that while their greater education led middleclass parents to be more likely to read the experts’ books, as we knew they did, they need not have followed the experts. That they did follow the experts was not, to my thinking, because they blindly followed expert advice, but because the experts gave them useful advice, consistent with their values.
What I did instead was to approach the entire issue from a vastly different perspective, the perspective of sociological theory.
13 - Poland and Ukraine in Transition to Capitalism and Democracy
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 75-82
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To return to my story of the Polish research, there was now really exciting news. We had been able to enlist the cooperation of our Ukrainian colleagues, Valeriy Khmelko and Vladimir Paniotto, to be our collaborators in a comparative study of the transition of Poland and Ukraine to capitalism and democracy.
I had long been interested in doing a study of the Soviet Union. I had even secured for myself the position of the US representative on the governing board of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), to negotiate on behalf of the United States with the representatives of the Soviet Union on matters sociological. All dealings with the Soviets then required a top-down bureaucratic arrangement. It had been great fun. I got to meet many Soviet officials, some of them splendid people, others anything but, and not to be trusted. In the course of my dealings with my Soviet counterparts, I tried to enlist the research collaboration of a noted Soviet sociologist, Vladimir Yadov, who previously had done excellent research, but he demurred. Yes, he was a member of the Communist Party. Yes, he was interested in joining me in a research project. But no, he would not be entrusted by the Soviet government with doing research on such delicate matters as the relationship of social structure and personality. He was entrusted, though, to be the Soviet codirector, with me as the American codirector, of a series of conferences of Soviet and US sociologists.
There was an old adage in Soviet life, that the further away you were located from Moscow, the more freedom you had to do research. Yadov knew two Ukrainian sociologists whom he thought top notch, and whom he thought would be interested in my project – Valeriy Khmelko and Vladimir Paniotto. He invited them to attend the next conference that we then were planning, and they of course readily agreed. (It was purely coincidental that my mother was born in Ukraine, and that I was personally interested in visiting that country.) My Polish collaborators were also intrigued with the possibility of our collaborating with Ukrainians. They knew a lot about research in nextdoor Ukraine, but the ties between the two countries were not strong, and my collaborators were immensely curious.
Index
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 117-124
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10 - The Vietnam War, Nixon, and Me
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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During all the time since I returned from Poland, I was concerned about the damned war in Vietnam, but there was very little I could do about it. Janet, however, soon found that she could devote herself intensively to antiwar efforts. She returned to her former employers, Vi and John Gunther, for whom she had once been secretary, but now as a full-fledged and experienced lawyer. They had just the job for her: She became the staff – the total staff – of a committee they set up to fight Mr. Nixon and his war. It was a Herculean task. She, of course, had no subpoena or any other powers to make any sort of inquiry other than to report what was already in the newspapers but not widely known, or known only to people associated with Capitol Hill or otherwise knowledgeable. She spent lots of time at the Congress, and became well acquainted with any number of knowledgeable people. And she used that knowledge advantageously. It was a very exciting life. But it was her life, not mine, except insofar as it imperiled my position as a government employee. But that was a risk that I was willing to take. I knew I could easily get another job.
Then one day, an extraordinary thing happened. I went to the immense National Institutes of Health (NIH) cafeteria, where, at a well-situated spot in the middle of the room, a well-known and much admired woman, one of the scientific stars of that institution, had set up a bridge table, and was busily soliciting signatures for a petition against the war. But she was not alone. She was being manhandled by a cigar-smoking NIH cop, who was trying to muscle her into closing shop. She resisted. I rushed in and intervened. He turned on me, and we were immediately in a scuffle, my one concern being that damned cigar, which he kept pushing closer to my eyes. But I was a pretty good boxer. My father, who had as a young man been a semiprofessional prize fighter, had bought me child-sized boxing gloves when I was a young kid. I had been beaten up by a gang of Irish kids on my way home from a Cub Scouts meeting at a local synagogue.
15 - My Two Exploratory Expeditions to China
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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I had for many years wanted to study China. It was in obvious contrast to Russia and the Russian empire. It was a fascinating culture. My wife, Janet, was even more eager to see China. She had always wanted to visit China, and she encouraged me enthusiastically whenever I mentioned the possibility of my going there. She also made it extremely evident that she desperately wanted to go with me. But she had an advanced case of Alzheimer's disease, and every expert we talked with warned us that the worst thing for Alzheimer's patients to experience was change. And how much change could there be but a different language, a different culture, a different everything? A trip to China was the worst thing that Janet could undertake.
Then came my golden opportunity to go to China. A very interesting international organization was planning an international convention in Shanghai. Great. I knew the organization and thought very well of it. I had gone to one of its earlier conventions, this one in France, where the organization paid my way to the most fascinating convention I had ever attended. This time, the organization didn't offer to pay my way, but it did encourage me to attend. Janet was ready to pack. We met with her psychiatrist, Dr. Goldberg, and explained my interests and Janet's. He smiled and said to me, “I needn't tell you all the many reasons why it is not advisable for you to take Janet to China. Change is not good for Alzheimer's patients. All I can assure you, is that if you decide to take her, despite my advice, I will do all I can to help you, but that is likely to be no more than to meet the medical evacuation plane on your return.” Janet smiled her most loving smile, and said to me with joy in her eyes, “Then we are going, aren't we?” I said, hesitantly, “Yes, we are.”
My first trip to China was the most extraordinary trip of my life. It was, to begin, of immense importance for my research, because a study of China was a gigantic departure from my previous research, even in Japan, Poland, and Ukraine, because the culture was so entirely different. I also had no inkling of how to find colleagues who could potentially become my collaborators.
6 - Life on Sabbatical Leave in Norway and at the National Institute of Mental Health
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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Norwegian sabbatical
I received, to my surprise, an invitation to come to Norway for 14 months as a visiting scholar at a private research foundation, the Institut für Bildungsforschung (Institute for Educational Research). The invitation was the handiwork of a visiting scholar at the NIMH, not then my particular friend, but a man destined to become my good friend, Yngvar Löchen. By great good chance, the timing was optimum. Carmi and I were in the midst of planning a further study, another huge study that we could not carry out ourselves, but once we had laid the plans we could turn over the actual survey to the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago (who in fact did a superb job). I could go to Poland, and after my very limited but very exciting experiences in Torino, I was eager to see Europe and the world. Fortunately, my administrative superiors were all in favor of introducing sabbaticals into the government's way of handling its scientists.
My wife's and my splendid year in Norway had several components, but I shall separate them in telling you about them.
The first was my research and my unintended effect on Norwegian research. Norwegian research was a derivative of the German tradition of extraordinarily independent research, a tradition that made no sense to me. Practitioners worked alone and could not consult with anyone, not even with statisticians. For example, in doing doctoral research, the candidate would apply for a stipend from a foundation (whose funds came from betting on soccer games). If he got the stipend, he did the research; if he didn't get the stipend, too bad. Along the way, he never could discuss his research with anyone. It was forbidden to consult even to that extent. When he finished, the oral exam was always held in a huge auditorium, attended by reporters from all seven Norwegian newspapers, for this was an important national event. The quality of the exam was connoted by the titles of the first two examiners: the first opponent and the second opponent. The outcome of the exam was dichotomous: Either there was a wild, drunken dinner, a great celebration, or the victim committed suicide.
5 - The Transformation of the Occupations Study into a Longitudinal Analysis
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 23-30
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Carmi Schooler's and my decision to do a follow-up of the occupations study of social stratification and personality resulted in a remarkable transformation of the research, as we knew it would, but we had little advance knowledge of what that transformation would entail. For one thing, it became a much more intensive study, for we were not merely selecting a new sample, but searching for, and trying to interview, the very same men we had interviewed years before, wherever in the United States they might now be living. That was not easy to do. Moreover, when they had initially been interviewed, many of them had thanked us for a very interesting experience. Ten years later, all they remembered was that it had taken (on the average) two and a half hours. Not only that, but we were trying also to interview their wives, if they were now married, and the child about whom we had inquired earlier, wherever that child might now be living. This was during the Vietnam War and funds were scarce, but our bosses, John Eberhart and Bob Cohen, were enthusiastic about the study, and they somehow secured the funds for us. Even the officials of the Nixon administration, whatever they thought of me and my politics, seemed supportive.
More important still, a revolution in statistical analysis was in process, as Karl G. Joreskog and his colleagues were inventing linear structural equations analysis, a brand-new form of analysis that permitted us to go far beyond the correlations between job conditions and personality, to assess the mutual effects of social structure on personality and of personality on position in the social structure that produced their combined effects. Carmi and I were very much aware of this in-process revolution and we tried to keep up with it; we even went back to school to update our knowledge of statistics – a major undertaking. And, ever eager to improve our research, we also had plans for adding to what we wanted to ask our respondents. But luck was again on our side. It worked out that we could do what needed to be done before the fieldwork was started, then we again turned the fieldwork over to the expert hands of the National Opinion Research Center, who carried it out in exemplary fashion.
1 - Hagerstown and Schizophrenia
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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I must begin this review of the research I conducted in Hagerstown with an explanation: Here is the story of a spectacularly successful research project conducted under preposterous circumstances. The details may be a bit sketchy (this is a report from decades ago), but the essentials are correct. The events are anything but ordinary. The research was carried out under very strange circumstances. I was hardly qualified to conduct this research. I ran into all sorts of difficulties. And yet the research was extraordinarily fruitful.
Scene: The annual meeting of a House of Representatives committee on drafting a budget for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), probably for Fiscal Year 1953. A member of the committee had the floor, and told the director of the NIMH about a recent, welcome experience. He was in Phoenix, Arizona, on a Saturday afternoon, had run out of worthwhile activities to pursue, and had stopped at the offices of a research field station in that city, not really expecting it to be open. But open it was, and brimming full of activity. The representative was duly impressed that federal employees were at work on a Saturday afternoon and commended the director of the NIMH, after which he invited a request for an increase in funds. The director of the NIMH, a psychiatrist named Robert Felix, a man with a well-deserved reputation for being fast on his feet, responded equivocally that he had shut down that field station. True, the personnel worked hard, but it was supposed to be a research unit, and it wasn't doing any research. He went on to say that he and his colleagues were opening a research field unit in Hagerstown, Maryland. They had recently hired an expert in population studies to conduct research there. Bob Felix won the day. His audience quickly forgot the sad fate of the federal employees in Phoenix, Arizona, and were eager to hear about the plans for Hagerstown, Maryland. What the reader is unlikely to know, but what was well known to the members of the House committee, was that years earlier, Hagerstown had been the place where renowned research had been done by a man named Antonio Ciocco, and the new research unit was certainly being planned to pick up the threads of his work.
14 - The Presidency of the American Sociological Association, Ronald Reagan, and My Job Switch
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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I interrupt my discussion of the research to highlight three essentials of my personal life that greatly affected my further career and my work: My presidency of the American Sociological Association (ASA), my experiences with the Ronald Reagan administration, and my concurrent move from the NIMH to Johns Hopkins University.
Presidency of the American Sociological Association
To say that I was eager to be president of the ASA would be the greatest possible understatement. A few years earlier, when I was defeated in my bid for the vice presidency, I was keenly disappointed. It turned out that this was a blessing in disguise, because it transformed me from being unknown to many members of the ASA, to becoming a viable candidate for the ASA presidency. In 1986, I was nominated for the presidency. I thought that members not very conversant with the ASA might have thought of me as a government bureaucrat and would have voted against me. I was a bit surprised when I won.
There were three components to my presidency.
The first, and by far the most important in my mind, was the presidential address. I had been a keen student of ASA presidential addresses for many years, and for the most part I had been disappointed. It seemed to me that most presidents had a mistaken notion about what the presidential address should entail. Some thought that this gave them the opportunity to demonstrate to their colleagues that they really were great social theorists. Whatever they had written before, this time they gave a theoretical address – and demonstrated that they didn't have the foggiest idea of what social theory was about. Others thought that they had been elected pope, and preached to their congregations what was wrong with sociology and what should be done. By and large, I believe that they only demonstrated that they had not understood what their colleagues had said in their speeches.
To my mind, only two of my colleagues had given really impressive presidential addresses. The first was by my ego-ideal, Robert K. Merton, in 1957, entitled “Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science.” The second was by my mentor, Robin Murphy Williams Jr., in 1958, entitled “Continuity and Change in Sociological Study.”
9 - Occupational Self-Direction and Distress in Poland
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
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- 30 April 2019, pp 53-58
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Summary
We had been developing the idea of occupational self-direction ever since the Torino study, then only with crude indices, but we later developed those indices considerably. In the study of men employed in civilian occupations in the United States, we developed a fully serviceable index of the substantive complexity of work and reasonably adequate indices of closeness of supervision and routinization. With these indices, we were able to demonstrate that statistically controlling these facets of occupational self-direction explained sizable portions of the relationships of social stratification with psychological functioning. With the advent of longitudinal analysis and of linear structural equations causal modeling, we were even able to show not only that occupational self-direction largely explained the effects of social stratification, and now also of social class, on psychological functioning, but that even in models that allowed for reciprocal effects of occupational self-direction on personality and of personality on occupational self-direction, occupational self-direction actually affected personality. In fact, these effects were even larger than we had previously found with more primitive methods. But we had not yet shown that any of this was true of countries other than the United States. And we did not really know what besides occupational self-direction mattered. Our finding of opposite relationships between class and stratification with distress for the United States and Poland raised the interesting question of what, besides occupational self-direction, explained the relationship between social structure and distress.
We had the opportunity to deal with both questions in the Polish study.
First of all, of course, we needed a good index of occupational selfdirection for Poland. We opted, essentially, for using much the same index as we had used in the United States. The issues of the meaning of terminology in the questions about values for children and about orientation to self and others that so concerned us in developing indices of those questions was not at issue here. We had used a much more direct procedure of asking descriptive questions about relatively clear-cut issues. Both the US and Polish indices of occupational self-direction fit their respective variance–covariance matrices well. The parameters of the models were quite similar in the two countries, with the substantive complexity of work by far the most powerful component of occupational self-direction.
16 - China in Transition to a Modern Economy
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 12 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2019, pp 93-104
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Summary
Weidong's and my study was about social structure and personality during the privatization of urban China. It was designed to test the generality of the findings and interpretation of the relationships between position in the social structure and personality that had initially been developed in the US studies, particularly the large-scale study of employed men conducted in 1964, and extended to the study of employed men in socialist Poland. This study was further extended to employed Japanese men, to the wives of the men in all three countries, and subsequently to the study of both men and women, whether or not employed, in both Poland and Ukraine during the early stages of their transition from socialism to nascent capitalism. All these studies consistently showed that position in the class structure and in the stratification hierarchy were closely linked to such fundamental dimensions of personality as intellectual flexibility, self-directedness of orientation, and, with the exception of socialist Poland, a sense of distress.
Moreover, the explanation of these relationships between social structure and personality was much the same at all the times and for all the nationalities studied. Position in the class structure and in the stratification hierarchy was highly correlated with job conditions that facilitate or constrain the exercise of self-direction in one's work – notably the substantive complexity of the work, how closely it is supervised, and how routinized it is. These job conditions, in turn, affect and are affected by intellectual flexibility, self-directedness of orientation, and, except for Poland when it was socialist, a sense of well-being or distress. That exception marked the one major cross-national difference between the capitalist United States and socialist Poland. Managers in the United States were among the least distressed among all social classes, while managers in Poland, particularly those who were not members of the Communist Party, were among the most distressed. And manual workers in the United States were the most distressed social class, but in Poland were the least distressed. The Polish–US differences appeared to be largely a function of differences in the conditions of job and life experienced by Polish and US managers, and by Polish and US manual workers. Herein, we thought, was a major clue as to the limits of our theory.
17 - Retirement, and My Last Sabbatical, at Deep Springs Junior College
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 12 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2019, pp 105-108
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Summary
I had returned to Hopkins to complete the analysis of the data provided by the China study, with plans ahead for writing a memoir that would include reports of all of my research. I had grown old, old enough that it was long past time for most people to retire. Any doubts I might have had about retiring were alleviated by an offer from the dean. She was strongly advocating the establishment of what she called “The Academy at Johns Hopkins,” an institution for emeritus faculty who wished to continue their association with the university. It was very appealing, as she painted it. We would have a small building in the middle of the campus, a greenhouse no less, and an intellectual life of our own, but with all the facilities of the university available to us. Implicit in the plan was that the members of the Academy would all have offices in the greenhouse, and we would share a lively intellectual life there. I readily agreed to retiring from my formal position as a full professor, giving up my named professorship, and moving to my new office in the Academy's greenhouse.
I knew, of course, that this office would not begin to accommodate my decades of accumulating books and papers. But that was readily dealt with. I tossed out several tons of papers that I felt certain no one would ever want to use. I gave several thousand books that I had acquired over the years to an organization that wanted them for use by African students and faculty members. I hired a building contractor to strengthen the foundation walls of my house in Washington, and to convert a pantry where I had earlier stored dishes and cooking apparatuses into a storeroom for three filing cabinets and several shelves for papers that I wanted to bring to my home (and office) in Washington. All this worked out well.
There was also a very nice gift from the dean. I was due for sabbatical leave, and I was particularly eager to take that leave to teach at Deep Springs – my gift to the institution where I had spent my first two years in college, and that I still dearly love and support.
3 - The Torino Study
- Melvin L. Kohn
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- Book:
- The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 12 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2019, pp 15-18
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Summary
The next study was carried out in Torino, Italy, by my friend and colleague at the NIMH Len Pearlin, at about the same time as the latter two of the four studies that we were conducting in Washington, DC. Len was eager to test the generality of my principal finding in Washington – that social stratification was closely related to parental valuation of self-direction or conformity to external authority – by studying the same phenomenon in a contrasting city. He chose Torino because it was a city of the same size, but of a different culture, with a more radical working-class tradition. I was tremendously excited by his proposal, and agreed to go along, in a secondary position, collaborating with him on the replication of what I had done in Washington and some important extensions thereof.
This study was important to me for three principal reasons. The first, of course, was that I was eager to see whether my findings were the result, one way or another, of Washington being so atypical a city, based as it is on employment in the national legislature and its attendant modes of employment. Turin provided a good test, for in Turin were located major businesses involving advanced technologies. A second reason was that it was our very first attempt at cross-national research, to test whether US findings were true as well for other cultures, and it was a very exciting beginning. The third reason why it was so important was that we learned so much from it.
An anecdote gives some sense of why our initial experience of cross-national research was so eye-opening to us. By sheer luck, we had inherited a wonderful group of bilingual interviewers trained by an American friend. At our first meeting, the ladies informed us that the study was an American import and didn't make any sense to Italians. I jumped in to ask for an explanation. One of the ladies gave me an example that even to my limited knowledge of Italian sounded awful. As it turned out, the Italian language, like many European languages, is really two languages in one: A formal, literary language spoken only by the elite, and a common language spoken by everyone else.