Overcoming Barriers to Clinical Sociology

The search for bridges between theory and practice is related to such terms as sociatrist, institutional psychiatrist, societal technician, and clinical sociologist. The need to inject clinical sociological findings into the work of the public relations counselor, personnel director, management specialist, labor relations consultant, political manager, opinion analyst, and social worker is outlined. Special attention is given to (1) societal and especially middle-class professional cultural obstacles to the development of realistic clinical sociological research, theory, and practice; (2) disciplinary barriers against the clinical approach built into much sociology; and (3) historical trends that now appear to be favoring the formal emergence and recognition of clinical sociology

Nonviolent Agencies in the Northern Ireland Struggle: 1968-1979

The Northern Ireland struggle has enlisted or given birth to a great many social welfare organizations allegedly dedicated to the nonviolent solution of the area’s problems. These consist principally of three types: (1) agencies of religious denominations or groups of denominations, (2) voluntary social work, demonstration, and protest societies, and (3) political actionist bodies. Those of the first two types face the pitfalls of the ready middleclass recourse to conscience-soothing rituals and to compromise at the expense of lowerclass and ethnic outgroup interests. Those of the third type include ones that are effective, but some tend to fall into lowerclass dependence in frustration upon violence, a counterproductive procedure. The first two types apply “band-aids” to painful symptoms or create a kind of social anesthesia. Despite noble intent, they both leave the exploitative social structure intact. At this time, only such cross-class organizations as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, the Association for Legal Justice, and Amnesty International appear to have made substantial nonviolent contributions to the movement of Northern Ireland toward a just settlement of differences, a settlement that is still far in the future

What Kind of Sociology is Useful to Social Workers?

Both social workers and sociologists have been trying desperately for more than a century to live down their miscellaneous ancestry. Both are still embarrassed that their disciplines are rooted historically in the work of oldtime clergy, police, utopian philosophers, sentimentalists, reactionary manipulators, and radical thinkers and agitators. Nevertheless it was from those men\u27s and women\u27s concerns, their perceptions of social problems, their efforts at social amelioration and reform or revolution, and their inter-cult conflicts that the two corps of modern professionals sprang

Lifetimes in Humanist Sociology

Elizabeth Briant Lee and Alfred McClung Lee describe their family backgrounds, their dedication to humane values and their interest in alleviating social problems. The authors discuss the humanistic social science organizations they founded which were a reflection of their values

Michigan's Continuing Abolition of the Death Penalty and the Conceptual Components of Symbolic Legislation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68316/2/10.1177_096466399300200304.pd

Principles Of Sociology

359 hlm, 21 Cm