Some Observations on Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History”

For a number of years I have not had any time to undertake book reviews but I feel so keenly the importance and excitement of Mumford\u27s work, and my own personal debt to that work, that I wanted to contribute to this symposium even if I could not begin to do justice to the task. What follows are my only slightly modified notes made on reading selected chapters of the book-notes which I had hoped to have time to sift and revise for a review. I hope I can give some flavor of the book and of its author and invite readers into the corpus of Mumford’s work on their own

Listening to popular music

Unter dem Titel "Listening to popular music" erstmals im American Quarterly II, 1950, 359-371 abgedruckt. (DIPF/Orig.

Long-standing nonkin relationships of older adults in the Netherlands and the United States

The main research questions of this study were (1) How long have adults in the Netherlands and the United States known members of their nonkin networks? (2) What are the predictors of long-standing nonkin relationships? and (3) Which predictors are recognizable in both societies? The data came from the NESTOR-LSN survey (3,229 adults aged 55 to 89 years in the Netherlands) and from the Northern California Community Study (n = 1,050, with 225 respondents aged 55 to 91 years in the United States). In both countries, the duration of nonkin relationships was related to the absence of network-disturbing variables (e.g., the number of years since the last move), network-sustaining variables (e.g., distance to nonkin), and other network properties (e.g., homogeneity). Nationally based differences were also observed (e.g., having a car was related to stable relationships only in the United States, and the special integrative functions of exclusive friendships were elicited only in Europe)

The return of the fifties: Trends in college students' values between 1952 and 1984

Five identical surveys were carried out in 1952, 1968–1969, 1974, 1979, and 1984 among undergraduate men at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan to measure value trends. In most value domains the trends are U-shaped, showing that the trends from the fifties to the sixties and seventies have reversed, and attitudes in 1984 were either similar to the fifties or moving in that direction. The domains include traditional religion, career choice, faith in government and the military, advocacy of social constraints on deviant social groups, attitudes about free enterprise, government and economics, sexual morality, marijuana use, and personal moral obligations. Two attitude areas do not show a return of the fifties: (1) other-direction was high in 1952, then dropped to the sixties and did not rise; (2) the level of politicization rose greatly from 1952 to the sixties, then dropped again only slightly.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45659/1/11206_2005_Article_BF01106623.pd

Waste, Industry and Romantic Leisure: Veblen's Theory of Recognition

types: ArticleVeblen’s work contains a neglected, since for the most part implicit, theory of recognition centred on his concepts of waste and workmanship. This article tries to develop this theory in order to shed new light on the theorem of conspicuous leisure and consumption. The legitimacy of violence at the ‘predatory stage’ of culture has been partly superseded by a legitimacy of industrial efficiency, so that the leisure classes need to disguise their conspicuous waste as socially useful productive endeavours. At the same time waste remains a powerful symbol of legitimate status, so that even the industrial classes turn to it in order to assert their social worth and demand social recognition. Waste - which is far more central in Veblen’s theory than is emulation - becomes an ambiguous symbol which can stand for both unproductive privilege and industrial efficiency. The utilitarian urge for efficiency and the meaninglessness of a struggle for recognition through conspicuous waste produce a desire for a romantic escape, also acknowledged by Veblen, but often overlooked in his sharp criticism of consumerism