American Sociologist Quotes

The Bible makes clear a basic truth that we self-centered humans find difficult to accept, namely, that the natural universe was not created primarily for us. There is no doubt that God wants us to enjoy it and even use its resources to optimize a good life for ourselves. But the ultimate purpose of creation is worship. Nature and all living things were created to glorify God.

The fundamental ideas of colonization are a movement of population and an extension of political power; because it is allied to them both, colonization is therefore to be distinguished on the one hand from migration, and on the other from conquest in the broad sense.

Albert Galloway Keller

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

Peter L. Berger

The social action approach, assumes there is a disadvantaged (often oppressed) segment of the population that needs to be organized, perhaps in alliance with others, in order to pressure the power structure for increased resources or for treatment more in accordance with democracy or social justice.

Charles Zastrow

The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold taste in any particular way, nor to debase it.... It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mass production possible. Advertising helps to unify taste, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible.

Ernest van den Haag

When buffering, leveling, and forecasting do not protect their technical cores from environmental fluctuations, organizations under norms of rationality resort to rationing.

James D. Thompson

Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

Education doesn't have aims. It is the aim of other things.

Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals... they are expendable. Institutions... may be partly engineered, but they have also a natural dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

Philip Selznick

Because the activists usually cash out their holdings shortly after their demands are accepted or rejected, the question remains whether most of them are committed to companies' future success. The risk is significant that their initiatives can weaken a company's competitive position, to the detriment of long-term shareholders, and the high-leverage financing structures they often propose may put companies in jeopardy in the event of an economic downturn.

When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. They are liberties that most closely affect the lives of the people — power in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in the cultural life of nationalities, freedom of women in public and private life, and a tremendous development of education for adults and children.

Roger Nash Baldwin

There are accepted definitions of Americanism. There is none of Americanization. The reason is not hard to find. There is in America a national impulse called Americanization, which was understood as a war necessity before it had developed in time of peace. It acquired a generalization before it had become specific. It was subjected to organization and committed to the achievement of results before it was a branch of knowledge fairly evolved and reduced to practice.

If both new and true, it is not significant.

Robert K. Merton

Institutions are social structures that have attained a high degree of resilience. [They] are composed of cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life. Institutions are transmitted by various types of carriers, including symbolic systems, relational systems, routines, and artifacts. Institutions operate at different levels of jurisdiction, from the world system to localized interpersonal relationships. Institutions by definition connote stability but are subject to change processes, both incremental and discontinuous.

William Richard Scott

No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them.

Leadership is the process of motivating, mobilizing, resourcing, and directing people to passionately and strategically pursue a vision from God that a group jointly embraces.

Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and no where else.

Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

A fact is not itself a phenomenon at all, but a proposition about one or more phenomena.

Talcott Parsons

A psychosocial study of child-rearing practices in a representative sample of parents living in the Detroit area. Old and new practices in child rearing are examined and interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial and bureaucratic families. The data suggest considerable differences in child-rearing techniques. The authors conclude that giving a child freedom to solve particular problems may eventually free him from excessive restraints and pressures. Appendices contain detailed tables, a discussion of statistical techniques, and an appraisal of religion and bureaucracy.

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

Organizations are (1) social entities that (2) are goal-directed, (3) are designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (4) are linked to the external environment.

Richard L. Daft

Social behavior is an exchange of goods, material goods but also non-material ones, such as the symbols of approval or prestige. Persons that give much to others try to get much from them, and persons that get much from others are under pressure to give much to them. This process of influence tends to work out at equilibrium to a balance in the exchanges

George C. Homans