At the turn of the century racketeering reached scandalous proportions in the building and construction industry, which was highly competitive and operated by relatively small and mobile contractors. The unions found it necessary to give their business agents and other officials peremptory power so that grievances could be taken care of promptly while the work was in process, for once the work was completed and the contractor moved on, the workers might be left without their grievances adjusted. Since the industry was mobile the union also acted as the labor-recruiting agency, and thus in periods of labor scarcity the contractor was even more dependent on the union officials.
"Whether these four orientations--science, democracy, industrialization, and peace--taken together, properly portray the ends of true modernity and liberty constitutes a question that, for the purpose here, can remain open. I wish, however, to suggest these four concepts as a broad paradigm in terms of which some of the larger social issues, including the one for the present discussion, can profitably be conceived--to suggest, in other words, that a serious opposition in any two or more of these four thoughtways breeds a society that is less free, less open, less dynamic, less infinite and boundless than otherwise would be the case.
In a restless world in which the greatest number of people are classified as members of underdeveloped communities, and in which many of those same people have just recently gained their freedom from foreign overlordship, industrialization in the magic term employed to designate what is necessary both to economic improvement in standards of living and to the maintenance of hard-won national independence. This universal rebellion against both destitution and colonialism quite obviously necessitates foreign-policy responses by the great, industrially advanced nations.
Industrial sociology is a field of applied sociology, and has grown mainly out of interests in such issues as productivity, motivation, and unionization. In many cases, however, the theoretical relevance of the studies is evident, and often it is explicitly discussed by those who conducted the research. 'Overcoming Resistance to Change,' a frequently quoted study, is a case in point: while the problem studied is how to introduce frequent changes into the system of production in a pajama factory without reducing productivity, it is discussed from the point of view of its contributions to Kurt Lewin's field theory.
Marx was more confident than his reasoning gave him any right to be that the society to succeed capitalism would be a free one; and he did not understand that special political techniques would be required to protect freedom, even in an economy of abundance from which private property in the means of production had disappeared. But his expectation that post-revolutionary society would enlarge human freedom and dignity was not an idle one.
Mexican rural education has faced many problems, but none more formidable than the language diversity typical of much of the countryside. When Jose Vasconcelos established a system of rural schools in 1921, nearly 2 out of 14 million Mexicans knew no Spanish. They were monolinguals, speaking one of fifty or more Indian languages: Nahuatl, Maya, Trique, Mixtec, Otomi, Tarascan, Totonac, and others. Another 2 million spoke Spanish but were more at home in their native tongues. There were hundreds of local Indian dialects. The stronghold of the Indian tongues was in the southeast, from Tamaulipas south to the Pacific Ocean, west to Michoacan, and east to Guatemala, and in the peninsula of Yucatan.
Tribute to Alfred Weber, who died at ninety.
Review of book by Ernest W. Lefever. New York: Meridian. 1957. 197 pp.
Review of the book by Harvey Leibenstein.[Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California. New York: John Wiley. 1957. 295 pp.
Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought
Review of the book by Arthur A. Cohen. New York: Hillary House. 1957. 1110 pp.
Review of book by Karl Mannheim, ed. by J. S. Eros and W. A. C. Stewart. New York: Philosophical Library. 1958. 169 pp.
Review of book by Ruth Locke Roettinger with foreword by W. W. Pierson. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press. 1957. 252 pp.