Editors' Introduction: Transitional Issue

Abstract

We have decided to list three editors for this issue to acknowledge its origins in a period of transition. The articles were actually selected by former editor Daniels and her deputy, Spector, who graciously agreed to maintain responsibility for all papers submitted before March, 1978, in order to let incoming editor Colvard finish a long-scheduled sabbatical leave. Papers they accepted pending required revisions will continue to appear at intervals in this journal, but formal responsibility for editoral decisions will become Colvard's beginning with our next issue: Vol 26, Number 2, December, 1978. The new deputy editor will be Rachel Kahn-Hut, whose logic has strengthened many of our manuscripts the past few years. In the next three years under the new editors, there will be gradual changes in the types of articles we will publish, but also considerable continuity with Social Problems' own origins in a social movement attempting to make U.S. sociology less scientistic and arcane, more scientific yet humane.* We will remain interested in essays as well as research reports, in practice as well as in theory, and open to interesting work in many styles on many topics. We will try to keep this a lively, readable, yet publication of value to many types of readers and writers. But we also plan to concentrate somewhat more on work that is international and critical, whatever its intellectual origins, disciplinary labels or political implications. A start in that direction, away from the paradoxical ethnocentrism of an American social science, is already signaled in the present issue, in Lu's paper on psychiatry in the People's Republic of China and Osako's on professional women in Japan. The membership of our sponsoring organization, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, has long been international and has often taken pride in efforts to keep the Society more in touch with its scientific and democratic ideals than is common in many other professional and scientific associations, in this nation and others. We feel that a gradual move toward becoming a more international and critical journal should support, not jeopardize, the scholarly and humane interests of the very diverse persons and groups now concerned with the publication of this journal. We will report more on this development in future editorials, and welcome our readers' reactions.