Commonsense Meaning Research Articles

Is Mobility in the United States Still Alive? Tracking career opportunities and income growth

Longitudinal data are used to compute income and earnings mobility in the 1970s and 1980s. The various strengths and weakness of different perspectives on mobility are assessed, with the change in real income or earnings being chosen as the one that most closely resembles the common-sense meaning of progress or decline. Care is taken to choose the proper age ranges and to define quantiles on the basis of 10-year income or earnings. Based on the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, this paper finds the share of family income losers among prime-age adults rose from 21% in the 1970s to 33% in the 1980s. This jump is reflected in a corresponding jump in the share of male earners with declining earnings over the same time period. Female earners, however, worked 44% more in the 1980s than the 1970s and fewer were on declining earnings paths. In terms of sub-populations, lower income and less educated groups had larger increases of income and earnings losses.

The meaning of Hominidae

Traditional taxonomy of Hominoidea collides head on with the latest proposals of classification, grounded on molecular studies. Therefore, the common-sense meaning of “hominidae” does not fit some of the current technical meaning anymore. Besides, there is no consensus among molecular scholars about what genera should be placed into the Hominidae family. Some possible solution to this problem are examined in this article. It is eventually proposed a tentative classification of humans and great apes that, keeping the traditional Hominidae family (Simpson), might be accepted from the point of view of cladistic and molecular studies.

Representing the slum

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

The Nature of Historical Knowledge.

This work proposes a single to incorporate all aspects of history - events, evidence, interpretations, books and lectures, popular ideas and social effects - into one comprehensive whole. This study is grounded in the common-sense meaning of the word, structure It composes one paradigm encompassing the organization of history as a whole and the organization of each of its parts. Dr Stanford locates the problems of studying story, both philosophical and practical. He clarifies the issues and exemplifies the current thinking of both historians and philosophers.

Phantoms of the Studio

No matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice without theory. The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a theory, a disingenuous and naive one, but none the less a theory. Reading works of art is dependent-at some quickly reached level of observation-upon reading in general. This may seem obvious in a wider intellectual context, but it is noted here in respect of the resistance to such ideas in the art school ambience. But even in a wider context reading is taken so much for granted that its operations and effects are often presumed to be natural. Reading, however, presupposes a critical and complex theoretical discourse, even if it is a buried one. It is a discourse about language and meaning, about the relationship between language and the world, about meaning and people, their social organisation and relations in the world. It is tran,parent that language is not transparent, and since reading art works is so languagedependent, then this business of reading is not transparent either. Once again, to constituencies other than those of the art schools and general art milieu this may seem an obvious point to make, but the notion of an unmediated 'visual language' is still a widely canvassed one in the art world. There more than anywhere the shift to the world of the instincts which has gathered momentum from the time of Romanticism has become dogmatically entrenched. The notion of a distinctive 'visual language' is founded upon the realm of the instincts. This is a 'language', it is alleged, of unmediated instinctual access, which in turn assumes language itself to be transparent in the sense of it being merely a medium in which individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things. The notion of a 'visual language' is a kind of common sense still central to the dominant discourse in art schools. By a common sense discourse I mean any discourse which demands to be easily read and is therefore compelled to reproduce its most familiar assumptions and values. To challenge familiar assumptions and values by staying within them is impossible. The conception of the artist is at the centre of the Western humanist-empiricist-idealist interpretation of the world. Humanism proposes that 'man' is the origin and source of meaning, action and history. This is a weak position because it locates meaning in a single place. The notion of an unmediated 'visual language' is a typical piece of this common sense meaning fixing. Linked strongly to and interdependent with this notion of a 'visual language' is the notion of the artist as an ideologically unyoked, centred subject. The yearning for this state of freedom from ideology is itself a symptom of ideological alignment. The centred subject, like language itself, is also taken to be natural not linguistic, its ideological construction being thoroughly suppressed. In art school discourse, the notion of the centred subject is also a typical example of meaning fixing. But any attempt to fix meanings comes up against the act of reading itself. In the process of reading, meanings are not only fixed but are also released. Amongst the more general points being discussed here is the largely unrecognised coercion of meaning fixing in and behind teaching in art schools. This coercion is, ideologically, to be expected. It holds to a theory of much wider impact than its application in the domain of art teaching which is widely subscribed to in Europe and America in what in old academic terms is called the Humanities. This is the theory of expressive realism. Essentially, the theory is an amalgam of two concepts, one old, one new. The older one is the Aristotelian concept of art as mimesis which was one of the important engines of Renaissance art theory and practice. The newer one is the Romantic concept that the source from which art springs is 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and thus that art expresses the ethos, feelings and perceptions of a person 'possessed of more than usual organic sensibility'.1 This amalgam remains the staple ideology of art school discourse and teaching. The practice of reading, as conceived in the context of the theory of expressive realism, despite the inherent instability of its more sophisticated versions, is still dominated by the propositions which constitute the concept of the centred subject. These are:

The Assisted Places Scheme: An Ambiguous Case of Privatization

That was the view of Mark Carlisle, the Minister responsible for implementing the Assisted Places Scheme (interviewed by us, February 1982). Yet that Scheme, the Thatcher government's first major policy initiative in education, is now often seen as part of a broader process of privatizing the education sygtem.2 However, we have argued elsewhere that its genealogy did not lie in the market ideology of the 'New Right', and that it was primarily the resurrection of a 'scholarship ladder' to selective secondary education and therefore deliberately limited in scope.3 It is certainly not immediately obvious that a Scheme which uses public money to help a relatively small number of individuals to purchase places in schools which would otherwise be filled almost entirely by full feepayers is a privatization measure in the commonsense meaning of the term. But this may be to take rather too narrow a view of the nature of privatization, and of its relationship to other elements of Conservative ideology such as the fostering of parental choice. In this paper, we therefore explore the Assisted Places Scheme in terms of the various policy strands that might be considered as components in the privatising of educational provision. Heald has identified four major elements of privatization:4

The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.

The significance of social identities.

Common-sense meanings of the 'individual' and the 'social' are examined emphasizing the fallacy of viewing them as denoting separate entities given in nature. The concept of social representations is used to explain the construction of these categories in terms of the particular systems of values, ideas and practices of different societies. The concept of social identity marks the individual-social interface interpreted as the construction of individuals in relation to the social representations of significant groups in their society. The earliest constructions of a social identity are traced in the domain of gender because this is a ubiquitous feature of social life, involving the differentiation of only two groups; they are obligatory and use physical differences to provide the signifiers in a semiotic system of social representations. Empirical evidence is reviewed showing that the development of a social gender identity is a complex process and involves many aspects of children's activity slowly coming to be regulated by the particular social representation of gender dominant in their society.

Tradition, Genuine or Spurious

LIKE MANY SCHOLARLY CONCEPTS, is at once a commonsense and a scientific category. In its commonsense meaning, tradition refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs. In the social sciences, an ongoing discourse has attempted to refine this understanding of tradition as it has proven empirically and theoretically inadequate. Recent efforts to clarify the concept of tradition, most notably those of Edward Shils (1971, 1981), do much to add nuance to our conventional understanding but leave unresolved a major ambiguity: does tradition refer to a core of inherited culture traits whose continuity and boundedness are analogous to that of a natural object, or must tradition be understood as a wholly symbolic construction? We will argue that the latter is the only viable understanding-a conclusion we have arrived at by comparing our independent investigations in two quite disparate ethnographic situations. In our attempts to analyze national and ethnic identification in Quebec and Hawaii we have concluded that tradition cannot be defined in terms of boundedness, givenness, or essence. Rather, tradition refers to an interpretive process that embodies both continuity and discontinuity. As a scientific concept, tradition fails when those who use it are unable to detach it from the implications of Western common sense, which presumes that an unchanging core of ideas and customs is always handed down to us from the past. As many writers have noted (e.g., Eisenstadt 1973; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Singer 1972; Tipps 1973), one inadequacy of the conventional understanding of tradition is that it posits a false dichotomy between tradition and modernity as fixed and mutually exclusive states. M. E. Smith (1982) has pointed out that and are interpretive rather than descriptive terms: since all cultures change ceaselessly, there can only be what is new, although what is new can take on symbolic value as traditional. Following Smith's lead, we can see that designating any part of culture as old or new, traditional or modern, has two problematic implications. First, this approach encourages us to see culture and tradition naturalistically, as bounded entities made up of constituent parts that are themselves bounded objects. Second, in this atomistic paradigm we treat culture and its constituents as entities having an essence apart from our interpretation of them; we attempt to specify, for example, which trait is old, which new, and to show how traits fit

Attitude to religion reconsidered

A matter of definition A number of educators write confidently about 'the religious attitude', but there is no clear consensus what this attitude means. Thus Wilson says that 'it is hard but not impossible to distinguish a particular attitude, which it is fair to call 'religious', from other attitudes'. For him 'the notions of awe, worship, and reverence are perhaps particularly characteristic of the religious attitude. What Wilson appears to be searching for is a term which expresses the essence of religious experience, as distinct from the essence of aesthetic experience and he uses 'attitude' for both types of experience or forms of knowledge. In his defence of Roman Catholic education, Conway argues that religion is not something to be learned like the multiplication table. It 'involves a basic attitude to life which affects all one's other attitudes'2 and the Church school provides an atmosphere in which faith breathes into the air and the religious attitude is unconsciously absorbed by the children. For Conway 'the religious attitude to life' which should permeate the school is derived from Roman Catholic Christianity, but he is not explicitly clear as to what 'the religious attitude' means. Wilson and Conway are not in agreement about the nature of the religious attitude, but they both use 'attitude' with a commonsense meaning of 'posture or position',3 the general posture of reverence, the specific position of Roman Catholic commitment. Other writers seem to have moved away from the commonsense meaning and this movement may be seen in attempts to identify the attitudes promoted by the study of religion. In a discussion of the contribution made by Religious Education to the whole curriculum, Grimmitt states that the study of religion promotes the following attitudes:

Commitment: A Comment on Uses of the Concept

Sociologists of religion frequently utilize the concept of commitment in a manner that departs markedly from its treatment by social scientists in general. While its general sociological usage centers around the notions of focused lines of action and/or consistency, Charles Glock's essay (1962) on commitment equated it with religiosity and religious scholars have tended to adopt his usage of the concept. Treatment of the term by scholars both in and outside the area of religious studies is reviewed and contrasted. The methodological and theoretical implications of the basic departures are considered and specific suggestions for measuring commitment are offered. Usage of the term "commitment" within the area devoted to the scientific study of religion bears little resemblance to its general usage by sociologists. It will be argued that the lack of correspondence stems primarily from an allegiance to Charles Glock's (1962) original statement and from the tendency to ignore theoretical contributions outside of the religious context.1 Further, it will be contended that, consequently, empirical and theoretical progress in this area has been hindered; and that the real potential of religious commitment as a heuristic concept has as yet been unexplored. Let us first outline the scope of those discussions of commitment by persons not integrally involved in religion per se to cast some light on its present meaning and usage in areas other than religion. Howard Becker (1960: 32) expressed a concern similar to ours. There has been little formal analysis of the concept of commitment and little attempt to integrate it explicitly with current sociological theory. Instead, it has been treated as a primitive concept, introduced where the need is felt without exploration or examination of its character or credentials. As is often the case with unanalyzed concepts used in an ad hoc fashion, the term has been made to cover a wide range of common-sense meanings, with predictable ambiguities. Not only was Becker's statement rele-

Altruism and Sympathy: Their History in Philosophy and Some Implications for Psychology

In their attempt to give rational foundations to the commonsense belief that one ought to help other people, philosophers have resorted to a wide range of theories making such diverse factors as self‐realization, pleasure, or duty the motivators of helping behavior. Their theoretical explorations have led to rethinking the basic concepts of “self” and “other” as preparatory to answering the question of what principles ought to or might govern helping relations between people. Recent psychological investigations fall short in the area of theoretical articulation of basic concepts and rely too much on common sense meanings. Refinement of concepts can result from fuller attention to personality factors, personality theory, and the many different social contexts of helping.

Graphical Statistics and Common-Sense Applications

Analogs in statistics and mechanics can give the engineer a commonsense meaning of arithmetic means, standard deviations, and lines of mutual regression by least squares. Even so, numbers often have less vivid impact than graphs in the interpretation and projection of data which vary. Examples show how data can be analyzed graphically using medians and quartile deviations as measures of averages and variations. Such graphical methods lead to inferences equally valid and usually more meaningful than corresponding numbers arrived at by the method of least squares. A scale of probable deviations is presented in terms of percentage frequency and quartile deviations which, for normal distributions, leads graphically to the same probability estimates as those derived numerically by least squares, less abstractly and in less time. A list of papers on probability and statistics as indexed in Transactions, ASCE from 1901 through 1950 is appended.

Measurement of Emotions in Different Groups

One of the prerequisites for the continuation of a society is that people can communicate with each other in an adequate way. This is mainly done by using the written or spoken word. By means of words we pass on thoughts, ideas, reactions and feelings. What interests us here is what may be called verbal communication. In everyday verbal communication people often presuppose that every word used by them has the same meaning to those they address as to themselves. As a rule this presupposition is probably unconscious, but it may also be conscious. The way we see it this presupposition is often erroneous. Two individuals may mean entirely different things by the same word. We will not discuss the meaning of meaning here; the common-sense meaning of meaning is enough for us. But we want to make a distinction between the two kinds of meaning a word, a verbal symbol, may have. It makes sense to talk of the descriptive meaning of a word and the emotive meaning of a word. One word may have the same descriptive meaning to two individuals but at the same time a different emotive meaning just as it may have a different descriptive meaning but the same emotive meaning. We will here chiefly discuss the emotive meaning. Our basic assumption is that if a word has a different emotive or descriptive meaning to two individuals, the two individuals do not belong to the same group or they used to belong to different groups. We then say that these two individuals do not live in the same symbol environment, i.e. the word is not attached to the same object for the two individuals. It is not associated with similar behaviotir and it is not associated with similar feeling. From this it follows that the situation or situations in which a word has been learned are of prime importance for the individual's linguistic usage. These ideas are mainly taken from Torgny T. Segerstedt.1) It is not absolutely necessary that a word with emotive meaning is consciously associated with a certain object, behaviour or readiness for action. That is to say, its emotive meaning need not be dependent, it may be independent; the word is solely emotional. The chief task of the word, from a sociological point of view, is to create a feeling to strengthen or keep the cohesion within the group.

Some Social Functions of Kutchin Anxiety1

A NXIETY may be defined as a generalized rise in tension or, to paraphrase H. S. Sullivan, a drop in euphoria, in anticipation of pain or deprivation. The anticipatory aspect of and its diffuse nature are central both to the ordinary common-sense meaning of the term (Homans 1941:164n) and its clinical usage (e.g., Freud 1936:112n). Goldstein (1939), Sullivan (1946, 1948) and Cameron (1947), among other psychologists, distinguish from fear by the diffuse nature of the former; their definitions all stress the vagueness of cognitive structure as one of the central factors in anxiety, a factor directly-if not ultimately-responsible for the helplessness which is an integral part of any experience of strong anxiety (Hanfmann 1950 64). Students of society have seen as a condition of disorganization wherein the individual requires the support or the discipline provided by social control; they have also found to be in itself a driving force for social control. Thus Malinowski's theory of magic explains magical ritual as a means for reducing arising from the inadequacy of realistic techniques for controlling the forces of nature (1935; 1948:12-14, 60; Homans 1941). Nativistic movements have been viewed as mechanisms for relieving resulting from drastic sociocultural change (Gillin 1942; Linton 1943; Hallowell 1945). On the other hand, from Kierkegaard-if not earlier-to the psychoanalysts it has been asserted that is a great teacher. Whiting (1941) has shown specifically how it plays a part in the enculturation process. Hallowell (1941) has indicated its social value in another context, where antisocial behavior is inhibited through techniques for intensifying anxiety. Hallowell's contributions to the study of both social aspects of are based upon researches among American Indian cultures of the northern Woodland area. The purpose of this paper is to indicate how, among another northern American Indian people, the Kutchin, may serve as a positive social force, enhancing group cohesion, even though it is not acted out in a shared ritual. At the same time, certain characteristics of Kutchin status relationships are noted which may operate centripetally in situations where, among peoples of very similar culture, entirely centrifugal tendencies have been described. A high level of free-floating has been observed among Indians of the American boreal forest. This has been seen as reaction to the threat of traumatic situations such as hunger or disease with which the cultures in question are unable adequately to cope (Landes 1937:88; Hallowell 1946:225).2 On the level of personality development, the generalized and disproportionate

HEARING LEVEL, HEARING LOSS, AND THRESHOLD SHIFT

<i>To the Editor</i>: The following excerpt from our recent paper in the<i>A. M. A. Archives of Industrial Health</i>entitled, "The Medical Principles of Monitoring Audiometry" (Davis, H.; Hoople, G., and Parrack, H. O.:<i>A. M. A. Arch. Indust. Health</i>17:1-20, 1958), speaks for itself. <i>"Hearing Level, Hearing Loss, and Threshold Shift</i>.—The familiar term 'hearing loss' includes three quite distinct concepts, and much confusion and many unnecessary arguments have occurred in court rooms, in committee rooms and in clinics because of this semantic monstrosity. These three concepts are (1) the otological meaning—<i>symptom</i>indicating an<i>abnormal condition</i>of hearing, (2) the audiological meaning: the<i>status of hearing</i>as measured by a reading in decibels on the hearing-loss dial of an audiometer, and (3) the common sense meaning—<i>a change for the worse</i>in the sensitivity of hearing. It has been particularly difficult in medicolegal situations to reconcile the second

Hearing Level, Hearing Loss, and Threshold Shift

To the Editor: following excerpt from our recent paper in theA. M. A. Archives of Industrial Healthentitled, The Medical Principles of Monitoring Audiometry (Davis, H.; Hoople, G., and Parrack, H. O.:A. M. A. Arch. Indust. Health17:1-20, 1958), speaks for itself. Level, Hearing Loss, and Threshold Shift.—The familiar term 'hearing loss' includes three quite distinct concepts, and much confusion and many unnecessary arguments have occurred in court rooms, in committee rooms and in clinics because of this semantic monstrosity. These three concepts are (1) the otological meaning—symptomindicating anabnormal conditionof hearing, (2) the audiological meaning: thestatus of hearingas measured by a reading in decibels on the hearing-loss dial of an audiometer, and (3) the common sense meaning—a change for the worsein the sensitivity of hearing. It has been particularly difficult in medicolegal situations to reconcile the second

American Political Parties as a Conservative Force

N CLASSICAL democratic theory political parties, when mentioned at all, were treated as one-way transmission belts between the electorate and those persons voted into office. The role of the parties was seen in extraordinarily passive terms. The parties were considered, at least ideally, to be essentially mechanisms through which the will of the citizenry could be canalized and turned into positive law. Today, in contrast to the view held half-a-century or more ago, parties are also viewed as social groups. To some extent, persons who identify themselves with parties share some common expectations, or values, or goals. As the Survey Research Center has shown, it is a ticklish business to pin down the exact ingredients of identification and to measure precisely the factors in voter motivation.' Yet enough insight has been gained so that it may be stated categorically that parties are social groups or, to put it differently, that they have lives of their own. They are to some degree an independent variable in the total political process. Foreign observers of the American political scene the names of Laski, Brogan, Siegfried, and Duverger come readily to mind have often commented upon the conservative nature of American politics. Without embarking on a safari into cultural anthropology, the thesis can be defended that the parties themselves are partly the cause of the conservatism so frequently noted in our political life. For purposes of the discussion, it is not necessary to give a technical definition of conservative; the term is used in its ordinary common-sense meaning, as will become apparent. It will also be assumed that there is general agreement on a few basic propositions, e.g., that the national parties are rather decentralized, that constitutional factors have strongly shaped the development of the parties, etc., so that there will be no need to quibble over the obvious. Each of the ways in which the parties are believed to contribute to conservatism is summarized below, and the evidence tending to substantiate the proposition is dealt with briefly. While the reader familiar with the literature on parties might have chosen different illustrations, it is hoped that those which are given are sufficiently representative to carry conviction.

On the Nature and Justification of Ideals

IN THE process of clarifying a concept already in general use, it is as unwise to neglect popular sense as it is to retain it unrefined. Beginning, then, with common-sense meanings as recorded in dictionaries, we learn that an is a standard of excellence, a goal, a purpose, or model; it is an imagined something acting in the capacity of a guide or norm. These everyday usages serve as rough delimitations of the area to which the term applies, but they lack the precision and indications of systematic relatedness which philosophic discourse demands. They leave us with the helpful but vague notion that in certain circumstances human beings entertain in imagination states of affairs thought of as superior in value and useful as guides or standards. If we follow the suggestion contained in these common usages, as I think we must if we are to retain contact with the experience within which our practical problems occur, we must say that the genus of ideal is idea. An is something held in imagination, an idea; but not all ideas are commonly called ideals. With what species of idea are we here concerned? An implication of the dictionary treatment quoted is that all ideas may be divided roughly into those which are more or less accurate reflections of experienced data and those which are in some respect novel. Ideals, as imagined states of affairs, belong to the latter group. An ideal, we may say, is an imaginal construct, i.e., an idea which is novel, in relation to actually experienced data, in degree of quality, in arrangement of elements, in extent of application, or in two or more of these respects. Usage cautions, however, that not all imaginal inventions are ideals. The evils depicted in fiction are not ideals; the invented aspects of a hypothesis about the unknown, e.g., the possible happenings of the next decade or the genes in biological theory, are not necessarily ideals. The hint is that an is only one sort of imaginal invention, namely, that which is of a valuable situation. This does not mean that an is a value but, rather, that it is a situation-in-idea which has value. But common usage reflected upon leads to a further distinction. Not even all valuable situations as constructed and held in idea are considered ideals. I might imagine a new teaching method which would seem valuable to me or a novel and valuable arrangement of articles on my desk without feeling impelled to call either ideal. An ideal, apparently, is an imagined construct of superior value; and the superiority asserted is with regard to something in experience which has fallen short in some manner and which has in its inadequacy provided the stimulus to the construction involved. An ideal, thus, is a consequence not of a simple value decision but of the more complex evaluative judgment. On the basis of clues gleaned from popular usage we may now give a refined though yet relatively simple definition of our problematic concept: An is an imaginal reconstruct of some experienced situation, or type of situation, embodying an evaluative judgment to the

An Appraisal of the Community Movement

O NE of the striking aspects of the recent interest in social reconstruction has been the increasing emphasis upon the community as a social unit of real significance. The term, community, is by no means a new invention, for in its original meaning of common life it has long been a familiar concept descriptive of the natural grouping of people in small, local areas, a characteristic type of association handed down from the earliest historical times. The tribal community among pre-literate peoples, the village commune in mediaeval Europe, the Utopian communities of the nineteenth century, bear sufficient witness to the long history of this term and the common sense meaning that was ordinarily attached to it. Prior to the opening of the present century, there was occasional reference to the community in the literature of the social sciences but for the most part only in a casual way, and it was not ordinarily deemed of sufficient importance to be given special mention in an index or table of contents. Among the first English books to use this term in their title were Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities published in I87I and F. Seebohm's The English Village Community which appeared in I890. The gradually evolving interest in the community as a suitable unit for serious study received great impetus from the publication in England of such books as Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, (i89z); Rountree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life; and Besant, East London, both published in I9OI. In Amnerica, this interest in social problems centering in the congested quarters of great cities found expression in two volumes of Riis, How the Other Half Lives and The Battle of the Slum.. While these books, published in I890 and i892, were impressionistic descriptions lacking Booth's zeal for statistical facts, they were none the less revealing and convincing. Another landmark in these early community studies was Hull House Maps and Papers which was published in 1895 by residents of Hull House. An unusual feature of this volume was a colored map showing graphically the location of the different nationalities in a downtown section of the city, a type of study which foreshadowed the more elaborate ecological studies undertaken many years later. The first beginnings of the utilization of the statistical method in American books in this field are seen in Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (i899), and in the volume by Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chica go: Report by the Investi-