Contemporary Urban Society Research Articles

Joyce Carol Oates: The Critical Response Matures

Joanne V. Creighton. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G.K.Hall. 1979.173 pp. Ellen G. Friedman. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Frederick Ungar. 1980. 238 + x pp. Mary Kathryn Grant. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press. 1974.1978.167 + xiv pp. Gary F. Waller. Dreaming America : Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press. 1979. 224 + xii pp. The quite prodigious outpouring of fiction and poetry from Joyce Carol Oates since the early 1960s has provoked diverse and sometimes curious responses from reviewers and critics. Prior to the publishing of Wonderland in 1971, commentators were struck by the inevitable violence—at times, seemingly gratuitous—in Oates's work, and uneasy comparisons with various traditions were made: with the naturalists, with Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O'Connor, with realists who anatomize contemporary urban society. Dubious, perhaps, about the quantity of stories and novels, their frequent appearance within a relatively short period, and some repetitiveness of theme and character, critics of Oates's first decade of publishing worried about the quality of her work and how to classify it. Now that another decade has passed, the body of work has taken definite shape and critical response is becoming mature and valuable.

The airplane passenger: Protection of self in an encapsulated group

Data from participant observation and unstructured interviews demonstrate that being a passenger on commercial airplanes leads to membership in an “encapsulated group.” Encapsulated groups are collectivities of individuals who voluntarily or involuntarily share physical but not necessarily social closeness for the purpose of attaining some goal or reaching some destination. Encapsulated groups flow through “people pipelines,” a network of social and physical channels for processing human beings in contemporary urban society, especially in bureaucratic organizations. The role of airplane passenger is analyzed to demonstrate how individuals defend self-integrity in the encapsulated group. The passenger enactment process and the encapsulated group are shown to manifest several characteristics of total institutions (Goffman, 1961a).

Race and Residence: The Concentration and Dispersal of Immigrants in London.

The segregation of immigrant groups in British cities is widely regarded as one of the principal 'problems' of contemporary urban society. This book examines not only the current levels of residential concentration and segregation in London but also plots trends in these phenomena.

Regulation and Control of Urban Environments: A Multilevel Approach

The expertise of systems and control engineering is potentially relevant to the problems of contemporary urban society. But to realize this potential, a paradigm which represents urban problems as problems of design and control must be developed. A possible structure for such a paradigm is suggested by Simon's conception of an " artificial science" which emphasizes the problem of designing inner environments whose object is to attain goals and to function adaptively in outer environments [11]. This paper proposes an organization-environment model, combining the Urban Dynamics and hierarchical multilevel systems approaches as one possible basis for such a science. A descriptive formal model of an urban government using the multiechelon approach is developed, and the consistency postulate for the system is defined. This definition illustrates a commonly encountered problem in political systems, namely, the imperfect relationship between electoral and administrative processes and "the general welfare." But this problem cannot be examined systematically until an operational overall system goal for a specific system is defined. Modifications of the Forrester Urban Dynamics model to include a coefficient of "satisfaction" are described to illustrate a potentially useful definition of such a goal. Preliminary results indicate that the values of this coefficient are consistent with the implicit normative assumptions of the Forrester model.

Historical Contours of Contemporary Urban Society: A Comparative View

Historical Contours of Contemporary Urban Society: A Comparative View