Context Of Social Structures Research Articles

An Urban Social Geography of the Homeless in Osaka, Japan

This article seeks to explain the circumstances of homeless people in Osaka City and their temporal change using the concept of the social space in an urban area. The special concern here is Kamagasaki District, a typical and nationally well-known yoseba (the space served as a catchment place of day laborers for jobs regarded as relatively unskilled). Such places generally have a large number of cheap lodging houses (doyagai) for them. The homeless people in Japan, mostly single man, were called formerly runpen or furosha, and currently are known as nojukusha. They correspond to day laborers in a substantive sense.Kamagasaki is a commonly-used place name of the neighborhood, located in the northeastern part of Nishinari-ward, Osaka City, and its extent is almost identical to that of Airin-chiku (Airin District), as is has usually been referred to by the administrative authorities, police and mass media. There is a huge day labor market centered on Airin Multi-purpose Center in this area and it is generally said that the district has more than twenty thousand day laborers, about two hundred cheap lodging houses and numerous eating houses, resulting in a distinctive landscape segregated from surrounding areas.In the second section, previous research of yoseba is reviewd. This district has been studied as a disorganized area mainly by social pathologists in the existing literature of social science. But it mirrors a negative and passive understanding of this social space in urban area. The author here, putting emphasis on the social structural context, would like to identify a certain social space focused on the district. On this occation the actual situation concerned with the homeless is a very good indicator of the social space.The third section is devoted to a historical explanation. In the period immediately after World War II, Osaka City's governmental measures toward the homeless was to settle disorder due to the influx of sufferers and returnees in and around Osaka Station. Nevertheless, as the district served as the place for single male day laborers during the period of fast economic growth in the 1960s, the homeless within the city tended to be accounted for primarily by Kamagasaki's day-laborers. Then, the measures were developed in the Airin regime (Airin taisei) which was established in the beginning of the 1970's, motivated by the‘riots’and still continues. The survey of occupational careers conducted in 1988 indicates that, the numbers of homeless persons rise occur in the season or months when jobs are unavailable, whereas they become laborers in the remainder.Specific attributes are discussed in the fourth section. According to the records of the Thursday Night Patrol Party within the Kamagasaki Christian Society, there is a general tendency to seasonal size change in incidence of the homeless: they expand from April to summer and then contract. Such change is due to the job offering variation concerned with the labor force through the Nishinari Labor and Welfare Center as well as climatic condition such as temparature. Moreover, the records suggests that this change has been less remarkable within the district, while now obvious outside it. Also worthy-of-note is that, as the number of the homeless as a whole tends to decrease, the inside-the-district proportion has been lower.In the 1988 investigation, the homeless persons are grouped into the following three length types: the long type (more than one year), the short type (less than one year), and the cyclic type, which implies repeatedly homeless and non-homeless conditions seasonally over the past years. Furthermore, such types are cross tabulated with income source and reason for becoming homeless. With regard to the source, many of the long and short types work as junk dealer (yoseya), while most of the other type are day laborers.

Religion and Region: Sociological and Historical Perspectives

T1his symposium has been a brief opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange between sociologists and historians with a helpful focus on specific regional and denominational patterns. As the lively discussion following these papers has shown, The Third Disestablishment proves to be a useful springboard for interpretation of broad historical changes. We need more such interdisciplinary interchange of ideas, because sociological survey methods tend to produce aggregates of individual opinions, values, characteristics. To put these data into a social structural context, sociologists can correlate such individual attitudes with indicators of social class, political preference, religious affiliation, or level of education, for example. Nevertheless, interpretations of broad social changes, such as those Hammond has addressed, must involve a level of analysis beyond aggregates of individual opinion. A historical perspective is one important path to a more comprehensive level for sociological interpretation. Indeed, it is imperative for an understanding of social change, because the forces leading to change are not directly amenable to social survey techniques. Furthermore, we lack comparable survey data for attitudes of, for example, Massachusetts believers in 1788 and 1888, so we must rely upon extrapolations from the historical record. While this symposium has emphasized mainly what sociologists can gain from a historical perspective on their subject matter, such interchange could also benefit historians. Much historical analysis is limited by a case-study methodology, which tends to be so narrowly focused that the historian hestitates to generalize much beyond that specific instance. Chronicling the actions of individuals or groups, the historian might fail to observe or document social structural factors embedded in the actions' settings. Thus, both historians and sociologists would probably achieve better analyses and interpretations in their own fields by sharing something of each others' perspectives on the social world. Each of these four vignettes of state makeup and historical character has effectively highlighted important methodological and interpretive issues for the sociologist of religion. Williams's report of the uniquely ordinary and adamantly bland cultural flavor of Ohio suggests that that state might be ideal as a survey research site. As a native of southern Indiana, I was relieved to discover that Ohio might have actually surpassed Indiana's ordinariness. The grayness of Ohio, however, creates problems for the sociological interpreter: How can one use this feature of the state to help explain anything of its religious climate?

New Trends in Black American Interracial Marriage: The Social Structural Context

This study addresses the underlying demographic correlates of interracial marriage as distinct among black women and men in a western [U.S.] location. Logistic regression analyses indicated that the structural correlates were nearly identical for men and women: the interracially married tended to be younger more likely to have been married before and more distant in age from their spouses....Furthermore persons born in the North...and in foreign countries were more likely to be married to nonblacks which seemingly indicates that moves away from communities of origin to environments that are relatively tolerant regarding race facilitate interracial marriage. Findings are interpreted as indicative of the strength of social control in mate selection. (EXCERPT)

The Structural Contexts of Stress

In all of his work, as illustrated in present paper, Leonard Pearlin brings a sociological perspective to study of stress, conceptualizing stressors, mediators, and outcomes in terms of social structural context that shapes them. In this commentary I suggest taking a more general approach than that proposed by Pearlin. This approach entails drawing upon past and recent developments in sociological theory that aim to explicate linkages among individuals, groups, and social institutions, which some scholars call micro-meso-macro linkages. Pearlin asserts that one of our goals in social study of stress is acceptance of stress research by sociological mainstream. I would add another goal: that of contributing to testing and refinement of sociological theory both within and outside mainstream. To accomplish these goals, we need to place our work explicitly within theoretical frameworks of sociology, both classical theory and more recent theoretical developments and refinements. I would like to draw attention to work of some contemporary sociologists who are formulating and refining theories that have applicability for study of stress, and of others who are engaged in stress research from within two of these theoretical frameworks. As I will describe later in more detail, these sociologists have taken as their subject matter the unities between social structure and inner functioning of individuals (Pearlin) and are concerned with many of

Persuasion in a Self-Help Group

This research utilizes observational and interview data to examine the techniques of persuasion utilized m a self-help organization for persons with mental problems. Successful affiliation with the group is conceptualized as a type of conversion process. The interplay between recruit background and group interactional dynamics convinces recruits to accept the group's ideology and define its method as a necessary treatment for their mental problems. A member's conversion has important long-run implications. In particular, although acceptance of the organizational ideology may facilitate the "recovery" of the individual, it simultaneously reinforces an understanding of mental problems as caused by individual inadequacies. The social structural context of such individual problems is then largely ignored.

An Attribute Approach to Relationships between Offenders and Victims in Homicide

The relationship between the victim and the offender is an important variable in studies of personal violence because it places the event within the context of social structures. Roles such as husband, wife, friend, lover, and stranger are complex social relationships which may delineate homicides that share a distinctive etiology.' Furthermore, the moral and legal responses to violence are, to a large extent, determined by the social roles of the victim and offender.2

The process of acculturation: Theoretical perspectives and an empirical investigation in Peru

World-wide migratory patterns have led to an increasing interest in acculturation processes and their psychosocial and psychiatric sequelae. This paper reviews alternative theoretical approaches to the study of acculturation and identifies gaps in the current knowledge base. We then present empirical research of acculturation processes experienced by both Indian rural to urban migrants and White-Mestizo non-migrants in Lima, Peru. The study examined overall acculturation and five sub-dimensions: language use, customs, sociability, perceived discrimination and ethnic identify. The data show that second generation migrants are more highly acculturated across sub-areas and perceive less ethnic discrimination that first generation migrants. The first generation varied in acculturative level across sub-dimensions as a function of their age at the time of migration. Contrasts between the migrant and dominant group depicted a two-way process of culture change, but a process characterized by an inequality in the content exchanged in each direction. Socio-demographic correlates of acculturation were also found. These results are discussed in terms of the potential psychological consequences of alternative acculturative adaptations within the Peruvian social-structural context.

The Social Reconstruction of Sexual Assault by Women Victims: A Comparison of Therapeutic Experiences

In this study, the conventionally accepted view of sexual violence against women as manifested by traditional therapy is contrasted with the feminist perspective represented by feminist therapy and feminist self-help groups for victims of sexual assault. The focus of the research is on the ways in which consumers of different therapies are taught socially to reconstruct their sexual assault experiences. On the basis of intensive interviews with victims of sexual assault or incest who have subsequently experienced therapy, the reconstructions of the assault encouraged by conventional therapeutic approaches are found to differ sharply from those developed in feminist modalities. The conclusion is that conventional therapies for victim of sexual assault tend to perpetuate the existing belief structure about rape and incest by isolating and blaming the victim. In contrast, feminist counselling and feminist self-help groups remove the woman's false sense of guilt, validate the woman's experience with sexual violence, and enable the victim to develop an understanding of the social structural context in which sexual assault occurs.

Southern Violence Revisited

Edward Ayers has made a distinguished contribution to venerable debate over relationship between southerners and laws. Perhaps even more important, however, his consideration of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century South illuminates central questions concerning character of region in an era of fundamental change. Ayers's findings about rates and types of crime and patterns of conviction and punishment portray a distinctive section transformed by experience of war and Reconstruction. Vengeance and Justice brings new evidence and a refreshing perspective to current disagreements about capitalist or precapitalist nature of Old South, about ties between and slavery, about effects of war and emancipation. Ayers begins his study with a consideration of southern violence that allows him to characterize antebellum southern society more generally. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's recent work on occupies an influential place here, but Ayers has revised these earlier arguments to imbed in a social-structural context that he contends Wyatt-Brown neglected. Slavery, Ayers asserts, generated honor (p. 26), and honor, in turn, produced violence and a sense of limited applicability of law. An overweening concern with opinions of others (p. 19), is in Ayers's view product of economically undiversified, localized, explicitly hierarchical societies where one standard of worth can reign (p. 26). Slavery insulated Old South from market development and cultural diversity associated with capitalism and its system of values. In North and other more developed areas, came to be supplanted by dignity, an internal rather than external gauge of self-worth -the conviction that each individual at birth possessed an intrinsic value . .. theoretically equal to that of every other person (p. 19). The importance of self-control, discipline, and autonomy within wider notion of dignity indicates its close connection to the transformations

A critique of criminology: toward an integrated structural-Marxist theory of delinquency production.

Juvenile delinquency is understood as a latent outcome of the social reproduction process of capitalism. A structural-Marxist understanding of contradictory social relations that contour life in modern capitalism allows us to reinterpret and apply the insights from various criminology theories in building a new theoretical approach. A review and critique of the major theoretical perspectives in criminology are provided, and a structural-Marxist perspective on the larger social structural context is explicated. A new integrated theory of delinquency, grounded in Marxian insights on the role of productive relations in shaping other social relations, is developed and supported with empirical evidence from research representing a broad range of theoretical perspectives.

Leaving Competitive Sport: Retirement or Rebirth?

This paper reviews existing information on retirement from sport and offers an interpretation of the retirement process that will both challenge widespread assumptions held by sport sociologists and provide hypotheses for future research. The dynamics of the retirement process are discussed for athletes in top-level interscholastic and amateur sports as well as in professional sports. Existing data suggest that retirement for athletes in each of these contexts is not an inevitable source of stress, identity crises, or adjustment problems. It is argued that the dynamics of the sport retirement process are grounded in the social structural context in which retirement takes place. Factors such as gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, and social and emotional support networks shape the manner in which one makes the transition out of sport. Therefore, retirement from sport sometimes may be the scene of stress and trauma but, by itself, it often is not the major cause of those problems.

Social Interactional and Sociolinguistic Rules

All social interaction involves communication; it is difficult to make an explicit differentiation between sociolinguistic and social interaction rules. For heuristic purposes, I propose a tentative distinction between: (1) social interactional rules as those governing social behavior within social structural contexts having such features as, for example, role, hierarchy, exchange requirements, etc.; and (2) sociolinguistic rules governing the use of resources of spoken and written language within sets of social structural constraints. I propose a further distinction between system-specific rules and rules which may be common to all societies (or sociolinguistic systems) and provide illustrations for each type of rule at each level of possible generality. All students of human social behavior (and probably most, if not all students of other animal social behavior) see that behavior as persistent, pattemed, non-random, rule-govemed. (Even so-called free variation is probably non-random-the rules which govern it are simply not very interesting.)' This fact lies at the roots of scholarly work in a number of disciplines in the natural and social sciences and in the humanities, whose practitioners involve themselves in research directed to the specification of the rules themselves; to a search for their sources; to understanding their acquisition by members of social groups; to a comprehension of the relations of rules across levels (viz., physiological psychological, social); to answers to questions about their stability and change. Men and women everywhere attain

Female Participation in Farm Work in Central Kerala

This paper attempts to show that at the micro level women's participa tion in agricultural work is controlled by a complex of norms in the local social structural context. Published accounts dealing with sexual division of labour in agriculture are highly generalised and are based on aggregate census figures. Occasionally, one finds a remark that some non-economic factors also influence women's participation at the village level. A few recent studies (ICSSR 1975; Boserup 1975 : 99-111; Gulati 1975 (a) : 1692-1704; Joshi 1975) reveal keen awareness of the need to explore in detail the social factors to learn the differential participation of women workers. Notwithstanding the recognition, none of these studies could deal with the issue squarely as they used aggregate census data for their analysis. Useful as the findings of these studies are, the real need seems to be the integration of census data with those drawn from ethnographic and case studies at the micro level.

"Women in the Migratory Process": A Reductionist Outlook

The point of my title is to indicate my ever-increasing malaise respecting the spurious reification of as a unit for anlaysis-a unit I see as ideologically generated, not scientifically. The category seems to me a rhetorical one, not one which has (or can be proved to have) generic scientific utility. The category, at best, is only useful contextually, i.e., with reference to special social situations or societies, where, in any case, it is better rendered conceptually as women's roles which entail also, of course, men's roles. I suppose, epistemically, methodologically, there is a certain utility in organizing an inquiry such as this symposium dealing with the question of in the migratory process in order that its essential emptiness of scientific content can become manifest-as occurred in the symposium. Not really surprisingly, what turned out to be significant were households, extended kin networks, and sometimes other social groupings, both in places of origin and in migratory meccas. I shall argue, as one major part of my comment, that the use of the category women, here and of course, generally-like other personalistic categories-is a reductionist and individualistic outlook, a paradigm characteristically part of American rhetoric emphasizing the individual, the psychological, Calvinistic internalizations of norms and self-reliance, etc.; all at the expense of the structural, the organized, the collective, the socio-culturally determined. Emphasis on the individual and on internalized norms and personal motivation, furthermore, tends to obscure the socially-determined strategies (as opposed to the motivations) in individual and group action within social-structural contexts. I shall return to the reductionist question later. During the symposium, Judith-Maria Buechler commented that the world of women is also the real world of men and the real world

Nicknames and Number Plates in the British West Indies

AMONG THE MORE COLORFUL CUSTOMS of the British West Indies are the widespread use of nicknames and the universal memorization of automobile number plates. Such designations as Hot Dog or PI7i3, for example, often serve to identify persons in lieu of formal names or as complements to them. Yet nicknames and number plates symbolize more than individual identity; they also symbolize cultural identity, locating persons in a moral order and class hierarchy. Nicknames and number plates may be seen as elements of folk taxonomic systems that have a cultural resonance derived from native value categories. In this article I wish, first, to offer a brief ethnographic account of nicknames and number plates, focusing on their linguistic role as alternate forms of nomenclature. Second, I will consider the functions served by nicknames and number plates within their social structural context. Third, I want to examine the cultural meaning of nicknames and number plates and show how this meaning governs the extent and circumstances of their usage. My data are drawn primarily from Bermuda2 and Barbados, but are collaborated by observations I have made in many other British Commonwealth territories in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.

Mass Media Socialization Behavior: Negro-White Differences

Mass Media Socialization Behavior: Negro-White Differences