Diversity Of Human Experience Research Articles

Teaching Sex and Gender: A Decade of Experience

on the discipline as a whole. Then we delineate four stages in the development of sex and gender courses within the sociology curriculum: (1) Invisible; (2) Token'; (3) Growth' and (4) Mainstreaming. Next, we describe current emphases in sex and gender courses on the diversity of human experience especially by race, ethnicity, class, and sexual preference. Finally, we note the pedagogical challenges faced by sociologists teaching about sex and gender.

Accounting for accounting: A story about managerial accounting

‘Accounting’, as the term is utilized in textbooks, discussed by teachers and researchers, and practiced by accountants, has evolved a narrow and specific meaning. It refers to the financial transactions of enterprises, and is generally concerned with the process of codifying, summarizing and reporting on such transactions. Although recent years have seen (at least on the research front) accounting becoming more broadly defined to include such things as individual and group reactions to transactions or their results (see, e.g. the human information processing research conducted by Ashton, 1976, and others, and the efficient market research undertaken by Beaver, 1972, and others), other interpretations and analyses based on the term itself have not occurred. For example, a recent article by Silverman (1975) on accounting in organizations bears little or no resemblance to “our” sort of accounting. What Silverman is concerned with are accounts as stories, the tales individual members of organizations construct to explain, understand and justify the behavior of themselves and others in organizations. Just such interpretation and analysis provided the genesis of the arguments in the present paper which attempt to explain what management accounting is and, more importantly, why it exists. Prior to launching into this explanation, a short digression on another recent approach which addresses these same questions sets the stage for the ensuing analysis. The newest explanation for the what and why of managerial accounting that has appeared in the literature is agency theory. In simple form, the argument is advanced that a principal (or owner) will seek accounting reports from an agent (or manager) as a form of control in an attempt to ensure that his resources are not being squandered. A number of papers have appeared based on this relatively simple proposition, for example Zimmerman’s (1979) research on cost allocation, Demski & Feltham (1978) on budgeting and Atkinson (1979) on standard setting problems. The work has basically been concerned with the design of incentive and accounting systems to overcome the assumed fundamental incentive of an agent to provide a less than honest report on his utilization of assets. Importantly, as Zimmerman (1979) argues, the questions are addressed in a positive rather than normative form. The fundamental difficulty with what amounts to an agency theory of the firm is that unidimensional explanations of behavior are, in general, not rich enough to capture the variety of human experience. Central to agency notions are assumptions that agents as resourceful, evaluative, maximizing men (REMMS) will, in the absence of tight restraints and controls engage in activities such as shirking, theft and on-the-job leisure, or the consumption of prerequisites such as “. . . thick carpets, air-conditioning or congenial employees” (Zimmerman, 1979, p. 506). The behavioral assumptions of REM men must be severely questioned in the light of the last twenty years of research into the area of human choice (March, 1978); the elements of Taylorism in the description of expected behaviors is an overly simplistic and inaccurate model of behavior in organizational settings. For example, the role of power in

Art and Science

COULD BE MORE DIFFERENT THAN SCIENCE AND ART? The former IS considered as a rational, objective, and cool study of nature; the latter is often regarded as a subjective, irrational outburst of feelings and emotions. One may also consider scientific discoveries as the products of imagination, of sparks of sudden insight, whereas art could be viewed as the product of painstaking work, carefully adding one part to the other by a rational thinking process. Surely art and science have something in common: both are ways to deal with our experiences and to lift our spirits from daily drudgery to universal values. But the roles of art and science in society certainly are very different. Science, unfortunately, is a closed book for most people outside the scientific community; its influence on society, however, is decisive in two ways. One is via sciencebased technology; the other is via the philosophical implications of scientific insights which, as it is often wrongly asserted, support a materialistic, rationalistic view of the world around and within us. The role of art is not so easy to define. It does, or should, contribute tp a deeper appreciation of our existence and should help us to endure the human predicament. Unfortunately, much of contemporary art is also a closed book to a large majority. Let us start with the diversity of human experiences and the diversity of what we are doing with them. There are outer and inner experiences, rational and irrational ones, social experiences between two or many human beings, and experiences with the nonhuman part of nature. Our reactions to these experiences are manifold and varied. We think and ponder about them; we make use of them to improve our lives and to avoid material and emotional hardships; we are oppressed or elated by them; we feel sadness and joy, love and hate. We are urged to act, to communicate them to others; we try to relate them to the pattern of our lives. We want to influence people and our environment. All this is the raw mate-

Ancient Baffles and Modern Times: Teaching Ultimate Questions

AbstractA special challenge of theology courses in the private liberal arts college is the ability to maintain an institutional commitment to identifiable moral and religious values while at the same time respecting the personal and academic integrity of a pluralistic student body. The Ultimate Questions course has been constructed to introduce such students to fundamental religious questions, problems and critiques and to demonstrate that these considerations begin in a wide variety of human experiences, activities and conceptualizations. Having depended on such thinkers as Tillich and Rahner to suggest that the religious problem is ultimately the human question, the course turns to an investigation of mainline Christian doctrine, worship and praxis as distinctive responses to the ultimate questions.

Probate Records as a Source for Early American History

HE varieties of human experience are not infinite, and the understanding of man proceeds through the study of the one, the few, and the many. Historians traditionally have concentrated on the first by focusing on the thoughts and actions of prominent individuals moving within a specific social and cultural milieu about which the researcher possesses a more or less clear picture. That picture, alas, is often the result of a series of camera's-eye views as perceived by the very actors themselves, and these views, superimposed one on the other, furnish the setting as well as the plot for the historian's narrative. No. wonder, then, that the earnest scholar searches for sources independent of his principals,, free of their influence yet pertinent to their fate. One such source exists in glorious profusion for students of early American history: the records of county probate courts. Many of these are available on microfilm, a few are published, and vast quantities rest in readily accessible archives.' The present writer's work in the records of Maryland and Massachusetts suggests that appropriate use of these materials can provide quantitative outlines of colonial economic development, furnish profiles of the evolving social structure, and sketch the contours of cultural change in the enclaves of European settlement in the New World.

History and the Changing University Curriculum

D URING the past few years there has been considerable experimentation with the college and university history curriculum. Some of it has focused on the method of presentation-the use of visual media, for example. Some has stressed the debates among historians about historical problems-the Amherst Series and its successors. Some has dealt with current issues of race, poverty, and war, organizing past material to cope with current problems. Here I wish to develop an argument for a different alternative, for a curriculum based on different contexts of human life in terms of social structure and social change. We should organize our courses, so the argument goes, so as to facilitate the student's understanding of systematic varieties of human experience in the past, and thereby facilitate entry into varieties of human experience in the present. The basic problem in any history curriculum is conceptual: what are the ideas about past society which serve as the organizing principles

On genetics, sociology, and politics.

ON GENETICS, SOCIOLOGY, AND POLITICS THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY* Typological Thinking There is a habit ofthought perhaps as old as language itselfthat keeps getting in the way ofour understanding ofthe history and nature ofthe processes oflife. This is our tendency to think in terms ofstatic types. Of course, we must sort out into categories the overwhelming diversity of phenomenawe perceive and experience, andwe do so inwords like "man," "cat," or "dog." Such words do not refer to particular persons or animals but to abstract representatives ofmankind, cat-kind, and dog-kind. Also, such words emphasize differences between "kinds" as ifthere were rigid boundaries; they give no hint ofwhat the "kinds" may have in common. Nor do they take into account, or even suggest, the diversity within "kinds"—the diversity ofpersons, of cats, and of dogs. Nevertheless, man has long sought for ways to unify as well as classify this diversity—since long before Bronowski said, beautifully, that "science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature—or more exactly, in the variety ofour experience. Poetry, painting , the arts are in the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety. Each in its own way looks for likeness under the variety ofhuman experience." One tempting way to unify is to declare that the diversity and change are false appearances. Plato did so by his famous theory ofideas. He believed that God created eternal, unchangeable, and inconceivably beautiful prototypes, or ideas, ofMan, Horse, and even such mundane and inanimate objects as Bed and Table; that individual persons, horses, beds, and tables are only pale shadows oftheir respective ideas; that acquiring wis- * Professor, The Rockefeller University, New York 10021. This is an adaptation of a paper presented at the Wenner-Gren Symposium in Burg Wartenstein, September, 1964. It appeared in the February, 1968, issue ofSocial Education and is reprinted here with their permission. 544 Theodosius Dobzhansky · Genetics and Sociology Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Summer 1968 dorn means "seeing" the ideaswhere formerly one saw only their shadows. Aristode assumed only one cosmic idea, which manifests itself in the visible world. He believed that nature's "purpose" was to realize the ideal form and that all animals were variants ofa single architectonic plan. For more than 2,000 years—up to the time of Darwin—the organic world was viewed either as Plato or as Aristotle saw it, within the Western World. Either way was compatible with believing that living, and even non-living, bodies constituted a "Great Chain ofBeing" that ranged from lesser to greater perfection. Leibniz in the seventeenth century and Bonnet in the eighteenth century felt satisfied that the Chain is single and uninterrupted . Bonnet saw it starting with fire and "finer matters," and extending through air, water, minerals, corals, truffles, plants, sea anemones, birds, ostriches, bats, quadrupeds, monkeys, and so to man. To Lamarck and to Geoffroy St. Hilaire in the nineteenth century, but not to their predecessors and contemporaries, the Great Chain implied evolution. Cuvier, dissenting, was ofcourse absolutely right that there is no single plan of body structure common to all animals. Still, the hypothesis that living organisms are manifestations of a limited number of basic types or ideas ofstructure was useful because it inspired studies on comparative anatomy and classification. There is no doubt that such data, though collected for another purpose, did help to furnish a base for the theory ofevolution. Such are some ofthe pre-Darwinian roots oftypological thinking. Their common quality is that they postulate, implicidy or explicidy, archetypes or ideal types. Populational Thinking The Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution shattered the basis of typological thinking over a century ago, but many biologists are still unaware ofthis profound implication. I agree with Mayr that "the replacement of typological thinking by population thinking is perhaps the greatest conceptual revolution that has taken place in biology." My only cavil is that Mayr's "has taken place" is overoptimistic, although I do believe that this conceptual revolution is well under way. It has proceeded so slowly because the difference between typological and populational thinking is as subde as it is profound, but also because habits of thought are at least...

Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays.

in Politics, first published in 1962, has established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of 'reason' in rationalist politics. Oakeshott criticizes ideological schemes to reform society according to supposedly 'scientific' or rationalistic principles that ignore the wealth and variety of human experience. Rationalism in politics, says Oakeshott, involves misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge. History has shown that it produces unexpected, often disastrous results. Having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than training in technique of analysis, the Rationalist succeeds only in undermining the institutions that hold civilized society together. In this regard, rationalism in politics is a corruption of the mind.