Process Of Historical Change Research Articles

The genesis of accountability: The west point connections

We focus on the genesis of the new managerialism in U.S. business and factories in the nineteenth century and re-examine the published histories of the U.S. armories and the railroads. We trace the influence in both arenas of the engineering/military graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who represent and reproduce the meticulous “grammatocentric” and “panoptic” system for human accountability introduced there in the years after 1817. Our overall concern is to re-analyse apparently economic-rational changes in accounting and accountability in a wider frame which explains their development as aspects of a general shift in power-knowledge relations—a shift which Foucault characterised as the development of disciplinary power and which we argue originated in elite educational institutions. We propose further examination (or re-examination) of the original accounting and administrative records relating to the armories and the railroads in order to establish the precise process of historical change.

Qi and the Atom: A Comparison of the Concept of Matter in Chinese and Western Philosophy

The concept of matter is the cornerstone of philosophical materialism. In each of the nations and cultures of the world it has undergone a long historical process of change and development. To study these concepts of matter from a comparative perspective will undoubtedly help to clarify the general laws governing human philosophical thinking and their various characteristics in the many cultural traditions of the peoples of the world.

Local Variations of Household Forms and Family Consciousness

One of the most significant tasks for the sociology of marriage and the family in Japan is to clarify the relationship between the radical changes of society and family structure after World War II, and their impact on the system and the functions of the traditional Japanese family. During the years 1956 and 1957 a worthwhile project was undertaken by a group of family sociologists in the Tokyo area in an attempt to analyze the dynamics of the post-war Japanese family. This article analyzes the family composition and consciousness in four different types of communities in Tokyo: a mountain village, a suburban farming community, a suburban nonfarming community, and an apartment area. Findings from this study could be categorized into the following three. First, it was confirmed that the rural family tends to be an extended family, whereas the family in the urban area tends to be nuclear. Within each family, however, there exists a dynamic process of historical change in its structure throughout the family life cycle. Secondly, the traditional family consciousness is still rooted deeply among the rural farming families. Thirdly, it was not possible to observe any significant relationship between the form of the household composition and the family consciousness of the people. The result of this study might suggest the significant impact of the revision of the civil code after World War II on individuals' consciousness but not yet on the fundamental structure of the family in Japan. These discoveries. however, should be reevaluated in the light of growing urbanization of the younger generations in Japan.

Colligation and Classification in History

W. H. Walsh's greatest contribution to analytical philosophy of history has possibly been identification of colligatory terms and investigation of their functions in historical writing. Walsh noticed that there is one way in which historians make historical events intelligible which differs markedly from way scientists explain natural events. Whereas scientists, according to Walsh, understand events by classifying them and then subsuming them under causal laws, historians often look instead for inner relationships between event to be explained and other events which came before and after it, thus discovering a particular process of historical change of which it was a part.' Colligatory terms identify processes of historical change by which individual events are colligated. The process of historical change identified by a colligatory term, Walsh said, was a sequence or group of events related by common ideas or values they expressed. Where these ideas formed a specific plan, purposively carried out in a sequence of actions, then colligation of those actions by reference to that plan provided a teleological explanation of them. As an example of this form of colligation Walsh explained how by mentioning Hitler's policy of German self-assertion and expansion an historian could colligate and partly explain steps he took in carrying out that policy, such as repudiation of unilateral disarmament, German withdrawal from League of Nations, absorption of Austria and incorporation of Sudetenland. If ideas expressed in a group of events did not constitute a plan but simply a set of values and principles, then by colligating events through reference to those values historian provided what Walsh called a semi-teleological explanation of them. As examples of movements and periods which have expressed different sets of values and principles, and by reference to which individual events have been colligated, Walsh listed the Enlightenment, Romantic

South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.

African History in the 1960's: Religion

Of all the “subfields” of African history, religion is in the most preliminary condition. It is also, in all probability, the most difficult to treat in an orderly fashion, owing to the constant spillover into other areas generally regarded to be more preemptive in modern historiography. Our task in isolating religion as a subfield entails in part an operation of retrieval from political, social, and intellectual sectors of the discipline. Problems of definition must also be tackled. Are we primarily concerned with religion in history or the history of religion? Where is the cutoff mark in considering myth, ritual, and other phenomena that are related, but not at all times central, to religion? The following frame of reference is necessarily sketchy but is offered as a foundation for ensuing historiographical remarks. References to the major types of religion, whether “traditional,” Christian, or Muslim, will be minimized for the present. Religions have secular and spiritual aspects, the secular being most frequently observed and reported in connection with political and social institutions or behavior. The spiritual aspect and the internal development of a belief system are comparatively inaccessible, but highly significant. Popular beliefs, as well as more formal ideological and theological tenets, fall into this category. Owing to the role of religion in supporting a style of life and/or a political system, the survival of certain religious values may offer clues about a former epoch and the process of historical change in a society.

A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939

A MONG the many factors affecting the process of historical change within the United States today, one, more than any other, seems to stand out. This is the increasing use of the protest demonstration, both as a means of calling public attention to social ills and as a way of prodding government to take the necessary action to correct those ills. The effectiveness of the demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s cannot yet, of course, be accurately measured. At least one earlier group protest, however-a sharecropper roadside demonstration in Southeast Missouri in 1939-does provide an excellent case study of how this device was successfully used during the depression as a peaceful weapon for social change. The 1939 sharecropper demonstration bears remarkable similarity to the contemporary protest movement. It was in the public view; it attracted national attention; it exposed conditions that shocked the public conscience; it was mostly composed of Negroes; it was charged with being inspired by outside agitators and Communists; it fomented cries of police terrorism; it brought about an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and it aroused considerable activity on the part of local citizens and state government. Finally, although the demonstration caused a stir in the upper echelons of the federal government, it apparently failed to bring about any fundamental change in the attitude of the New Deal toward the sharecropper and the tenant.' The 1939 demonstration occurred in the region of Missouri popularly re