Social Structure and Self-Direction: Comparative Analysis of the United States and Poland - Softcover

Melvin L. Kohn; Kazimierz M. Slomczynski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8373881069 ISBN 13: 9788373881068

Publisher: IFiS Publishers, 2006

Synopsis

This is a new edition of a book earlier published by Blackwell (1990-hardcover; 1993-paperback), now with a new foreword. The book presents the results of a major research project on the relationship between social structure and personality in both capitalist and socialist societies. Based on a formidable array of original empirical work and using sophisticated cross-national methodologies, it gives a profound comparative interpretation of the links between social class and social stratification, working conditions, and personality in the capitalist United States and Poland, then in the last period of a still functioning socialist regime.

About this title

About the Author

Melvin L. Kohn, professor of sociology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, is a past president of the American Sociological Association. For many years he was chief of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD where he headed, with Carmi Schooler, an outstanding research study on social structure and personality. In addition to multiple papers in leading journals of the discipline (e.g., American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces) this research resulted in Kohn's classical book Class and Conformity: A Study in Values (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969; 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1977), the co-authored by Schooler, Work and Personality: An Inquiry into the Impact of Social Stratification (Norwood, NJ: Ablex), as well as other books and edited volumes. This study has been replicated in several countries, including Poland, where it was carried out by Kazimierz M. Slomczynski and his collaborators. The comparative two-country study, first presented in a 1981 American Sociological Review paper by Slomczynski, J. Miller, and Kohn, is most thoroughly analyzed in the 1990 Kohn and Slomczynski's Social Structure and Self Direction. Kohn - who collaborated also with Japanese, Ukrainian, and Chinese sociologists - authored, or co-authored, many other papers and books published in American, European, and Asiatic sociological outlets. Kazimierz M. Slomczynski is a professor of sociology at the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, also affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. He specializes in cross-national studies on social structure and inequality, work and personality, social transformation of post-communist societies, and political sociology. In addition to Social Structure and Self-Direction, he authored, or co-authored, the following English language books: Social Structure and Mobility: Poland, Japan, and the United States (Warsaw: IFiS, 1989); Investigations on Class Structure and Social Stratification in Poland, 1945-1975 (with W. Wesolowski, Warsaw: IFiS, 1977); Mental Adjustment to the Post-Communist System in Poland (with K. Janicka, B.W. Mach, and W. Zaborowski, Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 1999); and Open for Business: A Persistent Entrepreneurial Class in Poland (with Elizabeth Osborn, Warsaw: IFiS Publishers 2005). He published his work in numerous periodicals, including the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Political Research, and International Journal of Sociology. Recently he edited Social Patterns of Being Political(Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 2000); Social Structure: Changes and Linkages (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 2002); and Continuity and Change: Structural and Psychological Adjustment in Poland (with Sandra T. Marquart-Pyatt, Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 2007).

Edition details

• Publisher: IFiS Publishers
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8373881069
• ISBN 13: 9788373881068
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 348