Word: amitai
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...America a fixation on assassination conspiracies? After all, the latest furor over who really killed J.F.K., inspired by Oliver Stone's movie, has only recently abated. There remain rabid challenges to official versions of the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X murders. To sociologist Amitai Etzioni, the fascination with these questions reflects a need to explain life's inexplicable dark side: Why did all these heroes die? That tendency is encouraged by America's individualism, which encourages an instinctive distrust of authority and officialdom...
...hospital patients for AIDS. Some people argue for mandatory testing; others insist that it be voluntary. But both groups seem concerned only with the patient's rights. "No one on either side wonders if the patient has a responsibility to his fellow human beings," says George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni. "The language focuses almost exclusively on individual rights, which are quickly described as absolute and which are then disconnected from societal obligations...
...widespread is this sort of disaffection, says author John Taylor in a sizzling New York magazine article, that a double-barreled social phenomenon now threatens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights industry" -- the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly asserted, and whose transgression is -- always -- a matter for outcry...
...group, under the leadership of prominent sociologist Amitai Etzioni, took public shape just a few weeks ago with the launching of a quarterly journal, Responsive Community. "To the A.C.L.U., libertarians and other radical individualists," Etzioni and his co-editors declared in their statement of purpose, "we say that the rights of individuals must be balanced with responsibilities to the community...
...parade of highly visible corporate misdeeds has sparked the outrage. According to a study by sociologist Amitai Etzioni, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, two-thirds of FORTUNE 500 companies were convicted between 1975 and 1985 of serious crimes, from price fixing to illegal dumping of hazardous wastes. Executives at Beech-Nut tried to pass off flavored water as apple juice. Ivan Boesky and a ring of Wall Streeters traded on insider information. Even such an upstanding company as Eastman Kodak, which has won awards for its minority-hiring and other social programs, has felt the heat. Residents...