Word: etzioni
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Some of the yordim reply that they have left for one reason only: greater opportunity. They believe Israel cannot offer the scope, either financially or intellectually, that the émigrés are seeking. Says Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, a former Israeli who came to the U.S. in 1958: "In Israel, you deal with Israel. In the U.S., you deal with the U.S., the world-and Israel." Cardiologist Yzhar Charuzi says that his career would have been stunted if he had remained in Israel. "Here I have my opportunities," says Charuzi, now head of the coronary-care unit...
...influence is not doubted. Etzioni is one of the new social science mandarins now beginning to dominate the profession: a politically astute opinion maker and entrepreneur who is acquiring considerable power by attracting the federal and foundation research dollar, handing out jobs, showering newspapers and magazines with articles on every conceivable subject, and producing hard-nosed, workable programs that politicians like...
...Center for Policy Research, Etzioni presides over a burgeoning empire of some 20 staff members, plus sociologists, economists, historians, doctors, lawyers and planners who churn out a million dollars' worth of reports each year. A recent study of the problems of Spanish-speaking children in New York City schools was the basis for a court ruling to expand full-time bilingual education. In another project, engineers working with the center developed a new rapid-response telephonic device that Etzioni says "can restore the New England town meeting" for large organizations. Using it, the New Jersey League of Women Voters...
Power Base. Etzioni's main theoretical effort and "life's work" is The Active Society, a long and turgid treatise on how to use the levers of social change. In it, Etzioni explains how social progress requires consensus and a power base to protect and promote change. Thus he considered Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty a doomed effort from the start because it gave the poor authority without a power base. He also opposes school busing as a means of integration because no consensus for it exists. "If you want it, fine-go out and convince...
Though he is a committed man of the left, Etzioni does not have the conventional liberal preoccupation with individual freedom. In his talks on sex, for example, he argues that the sexual revolution must eventually become stabilized with some sort of new norms for sexual conduct and not just end with a nation full of "gushing ids." He has astounded scientists by suggesting they stop research likely to prove socially harmful, such as work on human cloning and subliminal communication techniques...