Word: sociologists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...latest skirmish in the battle between aesthetes and sociologists has proved inconclusive. Clive Barnes, dance critic for the New York Times, took steps to parry a Harvard sociologist's study of dancing, but his sarcasm couldn't diminish the deadpan humor of the scientist's study...
...Dealers and other psychologists offer only rough generalizations: competitive types favor man-against-man games such as blackjack; intellectual types and women more passive pursuits such as roulette; craps, with its rattles, pitches and shouts of "Baby needs shoes!" attracts the assertive male. As for horseplayers, according to one sociologist, about 60% are lower- and middle-class men who bet long shots "to assert their ability to make individual decisions in a depersonalized society...
Perhaps the most persuasive theory is advanced by Sociologist Erving Goffman, who worked for a year in Las Vegas as a dealer. He describes gambling as a "meaning machine that grinds out random decisions very rapidly. Betting on the outcome transfers mere random decisions into fateful ones. This provides an essentially meaningless but exciting situation that allows people to read into the action whatever fantasies they want, to groove, to go crazy in an intensely personal way." In other words, gambling becomes life itself, made into whatever one wants...
Reshaping the Landscape. More by accident than design, some university books turn into bestsellers. The Lonely Crowd, by Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, has sold more than a million copies since it was published by Yale in 1950; Chicago's Manual for the Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations has sold nearly 900,000 copies. Oklahoma's Plowman's Folly, written in 1943 by a county agricultural agent, Edward H. Faulkner, not only sold 355,000 copies, but, by advocating shallow disk harrowing for small-grain crops instead of deep plowing, literally reshaped the landscape of rural...
...main case against p.r. is not that it brainwashes people -it is not really powerful enough to do that. As New School Sociologist Ernest van den Haag says, "Public relations can seduce, but it cannot rape." What is often most troubling is that p.r. can place a kind of shield between the public and reality. It creates the feeling that smiles are not quite real, laughter not quite spontaneous, wit not quite unrehearsed, praise or blame not quite from the heart, elegance not quite instinctive, courage not quite brave and virtue not quite clean. The best p.r. men know...