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"Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills" : the Weber project -- The precedence dispute : November 1944-June 1946 -- Credit, contracts, and the ethics of publishing : character and social structure -- Mills ascending : the young careerist -- Hard times in America : the tribulations of Hans Gerth

Discusses the relationship between C. Wright Mills & Hans Gerth & the controversy surrounding their collaboration & publication of From Max Weber. Although Mills originally assisted Gerth in his translations of Weber's sociological writings, the relationship quickly shifted into one characterized by collaboration. Mills's vision of a volume of translations of Weber's writings, his courtship of the Oxford U Press, & his bargaining with Prentice Hall over the publication of two texts, including the Weber volume, are reviewed. The origins of Gerth's relationship with sociologist Edward Shils, the controversy surrounding Shils's & Mills & Gerth's decision to publish volumes of Weber translations, & the deterioration of the friendship between Shils & Gerth are examined. The specific roles Gerth & Mills played in their collaborative relationship & the problem of receiving credit for published work are considered. J. W. Parker

Challenges Daniel Bell's (1996 [1976]) explanation of the cultural revolution that occurred during the 1960s & 1970s. Bell's assertion that culture had been separated from its socioeconomic foundations is questioned; moreover, Bell is accused of disregarding how society & economics continue to influence culture. Although Bell demonstrates the prevalence of antibourgeois sentiment in Europe since the 17th century, he fails to account for the actual cultural revolutions & ignores class issues in the US & Europe. In addition, Bell's reliance on the Protestant ethic to explain the cultural revolutions is repudiated, because the Protestant ethic's influence was not prevalent & had begun to decline. The authors' (1971) account of the cultural revolutions -- that economic & institutional transformations engendered the rise of a new class -- is offered as an alternative to Bell's argument. Although the complete collapse of the middle class is deemed unlikely, it is concluded that a novel ideology that encourages self-discipline & conquers alienation would safeguard against such a destructive culture. J. W. Parker

In recent years all manner of research instrurnents and techníques and the quality of the data they yie1d have been placed under critical scrutiny. This artic1e brings a fresh perspective - the sirnultaneous comparison and evaluation of data secured with a wide variety of instruments in a single community setting-to some of the fundamental problems and questions involved in securing va/id responses. It is asserted that securing valid responses consistent with the behavior and phenomenology of the respondent in ordinary non-research situations is a sina qua non of the other forms of data oontrol to which socia'! scientists have tended to limit their attention. Because severa'! fie1d workers utilizing a variety of techniques were continuously able to check, re-check and cross-check information gathered from a particular respondent, a number of types of errors and sources of rnisinformation were revealed. These errors and misinformation result from purposeful intent, the temporary character of the tole of the respondent, the psychological characteristics of the individual respondent and from the involuntary inability of the respondent to meet the demands of the interview situation. Given these sources of error and misinformation, the problem confronting the analyst and theinterviewer is almost overwhelming. TraditionaHy the anthropologist has coped with this problem by assigning different weights to the responses of different respondents and to the responses from a single respondent gathered at diferent times and under differenr circumstanoes. In doing this he can never be sure that other procedures or further probing might not have yielded different information, and he has difficulties in objectively supporting the validity of his interpretations. But the same social psychological apparatus which produces different levels of response in free and depth interviewing also operates in other types of field instruments. The central problems lies in the fact that al'! answers to the same question in standardized interviews are not ofequal weigÍft, and cannot be treated as suchv In assigning equal weights the analyst simply adds up the conscious and unconscious misinformation, bias and accuracy and treats them aH as equal.Poll-type surveys secure and provide information in those specialized areas of mass society where otherwise such information is not readily available. Such surveys are valuable when they probe re'latively simple areas of choices among current alternatives avaílable at the public level; for example, presidentíal pol1s. However, when the object of research is to study at bottom the dynamics of a community or an institution, and where the problem of social and psychological levels of response is crucial to the research problem itself, other techniques are indispensable: forexampLe, in totalitarian societies even political and communications polling does not provide valid results since opinions which lead to such data are not adrnissible at the public level. ; Resumen en inglés.