The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality

By Melvin L. Kohn

In The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality Melvin Kohn, a pioneer in the cross-national, comparative and collaborative study of social structure and personality examines his sociological research spanning a six-decade career to articulate a theory of social structure and personality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785270680

Book preview

The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality

The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality

Melvin L. Kohn

UNION BRIDGE BOOKS

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)

UNION BRIDGE BOOKS

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www.unionbridgebooks.com

© Melvin L. Kohn 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-066-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-066-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Preface

1.Hagerstown and Schizophrenia

2.Social Stratification and Parent–Child Relations in Washington, DC

3.The Torino Study

4.Men Employed in Civilian Occupations in the United States

5.The Transformation of the Occupations Study into a Longitudinal Analysis

6.Life on Sabbatical Leave in Norway and at the National Institute of Mental Health

7.Class, Stratification, and Personality

8.Poland under Communism

9.Occupational Self-Direction and Distress in Poland

10.The Vietnam War, Nixon, and Me

11.Japan

12.Germany – West and East

13.Poland and Ukraine in Transition to Capitalism and Democracy

14.The Presidency of the American Sociological Association, Ronald Reagan, and My Job Switch

15.My Two Exploratory Expeditions to China

16.China in Transition to a Modern Economy

17.Retirement, and My Last Sabbatical, at Deep Springs Junior College

18.The Theory I Propose

Index

Preface

In the course of a very long career as a sociologist, I have written or coauthored, with my collaborators, nine books in English and a multitude of articles about our research. I had thought when I published the last of these books, Adventures in Sociology: My Life as a Cross-National Scholar, a few months ago, that I could now at long last retire and catch up on reading new books and rereading old ones. But that was not to happen quite yet. As I thought about my professional life, it seemed to me that it had been given largely to the development of a theory about the relationship of social structure and personality. I thought I had done a reasonable job of presenting this theory in the memoir, but I concluded that I still had more to do to reach my goal of presenting a fully developed theory.

Adventures in Sociology had been different from all its predecessors in that it was a true memoir, the autobiography of a social scientist. I had tried to present my life and my work together, showing how my personal relationships and the institutions in which I worked influenced my work. I had also discussed at length my conflicts with my two prominent enemies, Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. I was very proud of presenting my life and my work in the same book.

I had also made an early decision that Adventures in Sociology would be a book written not only for my colleagues in sociology but also for a lay audience. I made a small but highly significant change of tense in my writing. In the original publications, I had used the present tense, i.e. American respondents (obviously, at the time of some particular study) value this or that characteristic for their children, while Italian parents (obviously, at the time of that study) value this or some other characteristic. In my memoir, all of this was changed into parents in some country at some time valued some characteristic, at other times valued this or some other characteristic. I did not assume that people’s values never change.

The book was warmly accepted both by my colleagues and by my neighbors who knew nothing about sociology but who enjoyed reading the book.

There was, however, one important limitation to the memoir, as I now see it. Although the memoir includes the very last study that I did, a study of that fascinating country of China, it was written very soon after completing the fieldwork for that study. I did not then realize the full implications of that study for the larger theory. I want now to finish that important task. To do this, I have made some very important changes in the text of the memoir to suit what I want to do in fully developing a complete theory of the relationship between social structure and personality – something that had been left incomplete.

For one thing, I want to emphasize the development of a theory, not the life of a particular sociologist. I have deliberately left out of this book everything about my early life that might have influenced my intellectual development, but had nothing to do with the theory that is the subject matter of this book. (For those readers who want to know more about my personal life, there is always the memoir to read.) In short, I want to focus on the task that I had left unfinished.

In particular, although my collaborators and I consistently found that social class and social stratification were the most important social factors affecting people’s values and orientations, we had also found interesting cross-national inconsistencies in people’s reactions to similar social conditions. We conscientiously presented these cross-national inconsistencies, and we even admitted that we could not entirely explain them. But now, I think I can explain them because the Chinese study has taught us a great deal more about the bearing of social structure on personality, not only in China, but everywhere.

I want to review all the studies I have conducted, but from today’s perspective, looking at each study from the perspective, not of the particular findings of that study as we saw them at the time of the research, but from how it contributes to our full understanding of the similarities and differences in the relationships of social structure and personality of the different countries we have examined.

Which brings me to the most important reason for wanting to write this book. In the months since I published the memoir, I have thought a great deal about why the cross-national discrepancies occurred, and whether they undermined the theory or can be used to explicate and expand the theory. That’s the essay I really wanted to write, and the most important reason for writing this book. And this part of the book is completely new.

Finally, I have decided not to include the statistical packages that underlie the various conclusions that I have drawn. Statistical findings are exceedingly expensive to publish, and I mean to make this book available to a wider audience than could afford a book that would contain all the necessary statistical tables. Most of my readers will accept my word that the official reviewers of my research in the various journals in which I have published the original papers accepted my conclusions. Moreover, I can suggest to my present readers that, if they are interested in examining the statistical tables, most of them were printed in my book published in 2006, titled Change and Stability: A Cross-National Analysis of Social Structure and Personality and translated into Chinese by the Social Sciences Academic Press of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2007. The American edition has long since gone out of print, but it is available in many public libraries. Of course, a book published in 2006 could not contain the most important study of all, that of China. But the article that my principal Chinese collaborators, Weidong Wang and Yin Yue, and I published in Social Forces (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2012) is also readily available. It is also certainly worth reading for a presentation of how the findings of this study appeared to its authors at the time of its completion.

Chapter 1

Hagerstown and Schizophrenia

I must begin this review of the research I conducted in Hagerstown with an explanation: Here is the story of a spectacularly successful research project conducted under preposterous circumstances. The details may be a bit sketchy (this is a report from decades ago), but the essentials are correct. The events are anything but ordinary. The research was carried out under very strange circumstances. I was hardly qualified to conduct this research. I ran into all sorts of difficulties. And yet the research was extraordinarily fruitful.

Scene: The annual meeting of a House of Representatives committee on drafting a budget for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), probably for Fiscal Year 1953. A member of the committee had the floor, and told the director of the NIMH about a recent, welcome experience. He was in Phoenix, Arizona, on a Saturday afternoon, had run out of worthwhile activities to pursue, and had stopped at the offices of a research field station in that city, not really expecting it to be open. But open it was, and brimming full of activity. The representative was duly impressed that federal employees were at work on a Saturday afternoon and commended the director of the NIMH, after which he invited a request for an increase in funds. The director of the NIMH, a psychiatrist named Robert Felix, a man with a well-deserved reputation for being fast on his feet, responded equivocally that he had shut down that field station. True, the personnel worked hard, but it was supposed to be a research unit, and it wasn’t doing any research. He went on to say that he and his colleagues were opening a research field unit in Hagerstown, Maryland. They had recently hired an expert in population studies to conduct research there. Bob Felix won the day. His audience quickly forgot the sad fate of the federal employees in Phoenix, Arizona, and were eager to hear about the plans for Hagerstown, Maryland. What the reader is unlikely to know, but what was well known to the members of the House committee, was that years earlier, Hagerstown had been the place where renowned research had been done by a man named Antonio Ciocco, and the new research unit was certainly being planned to pick up the threads of his work.

Here is where I enter the scene, and after this point I am more knowledgeable about the actions and reactions of the participants because I was very much involved. Sometime soon after the foregoing events, I was informed of their import. The expert in population studies was a young (23-year-old) man named Mel Kohn, recently recruited into the ranks of the US Public Health Service, with no relevant knowledge but with a very fresh PhD. I had joined the Public Health Service to escape the infantry. My knowledge of anything related to Hagerstown was nil, but I was a handy person to plug into an open slot. But the assignment was very real. I was to report to Hagerstown, to an already opened office in the Second National Bank Building, to do research.

Soon thereafter, I moved to Hagerstown. It was a small city (60,000 people). I could not see any reason to study Hagerstown rather than any other city in the United States. I didn’t see anything unique in my new office – actually Antonio Ciocco’s data storage room. It was full of the coal dust from three railroads. And I didn’t for the life of me understand what relationship there was between my dissertation research and whatever it was that I was to study in Hagerstown. But I was keenly aware that it was this or the infantry. So it was to be Hagerstown, and I accepted the assignment, not happily, but with remarkably little objection other than my appellation for the community, picked up from a truck driver I met in a local bar, as being the asshole of the earth.

I began planning the research I was to do in Hagerstown. Picture me in my office. I had acquired a secretary (I went to the US Employment Service and presented my description of a nonexistent job to a receptionist, who said it sounded interesting and she would take the job herself). When I swept out the coal dust, it was an acceptable office. My picture of myself in the office is of a man sitting in a swivel chair with his feet on the desk and a cigar in his mouth, reading innumerable journals in many fields.

It was interesting reading, from which I learned two important things. One was that sociologists working in the field of mental disorder were fixated on something called the social isolation hypothesis. The hypothesis had been introduced into the field by two men, Robert Faris and Warren Dunham, in a strange book. The substance of the book was a demographic analysis of rates of schizophrenia for the city of Chicago, perfectly reasonably done except for one thing – they had demonstrated that the conditions of life of various areas of Chicago that happened to have high rates of hospital admissions for schizophrenia were conducive to social isolation, but not that there was any necessary connection between social isolation and schizophrenia. Interesting. But they simply hadn’t shown that those conditions actually led to schizophrenia.

Nor was I the first person to recognize the lack of causal effect. The author of the preface to this very book (a distinguished sociologist named Ernest Burgess) had clearly pointed it out. Inter alia, the areas of the city that contributed the most cases of schizophrenia were also the lowest-status areas of the city, but Faris and Dunham completely ignored this fact. And so did dozens of other authors who replicated Faris and Dunham’s findings in city after city, in the United States and abroad. It seemed to me that nearly every month produced another study showing that rates of schizophrenia were highest in areas of the city that were conducive to social isolation, but never did anyone demonstrate that these conditions actually produced the schizophrenia.

Another set of findings also intrigued me. In countless studies, investigators showed that the relationships between people who later became schizophrenic and their parents were dissimilar from those of normal (non-schizophrenic) people. Great, better than Faris and Dunham. Except for one thing. The samples of normal controls in most of these studies were mainly samples of hospital employees, not well matched with the schizophrenics themselves.

To my astonishment, both of these literatures were methodologically weak. And to my huge delight, there was a solution to both methodological problems in my office, available to me (and, essentially, to no one else) in Ciocco’s wonderful data files. All one had to do was to find the people who became schizophrenic in the years following adolescence, and then to match every one of them with someone of the same social background (in terms of gender, both parents’ achieved educational levels, father’s occupational level, and whatever else was available in the data). I could hardly wait to do it. I had discovered the one respect in which Hagerstown was superior to all other cities in the United States for doing research on schizophrenia: Only in Hagerstown could one design research that would overcome the methodological defects of past studies. The solution lay in Ciocco’s wonderful data.

I had to overcome a few obstacles. One was that I needed the cooperation of