Delbert Charles Miller Quotes

faces a renaissance if the leaves of social change can be read correctly. The permissive freedom of the 1960s and 1970s is being curtailed by some harsh economic realities. Parents and students alike are seeking the economic promise of job guarantees when the students graduate. Liberal arts education is on the defensive. Such training must demonstrate it has vocational opportunity or can be converted to such opportunity by postgraduate training. Sociologists who have had the freedom to do their own thing for 20 to 30 years are being forced to make some agonizing appraisals. The entire field of sociology has been placed under scrutiny. The drastic cuts in research funding are only one index of the governmental depreciation of sociology and most other social sciences. The loss of sociology majors and enrollments is another index of student and parental lack of confidence in sociology as a good investment. Academic sociologists who have placed applied sociology in a second-rate category are beginning to recognize that research training of graduate students must turn to applied training or jobs will not be available for many, if not most, of their graduate students. In a similar manner, research funding and graduate fellowships will not be available unless this change is made.

It is the big enterprises which occupy the strategic centers. Most small businessmen, independents, professionals and even farmers gain their livelihood largely as suppliers or as distributors for the large enterprises. It is the large enterprises which establish the price and wage policies of the nation. The pattern of union-management relations is set by the contracts drawn between big labor and big business. Governmental regulations grow up to harness and channel the economic power and practice of large enterprise. The personnel policies adopted by the large industry become the models for the entire industrial society.