The essays address five themes, 1) Bureaucracy and its impacts on work, industrial planning processes and the means by which decisions are made by power cliques; 2) Crime and Morality in the factory and white collar work including the work of the advertising man; 3) Leadership and Legitimacy including a brilliant essay on the "The Crisis of Confidence in Modern Politics"; 4) Expertise including the classic essay, "The Springdale Case" written with Arthur Vidich that explains the ethical and intellectual challenges of writing the book "Small Town in Mass Society" within the context of a bureaucratically controlled research study sponsored by Cornell University; and 5) Culture and Community which contains five essays on a range of topics including art, culture, styles of dissent and a theory of the contemporary American Community, written with Arthur Vidich, which turns out to be one of the most prophetic essays on contemporary communities and populist ideologies ever written. Anyone interested in what happened to American politics in 2016 will need to read this essay.
Bensman's contributions to sociology in general and to various sub-disciplines - such as industrial and governmental bureaucracies, political legitimacy, the psychology and ethics of occupations within modern bureaucracies - are well represented in this collection of essays. While many sociologists have only known Bensman as the co-author of "Small Town of Mass Society", this carefully selected compilation of his essays edited by Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham, clearly shows him to be one of the most insightful social theorists of the 20th century. His apprenticeships with Hans Gerth at the University of Wisconsin and C. Wright Mills at Columbia University were instrumental in sharpening his natural analytical skills. His autobiographical essay reveals how the child of a shoemaker, living on the margins of society in upstate Wisconsin, turned what might otherwise be an inherent social disadvantage for upward mobility, into an opportunity to prove the world wrong. Bensman was a "sharp cookie" and he used his brains to make career opportunities that others could not possibly imagine. Those same analytical skills have turned this book into a classic study of American bureaucracy and its impacts on occupational ethics, expertise and the community values of today.
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