Sociology 230 - A Portrait of Vidich's 1963 Course in the Community

Arthur Vidich, Circa 1959

Perhaps the best means of understanding the type of sociological interests of Arthur Vidich is through viewing the courses and course materials he used to teach about The Community - one of his most popular courses over his forty year teaching career at the New School for Social Research.  Below is the complete course outline and reading list for Sociology 230.  The books he included in Sociology 230 during the spring of 1963 still represent some of the classic studies of traditional and non-traditional communities. Anyone interested in community studies will find this reading list of immense interest. 

THE COMMUNITY                                    A. Vidich

Sociology 230                                                                                      Spring, 1963

Wednesday: 6:20- 8:00

It is expected that within the first two or three weeks each student will have selected a subject for his work in the course. This means that each student is expected to select a problem for himself and to submit the results of his research in the form of a paper at the end of the semester. There will be no final examination.

The course will focus primarily on the issues and problems of the community in modern times, particularly in the United States, though students with an interest in other parts of the world may elect to do their work in an area of their own choice.

Course Outline and Reading List

Everyone should read:

M. Stein, Eclipse of Community, Princeton, 1960

J. Dollard, Caste and Caste in a Southern Town, Anchor paperback

F. Hunter, Community Power Structure, U. of N. Carolina, 1953

Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition, Harcourt-Brace, 1937

Sealey, Sims, and Looseley, Crestwood Heights, Basic Books, 1956

W.F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, U. of Chicago

C. Wright Mills, White Collar, Oxford

Lewis Mumford, Culture of the City; The City in History

1.    Sept. 26: Introduction: the classical 19^th century model of analysis as posed by Maine, Marx, Tonnies, Durkheim in the face of 20^th century bureaucracy and centralization.

A. Vidich and J. Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society, Anchor, 1960

2.       Community as Myth and Illusion: institutional and psychological penetration of community by central institutions.

T. Veblen, Absentee Ownership

3.       Institutional and Psychological Integration of Mass Life and the Breakdown of Community Identifications.

4.       Class Identifications as Unconscious Communities

C. Wright Mills, White Collar

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy

Lewis and Maude, The English Middle Classes

Bendix and Lipact, Class, Status and Power, Free Press

5.       Mass Politics and National Identifications

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, paperback

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, paperback

Karl. E. Meyer, The New America; Politics and Society in the Age of the Smooth Deal, Basic Books, 1961

H.D. Laswell, the Political Writings of; Free Press, 1951

6.       Specialized Communities

a.       Leadership Communities

F. Hunter, Community Power Structure

Davis and Gardner, Deep South (part on cliques)

White, Street Corner Society

b.      The Corporation

W.H. White, the Organization Man
Is Anybody Listening?

Any issue of Fortune

Robins Moore, Pitchman, Popular Client

F. Wakeman, The Hucksters,
Executive Suite

Hallie, Burnett, The Brain Pickers, Dell

c.       Occupations and Professions

Carr-Saunders, The Professions

Warner and Low, The Social System of a Modern Factory

Harvey Svados, On the Line, paperback

C.W. Bakke, The Unemployed Worker, Yale

d.      Prisons, Hospitals, Universities and Churches as Communities

Stanton and Schwartz, the Mental Hospital, Basic Books, 1954

Paul Harrison, Authority and Power in the Free Church Tradition, Princeton, 1959

T. Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, Sagamore Press, paper, 1957

S. Barr, Purely Academic, Simon and Shuster

G.M. Sykes, The Society of Captives, Princeton, 1958

P. Goodman, The Community of Scholars

C. Wright Mills, Sociological Imagination

e.      Life in Total Institutions

B. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, Free Press, 1960

Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching, Wiley, 1932

Stein, Vidich and White, Identity and Anxiety, Free Press, 1960

Part 2, Section E, the Dissolution of Identities

7.       Psychological “Pseudo” – Communities in Mass Life

Robert Merton, Mass Persuasion, Harper, 1946

Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, Modern Library

Heinrich Mann, The Blue Angel, Signet Book

Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust, New Classics SeriesMiss Lonely Hearts, New Classics

S. Freud, The Future of an IllusionDelusion and Dream, Beacon paperback, 1956

W.L. Warner, The Living and the Dead, Yale, 1960

Seeley, Crestwood Heights