Review

Reviewed Work(s): An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences. by Charles A. Lave and
James G. March
Review by: David D. McFarland
Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Mar., 1977), pp. 196-197
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2065803
Accessed: 27-09-2019 07:00 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

extend access to Contemporary Sociology

This content downloaded from 5.36.75.38 on Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:00:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
196 CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY: A JOURNAL OF REVIEWS
An Introduction to Models in the Social Sci-
ences, by CHARLES A. LAVE and JAMES G.
MARCH. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
$6.95 paper.
DAVID D. MCFARLAND
University of California, Los Angeles
Are you a mathematical sociologist who
"earns his or her way" by teaching an inter-
disciplinary "Introduction to the Social Sci-
ences" course to students whose interests are
not yet focused on a single discipline, such
as sociology, let alone a sub-disciplinary spe-
cialty, such as mathematical sociology, and
who (worse yet) have had no mathematics
since ninth grade algebra? If so, the book
under review is something you should con-
sider assigning as a supplementary text. It
might make the course a lot more interesting
to teach without in the process scaring away
most of the students.
The book has an informal, chatty style,
with catchy titles and even (I kid you not!)
poems. No college level mathematics is re-
quired at any point, and the little amount of
mathematics that is involved is introduced at
the most leisurely pace imaginable: the very
first equation I found appears on page 91,
where we are told about Sally, who cuts a
class to tune up her VW, and who assigns
numerical values to the probabilities that it
will work much better, work the same, or
blow up. (The latter, in case you are curious,
is .05.) Again, still concerning the leisurely
pace, the reader will be well into the final
chapter (p. 361) before encountering the idea
of rates of change; and even there discussion
is confined to finite differences, using delta
notation-no mention of derivatives.
The book begins with an eighty-four page
discussion of model development and use.
There are a number of such discussions in the
literature, but this differs from others by its
wittiness and informality, and also by its
restriction to verbal models. For example, we
read, "Suppose you are sitting in class when
the person next to you asks a really dumb
question. . . . [and] you also know that the
person next to you is a football player" (page
25). The task is to produce a "model" of a
process which might produce such an ob-
servation.
The discussion begins with what the au-
thors call "a simple model," namely the
verbal assertion, "Football players are dumb"
(p. 25). (Many authors would object to
calling that a "model.") The discussion even-
tually reaches the point of trying to set up
This content downloaded from 5.36.75.38 on Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:00:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
critical experiments to choose among much
more sophisticated (but still completely non-
mathematical) "models" such as "Model 2.
Everyone wants to feel successful. Achieving
success in any one area, for example, ath-
letics, is enough to make most people content"
(p. 58). Interestingly, none of the "models"
considered mentions the possibility that su-
perior athletes who do not satisfy the usual
admission standards are admitted anyhow.
Every page or two the reader is interrupted
with a boldface upper case command to
"STOP AND THINK," followed by sugges-
tions of the lines along which thought should
proceed: "What does the model leave out?
Are there important factors omitted by this
simplification?" (p. 30), or "What does the
model predict will happen in this situation?"
(p. 303), or suggestions which are specific
to the model then under discussion. (These
Stop and Think suggestions are in addition to
exercises at the ends of the chapters, exercises
whose general flavor is similar to that of the
text they accompany.)
After the introductory eighty-four pages,
the book contains four chapters, each devoted
to consideration (in about as much depth as
could be expected in a book requiring no
college level mathematics) of mathematical
modeling of some particular phenomenon. A
seventy-one page chapter on individual deci-
sion-making, emphasizing expected utility
maximization and analysis of choice within
the decision tree framework, will be of more
interest to psychologists and statisticians than
to sociologists. A ninety page chapter on "ex-
change," which consists of an elementary
treatment of indifference curves for supply
and demand, will be of more interest to the
few remaining economists who do not know
calculus than to sociologists whose specializa-
tion places them within the realm of "ex-
change theory." The ninety-three page chap-
ter on "adaptation," which treats some simple
learning models, will be of more interest to
psychologists than to sociologists.
The single chapter which bears upon so-
ciology more than any other discipline is the
seventy-seven page chapter on diffusion. This
chapter's catchy titles include "Explorations
of Social Diseases." Now to oldsters such as
myself, "social disease" was a euphemism for
VD, but several present-day students I queried
claimed they had no idea what the expression
"social disease" meant, so I conclude that in
this case the authors' wittiness was lost on the
younger generation.
Nevertheless the chapter does include seri-
ous discussions of the spread of divorce,
 OCCUPATION, WORK, AND LEISURE 197
rumors, economic development, and other ob-
jects of diffusion among undifferentiated indi-
vidual units and through various kinds of
social structures. The authors make the useful
distinction among "birth processes," "birth
processes with limits," and "broadcast proc-
esses." So despite a joke whose humor es-
capes contemporary college students, that
chapter has something to say to students who
are prospective sociologists.
In the event that you happen to be teaching
"Introduction to Mathematical Sociology,"
rather than "Introduction to Social Science,"
there is a much more suitable textbook avail-
able Mathematical Sociology, by R. K. Leik
and B. F. Meeker. If, however, you are
teaching an interdisciplinary social science
course whose students have negligible mathe-
matical training, and you would like to beef
it up a bit, this book might be exactly what
you need.
Occupations, Work, and Leisure
Work and Play: Ideas and Experience of
Work and Leisure, by ALASDAIR CLAYRE.
New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 217 pp.
$11.00 cloth.
ANDREA FONTANA
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
In an era of trite cliches about work aliena-
tion and gratuitous attacks on the edifice of
modern technological society it is refreshing
to see a work which carefully examines as-
sumptions too often taken-for-granted. This
book provides a novel approach to the study
of industrialization which should be carefully
heeded by sociologists, economists, and other
scholars interested in the study of work and
its cultural implications.
The work reviewed here poses the question
of whether work is the central life interest as
commonly assumed or whether play is the
area which provides people with fulfillment
and happiness. The book is divided in two
distinct parts. The first part traces the origin
and the development in the nineteenth cen-
tury of ideas critical of industrialization and
their claim that technology has caused work
to become monotonous and repetitious and
thus has dehumanized it. The second part
examines data to see the fit between the criti-
cal ideas and the working classes' own no-
tions.
Rousseau, Schiller, and other early critics
This content downloaded from 5.36.75.38 on Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:00:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
of machinery are examined. Marx's views on
the constraining nature of work in modern
societies are presented, followed by the strong
ideas of William Morris against the conditions
of technological work. All of the writers ex-
amined share the following assumptions: (1)
if given a chance human beings would seek
art and intellectual improvement, (2) it would
be relatively easy to change the current state
of affairs, (3) the center of life is meaningful
work, and (4) the pre-industrial past was
better.
Clayre points out that the assumptions of
these writers do not in fact reflect the posi-
tion of many pre-industrial workers. He uses
Mandeville's early theory that no objective
standards of measurement exist apart from the
members' own expectations of a situation
and he proceeds to show whatever scanty
evidence of pre-industrial workers' accounts
he can muster.
The data, (limited by and large to ballads
and folksongs, since writing was undertaken
by the rich and the clerical) indicate that
culture rather than technology determines
satisfaction for people. Thus, concludes the
author, the philosophical critiques of indus-
trialization reflect but the view of a particular
group, "the philosophical observers of indus-
trialization, who did not themselves for the
most part work with their hands" (p. 178).
The author could have gone further in his
suggestions of alternate central life interests,
suggestions which are barely sketched in this
volume. But to do so perhaps would have
taken the writer far afield from his main
point, which he drives home in a clear and
succinct manner; to go on speaking of the
dehumanizing effects of technology and of
workers' alienation is but the perpetuation of
an unsubstantiated myth created by a group
of "armchair" theoreticians. Reality, as borne
out by the members of the working classes
themselves, is a far more complex endeavor.
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experi-
ence of Play in Work and Games, by
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI. San Fran-
cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975. No price listed,
cloth.
MURRAY S. DAVIS
University of California, San Diego
This is one of those books that makes one
realize once again the inefficiency, waste, even
tragedy of the current division of intellect in
the academy. This book's significance for so-