Spelling Documents

We reproduce here the three texts that the subjects corrected and the accompanying instructions. The instructions paragraph and heading stayed the same on each of the three separate sheets on which the corrections were made. We rotated the

texts across subjects so that each text was used first one-third of the time.

NAME __________________________________  Net Number Right__________

Instructions: You are to correct the spelling errors in the selection below. Do this by circling the word which you think is incorrectly spelled andcorrecting it in the left margin . No money can be earned unless you follow both of these instructions! You will be paid as follows: $.25 for each of the first 4 errors found; $1.50 for each of the next 4 errors found; and $3 for any more errors found. You have only 4 minutes^[1] for this task. Any correct spellings which you identify as incorrect and change to an incorrect spelling will be subtracted from your total number of corrections. When you have completed this task, or time runs out, bring your paper to the monitor for scoring. Each of you has a different selection.

[Text #1] Let us now approach another exceadingly important aspec of this body of theory which relates to but goes beyond these main traditions. The emphasis on the importance of normative references as defining the situation for motivated and meaningful action has been noted. On the one hand, Weber, with reference to the cultural level, and Durkhem to the social, then came to the important conception of common normative elements, especially beliefs and values for Weber and the conscience colective for Durkheim. From these starting points it has gradually come to be understood that what I have called institusionalization and internalization (with reference to personality of the individual) of these normative elements constitute the primary focus of the control of action in social systems, threw processes whose general nature has come to be much better understood in recent years than preaviously.

The first aspect of this better understanding has come mainly from outside the behavoral sciences, namely from the

[1] Subjects were given only three minutes for the second and third rounds of work.

biological analysis of self-regulating systems and from the engineering analysis and design of information-processing and automaticly regulated systems. The biological model goes back at least to the conception of the constansy of the internal environment of the organism as self-regulating by Claude Bernard, especially as further developed by W. B. Cannon in his concept of homeostatis. It has, however, received an enormous recent impitus by the extension of such conceptions to the field of cellulur biology and biochemistry in the new knowledge about the mechanisms of heredity, both of species and of individual cells, through the complex molecules of DNA and RNA. The developments from engineering have of course involved the analysis of communications systems, computers and automation.

[Text #2] All of these developments have introduced a new perspective. It is that of the importance of the mechanisms responsable for the implementation of patterns for "plans" which, operating with low energy, can control systems of much higher energy. It has become clear that the outputs of such systems are closely analogus to symbols having meanings, and indeed there has been established a direct bridge between information theory and linguistics. It is above all across this bridge that contact has been made by these natural science conceptions with the historic problem areas of the disiplines dealing with human social behavior. The key proposition, one might say, is that social interaction operates overwelmingly through linguistic communication and that language and other simbolic media constitute the primary mechanisms of its control articulating as they must with the motivational mechanisms, internal to the personality, which are involved in intensional linguistic expression and in turn those involved with stiumlus, through reception of meanings, to overt action.

The bearing of this development on the ancient controversy over the relative significanse of Idealfactoren and Realfactoren in the social prosess should be evident. This very old problem presents quite clearly a false dilema in the sense that the nineteenth century argument over hereditary versus environment

in the biological sense involved a false dilema. Quite clearly both sets of factors are essential to any adequate analysis of proceses in social systems, including those by which concrete structures come to be changed from one for into another. This bald statment is not, however, taken alone, very helpful. It is necessary to be in a position to be much more specific about just what the changes are and just how (i.e., by what proceses) they occur.

[Text #3] The relations among these theoreticaly essential elements in the analysis of prosess must be established by a specifically socio-logical articulasion between the cultural categories of meaning and the psychological categories of motivation, an articulasion which has been taking shape in the conception of institutionalized values and norms on the one hand, of roles and colectivities on the other, as the primary structural components of social systems within which meaningful motivated action can be analized. In one sense systimatic attention to this type of analysis of motivated action is no longer a matter of "structural-functional" theory in the simpler meaning of that concept. It establishes a new level on which I think it safe to say the parallel terms are not structure and function but structure and prosess. The concept of function then becomes the common point of reference for the formulation of problems, which is common to both the others and which binds them together in terms of their relevence to the master concept of system.

By these criteria Max Weber was not in a strict sense a structural-functional theorist—not as strict as Durkhem or Radcliffe-Brown. He did, however, think in very similar terms, but without such strict refrence to the concept of a social system. His greater emphasis on motivated action and the coginate conception of process, however, has made his work a very important bridge to a more process-oriented sociology. The firm foundation in a systematic conception of a functionaly ordered and diferentiated system outlined above has, however, made it possible to make the Weberian type of analysis more rigorous and hence fruitfull than it originally was.