Magazines: Sociology in English

Last winter a little-known magazine called Transaction charged that the President’s State of the Union message was a barely recognizable description of the U.S. The message relied too heavily on economic bookkeeping, too little on social accounting, wrote Bertram M. Gross, professor of political science at Syracuse University. To reflect the quality as well as the quantity of American life. Gross said, the President should deliver an annual “Social Report” that deals in the round with the state of education, arts, crime and disease in the U.S.

The Transaction article followed a series of talks Gross had had with White House aides. At the time, the magazine had a circulation of only 12,000, but once the provocative article appeared, Gross was summoned back to the White House. His ideas were incorporated into a speech President Johnson gave in March. L.B.J. instructed the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to develop a study of “social indicators” along the lines Gross had suggested. And Gross was hired as a HEW consultant.

Rarely are sociological ideas so rapidly translated from print into action, but then Transaction is no ordinary sociological publication. Written in brisk English, it examines such diverse material as mental hospitals, college sororities, and flying-saucer watchers. It was founded by Alvin W. Gouldner, 46, professor of sociology at St. Louis’ Washington University, who was anxious to convey the findings of the social sciences to a wider public. Financed by the university, the magazine, which sells for 75¢, has reached a circulation of 21,000; in November, it will convert from a bimonthly to a monthly.

One Taboo. Editor Leonard Zweig, 36, ransacks the scholarly journals and attends all the social-science conventions in a constant search for ideas that can be turned into Transaction articles. Since social scientists have a habit of talking in professional jargon and burying their leads somewhere in the middle of their stories, Zweig has to edit heavily. But there are few complaints. Wrote Raoul Naroll, professor of anthropology, sociology and political science at Northwestern University: “It is startling to see some of my thoughts coming back to me in plain English.”

Editor Zweig has only one taboo: he refuses to run any articles with an ideological ax to grind. “Readers can take our ideas and fit them into their own ideologies,” he says. “We are in the rationality business.”