BOOK REVIEWS
region in relation to the nation as a whole. With-
in the region, centrifugal forces will continue
to operate, producing the familiar picture of
declining central cities and growing rings. If
anything, the projections appear conservative.
As the preliminary results of the 1960 census
indicate, the dynamic forces pinpointed by
Vernon and his collaborators seem to operate
rather more rapidly than they anticipated.
Well-written and based upon a wealth of re-
search material, the book deserves to be read by
all sociologists. Those with a special interest in
problems of metropolitan development will
need to refer also to the more detailed mono-
graphs upon which it is based.
KURT B. MAYER
Brown University
Governance of Colleges and Universities. By
JOHN J. CORSON. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1960. Pp. viii+209. $5.50.
Robert M. Hutchins once remarked that,
insofar as the administration of universities is
concerned, faculties have traditionally mani-
fested a preference for anarchy over any form
of government. Since the times when colleges
and universities were bands of scholars who
governed themselves, however, a good many
others have got into the act. The process of
academic decision-making, as a consequence,
has become so involved that it is not always
easy to ascertain just who is responsible for
what.
The intricacies of this whole process are
thoughtfully examined in John J. Corson's
book, Governance of Colleges and Universities.
The author is both a "several-time educator,"
as he calls himself, and one of the nation's best-
known management consultants. (Both perspec-
tives, incidentally, are evidenced in his presen-
tation.) The volume is ninth in the Carnegie
Series in American Education, a series being
issued "to provide facts and recommendations
which would be useful to all those who make or
influence the decisions which shape American
educational policies and institutions."
In brief, this book tells who the decision-
makers of higher education are and how they
arrive at the basic policies and procedureswhich
determine action. Corson looks first at the broad
problems of governance inherent in the college
or university as an administrative enterprise
and appraises the roles of trustees, presidents,
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541
departmental chairmen, and faculties. In a sec-
tion entitled "The Ecology of Governance,"
the influence exerted by outside groups such as
alumni, governmental agencies, professional
associations, accrediting organizations, donors,
foundations, and others is analyzed.
Although Corson's analysis is based princi-
pally upon what has already been written about
colleges and universities, it also stems from
some firsthand observations in ten institutions
and from "conversations and correspondence"
with a wide variety of individuals who are
directly involved in one way or another with
the governance of academic institutions,
Written with a full appreciation of the fact
that the administration of higher education is
and should continue to be different from that
of government, business, and industry, this
book is unusual for its balance and lack of
bias. The findings are not arranged to make a
predeterminedcase for any special mode. More-
over, there is no defense of cumbersome prac-
tices which are no longer adequate to meet the
increasingly complicated functions of higher
education. The descriptive and analytical ma-
terials, correspondingly, make this a very use-
ful volume.
For the sociologist who is interested in the
institutitonal processes of higher education, the
book is full of leads to further inquiry in an
area where emotion and rhetoric rather than
the interrelations of structure and function have
too long been guides to action.
LOGAN WILSON
University of Texas
Identity and Anxiety. Edited by MAURICE
STEIN, ARTHUR J. VIDICH, and DAVID MAN-
NING WHITE. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.
Pp. 658. $7.50.
Most of the essays in this volume were chosen
to illustrate "the pitfalls awaiting the persons
who would develop a personal style in mass
society." With the solemnity of the physician
palpating a diseased organ, the editors hold our
society up for diagnosis by sociologists, political
scientists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, phi-
losophers, and writers. The conclusions are
depressing: "Political and social upheavals of
our time .. . represent such pervasive and over-
whelming threats to stable identity that . . .
it almost appears as if the anxiety they arouse
can only be managed by defensive apathy."
 542 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Some representative themes are: commercial
pressures make it difficult to implement tradi-
tional values (Griff); neurotic unconscious im-
pulses have profound effect upon the choice of
career and may even wreck a career after it
has begun (Kubie); traditional orientations
such as liberalism and socialism are not perti-
nent to modern political and social problems
(Mills); the institutional pressures of the
teaching profession tend to produce desiccated
and inflexible personalities (Waller); philoso-
phers are eschewing traditional problems in
favor of inquiries into contentless technique
(Earle); it is difficult to synthesize an identity
in the face of the deteriorating values and the
diminishing emotional support offered by the
home (Moore) and the church (Wakefield).
The editors have also included essays on the
"dissolution of identities" that results from
extreme coercion. The topics include the be-
havior of people in organizations like mental
hospitals, prisons, and concentration camps
(Goffman); the effect on prisoners of the re-
form of thought practiced by Chinese Com-
munists (Lifton); the imprinting of unwel-
come ideas and the creation of apathy by di-
rect and indirect methods of brainwashing and
"menticide" (Meerloo).
What may result if one stumbles into any of
the numerous pitfalls, as most are apparently
destined to do? Again we are provided with a
long list of difficulties, most of which amount
to confusions about values and self: the per-
vasiveness of anxiety (May); the origins of
anxiety in the lack of freedom for self-realiza-
tion (Fromm-Reichmann); the indefinablefears
caused by the fact that "nobody really believes
in what he still takes for granted" (Riezler);
the atomization of the outer world in a complex
society with resultant increase in inner dis-
orientation (M. Mead); the development of
diffuse and negative identities (Erikson); per-
secutory anxiety, which sometimes produces
ego-surrender in the mass through affective
identification with a leader (Neumann).
The editors, reaching no "shortcut solutions,"
offer in a final section essays by or about men
who "have access to vital qualities emerging in
world history and . . . are able to incorporate
these qualities into their intellectual efforts."
The section includes creative essays in various
fields: poetry as a civilizing force (Bowra) and
as an expression of the desire to transform and
renew (Howe); values and emotions in the
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poetry of primitive people (Radin); individ-
uality (Cohen); the fruits of mysticism
(Fingarette); our position in history (Dardel,
Jaspers); an existential reinterpretation of
some traditional values (Buber).
The creativity that one is led to expect from
the array of scintillating names-Martin Buber,
Howard Becker, C. Wright Mills, George Or-
well, I. A. Richards, among others-is mani-
fested in a high proportion of the essays. The
editors have shown considerable acumen in
choosing provocative and relatively short se-
lections, most of which have not been reprinted
elsewhere. It is the interpretation and organiza-
tion of the reprinted material to which many a
reader will take exception. There is an implicit
promise of an organized theory in the editor's
description of identity and anxiety, which are
described as "central perspectives" which "al-
low us to undercut conventional interpretations
of many important social issues." The editors
do not make it clear how the undercutting is
to be done. Certain kindred issues are evident
in some of the essays, but the alien orientations
of the different writers preclude conceptual
unity. The editors maintain that the divergent
intellectual styles "illuminate" the same issues
and that these will become evident to the reader
who assumes the "generalist" identity and
reads the essays with his "sixth" and "seventh"
senses. Oft reiterated terms, like "mass so-
ciety," "reality," "identity," and "anxiety," ap-
parently provide keys to common themes, but
they are nowhere defined by the editors.
By grouping the papers under such lurid
titles as "The Terror and Therapy of Work"
and "The Encircled Mind," the editors have
distorted the meanings of some of the essays.
While these can be used to illustrate the diffi-
culties of establishing an identity in mass so-
ciety, they are not necessarily related to this
topic and seem to have been written with other
goals in mind. Among them are Fromm-Reich-
mann's clinical analysis of anxiety, Swado's dis-
cussion of the unskilled worker's lack of grati-
fications, Orwell's scintillating essay on politics
and the English language, and Gorer's ideas
about man's resistance to thinking about death.
In the introductory chapter the editors claim
an intellectual kinship with such writers as
William H. Whyte, David Riesman, and Erich
Fromm. In a reprinted essay, Harold Rosen-
berg identifies the works of these writers as
part of an old literary tradition concemed with
 BOOK REVIEWS
the destructive automata created by society.
Instead of Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe's me-
chanical man, or Melville's confidence man, the
current inheritors of the tradition worry about
other-directed and organization men, their loss
of identity, their escape from freedom. The
latter writers, Rosenberg thinks, are part of a
self-conscious intellectual caste, successful in
their quest for powerful positions in large
bureaucratic organizations,but alarmedbecause
they have become automata dominated by their
roles in "the dehumanized collective." Conse-
quently, they often suffer from profound de-
pression, "a force [which precludes] a . . .
radical and realistic understanding of American
life." The fear that we will all suffer the anxie-
ty and confused identity of the "Orgman" is
"not a conclusion based on social analysis but
a projection of the fate [these writers] have
chosen."
DANIEL R. MILLER
University of Michigan
FIRO: A Three-dimensional Theory of Inter-
personal Behavior. By WILLIAM C. SCHUTZ.
New York: Rinehart & Co., 1958. Pp. ix+
267. $6.50.
"The book is organized around a formal
theory. The range of phenomena to which this
theory is applicable may be called interper-
sonal behavior. . . . There are three interper-
sonal need areas, inclusion, control, and affec-
tion, sufficient for the prediction of interper-
sonal behavior." Any work which proposes a
formal theory intended to be necessary and
sufficient as a basic theory for the entire range
of interpersonal behavior cannot fail to be of
great interest, if not a great shock, to sociolo-
gists.
FIRO (meaning "Fundamental Interper-
sonal Relations Orientation") is one of the re-
cent theoretical works to come out of small-
group work (and as such can be very fruit-
fully compared with other theoretical works
depending primarily on small-group data for
inspiration and support, such as Thibaut and
Kelley's The Social Psychology of Groups). It
differs from most of the other theories in that
it makes an attempt at "coming-out." Its pau-
city of references to other data might be laid
to a certain shyness inevitable in any theoreti-
cal coming-out, but it is nonetheless striking.
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543
Schutz has tried to show that the three pri-
mates-inclusion, control, and affection-which
are measured by the FIRO questionnaire, as-
sume dominance in a sequential phase-shift of
group, as well as individual and cultural, de-
velopment and dissolution. First the problem
of inclusion dominates interpersonal behavior;
then control dominates; then affection. The
similarity of this phase-shift model to Par-
sons and Bales's phase-shift model in the
Working Papers is striking, but somehow the
Working Papers escape reference. During the
dissolution of a group the order of dominance
(of ultimate concern) is reversed: from affec-
tion to control to inclusiona-which is a some-
thing-more-than-Parsons-and-Bales. Group
compatibility, treated largely as a function of
complementarity of desired and expressed role
behavior, is considered at length, but primarily
relative to group productivity. Finally, the sub-
theories are collected into a proposed formal
general theory, which is not totally synthe-
sized into a system of equations.
FIRO seems to be a theory built around
and for instrumental task groups; its relevance
for the entire range of interpersonal behavior
is more an assertion than a description of
what the work attempts. Quite possibly this
chasm between aspiration and serious attempt
is due primarily to a failure to grasp fully the
fundamental question underlying every theory
in process of being constructed: precisely what
are the important questions to ask nature about
this universe of phenomena? One of the con-
sequences of the failure adequately to face this
question is the lack of any variable represent-
ing communication (how are inclusion, con-
trol, and affection to get around without com-
munication?) or learning (and thus no "val-
ues") unless in some way one can get "learn-
ing" out of "control."
The major potential contribution of FIRO
to sociology is its consideration of affection as
a basic variable of interaction-a variable
generally completely left out of sociology,
though Homans gave it far more adequate
treatment-and its development of a formal
theory of interaction that demonstrably gen-
erates specific, quantitative hypotheses to be
tested by measuring devices developed as an
integral part of the theory. The formal theory
of FIRO seems largely an attempted synthesis
of interpersonal behavior under a basic theory
of three interrelated quantitative variables-