Sociologists have a predilection for the collective. We are centrally concerned with social facts, characteristics of collectivities that give shape and motivation to individual action. Sociological research on schooling shares this interest in the collective. School resources, composition, climate, leadership, and governance, all collective attributes of schools, are often looked to as sources of influence on the outcomes of schooling for individual students.Yet the study of school organization is marked more by failure than by success. It is especially significant that the most important contribution by sociologists to research on schooling-the famous Coleman Report of 1966-is also the most spectacular failure to connect the collective with the individual in an educational setting. Variation in school conditions was largely unrelated to differences in student outcomes, as school-level effects were dwarfed by the powerful influence of the home environment for student learning. Though policymakers drew implications from the positive impact on learning of the proportion of White students in a school, the effect of racial composition was small compared to the great importance of individual family background factors. This pattern of results, emphasizing the individual over

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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.American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.A theoretical model is developed in which organizational structure is related to the type of coordination in the organization-planning or programming versus feedback or mutual adjustment. It is argued that the nature of the mechanism of coordination employed in the organization in turn affects the volume and direction of communications in the organization. Hypotheses are developed relating the variables of complexity, formalization, and centralization to communication rates. These hypotheses are tested in a 1967 study of 16 health and welfare organizations using a number of different measures of communications. In general, interdepartmental communications, both scheduled and unscheduled, are found to be affected most by these structural characteristics. INTERNAL communications in organizationshave been the subject of considerable discussion in the literature on organizations, yet empirical studies which attempt to measure various aspects of organizational communications in organizations are scarce, Landsberger's (1961) article being a notable exception. In this paper we shall provide a framework for relating communication patterns to organizational structure and discuss some results of a test of this framework in 16 health and welfare organizations.Usually, communications have been related to only one aspect or dimension of organizational structure. For example, Victor Thompson (1961), building upon an earlier study by Dalton (1950), showed the relationship between communication patterns and the degree of specialization within the organization. In their summary of a number of studies, Blau and Scott (1962) noted the relationship between communication patterns and status in an organization. Still other studies have related communication patterns to rules (Gross, 1953;Blau, 1955) and to power (McCleery, 1957; Smith, 1966). However attempts to weave together all these aspects of organizational structure and the * This investigation was supported in part by a research grant from the Social and Rehabilitation Services, Vocational Rehabilitation Administration, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Washington, D.C. We wish to express our appreciation to Harry Sharp and the Wisconsin Survey Laboratory who conducted most of the interviews for this study and to The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin for computer funds. We wish additionally to acknowledge the helpful comments of Robert Dewar.

The coronavirus continues to take a devastating toll on the population of the USA. But that toll is not identical across all segments of the population. Specifically, Black citizens are more likely than their White counterparts to experience the dislocations associated with the coronavirus. Nor is the extent of racial differences fully known, given limitations to the testing, hospitalization, and other data currently compiled. What does emerge, however, is an understanding that the reported outcomes reflect social inequities rather than biological predispositions. The inequities flow from both historical forces and contemporary ones that leave sizeable fractions of the Black population without access to quality healthcare or safe environments. The discrepancies suggest that the development of safe and effective vaccines might not eliminate the racial disparities associated with COVID-19, for that development will not alone erode levels of structural racism in the society. Concerted actions that engage multiple segments and participants are demanded.

This study examined the organizational context in which medical societies composed of women physicians were formed in the last decade of the nineteenth century in America. The inquiry was centered on the relationship between the number of existing organizations and the formation of a particular category of association. Two explanations for a relationship between the number of organizations and the establishment of women's medical societies were investigated: (1) the opportunities existing organizations allow for individuals to acquire skills they can use to start other organizations; and (2) the importance of social networks built within existing organizations. The results showed more medical societies in the cities where women's medical societies emerged than in a matched set of cities. The results would seem to imply that it is the presence of organizations similar to the focal one that is related to the formation of a particular kind of organization not the overall level of organizational activity.