Cohort Analysis is a method of separating age, period and cohort effects from time-series social survey data classified by age and period. The method is known to be useful in the study of social change. Many authors have pointed out, however, that cohort analysis has an identification problem and that the three effects cannot be uniquely separated without some prior information. In order to overcome the difficulty, this paper describes Bayesian cohort models in which prior information is assumed that the parameters of the effects change gradually and Akaike's Bayesian information criterion, ABIC, is used to select the best model. Four Bayesian cohort models are presented: L-APC and N-APC are ordinary three-effect cohort models for a qualitative and a quantitative response variable, respectively; L-[AP]PC and N-[AP]PC models contain the age-by-period interaction effect instead of the age effect. These models enable us to analyze a data set arranged not only in a standard cohort table but also in a general cohort table. They can also handle a data set with some unobserved values. The SSM (Research on Social Stratification and Social Mobility in Japan) data are analyzed to illustrate the usage of the proposed method.

View full abstract

     Much of the empirical research on the social stratification process tends to focus on the relation between father's and son's occupational status and, too often, neglects it's dynamic features. This situation changed in the 1980s when sociologists began to use event history analysis in empirical research, but we might not know enough about relations between career mobility and time dependent variables yet.
     In this paper, attention is directed toward the conceptual work of career mobility processes. First, we distinguish two types of the dynamic processes in career mobility taking place, and second, present empirical examples for these processes from an analysis of SSM (Social Stratification and social Mobility) data.

View full abstract

     One of the main conclusions of the population ecology of organizations is the proposition that every organization has structural inertia and that selection pressures in modern societies favor organizations with high levels of inertia. This contradicts some main assumptions of strategic-adaptation perspective of organizational management. We tried to clarify the effects of structural inertia on organizational adaptations.
     We did life-time analyses of 313 electric factory organizations in Kanagawa prefecture. We find that the organizations with large capital are more adaptive than originally small ones. In this sense, there are some inertial effects of original capital on organizational adaptations. But we cannot conclude the positive effects of structural inertia on organizational adaptations.

View full abstract

     The purposes of this paper are to examine what change is considered as sex-role development and then to evaluate the sex differences of children by means of the rating standard of sex-role development examined before.
     Taking a development for an average difference between two age groups, some hypotheses about sex-role development were tested by a statistical data of younger and older age groups of primary school children. Consequently 4 rating standards were selected: those were (1) an increase of the degree of coincidence in the norm of sex-role among boys and girls. (2) an increase of differentiation between masculine and feminine role, (3) specifications in masculine and feminine roles, and (4) an increase of deviation of self from the norm of sex-role.
     Using rating standards of development ((2)-(4)), the sex differences were further analyzed. It was unexpectedly founded that boys developed earlier than girls. Some factors of the sex differences were considered.

View full abstract

     The purpose of this article is to understand Darwinism as a construct of logic and to reveal its sociological potential. Darwinism is a theory of reproductive systems and the consequences of their survival process, i.e. “evolution”. In this sense, Darwinism can refer to phenomena other than the biological; it can describe how a certain constituent of culture and a certain type of social organization will reproduce itself and survive.
     The important turning point of evolutionary theory was from Lamarckism to Darwinism. This article, at first, clarifies the nature of this conversion. The Lamarckians claim that a system selects choices for its own future, while the Darwinians claim that environment selects a certain kind of system. The former explains the change of a certain system on the level of an individual system, while the latter explains it as a replacement of individual systems. This suggests that social evolution theories about a system like Luhmann's have no relation to Darwinism even though they in many cases have Darwinism-like outlooks. Here, this article examines the meaning of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” a proposition about reproductive efficiency, and points out some inadequacies in existing applications of this phrase in sociology. The concepts, ‘survival’ and ‘adaptation’, are on a different level from ‘development’ in the ordinary sense. The following concepts in social evolution theories are criticised: ‘selection,’‘differentiation,’ and ‘stages of development’.
     This article also throws light on some other aspects of Darwinism. Darwinism explains change of a certain system on the aggregate level as a replacement of individual systems. Thus Darwinism is a kind of micro-macro-linking theory. Here, this article refers to the theories of niche and altruism. These can be understood as theories about the process in which the character of the individual system is determined on the aggregate level. In this way, Darwinism expresses an emergent property.
     It may be possible to apply these considerations to persons whose characters are determined under social processes. This article proposes the reconstruction of Darwinism as a theory for considering the alienation of people under such conditions.

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract