From the preface: “The present work and a simultaneously published companion volume, Theory and Practice of Social Planning, share an overall goal. They would conceptualize and illustrate both specialized planning for social programs or fields and the social aspects of more general planning endeavors. Of particular concern here is the demonstration through use of a number of critical planning concepts often discussed only in the abstract. Author and reader, of course, are concerned with specific policies and with programs in specific fields. The studies presented – they are short monographs rather than true chapters – introduce issues and problems in a variety of high-priority areas. The specific rationale for selection and the manner in which each study is employed are discussed in the first chapter.” Topics include: the anti-poverty war, child delinquency, income security, city renewal, community psychiatry, and the delivery of social services at the local level.

ALFRED J. KAHN was professor of Social Policy and Planning at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

This 1942 volume is the fourth edition of Social Work as a Profession, originally published in 1935, detailing the vast growth of social work as a profession from its emergence as a humanitarian effort in the nineteenth century to the rapid changes in professionalization at the end of the 1930s. It includes census data on the number of social workers, as well as additional figures on salaries and educational and training.

Esther Lucile Brown was research associate in the Department of Statistics at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This study deals with philanthropic foundations: their types, organization, boards of trustees, finances, professional staff, methods of operation, grant programs, areas of interest, reporting and publicity, and legal problems. It is based on extensive interviews, correspondence, questionnaires, examination of the literature in the field, and its author’s long experience with the Russell Sage Foundation and as consultant and adviser to other foundations and philanthropic organizations. It is designed to assistant foundations and to serve as an aid to prospective donors and their advisers in setting up such institutions.

F. Emerson Andrews was director of publications at the Russell Sage Foundation.

A general history of large American philanthropic foundations from their creation in the nineteenth century to the larger development of such foundations in the twentieth century, this 1954 book is an attempt to provide a systematic, historical interpretation of twentieth-century foundation principles, planning, and operation.

Joseph C. Kiger taught history at the University of Alabama and Washington University, St. Louis.

Written in response to the question of who should organize, administer, and finance professional schools of nursing, this 1948 book, sponsored by the National Nursing Council, examines what the future of nursing entailed and presents a plan for standardized curricula and training in nursing education.

Esther Lucile Brown was director of the Department of Studies in the Professions of the Russell Sage Foundation.

How is the computer modeling of socioeconomic systems being used in government decision making? Is it providing the needed guidance? When it is not, why not? What is its future? How can it be made more useful for policy purposes? To address these questions, the authors investigated a multitude of different types of models being applied or developed in a wide variety of policy areas. They examined models of municipal operations, models of the national economy, and models of the world to detail the tensions between policy modeling and policymaking.

This is a study of industrial organization, viewed in the light of moral and legal evolution. This  book explores a number of themes in the sociology of law, including: the relevance of legal theory to private non-state institutions, the nature of legality and its social foundations, incipient and inchoate law, legal cognition, and the relation between law and politics. These general topics are explored in regard to the extension of the rule of law to modern industrial employment.

Philip Selznick was professor of sociology and law at the University of California, Berkeley.

This book takes origin from Cornell’s program for research and training in culture and applied science, addressing the question of facilitating the introduction of modern agriculture, industry, and medicine to areas that are deficient in these technologies. Of central concern is the fact that technological innovations are apt to have consequences ranging from hostility toward the innovator to extensive disruption and crisis in the society. More generally, people resist changes that appear to threaten basic securities, that they do not understand, or that are forced on them. This casebook offers actual examples of efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, to bring about a change in some culture, with the desirability of using social science as an aid to technology.

Contributors: John Adair, Anacleto Apodaca, Wesley L. Bliss, Henry F. Dobyns, Allan R. Holmberg, Margaret Lantis, Alexander H. Leighton, Allister MacMillan, Morris Edward Opler, Tom Taketo Sasaki, Lauriston Sharp, Rudra Datt Singh, Edward H. Spicer, and John Useem.

Edward H. Spicer was professor of anthropology and sociology, University of Arizona.

A plan for their national collection and a handbook of methods recommended by the committee on governmental labor statistics of the American Statistical Association. This volume presents the consensus of opinion of the members of the Committee on Governmental Labor Statistics concerning problems involved in the collection and publication of adequate employment statistics for the United States.

Ralph G. Hurlin was director of the Department of Statistics of the Russell Sage Foundation.

William A. Berridge was associate professor of economics at Brown University.

A volume of the “Population of the United States in the 1980s” series commissioned by the National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census, which utilized data from the 1980 census to analyze trends in American life, Dollars and Dreams explores the dramatic changes in U.S. standard of living as wage stagnation and rising income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s began to undermine Americans’ traditional economic optimism. Levy examines various social and economic trends in income distribution since World War II, such as the rise of the suburbs, the fall of the steel industry, the baby bust, double-income families, single-parent households, income growth among the elderly, and deficits in Washington. His follow-up, New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change, was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1999.

FRANK LEVY is Daniel Rose Professor of Urban Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.