Podgorecki presents his own participant observation of the political and organizational pressures that were exerted upon sociologists to produce dogmatically proper results to give a false diagnosis of social reality. He analyzes the roles of Polish sociologists as dissenters, observers, conformists, or eager agents of the rapid and imposed changes designed to bring about an alien communist utopia. Podgorecki synthesizes data pertinent to social changes during the period of real socialism and the new system of formal and informal stratification mainly based on the access to formal power and its shadow counterparts.

Finally, he discusses the social stratum of the intelligentsia, considered to be the vital link between the worker-based phenomenon of Solidarity and the traditional Polish ethos, and their intricate alliance that generated the sparks of the inflammatory revolution that changed the face of Europe. Recommended for scholars and students of sociology, political science, and East European studies.

Podgorecki examines oppression that results from pressures inside social groupings, large and small, effected by different normative and conformity-inducing mechanisms designed to regulate human behavior. Podgorecki provides a critical examination of the empirical findings in the most important and imaginative experimental studies of various types of oppression (including those by Milgram and Zimbardo), as well as data collected in "natural" settings like asylums or concentration camps. New interpretations of those findings furnish a new angle of vision requiring modification of the existing typologies of individual adaptation including the best known typology elaborated by Merton (conformity, ritualism, innovation, withdrawal, rebellion). Podgorecki goes on to trace regularities in historically recorded patterns of behavior of people living under totalitarian and post-totalitarian conditions. Finally, based on these insights and on the recent developments in sociology of law, a new theory of law is advanced, which utilizes as its important axis a conceptual differentiation between the official and intuitive law. Recommended for scholars of sociology, social psychology, political science, and especially criminology.

The novels of David Lodge and Robertson Davies offer amusing insights into the bumbling brilliance of university life, but in their quest to entertain they often leave unanswered questions about the interplay between the life of a university and the social setting in which it either thrives or withers. Here, a veteran of universities in Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, and Canada offers a cross-national sociological analysis of the cultural and political aspects of university life. Interviews with over twenty scholars-several of them Nobel laureates-provide detailed accounts that allow the author to construct a thorough typology of university professors as they live in the existing world of modern sciences and humanities. By linking this typology with various types of social systems, the book focuses on interconnections between unique characteristics of those systems and specific models of scholars. Subsequently, through a series of profiles and case studies, the author constructs illuminating portraits of university life and culture in Poland, England, Japan, the United States, and several other countries.Refining some ideas of Max Weber and Florian Znaniecki, this work explores the increasing world-wide influence of the American (U.S.) style of research and teaching. One of this style's main characteristics, professionalization of the academic-with its focus on sciences and humanities as a career-runs counter to the traditional, European, continental, scholarly ethos that was centered around the concept and practice of the scientific school. While not unequivocally detrimental to scholarly endeavor and creativity, the American domination has some strongly destructive consequences. In the contemporary world, it becomes imperative to look for new ways of making scholars more responsible and responsive in their research and teaching practices. As elaborated in "Higher Faculties," the basis for defining their responsibilities lies in the framework of the global ethics.