The author examines the numerous facets of 'implicit intelligence policies'those unspoken directives that often profoundly influence social and educational policies-and their impact on policies regarding measured and actual mental ability.

This book has several objectives. Most basically it presents an approach to assessing interorganizational innovation diffusion. To do this we have tried to link contempo rary organizational theory with more person-centered diffusion theory. We have also combined contingency theory with the resource dependence perspective to explain why organizations might choose to initially consider an innovation, re define it to suit their particular environmental context, and then implement it. Another objective has been to examine how environmental constraints can limit the ways in which diffusion...

School improvement, like motherhood, has many advocates. Everyone is for it, without having to campaign actively on its behalf. And just as the 100% of people who have had mothers think they know how mothering could be done better, so the (nearly) 100% of people who have been pupils in schools, or have even taught in or managed them, think they know how schools can be im- proved. More precisely, they are sure that schools ought to be improved. The trouble is that they propose a staggering, conflicting range of methods of improving the schools, from;'back to the woodshed" to teacher merit pay,...

The bright side of the 1980s, or the "Hispanic decade," as it was dubbed early on, may ironically turn out to be the detail and sophistication with which the economic and social reversals affecting most Latinos in this period have been tracked, with a fresh cohort of Latino scholars playing an increasingly prominent role in this endeavor. As this volume conveys, these analyses are steadily probing more deeply into the fine grain of the processes bearing on the social conditions of U. S. Latinos and particularly into the diversity of the experiences of the several Latino-origin nationalities...

By way of introduction to this fascinating book, let me highlight two of its many contributions. First, it is a good example of something all too rare in sociology: testing competing general theories. Most of us either try to develop or refine theories about how the social world works, and cite convenient data as support, or we select and collect data that will fit some general theoretical position. In the first case, the data playa subor- dinate role-bits of evidence for our view of life. In the second, the theory plays a subordinate role-a way to make sense of the social behavior we have...

by Ronald G. Corwin What do the following have in common: regulatory agencies, magnet schools, a declining empire, puritan asceticism, plea bargaining, the recent tax revolt in California, the Boston Tea Party, the Vietnam War, public drinking halls during Prohibi- tion, police entrapment, and Yosemite National Park on Labor Day weekend? If the answer is not readily apparent, read this engaging book. Dr. Sam Sieber makes a convincing case that harbored in a potpourri of such events are countless instances of how well-intentioned social interventions often produce harmful effects. Searching...