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...

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...

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...