The Causes of Human Behavior : Implications for Theory and Method in the Social Sciences

Coleman’s work. It also contains some personal impressions of James Coleman’s personality. Unfortunately, there are not many contributions that profoundly debate Coleman’s most important theoretical works on mathematical sociology and rational choice theory. Most articles are good but not all of these good articles contain a detailed discussion of Coleman’s ideas. In this respect, some articles would have been more appropriate for a festschrift than a discussion volume.

was slick caused the fact that the accident occurred. This is what Mohr refers to as "factual causation." Mohr defines factual causation in the following terms: X was the factual cause of Y if and only if X and Y both occurred and X occupied a necessary slot in the physical causal scenario pertinent to Y (p. 27). (Parenthetically, it does seem odd to call X the factual cause if it is merely one out of many necessary "slots" in the physical causal scenario.) In my view, this analysis of causation fails to illuminate. There are very hard questions to be answered if we are to have a satisfactory analysis of social causation, but the retreat to physical causation seems not to be helpful in attempting to answer such questions. (Does it make sense to ask what was the physical cause of the fall of the Roman Empire?) There is a substantial literature within the philosophy of science on the issues of causation and causal explanation (e.g., work by Wesley Salmon, Nancy Cartwright, or Jon Elster). Within the context of the current state of debate, Mohr's analysis of physical and factual causation appears unhelpful.
Turn now to Mohr's treatment of the causation of behavior. He asks a simple question-Do thoughts (purposes, reasons, wishes, desires) cause behavior (physical movements of the body)? His answer is negative, because we sometimes decide to do X but fail to do so (the irregularity problem). "The connection between our thought categories and the appropriate behaviors does not seem to be necessary or lawlike" (p. 63). He argues that we should here take our cue from the analysis of physical causation that preceded and look for a set of physical circumstances that could be said to cause behavior. Thus Mohr believes that it is necessary to identify the physiological mechanism that underlies the "reason-behavior" nexus if we are to have adequate causal explanations of behavior at all (p. 58), and he offers the "affect-object" paradigm as the basis of further theorizing in this area (p. 70). This is highly speculative account of how desire and thought might be embodied within the central nervous system. Here we are in deep and troubled waters, for it seems fairly clear that cognitive science and neurophysiology are still very far from having convincing answers to questions such as What is the physiological basis of thought? Fortunately, most other observers have concluded that the sort of intertheoretic reduction that Mohr aspires to is in fact unnecessary. We can give satisfactory answers to questions such as How do falling interest rates cause rising levels of investment? without having a neurophysiology of investor decision making. More generally, it is not necessary to reduce causal assertions at one level of description to causal relations at a lower level of description.
In summary, Mohr deserves credit for focusing on a series of issues that are fundamental to our understanding of social research. Mohr's discussions of many of these issues ask some of the right questions, but his answers are often less than satisfying.

University of Massachusetts, Boston
It is curious how little interest most academics show in their profession and the industry in which they work. Now more than ever, it is critical that faculty become more knowledgeable about these matters. As we go about our daily business, higher education is undergoing a massive shift. A whole generation of faculty who entered higher education during what turns out to be a rather brief golden age is retiring, and new faculty are entering a more depressed industry. Appropriations for student aid, institutional support, and research are not as forthcoming from the state and the federal governments, as higher education becomes only one of many worthy activities clamoring for attention. At the same time, higher education has become a central institution in U.S. society. As such, it draws even more attacks from legislators, governors, and the media than it did at the height of student protests.
Faculty at Work tells us all that we possibly need to know to respond to these attacks. It also offers a treasure trove of data for students of the sociology of work, the professions, and higher education. The book reports on results of the authors' survey of administrators and faculty members, supplemented by data from several other national surveys carried out by the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Research Council, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The authors' own survey of faculty, carried out in late 1987 and early 1988, picks up a decade after a major national survey of faculty conducted by Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster in American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled (Oxford University Press, 1987). Blackburn and Lawrence drew a random sample of over 4,000 faculty in a cross section of liberal arts disciplines, selected to represent the national distribution of faculty in nine institutional types defined by the Carnegie classification-research universities I, research universities II, doctoral universities I, doctoral universities II, comprehensive universities and colleges I, comprehensive universities and colleges II, liberal arts colleges I, liberal arts colleges II, and community colleges (A Classification of Institutions of Higher Education [Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987]). In addition, the book presents a more limited set of results from a survey of 500 academic-area administrators carried out in 1988 in 103 colleges and universities.
The book focuses primarily on understanding what motivates faculty to carry out research, teach, and engage in service. Blackburn and Lawrence present a causal model consisting of environmental, sociodemographic, situational, and individual variables to account for faculty