AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION AND OTHER SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONSYinger, John 1995 Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The
Continuing Costs of Housing Discriminations. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation.
ROBIN M. WILLIAMS, JR.AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL
ASSOCIATION AND OTHER
SOCIOLOGICAL
ASSOCIATIONS
The American Sociological Association (ASA) will
celebrate its centennial year in 2005; since its
inception, it has grown in size, diversity, programs,
and purpose. Current ASA goals are as follows:
- Serving sociologists in their work,
- Advancing sociology as a science and as a
profession, - Promoting the contributions and use of
sociology to society.
While the first goal remains the raison d’etre
for the membership organization, over the ASA’s
100 years, there have been ebbs and flows, support
and controversy, about the latter two goals and
how the association embodies them.
ASA MEMBERSHIP TRENDSAn interesting perspective on the ASA’s history is
revealed through an examination of membership
trends. Table 1 shows fairly slow but stable growth
up until 1931. During the years of the Great
Depression, there were substantial declines. De-
spite these declines, however, sociologists were
becoming very visible in government agencies such
as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S.
Bureau of the Census. Between 1935 and 1953, for
example, there were an estimated 140 profession-
al social scientists, the great majority of them
sociologists, employed in the Division of Farm
Population and Rural Life. This activity reached its
peak between 1939 and 1942, when there were
approximately sixty professionals working in Wash-
ington, D.C. and in regional offices. Sociologists
are well placed in many federal agencies and non-
profit organizations in Washington; however, they
are ‘‘undercover,’’ working under a variety of
job titles.
The years following World War II saw a rapid
increase in ASA membership—the number nearly
quadrupled between 1944 (1,242) and 1956 (4,682).
Between 1957 and 1967, membership more than
doubled, from 5,223 to 11,445, and continued
upward to 15,000 during the heights of the social
protest and anti-Vietnam War movements. How-
ever, during the latter half of the 1970s, member-
ship gradually drifted downward and reached a
seventeen-year low of 11,223 in 1984. In the next
fifteen years, the membership increased by 2,000
and has remained stable at over 13,000 in the 1990s.The growth and decline in the ASA can be
accounted for in part by a combination of ideologi-
cal and demographic factors as well as the gradual-
ly changing nature of work in American society,
particularly since the end of World War II. For
example, the GI bill made it possible for an ordi-
nary veteran to get a college education. The col-
lege population jumped from one-half million in
1945 to several million within three years. Gradu-
ally, while urban and metropolitan populations
grew, the number and percentage of people in the
manufacturing sector of the labor force declined,
and the farm population declined even more dra-
matically, while the service sector grew. Within the
service sector, information storage, retrieval, and
exchange grew in importance with the coming of
the computer age. These societal changes helped
to stimulate a growth in urban problems involving
areas such as family, work, and drugs, and these
changes led to a growth of these specialty areas in
sociology.Membership in the ASA rapidly increased in
the 1960s and early 1970s, an era of many social
protest movements. Sociology was seen as offering
a way of understanding the dynamic events that
were taking place in this country. Substantive are-
as within the ASA and sociology were also affected
by these social changes. As Randall Collins (1989)
points out, the social protest movements of the
1960s and 1970s coincided with the growth within
the ASA of such sections as the Marxist, environ-
mental, population, world systems, collective be-
havior and social movements, and racial and eth-
nic minorities sections. In addition, the growing
public concerns in the late 1970s and early 1980s
about aging and equality for women were reflect-
ed within the ASA by new sections on sex and
gender and aging. Similarly, the ‘‘me’’ generation,
in the aftermath of the protest movements and the