The social organization of computing: the university and the sociology department

The following material is extracted from a paper presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association, Montreal, August, 1974. We have concentrated on giving a survey of the positive proposals, and the discussion of problems involved in them, contained in the full paper. Parenthetic comments show where material has been deleted that is not a continuation of the preceding text. Copies of the full paper are available from the authors; it is a working draft, and they earnestly solicit reactions. The general purpose is to stimulate discussion of effective organization of computing for social and behavioral scientists in colleges and universities, and to provide some useful aids for presentation of the case for better computational support to administrative personnel. It may have some wider relevance, both for other settings and for substantive analysis.