WALTER FIREY Sentiments and Symbolism as Ecological Variables Watler Firey complements Homer Hoyt's discussion of high income

residential development. Firey begins by saying that some Human Ecologists tend to focus on cost of transportation and development, while other Human Ecologists overemphasize the role of economizing fiscal agents (eg., Realtors). By analyzing the development of Boston's posh Beacon Hill neighborhood, Boston Commons and Boston's historic colonial cemeteries, as well as the North End lower class Italian neighborhood (the one studied by Whyte in Street Corner Society), Firey shows that sentiments and symbolism can be as effective as economic considerations in determining where specific kinds of people work and live. Eg, residents of Beacon Hill have a sentimental attachment to their neighborhood, over and above its economic ''fashionability.'' Eg, older residents of the North End, though they may be able to afford to leave the neighborhood, may remain because they retain Italian values: ''Residence in the North End seems therefore to be a spatial corollary to integration with Italian values. Likewise emigration from the district signifies assimilation into American values, and is so construed by the people themselves. Thus, while the area is not the conscious object of sentimental attachment, as are Beacon Hill and the Common, it has nonetheless become a symbol of Italian ethnic solidarity.''

References http://www.che.ac.uk/ http://www.humanecologyreview.org/ http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo16/16london.php

Eugene Odum
Life depends on adequate conditions of food, water, and shelter from inclement elements and also that weather, geological, and biological factors (among others) are involved in the web of life that affords this environment. In the 1940s and 1950s, "ecology" was not yet a field of study that had been defined as a separate discipline. Even professional biologists seemed to Odum to be generally under-educated about how the Earth's ecological systems interact with one another. Odum brought forward the importance of ecology as a discipline that should be a fundamental dimension of the training of a biologist.Odum adopted and developed further the term "ecosystem". Equilibrium theory General equilibrium theory studies supply and demand fundamentals in an economy with multiple markets, with the objective of proving that all prices are at equilibrium. General equilibrium theory is distinguished from partial equilibrium theory by the fact that it attempts to look at several markets simultaneously rather than a single market in isolation.In the second half of the 19th century, the idea of equilibrium as applied to social problems was developed by the positivist sociologists A. Comte, H. Spencer, A. Small, and L. Ward, for whom the yardstick continued to be the equilibrium of physical systems. The conceptual foundations of the theory of equilibrium were slightly modified in the early 20th century under the influence of organismic thinking. The yardstick of equilibrium was no longer a mechanical system but the living organism, where this equilibrium is achieved through complex processes of internal regulation. One of the first to use such an approach was A. A. Bogdanov, whose tectology prefigured certain hypotheses of cybernetics and contemporary systems approach, even though his theory was not devoid of several serious mechanistic miscalculations and simplifications. General equilibrium theory is a branch of theoretical economics. It seeks to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that a set of prices exists that will result in an overall equilibrium, hence general equilibrium, in contrast to partial equilibrium, which only analyzes single markets. As with all models, this is an abstraction from a real economy; it is proposed as being a useful model, both by considering equilibrium prices as long-term prices and by considering actual prices as deviations from equilibrium. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_equilibrium_theory http://biology.duke.edu/upe302/syllabus2005.html

Erving Goffman

Presentation of Self
Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1956, with a revised edition in 1959. He had developed the book's core ideas from his doctoral dissertation. It was Goffmans first and most famous book, for which he received the American Sociological Associations 1961 MacIver Award. Goffman describes the theatrical performances that occur in face-to-face interactions He holds that when an individual comes in contact with another person, he attempts to control or guide the impression that the other person will form of him, by altering his own setting, appearance and manner. At the same time, the person that the individual is interacting with attempts to form an impression of, and obtain information about, the individual. Goffman also believes that participants in social interactions engage in certain practices to avoid embarrassing themselves or others. Society is not homogeneous; we must act differently in different settings. This recognition led Goffman to his dramaturgical analysis. He saw a connection between the kinds of "acts" that people put on in their daily lives, and theatrical performances. In a social interaction, as in a theatrical performance, there is an on-stage area where actors (individuals) appear before the audience; this is where positive self-concepts and desired impressions are offered. But there is, as well, a back-stage a hidden, private area where individuals can be themselves and drop their societal roles and identities. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Erving_Goffman.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman