[NOTE: This is an autobiography written on May 10, 2007 upon my request and is published here with the author permission.]


Dr. Wendell Bell: American sociologist and futurist, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale University

Personal History and Education

Although Wendell Bell was born in Chicago, IL, he considers himself a Californian because at the age of four his family moved to Fresno, CA where he was raised. Except for two and a half years at a private Military Academy in the Los Angeles area, Bell was educated (k through 12) in the public schools of Fresno.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of 7 December 1941 led him to graduate from Roosevelt High School a semester early, in January 1942. He joined the Naval Aviation Cadet (V-5) Program, was called to active duty in 1943, and became an Ensign and a Naval Aviator in October 1944, later serving in VPB-106 in the Philippine Islands.

After flying three-plus years on active duty in the U.S. Navy, he returned to Fresno and earned his living for a time as a commercial pilot, mostly as a flight instructor and charter pilot. He also served as a “weekend warrior” in a squadron in the Naval Reserve.

Additionally, he started college, although he continued flying at first. Soon he was devoting more and more of his time to his studies, graduating with a B.A. in Social Science (highest honors) from California State University, Fresno in 1948 (in less time than normal with some credits for his Navy education and by loading up on additional courses each semester and taking summer courses as well).

He had married Lora-Lee Edwards in 1947 and he and his new wife headed for the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949, where he pursued graduate work in Sociology, supported by the G.I. Bill and his work as a Teaching Assistant. He received his M.A. degree from UCLA in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1952.

Academic Career

Bell’s first full-time academic position, beginning in 1952, was as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he taught advanced statistics and urban sociology, among other courses, in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, he devoted most of his time to being the founding Director of the new Stanford Survey Research Facility. The idea was to establish a survey research center at Stanford for the primary purpose of facilitating the social research of other faculty members by providing data collection and preliminary analysis for studies designed by them.

For the next two years, many of Stanford Sociology graduate students worked with Bell doing survey research. The research ranged from collecting data for a Professor in the Business School, to surveys of present and former Stanford graduate students funded by a Ford Foundation self-survey, to data collection from selected San Francisco neighborhoods to carry on Bell’s own research.

Bell moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL in the fall of 1954 as an Associate Professor. There he taught, among other courses, Introductory Sociology, Urban Sociology, and Social Research Methods. While there, he continued his own research on American cities and added an exploratory research trip to the Caribbean island of Jamaica during the summer of 1956.

In 1957, he returned to UCLA as a member of the faculty and was soon promoted to Full Professor. Although he continued his work in urban sociology at UCLA, he shifted his major research efforts to a series of studies of elites and nationalism in the new states of the Caribbean, first with a Social Science Research Council three-year half-time faculty fellowship and then with a research grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The latter helped fund the UCLA West Indies Study Program with Bell serving as the founding Director. The Program provided fellowships for advanced American graduate students to do dissertation research in the Caribbean new states as well as for West Indian graduate students to attend UCLA and work toward their Ph.D. degrees with the hope that they would make future contributions to the development of their new states.

In 1963, Bell accepted a Professorship at Yale University, but spent his first year on leave from Yale at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, CA.

Arriving on the scene at Yale in the fall of 1964, Bell was soon asked to serve as Chair of the Department of Sociology, which he began to do in July 1965. Working with other Yale sociologists, including the two other Full Professors in the Department at the time, Bell served as Chair for four years, greatly expanding the Department, adding, in addition to junior faculty members, seven new Full Professors (including one promotion from among nontenured Yale sociologists).

Yale was in transition during his tenure as Chair and into the early 1970s. There were widespread protests on campus against America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam; there was a struggle to open the then all-male Yale College to women undergraduates; there was controversy about affirmative action to add more students and faculty members from ethnic and racial minority groups; there was heated debate about establishing an African American Studies Program, a business school, an Institute for Social and Policy Studies, a women’s study program, and other interdisciplinary centers and institutes; and there was conflict about Yale remaining a national university rather than becoming a global, international institution.

Yale, founded in 1701, was being pushed and dragged into the modern world. It was a stormy, yet exhilarating, time of change and Bell played a role in many of the struggles—e.g., in bringing women undergraduates to Yale, in supporting affirmative action for minority faculty and students, in establishing social and policy studies, in supporting Yale’s becoming a global university (which today Yale is), in creating a Collegium on the Future (that Harold D. Lasswell and he originated, but which did not last), and, especially in starting an African American Studies Program (which is now a full-scale Department), which he and other Yale faculty members who had worked in the Caribbean or Africa helped to found.

Additionally, along with several of his colleagues, Bell proposed a Comparative Sociology Training Program and received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health beginning in 1969. It provided training fellowships for graduate students to carry out research in countries throughout the world. Bell directed the Program, continuing his own research in the Caribbean, while supporting other faculty and students working in other countries of the world—in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. One important purpose of the Program was to expand the scope of American sociology by the study of other cultures and societies—to contribute to the development of a transnational sociology.

During this time, Bell’s commitment to a sociology that incorporated worldwide societal variation was matched by his growing interest in the transformation of societies through time, especially with research into possibilities for the future (see below). As early as 1966-68, he received a Russell Sage Foundation grant jointly with a colleague, James A. Mau, for an investigation of “the sociology of the future,” which resulted in several future-oriented articles and an edited volume, The Sociology of the Future (Bell and Mau 1971).

Although he continued his work in comparative sociology, especially in the Caribbean, serving as President of the Caribbean Studies Association in 1979-80 and as a member of its Council as late as 1989, he increasingly worked in the futures field and attended conferences of futures studies organizations.

In 1985, he spent most of the year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Australian National University, where he started writing what was to be his major work, the two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies (1997).

During his tenure at Yale, Bell taught many courses for both undergraduate and graduate students, including the Logic of Social Research, which he taught nearly every year aimed at first-year graduate students; Urban Sociology; Social Change and the Future; the Sociology of the Future; Race, Class, and Nation in the Caribbean (joint with African-American Studies); the Sociology of Nationalism; and the Sociology of Good and Evil.

In 1995, although Bell retired from a full-time faculty position (at age 70), he remained at Yale and continued writing about futures studies. For five years, 2000-05, he was appointed a Senior Research Scientist in Yale’s Center for Comparative Research, where he continued his work. Today (at the time of writing), he continues writing for futures journals (Slaughter 2007) as well as for sociologists (Bell 2008) and speaking at conferences (most recently in September 2006 at Cardiff University in Wales).

Sociological Research and Writing

Since 1953, when he published his first article in a professional journal, Bell has written, co-authored, or edited nine books and written more than 200 articles, chapters in books, or book reviews.

One recurring theme in Bell’s work is the recognition of human agency. Yes, society and culture shape the individual and Bell’s work often includes data that help explain this causal process in particular times and places, for example in shaping individual judgments about how much inequality is just or fair (Robinson and Bell 1978). Yet, perhaps more important, he is concerned with the other side of the coin as well, that is, how individuals by their actions shape societies and cultures, for example how individual attitudes toward equality in politically dependent colonies can lead to decisions and actions that create nationalist movements and produce political, social, and cultural change (Bell 1964, 1967; Bell and Oxaal 1964).

Bell began his social research by studying neighborhoods in Los Angeles and San Francisco, following the work of Eshref Shevky who was one of his professors at UCLA (Shevky and Williams 1949). This work showed that three major dimensions could summarize the many social variations of urban neighborhoods (socioeconomic status, familism, and ethnicity) and that neighborhoods could be usefully typed into different “social areas” according to them (Bell 1955). After Shevky and Bell published Social Area Analysis, many other researchers carried out the construction of social areas in a comparative framework in many cities, not only in the United States but also throughout the world.

Bell pursued this work by conducting surveys of residents in selected social areas in San Francisco showing how many of the generalizations of the time about the lonely, anomic, socially isolated city dweller were oversimplifications. In fact, only a few social areas typically contained such people (those of low socioeconomic status and, especially, of low familism). In other social areas, there was frequent participation with neighbors, relatives, co-workers, or other friends often supplemented by attendance of meetings and events of a variety of formal social organizations and a well-developed sense of community (Bell and Boat 1957; Bell and Force 1956a, 1956b).

Underlying this work was a theory of social choice, focused on how people, within the limits of their resources and opportunities, decided to seek certain life styles by the types of social areas in which they chose to live. Shevky and Bell viewed the cityscape less as a product of impersonal social forces (as some of the Chicago human ecologists did), and more as a product of individual and collective decision-making and action.

Bell tested the theory of social choice with a series of studies aimed at discovering why people choose to move to the suburbs. He focused on the factors that tended to push them from their prior residences, usually apartments within the city, and the factors that pulled them toward the suburbs, including the images they held of their future possible lives there.

Contrary to much sociological thinking at the time that described suburban living negatively as “split-level headaches,” “cracks in picture windows,” or “the eclipse of community,” Bell found mostly contented suburbanites who achieved in their move what they had hoped for, including a cleaner, quieter, safer, more family- and child-friendly neighborhood, a sense of community with considerable interaction and mutual support among neighbors, and bigger and better housing than they had had in the city (Bell 1956, 1968).

In a more general aspect of this work, Bell showed how hope and despair are contingent on a person’s access to the means for the achievement of life goals (Meier and Bell 1959). Severe poverty, political repression, and lack of education, for example, reduce people’s choices and desirable alternatives for the future. Clearly, individuals’ images of the future are involved in having hope, which is importantly a belief that the future will be better than—or at least as good as—the present, or in being despairing, which often means a belief that the future will be undesirable. Here the reciprocal dependence of society and the individual becomes transparent.

Bell’s interest in images of the future and their role in people’s actions dominated his studies of elites and nationalism in the new states of the Caribbean. In a series of studies that he and his colleagues carried out over a period of about 25 years, he investigated how the decisions of nationhood were made in former British colonies as they went through the processes of becoming politically independent—from Jamaica in the north through Barbados and some of the Leeward and Windward Islands to Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana in the south. Descendents of African slaves or East Indian indentured laborers numerically dominated the populations of these emergent states.

The new nationalist leaders in these territories set about defining and constructing their new state’s futures. They wrote constitutions for the new states-to-be. They chose national mottos, national flags, national heroes, national flowers, and national birds, among other symbols that would signify the character and meaning of the new states.

More important, they decided what geographical boundaries their new state would have (e.g., a West Indies Federation or each territory “going it alone”?); what kind of government they would have (e.g., a political democracy or not?); how much of a role the government should play in regulating the economy (e.g., how socialist should it be?); what kind of social structure the new state should have (e.g., how to put an end to racial inequality and create more equal opportunity for all the new citizens?); what national character of the people should be encouraged (e.g., should it be a new enlightened, egalitarian and inclusive character freed from the twin heritages of slavery and indentured labor on the one hand, and freed from colonialism as an authoritarian social and political system on the other?); what new national cultural traditions to foster (e.g., should the African or Indian origins of the majority of the people be celebrated and should a new national history be written that emphasized the long struggle for freedom against oppression? Should Sam Sharpe and Nanny of the Maroons be selected as new national heroes in Jamaica because they had led slave revolts in the past?); and what global alignments ought their new state make as it stepped onto the international stage (e.g., at the time of independence, should it align with the United States and the West or with Cuba and the Soviet Union?) (Bell 1964, 1967; Bell and Oxaal 1964).

Additionally, Bell and his colleagues did follow-up studies to evaluate the performance of the new national leaders after they came to power. They asked, how successful were the leaders in achieving their pre-independence goals and their earlier positive, idealistic images of their new state’s future? (Bell 1977, 1980). To find answers, they looked at changes in rhetoric, beliefs of the leaders, social legislation passed, and relevant economic and social indicators.

In a nutshell, to take one example from the effort in Jamaica to reduce unjust inequalities of race, ethnicity, class and nationality, Bell found that twelve years after independence the rhetoric of equality as fair had become even more dominant and widespread among Jamaican leaders than it was before independence.

Through a variety of social legislation, the leaders had achieved some success: legal and political rights had been guaranteed by the new constitution; legislation also was aimed at improving minimum wages, workmen’s compensation, pensions, medical services, literacy, and free primary education; and legislation eliminated many inequalities in the treatment of “illegitimate” children. Yet little was done effectively to relieve the poorest class of society.

Educational and income data showed some small improvement. Jamaicans received more schooling and there may have been more equality in achieving a floor of primary education than before. School enrollments were up, but frequency of attendance had not increased and many schools remained overcrowded. The most recalcitrant fact was that inequality of income showed only a small shift of real income from the highest to the lowest income groups. Income inequality remained great.

Even the beliefs of the leaders themselves showed that nearly two-thirds of them believed that Jamaica had not been successful or had failed in dealing with the problem of poverty and that the new parliamentary system had benefited the middle and upper classes more than it had benefited the unionized workers and lower classes. Yet more than two-thirds also believed that the poorest Jamaicans were absolutely better off than they had been before independence.

Bell concluded that the Jamaican leaders, for the most part, had sincerely pursued their images of social justice, equality, and economic development, had passed legislation designed to achieve their goals, and had had some success in achieving them. Where they could make change by legislation, they often did move toward their goals—for example, in reducing racial discrimination in public places or providing more primary education. But on economic issues they faced limitations, because, at least in the short run, they could not create new wealth, decree a prosperous economy, or wipe out poverty simply by passing laws. To do so they needed more material and managerial resources than they had (Stephens and Stephens 1986).

Finally, the work on the new states in the Caribbean would have remained logically incomplete without additional comparative work in both the old states and the colonies of other countries that did not choose to become politically independent. Thus, over the years, Bell sponsored research in the older states of Dominican Republic and Haiti as well as in the French territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which had retained their ties to France (Murch 1971). He also engaged in more extensive work comparing new and old states (Bell and Freeman 1974).

Becoming a Futurist

Throughout the period of his work in the Caribbean, Bell served as consultant to a variety of other projects and carried out additional research, such as his work on public leadership (Bell, Hill, and Wright 1961) and his comparative work on equality and social justice in England and the United States (Perkins and Bell 1980; Robinson and Bell 1978, 1980). But by the mid-1960s he had begun to explore the general principles of futures thinking and the role of images of the future in decision-making and social action. With the publication of The Sociology of the Future in 1971, he started devoting the bulk of his time to the new field of futures studies.

It was, of course, his research in the new states that sparked Bell’s interest in leadership, social justice, and the future. His field trip to Jamaica in 1956 placed him at the center of a coming future made problematic by the transition to independence. He saw the processes of constructing polity, society, and culture made transparent. Clearly, in the new states the future was open. What would the new national leaders make of their former British West Indian colonies when they became masters of their own fate? What ought they do to create a good future?

There was talk of little else during that first summer in Jamaica other than what was possible, what were the alternatives any of which might become Jamaica’s future? What was most likely to happen, given Jamaica’s past history and present resources? What was preferable? What was the best, most desirable future for Jamaica? How could it be achieved?

It was as if the mysteries of society and the engines of social change had suddenly been revealed. What was taken for granted in older states and clouded by custom, tradition, and myth as being unquestionable, sacrosanct, and timeless—even in the first new nation, the United States—were prominently and visibly tenuous and open for revision in the new states. Such things included constitutions, structures of governments, geographical boundaries, national heroes, and cultural histories. But, in fact, such things are just as problematic in the old states as in the new states. It is simply less obvious in the old states that this is so.

Everywhere people produce the future by their acts, even when they act to reproduce the past and present. Everywhere people determine what their future will be, whether they are aware of it or not. Everywhere the images of the future people hold may clash with conflicting images held by others and lead to conflict to control the future. Everywhere the past is finished and cannot be altered. And everywhere the future is open, offering possibilities of new and better lives as well as possibilities of disaster—contingent on the choices that humans make and the actions they take.

Of course, this is not to say that the future always turns out as people hope and plan. There may also be unintended, unanticipated, or unrecognized consequences of human action. Constant monitoring is necessary as is willingness to change one’s methods and policies when they are not working as planned.

Although all of this may seem obvious, it so impressed Bell during his research in the new Caribbean states that he has spent more than four decades trying to understand the role of futures thinking in social change, to discover how images of the future are born and shaped on the one hand and on the other hand to learn how images of the future interact with individual and collective beliefs, values, decision-making, and actions to shape the future of individuals, societies, and cultures. He keeps asking, what constitutes a “better world” of human well-being and freedom and how can we humans help to bring such a world into reality?

These are issues that Bell discusses in Foundations of Futures Studies. For example, Volume One, “History, Purposes, and Knowledge,” deals with possible and probable futures and how we can make grounded, reliable and valid assertions about them, and Volume Two, “Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society,” deals with preferable futures and how we can justify rationally and empirically the assertions about what constitutes the good society.

Bell’s Foundations of Futures Studies along with Richard A. Slaughter’s three volume, The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, and Slaughter’s New Thinking for a New Millennium, all published in the late 1990s, aim to provide a summary of past work of the field of futures studies and a guide for its future development. Each also contains images of a future sustainable human society based on human well-being and freedom.

Since the publication of his Foundations volumes, Bell has continued to work toward the development of futures studies and for increased futures thinking among social scientists, especially sociologists (Bell 2002a/b; Marien 2002). Also, he has continued his exploration of the good society of the future, focusing on universal values and the eternal struggle between good and evil (Bell 2000). For example, his work on evil, following Baumeister (1997), shows that nearly everyone is capable of evil acts and that ordinary people engaged in mundane tasks carry out much of the cruelty and violence in the world. Using the principles of futures thinking, critical realism, and social inclusiveness, Bell claims that people can learn to curb their demonization of others and the sometimes terrible escalation of harm to others that it produces and to adopt a code of behavior that emphasizes being responsible for themselves, doing no harm to others, and helping other people when they can.

Beyond the Academy

Like most futurists and many sociologists, Bell upon occasion has moved outside of the academy into the public sphere to consult or become involved with some of the social issues of the day. To give a few examples, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, co-chaired by former U.S. Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman (whose reports members of the Bush administration ignored despite Hart’s efforts to bring the results to their attention); for sixteen years he was on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Global Ethics, which openly examines ethical issues involved in both private and public life; he worked for Sandia National Laboratories on a study of the safe storage of nuclear waste at the Waste Isolation Plant in New Mexico; he evaluated research on culturally-appropriate dispute resolution procedures for the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and the Hawaiian Judiciary; he analyzed data from an eight-city mothers’ opinion poll on high tech and high touch toys (for the purpose of increasing the attraction of non-violent toys) for an advertising agency and became the public spokesman to explain the results of the study to journalists for six months (the toy company created six baby animal toys, known as Puffalumps); he consulted for the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress on a variety of issues; he worked for the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice searching for more justice and fairness in dealing with America’s large prison population; and he served as the Governor’s appointee to the Commission on Connecticut’s Future that, among other things, looked into the futures thinking and planning of all the major departments of the government of the state of Connecticut.

In all the above efforts and others, Bell attempted to apply the principles of futures studies as well as of sociology.

Finally, Bell has had several avocations. After his service as a Navy pilot and then commercial civilian pilot, he continued to fly for some time for the sheer pleasure of flying.

His wife, Lora-Lee, and he took up horsemanship as well as studying barn management and horse care, starting in 1962. Lora-Lee devoted much of her time to the enterprise, at one point having 200 riding students. Both Lora-Lee and Wendell focused on the three-day event (dressage, cross-country, and stadium jumping) and had riding instruction and experiences not only in the United States, but also in the Caribbean, England, France, and elsewhere in Europe.

After more than twenty years in the horse business, Lora-Lee gave up her horses in 1985 and devoted herself to her other passion, art (especially batik and watercolor). She taught art classes for more than twenty-five years, mostly at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, CT and encouraged Wendell to learn enough about art and the art world to fill at least a small part of what was a large gap in his knowledge.

Now in their early eighties, Lora-Lee and Wendell have become avid ballroom dancers. For more than three years, they have been taking dancing lessons and practicing whenever possible. They look forward to the time when they can devote themselves more fully to dancing… May hope and dreams of the future never end!

References
Baumeister, Roy F. 1997. Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence. New York: W.H.
Freeman and Company.
Bell, Wendell. 1955. "Economic, family, and ethnic status: an empirical test." American
Sociological Review 20 (February): 45-52.
_____. 1956. "Familism and suburbanization: one test of the social choice hypothesis."
Rural Sociology 21 (September-December): 276-283.
_____. 1964. Jamaican Leaders: Political Attitudes in a New Nation. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
_____. (ed.). 1967. The Democratic Revolution in the West Indies: Studies in
Nationalism, Leadership, and the Belief in Progress. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.
_____. 1968. "The city, the suburb, and a theory of social choice." Pp. 132-168 in
Scott Greer et al. (eds.), The New Urbanization. New York: St. Martin's Press.
_____. 1977. "Inequality in independent Jamaica: a preliminary appraisal of elite
performance." Revista/Review Interamericana 7 (Summer): 294-308.
_____. 1980. "Equality and social justice: foundations of nationalism in the Caribbean,”
Caribbean Studies 20 (June): 5-36.
_____. 1997. Foundations of Futures Studies. Vol. 1 “History, Purposes, and
Knowledge (paperback 2003); Vol. 2 “Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society” (paperback 2004). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
_____. 2000. "New futures and the eternal struggle between good and evil." Journal of
Futures Studies 5 (2) (November): 1-20.
_____. 2002a. "A community of futurists and the state of the futures field." Futures 34
(3-4) (April/May): 235-47. [Available online at www.sciencedirect.com].
_____. 2002b. “Advancing futures studies: a reply to Michael Marien,” Futures 34 (5)
(June): 435-47. [Available online at www.sciencedirect.com].
. 2008. “Public sociology and the future: the possible, the probable, and the
preferable.” In Vincent Jeffries (ed.), Handbook of Public Sociology. Rowman and Littlefield, in process.
Bell, Wendell and Maryanne T Force. 1956a. "Urban neighborhood types and
participation in formal associations." American Sociological Review 21 (February): 25-34.
_____. 1956b. "Social structure and participation in different types of formal
associations." Social Forces 34 (May): 345-350.
Bell, Wendell and Marion D. Boat. 1957. "Urban neighborhoods and informal social
relations." American Journal of Sociology 62 (January): 391-398
Bell, Wendell, Richard J. Hill, and Charles R. Wright. 1961. Public Leadership. San
Francisco, CA: Chandler.
Bell, Wendell and Ivar Oxaal. 1964. Decisions of Nationhood: Political and Social
Development in the British Caribbean. Denver, CO: Social Science Foundation, University of Denver.
Bell, Wendell and James A. Mau (eds.). 1971. The Sociology of the Future: Theory,
Cases, and Annotated Bibliography. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Bell, Wendell and Walter E. Freeman (eds.). 1974. Ethnicity and Nation-Building:
Comparative, International and Historical Perspectives. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Bell, Wendell and Robert V. Robinson. 1980. "Cognitive maps of class and racial
inequalities in England and the United States." American Journal of Sociology 86 (September): 320-349.
Marien, Michael. 2002. “My differences with Wendell Bell,” Futures 34 (5) (June):
449-456. [Available online at www.sciencedirect.com].
Meier, Dorothy L. and Wendell Bell. 1959. "Anomia and differential access to the
achievement of life goals." American Sociological Review 24 (April): 189-202.
Murch, Arvin. 1971. Black Frenchmen: The Political Integration of the French Antilles.
Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co.
Perkins, H. Wesley and Wendell Bell. 1980. "Alienation and social justice in England
and the United States: the polity and economy." Pp. 71-101 in R. F. Tomasson (ed.), Comparative Social Research, Vol. 3, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Robinson, Robert V. and Wendell Bell. 1978. "Equality, success, and social justice in
England and the United States." American Sociological Review 43 (2): 125-43.
Shevky, Eshref and Wendell Bell. 1955. Social Area Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Shevky, Eshref and Marilyn Williams. The Social Areas of Los Angeles: Analysis and
Typology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Slaughter, Richard A. (ed.). 1996a. The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies. Hawthorn,
Victoria, Australia: DDM Media Group. [Also available in the Professional Edition on CD-ROM, Foresight International, Indooroopilly, Qld, Australia, 2005].
_____. 1996b. New Thinking for a New Millennium. London: Routledge.
Stephens, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens. 1986. Democratic Socialism in
Jamaica. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Biographical References
Bell, Wendell. 1969. “Teachers, Students, and Ideas: A Personal Account.” Pp.215-55
in Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), Sociological Self-Images: A Collective Portrait. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Levelhead 753 [aka Wendell Bell]. 2005. “On becoming and being a futurist: an
interview with Wendell Bell,” Journal of Futures Studies 10 (2) (November): 113-24).
Slaughter, Richard A. 2007. “Looking towards the futures studies renaissance: a
conversation between Richard A. Slaughter and Wendell Bell,” Journal of Futures Studies, in press.
Stevenson, Tony. 2003. “Biography: Wendell Bell: critical realism in studying the
future,” Futures 35 (3) (April): 283-95. [Available online at www.sciencedirect.com].