When consumers experience problems with purchases the most frequent mechanism for their solution is complaint to the seller. This case study describes and attempts to evaluate the working of the complaint mechanism in handling the problems of purchasers of selected household appliances. The complaint mechanism was found to be commonly used and effective in handling matters defined by consumers as problematic, and consumers often seemed to obtain more generous concessions than the law required of the seller. The latter's response was liberal because management defined generous dealing with customers as consonant with long-run commercial interest, and because staff experienced both official and unofficial pressures to grant customers' requests.

This study examines the reactions of thirty complainants to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Complainant class is found to be the single most important explanatory factor; sex and race are not generally important when class is controlled. Higher class correlates with more idealistic motives for filing complaints, greater participation in and higher expectations about the process, better case outcomes, and a more negative evaluation of the Commission. No complainant obtained all the relief sought, but lower class complainants were generally happy with any favorable settlement, while higher class complainants were not. Complainants who seek to vindicate a principle, and therefore are less willing to compromise, find themselves in conflict with the pragmatic approach of most private attorneys (whose own economic interests may also be inconsistent with those of their clients) and with that of the MCAD (which adopts a generally pragmatic stance and prefers to conciliate rather than adjudicate, partly because it is so difficult and time consuming to prove discrimination based on unequal rather than unreasonable treatment). Symbolic and emotional factors determine complainant reactions more than case outcome.

Defendants in criminal cases were asked to evaluate the fairness of the treatment they received. Several correlates of defendant evaluations are discussed, including “predisposing” variables (race, past record, and political alienation) and “case-specific” variables (sentence received, disposition by trial or plea, and a defendant's sense of how his sentence compares with those given to others). All are related to a sense of fair treatment, sentence received and comparison level most strongly. The implications of these findings for recent discussions of plea bargaining and greater sentence equity are discussed.

Many commentators have explained the shift in policy from the quietude of Legal Aid to the aggressive advocacy of Legal Services by pointing to a change in personnel. This paper presents data on the background of a national sample of Legal Services lawyers in 1967, and through a variety of analyses argues that, though Legal Services differed from Legal Aid, neither the organization as a whole, its reformist elements, nor its local administrators were dominated by a “new breed” of activist lawyer with elite credentials. Instead, Legal Services in both 1967 and 1972 was characterized by a remarkable heterogeneity of staff. Implications of these findings for the delivery of lawyers' services to the poor are discussed, and it is suggested that the “radical” character of the program is due more to the opportunities Legal Services has offered lawyers to pursue client interests than to background characteristics of personnel.

Lawyers in the federally funded Legal Services program for the poor have distinguished themselves from their predecessors in privately funded Legal Aid societies by discounting long-range career perspectives while expecting work to be involving. In the first part of this paper I analyze how the social status of poor people creates pressures toward routine treatment, and how reform litigation contributes to the Legal Services lawyer's involvement. In the second part I use this career analysis to understand the dilemmas currently confronting Legal Services leadership as it addresses problems of staff turnover. Recalling the social movement origins of the Legal Services program, I treat the turnover problem as a challenge to the institution to define its historical role. The dilemmas confronting institutional leadership in responding to turnover reflect tensions experienced by all reform organizations as the social movements initially supporting them deteriorate.

Proposals for the decriminalization of heroin are examined and then analyzed in terms of the ideology of tolerance which informs anti-psychiatry, labeling sociology, and the concept of the victimless crime. Marcuse's discussion of repressive tolerance is brought to bear on this issue in order to suggest that tolerance for deviance may have consequences not immediately expected by those who advance reformist proposals regarding narcotics policy.