Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertations

UNPUBLISHED Ph.D. DISSERTATIONS Reviewed by J. William Frost "Quaker Organization: A Sociological Study of the American Friends Service Committee." Berkeley, University of California Survey Research Center, 1963. By Lawrence R. Ephron. "Revolutionary Faithfulness: The Quaker Search for a Peaceable Kingdom in China, 1939-1951." Ph.D. Diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1974. By Cynthia Letts Adcock. "The American Friends Service Committee: A Quaker Experiment in Social Change and Organizational Innovation—A Study in Value." Ph.D. Diss., Boston College, 1975. By Jane Knowles Webb. In 1911 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Hicksite pondered the ill effects of hiring its first paid secretary, Jane Rushmore. In 1952, according to Clarence Pickett, the American Friends Service Committee had a staff of 200 in Philadelphia, in addition to workers at regional offices and on various domestic and overseas projects. The AFSC Corporation, the Board of Directors, and hundreds of volunteers made the structure more complex, and a 1980 chart of organization and committees showed all die complexities of modern corporate management. In 1916 administration expenses equalled 3Vi percent of receipts and 4 4/5 percent of total expenditures; in 1981 the annual report showed expenses of $3.2 million, not quite 24 percent of total budget, for "Supporting Services" (administration, fund raising, information services); the comparable figure for the British was 33 percent. Books written about Quaker service devote much attention to anecdotes of good works while ignoring the inner workings and structure of the Service Committee. Even less attention has been paid to the impact of die organizational apparatus: FCNL, FWC, FGC, FUM, AFSC, etc.—our Quaker alphabet soup—on local meetings. The transformation of the character of the Society of Friends by large scale organizations and salaried personnel is a major theme of the twentieth century. While there is a plethora of paper sent out by the various Quaker organizations and memoirs of participants are common, a scholarly perspective attempting to be objective is very rare.1 Fortunately, those who pursue advanced degrees remain fascinated with how and what Quakers do. The works reviewed here, in sociology and history, provide an attempt to evaluate Quaker service from outside the meeting's perspective, even when the authors are members or in sympathy with Quaker objectives. Lawrence Ephron's "Quaker Organization" is a structural analysis of the Service Committee which is described as a combination of elite and voluntary participation, with a centralized overseas program and decentralized domestic operations. Comparing the AFSC with other voluntary organizations , Ephron found the Committee far more questioning as to its purpose 1. Clarence H. Yarrow, Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation (New Haven, 1978) is a notable exception. 64 Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertations65 and directions as well as caught between conflicting value systems: effectiveness versus witness, Quaker norms against secular social work emphases. The AFSC was unwilling to decide whether it was a relief agency, an explorer on die "cutting edge" of new social programs, a demonstrator of solutions to social problems, a meeting for worship, or a forum for social change. Ephron's short study, based upon interviews and an unimpressive list of secondary sources, merely set up the issues. Since he examined neitiier any project nor headquarters to answer his queries, he could not determine whether die tensions were alleviated in practice. Jane Knowles Webb's dissertation in sociology combined structural analysis of the New England Regional Office with an examination of how Friends diere dealt with attempts to change the focus of service from within. The Vietnam War attracted many radicals to Quaker organizations and Webb provides our best (and really only) study of the conflicts between religious traditions and secular radicalism within the AFSC.2 She shows what happens widiin a bureaucratic system when Quaker consensus breaks down. The conflict was complicated because some staff lived on subsistence and others, including volunteers, had salaries commensurate with their positions in die AFSC or corporate and academic structures. The dissertation does not discuss die content of the disagreements; Webb was interested in how Quakers handled conflict. She found diat the open venting of disputes, rap sessions, and long discussions neither eased the pain of conflict nor provided a remedy. The solution was brought about by traditional Quakers using...