ABSTRACT
In the field of ethnicity, it is easier to talk of specific linguistic groupings and national minorities than to deal with the conceptual problems of yet another social stratification variable. Ethnicity is strategically efficacious as an organizing principle. But they do not indicate whether the strategy has been evolved by ethnics themselves, by social scientists doing the analysis, or by community organizers in search of new modes of protest. Louis Horowitz ignores the ways in which ethnicity may function as a transnational cohesive factor. It has the advantage of showing that ethnicity is an aspect of the fusion of status order with the political order. Talcott Parsons serves his systemic scaffold well by integrating the concepts of ethnicity into his own general theory of societal evolution. Martin Kilson deals only with the black experience as an aggregate mass serving as role model for newer white ethnics.
