Academic Journal Articles

This page includes most of my publications that appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals.  These publications are available in research libraries or through inter-library loan. I have included links to the publishers web sites, where these are available.

Murley, Lisa, Keedy, J., & Welsh, J. F.  (2008) Examining School Improvement Through the Lens of Principal and Teacher Flow of Influence in High-Achieving, High-Poverty Schools. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 7(4), 380 – 400. 

Based on the social exchange theory of Homans, Gouldner, and Malinowski, this sociocultural analysis of three elementary schools focused on principal-teacher and teacher-teacher exchanges of instructional influence. Two questions were asked: (a) In what ways, if any, do principals and teachers in high-achieving, high-poverty schools exchange social influence? and (b) How do these exchanges contribute to a school's instructional capacity?

Data for this article were collected through interviews, observation, and document mining, and were analyzed inductively. Two major findings emerged from the data. First, principal and teachers exchanged influence reciprocally through (a) informal prerequisites that created a zone of trust for other exchanges of influence, (b) exchanges initiated by assertive teachers that provided reciprocity and indirect social equilibrium between teachers and principals, and (c) exchanges perceived by all players as instructionally valuable. Second, three processes were analyzed as increasing schoolwide instructional capacity: (a) principal-initiated instructional efforts, (b) teacher-directed instructional initiatives, and (c) principal and teacher access to instructional resources.

Welsh, J. F., Taylor, H., & Petrosko, J.  (2007).  The school-to-college transition in the context of educational reform:  Student retention and the state policy process.  Journal of College Student Retention, 8(3), 307-324.

One of the major goals of my research in higher education was to assess the impact of state-driven education reform efforts. This study attempted to discern the effects of reform in both Kentucky's P-12 and higher education on the retention of freshmen college students. Basically, we discovered that the efforts at improving student preparation for college by the state had little impact. In fact, institutions had information they needed to improve student retention in their admissions data bases. From a practical viewpoint, retention rates would be improved if institutions would act on data that was already available to them.

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Welsh, J. F., Nunez, W., & Petrosko, J.  (2006).  Assessing and cultivating faculty support for strategic planning:  Searching for best practices in a reform environment.  Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(6), 691 – 708.

This study also looked at the impact of reform efforts in Kentucky post-secondary education that were driven by state government. We drew data from faculty and administrators at all of the community colleges and baccalaureate granting institutions in Kentucky to explore the support for and impacts of strategic planning efforts. Basically, we discovered that support for strategic planning and the success of strategic planning varied by type of institution and whether the respondent was a faculty member or an administrator. Faculty support seemed dependent on how the goals of strategic planning were presented. If the goal of institutional improvement was paramount, faculty were more likely to support planning efforts. Administrators seemed more interested in responding to state mandates and were less interested in the institutional improvement aspects of planning.

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Welsh, J. F., Nunez, W., & Petrosko, J.  (2005).  Faculty and administrative support for strategic planning in a reform environment:  A comparison of two and four-year institutions.  Community College Review, 30(4), 1 – 20. 

This article was derived from the same study as the article discussed above. In this case, however, the primary intent of the analysis was to discern the impact of type of institution on faculty and administrative support for strategic planning activities. The study drew data from public institutions in Kentucky, a state that has pursued fundamental change in its higher educational system since 1997. The study compared faculty and administrators on five predictor variables. The data revealed that administrators at both community colleges and four-year institutions than do faculty. However, the data also reveal that faculty at the associate degree-granting institutions were more supportive of strategic planning than their counterparts at the baccalaureate granting institutions, which was probably a reflection of the attention that reform efforts in Kentucky directed at the community and technical colleges. This article also discussed how administrators can cultivate faculty support for strategic planning. Participation in the planning process and demonstration of the implementation of planning recommendations are significant drivers of faculty support.

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Welsh, J. F., Brake, N., & Choi, N.  (2005).  Student participation and performance in dual credit courses in a reform environment.  Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 29(3), 199 – 213.

Dual credit programs, the practice of allowing students to earn both high school and college credit simultaneously, are an increasingly popular policy tool of state-driven postsecondary reform, particularly where legislatures and state higher-education boards seek to increase access to higher education and achieve greater collaboration between schools and colleges. This article reported on the role and impact of dual-credit programs in the reform of Kentucky public postsecondary education. Analysis of student course taking patterns and performance reveal that more students were enrolling and succeeding in dual-credit courses. Participation rates of students from underserved populations are also increasing, but they still lag behind other demographic groups. To the extent that postsecondary reform is concerned with improving participation rates of all groups, this suggests an area where reform efforts to improve access and achievement of all students, are not succeeding fully.

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Welsh, J. F.  (2004).  Supporting minority student access and achievement:  Is there a role for the states?  Race, Ethnicity, and Education,  7(4), 383 – 397.

This article reported on the results of a national study of state higher education boards in the United States to understand their role in efforts to increase student access and achievement in higher education. The data reveal that only a small minority of state higher education boards have articulated policy objectives and implemented initiatives that are intended to improve minority student access and achievement. The data also reveal that, while the majority of states have information systems that enable them to measure and assess minority student access and academic progress in higher education, few have produced evidence that their initiatives have improved minority student access and achievement. The national discussions about affirmative action in higher education appeared to have dampended state efforts to improve minority student access and achievement in the United States.

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Welsh, J. F., & Metcalf, J.  (2003).  Administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities:  Responses to the “new accountability.”  Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 25(2), 183 – 193.

This article was one of a series of five articles that reported on facets of a major study on faculty and administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities in higher education. State governments and accreditation agencies are especially interested in promoting institutional effectiveness activities among colleges and universities. This study reported on the results of a survey directed at administrators who worked at institutions in the south eastern quadrant of the United States. The data revealed that administrators are more supportive of these efforts if the recommendations are actually implemented and if there is measurable improvement in the institution's performance.

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Welsh, J. F., Petrosko, J., &  Metcalf, J.  (2003).  A culture of accountability.  The Community College Enterprise, 9(1), 21 – 37.

This article reported from the same study as the article discussed above but is focused on how community college faculty and administrators compare with their counterparts at the four-year institutions. Most significantly, we found that faculty and administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities were higher at community colleges than at four-year institutions. We also found that the motivation for these activities, the depth of their implementation, how the institution defines quality, and the level of the participant's involvement affect support at the two-year institutions. At the four-year institutions, faculty support depends primarily on institutional improvement, not accountability, as the primary motivation and an outcomes view of quality. Administrators, on the other hand, place a premium on depth of implementation, or "closing the loop" on institutional effectiveness activities. Administrators and faculty who are involved in these activities may want to pay some attention to these findings if they are interested in cultivating more support for strategic efforts at their institutions.

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Welsh, J. F., Metcalf, J, & Petrosko, J.  (2003).  Support for institutional effectiveness activities:  Faculty and administrator perspectives at two-year institutions.  Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 27, 75 – 94.

This article reported from the same study, but focused on the two-year institutions specifically. We found that faculty at the community and technical colleges are not less supportive of institutional effectiveness activities than administrators, contrary to a lot of the research literature on the topic. Four attitudinal variables we studied are particularly important for cultivating support among faculty and administrators at two-year institutions: first, quality has to be the primary motivation; second, the prevailing definition of quality must be on outcomes, not inputs; third, employees must be allowed to participate; and fourth, the results must be implemented and communicated.

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Welsh, J. F., & Metcalf, J.  (2003).  Faculty and administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities:  A bridge across the chasm?   The Journal of Higher Education, 74(4), 445 - 468.

The Journal of Higher Education is probably the most important research journal on colleges and universities in North America. It is therefore a distinct honor to have a publication appear in it. This article was undoubtedly the cornerstone of all of our research on support for institutional effectiveness activities in higher education. The other articles parsed out different aspects of the research for in depth analysis, but this article presented the broad overview of the study. As indicated above, we gathered data from faculty and administrators at institutions that were accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. We analyzed the factors that affected support for institutional effectiveness activities in higher education. This article described the finding that the relatively greater support for institutional effectiveness activities among administrators tends to disappear when we take into account the motivation for pursuing these activities, the depth of their implementation, how quality is defined, and the level of involvement of the participants. Generally, support is improved if improvement is the motivation, the recommendations are actually  implemented, outcomes is the preferred view of quality, and if employees are actually allowed to participate in a significant fashion.

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Welsh, J. F., & Metcalf, J.  (2003). Cultivating faculty support for institutional effectiveness activities:  Benchmarking best practices. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 28(1),  33 - 46.  

This article was the fifth publication in this series. It appeared in a fine international journal.  The focus this time was on how to develop faculty support. Many of the same findings gleaned from the other four studies were pertinent to this article. However, the primary interest was in providing a set of benchmarks that institutions could use to identify if they were doing all they should be doing to promote support and involvement in institutional effectiveness activities.

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Welsh, J. F.,  Quan, J., & Nunez, W. (2002).  Institutional strategy and information support:  The role of data warehousing.  Campus-Wide Information Systems, 19(5), 168 – 174.

This article describes the concept of data warehousing, which is archiving data from information systems in such as way that it will be helpful to an organization. The article relates the data warehousing to the idea of institutional strategy, or the suggestion that it is important for institutions to have a philosophy of what they are all about or what they are attempting to accomplish. The article proposes a mutually reinforcing relationship between the two: optimally, the data warehouse both reflects and shapes institutional strategy. It was a pleasure to work with my friends Jeff Quan and Bill Nunez, two very impressive IT and data management professionals.

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Welsh, J. F.   (2002).  Assessing the transfer function:  Benchmarking best practices from state higher education agencies.  Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 27, 257 - 268.

This article reported on the results of a national study of the efforts of state higher education boards to assess the effectiveness of transfer and articulation policies and programs between the community colleges and four-year institutions.  I also attempted to identify some of the best practices from states that actually attempted to assess the effectiveness of their policies.  One of the basic observations of the study was that while almost every state has the capacity to measure student mobility and performance, very few actually look at their data to determine how well transfer students do. From a policy perspective, there is a lot of interest in the performance of transfer students, but very little effort to examine how they do. In the area of transfer and articulation, state boards do very little to improve outcomes for students.

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Welsh, J. F., & Dey, S.  (2002).  QMS2000:  Linking assessment and information technology.  Campus-Wide Information Systems, 19(2), 73 – 80.

This article reports out on an information system I developed with Dr. Sukhen Dey of Deyta, Inc that collects, formats and analyzes data on client satisfaction with various facets of the performance of colleges and universities. This article focuses on the technology and how the system works from an IT architecture point of view. As a result of my publications with this journal, I became a reviewer and, eventually, was appointed to the editorial board. 

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Welsh, J. F., & Dey, S.  (2002).  Quality measurement and quality assurance in higher education.  Quality Assurance in Education, 10, 17 - 25.

This article was related to the project described in the previous summary. However, this article looked at how the Quality Measurement System can be used by institutions that are in the midst of preparing for accreditation visits. This is an international journal. Thus, the work Dr. Dey and I did received considerable international recognition.

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Welsh, J. F.   (2002).  Reconstructing Capital: The American roots and humanist vision of Marx’s thought.  Midwest Quarterly, 43, 274 – 287.

This article reported on my study of (1) how events in the United States affected Marx's intellectual development and (2) how Marx went about writing Capital. Basically, I discovered that Marx was deeply affected by the Civil War in the United States and that he revised his draft of the first volume of Capital based on worker protests of Britain's policy favoring the South. The major revision was the inclusion of an 80 page chapter on "The Working Day," which was a phenomenological analysis of work under capitalism and resistance to the labor process. I argued that Capital had American roots and a global, humanist vision that is typically overlooked in discussions about Marx's thought.  This article was included in a collection of "outstanding articles in the social science" by Tufts University that was published on CD and distributed to libraries in developing nations across the world. The article has also been reference in several published studies of Marx's thought.

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Welsh, J. F., Dey, S., & Alexander, S.  (2001).  Continuous quality measurement:  Restructuring assessment for a new technological context.  Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26, 391 – 401.

This was the initial publication regarding the application of the Quality Measurement System for higher education. The article focused on the uses of quality measurement for the assessment of student learning in higher education. The article was selected by the board of the journal as one of the outstanding manuscripts on innovations in assessment in higher education. AEHE is an international journal edited by William Powell at the University of Bath, Great Britain. Trudy Banta and Peter Ewell served on its editorial board. I served as a manuscript reviewer for this journal until my retirement in 2007.

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Welsh, J. F., & Kjorlien, C.  (2001).   State support for inter-institutional transfer and articulation:  The role of information systems and data bases.  Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 25, 313 – 332.

This article was the first publication that emerged from my study of information systems used to support assessment in state higher education agencies. The focus of this publication was on students who transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. The main research question pertained to what state boards were doing to assess their policies and practices regarding transfer students. We found that there is considerable interest in assisting student transfers and that there is the technological capacity to assess how well transfer policies work, but the boards do very little in the way of actually looking at data to see how well transfer policies perform. Thus, there is a big contradiction between the policy interest of state boards and their actual practice.

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Welsh, J. F.   (2000).  Course ownership in a new technological context:  The dynamics of problem definition.  The Journal of Higher Education, 71, 668 - 699.

This article was based on a study I did on the question of who owns course materials developed in a technological environment. Increasingly, institutions are asserting ownership over course materials developed by faculty using multimedia and the web, which is a marked departure from historical practice, thus generating considerable conflict. The article identified a series of steps that institutions experience as they attempt to work through the conflict to arrive at a workable policy.

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Koplik, S. Z., & Welsh, J. F.  (1994).   Under the microscope:  Priorities for trustees of public institutions. Connection:  The New England Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development, 9(2),  53 - 64.

In this article, Stan Koplik and I discussed some of the major policy issues that were evolving in the mid-1990s. Many of the issues are on the front-burner of colleges and universities today. They included technology-based education, diversity, faculty evaluation, the role of colleges and universities in economic development, and how faculty productivity should be evaluated and rewarded.

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Koplik, S. Z., & Welsh, J. F.  (1993).   Teaching and research:  Tip the delicate balance.  Trusteeship, (September – October), 23 - 25.

This article also developed some themes pertaining to faculty evaluation. The basic idea pertained to finding the appropriate balance between teaching and research in faculty workload. One of the most important issues concerns how institutional type affects or should affect the balance of teaching and research. Much of the conflict over teaching and research institutions confronted in the 1990s was generated  by confusion or conflict about the mission of regional, comprehensive institutions: should they develop doctoral programs and research capacity, or should these responsibilities be limited to the research universities?  Trusteeship is the publication of the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities.

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Welsh, J. F.   (1987).  Introduction to Marxist-Humanism:  Perspectives on labor.   Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 10(4), i - ii.

I edited this edition of QJI and introduced the essays written by Marxist-Humanist philosophers and activists. This issue includes articles by Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson. It also included the first publication in an academic journal in English that analyzed Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts. QJI was founded by my dissertation advisor, Ivan Chapman, and Alex Freedman. It is still operating today as an electronic journal. I always tried to support it because I was interested in its mission to "critique the conventional wisdom" and because Chapman founded it. From 1978 to 1987, I wrote for it many times, reviewed manuscripts for it, and eventually was appointed assistant editor. This was the last issue I did anything substantial for the journal, however, because my job with the Kansas Board of Regents was very time-consuming. But, I'm proud of this issue and, generally, the work I did for QJI.

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Welsh, J. F.   (1987).  The social psychology of fraud:  dramaturgy, Carnegie and puppet theater. Mid-American Review of Sociology, 11(1), 45 - 66.

This article emerged out of my study of the social psychology of dramaturgy. I was particulary interested in the dramaturgical structure of social interactions and how these were affected by varying socio-historical circumstances. In this article, I examined the nature of fraud in everyday life by counterposing Dale Carnegie's prescriptions for succeeding in American society and Carlo Collodi's story of Pinnochio. Carnegie basically encourages individuals to falsify everyday presentations of self for the sake of earning more money and gaining more power in organizations. Thus, the lure of financial success and social power fundamentally structure social interactions in everyday life. I argued that this is a form of puppet theater, not authentic human interaction. This is opposed by the story of Pinnochio, in which the challenge is not to make more money or to gain power, but to transform oneself from a puppet to a real person, or to live an authentic human life.

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Welsh, J. F. (1986). Temporal existence in the capitalist world system. The Bulletin of the Graduate School of Pittsburg State University, 19, 5 - 15.

This essay on the social experience of time was selected by the Graduate Council of Pittsburg State University in 1986 as the research study to be featured in the Bulletin which was the annual publication of the Graduate School that celebrated faculty scholarship and publication. The essay explored the historical meaning of time and traced its variation through different socio-historical formations up to the development of the capitalist world system. As societies developed capitalist social systems and progressed from agricultural to industrial or even post-industrial economies, the social construction of time changed from a cyclical expression to a linear expression. Under capitalist conditions, time is dominated by the commodity form. However, as these advanced industrial societies began to experience manifold social crises, a new form of time appeared: pseudo-cyclical time, which is a form of time that recreates space for an escape from the commodity time of capitalism. Thus, the pseudo-cyclical time is a form of social control or an effort to reconstruct social passivity.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1986).  Reification and the dialectic of social life:  Against the Berger group.   Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 10(2),12 - 23.

Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality is a classic statement in social theory about how social reality is created and how people gain a sense of it. Their work includes substantial commentary on the concept of reification, which is the process of giving abstractions a power over persons and social relations. However, Berger and Luckmann see reification as a completely normal phenomenon, not specific to socio-historical circumstances. Moreover, reification is necessary to give people a sense of the reality of the objective world. I argued that this was an inaccurate and unfortuante treatment of reification. I argued that reification is a phenomenon that emerges in alienated social environments; it is not an historical absolute and it is not necessary to the social process. In fact, reification contradicts an authentically social and human process of reality construction. It reflects and reinforces forms of exploitation and domination. Berger and Luckmann's concept is really a form of conservative theorizing as it seeks to universalize alienated social environments.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1985).  The political dramaturgy of the capitalist state.  Mid-American Review of Sociology, 10(2), 3 - 28.

In this study of politics in the United States, I pursued a radical libertarian critique of the state by focusing on how ideology is used as a tool of social control. Dramaturgy is not only the study of everyday interactions, but is also the means by which ideology is imposed on society and individuals. The argument is basically that the U.S. government needs to maintain impressions of participation, accountability, and rationality or else the contradiction between the image of the benevolent state and its harsh reality will become apparent and encourage opposition, thereby increasing social disorganization and contributing to the management crises of advanced state capitalism. The paper concludes with an assessment of the possibilities of an authentic politics in the U.S. and suggests that political dramaturgy must be re-oriented toward a critique of the contradiction between the benevolent appearances and the more negative functions of government in society and in the lives of persons.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1984).  The presentation of self in capitalist society:  Bureaucratic visibility as a social source of impression management.  Humanity and Society,  8, 253 - 271.

This article was a part of a broad study I pursued in the 1980s about the social sources of impression management, the central concept of dramaturgical sociology. I argued that in bureaucratic organizations only visible work or visible interactions are rewarded or socially validated. Thus, the emphasis is on activity that is visible or that which fits in within the frame of reference of the organization. Because bureaucracy is concerned with rationalizing interaction it tends to create a fetishism of appearance, or a one-sided focus on that which is immediately visible to those in the organization. The consequence is a reduction of persons and social relationships to only that which reinforces the strategic efforts of the organization. Alternatives or interactions that do not fit are dismissed by the organization as irrational.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1984).  The presentation of self in capitalist society:  Alienated consumption as a social source of impression management.  Quarterly Journal of Ideology,  8(2), 23 - 38.

This article argued that impression management, the central concept in dramaturgical analysis, has distinct and interrelated social sources, one of which is alienated consumption. The dominant class under state capitalism utilizes the technologies of marketing, advertizing and the mass media to create artificial needs in people in order to ensure that a social surplus is consumed. The rationalization of the process of consumption has consequences for the presentation of self: the consumptive display of commodities becomes an important feature of social interaction and individual identity. Dramaturgical analysis is expanded by demonstrating a connection between the encounters in everyday life and the capitalist social system. The analysis in this article builds upon Thorstein Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption by arguing that the evolution of American society since Veblen's time has generalized the ideological functions of consumption so that consumption is no longer significantly related to personal need, but instead to the management and economic crises of advanced capitalism.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1983).  Beyond Berger and Luckmann:  Toward a praxis-oriented sociology  of knowledge.  Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 7(1), 66 - 69.

This article was also part of my study of the work of Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge. In this article I specfically addressed the issue of determinism in the work of Berger and Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality purports to be a dialectical theory of society and personality. However, there are significant areas where Berger and Luckmann reveal a type of determinism. This is particularly apparent in their views of externalization and socialization. Basically, they argue that individuals tend to internalize the objective facts of society. Given this point of view, it is difficult to envision how persons could externalize or participate in the externalization of any innovative or new form of society. If Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge does not include any sort of provision of indeterminacy in the social process, it is hard to see how it is fully dialectical. The dialectic always allows for the reciprocity of the objective and the subjective worlds.

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Welsh, J. F.   (1983).  The individual and socio-historical process:  A project for history and social science students.  The Practice of History and Social Science, 14, 5 - 8.

This article reported on a teaching technique I used in my sociology classes to help students understand the sociological perspective. Basically, I asked students to go to an issue of a newspaper, or some other form of recorded media, for the day they were born and analyze a major news story. Students were asked to identify the ways in which they were directly or indirectly affected by the events described in the article. They were also asked to reflect on what they learned or could learn about themselves by reading an account of events that occurred on or around the time of their birth. The project was intended to develop the ability of students to think sociologically.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1983).  The political meaning of born-again Christianity.  Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 6(3), 21 - 32.

This article offered an alternative interpretation of the rise of the religious right in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The connection between religion and politics has been an important dynamic historically and in the current period. In the early 1980s, the evangelical tendencies in American Christianity were transformed into a phenomenon I called "born again politics." This transformation entailed a significant shift in the political and religious expression of born-again Christianity. Most importantly, the process of reality construction shifted from a typically small face to face participatory process to one dominated by large-scale, high tech communications technologies controlled by religious, political, and corporate elites. Culturally, the shift was from a reciprocal, participatory process of reality construction, within an evangelical framework, to an asymmetrical, top-down process.  The rise of born-again politics, which was enormously helpful to the ascendance of the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan, adumbrated the demise of born-again religion.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1982).  Dramaturgy and political mystification:  Political life in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 6(2), 64 - 77.

This article was one of my initial manuscripts on dramaturgy and political mystification in the United States. In the original article, I was concerned with the ways in which the political system in the United States uses dramaturgical technologies to present itself as participatory, democratic, and accountable, while masking or mystifying elitist and authoritarian practics. Dramturgy is the study of how social actors present themselves in interaction frames. The article also applied the methodology of immanent critique to the study of political ideology.  Immanent critique counterposes what a social formation says about itself to what it is or what it is becoming. In dramaturgical analysis, the contradiction is between how the government actually operates, or the thing-in-itself, and, how it presents itself, or the thing-as-it-presents-itself.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1981).  Shen-wu-lien: China's anarchist opposition.   Social Anarchism,  2(1), 3 - 15.

This article provided a description and analysis of a group called Shen-wu-lien that appeared in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid to late 1960s. Shen-wu-lien published several critiques of the Cultural Revolution. The most notable was an essay entitled, "Whither China?" It seemed to me that Shen-wu-lien argued for the rudimentary principles of anarchism. This essay was very critical of the communist leadership and the Cultural Revolution. Since it called for the abolition of the state and the bureaucracy, I thought it was an authentic expression of anarchism. Interestingly, Raya Dunayevskaya also commented on Shen-wu-lien in her study of Philosophy and Revolution. She saw Shen-wu-lien as one of the new forces and new passions for revolutionary change, but did not go so far as to describe them as anarchists. However, her Marxist-Humanism is very libertarian and, in my opinion, has much in common with the collectivist anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin, although she would never accept the evolutionary aspects of this branch of anarchism.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1981).  About Shen-wu-lien. Social Anarchism, 2(1), 3 - 4.

This brief article attempted to supplement the more substantial piece on Shen-wu-lien that appeared in the same issue. This entity was a group of Chinese anarchists who opposed Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. They argued that the Cultural Revolution only strengthened the communist dictatorship in China.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1980).  Revolutionary subjectivity and the crisis of sociology.  Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology,  8, 143 - 149.

This essay outlines the critique of Marxist sociology that I developed in the late 1970s. Drawing from Bakunin's critique of Marx and the First International in the 1860s, I argued that Marxist theory is centralist and repressive in its politics. Inevitably, it alienates the object or goal of political practice, liberation, from the centralist, authoritarian practice it insists on. This problem is rooted in the work of Marx and Engels on political organization and is reflected in contemporary critical theory and Marxist sociology. Hence, Marxist sociology can never be a liberatory social theory. This argument did not sit well with Marxist sociologists, but Bakunin was right and so was I.

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Welsh, J. F.  (1973). William Godwin:  Anarchist philosopher.  The Match!  February, Pages 7 and 8.

Of course, this was not a peer-reviewed academic journal, but it was my first publication that appeared in a national periodical. Godwin is an interesting character, although he is not really a major philosopher. I thought his attempt to blend anarchism with an individualist ethical theory was very interesting. He is also probably the first philosopher to develop an organized argument for anarchism which appeared in his classic, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. I'm not really convinced that he was completely consistent in this position, but he did make a systematic attempt. He certainly developed a significant and innovative critique of law and authority. I also thought that it was interesting that he was married to Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist philosopher, and the father of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, which is a very nice critique of reification and the alienated uses of science. Godwin also wrote a very thrilling novel entitled, "The Adventures of Caleb Williams." It is a political novel in that characters represent political archtypes and the plot involves resistance to injustice perpetrated by the government.  The issue my essay appeared in also included a sharp exchange between the editor and Maoists, hence the picture of Mao on the first page. It also included a very nice essay by the egoist writer Sid Parker on anarchism and the "proletarian myth," which is the almost religious idea that the proletarians were going to lead humanity into a golden era. It is very hard to get your hands on old issues of The Match! Even most research libraries do not have back issues of it. Issues from 1972 to about 1978 are included in the John F. Welsh Special Collection in the Leonard Axe Library at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas.  The Match! was a very lively publication in a very lively time in American history.