The subtitle of this volume, Surrounded by Symbols, describes mankind's unique environment. The book tells how freedom in using language creates social reality. A language for civility and scholarship avoids spuma, magic, and defensive bilge. Taking a telescoping view, we study vibrations in symbolic environments between tradition and modernity, faithfulness and pragmatism, and between materialism and humanism. Taking a microscopic view, we see the descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive language, often imbued with emotions, forming a universal minimum vocabulary of social reality.
Hans L. Zetterberg, born 1927 in Stockholm, Sweden, came to the University of Minnesota in 1949 and maintained United States as his main base for 20 years. He taught sociology at The Graduate School of Columbia University and briefly at Ohio State University, where he was Chairman of the Sociology Department. He was also publisher of Bedminster Press which had the motto: "Books by scholars for scholars." In his native country he was the first chief executive of The Tri-Centennial Fund of the Bank of Sweden, one of Europe's larger foundations supporting social science. He turned to the private sector as a longtime pollster, managing director and owner of a company, Sifo AB, for market and social research. He became editor-in-chief of a Stockholm newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, and developed his writing to reach a curious general public. In a multi-volume work The Many-Splendored Society he sums up essential knowledge of social science. His key to social reality is simple: if mankind has the capacity to cook previously unheard-of sentences, it also has the capacity to cook and serve social structures never before seen.
Zetterberg is a past President of The World Association for Public Opinion Research.
