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12 J. Conflict Resol. 1 (1968)

handle is hein.journals/jcfltr12 and id is 1 raw text is: France and other countries: a study of international interaction1 THEODORE CAPLOW and KURT FINSTERBUSCH Departments of Sociology, Columbia University and University of Wisconsin Introduction The purpose of this paper is to describe a collectivity whose members are nations, in much the same way that we might describe a primary group composed of individuals. The object is to point up similarities between individual and inter- national interaction that have hitherto gone unnoticed. To illustrate the method of analyzing a set of nations in this way, we selected France as our principal subject and looked for her principal interaction partners.2 It was immediately apparent that the membership of the set would vary to some extent depending upon the type of interaction. The data in this paper are based on four distinct types of interaction: exchange of university students, trade in visible commodities, exchange of printed matter through the mails, and translations of books. Of course these do not exhaust 1 Prepared for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Fran- cisco, August 1967. This study was made pos- sible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whose support and encourage- ment are gratefully acknowledged. The state- ments made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors. Christine Caplow gave invaluable assistance in preparing the statistical data. 2 For a rapid orientation to the international position of France, see Bj1l (1966). the possibilities,3 but they cover a consider- able range and show that the relationships established among nations in a given type of interaction may be quite different from those in another type. One of the authors has proposed a simple analytical model, based on four variables, for the description of situations in which two or more actors, having some common goals and some disparate goals, engage in joint action (Caplow, 1964, pp. 9-10 et seq.). The four variables are denoted as S, I, V, A. The S variable refers to some aspect of the relative strength of the parties, the I variable refers to the degree of their mutual influence within the relevant action system, the V variable refers to the voli- tional component of the situation, and the A variable is a measure of their joint achievement. When this scheme is used with reference to paired relationships in an informally organized group, the four vari- ables are called status, involvement, va- lence, and activity. They may be visualized as dimensions of an interaction matrix where status, as usual, refers to the relative strength of the parties; involvement mea- s Among the many other types of interaction that might be studied, the ones that particularly suggest themselves are diplomatic representa- tion, investment transactions, and exchange of films.

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