Community and Government of Tuscaloosa, Alabama

There has been an increasing realization in recent years that no one of the various disciplines concerned with the study of man and his society, ranging from biology through the social sciences to philosophy, is sufficient unto itself. Human behavior and social processes are no respecters of interdisciplinary barriers. Many social scientists are therefore attempting to examining such behavior and process as a whole - to integrate their own area of concentration with knowledge derived from other approaches. This is not to imply that the thinking of a political scientist, for example, should become a hash of indiscriminately compounded political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology, seasoned with psychology. The local organs of government and political processes should rather be studied in their larger societal context, and their relation to this context analyzed.