Biography

David Marple is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University.

Education (3)

University of Cincinnati: Ph.D., Sociology 1981

The University of Albany: M.A., Graduate Studies

Western Kentucky University: B.A., Undergraduate Studies

Areas of Expertise (3)

Sociology of Emotions

Sociology of Sport

Social Psychology

Industry Expertise (2)

Research

Education/Learning

Affiliations (2)

• American Sociological Association
• North American Sociology for the Sociology of Sport

Links (1)

• Faculty Profile

Courses (4)

Sociology of Sport

An examination of the social nature of sport in society. Topics may include the interrelation of sport and culture, sport and the socialization process, deviance and violence in sport, sport and race, the status of women in sport, and the political and economic ramifications of sport.

Sociology of Emotions

This course examines how culture and society influence our feelings yet also leave us with the ability to change how we feel, individually and collectively.

Social Psychology

The interrelationships between individual behavior and the larger social order. Language and communication, the self, interaction and interactional strategy, aggression, perception and attribution theory, prejudice and discrimination, and collective behavior.

Human Behavior: Principles of Sociology

Development of the perspectives, concepts, and methodologies needed for objective, analytical thinking about human interaction. Relationships explored in terms of the development of the self through interaction, basic types of social organization, collective behavior, types of institutions, and aspects of the total social system such as social change and population phenomena.

Articles (1)

Technological Innovation and Organizational Survival: A Population Ecology Study of Nineteenth‐Century American Railroads

Sociological Quarterly

David Marple

2008 The population ecology model of formal organizations is used to study how adaptive maneuvers enable organizations to maintain themselves in a distribution of like organizations and, ultimately, to understand how the process of selection leads to survival and reproduction of certain types of organization and attrition of other types of organizations. Selection is readily affected by organization innovation, whether administrative or technological. This research dealt with how the steel rail may have affected the survival of 214 railroads in a fourteen-state area of the U.S. from 1860 to 1890. The findings indicate that two organizational characteristics, age of railroad and size of a rail operation, contributed more to rail survival than did technological innovation. Several methodological and theoretical issues are discussed which surround the choice of the population ocology model and the conduct of this research.

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