This book contains a collection of original research papers which were presented in honor of the Bordon Award recipient, Professor Eric Baer, on the occasion of the 55th Meeting of the American Chemical Society (Atlanta, Georgia, March, 1981). The contributors are present or former colleagues and students who have worked with him in the Department of Macromolecular Science at Case Institute of Technology of Case Western Reserve University. Throughout his work, Eric Baer has attempted to find the relation- ships of solid state structure and hierarchy to the resultant pro- perties from which specific functions are derived. Although he has studied many seemingly unrelated subjects, from irreversible de- formation, mechanics and yield processes in amorphous polymeric solids to structural organization and mechanical function of ten- don, his unique goal has been to develop models from the real structure that would allow a quantitative description of properties. Today, this area of microscience is rapidly expanding as new and sophisticated applications of polymeric materials with multifunc- tional properties are emerging from our understanding and control of the solid state. The wide-ranging ideas and the original- ity of Professor Baer’s contributions have stimulated many new concepts which are now widely accepted in the field of high polymers. The contributions to this volume represent many of the areas which he has explored.