bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Undergraduate Sociology: Research Methods in the Public Sector Curriculum
Authors: Payne G. , Lyon E. S. , Anderson R.
Published: September 2003

This paper presents an investigation of the research methods curriculum in public sector sociology courses. It is based on an analysis of CNAA course documents for degrees in sociology and the social sciences, and undertaken with the aim of contributing to the current debate on the content of the undergraduate curriculum in sociology. The survey results suggest several trends in curricular policy: in particular an increasing emphasis on practical competence and familiarity with procedures and techniques, and a greater recognition of `methodological pluralism', although qualitative methods are still given only a marginal place in many courses. There was little evidence of progress in the teaching of quantitative skills, nor was computing yet seen to be a core element of the curriculum. The documents also revealed a continuing problem over the place of methods teaching as a whole in relation to other parts of the curriculum as reflected both in time allocation and in assessment weighting. It is argued that if the claims of sociology to practical and vocational relevance are to become genuine for students wishing to pursue research in a variety of careers, then research methods teaching needs to be brought out of the ghetto. It is the contention of the authors that this is not just a pragmatic consideration: such a change would also benefit sociology as a discipline.
A Response to R.J. Robinson's, `the “Civilizing Process”: Some Remarks on Elias's Social History'
Authors: Dunning Eric
Published: September 2003

R.J. Robinson (1987) argues that the crux of Elias's theory of the `civilizing process' lies in its status as historiography and claims to have shown that ` all Elias's main claims about social history are demonstrably false.' Accordingly, he argues, `the theory of the civilizing process seems very largely destroyed.' Close reading of Robinson, however, suggests that he has misinterpreted Elias in significant ways and that a more accurate reading of Elias's texts will be necessary before his theory can be properly evaluated.
Ritual Talk
Authors: Manning Phil
Published: September 2003

The analysis of talk is important for Goffman's examination of the self in face-to-face interaction. Here I suggest that his target is best described as being our ritual talk. Goffman defined ritual in two ways: as the smooth running of everyday encounters and as the honouring of the selves who people them. He suggested that ritual talk is structured by both prevailing rules of social interaction and by the sequential organization of talk. However, on occasion he hinted that this account is too simple. I agree, and suggest ways of furthering his investigations.
From Public Provision to Privatisation: The Crisis in Welfare Reassessed
Authors: Pulkingham Jane
Published: September 2003

Privatisation policies, pursued by a government informed by neoclassical economic theory and intent on `rolling back the frontiers of the welfare state', have been widely criticised as turning the tide against both the `welfare state' and `welfare' more broadly. The policy to privatise public industries and services is, in effect, both an employment and wage policy: the intention is to govern, not simply the general type of service provision but also, the method of wage determination itself. The argument in this paper is that the privatisation strategy is the culmination of, rather than a digression from, post-war policies in the public sector concerning wage determination. In arguing that privatisation represents the culmination of public sector wage policies in the post-war period, it is being suggested that privatisation denotes the most categorical statement and extension of successive policy developments promoting the salience of so-called `market' principles in the determination of wages. It is contended, furthermore, that the legitimacy of and increasing emphasis given to criteria such as efficiency and productivity in the name of `economic necessity', has been cultivated as a result of the power given to economic, as against social explanations, rather than emanating from any intrinsic `economic' logic.

Political and social research concerning the privatisation of public services, though often highly critical of the Government's philosophical and economic beliefs, nevertheless has perpetuated and ultimately reinforced these beliefs by failing to challenge fully the principles underlying the privatisation agenda. The privatisation debate is premised upon the assumption that `the logic of the market' provides a salient description of the overall process occurring. I would suggest that this needs to be reconsidered and an alternative conception established to further our practical and analytical understanding of the processes observed.
Improving on Sociology: The Problems of Taking a Feminist Standpoint
Authors: Ramazanoglu Caroline
Published: September 2003

The case for feminist knowledge as an improvement on male-centred sociology is a strong one. Taking a feminist standpoint produces knowledge of gendered meanings and relationships of which we may not be aware and which sociology has generally ignored. This resolves some of the problems posed by male-centred versions of sociology. Taking a feminist standpoint, though, also raises serious problems of how to make both sociological and feminist knowledge convincing. It enables us to improve on existing sociological knowledge, but exposes many further problems which still need attention. The implications of taking a feminist standpoint are explored by considering some methodological problems of improving on a 1960s study of shiftworking women.
Safety, Discipline and the Manager: Building a `Higher Class of Men'
Authors: Turner Kathy
Published: September 2003

Most analyses of the connection of safety legislation to the capital/labour relation are organised around the question of the failure of safety legislation to prevent injury and death at work. However, these accounts are problematic in that they rely on a necessary relationship between the imperatives of capital and the actions of owners and managers. This paper uses a case study of the Queensland (Australia) coal mining industry to argue that a connection between safety legislation and the capital/labour relation can be found by starting, not from the question of failure, but from an exploration of the effects of the apparatus of safety. By approaching the question from this direction it allows a significant change within the mining labour process to be traced. The apparatus of safety operated both to differentiate the manager from the miners as labourers and to constitute the manager as the (partial) site of co-ordination and discipline. Thus the new category was aligned with capital and a prior condition for the real subsumption of labour was set in place. In this form of analysis the failure of safety legislation and the reforms which it engenders appear in a new light. They are no longer organising principles of analysis but parts of a strategy which was continually aiming at a shift towards a more capitalist labour process.
Socio-Spatial Prototypes of a New Organization of Consumption: The Role of Real Cultural Capital
Authors: Zukin Sharon
Published: September 2003

The recent proliferation of new market-based consumer goods and experiences, and the high visibility of such consumption-biased spatial complexes as `gentrification' and `Disney World', call attention to the real, rather than the symbolic, role of cultural capital in contemporary service economies. Cultural capital is linked, on the one hand, with the circulation of financial capital in investment and production. It is related, on the other hand, to new demands more affluent consumers make of the consumption process ( e.g., demands for authenticity and security), and a changing nature of consumer products. These observations suggest a new organization of consumption, most marked at the high end of the market, that has to be examined in terms of spatial embeddedness, which locates consumption in space and localizes specific features of a service economy; the social creation of new relations between cultural producers and consumers, especially a relation of mediation; and the role of new consumer products and practices in instituting circuits of cultural capital that articulate with more traditional economic circuits. Gentrification and Disney World are described in terms of these three concepts, suggesting their role as socio-spatial prototypes of a new organization of consumption.
How many Classes are there in Contemporary British Society?
Authors: Runciman W. G.
Published: September 2003

If `class' is defined in terms of the economic power (or lack of it) attaching to different roles through their relation to the processes of production, distribution and exchange, then the number of classes in a society is a function of the number of dividing-lines in its social space which can be so drawn as to mark qualitative differences between sets of similarly positioned roles. These differences are defined neither by income nor by employment status as such, but by one or more of the three functionally equivalent criteria of ownership, control and marketability. From this approach, it follows that the number of classes in contemporary British society is seven; and although this schema poses (like any other) a number of practical difficulties in assigning the incumbents of particular roles to their appropriate classes, it can help to clarify, and perhaps to resolve, several problems in current stratification research.
Fitting in with the Setting: A Problem of Adjustment for Both Students and the Researcher
Authors: Parry Odette
Published: September 2003

The account presented here is based on the fieldwork collected for a doctorate which comprised a case study of a journalism school for post-graduate journalism students. The research, on occupational socialisation, which was primarily carried out by participant observation took place over one academic year (1984/85) and followed a cohort of students through their training at the school. This paper looks at the re-socialising function of the first term at journalism school, which because of the demands it makes upon the time and commitment of students is presented as a `Greedy Institution'. During their first term students are expected to discard their lay perspectives on journalism, and also the academic style which characterises their undergraduate education, in favour of the school's version of occupational practice. The paper also takes issue with the ways in which the researcher must fit in with the day-to-day requirements of practice demanded by the school and how, in many ways, her academic and research interests are incompatible with the task of re-socialisation which staff at the journalism school set out to achieve. The paper highlights how greedy institutions may have particular implications for the participant observer.
Sociologists, Training and Research
Authors: Burgess Robert G.
Published: September 2003

This paper was originally delivered as a British Sociological Association Presidential Address at the end of the Annual Conference at the University of Surrey in April 1990. In the style of Presidential Addresses it was written as a lecture that would cover a range of issues and themes. In revising it for publication I have tried to keep much of the style of the lecture as well as the range of contemporary themes that were covered: training for `practising' sociologists, employment questions, and the role of the British Sociological Association in debates about research training. It is intended to illustrate some of the major concerns of British sociologists at the start of the 1990s.
Social Class and Social Support: The Same or Different?
Authors: Oakley Ann , Rajan Lynda
Published: September 2003

This paper is concerned with themes taken from two different areas of sociological theory and investigation. The first relates to work on social class and social relationships and networks, within which a central issue has been the extent to which interpersonal ties are differentiated by occupationally-based class groups in modern society. The second area of work lies within the sociology of health and illness, and concerns the question of the health-promoting potential of social support. The paper draws on data from a study of a social support intervention in pregnancy involving 507 pregnant women in the Midlands and the South of England, and considers to what extent family, friendship and neighbourhood ties exhibit different patterns by occupational and other measures of class. The study findings suggest that working class women are not more closely involved with their relatives and are more isolated in terms of friends than middle class women; male domestic support is also less common in working class households. These patterns are discussed as part of the context within which services for the promotion of maternal and infant health are provided in modern industrial societies.
Professionalism and Rationality: A Study in Misapprehension
Authors: Fores Michael , Glover Ian , Lawrence Peter
Published: September 2003

In an earlier paper the professions were identified as a primarily Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and associated with economic under-performance. The present paper goes further by questioning the theoretical interpretations of professionalism in the writings of some of the founding fathers, and occasionally of their translators. We variously question here Weber's restricted concept of the entrepreneur, Parsons's rendering of these ideas in English, the assumption that science in general has had a Newtonian character, and that association with science produces a rational disposition in human actors. The view expressed here is that these various misapprehensions - about entrepreneurialism, professionalism, rationality and science - derive from a desire to impose order, to oversimplify phenomena as systems, and to focus on that which may be described and codified, to the neglect of voluntaristic and problematic dimensions.
The Class Location of Families: A Refined Classification and Analysis
Authors: Graetz Brian
Published: September 2003

While the class location of families has received considerable attention in recent years, existing research has adopted quite divergent approaches in defining those locations. This inconsistency is symptomatic of a number of unresolved practical problems associated with classifying the class composition of families. This analysis identifies these problems and suggests ways in which they might be overcome. It argues that rather than adopting a simple categorical distinction between class homogeneous and class heterogeneous families, it is important to distinguish between levels or degrees of class heterogeneity. A strategy for doing so is outlined, and its advantages in distinguishing different types of class locations are demonstrated through an analysis of class identity.
Europe and the European Community 1992
Authors: Bryant Christopher G. A.
Published: September 2003

Completion of the European Community's single internal market by 31 December 1992 is intended to secure the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour within the Community. This article examines the 1992 project with special reference to harmonisation and variation among the twelve members of the EC, `Social Europe' and the Social Charter, `Citizens' Europe', and the wider European context following the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe. It is argued that the interaction between the neo-liberalism of the single market, other EC policies, and the various historic practices of the twelve will generate highly complex outcomes for the Community as a whole and for individual members. Novel social and political forms - some of them hard even to conceptualise - may be expected. The same may be said of Eastern Europe. Throughout the continent sociologists will have an indispensible part to play in making the provenance and character of the various outcomes understandable to all concerned.
Citizenship, Consumption and Rights: A Comment on B. S. Turner's Theory of Citizenship
Authors: Harrison M. L.
Published: September 2003

This paper suggests amendments to the outline of the theory of citizenship recently offered by Turner. In particular, five issues are noted: the necessity of disentangling the normative and the material; the need to recognise the significance of the differential character of experiences of citizenship; the desirability of placing differential experiences within a context which acknowledges class and intra-class divisions, incorporation and exclusion, in a number of separate but related settings; the problems of defining welfare and of a welfare stereotype; and the need to explore more fully the dimensions of property rights claims within notions of citizenship.
Securing the Future: `Survival Strategies' amongst Somerset Dairy Farmers
Authors: Pile Steve
Published: September 2003

This paper examines the way in which farmers use survival strategies to ensure the reproduction of the family farm. These survival strategies develop from farmers' individual motivations and their attitudes towards social processes - the way they read history. However, farmers are constrained by their structural relationships. I argue that what is important is the way farmers understand their structural relationships and the meaning they give to them. This is so especially in the case of family farming, where there is an intersection between family-centred motivations and vocation-centred motivations. Initially I explore these issues by introducing the theoretical literature which attempts to understand the structural relationships in which farmers live and act. Then I describe farmers' family-centred and vocational-centred motivations (or privatisms) and the way in which they understand social processes. These form the foundation for farmers' survival philosophy and practice. I conclude by arguing that farmers are (unintentionally) reproducing the structural relationships that are threatening the survival of the family farm in its present form.
Planning Inquiries: A Socio-Legal Study
Authors: Blackman Tim
Published: September 2003

The British planning system has come under strain in recent years with the combination of large-scale urban restructuring and heightened environmental awareness. This article considers the underlying conflicts of social values and interests which are suppressed by planning and its `public interest' ideology. A study of public inquiries is presented, drawing on the recent inquiry into the Belfast Urban Area Plan, to illustrate how public inquiry discourse reflects a system of public administration which is strong in powers but weak in social policy. The implications of this for both the legitimacy and role of planning are discussed.
`Depth Hermeneutics': Some Problems in Application to the Public Understanding of Science
Authors: Locke Simon
Published: September 2003

J. B. Thompson's recently proposed `depth hermeneutical' method for the study of culture and ideology provides a clear and systematic account of the expectations of a critical approach to culture. However, in attempting to apply the method to one particular area of modern culture - science - certain unanticipated difficulties arise. In particular, there is exposed a crucial ambiguity regarding the relative status of the accounts offered by analysts and audiences, which if left unresolved threatens to undermine the whole intent of the method. This ambiguity is explored with reference to current research into one example of the public understanding of science - creationism - and the nature of scientists' discourse. It is suggested that the source of difficulty resides in Thompson's conception of the `mobilised meaning' of cultural products, a conception that artificially restricts the range of possible meanings a given cultural product may have, in such a manner as to accord priority - albeit unintentionally - to analysts' readings, thereby undermining the stated view of audience readings as critical appropriations. Consequently, it is considered doubtful that Thompson has been fully successful in his aim to go beyond the limitations of `semiotic' analyses.
Mind, Body and Behaviour: Theorisations of Madness and the Organisation of Therapy
Authors: Prior Lindsay
Published: September 2003

This paper is concerned with the socio-medical organisation of psychiatric disorder. The main line of analysis demonstrates how different psychiatric ideologies produce different objects of professional focus and, consequently, radically different forms of therapy and therapeutic environment. By way of empirical evidence, the paper examines in some detail three contrasting contexts in which psychiatric disorder has been described and organised. The first is represented in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, the second in the case books of a turn of the century asylum, and the third in the activities and practices of a modern psychiatric ward. By drawing on these sources of data, it is argued that an understanding of large scale changes in the organisation of psychiatric health care (such as is evident, for example, in modern trends from hospital to community care), firmly depends upon a study of the inner structure of psychiatric ideologies. Furthermore, and as a corollary of this it is claimed that appeals to extra-psychiatric (economic) interests and/or scientific (pharmacological) advances as key factors for explaining processes or organisational change (especially the process of deinstitutionalisation), are essentially misleading.
Images of Parenthood in the United Kingdom and Japan
Authors: Dingwall Robert , Tanaka Hiroko , Minamikata Satoshi
Published: September 2003

Depictions of pregnancy and parenthood in parentcraft literature in the United Kingdom and Japan are examined as evidence of the beliefs and values of the two societies. Following a review of the texts produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with their common authoritarian tone and emphasis on women's responsibilities towards the nation, there is a brief discussion of the concepts used to guide the analysis of contemporary visual material. The `official' versions of parenthood produced by government agencies are set alongside `commercial' and `alternative' models produced by mass-market publishers and radical groups. The UK manuals are seen to present parenthood as the joint responsibility of choice-making adults, while the Japanese marginalize women and emphasize their subordination to medical authority. The Westernized tone of the commercial publications is essentially superficial and a reflection of a prevailing consumer style which overlays a traditional culture. Contemporary UK texts show a drift towards utilitarian populism, which may be a significant marker of cultural change.

Child-training literature is as much expressive of the moral climate of the time and place in which it is written as the state of scientific knowledge about children (Mead and Wolfenstein 1955:44).
The Empirical Correlates of Action and Structure: The Transition from School to Work
Authors: Layder Derek , Ashton David , Sung Johnny
Published: September 2003

The paper attempts to link theoretical ideas concerning the relation of agency and structure with empirical research on the transition from school to work. In particular, some of the propositions of structuration theory are assessed in terms of their applicability to empirical research which investigates the impact of individual and structural variables on movement into the labour market, and the way the variables combine to determine entry into labour market segments. The data suggests that structural and individual factors are influential at all levels of the occupational hierarchy, but that the strength of influence varies at different points in the hierarchy. This supports the axiom of structuration theory which asserts that structure and activity are deeply implicated in each other in the process of social reproduction. However, the data further suggests the `duality of structure' principle has to be considerably modified in order to apprehend phenomena such as labour market processes. In this respect we believe that structure and action variables have to be viewed as loci of powers rooted in partly independent ontological domains but which interpenetrate each other in specific empirical areas at particular points in time and space.
Explaining Union Density in Twentieth-Century Britain
Authors: Runciman W. G.
Published: September 2003

The statistics of union density in Britain are throughly documented and there is little disagreement about the overall pattern across British industry between the turn of the century and the present day. However, discussion of their significance has largely been dominated by the two apparently incompatible approaches of the `Marxian' and `Industrial Relations' schools. In this article, it is argued that an interpretation derived from the theory of social selection can reconcile what is valid in these two approaches and thereby suggest a more satisfactory explanation than either of the reported pattern of variation, both over time and across different sectors of the economy. In conclusion, some wider implications are discussed which bear on recent debates over the class position of white-collar employees.
The Professionalisation of Social Work? A Case Study of Three Organisational Settings
Authors: Anleu Sharyn L. Roach
Published: September 2003

This case study of social workers employed in three organisations suggests that conflict and tension arising from specific bureaucratic requirements combined with professional workers' claims for autonomy are not the invariable or inevitable outcome of organisational employment. Indeed, by defining spheres of competence and exclusive jurisdiction, organisational guide-lines protect social workers from encroachment by, and competition with members of other professions. This thereby strengthens the position and increases the legitimacy of social work within an organisation. In addition, social workers depend upon complex organisations for essential resources including employment opportunities and clients thereby contributing to professional-organisational interdependence and integration.
Is Britain a Class-Divided Society? A Re-Analysis and Extension of Marshall et al.'s Study of Class Consciousness
Authors: Evans Geoff
Published: September 2003

Marshall et al. have claimed that class is the major social structural influence on social consciousness and ideological conflict in modern Britain. In this paper I re-analyse data from the Essex class study and demonstrate that the class consciousness index devised by Marshall et al. is not an adequate measure of a unitary concept of class consciousness and that their claims about the pre-eminence of class as a structuring influence on identities and attitudes are not supported by the data. My analysis shows that education, income and several other factors influence levels of `class consciousness'. I go on to show that the class consciousness index in-appropriately aggregates diverse types of attitudes and identities, of which only `class identification' has a substantial association with social class. Moreover, class differences in attitudes towards redistribution disappear completely when they involve costs as well as benefits for working class respondents, thus indicating that classes do not differ in their commitment to egalitarianism. In the discussion several responses to the problems encountered in measuring class consciousness in contemporary Britain are examined.
The Promising Future of Class Analysis: A Response to Recent Critiques
Authors: Goldthorpe John H. , Marshall Gordon
Published: September 2003

Class analysis has recently been criticised from a variety of standpoints. In this paper we argue that much of this criticism is misplaced and that, as a research programme, the promise of class analysis is far from exhausted. The first part of the paper clarifies the nature and purpose of class analysis, as we would understand it, and in particular distinguishes it from the class analysis of Marxist sociology. The second part then makes the case for the continuing relevance of class analysis, in our conception of it, by reviewing findings from three central areas of current research.
Immanence Changes Everything: A Critical Comment on the Labour Process and Class Consciousness
Authors: Tanner Julian , Davies Scott , O'Grady Bill
Published: September 2003

This paper discusses a number of problems with labour process accounts of worker subjectivity. They are manifested as ambiguities about the meaning of worker behaviour, and have their origins in conflicting ideological requirements of Marxism and assumptions of immanence. We argue that it is these theoretical precepts, rather than cumulating empirical knowledge, which have driven debates on the labour process and interpretations of behaviour in the workplace. We show how essentially similar activities are construed as either reproducing capitalist relations or resisting them, according to the theoretical needs of the labour process pardigm. Compounding this interpretive problem is the insistence of labour process theorists that the point of production is the key source of worker consciousness in capitalist society. We conclude that labour process is incapable of theoretical growth because of its non-cumulative circulation of explanations and fixation on the workplace. In its place we advocate more inductive empirical approaches to the study of consciousness.
The `Discouraged Worker' Revisited: Post-16 Participation in Education South of the Border
Authors: Gray John , Jesson David , Sime Nicholas
Published: September 2003

A recent analysis of data from Scotland found evidence of `discouraged worker' effects. More young people stayed on in full-time education post-16 in areas of high adult unemployment than in areas of low unemployment; this was particularly true for those with middling-level qualifications. Using comparable data on English young people the paper attempts to replicate the Scottish analysis. Although evidence of local labour market effects is offered, no `discouraged worker' effects were found; in fact, more young people stayed on in areas of low unemployment. Some possible reasons for differences between the two countries, including the potential influence of different structures of post-16 educational opportunities, are explored.
Individual Care? Power and Subjectivity in Therapeutic Relationships
Authors: May Carl
Published: September 2003

Ideas about interpersonal relations between health care practitioners and their clients have been radically reformulated over the past two decades. In the face of critiques of the ways in which health care systems objectified the populations which they served, a new vocabulary - stressing holistic and personal care - has become thoroughly accommodated within health professions. This paper examines the ways in which this new definition of the patient raises questions about power and control in health care. The paper takes as a concrete example the practices involved in the nursing care of the terminally ill. However, at a general level the arguments advanced here may be applied to a range of health and welfare professions.
Constructing Causal Accounts in Social Work
Authors: Bull Rodney , Shaw Ian
Published: September 2003

Causal accounts are a relatively neglected aspect of occupational discourse. Using the example of social work, it is argued that the metaphor of narrative drama may have led to a framework in which the inspection of causal texture is not central to the analytic task. Starting from the literature on accounts, we argue that a promisingly fruitful way of exploring issues of social work talk and causality is through ethnography. Preliminary directions are outlined towards an ethnography of causal accounting within professional discourse in social work, and we identify incidents and events that may be investigated as possible `triggers' for such accounting. Causal accounts are viewed in part as occupational `survival kits'. We speculate on possible implications of such an ethnography for thinking about social work practice and management.
Even Sociologists Fall in Love: An Exploration in the Sociology of Emotions
Authors: Jackson Stevi
Published: September 2003

While the institutionalisation of love in marriage and its representation in romantic fiction have been the focus of considerable attention in sociological and feminist writing, the cultural meaning of love as an emotion has been neglected. This paper explores the possibility of developing a sociological approach to love based upon the assumption that emotions are culturally constructed. Existing sociological and feminist work is suggestive of themes which the paper seeks to develop: the distinction commonly made between being `in love' and love as longer term affection, the mysterious power accorded to the former emotion, the contradictions between these two forms of love and the ways in which the ideology of romance has been associated with women's subordination. As a means of theorising these aspects of love, a conceptualisation of subjectivity as constituted through narrative or discourse is considered. This perspective may enable us to account for the cultural specificity of emotions, but there are questions which it leaves unanswered.
Weber, Wagner and Thoughts of Death
Authors: Chalcraft David J.
Published: September 2003

This article seeks to show the ways in which an addition made to the second edition of The Protestant Ethic can be illuminated by placing it in the context of Weber's personal life and how that text can also illuminate various personal concerns and relationships that characterised Weber's life, in particular during his last year alive in Munich. Aspects of Weber's personal life are explored making use of Marianne Weber's account of her husband's life, although her account is subjected to some critical analysis. It is shown that key concerns in Weber's life at this time included death, family responsibilities and eroticism. The addition (which basically involves the quotation of Siegmund's answer to Brünnhilde - the herald of death in Wagner's opera Die Walküre), relates to these themes, and in the context of The Protestant Ethic opens up a whole range of intertextual affinites which serve to highlight the way in which Weber drew on a cultural heritage to give expression to his ideas and emotions. This complexity also relates to Weber's relationships with Else Jaffé, Mina Tobler, Marianne Weber and his sisters, Klara and Lili; and it is to these relationships that I seek to relate Weber's use of Wagner. However, it is argued that the reference to Wagner in The Protestant Ethic, when understood in the context of Weber's life, is overdetermined, and that it is difficult to specify precisely what Siegmund's speech meant to Weber and to the persons in his immediate circle. It is argued that rather than this indeterminancy undermining the biographical perspective of the paper, the complexity of Weber's relationships and emotions that is uncovered serves to capture the dilemmas of `real' life.
Changing Sociological Perspectives on Chance
Authors: Smith Mike
Published: September 2003

This article offers a `cognitive map' of interpretations of chance, within the Weberian paradigm, as revealed by twentieth-century writers from the United Kingdom, the United States and France. It notes the tension between the opposing definitions of chance as `residue' and chance as an important explanatory element in social development models. It describes how the predominant view of chance as `residue' between the 1940s and the 1960s was challenged from the 1950s and has been replaced, for many writers since the 1980s by the acceptance of the importance of chance for understanding the indeterminate nature of reality. While chance remains undertheorised in sociology the writings of a number of key authors have been used to suggest crucial features which distinguish social chance from other forms of chance and enable the former to be defined more carefully. Social chance, it is suggested is `unforeseen chance'. It consists of two main categories: `chance impacts' and `chance outcomes of interaction', the latter category, itself, made up of two sub-types: `agonistic chance' and `aggregated chance'. The article concludes with brief references to developing agreements among sociologists over appropriate levels of analysis, conditions and outcomes associated with the analysis of social chance.
Critical Realist Ethnography: The Case of Racism and Professionalism in a Medical Setting
Authors: Porter Sam
Published: September 2003

The purpose of this paper is to identify a philosophy for ethnography which could overcome some of the epistemological criticisms to which it has recently been subjected, notably by Martin Hammersley (1990, 1992). It is argued that Roy Bhaskar's (1989a) theory of critical realism is capable of solving many of the problems raised in relation to representational claims, theoretical focus and explanatory status. A substantive example of how critical realist ethnography can be used is given in a participant observation study of how racism affects occupational relationships between nurses and doctors, and how its effects are mediated by professional ideology. It is argued that the universalist-achievement ethos of professionalism tends to counter the ascriptive nature of racism. Thus, as long as a functional-specific pretext is unavailable, the effects of structural racism will remain latent in social situations where professionalism has a powerful influence.
Constructing Difference: The Making of Gendered Subcultures in a Japanese Automobile Assembly Plant
Authors: Gottfried Heidi , Graham Laurie
Published: September 2003

Using participant observation, this article explores the social forces giving rise to workers' culture in a Japanese automobile assembly plant. Most theories share the problematic assumption that workers' culture is homogeneous, obscuring the emergence of, and interplay between, subcultures. Subcultures encourage male and female workers to see themselves in opposition to the other and to articulate narrowly constructed gender subjectivities that conform to factory discipline in a changing post-Fordist work place. The analysis suggests the need to examine both sides of the class and gender divide in order to understand fully the labour process and the formation of organisational culture.
De-Constructing Concepts of Care
Authors: Thomas Carol
Published: September 2003

`Care' has been the focus of much sociological and policy related research in the last decade. However, a review of this research literature reveals that the concept of `care' is not uniformly defined, nor is its epistemological status clear. This paper explores the problematic nature of the concept of care in sociological research. In the first section, concepts of care characteristic of 1980s research are deconstructed and compared. This demonstrates their variable and partial character. The second section contrasts the ways in which feminist writers Hilary Graham (1991) and Clare Ungerson (1990) have recently begun to recon- ceptualise care. It is argued that these authors are working along quite different conceptual paths, and that neither reconceptualisation transcends the problem of the partiality of preceding concepts of care. In section three, a unified concept of care is introduced and the question of the theoretical status of the category `care' is addressed.
Recession, Restructuring and the Fate of the Unemployed: Evidence in the Underclass Debate
Authors: Payne Joan , Payne Clive
Published: September 2003

High levels of unemployment over more than a decade together with industrial restructuring suggest there may be a widening gap between the work chances of unemployed people and the rest of the workforce in Great Britain. Labour Force Survey data show that the proportion of unemployed people who had found work one year later was much lower after the economic recovery of the late 1980s than it was ten years previously. We model trends between 1979 and 1989 in the work chances of unemployed people relative to the chances of people in work. During the first half of the decade work chances of these two groups diverged, and though later economic recovery enabled young unemployed people to regain their 1979 position relative to young people in work, the relative work chances of older unemployed people were permanently impaired. These trends relate closely to employers' recruitment rates, and suggest that changes in the type of labour sought by employers have been particularly disadvantageous for older people, especially men. Our findings do not support the idea of the emergence of an unemployed `underclass' as a general phenomenon, but prolonged high levels of unemployment in the 1990s may change the picture.
Labour Supply after Childbirth: Do Employers' Policies Make a Difference?
Authors: McRae Susan
Published: September 2003

Data from a national survey of new mothers are linked to data from a survey of their pre-birth employers in order to investigate the importance of employer characteristics and policies, relative to women's individual characteristics and circumstances, in determining labour supply outcomes after childbirth. Three labour supply outcomes are examined: returning to work after childbirth, hours of work after returning to work, and choice of employer after the birth. Over the period of time between the birth and whether the mother returned to work (8-9 months), it appeared that women's own characteristics, and the local rate of female unemployment, exerted a stronger influence on drawing women back into employment than did employers' policies. However, employers' retention policies appeared to give women the choice of remaining out of the labour market for longer periods, without risking the penalties usually associated with changing jobs after childbirth. The study finds no evidence to support a suggestion derived from labour market segmentation theory that there will be a distinct patterning in terms of industry or size of the relationship between employers' policies and women's labour supply decisions after childbirth. However, further support is given to the importance of employers' policies in relation to the segmentation of the labour supply.4
The Changing Effects of Lone Parent Families on the Educational Attainment of their Children in a European Welfare State
Authors: Dronkers J.
Published: September 2003

This article1 analyses the effects of different forms of lone parenthood (lone mother, mother and step-father, lone father, or father and step-mother) compared to natural parents families on the educational attainment of their children, using a national data-set on educational attainment in the Netherlands in the late 80s. Children living in lone parent families attain lower educational levels at the start of secondary education compared to children living in natural parents families. This is still the case after controlling for background variables. There are indications that lone mother families function differently from families of a lone father. Compared to the negative effect of lone parent families on educational attainment in the late 70s, the negative effect of the lone mother family has increased in the late 80s.
Class as a Social Fact
Authors: Lee David J.
Published: September 2003

Use of the concept of class in sociology has come under three types of attack: that it contains residues of an unacceptable Marxist holism or otherwise lacks explanatory power; that it is an essentially contested and, therefore, ambiguous term and, that it is decreasingly relevant to contemporary social conditions. This article argues that all three criticisms are mistaken and have only become possible because of the survival of economistic thinking in both the Marxist and Weberian mainstream traditions in sociology. Class analysis needs to be rethought in Durkheimian terms as an externally constraining social, not economic, fact. Such an approach entails recognition of the role of money circulation as a collective representation through which the social division of labour is framed and classified. It is argued that this approach can be adopted without conceptual ambiguity, is consistent with existing research on the `impersonal possession' of private and public capital and complements the enduring contributions of existing class theories.
Productive, Relational and Everywhere? Conceptualising Power and Resistance within Foucauldian Feminism
Authors: Cooper Davina
Published: September 2003

This paper critically explores the ways in which power has been conceptualised within Foucauldian feminism. I focus on two facets within this framework: power as productive and power as relational. Although Foucauldian feminism combines both, tensions between them exist, particularly when it comes to understanding resistance. I argue for the need to focus on a productive or generative paradigm of power which perceives power neutrally as neither inherently oppressive nor liberatory, yet with the capacity to be both. In this way, power can be conceived of as ubiquitous and trans-historical without inhibiting the possibilities for social change.
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
Authors: Bloomfield Brian P. , Vurdubakis Theo
Published: September 2003

This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which `reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control technology for organisational purposes; and we illustrate our case with a discussion on the textual practices through which the boundary between the `technical' and the `social' is constructed and sustained. In this connection it is worth noting that consultancy reports on IT reflect a concern central to social scientific inquiry - namely, the analytical relationship between the `social' and `technical' domains. Our starting point is to situate such reports within the broader category of textual and graphical constructs - inscriptions - which in various fields of enquiry and application, discipline and practice, are used to represent reality in order to act on it, control or dominate it, as well as to secure the compliance of others in that domination.
Career as a Project of the Self and Labour Process Discipline
Authors: Grey Christopher
Published: September 2003

This paper draws together recent insights in labour process analysis, which highlight the role of Panoptic techniques of disciplinary power, and work which suggests that the project of self-management has become a defining feature of contemporary subjectivity. In particular, it is argued that the discipline operationalised within the discursive and non-discursive practices of `career' should be treated as an aspect of this contemporary project of self-management. The pursuit of career is seen to have the potential to transform techniques of disciplinary power into adjuncts of these projects of the self. These themes are explored through the presentation of case study material on the accounting labour process.