bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The temporal gaze: the challenge for social theory in the context of GM food
Authors: Adam Barbara 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThe temporal gaze in socio‐environmental theory can take many forms. Time may be added to existing approaches without disturbing the status quo of theory and methodology. Alternatively, focus may be on the time–space of socio‐environmental existence or typologies constructed of the complexity of socio‐environmental time. Finally, phenomena, processes and events may be conceptualized as timescapes. Through the focus on genetic modification of foods, the paper demonstrates the pertinence of this timescape perspective for social theory and socio‐environmental analyses. A thorough‐going temporal gaze is important because a) such reconceptualization forms an integral part of rethinking the social sciences' relationship to nature and environmental matters; b) the implications at the level of theory tend to be glossed over and ignored; and c) it is central to changing practice at the level of public and personal action. The paper thus uses a timescape perspective to set out substantive and conceptual issues that present some of social theory's challenges for the new millennium.
New frontiers facing urban sociology at the Millennium
Authors: Sassen Saskia 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThe article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio‐cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own specific conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation?
Archiving cultures
Authors: Featherstone Mike 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the particularity and singularity of the event. Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives of the good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life. One implication here is that rather than see the archive as a specific place in which we deposit records, documents, photographs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed, should we not seek to extend the walls of the archive to place it around the everyday, the world? If everything can potentially be of significance shouldn't part of the archive fever be to record and document everything, as it could one day be useful? The problem then becomes, not what to put into the archive, but what one dare leave out. Some of the implications of these questions were considered by Georg Simmel, in his argument that there has been a build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective culture. This is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order, given the finite limits of the human life course we all face. It is something which confronts the individual with irresolvable dilemmas over selectivity, with each particular choice amounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others. Related questions about the difficulties of handling cultural completeness, were also addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the Aleph. Yet both could hardly have anticipated the full implications of the electronic archive: the development of new technologies for storing, searching and communicating information through the Internet with its databases and hypertext links. The electronic archive offers new possibilities for speed, mobility and completeness of access to cultures which have become digitalized, which raise fundamental questions about ownership, intellectual property rights, censorship and democratic access. The implications for culture are clear: the new electronic archives will not only change the form in which culture is produced and recorded, but the wider conditions under which it is enacted and lived as well.
Mobile sociology1
Authors: Urry John 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to develop a manifesto for a sociology concerned with the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mobilities. A number of key concepts relevant for such a sociology are elaborated: ‘gamekeeping’, networks, fluids, scapes, flows, complexity and iteration. The article concludes by suggesting that a ‘global civil society’ might constitute the social base of a sociology of mobilities as we move into the twenty‐first century.
Globalization and the German model of capitalism – erosion or survival?
Authors: Lane Christel 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThe German business system has been regarded as a particularly tightly coupled system, with embeddedness of even multinational companies (MNCs) in their home base as particularly deep. A study of the impact of companies' changing internationalization, if not globalization, strategies is therefore especially suited to test competing claims about their effects on the German business system. Are we experiencing an erosion of this system, an adaptation in a largely path‐dependent way, or even a greater specialization and stronger crystallization of the German business system?To investigate these questions, the paper examines a small number of German MNCs in their domestic and international context. More particularly, the work focuses on whether and how their emergent globalization activities affect the reproduction or erosion of the three institutional complexes which shape the factors of production: the financial system; the innovation system; and the industrial relations system. The paper concludes that a new type of transformation – hybridization – is emerging. It is regarded as a consequence of German companies' growing integration into a global economic system.
Compromising positions: emergent neo‐Fordisms and embedded gender contracts
Authors: Gottfried Heidi 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis paper adopts a regulation framework to chart the emergence of neo‐Fordism as a flexible accumulation regime and mode of social regulation. Neo‐Fordism relies on old Fordist principles as well as incorporating new models of emergent post‐Fordisms; old and new social relationships, in their particular combination, specify the trajectory of national variants. I argue that Fordist bargains institutionalized the terms of a compromise between labour, capital and the state. These bargains embedded a male‐breadwinner gender contract compromising women's positions and standardardizing employment contracts around the needs, interests and authority of men. A focus on compromises and contracts makes visible the differentiated gender effects of work transformation in each country.
Market returns? Gender and theories of change in employment relations
Authors: Irwin Sarah , Bottero Wendy 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis paper explores recent arguments about the marketization of female labour, in the context of a wider analysis of the role of concepts like ‘the market’ and ‘individualization’ in sociological accounts of change in employment relations. It will be argued that within sociology there has been a tendency for rapid, large‐scale changes in employment relations to be characterized as the breakdown of social influences or structures and as the emergence of atomized, individuated market forces. In the most recent models, change in the nature of gendered positions within employment are presented in terms of a decline of social structuring and social constraint. These emergent accounts hold similarities to classical economics, and to Marx's and Weber's accounts of employment, which also characterized new forms of employment relations in terms of the emptying of their social content and their replacement by market forms. We offer an alternative, moral economy, perspective which foregrounds the continued significance of social relations in the structuring of employment and employment change. We develop the argument through an analysis of gendered patterns of employment and change in family form.
The concept of social care and the analysis of contemporary welfare states
Authors: Daly Mary , Lewis Jane 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTCare is now a widely‐used concept in welfare state research, firmly established in the literature by feminist analysis. We believe that the concept as it has been used and developed to date has limitations that have hampered its development as a general category of welfare state analysis. In essence we argue that the political economy aspects of the concept have remained underdeveloped. The main purpose of this article is to elaborate a care‐centred concept – which we name social care – that countenances and develops care as an activity and set of relations lying at the intersection of state, market and family (and voluntary sector) relations. We are especially concerned to examine what the concept of social care can tell us about welfare state variation and welfare state change and development. The article works systematically through these themes, beginning with a brief historical sketch of the concept of care and then moving on to elaborate the analytic potential of the concept of social care. In the latter regard we make the case that it can lead to a more encompassing analysis, helping to overcome especially the fragmentation in existing scholarship between the cash and service dimensions of the welfare state and the relative neglect of the latter. The concept of social care serves to shift the centre of analysis from specific policy domains so that instead of focusing on cash benefits or services in isolation it becomes possible to consider them as part of a broader set of inter‐relating elements. In this and other regards, the concept has the potential to say something new about welfare states.
Technology and social interaction: the emergence of ‘workplace studies’
Authors: Heath Christian , Knoblauch Hubert , Luff Paul 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTDespite the substantial body of literature concerned with the ways in which digital media are transforming contemporary society and institutional life, we have relatively little understanding of the ways in which new technologies feature in day to day organizational conduct and interaction. There is however a growing corpus of empirical research which places the situated and contingent character of new technologies at the heart of the analytic agenda, but as yet, these studies are relatively little known within sociology. They include ethnographies of command and control centres, financial institutions, the news media, and the construction industry. They address the ways in which tools and technologies, ranging from paper documents through to complex multimedia systems, feature in work and collaboration. In this paper, we discuss these so‐called ‘workplace studies’ and consider their implications for our understanding of organizational conduct, social interaction and new technology.
Subalterns of technopoly: brokering techno‐power in academic sociology
Authors: Keenan William 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTDrawing on responses to a small‐scale sensitizing sociological probe of ‘technological stratification’ in academic sociology, this article considers the role of academic staff delegated to oversee the distribution of information and communications technology resources within their departments between the years 1987–1996. From their recollections as local ‘gatekeepers’ of the new knowledge technologies, these ‘subalterns of Technopoly’ perceived themselves as relatively powerless ‘techno‐power brokers’ unable to make a significant difference to the ‘technological stratification’ they encountered in their working environments in that period.
Consumerism, disorientation and postmodern space: a modest test of an immodest theory
Authors: Woodward Ian , Emmison Michael , Smith Philip 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThere has recently been an explosion of theoretical literature on social space. A central claim in this literature is that postmodern spaces are experienced as confusing or disorienting by human subjects. This claim remains untested. The paper reports results from a small‐scale survey conducted in one form of postmodern space – the shopping mall. It suggests that unsupported assertions about the disorienting effects of postmodern space and their associated influence on consumerist activities should be treated with scepticism. Through practice humans are able to develop routines which enable them to competently navigate these spaces.
Is it a different world to when you were growing up? Generational effects on social representations and child‐rearing values*
Authors: Scott Jacqueline 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore the way in which people view how the world has changed since they were growing up. This is done both quantitatively and qualitatively, using open‐ended responses from the British Household Panel Survey. The theoretical perspective draws on Mannheim's insight that generational location predisposes individuals to characteristic modes of thought and experience and Moscovici's contention that generations may have distinctive social representations. The data largely support the generational hypothesis. The ten most frequent changes mentioned are unemployment, lack of safety, lack of discipline, increased pressure, moral decline, increased crime, drugs, environmental problems, and family breakdown. These social representations of how the world has changed are significant predictors of child‐rearing values, especially for women. More generally, I argue that despite the broad consensus concerning the problems facing children born today, the social representations of men and women who grew up in different epochs exacerbate the value clash between generations.
The Irish brawn drain: English League clubs and Irish footballers, 1946–19951
Authors: McGovern Patrick 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis paper draws on world systems and resource dependency theories to show how the changing recruitment practices of English League clubs have deepened the brawn drain from Irish football, thereby compounding its underdevelopment. An analysis of the origins, method of recruitment and destinations of Irish players (North and South) who appeared in the English League between 1946 and 1995 shows that English clubs imported large numbers of Irish players throughout the second half of the twentieth century. However, it was the inclusion of Irish teenagers within the youth policies of the largest clubs in the period after the 1970s that marked a break from the traditional pattern of buyer‐supplier relations. Instead of continuing to purchase players who had established reputations within the Irish leagues, English clubs began to hire the most promising schoolboys before they joined Irish sides. As this practice spread, it eventually eliminated a valuable source of income: the selling of players to English clubs. Despite this development it would, however, be inappropriate to view the relationship between the Irish and English football industries as a simple zero sum game as Irish clubs benefit from employing highly trained young players who return home after failing to establish careers in England.
Football fandom and post‐national identity in the New Europe
Authors: King Anthony 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThrough European club football, we can begin to detect the outlines of a new Europe of competing cities and regions which are being disembedded from their national contexts into new transnational matrices. Focusing on a specific network of Manchester United fans, broadly located in the city of Manchester, this article examines the development of European consciousness among this group of individuals. This consciousness does not consist of a European supranationalism but rather of a new emphasis on the locale of Manchester and an increasing recognition that Manchester United and the city of Manchester must compete autonomously with other major clubs and cities in Europe.
‘Bataille's boys’: postmodernity, Fascists and football fans
Authors: Smith Tom 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTIn his analysis of football hooliganism, Anthony King claims to reveal the historical, conceptual scheme young, male supporters draw upon. This ‘masculine vision’, he states, is similar to that held by the Freikorps. Both groups are said to adhere to modernist notions of masculinity, sexuality and nationhood, reinforced by rituals which maintain boundaries between these ‘proper’ males and deviant ‘others’. Occasionally, football hooligans breach these boundaries in acts of postmodern transgression. King also claims that fans link sex and violence in their imaginations. In this response I examine King's critique of his fellow theorists; challenge his ‘Freikorps‐Fans’ analogy; demonstrate the problem he has in establishing the sex‐violence link and question the relevance of his concept of postmodernity.
Electoral democracy, revolutionary politics and political violence: the emergence of Fascism in Italy, 1920–21
Authors: Elazar Dahlia Sabina 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThis study examines the determination of the Italian Fascists' extra‐parliamentary, para‐military, violent strategy. What were the effects of the socialists' political strategy, relying on electoral democracy, on the creation and strategy of the Fascist Action Squads? A comparison among Italy's 69 provinces, based on quantitative and qualitative historical evidence reveals a distinct pattern in the Fascists' violence. They attacked mainly provinces where the Socialists enjoyed the greatest electoral support. This pattern was a product of two historical processes: (a) the threat of the Socialist party to the landlords' economic and political hegemony, and (b) the landlords' tradition of militant anti‐worker organization which culminated in their alliance with the Fascists.The Fascists' struggle for, and takeover of, political power was not an immanent historical necessity. It was first and foremost an anti‐socialist reaction. It was shaped both ‘from below’, by the political power and radicalism of the PSI and the para‐military capacity of the Fascist Squads; and ‘from above’, by the active support the Fascists received from the landlords and the state. Supported by organized landlords and blessed with the authorities' benevolence, the Squads were able to destroy – physically and politically – the legitimately constituted provincial governments of the Socialists. The alliance with the landlords determined the Squads' almost exclusive attacks on Socialist provincial strongholds that constituted the greatest threat to the landlords' interests, while provinces dominated by the ruling Liberal party were excluded from the Squads' path of ‘punitive expeditions’.
On sources and narratives in historical social science: a realist critique of positivist and postmodernist epistemologies*
Authors: Bryant Joseph M. 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTCritics of the interdisciplinary enterprise of historical sociology commonly contend that the narrational accounts of past social phenomena provided by historians are inadequate to the task of theory‐building and testing. In support of this negative assessment, opponents will adduce informational deficiencies in the available data (the standard positivist appraisal of historical evidence), or cite the interpretive anarchy that seemingly prevails at the narrative phase of emplotment (the skeptical, postmodernist contention that historiographic texts ‘construct’ rather than veridically represent the events they artfully contrive to signify). Both of these lines of criticism are unbalanced, and therefore seriously misleading as regards the epistemic foundations of historical‐sociological inquiry. The ‘social authenticity’ and ‘informational density’ of historical evidence does allow for veridical reconstructions of the past, while the reflexive interpretive protocols of source criticism and the sociology of knowledge can be deployed to provide warrant for discriminating arbitrations between competing theories and narratives. The various epistemological deformations in the study of human affairs that have been encouraged by the old idiographic–nomothetic polarity – chronic ahistoricism within the social sciences, the atheoretical predilections of much conventional historiography – are rectifiable through the consolidation of a fully integrated sociological history, a unified and inclusive historical social science.
The power and limits of ethnonationalism: Palestinians and Eastern Jews in Israel, 1974–1991*
Authors: Kraus Vered , Yonay Yuval 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThe relative standings of four ethnic groups – Muslim Palestinians, Christian Palestinians, Asian‐African Jews, European Jews – were compared, using mobility data from 1974 and 1991. The findings show that despite the lack of government support and the prevalence of inexorable discrimination against Israeli Palestinians, they have narrowed the gap with Asian‐African Jews in both education and occupational prestige. This finding demonstrates that ideological and political hegemony is not always effective in improving the socio‐economic standing of preferred minorities (Asian‐African Jews), and that social and economic structures may counterbalance the anti‐Palestinian nationalist ideology. The analysis suggests that residential and educational segregation of Palestinians protects them from direct competition with European Jews, whereas Asian‐African Jews have to compete with this dominant group in schools, as well as in the labour market.
Spencer is dead, long live Spencer: individualism, holism, and the problem of norms*
Authors: Zafirovski Milan Z. 
Published: December 2003

ABSTRACTThe debate between the advocates of sociological individualism and those of holism has been pervasive in the development of social theory. This debate is often situated in the false problems of sociology, since it is seen as a particular form of the perennial and irresolvable dilemma between social nominalism and realism, as well as between freedom and determinism. Nevertheless, the debate is far from over within contemporary sociology and other social science, as indicated by the resurgence of individualism in rational action theory and its repudiation by holistic social theories. The aim of this paper is to identify some modern variations on this theme as well as to discern certain common tendencies of two seemingly opposite theoretical perspectives, viz. the convergence upon a normative solution to the problem of social order. This convergence is therefore denoted normative convergence between sociological individualism and holistic sociology.