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The paper examines three aspects of demographic change and conjectures about their wider impact on British society. Two features of fertility behaviour are highlighted. The first deals with ethnic variations and the likely continuation of high fertility rates amongst women of South Asian origin. The second involves the continued bifurcation between career women and those for whom motherhood remains a central life project. International migration is also assessed and the contradictions within the 'Fortress Britain' strategy exposed. Britain will continue to receive migrants from overseas and British society will become increasingly multi-ethnic. The paper also examines the tensions between an increasingly ageing population and the development of increased ethnic and cultural diversity. The paper concludes with some implications of these changes for the discipline of sociology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to Ian Craib's critique of the present authors' paper in the May 1993 issue of Sociology which suggested the concept of gender stereotyped emotional behavior. The present authors relate that they would agree with Craib that much of cultural studies is merely a form of description which offers no clue as to the relationship between particular discourses and how people live their lives: some form of connection or identity between discourse and experience is usually implied but scarcely ever demonstrated. They note that in attempting to rubbish their suggestion of gender stereotyped emotional behavior, a number of sociologists including Craib have abandoned conventional sociological criteria and argued that because they personally know or know of individuals who are able to discuss their emotions the phenomenon cannot be widespread. They explain that their point is not essentialist, that all men cannot express intimate emotion but that--under the prevailing societal conditions of persistent gender inequalities of power and gender divisions of labor and emotion work--most men find themselves unable or unwilling or do not choose to do so in the context of close heterosexual relationships.

Drawing on data from a study of grandparenthood, this paper examines the nature of projected action, and the value of the concept of `rule' in both lay and sociological reasoning. The way in which people becoming grandparents for the first time defined grandparenthood is analysed through an examination of their formulations of appropriate grandparenting behaviour, as elicited in qualitative interviews. Although much was left ill-defined, grandparental involvement with the younger generations was accounted as being bounded by certain rules or guidelines which served to restrict grandparental action, and set limits to their intended behaviour. Three main restrictions on potential action were noted: `not-interfering', `sharing', and `not-spoiling'; the grandparents' elaborations of these will be examined. They seemed to express underlying `rules' which represented a way of speaking about or making sense of a future role. However, the failure of these `rules' to perform as clear cut prescriptions for behaviour enabled the grandparents to develop a role for themselves. Notions of appropriate grandparenting behaviour were found to be based on personal experience or commonsense knowledge. Drawing on their knowledge of family life, the grandparents were able to give themselves a positive but nonetheless non-interfering role. The personal characteristics and expectations of the grandparents, as people able and willing to spend time with their families, seemed to create an inherent contradiction in their projections of a grandparental role. Yet it was such different relevances which facilitated the production of a potentially satisfactory set of practices for `doing grandparenting'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pleads for hermeneutic processes to be taken into account in the discussion of role conflict. In order to avoid reification of mechanistic assumptions under- lying cross-pressure models of social action, it is suggested that theory as well as research should take into consideration that norms and behaviour are mediated by interpretative processes. These constitute a level of `social understanding' which can be operationalized in role-conflict terms as three different types of conflict. Reciprocity of perspectives and evaluation, as the main dimensions of interpretation processes, are shown to be the main features of conflicts in role interaction [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]