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This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorfman is eulogized as the creator and curator of the definitive account of Veblen's life and work. He argued that Veblen was the archetypal marginal man and that this explains his dissenting contribution. Dissemination of Dorfman's pathography of Veblen led to its hegemony - until now. Andrew Veblen was the first to challenge Dorfman's portrait of his younger brother's life in the mid 1920s. He asserted that his family were not linguistically, socially or economically deprived. However, it was not until Dorfman's private papers became publicly available in the 1990s, that his flawed view of Veblen became more widely and comprehensively contested. An alternative appreciation of Veblen is advanced with reference to his experiences in general and the works of Bellamy, Morris and Ibsen in particular. Data sources include Dorfman's original tome, Andrew Veblen's extensive correspondence with Dorfman, and Veblen's own writings. It is concluded that Veblen's radical views are entirely congruent with his life experiences during an era of capitalist transformation. The moral of this saga is that a dose of Veblenian scepticism is essential to intellectual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mannheim's 1923 essay 'The Problem of Generations' has often been described as the seminal theoretical treatment of generations as a sociological phenomenon. Yet in practice scant attention has been paid to the sociology of generations by British sociologists. This is despite the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical time. This paper aims to raise the profile of the sociology of generations within British sociology. It is shown that Mannheim's essay can be read as a text which contributes to our understanding of key sociological issues, in addition to 'the problem of generations'. These issues include the nature of time, the relationship between biology and the social, and socio-psychological connections of language and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of social mobility has been a study of male mobility experiences. That is, not only have females been excluded by intention from these investigations, but, more importantly, it is argued that this omission is justifiable and legitimate. This is particularly so in relation to the British Isles where the heated defence of the traditional position, presently labelled the conventionalist approach, continues to rationalize and justify the exclusion of over one half of the British and Irish population. Drawing together recent North American, British and Australian research, this paper challenges both the theoretical and empirical assumptions of this conventionalist position. Arguing that a woman is neither simply a summation of domestic identities nor is her status one of complete dependency, national and international evidence on the unique and important contribution of women to the occupational attainments of husbands and children, as well as the class reproduction of families in general, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper poses the issue of distributive justice in terms of the relationship between social class, social mobility and educational attainment, in contemporary Britain. Having discussed various conceptions of justice which might vindicate class inequality, the authors investigate empirically the specifically meritocratic defence, and report survey data suggesting that the effect of class origins on class destinations is only partially mediated by educational achievement. Class privilege can compensate for educational failure. Gender is also significant since women tend to fare worse than men with similar class origins and credentials. This evidence undermines the claim that Britain is a meritocratic society and supports the suggestion that only by political intervention can equality of opportunity be rendered compatible with significant and structured inequality of outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are many interpretations of the central themes of Talcott Parsons's sociology, it is evident that the idea of citizenship played a major role in shaping the core of his mature social thought. In addition to specific discussions of citizenship in relation to black inequality and participation, of the historical roots of universal participation in the societal community, and of the political openness and pluralism of American society, the problems of universalistic participation were in fact analytically crucial to Parsonian sociology. In other words, the theme of universalistic values was not merely an empirical issue, and not merely an aspect of political questions in his occasional essays and papers, but it coloured the basic components of Parsons's work as a theorist. For example, the notion of universalism defined one possible mode of orientation to action in the pattern variables, being contrasted with particularism. The pattern variables were not merely a passing phase in Parsons's long theoretical maturation; they were fundamental to what he understood by 'modernity'. They were as a result constitutive of Parsons's understanding of social change theory and modernization processes. Indeed, this theme of universalistic participation, its dependence on the legacy of the Protestant idea of universal salvation and its peculiar role in the formation of western societies, was a co-ordinating theme in Parsons's complex theoretical legacy. In addition to its importance in his theoretical development, it was the foundation of the pressuppositional level of his general value position, because Parsons regarded American society as the culmination of the process of modernity which, as we will see, was a process of universalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of a sequence of literary frames suggests that a heightened experience of interactional reality is also anomically constructive of the frame. In each of 16 frames, Durkheimian anomie neither destroys the frame's integrity nor renders its routine grounds unintelligible, as Goffman and Garfinkel would claim it must. Paradoxically, anomie ritually intensifies the frame. The selves in the paper's sequence of highly ritualized frames are not routine selves, however. They are 'strangers to themselves.' The analysis shows how Mead's 'I' can re-emerge from Goffman's ritual thinking -- where the T is collapsed into an interactionally-bound 'me' -- as an original manifestation of great importance to interactants, and therefore to society as well. (Parenthetically it is also argued that selves need an element of rituality in order to be selflike and that it is interactional rituality which guarantees the evolution of social life beyond given frames, corpora, cultural repertoires, and collective representations.) The idea that interactants can be strangers to themselves is an advance on Goffman's and Garfinkel's accounts of interactional selfhood, but one that problematizes the prosecution of the interaction sociology that Goffman and Garfinkel pioneer, since strangers to themselves disappear in normal sociological appearances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marxian theory of social class has always been troubled by the fact that the coalitions that individuals form have not, by and large, been consistent with the pattern of asset ownership. The purpose of this paper is to add another dimension to some of the existing approaches to this 'goodness-of-fit' problem. This is done by using n-person game theory to examine the coalitions that individuals would be expected to form in a struggle over division of the surplus. This provides a partial analysis of fragmentation within the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional codes and guidelines and literature on ethical issues in social research generally subscribe to the view that open methods of research are virtuous whereas covert ones are unethical. In particular ethical conduct is assured in the acquisition of the informed consent of participants. This paper is concerned with unethical aspects of open methods. It is suggested that researchers perceive negotiations with participants as situations of conflict and normally prevail by virtue of superior and practised skills. While research subjects are told that participation is voluntary, their defences -- in particular of their privacy -- are systematically eroded. Invasion is inherent in the textbook paradigm of the interview. Consent becomes a licence and the self-esteem of the investigator is measured in terms which run counter to the interests of subjects. It is argued that consent is a procedure which protects not the participants of social research but the researchers themselves, from whom moral responsibility for adverse consequences immediately passes. One of the implications of the practices surveyed is that ethical principles for social research should be safeguarded less in prescriptions of acceptable procedures than in the recognition of moral obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To resolve the ongoing controversy over Spencer's methodological views this paper establishes that the general philosophy set out in First Principles is a philosophy of science by documenting the influence of the Whewell-Herschel-Mill canons of good science on its structure and content. Its core ideas, the law of evolution and the persistence of force, are not metaphysical principles as most Spencer scholars claim. The law of evolution is a phenomenal law which specifies the course of transformation throughout all classes of phenomena. The persistence of force is a fundamental law which, together with its corollaries, the other first principles, explains why this is the course of transformation. This proscience interpretation of Spencer's position on the science-antiscience controversy also clarifies the role of the law of evolution and the persistence of force in his sociology. They generate a distinct kind of causal explanation, ultimate-causal explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body is socially constructed; and in this paper we explore the various and ever-changing constructions of the body, and thus of the embodied self, from the Greeks to the present. The one word, body, may therefore signify very different realities and perceptions of reality; and we consider briefly how and why these meanings changed. Plato believed the body was a 'tomb', Paul said it was the 'temple' of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that it was a 'corpse'. Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cosmic: one with the planets and the constellations. Descartes wrote that the body is a 'machine', and this definition has underpinned biomedicine to this day; but Sartre said that the body is the self. In sum, the body has no intrinsic meaning. Populations create their own meanings, and thus their own bodies; but how they create, and then change them, and why, reflects the social body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high point of research investment in mobility research was in the early 1970s, when three major national surveys of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland absorbed very substantial proportions of the spending of the SSRC on sociology. Only the Oxford Social Mobility Group retained a sufficiently large team of scholars to sustain active work on the data collected, although the number of publications that have subsequently made use of the three data-sets must now be several hundred in number. The dismal economics of large-scale survey research have since prevented ant similar follow-ups of mobility per se, but there have been some smaller specialist studies and new data have been derived from other sources. Both the range of articles featured in this paper, and the secondary analysis referred to, demonstrate how the original paradigm of mobility research and has become modified. Social mobility is now not so much a single area of sociology as four or arguably five connecting clusters of work. The first, not least in terms of paradigmatic dominance, concentrates on discovering and describing large-scale flows of people between social origins and social definitions. It is this which gives rise to our knowledge about patterns and rates of mobility.

This article presents the authors' comments on the report by John Westergaard and Ray Pahl to the University Grants Committee (UGC) on the institutional state of sociology in British universities. The paper has its limitations. Both authors were members of the working group of the UGC for the subject review, and so among the signatories of the report. At the time of writing this, the report is still only in the pipeline for publication so there are no reactions yet from sociologists to either argue or agree with the report. Nor can we make we make up for possible bias from inside commitment by offering startling benefit of inside view. Not because our lips are sealed; but because we do not think there is much unexpected to expose. We have no breathtaking revelations to make, for example, about mechanisms or pressures which might have been at work to induce the subject review panel to give the report a shape or direction at odds with some of its members' views. Circumstantial pressures there certainly were; but of a kind needing no special insight to anticipate or detect. The working group's recommendations bear no doubt a clear imprint from awareness of the acute, and politically determined, shortage of funds for higher education.

This paper directs critical attention to Emile Durkheim's considerations about the crucial role of non-transferable, human talent resources within any coherent theory of social justice. It is argued that Durkheim's appreciation of this question anticipated all modern formulations of the issue, and has been insufficiently acknowledged in the contemporary literature. It is contended that Durkheim developed a theory of 'equal treatment' through a rigorous repudiation of Mill's theory of self-ownership, but tempered the sociological force of this idea by developing a parallel 'equal opportunity' theory, which established the basis of a coherent defence of the idea of equality of opportunity through the principle of proportionality. It is concluded that the ethical and sociological compromise for which Durkheim argued between these two egalitarian theories of social justice remains philosophically coherent and sociologically plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recognizes the contribution made by Robert Miles to marxist scholarship on 'race' and class in Britain but it suggests that his central thesis is flawed in that a consideration of gender and community should be as central to the analysis as that of social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using as a case study the 1914 report of the government inquiry into the pay and working conditions of the Royal Irish Constabulary, this paper will address two issues in Max Weber's writings on class and status. The first concerns the recent claim by Barbalet that market situations are ultimately rooted in actors' subjective orientations and cognitions, something which has been taken for granted with respect to social status but which runs counter to previous interpretations of Weber's work on class. Certain implications for the way Weber's notion of class is conceived follow from this, which are supported by the case study. The second issue concerns Parkin's criticism of Weber for ignoring the role of the state, and his related observation that any consideration of class and status must address how the state functions to uphold or reshape structures of inequality. The deliberations and recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry afford an opportunity in microcosm to document some of the motivations the state has for endorsing social closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents guidelines for articles for submission by contributors to the "British Journal of Sociology." The aim of the journal is to provide a medium for the publication of original papers covering the entire span of sociological thought and research. Manuscripts should not exceed 8000 words in length and the editors would appreciate receiving shorter articles. Research notes or commentaries making contemporary contributions to the journal's fields of interest will also be considered by the editors but these should not be longer than 2,500 words. All submitted works should be typed in double line spacing on one side of numbered A4 size paper. Five copies of the article should be submitted. The title of the article, the author's name/s and address should appear on a detachable flysheet and the title only should appear on the first page of the article. An abstract of up to 200 words, typed on a separate sheet, giving a concise statement of the intention, results and the conclusions of the paper should be attached to the article. Authors should also include 6 keywords. Authors should note the total word length of their article on the cover sheet and also made a note of the date on which the paper was last updated. Tables and figures should appear on separate sheets with self-explanatory titles. Spelling practices should be consistent throughout the article.