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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.

In a previous paper published in "British Journal of Sociology," the author made the claim that despite decades of intensive investigation, not a single researcher had ever shown that class difference in education was indeed unfair and unjust. It was a charge that was underwritten by a simple, if technical, argument, which drew attention to what, in logic, would have to be shown if such a difference was to be regarded as an inequality, rather than as just another difference in a differentiated society. In this case, it was suggested that, other things being equal, the researcher would have to meet one of two conditions. He would have to show that the different classes were similarly disposed to education or, alternatively, if there were evidence, as in Great Britain, of considerable working-class indifference to education, he would need to demonstrate that such indifference was itself the result of structural or cultural inequality. Only then, it was argued, could the researcher be said to have reasonably shown that class difference in education was unfair; for only then could the researcher be reasonably sure that such a difference was not, after all, just another difference.

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]

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]

Due to the recent introduction and popularity of professional soccer in United States and Canada, this paper looks at whether the crowd violence which tends to accompany the game in Britain will be a problem in North America. Analysis includes a comparison of the historical development and present day conditions of the game in Britain and in North America. It is concluded that due to differences in the historical development and present day physical and social conditions within which the game is played, soccer in Britain lends itself to crowd violence whereas soccer in North America does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents the list of authors of the December 1989 issue of the British Journal of Sociology.

This section presents the articles published in the December 1989 issue of the British Journal of Sociology.

This article focuses on ethnomethodology in Great Britain. Immediately on publication in 1967, Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology made a strong and controversial impact on British sociology, which attracted attention than was altogether beneficial to the longer term health of the enterprise within the British concept. Initial interest and misplaced enthusiasm quickly faded, sometimes replaced by a resentment that ethnomethodology had not lived up to the image rather arbitrarily created for it. Other fashions came along, and the volume of comment expanded, especially the gratuitous and negative kind. The number who have remained well disposed to ethnomethodology through the period is small, a substantial proportion of them being linked through the Sociology Department at Manchester University in England. Studies of a more or less ethnomethodological sort have covered a range of substantive topics including the formulation of arguments in sociology texts, the analysis of newspaper headlines and stories, courtroom proceedings, interviews, interrogations, educational and business simulations, classroom organization, doctor-patient encounters, moral categories and political speeches, among others.

This article argues that contemporary British historical sociology is cognitively high-powered and of immense importance for sociology as a whole. A novelty of the exposition that is more or less dictated by such a claim is the specification of intellectual advance. Contemporary historical sociology is not another research program promising to deliver the goods at some future date, instead it is actually possible to point to sustained achievements which have implications for core concerns of the discipline. The term historical sociology is used broadly to include comparative as well as historical studies. A distinction will be made between a general sense of the past and the practice of historical sociology. One obvious way to underline the difference is by insisting that all sociologists, though with greater or lesser degrees of self-consciousness, posses the former. If historical sociology is a discrete speciality, it has a unique capacity to speak to fundamental presuppositions of most practicing sociologists. It must also be admitted that it is not always possible to separate British historical sociology from developments elsewhere. It has been pointed out that sociology was created by the emergence of modern societies whose precise physiognomy has thereafter been the central preoccupation of the subject.

This article does not aim to be a systematic review of women's studies and its ramifications in British sociology; rather it aims to present some of the key themes and areas attended to, and in the process reach some assessment of the extent to which the exercise of doing sociology has been in any way transformed by the feminist impetus. Three prior remarks are called for: one is that, since, by its very nature, women's studies is an interdisciplinary activity, restriction of the field of vision of sociology per se is not always possible or desirable. In particular, work done in the fields of social policy, social psychology, and social anthropology has fed into the concern of women's studies in sociology over this period. A cross-cultural perspective was especially important in the early years, when concern with the origin and meaning of observable social differences between men and women was high on the agenda. A second preliminary qualification relates to the exercise of locating women's studies within the academic domain. There are those who argue that this is, itself, improper; that, insofar as feminism is concerned with political action, the introduction of women into the academic syllabus is inappropriate and may even lead to political stasis.

This articles provides an overview of the topics on British sociology discussed in the September 1989 issue of The British Journal of Sociology. Pahl and Westergaard's reports to the University Grants Council on the institutional state of sociology in the British universities, represents a sociography of the sociological establishment at the last moment of a constitution of more or less autonomous universities which is not to pass to national management by the Universities' Funding Council. While Albrow's view of the nature of sociology offers illuminating contrast with the view taken by W. G. Runciman. Runciman dismissed some other fashionable explanations and went on to put forward his own terms of the nature of the subject. The significance of education in the political economy of modern society differs sharply in liberal and Marxist theory. For liberal it is central to the determination of both production and distribution. For Marxists it is a dependent variable about which Marx himself wrote little. In more recent writing the contrast continues, mainly because of opposed interpretations of the changes in the structure of employment and the incidence of the changes in the structure of employment and the incidence of social mobility both of which entail theories of the relation between education and employment.

This article talks about the sociology of hair. It attempts to describe developments in hair symbolism in North America and Great Britain. Hair is perhaps our most powerful symbol of individual and group identity. Powerful, because it is physical and therefore extremely personal, and because, although personal, it is also public rather than private. Furthermore, hair symbolism is usually voluntary rather than imposed or given. Finally, hair is malleable, in various ways, and therefore singularly apt to symbolize both differentiations between, and changes in, individual and group identities. The immense social significance of hair is indicated by economics. The hair industry is worth $2.5 billion in the U.S. as of September 1987. Hair symbolism has been extensively researched by anthropologists, particularly in initiation, marriage and mourning rituals, and in magic on a pars pro toto basis. The theory of hair developed in the article can be called the theory of opposites, since symbolic practice can be summarized in three propositions such as opposite sexes have opposite hair, head hair and body hair are opposite and opposite ideologies have opposite hair. This pattern of triple oppositions indicates the complexity and subtlety of hair symbolism and this complexity is possible for two distinct reasons. First, although hair grows all over the body, in terms of body symbolism there are only three zones of social significance: head hair, facial hair and body hair. Second, hair can be modified in four principal ways. Length can be changed. Colors and styles can also be changed and even the quantity of hair can be changed with the use of false or artificial hair.

The participant-observer study of the Cheshire Home in Great Britain which is described in this article was intended to bring some fieldwork evidence to bear on popular speculations in the field of the sociology of knowledge. These speculations are best known through the writing of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which draws heavily on the work of Alfred Schutz. Berber's sociology of knowledge draws heavily on notions of socialization which are derived from Goffman's studies of institutional life and from a too simple interpretation of G. H. Mead. This article therefore examines a Cheshire Home as a marginal world which perhaps gave a base for a counter reality and a cluster of counter identities by focusing on processes of resocialization. In view of the great weight given by Berger and Luckmann to temporality as a constituent of reality, special attention was given to the temporal framework within which inmates apprehended both daily agenda and personal biographies. The picture that emerges is of a remarkably tenacious normality. The Cheshire Home was not a base for a counter reality. The three categories which give shape and meaning to the lives of most adults held firm and were still prime categories for interpreting their lives and the world and for structuring relationships.