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This paper, based on fieldwork conducted in Singapore and Malaysia, examines the social foundations and organizational principles of Chinese business finns, focusing in particular, on the inclination to incorporate personal relationships in decision making. It identifies three key aspects of personalism: personal control, personal guanxi relationships, and interpersonal trust or xinyong. Personal control is effected largely through depending on people whom one personally trusts as this would reduce risks and afford better business control. The paper also examines the dynamics between guanxi and xinyong, and how these ideals are played out in reality. A central argument is that economic decisions are not based solely on market considerations. Rather, they are embedded in the context of larger social relations and institutional forces which shape, reinforce, as well as challenge, a set of behaviours or organizational structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the relationship between class origins and the position young people occupy one year after finishing post-primary education in the Republic of Ireland over the period 1984-1993. We find that class differentials in the position occupied after leaving school do not change over time, although, among young women, the relationship between educational attainment and the position occupied does change slightly. We show that the reason why this latter change can co-occur with an absence of change in class differences is because class origin effects on the position a school leaver occupies one year after leaving school are substantially independent of educational attainment effects. In other words, class differences in how young people fare after leaving school are only weakly mediated by education. Other channels of class influence must therefore be operating, and their cumulative impact is much greater than that of class based educational inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent commentary on working-class life has emphasised its 'privatisation', the restriction of networks of everyday relationships to the immediate family and its home. This marks a distinctive shift from earlier characterisations in terms of 'communal sociability' in which the extended family and a web of neighbours and friends are prominent. This paper presents evidence from a study of people living in a post-war suburb of Coventry which points to a considerable degree of communal sociability in an (apparently unlikely) locality. Privatisation is wholly inapt as a description of the contact with relatives, sources of help, neighbourliness, membership of organisations and recreation reported by respondents. The empirical basis of claims put forward by advocates of the privatisation thesis is examined and an alternative approach to the issue is sketched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines Weber's work on charisma from the original formulation in Economy and Society to the final statement in the essay on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Both the intended meaning of charisma in the earlier formulation and the uses and limitations of the new formulation are discussed. The paper concludes with some observations on the place of charisma in Weber's ethical and intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reassess Norbert Elias's central theme of the `civilizing process' with reference to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. My argument is that the process of `civilization' must be seen as thoroughly ambivalent, following Zygmunt Bauman's use of the latter term to denote the possibility of assigning an object or event to more than one category. The practice of naming and classifying social behaviours or processes as `civilized' or `barbarous' is am- bivalent, because they can never be placed so unequivocably in one or the other category - certainly not in a social scientific way. I then trace out ambivalences in the three central features of the `civilizing' process as Elias conceives it - the monopolization of means of violence, the removal of physical violence `behind the scenes', and the lengthening chains of interdependence between people. I shall argue that these ambivalent features are as much potential forces of destruction as they are of internal pacification and `civilization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on the article "The Attenuation of Class Analysis: Some Comments on G. Marshall, S. Roberts and C. Burgoyne, Social Class and the Underclass in Britain and in the USA'," by Lydia Morris and John Scott that appeared in the 1996 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology." Marshall et al's paper, Scott and Morris argue, may be located within the Nuffield programme of class analysis. They are critical of the departure of this programme from what they see as its Weberian origins. They argue that as a consequence Marshall et al fail to distinguish between individual class situations and Weberian social classes; the latter being demographically constituted collectivities that are formed through intra and inter-generational mobility, through relations of household formation and inter-marriage, and through a myriad of status-related social relations such as informal interaction and friendship. Scott and Morris conclude that, as a consequence of their failure to make this distinction, Marshall et al. do not address the really significant sociological question of whether the underclass can be said to exist as a real social class. Scott and Morris are also critical of a number of other features of the Nuffield programme, such as the seemingly arbitrary class labeling of the nominal categories of the different versions of the Goldthorpe scheme.

In this paper I attempt to construct a comparative analytical framework for the study of the state as a social relation and the regulation of gender relations. The first part of my analytical framework involves an analysis of the women's movement as an agent of political change. In the second part of my analytical framework, three typologies of regimes of gender relations are developed in order to capture the essential features of gender relations in different countries. These typologies are the egalitarian regime of gender relations, the ecclesiastical regime of gender relations and the liberal regime of gender relations. The final part of the comparative analytical framework involves an analysis of the dynamics of transformation of regimes and transition to new regimes. The main contribution of my typologies is that they analyse, on the one hand, how gender relations are regulated by the state in different parts of the economy (social reproduction included) that are relatively autonomous and identify, on the other hand, how social forces influence the nature of the state as a regulator of gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diachronic differentiation in productive organization is considered to have great significance for family relations. The transition from family-based production to wage-work is considered to have had important consequences for gender and generational hierarchies within the family and for relations with other kin. On the other hand, the significance for family relations of synchronic differentiation in productive organization has scarcely been explored. In this paper the issue of the significance of synchronic differentiation in productive organization for conjugal power relations is approached by examination of data from a comparative study of family relations in artisan and worker households existing side by side in time and place, in a community of Athens, Greece. Artisan wives were found to have much less conjugal economic power than worker wives. This difference in power can be traced to a structural difference between the two types of production engaged in. However, it results in a difference in conjugal power only because it occurs together with specific features of the wider material and cultural context which both groups share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]