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The article presents a response to comments from Lydia Morris, Ruud Koopmans, and Oliver Schmidtke to on the author's article "Citizenship, immigration, and the European social project: rights and obligations of individuality," all published in the March 2012 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology." The author examines the commentators' remarks on topics including neoliberalism, sociologist T. H. Marshall's concept of social citizenship, and the relationship between national and transnational citizenship.

With the collapse of the Leninist project in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the fluid relations between market and state consequent upon the New Right project of the Reagan and Thatcher eras in the West, citizenship analysis has assumed a central place in the political sociology of democratic societies. However, such analysis is presently characterized by a variety of divergent and, on occasion, contradictory positions. This article proposes that the debates around citizenship can be clarified by recognizing the existence of two conceptions of citizenship. The first of these, state citizenship, involves the identification of citizenship with the elaboration of a formal legal status, co-terminous with the emergence of nation-states and their diverse lineages. The article discusses the two main forms in which this conception appears in the relevant literature: that of full formal membership of a nation-state and that of a distinctive welfare-rights version. Some limitations of the status conception of citizenship are considered and recent political developments in relation to its use in the British context are discussed. A second conception, that of democratic citizenship, is then proposed which involves the elaboration of citizenship around shared membership of a political community, in which conception citizens are political actors constituting political spaces. Some implications of this alternative conception are discussed and exemplified with reference to the possibilities for a European political community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to redress the imbalance in the study of witchcraft and the status of women in England. European witchcraft has long fascinated historians and sociologists and one result of this has been a wide range of different, and often competing, accounts of this bizarre social phenomenon. There are those who believe in both the existence of witches as a malevolent force and in the very spirits and demons which they allegedly worshipped. Some, on the other hand, dismiss witchcraft as pure fabrication. Others have discovered in witchcraft the remnants of an ancient fertility cult which once rivaled Christianity, while still others have attributed it to a reaction against the authority of the established Church. Sociologist Richard Kieckhefer, in his recent study, explains shifts in the nature of witch persecution before 1500 in terms of the imposition of the concepts of the learned elite upon a traditional culture based upon folk magic and sorcery. He suggests that a substitution of diabolism for sorcery took place in the fifteenth century in order to align popular practices with an Aristotelian orthodoxy which refused to admit magic to be an independent type of reality.

American sociology is distinguished from British and continental European sociology by, among other things, a lack of interest in identifying and measuring social class, as distinct from social status. Indices of occupational prestige ratings have served as indices of social status. This article explicates the most popular American scale of occupational prestige ratings, and concludes that this index is not a plausible index either of the relative prestige of occupations or of social status, and furthermore, that such an index in principle is not obtainable. The errors of proponents of the scale lie in an idealistic theory of the social order and repetition of the classic mistake once committed, but now long avoided, by economists: aggregation of subjective evaluations. A well-known characteristic feature of American sociology, in contrast to British and continental European sociology, has been the absence of serious attempts to establish numerical indices of social class. Yet there have been a number of attempts to establish indices of what is variously known as social status or socio-economic status, mainly by means of polled verbal evaluations of occupations.

This essay drews attention to two books on empires by historians which deserve the attention of sociologists. Bang's model of the workings of the Roman economy powerfully demonstrates the tributary nature of per-industrial tributary empires. Darwin's analysis concentrates on modern overseas empires, wholly different in character as they involved the transportation of consumption items for the many rather than luxury goods for the few. Darwin is especially good at describing the conditions of existence of late nineteenth century empires, noting that their demise was caused most of all by the failure of balance of power politics in Europe. Concluding thoughts are offered about the USA., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2011.)

Despite the sociological and geopolitical significance of EU enlargement and opinion toward it, extant literature is lacking a theory of enlargement opinion and an examination of opinion in the wake of the 2004 enlargement. This paper fills these gaps by developing a symbolic defence of group position model to explain opposition to the entries of candidate states (as of 2005: Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Turkey) and to examine how these explanations differ for post-Communist EU members. Results of hierarchical multinomial logistic models of Eurobarometer (European Commission 2005) data from the EU-25 support the notion that the symbolic nature of enlargement shapes the effects of interests, threat, and other factors on opinion depending on candidates' position in a culturally and historically-rooted hierarchy of 'European-ness'. Attitudes toward Turkey's entry are less shaped by material interests than attitudes toward other candidates' entries, which is explained by Turkey's position at the bottom - and post-Communist countries' position in the middle - of this hierarchy in the post-Cold War era. Attitudes toward Turkey's entry are rather a function of the perceived threat that it poses to the group position and identity of Europeans, which is defended by the politically knowledgeable. While the lower levels of threat in post-socialist EU member countries help to account for their lower levels of opposition to candidates' entries, people in these countries to a greater extent use European identity as a way of symbolically distancing themselves from Turkey. Implications are discussed.

Sociological understanding of generations can be enhanced by avoiding defining them rigidly as chronological cohorts but rather linking people's accounts of their generational experience with an historically informed political economy. It then becomes possible, for example, to understand the complexity of generational politics. This paper uses data on the 'War Generation' taken from the Exeter Politics of Old Age project to link an empirically based political economy of generational inequality with a cultural sociology of generations. The 'War Generation' recognizes itself and is referred to by others in terms of a common identity. It is also an historical generation; its values, attitudes and, above all, sense of national solidarity and mutual obligation were forged in the direct experience of war. But it is also divided by divergent economic interests in property and pension rights based on the historical experience of the life course by successive groups and this segmentation can be observed in political action. The political culture of the War Generation manifests both continuity and change. Understanding these dynamics requires listening to people constructing their worlds, understanding their full range of historical experiences, and analysing the conditions for their conflicts and their cohesion.

Much current theory concerning nationalism holds that elites commonly create or cause popular nationalism. In part, that thesis may be due to an overwhelming emphasis in research on nationalism on positive cases: cases where nationalism has appeared, ignoring cases where it has not. In this article, I challenge the thesis by showing numerous historical cases in which elites have promoted nationalisms that ordinary people have not adopted, or in which ordinary people have adopted a nationalism before it was taken up by elites. Even if elites do not create popular nationalism, however, they can and do shape its expression in a variety of ways, such as organizing it, providing relevant information, or providing opportunity or incentive for it. I show this through historical examples.