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Empirically and theoretically, this paper considers the link between the urban community, as a social base, and the emergence of urban movements. It examines whether different urban communities lead to different urban movements, specifically whether cohesive communities lead to powerful movements. Using an Australian case study, the first part of the paper tests this relationship empirically. The findings given raise doubts about whether cohesiveness is a necessary pre-condition for widespread mobilization, as well as questioning the theoretical validity of 'urban community' and 'community' as sociological concepts. There is an apparent need to discard these concepts when referring to contemporary Western societies and a concomitant need to develop concepts which more appropriately identify the social organization of urban households and residential areas. The second part of the paper discusses these theoretical issues. It presents an argument on the way household and residential organizations change as the city changes and how they differ if urbanization differs between regions and between nations. This argument provides a more appropriate framework for examining the nature of the 'relationship between social bases and urban movements and it contributes a more useful explanation for the case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I shall pursue a rather different line of argument in an attempt to establish the theoretical and substantive interest of a sociological analysis of the detective thriller. More particularly, I want to suggest that the work of at least one writer who exerted an important influence on the development of the genre, Dashiell Hammett, can be read as supplying a salutary corrective to current sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent educational reforms in England have given considerable responsibilities for the overall administration of schools to governing bodies largely comprised of lay people. The paper explores the know- ledge of education possessed by lay governors. Issues considered include: the systematicity of that knowledge; its possible sources, and how gender, ethnicity and social class influence the knowledge held and used by governors. Also examined are the question of whether governors are always knowledgeable actors within the context of education and the implications of this for schools and democratic participation in their governance. Data is derived from a four year qualitative multi-site case study of ten school governing bodies in two English local education authorities undertaken by the authors between 1988 and 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that the contemporary form of capitalism – knowing capitalism – is distinctively different from its earlier incarnations by being ‘knowing’ in unprecedented ways; and that there is a ‘coming crisis of empirical sociology’, because related technological developments are producing a leading-edge research infrastructure located firmly within knowing capitalism, rather than in academic social science. These arguments are counter-posed here through two case studies. Thinking over the longer run via these suggests that ‘it has always known’ and sociologists ‘have always been “other” ’, and that the current situation is not as new as is claimed. The first case study concerns the reverberations of the South African War (1899–1902) and particularly the ‘concentration system’ and its knowledge-based and generating classification, measurement and disposition of groups of people. The second case study concerns the post-World War Two impact of wartime changes in the configuration of research and knowledge on Mass-Observation, a radical social science research organization on the borders and ‘other’ to institutionalised sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses survey techniques and quantitative analysis in the prosecution of art as against observation and verbal types of analysis. The foundation of statistical inference from samples representative of a wider population has now become commonplace knowledge and most first year students in the social sciences are made familiar with such notions as 'a representative sample', 'sampling error', 'biased and unbiased estimates' and similar ideas developed to express the logic of making inferences about a larger population from a considerably smaller sample. The method of case studies is, of course, general and has been extensively used, for example, in political science and in sociology. The argument that has been advanced here, then, is that case studies of whatever form are a reliable and respectable procedure of social analysis and that much criticism of their reliability and validity has been based on a misconception of the basis upon which the analyst may justifiably extrapolate from an individual case study to the social process in general.

The article presents information on the book "Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics," by David Riesman. The paperback version of this book excludes four of the case studies which appear in the original hard cover edition. The abridgement does not seriously affect the content of the book.