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This paper argues that we should think of community as being about social relationships rather than a 'thing' that is 'lost', 'found' or 'made'. The paper draws on the philosophy of Roberto Esposito and the sociology of David Studdert to highlight the overlaps in their approaches to community. Both argue that community is ontological, as unavoidably 'with us'. The paper then draws upon two empirical examples to argue that this approach could enable a different kind of public policy in relation to community. Policy would focus on existing relationships as the starting point for any efforts to effect social change. The implications for contemporary debates about localism are explored at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warde’s (1994 ) theoretical analysis of possible anxieties provoked in the act of consumption synthesises a large body of contemporary literature on uncertainty, social change and consumption. In doing so, it offers a predominantly structural model of the anxiety provoking tensions and forces individual consumers may be exposed to. Drawing on the work of contemporary figurehead theorists of social change, and proposing his own application of Durkheim’s model of suicide to the problem of consumption anxiety, Warde presents a model of how anxieties and their mitigation are embedded within configurations of contemporary consumer culture. Though Warde’s analysis illustrates the structural, theoretical context of potential consumption anxieties for particular social groups, it is unable to specify how such anxieties are manifested and managed – or performed – by individuals within specific social and consumption settings. This paper takes an interpretive approach, conceptualising consumption anxiety as a discursive, narrative phenomenon likely to surface within particular social settings that are conducive to generating expressions of anxiety. The paper also considers the relation between narrativisation and objects, arguing that the cultural capacity of objects must be understood within local settings where objects are afforded a capacity to act through various discourses. The argument is drawn using selections of face-to-face interview data collected from a sample of middle-class householders on the practice of home decoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to the notion of 'live sociology' and its call for new forms of attentiveness to the social, which also involves cultivation of time. Picking up from this observation, the paper asks: how can we find a way of using temporality systematically and routinely in our research practices? The argument concentrates on the concept of the past, and proposes a model for how the past can be reactivated and used analytically to deepen our understanding of contemporary life. To do this, the paper recovers and deploys the ancient technique of enargeia/vividness, and reconsiders Weber's sociology based on ideal-types, all in the effort to show how a special kind of a surrogate temporality/past could serve as a point of contact with things not directly observable. The aim is to show how vivid, enlivened past can be readapted for use as a type of method that triggers the release of new forms of sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory is an enormously important resource for the social sciences. This paper takes the subject of maternal memory to examine a corpus of work in the sociology of childbirth concerned with how women remember the experience of childbirth. It suggests that the sociology of memory has been more concerned with collective than individual experiences, and that women's memories of childbirth have generally been treated as a special case, rather than as a route to enhanced understandings of how memory works in relation to the all-important topics of time, identity and social change. Drawing on data from a 37-year follow-up to a study of childbirth conducted in the 1970s, it argues that maternal memory shares key characteristics with other kinds of memory, but can be significant in allowing women to reposition themselves as active social selves in a process that is remembered as not allowing much agency or autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a unitary notion of the habitus present in Bourdieu's early works and its transformation along his sociological career, to later conceptions of a fragmented habitus concept to examine contemporary relationality and social change. The career of the concept of habitus in Bourdieu shows that interplays of habitus and fields are seen to demand increasing labour of integration from individuals as social life becomes more differentiated. The paper claims the need for sociology to engage with field analyses to advance explorations of the habitus and to acknowledge the potential pliability of the concept. It is suggested that sociology may adopt the psychoanalytic notion of 'standing in spaces' (and associated notions of 'liminality' and experiences in interstitial positons) for a productive development of the notion of fragmented habitus, and to enhance proposals that view the social with a history that is made available to humans to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes to the community life of older people living in three urban areas of England: Bethnal Green, Wolverhampton and Woodford. All three were the subject of classic community studies in the 1940s and 1950s, these providing rich material about the lives of groups such as elderly people. Using this earlier research as a baseline, the paper presents data on how the experience of living in urban neighbourhoods has changed for older people in the intervening years. The article reviews the relationship between elderly people and their neighbours, drawing on quantitative as well as qualitative data. In conclusion, the paper identifies a number of general arguments pointing to the value of a community and locality perspective for understanding the impact of social changes on later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for addressing intergenerational transmission, historical change and agency. The framework will be employed to analyse the findings from a longitudinal follow-up study over two generations of men, where couples from Norway participated in an experimental research study, the Work- Sharing Couples Project, which aimed to promote egalitarian work-family adaptations in the early 1970s. The original study was based on both spouses working part-time and shift parenting. The follow-up study concluded that the untraditional work-family arrangement had not been passed on to the sons. The article develops a multidimensional analysis of the work-family adaptations of men in two generations: the untraditional adaptation of fathers in the 1970s; and the neo-traditional adaptations of sons in the 2000s. In developing a four-dimensional approach to intergenerational transmission and social change, the article contributes to the study of intergenerational transmission through the comparison of situated agency in different generations and time/spaces. Taking into account different aspects of time and space, personal biography, discursive and material structures of opportunity, and intergenerational dynamics at the family level as well as at social level, the article contributes to theorizing longitudinal qualitative research by linking the micro-level to the macro-level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years social science has been characterized by a cosmopolitan turn. Of the many questions that arise from this the most important are those that concern the implications for explaining social change. While cosmopolitanism is centrally about social change, much cosmopolitan theory due to its normative orientation lacks a capacity for explanation. The problem of explanation is also a problem that besets all 'big question' approaches in social science. In this paper a broad definition of cosmopolitanism is given and elucidated by an outline of its epistemological, ontological and methodological frameworks. Emphasizing the latter two, a relational conception of cosmopolitanism is developed as an alternative to dispositional/agency based and systemic accounts. First I argue that there are four main kinds of cosmopolitan relationships, which together constitute the social ontology of cosmopolitanism. These are the relativization of identity, the positive recognition of the other, the mutual evaluation of cultures, and the creation of a normative world culture. A methodological framework is advanced that distinguishes between the preconditions of cosmopolitanism, its social mechanisms and processes (of which three are specified: generative, transformational and institutionalizing) and trajectories of historical change. The argument is made that cosmopolitan phenomena can be accounted for in terms of this ontological and methodological framework. The advantage of this approach is that it offers cosmopolitan analysis a macro level account of social change that is broadly explanatory and which can also account for both the diachronic and synchronic levels of the emergence of cosmopolitanism as both a counter-factual normative cultural model and as a part of social and political practices and institutional arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a fundamental problem with individualisation theories - the assumption that contemporary personal lives are radically new and different from those in the past. This is a particularly important issue for individualisation theories because they essentially depend on the idea of epochal, even revolutionary, historical change. Empirically, I examine the experience of personal life in Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s (where a number of excellent sources exist) and compare it with today. Looking first at the personal life of gay and lesbian people, and of heterosexual spouses, I find substantial, but not unambiguous, 'improvement'- in terms of equality, openness and diversity - over the period. But this improvement does not necessarily mean transformation in how people think about their personal lives and how they ought to conduct them. The paper goes on, therefore, to examine 'tradition' and 'individualisation' through the lens of ideas around extra-marital sex and divorce. Rather than some duality between 'traditional' and 'individualising' people in the two periods, I find that how people thought, and the range of their thoughts, about how to conduct personal life seem similar in 1949/50 to the present day - given the debates and issues of the time. In both periods the married, older and more religious were the more 'traditional', and the young and the more professional were more 'progressive'. But the bulk of both samples were 'pragmatists', holding practical views of what was reasonably proper and possible in adapting to, and improvising around, their circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a degree of consensus among scholars that the character of warfare has substantially changed over the past three decades. However, there is no agreement about the direction and causes of this change. Some argue that 'the new wars' have become more brutal, more chaotic and decentralized. These wars are linked to the globalization processes emphasizing that as the unrestrained proliferation of globalized economy intensifies so will these new wars. In contrast others insist that all forms of organized violence are on the wane: there are fewer wars, they are less lethal, more localized and shorter than in previous historical periods. Moreover they argue that the very institution of warfare is gradually but definitely becoming obsolete. This paper challenges both of these perspectives and articulates an alternative interpretation. The aim is to develop a longue durée sociological analysis that focuses on the macro-organizational social context and explores the dynamics of the war-state-society nexus over the past centuries. I argue that warfare is not becoming obsolete and that 'new wars' are unlikely to completely replace inter-state warfare. Instead my analysis indicates that there is more organizational continuity in the contemporary warfare that either of the two dominant perspectives is willing to acknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Gayatri Spivak's journey of subalternity, demonstrating the empirical and sociological salience of this category beyond its theoretical and epistemic features, by highlighting its potential for increasing our understanding of society and bringing about social change. This argument contests assumptions in the literature about an epistemic/empirical fracture in Spivak's work, recasting her theoretical frameworks as sociologically relevant. Moreover, it demonstrates that this sociological reading, although it goes 'against the grain' of Spivak's own reticence about understanding subalternity sociologically, is well-founded: the theoretical-epistemic aspects of Spivak's subalternity contribute to analyses about the situation of subaltern groups under colonialism and neoliberal globalisation and the means by which that subordination can be challenged. This illustrates that her conceptions of subalternity maintain sociological specificity vis-a-vis vague characterisations of subordination (e.g. oppression). Spivak's later reflections on subalternity then grapple with the sociological deadlocks of her early approach: the disentanglement between subalternity and class exploitation. Her work thus delineates an explanatory matrix, interweaving sociological, philosophical and literary tools to explore entangled aspects of the subaltern condition. This systematic reading of Spivak's approach expands and contests current scholarship, highlighting its sociologically compelling aspects and indicating the analytical and transformative potential of her matrix for future sociological debates on subalternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst work on decolonising methodologies has persisted for more than 20 years, engagement remains uneven. Despite rich discussions of indigenous methodologies and decolonial thinking, the challenge of 'methodological stasis' remains, as Western knowledges, research practices and methods continue to dominate. This article argues for new critiques and concepts to further decolonial efforts. It first situates a discussion of methodological stasis in considerations of social change, arguing we should attend to the diversity of methodologies when evaluating the extent or direction of change. It then asserts that though depictions of methodological fractionation support critiques of dominant Western knowledges, they fail to provide new strategies for change. The concept of methodologies-in/as-practices is thus presented as a novel starting point, drawing from practice theories, which foregrounds the interlinking of diverse researching practices and researchers inside and outside academia. Exploring how methodologies-in/as-practices connects to and contrasts with decolonial, postcolonial and feminist contributions, the article establishes how this concept supports new trajectories for decolonial thinking and methodological change. It demonstrates how discussions of methodological techniques, philosophies and autobiographies can be critiqued and resituated through engagement with this concept, producing openings for new decolonial links and interventions. Furthermore, engaging with the case of practice theory methodologies for this critique outlines crucial steps towards decolonising the tradition of work the concept draws upon. Methodologies-in/as-practices is thus shown to support the spiralling work of undoing and redoing, unlearning and relearning central to decolonising methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the argument that ethnographic returning, in which ethnographers return to their field over time, and which is an engaged and long-term ethnography, can be considered a form of longitudinal qualitative study that can inform a reflexive analysis of the practice, or unfolding, of social life. Longitudinal qualitative studies have been designed as longitudinal at the outset and therefore have a specific focus on temporality, processes and social change. They often have an implicit theory of social change informing the analyses. Re-studies revisit the field site or community, and update or challenge the work of earlier researchers. These also tend to focus on change, if not so much on processes or time. Though their work is rarely labelled longitudinal, it is also quite common for ethnographers to return to the field and their (changing) communities over time, and here some focus on change is also inevitable. I call this ethnographic returning. All such temporal approaches require a constructive and positive approach to reflexivity, in which research is enhanced by acknowledgement that the social world, the academic world and the personal world of the researcher are intermingled and co-created through the ongoing process of social life. But, more than this, reflexivity needs to be relocated within a theory of the reflexive nature of social life (a theory of practice). I illustrate, through my own work, and drawing on the wider field of study on British migration to Spain, the contribution that participant observation and ethnographic returning can make to this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data gathered during and since the protests against the IMF and World Bank meetings in Prague in September 2000. It describes the interactional and deliberative processes that were undertaken by activists involved in framing the protests and the manifestation of this ‘frame-work’ in three separate marches denoted by different colours, which took place on September 26th during a ‘global day of action’. The paper utilises ethnographic detail to develop a critically engaged model of social movement frame analysis that focuses upon the genesis of these ‘action frames’, including the elaborate negotiation of conflicting ideological and tactical dispositions that lay behind them, and the variety of democratic decision making forums which were instrumental in their design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘This paper argues that the work of Michael Mann is distinguishable from neo-Weberian sociology in four ways. The first is his fusion of structural conceptions of large-scale social change to the empirics of individual action. The second is his fourpart theorisation of social power and its implications for the analysis of the state. The third is his endeavour to find a middle ground between comparativist and linear historiographies. The fourth is his combination of contextual specificity and nomothetic generality. While each of these areas will be approached critically, the paper will conclude that Mann's sociology has significantly contributed to our understanding of macro-historical change.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the evidence from research among young people in post-communist countries vindicates and should consolidate confidence in the Western sociology of youth's conventional transitions paradigm which seeks links between social origins, routes and destinations. Contrary to claims about postmodern fluidity, individualisation, and a blurring of traditional structural boundaries, the expected links between origins, routes and destinations have persisted throughout the transformation of the former communist countries. The relevant evidence also confirms the primacy of education-to-work and family/housing life stage transitions. Other aspects of young people's lives – their uses of leisure, levels and patterns of social and political participation, and socio-political attitudes, for example – become meaningful and explicable only when set in the context of the routes that individuals’ lives have taken, and the stages that they have reached, vis-à-vis their school-to-work and family and housing transitions. The paper proceeds to argue that the exceptionally thorough changes that are still in process in East-Central Europe and the former USSR reveal with exceptional clarity the processes whereby young people's life chances are structured in ways that are not of the individuals’ own making. It has been, and it remains, possible to observe how young adults learn from their own youth life stage transition experiences and, where applicable, use the assets that they acquire or retain, to advantage their own children thereby structuring the opportunities that confront all members of subsequent cohorts of young people. Finally, it is argued that the sociological approach being advocated is uniquely able to use the evidence from young people as a window through which to identify the impact of the ongoing macro-changes in former communist countries among different socio-demographic groups in the wider populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the concept of ideology with reference to social changes. Ideologies and classes are subject to the same forces of social change which are at work on the whole structure. These two concepts are explored in this paper, including the relation of elites to ideology. When people today hear the word "ideology" they almost automatically associate it with some aspect of class consciousness or class feeling which has coloured thought or desire. Yet the word "ideology" has no necessary connection with the concepts of class and class relationship. One original significance of the word was that of the science of the sources of ideas, and this, of course, could be understood in a strictly epistemological sense. Researcher in fact distinguished two sorts of socially distorted thought and called only that which is distorted to serve the interests of a ruling, class, a status quo, and a backward harking and historically based politics by the name of Ideology. Between all positions in a hierarchically ordered social system there exists what is sometimes called social distance.

Since intersectionality theory constitutes a critical assessment of the way the social world operates and strives for social justice, it entails an image of how the world is and how things could become. In this article a version of intersectionality with particularly strong counter-cultural tendencies is considered. Drawing on Ruth Levitas's approach to utopia as 'method', it makes explicit pluriversal intersectionality's utopian content. It is shown that the defining features of this intersectionality theory share an elective affinity with the principle of self-management lying at the core of the libertarian strand of socialist thought. But the utopia whose contours are drawn here is not expected to act as a blueprint. Instead, the article aspires to serve as an invitation to dialogue about the kind of future that could lie beyond intersectional oppression and, consequently, help consolidate pluriversal intersectionality's transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the different theories used to explain social change, the transition theory holds a special place. It has been applied to subjects such as demography, epidemiology, nutrition, etc. and most often from a multidisciplinary perspective. However, beyond the apparent uniqueness of the transition label there are quite different theoretical frameworks and presuppositions, which can be a source of misunderstanding. A first perspective considers change as the transition from one stable state to another and concentrates on the processes at work in the transition phase. It focuses attention on the interactions between cultural and biological variables and tries to take into account the consequences of the fact that they move at different rates. A second perspective conceives change as a series of stages (more or less stable situations) and proceeds to analyse the structural transformation of the organisation at each stage. The emphasis is placed on the transformations that take place during these stages. This brings us closer to the theory of stages. Finally, a third perspective combines stages and transitions. Change is seen as part of an evolutionary and progressive movement and as being reversible or not. This article studies the cognitive organisation of the different theoretical variants of the transition model in which food plays a more or less important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse how the invention of a national cuisine in the United Arab Emirates takes part in the journey of building the nation, both as a metaphor and as performance of larger political and ideological processes. It analyses the discourses of chefs and professional cooks that are or have been tagged as Emirati food experts. In the Emirati nation building process, the construction of identity is not 'defined by the other' against which the image of a common 'us' should be reflected. This is also mirrored in the national cuisine in the making, which is developing mostly endogamously. Emirati food both participates in and tells the story of nation building in the UAE, through three overlapping stages of development: traditional, modern and fusion food, which correspond to different moments of the perceived nation development and its fit within Western definitions of both national-states and modernity. Emirati food also helps to create identity borders, by defining who is allowed to taste the authentic flavours, through practices of commensality, and who is able to replicate them in restaurants. This article highlights the connections between nation building, social transformation and food, and explores the ways in which constructions of Emirati cuisine reflect discourses and practices of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-)develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ggThis article reviews several books related to sociology. The books are: "Social Problems and Social Movements: An Exploration Into the Sociological Construction of Alternative Realities," by H.H. Bash; "The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements," by J. Craig et al.; "Social Movements & Culture," edited by H. Johnston and B. Klandermans. These books illustrate the situation perfectly. Four of the texts are edited collections and only one of these has a substantial contribution from British sociologists. More than anything else these books have provoked me to think more seriously about why there has been no institutionalised sociology of social movements in Britain comparable to those of mainland Europe and North America for instance. To that extent the author has indulged in the luxury of speculating on that question at some length. Apart from this theme, what these books demonstrate is that there is no dominant paradigm in this area of sociology. In the U.S. there appears to be a resurgence of more actionist and culturalist oriented approaches.

A mixture of wonder, contempt, fear and romanticism is evident in adult responses to the activities of young people. Sociologists have so far portrayed in varying degrees these attitudes. To discuss only some of the recent observations on youth as a factor in social change and to attempt some assessment of the contribution which these have made to the understanding of change in the third quarter of the twentieth century, is a very large subject. On the whole the influence of new generations in bringing about social change has not been as systematically analyzed as some other aspects of social development. An adequate theory of social change must be concerned with the existing structure of society, the specification of new, emerging forms and a realistic consideration of the forces capable of bringing these into being. There is a need for clarification of the level and kind of conceptual problems which this involves and a discussion of the meta theoretical models on which these are based.

The article discusses the results of a pilot study conducted in a settlement in South East England, as part of a research project on the sociological aspects of expanded settlements. The purpose of the article is to look at the process of assimilation of newcomers into expanded settlements and to discuss the meaning of assimilation in small-scale societies. The author discusses the role of conflict in producing a cohesive structure or in enabling the newcomers to identify with a part, at least, of the expanded settlement. The rapid expansion of settlements surrounding London since the Second World War has provided an opportunity for those interested in rapid social change to examine novel aspects of small-scale societies. Various writers have pointed out the need for an adequate conceptual framework with which to understand the distinctive social situation in order to relate the data available for villages in more remote areas. The author points out that giving the new residents of settlement opportunities to fight external authorities may originally engender the feelings of community.

The article discusses the role and significance of education in economic, political and social change. The educational system now tends to be viewed as the master determinant of all aspects of change. This article illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the approach to the problem adopted by one school of neo-classical economists. The author attempts to estimate for India the "internal rates" of return to investment in human capital, comparing them with returns to investment in physical capital in the modem private sector of industry. It is concluded that the returns on educational investment for India appear to be considerably lower than for investment in private industry. In determining the growth potential of investment in education problem arises of weighing up the economic and social consequences of investment in different types and levels of education. Still influential is the view that as the underdeveloped countries of the world suffer from a shortage of skilled manpower, investment should be directed overwhelmingly into vocational education.

This article examines the double burden of 'menstrual etiquette' and the implications for women's inclusion in public spaces in Scotland today. Beginning from Laws' work on 'menstrual etiquette', we explore how menstrual etiquette is characterised primarily by the burden of rendering menstruation invisible, both discursively and practically. However, women not only work to ensure that others remain unaware that they are menstruating; they depend on technologies, such as menstrual product dispensers and bins, to facilitate this process of rendering menstruation invisible. When these technologies are absent or poorly maintained, women experience a double burden: not only must they maintain the social invisibility of menstruation but do so without social or infrastructural support or drawing attention to this absence (for fear of breaching the discursive silence demanded of menstrual etiquette). We locate poor maintenance of facilities within the very same 'civilising process' that has pushed women's bodily management to the furthest reaches of the private sphere. Socially invisible, these infrastructural supports are granted low status and poorly maintained. The pressure to maintain conceptual silence around menstruation limits women's capacity to contest this neglect and, in turn, perpetuates their exclusion from public space. This article, then, exposes the nature and the compounding temporal and affective burden of menstrual etiquette and advocates for breaking discursive silences to facilitate much needed social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents' values and practices are central to theorising the reproduction of inequality across generations. Where researchers have explored how parental values and practices relate to class circumstances and their combined influence on children's outcomes, the focus has been largely on younger families, with limited evidence on parents' perspectives at the point children approach and pass compulsory school leaving age. The trebling of university tuition fees in England, the insecurity which characterises many non-academic routes into the labour market and concerns about economic recession make this a particularly significant historical moment to investigate parental influences on children's pathways through post-compulsory education and training. This article draws on research into parents' perceptions and practices whilst their children were growing up through their teenage years between 2008 and 2014. In particular, it examines classed differences in how parents frame their young adult children's decision making, assess their pathways and accord markedly differing value to academic and vocational pursuit. It evidences temporal dynamics through showing how diverse values and resources underpin young people's evolving biographical pathways. In these ways, the analysis contributes to theorising parents' values and practices and their complex relationship with social class at a time of some significant social structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the background to community studies and the case for community re-studies. It examines the contribution of such research to understanding different dimensions of social change. The discussion highlights a number of challenges for such research, given changes in the meaning of community and the social contexts in which people experience everyday life. The article uses a particular research study to highlight some of the strengths and limitations associated with re-studies. It develops a number of strategies for developing community-based research, building on issues arising from industrial change and globalization and concludes with an assessment of possible futures for work in the community studies tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the 1960s, Colin Rosser and Chris Harris worked together on a community study in Swansea, south Wales, UK. It explored how families, in particular extended families, had been affected by social change since the early years of the 20th century. The re-study, which began in 2001, investigated the nature of social change and how it had affected extended families in the four decades since 1960. Research that is framed in terms of contemporary sociological theory asks different questions from those that were asked in the 1950s when structural functionalism was the dominant paradigm. The re-study, which replicated (as far as possible) the methodology of the original study, asked similar questions to those that had been asked in 1960. This meant that, inadvertently, it relied on a Durkheimian conception of society and social change. In this article I explore some of the methodological implications of asking the same research questions 40 years apart and reflect on how the two studies differ in the way they address issues of 'race'/ethnicity, gender and social class. I suggest that asking the same questions allows an appreciation of the continuities as well as changes in how family and community are experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest that a third revolution alongside the better known economic and political ones has been vital to the rise of modernity: the reproductive revolution, comprising a historically unrepeatable shift in the efficiency of human reproduction which for the first time brought demographic security. As well as highlighting the contribution of demographic change to the rise of modernity and addressing the limitations of orthodox theories of the demographic transition, the concept of the reproductive revolution offers a better way to integrate sociology and demography. The former has tended to pay insufficient heed to sexual reproduction, individual mortality and the generational replacement of population, while the latter has undervalued its own distinctive theoretical contribution, portraying demographic change as the effect of causes lying elsewhere. We outline a theory of the reproductive revolution, review some relevant supporting empirical evidence and briefly discuss its implications both for demographic transition theory itself, and for a range of key social changes that we suggest it made possible: the decline of patriarchy and feminisation of the public sphere, the deregulation and privatisation of sexuality, family change, the rise of identity, 'low' fertility and 'population ageing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of cultural change requires a dialectical theory of culture that does not reduce vectors of change to extra-cultural forces. Despite changes in expert technology that included the uses of ethnographic film to aid the carvers of Melanesian funerary sculptures, which are named malanggan, the carvers typically present their sculpture to either ritual or secular publics who are incredulous at the brief display, but with a difference in either case. This description of the visual shifts in the making and display of malanggan sculpture can be analyzed as a movement from ontological concerns about how people live in relationships, to epistemological concerns with how to communicate about who they are. These shifts in expert visual technique and its relationship to public culture are wholly cultural processes generating cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue of parent involvement in school life in the newly emerging realm of commodified education. It explores the limits of empowerment and its context-dependent nature. Previous research has shown that parent participation in school life often entails difficulties for both parties. In response to the difficulties, some schools have made direct efforts to improve parent-school cooperation. Parents of higher socioeconomic levels, however, tend to demand more substantive involvement. The case under scrutiny is that of parent organizing in an established Tel Aviv area, Israel, who demanded a share in the shaping of their children's education. These demands were couched in a hierarchy of moderate-status teachers and prestigious parents and backed by the parents' resources and their capability of effective organizing. As the case unfolded, conflicts between the parents and the educational system turned into a paralyzing factor, which further eroded the teachers' prestige and humiliated weaker parents within the community. Empowerment, commonly hailed as a desirable goal, may thus become an additional resource for the powerful, constituting less resourceful populations as passive and indifferent.

The article presents a study, which examined sociologist Alain Touriane's method of Sociological Intervention (SI) for the analysis of social movements. Touraine's method of Sociological Intervention (SI) for the analysis of social movements is examined in the light of a case study of Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS). The foremost theorist of the New Social Movement (NSM) paradigm is Alain Touraine, who defines a social movement as 'the organised collective behaviour of a class actor struggling against his (sic) class adversary for the social control of historicity in a concrete community.'

The article assesses the extent of democracy in Hungary and Russia Federation societies, which has a strong conditioning effect on the development of social movements. It addresses the question related to existence of democracy in Eastern Europe which would allow social movements such as environmental groups to operate and achieve their goals. In Hungary, although ecological issues are not central, politicians and environmental groups mostly cooperate, whereas in Russia Federation the relationship is either hesitant or sometimes even hostile. In Hungary great efforts have been made to create a society where political structures and processes follow democratic rules of political representation and accountability. In Russia Federation, on the other hand, it was only in the last years of the period of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that changes were introduced leading to the introduction of a more developed democratic system. These included the reorganization of Parliament and the constitution and decentralization of the local government.

This chapter reports preliminary findings from visitor research being executed by one of the authors in a conurbation of the English Midlands. The fieldwork consists of fifteen in-depth interviews administered at a random sample of households and with a total of circa 35 subjects. The report places the research design in the theoretical contexts of class, culture and locality, presents data from three interviews and provides a detailed analysis of one interview. The data suggest: (I) that local museums are mediators between identity and structure; (2) that museum meanings are diversely determined in relation to the class trajectories of subjects; (3) that museum visiting is to be understood as a social relationship rather than as an attribute of individuals and (4) that subjects readily conceptualize locality and identity through the visual vocabulary of museums and heritage sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that current reform proposals coming from Robert Pinker and others are challenging the universalist premises of generic social work. Pinker et al. argue that social work should, for the sake of efficiency and performance, be a connected set of specialist activities. This 'determinate dispersal' which we recognise as falling within the remit of postmodern strategies, we contrast with the far more libertarian ideas of the noted post-modern theorist J.F. Lyotard. Thus we site the political and cultural meanings of Pinker's ideas between generic social work which upholds ideas of universal ethical values and universal provision, and those of Lyotard whose anti-foundationalism proposes a radically heterogeneous society with no central value-structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political culture of classical Greek civilization, with its distinctive twin ideals of citizenship and mass participatory democracy, represents a revolutionary development in the history of human society. The social origins of that momentous cultural breakthrough are examined in this essay, with specific attention being given to those forces - destructive as well as reorganizing - which undermined the bases of traditional aristocratic domination and which prepared the ground for the emergence of new institutional patterns. Pressures for structural and normative 'democratization' are shown to have been exerted primarily by changes in the military domain, the central axis of political and economic power within the ancient city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By developing the concept of Multidimensional Developmental Pathways, the potential social policy consequences of such theorising are explored. In moving towards conceptualising the actual needs of people and the unity of their lives we can consciously (rather than unconsciously) contribute proposals for rebuilding social policy. With a view to generating further interest in alternative theoretical approaches to the analysis of 'family life', three theorems are then proposed. These three theorems constitute the first step in founding the New 'Family Studies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems with established sociological and socio-psychological conceptions of masculinity are discussed, and it is argued that object-relations theory can provide a clearer understanding of masculinity. An ideal type of the development of masculinity is built up in contrast to similar ideal types of human development and the development of femininity as portrayed by recent feminist writers. The status of the ideal type is then discussed, drawing out its implications for the relationship between psychoanalysis and sociological analysis, and for the nature of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Britain, as in many other western countries, there emerged in the mid-1970s a variety of business associations, policy and research institutes and political leagues, committed not only to the restoration of a Conservative government, but also to a much broader refurbishing of conservatism. A network of organizations, individuals and ideas grew up that became identified as the New Right.
The New Right, which clearly has an international character, was generated by economic and political crises, but it was nurtured by a variety of resentments and discontents whose roots lay in structural and cultural changes that had developed over the whole post-war period. Drawing, in part, upon interviews with leaders of the organisations that did most to mobilize opinion behind the New Right in Britain, the article examines the major changes - particularly those in class structure and in culture - to which the new conservatives were reacting.
It explores the major ideological strands - libertarian, neo-liberal and conservative - and looks at the attempts by the New Right to use these to produce changes not only in economic policy but in the cultural and moral fabric of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of system integration and its relationship to conflict and change. In the first part the article suggests that sociologist David Lockwood's notion of system integration is unduly restrictive and could be generalised to include all forms of functional or technical relationships within a social system. In the second part, it is explained how the notion of system integration might be divested of the teleology and reification implicit in its functionalist assumptions and related closely to the social action approach. It is seen that the contribution of conflict theory can be usefully linked with the notions of system and social integration in explaining social change. The article concludes that the bridge between systemic disorders and the ensuing patterns of conflict and change is best provided by conflict theory. For example, the mode of social integration, notably the structure of conflict management, can be seen as important in accounting for the propensity to system change resulting from contradictions.

This article argues that census reports provide a rich source of documentary evidence on social change in Britain--a source that has so far remained relatively untapped. The census reports for the nineteenth century can be regarded as the precursors of the Central Statistical Office's annual Social Trends reports, which incorporate summaries of census results as well as other data. Similarly the early census reports include a range of additional data showing trends in health (as reflected in mortality statistics), education and religion (as shown in the 1851 education and religious censuses) and other aspects of social and economic life.[5]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information about British politics. The difficult opacities of British politics offered no very obvious purchase point to the theorists. The straightforward and momentous dramas of 1968 transformed things in a few months of that remarkable year: the Pentagon march, the May Events in Paris, the Prague Spring and the invasion in August, all these were taken for wonders, and the smaller scale of British politics found its own bold poster images. This potted history can do no more than to a few loose knots between history and intellect, and mention the contexts in which present cliches so recently began. Structural-functional theories, doubtless started from the relatively stable and self-satisfied expansion of the rich nations after the war, and their no less satisfied investigation of their poorer, traditional and client nations amongst whom they set up their super-shops. Functionalism on the one hand, and abstract empiricism on the other, are no metonymy for anything when structures cave in under the pressure of both processes and people, and when the categories of the data-collectors are too porous to hold any information worth having.

This article informs that sociologists undertaking the teaching of and generalizing about the problems of Africa, Latin America and Asia have immersed themselves in bewilderingly complex and diverse social realities. It is informed that the disintegration of the European empires, punctuated by the success of the Chinese revolution and hastened by the decolonization of India, led to a partial rupture of the umbilical cord that tied the European centres to their far-flung dependencies. When the Bandung Conference was convened, virtually all the post-colonial societies of Africa and Asia were represented, together with what may be loosely referred to as ex-semi-colonial countries, like China and Yugoslavia-- a political self-identification of major significance. Those who were involved with the study and teaching of societies outside Europe and the U.S. have faced more directly than their colleagues a "shifting" reality which called into question some of the basic assumptions and precognitions of conventional sociology.

This article presents the author's reply to the comments of John Law and Barry Barnes on the article "Three Models of Scientific Development." The model of branching, for instance, deals with more than the consequences of innovation. One of its central assumptions is that the evolution of any one network depends considerably on developments in neighboring fields. In other words, the model of branching is an attempt to describe some of the processes by which established cultural resources in science are extended into new areas of investigation and some of the ways in which areas of investigation are defined as new in relation to an established corpus of knowledge. The model of branching is as much concerned, therefore, with the sources of innovation as with its consequences. It is an attempt to treat scientific development as a continuous process of discovering. There is the claim that the model of branching is a curious reflection of actors' own processes of labeling, and results from an attempt to use these as they stand in an analysis of cultural innovation. It is implied that the model of branching would have to take these ridiculous research areas seriously and that there must be, therefore, some basic fault in the perspective underlying the model.

This article presents the author's comments on the article "Three Models of Scientific Development," by M.J. Mulkay. Mulkay suggests that such development is better understood in terms of a `model of branching' rather than in terms of a `model of closure' such as that to be found in the work of T.S. Kuhn. Kuhn's interest in cognitive and cultural change as such is manifest in his concentration on the process of innovation. Mulkay has used his notion of branching into new areas of ignorance, produced as the consequences of innovation, to account for social change within science. If these interests are confused, it becomes dangerously easy to fall victim to misleading inferences and groundless expectations. Some of the most interesting issues in the study of science and scientists surround the problem of understanding why some areas or activities are thought to be more promising than others, why some doing normal science find their field `played out' whilst others find more problems being generated, hydra-like, than are being solved.

Debate with Marxism has given sociology much and not the least valuable outcome has been the critical scrutiny of basic pre-suppositions which might otherwise have gone unquestioned. A dialectical approach in sociology is not often enough seen for what it is: an alternative to the dominant orthodoxy in sociological method. Indeed the very use of the term "dialectic" tends to invite the side-tracking of the main issues by arousing premature demands for precise definition or philological projects. The dialectical paradigm has as its central concern just that new conception of history which brought it into being. It is focused on the generation of new phenomena, on all that is associated with emergence, creation and novelty. In a sociology which is conceived of as revealing the essential basis of any society whatsoever, there is an intrinsic interest in Order. In a society in a rapid period of social change, sociology acts as a defence mechanism, telling the reality, behind all the changes, there lies an abiding set of elements and principles.

Over the last few years, a charge has come that sociology is a form of bourgeois ideology, its function defined as the legitimation of the status quo, in so far as it ignores or minimises the role of class conflict in society and fails to grasp the dialectical character of social change. Most sociologists emphatically reject the view that their science is ideological and criticise Marxism as outdated, dogmatic and wholly ideological. In the book "German Ideology," authors remark that morals, religion and metaphysics have no history or development independent of society and its system of production. Historians of sociological thought frequently minimise this fairly obvious point which, as the sociology of knowledge has emphasised, points to the social determination of ideas; that the views expressed by a social theorist will ultimately depend on the way in which be structures the social world, on his world vision and on his relationship with the ideas and values of determinate social strata. It will be claimed that sociology through philosopher Auguste Comte, and Marxism through sociologist Karl Marx were originally in opposition as social theory through their contrasting treatment of political economy.