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The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman . In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmerman's notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing‘doing gender’– the concept's intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon renewed methodologies for social research in order to explore and re-present the complexity of lived relations in contemporary society. Renewed methodologies can transgress conventional or traditional ways of analysing and representing research data. This paper combines socio-cultural theory; experience (life stories); and practice (exhibition/performance) defined as ethno-mimesis to explore and better understand key themes and issues evolving from ethnographic work with female prostitutes. By focusing upon life history work with women working as prostitutes and by experiencing women's stories represented through live art we can further our understanding of the complexity of sex, sexualities, desire, violence, masculinities and the relevance of the body — the gendered body, the imaginary body, the performative body, the social body — within the context of post modern times, de-traditionalization, and what Stejpan Meštrović calls ‘postemotionalism’ and compassion fatigue. The paper incorporates stills from a video/live art performance, Not all the time ... but mostly ... performed by Patricia Breatnach, choreographed by Sara Giddens, sound by Darren Bourne and video produced by Tony Judge. The video/live art performance is a response to transcripts of interviews with women working as prostitutes and fuses dance, text, sound and video. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper argues that it is vital to reorient class analysis away from its long term preoccupation with class boundaries in the middle levels of the class structure towards a focus on the class formation at the top. This will permit sociological analysis to engage more effectively with concerns about the '1 percent' and accentuating wealth which are increasingly evident. Accordingly I sketch out the persistence of the 'problematic of the proletariat' in sociological analysis before considering theoretical resources which might permit an engagement with the 'wealth elite'. This paper serves to introduce the other papers of this special issue which use the GBCS to explore different facets of the wealth elite in Britain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta-narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial-bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis-à-vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self-identity and social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a version of 'live sociology' that enacts and engages with the openness and processuality of events. This is initially explored through a focus on everyday objects that, in their relationality, 'misbehave', potentially challenging standard sociological framings. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, it is suggested that such objects can be understood as 'idiotic' - possessed of an incommensurability that enables social scientists to 'slow down' and reflect upon 'what is busily being done' (not least by the social scientists themselves). This responsiveness to the idiot object is then contrasted to the proactive idiocy of Speculative Design. Here, artefacts - probes and prototypes - are designed to have oblique and ambiguous functions that allow both their users and designers to open up what is at stake in particular events. Examples taken from past and current research are used to illustrate how speculative designs can open up what 'the neighbourhood' and 'energy demand reduction' can be. The paper ends with a discussion of a possible 'idiotic methodology' and its implications for the conceptual and practical doings of social scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential voices have argued for a sociology which acknowledges the way we are co-constituted with a range of non-human species as part of the condition of life on this planet. Despite this, sociology has generally retained a conception of the social that is centred on the human. This paper argues for the inclusion of non-human animals in sociological agendas, focusing on the emerging field of the sociology of violence. It examines the institutions and processes through which non-human animals are subjected to different forms of violence, most notably, mass killing. The practice of killing animals is routine, normative, institutionalized and globalized. The scale of killing is historically unprecedented and the numbers killed are enormous. The paper argues that this killing of non-humans raises questions around inequalities and intersectionality, human relations with other species, the embedding of violence in everyday practices and links between micro and macro analyses. These are questions with which the new sociology of violence might engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of 'liveness', exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in 'live methods' I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making distributive middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportunities and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with their distribution, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, to endorse and actively pursue the re-distribution of social methods online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the relationship between sociological analysis and political action by subjecting the work of Bourdieu to scrutiny, especially in relation to the work of some of his contemporaries – Raymond Aron, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Jean-François Lyotard. The first part of the discussion focuses on educational research carried out collaboratively by Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1960s and considers the shared assumptions that underpin their projects. The paper discusses their philosophical divergence after the beginning of the 1970s, suggesting that Bourdieu's development was essentially in the Durkheimian tradition whereas Passeron's was more sympathetic to the legacy of Weber. Bourdieu's inclination to regard objective science as the product of subjective disposition meant his social science became inseparable from his socio-political mission, whereas Passeron distanced himself from Bourdieu's phenomenological or ontological reflexivity. The second part of the paper suggests Bourdieu is trying to practise phenomenological sociology within a historical social situation that, after 1979, was rapidly transforming into the postmodern condition, the diagnosis of which Lyotard had provided as an extension of his own reading of Husserl. The paper goes on to argue that, while La distinction sought to reconcile modernist sociology with postmodernism, Bourdieu could not relinquish what Aron regarded as the totalizing orientation of 'sociologism'. Although Lyotard, in contrast, pursued the implications of his own insights in a philosophical exegesis of Kant, the paper explores how there may yet be scope for some more fruitful view of the contemporary relationship between sociology and politics in mass democracy, particularly if we advocate socio-analytic reflexivity in association with a recognition of the 'différend'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses historical and ethnographic data to examine the struggles that surround livestock enumeration in highland Bolivia. Colonial officials counted llamas for purposes of taxation, while present-day government agencies and NGOs enumerate animals to attract money from aid agencies and promote entrepreneurial activity. In both instances, livestock enumeration serves not just to count animals but to render accountable their owners. The paper argues, drawing upon the work of Timothy Mitchell (2002 ) that such enumerative procedures carried out by experts do not simply record a reality, but by rendering herders accountable, seek to produce particular kinds of people within particular economic realities. Far from being a culturally neutral practice, the enumeration of llamas can constitute an act of symbolic violence that seeks to erase specific relationships between herders and animals and to prioritise the individual over the communal. In both colonial and contemporary cases, Andean people seek to produce themselves in ways that contest those in which others would produce them. [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]

Sociological interest in research with nonhuman animals is growing, but theoretical discussion of the importance of 'multi-species ethnography' or 'embodied empathy' has not, as yet, yielded many practical, qualitative methods. Taking as its case study the systematic cultivation of 'the felt sense' in an equine-assisted personal development site, referred to here as The Forge, this article discusses what role our bodies should play in ethnographic research with nonhuman animals if we wish to approach, in the words of Vinciane Despret, 'what matters' to them. In particular, it explores the potential of the 'felt sense', worked through somatic-emotional and attentional practices, for achieving greater researcher reflexivity in the field. Using stories, drawings and videos from the research site, I show that finding 'clean communication', a place from where the horse's active voice can begin to be 'heard', requires an embodied, reflexive methodological labour that, following Beth Greenhough and Emma Roe, I describe as 'experimental partnering'. This understands the horse's behaviour as phenomenologically co-produced, rather than as an object of study, but nonetheless requires clients to cultivate a critical distance from their emotions and assumptions. I argue that the practical techniques employed have methodological relevance for human–animal relations in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing interest in affect and emotions in sociological research, with a specific focus on 'mood', developing the concept 'mood of commitment'. It approaches political commitment as a mood, an affective lens, a dedication to a greater cause, asking how political commitments might be a low intensity affective relationship, and also a heightening, high intensity rhythm at the same time. I conceptualise 'mood of commitment' as an object of analysis that can be engaged to critically understand a wide range of political commitments. This article focuses on the case of Ottoman Muslim women's movements in the early 20th century, amid the turmoil of nationalist movements and 'modernisation' processes. It firstly analyses objects of desires that are circulated to be persuasive in the political movements, and attunement of women's movements with already existing nationalist movements. It secondly unpacks the kind of work involved in claiming to be in the 'right' mood of commitment, emphasising the production of hegemonic positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two theoretical moves are required to resist the 'humanist enticements' associated with sexuality. Post-structuralism supplies the first, showing how the social produces culturally specific sexual knowledgeabilities. A second anti-humanist move is then needed to overturn anthropocentric privileging of the human body and subject as the locus of sexuality. In this paper we establish a language and landscape for a Deleuze-inspired anti-humanist sociology of sexuality that shifts the location of sexuality away from bodies and individuals. Sexuality in this view is an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Assemblages territorialize bodies' desire, setting limits on what it can do: this process determines the shape of sexuality, which is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We illustrate how this anti-humanist ontology may be applied to empirical data to explore sexuality-assemblages, and conclude by exploring the theoretical and methodological advantages and disadvantages of an anti-humanist assemblage approach to sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a reply to John Parker's comments on the article "Three Models of Scientific Development." Parker's comments are, therefore, useful in so far as they draw attention to ambiguities in the text, to issues, which have not been examined in sufficient detail and to problems requiring further investigation. There are, however, one or two points on which the author thinks that he is clearly mistaken. In the first place, it is maintained that it is methodologically sound to define science as a moral as well as a technical order. The author can see no good reason for presuming that, unless one adopts this view, the author will be unable to study science historically. There is a tendency in these comments to regard any social phenomenon observable in science, for instance, competition or originality, as arising from a corresponding norm. Moreover, as results become increasingly pedestrian, less support, in the form of research grants or graduate students, for example, is made available.

This paper revisits The Other Side of Middletown, a collaborative ethnography written by a group of faculty, students and African Americans living in Muncie, Indiana - the town made famous by Robert and Helen Lynd in their 1929 original study, Middletown, and its 1937 follow-up, Middletown in Transition. Our re-study (published in 2004) addressed the lack of African American history and experience in the Lynds' works and in the Middletown literature that has materialized since then. Employing a collaborative approach to research and writing, the lines between researchers and research participants were considerably blurred: community members, students and faculty collaborated on research design, cooperatively lined out the study's overall questions, and together wrote and edited the final manuscript. Thus, working at the nexus between community and university, the study prompted multiple opportunities to complicate research methods, expand public scholarship and, importantly, augment teaching and learning between and among faculty, students and local communities. Reflections written by project participants in the book itself and in various published venues since its completion, for example, share an emphasis on how the partnership changed views of and experiences with race relations, community and university. With this in mind, I describe the particular social and relational contexts in which The Other Side of Middletown project first developed; elaborate its connections to the Lynds' original Middletown studies; summarize our study's approach and findings; and offer a few of the more salient lessons that materialized from our work: especially those that attend to issues of collaborative research, community engagement and shared pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociological research that one might aim for, even within the digital era. In so doing, it is suggested that current forms of engaging with transactional social data are problematic to the sociological imagination because they tend to be ahistorical and focus mainly on 'now casting'. The ahistorical nature of this genre of digital research, it is argued, necessarily restricts the possibility of developing a serious sociological imagination. In turn, it is concluded, there is a need to think beyond the digitized surfaces of the plastic present and to consider the impact that time and temporality, particularly within the digital arena, have on shaping our sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from the standpoint that academic freedom is a necessary precondition to sociological imagination that challenges and defies the status quo. In the introduction, we consider the legacy of sociology as praxis - intended not merely to understand, but to change the world. We then move on to conceptualise academic freedom as requiring formal, infrastructural and psychic freedoms. We then chart the genealogy of universities from academically free, but socially exclusive, institutions to their present state, using the history of higher education in the UK as a case study to consider the prospects for universities and academics within them to contribute to a vibrant and sustainable defiant sociological research imagination and the consequences of their failure to do so. We finish with a manifesto for the reinvigorating of a defiant sociological imagination building on the radical traditions we have referred to above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the main contributions of the figurational sociological tradition to the sociology of sport. It also charts the development of this work since the pioneering text, Quest for Excitement, by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, as well as offering a brief overview of some of the debates and disagreements that have arisen within the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norbert Elias was unusual amongst sociologists of his generation in placing international relations at the centre of sociological analysis - and he was ahead of various theorists of the state who argued in the 1970s and 1980s for enlarging the boundaries of sociology to include relations between states. In Elias's process sociology, international competition for power and security, and 'elimination struggles', have led to larger territorial monopolies of power. In the case of 'civilized' societies, inner pacification has developed alongside preparation for, and repeated involvement in, interstate war. Elias argued that there is no parallel to the 'civilizing process' in international relations, but he observed that higher levels of human interconnectedness have created pressures on people to become better attuned to each other's interests over greater distances. However, many groups react against perceived threats to power, autonomy and prestige and, in general, everyday orientations have lagged behind advances in international interdependence. For Elias, the sociological challenge was to understand how the species can acquire greater control over the processes of global integration. This paper discusses the place of international relations in Elias's account of the civilizing process; it maintains that the approach should be linked more closely with the 'English School of international relations' and its analysis of 'civility' and 'standards of civilization' in world affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a refinement of the sociological usage of the concept 'civilization' by distinguishing between three different 'faces' of civilization - as the opposite of barbarism, as equivalent to culture, and in Elias's sense as capturing a particular trajectory of socio-historical development. I then illustrate how this distinction between three different faces of civilization can be deployed in relation to the history of the various attempts by the English to civilize the population of Ireland. Finally, I reflect on the centrality of the experience of the colonization of Ireland for the English conception of how 'barbarism' should be understood and opposed to 'civilization' (which was then later mobilized in the colonization of the New World), as well as on the ways in which the colonization of Ireland constituted a binding together of both civilizing and decivilizing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the potential of quantitative research methods for sociologists who research the gender division of unpaid domestic work. To begin, it reflects on the emergence of the sociological interest in unpaid domestic work and identifies an early core concern with making invisible work visible. It is argued that quantitative research methods provide us with the most valuable opportunities for 'recognising' unpaid domestic work since they facilitate larger scale representative projects. However the data in most of the large scale surveys are scant, and fail to reflect developments in the conceptualisation of unpaid domestic work. Four areas of concern to contemporary sociology are identified: domestic work practices, relationships, negotiations and meanings. Given the complex questions that these four sub-topics raise, the paper proposes a range of sub-areas as a focus for ongoing sociological research into unpaid domestic work. It is concluded that, despite the methodological challenges presented, detailed indicators of the multiple dimensions of unpaid domestic work need to be agreed so that valid information can be collected in large scale surveys as routinely as it is on paid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory - including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes - as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in 'abnormal' forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having taken taking as one of its starting points a concern to avoid fetishising method – or employing any form of method for its own sake – this paper then argues that visual methods of research may be particularly helpful in investigating areas that are difficult otherwise to verbalise or articulate. These include Bourdieu's understanding of habitus; our predisposed ways of being, acting and operating in the social environment that Bourdieu himself suggests are ‘beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit’ (Bourdieu, 1977 : 94). Having outlined what Bourdieu means by habitus and considered some of the difficulties surrounding its operationalisation, the paper goes on to consider Bourdieu's own use of photography and understanding of photographic practice. It is then argued that we can move beyond Bourdieu's position by employing visual methods specifically to uncover and illuminate aspects of habitus. Where research participants are directly involved in this process this also means that visual methods can be potentially transformative, allowing for the development of forms of critical self-awareness amongst research participants of the sort that Bourdieu attributes to ‘socioanalysis’ ( Bourdieu, 1999 : 611). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the identity markers and rules used in the process of national identity construction by young adult New Zealanders, drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews with members of the majority culture of ‘Pakeha’ or ‘European’ New Zealanders. While these young New Zealanders draw on the markers of ‘birth’, ‘blood’ and ‘belonging’ identified in other studies, their claims to identity and belonging are troubled by the settler origins of their ancestors. The dilemmas these origins create for these young New Zealanders are identified along with the strategies they deploy as they seek to resolve them. The existence of these dilemmas suggests that a distinct identity rule is at work for this group that has not previously been identified in earlier studies. Thus, this analysis provides further evidence for the deployment of a common set of markers and rules as well as highlighting some of the ways in which these differ in different national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of human experts, we are required to rethink how expertise is constituted as a political and performative process. We focus on the provisos and qualifications that surround the use of calculative techniques and the worries and scepticism over the correctness, accuracy and interpretation of numbers and figures derived from systems of calculation. Rather than identifying expertise as the capacity to make calculations and to abstract ‘representations’ from the ‘real world’, a job increasingly done by information systems, we find expertise being performed in the transformation of things of different orders which enables representations to be returned to the world through allusions to their transformative effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on informants' accounts of gifts displayed on their living room mantelpieces drawn from a recent study exploring domestic display in Cardiff. The mantelpiece is an ideal space for looking at a particular category of salient objects: gifts on show in the home. An interpretation of narrative accounts is located within existing theoretical and empirical studies of gift exchange to reconsider the complex enmeshment of this traditional relation in everyday practices. An equivalence between the mantelpiece and the ‘gifts’ it presents in the home as taken-for-granted, inherited practices and materials leads to a final discussion focusing on the apparently democratised yet still gendered character of everyday gift practices. In conclusion, a consideration of the gendering of the gift questions whether this traditional, problematic method of accounting for and maintaining relations is desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on some specific problems of documentary research. General knowledge suggests that there are some quite different but fairly clear intellectual traditions within sociology associated with reliance on documentary sources: (i) quantitative content analysis, (ii) historical study, (iii) sociology of literature, (iv) linguistic/ethno- methodological, (v) personal documents. There are also more peripheral uses of documents in research that fit into none of these traditions. This discussion attempts to concentrate on those aspects of the use of documents which are not specific to any one type of use or tradition. Although the distinction is somewhat arbitrary, for convenience of presentation this paper will concentrate on those aspects of documentary research which are most directly related to the specific characteristics of documents. The precise definition of "document" is not very important, but for the purposes of this discussion it is taken to include at least some of the representational features of pictures without words. The specific characteristics of documents which raise the greatest problems are that the available stock normally exists already and cannot be created to order, and that contextual information needed to establish their meaning is often missing.

Those people who constitute the subject matter of sociological research are rarely in the position of being able publicly to comment on or criticise the research findings. In a society characterized by divisions based on class, education and occupation, such a reaction is in the main only likely to spring from the academic world itself. People living in a working-class community, or fixing speedometers to dashboards, or leading sporadic attacks on rival supporters on the way to the match do not generally have an opportunity to articulate through published material their feelings regarding what a sociologist has written about them. No Bethnal Greener has published an article entitled, say 'Family and Kinship in East London: Some Comments from a Resident'; no Luton assembly line worker has entered into a polemic with Goldthorpe and Co. via a book on 'Working for Vauxhall'; and no adolescent Oxford United supporter has written a critical review of Marsh's books for New Society.
This situation can, apart from anything else, serve to protect the research from direct criticism. We might speculate that in some instances the research findings would suffer more from a direct attack by one of the observed than by all the sociological critiques combined (though I do not wish to suggest that the examples referred to above are in this category). This paper is an attempt marginally to redress the balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is first, to demonstrate that the Durkheimian approach is not the most suitable method of studying suicide sociologically; and secondly, to illustrate the viability of an alternative sociological approach, one that derives 'types' of suicide, not from statistical correlations, but from examination of the social contexts of suicidal actions. It will be argued that this approach does more 'justice' to the complexities of suicidal phenomena, and thus allows for more realistic theories of 'social causation' to be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian Socialism is a concept which involves the amalgamation of ideas which are frequently considered to be contradictory and are not normally assumed to imply one another. In the mid-nineteenth century, the suggestion that Christianity and socialism might be reconcilable or even necessarily connected was far more unacceptable than it is today; the emergence of a group claiming to be not only both Christian and socialist but Christian Socialist was thus more anomalous. The existence of Christian Socialism between 1848 and 1854 therefore invites explanation, as does the disbanding of the movement so soon after its inception. Intuitively, the 'failure' of the movement may be felt to be natural and not surprising; this does not, however, mean that explanation is superfluous, for intuition may be ill-founded, and even if it is not, the assumptions about social processes which underly such judgements may fruitfully be exposed and perhaps evaluated.
The theme of this paper is that both the emergence and submerging of Christian Socialism at this time may be understood in terms of the social roots of the ideas involved in such a synthesis, and that such roots are crucial to any changes which may occur in the social distribution of ideas. Mannheim claims that ideas axe always rooted in social groups and amalgamate when the carrying groups merge;[1] the implication is that when such amalgamation of groups does not occur, syntheses of their ideas are unlikely to find a receptive audience. Berger suggests that the links between ideas and the social processes in which they are rooted may be extrinsic or intrinsic, that is, they may be contingent or necessary; some 'packages' of ideas, processes and groups may be more easily untied than others.[2]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to examine the concept of relative deprivation, of ten used in the analysis of conflict and riot situations in the United States, in its possible applications to the present situation in Northern Ireland. Three major factors have been identified, which causes civil disturbances: a history of strife, disputes about the legitimacy of the political system and persisting and short-term deprivation. A group may be said to be relatively deprived when a comparison is made between its situation and that of another identifiable group and it is shown to be at a disadvantage. It is necessary to note the distinction between the extent to which a group estimates itself to be deprived compared to another, and the actual extent of the difference, if any. The use of the concept also pre-supposes a criterion for evaluating a situation as one of deprivation. A group will have a criterion to justify considering itself relatively deprived, whether in terms of fairness, merit, justice, inequality of treatment or lack of equal opportunity. If a group considers the inequalities it endures are justified, it will not feel relatively deprived.

In this article we revisit our analytical concept of global grammars of enterprise to explore the ways in which this grammar is being reimagined in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crises it produces. Drawing on a hermeneutic sociological analysis of a variety of documents (policies, websites, think pieces), our rethinking revisits understandings of the relationships between 'enterprise', young people, education, training and work, and the importance of certain ideas about a young person's 'self project', 'self-fulfilment' and 'creativity'. In doing this work, which is largely located in the developed economies of the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, we trace a number of the entanglements between young people and global grammars of enterprise, and between what we identify as the emergent logics of 'rescue and restitution' and 'reconsideration and redefinition' that frame different, though connected responses to the pandemic and its uncertain, complex and ambiguous consequences for the future of work. We explore what sociologies of work, education and youth might contribute to problematising both the crises that the pandemic foreshadows in relation to young people's health and well-being and their education, training and employment pathways, and the 'solutions' that are being proposed to these crises at what Rosa Braidotti has identified as the convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Mass Extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research trajectories. From the 2000s, engagements with ethnicity have played an increasingly important role in these trajectories. Minority ethnic (ME) populations have emerged as a new type of dementia problem. Observations about diagnosis rates and timings, medication and nursing support (including care home admission) are normatively appraised to associate minority ethnicity with poor dementia outcomes. These outcomes are then attributed to purported cultural shortcomings of these populations. The emergence of (minority) ethnicity as a problem supports a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia, wherein citizens must govern their conduct accordingly so as not to become like the imagined 'ethnic' antagonist. Ultimately, dementia's newfound ethnicity problem may not serve the interests of people affected by dementia so much as researchers in the field, who should therefore reflect on their own contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological research into the body pedagogics of occupational, educational, religious and sporting groups focuses on cases in which the social and material environment reproduces these 'ways of life', yet devotes little attention to how cultures persist within circumstances hostile to their maintenance. Developing a transactionalist approach to body pedagogics, I address this lacuna by investigating the case of cycling within societies dominated by automobility. Cycling, in these contexts, requires individuals to engage creatively with challenging physical and environmental exchanges. Such exchanges frequently alienate but can involve the development of 'outsider' mobile status, have been reorganised into stable practices by vélo cultures, and highlight embodied processes relevant to general sociological investigations into marginalised cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the specificity of sociological materials and methods in relation to other disciplines and practices (art, literature, science and journalism) and questions the opportunities for sociological attentiveness, experimentation and failure in the context of contemporary UK professional, institutional and academic/ intellectual constraints. It asks whether materials and methods are 'sociological' to the extent that they tell about the problems of society, or whether it is the unique relation of sociology to its materials and methods that defines sociological practice. Exploring these questions in relation to a project that was researched and written during an extended period of unpaid leave (ie outside the profession and the institution), the article also examines some of the consequences of a changed relation between sociology and experience. What would be the implications if the aim of sociology was not only to theorize and explain experience but also, sometimes, to be an 'informed provocation' of experience? The second part of the article considers what the concept of 'make-believe' might offer sociology - not in terms of what sociology is, but rather in terms of what it does with its materials and methods. Finally, the article returns to the most common material that sociologists work with - words - and asks how it is possible to stay receptive to the vitality of words as forces in the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including relationship between the methods and values of sociological research, crisis in social method and value and eroding the lines between sociologists and other professions.

This paper analyses social capital structures in the field of power, based on data from the Norwegian Power and Democracy Survey on elites. Separating between objectified, institutionalised, embodied, and inherited social capital, and inspired by Bourdieu's approach, we analyse the relations between social capital and the other forms of capital by way of specific multiple correspondence analysis and ascending hierarchical cluster analysis. First, we find that the level of institutionalised social capital varies from one fraction of the Norwegian elite to another. Secondly, the range of networks established through previous work experiences is related to field seniority. Thirdly, the positions of highest endogamy are situated in the religious field, and to a lesser extent, in the scientific field, and in the juridical field. Finally, the 'core of the core' is defined by actors who are strongly interconnected inside what is called 'the tripartite system', with a high level of multipositionality and intersectorial connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus is not only a medical threat but also collides with the temporal logic inherent to capitalism. While capitalism demands constant growth, acceleration and efficiency, the outbreak urges societies to reduce, slow down and be patient. This article provides a sociological comment on the pandemic that focuses on the role of time and temporality. It explores the multiple ways in which the required responses to Covid-19 are at odds with the temporal order of capitalism. In the midst of crisis, the specific features, contradictions and weaknesses of the time regime governing modern societies become even more apparent – and make sociological scrutiny more necessary than ever. While this comment relates to the insights provided by the sociology of time, it uses a children's book to illustrate its argument. Drawing on Michael Ende's story of the orphan girl Momo and the grey gentlemen who steal people's time, I recapture the main features of capitalism as a time regime: measurement and commodification of time, temporal expansion, acceleration, appropriation of the future, and unequal temporal autonomy. The current pandemic challenges both individual and collective temporalities that are governed by these temporal imperatives of capitalism. I conclude with reflections on the feasibility of a more sustainable temporal order that Michael Ende's novel hints at and suggest how sociological research could support such an endeavour in the current crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embracing the manifesto for a 'live' sociology, I included portraiture into the research design of an ethnographic study into women's lived experiences of French suburbia and organised an exhibition entitled Habitantes d'Hier and d'Aujourd'hui: exposition sociologique et photographique. This was a personal project in the neighbourhood of my youth and was motivated by the intention to shine some light on the invisible stories of women living in lower-middle and middle-income suburbs in France. In this article, I reflect on the use of portraiture for the possibility it offers in capturing the ethnographic encounter as well as in giving saliency and offering a visual representation of the sociological analysis. I also discuss the exhibition of these portraits as a moment of conviviality grounded in the endeavour of writing differently from hegemonic modes of academic communication and dissemination allowing for a sharing and sharpening of the sociological imagination. It represents an opportunity to think beyond some of the more neoliberal imperatives that govern academia today and shape our sociological craft. I argue for the value of creating a moment of conviviality, that is a space challenging modes of dissemination, engagement and even impact to some extent, as well as modes of knowledge production: broadly opening up more possibilities for a truly public sociology to continue to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical analysis of the British monarchy within wider political economies of wealth and power. While sociology has renewed its interest in 'the elites', the British monarchy is often positioned as an archaic institution, an anachronism in relation to corporate forms of wealth and power, and therefore irrelevant. This article counters this framing by revealing the mechanics, technologies and actors 'behind the scenes', in order to expose and demystify the relationship between the symbolic and political-economic functions of the monarchy. To do this, I (re)conceptualise the monarchy as a corporation, 'The Firm', oriented towards, and historically entrenched in, processes of capital accumulation, profit extraction and other forms of exploitation. The article maps out The Firm's labour relations, financial arrangements, inter/national relationships and networks, and the legal status of The Crown and its components in order to demonstrate how 'old' and 'new' forms of wealth intersect and converge in contemporary Britain. This article is intended as a provocation to sociological studies of elites to suggest that, in overlooking monarchy, we are overlooking a key component of contemporary capitalism, and a key component in the reproduction of inequalities today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper that aims to make a contribution to the sociology of skills. It explains that a research, which suggests that skills and their transmission are the properties of communities, leaves unanswered the question of how information may be explicitly transmitted and acquired as part of the process of leaning a skill. It further discusses, studies of skill accept that skill acquisition occurs within a culture; it also examines in detail, which aspects of skills can be explicated and which cannot. Such a second-order study is presented here. It identifies a quasi-quantitative measure of skill acquisition-hardness. This measure is useful in understanding how task uncertainty is resolved in practice and how new skills are learnt. It explains learning how hard something is and how hard one should go at it is a part of becoming a skilled person. It mentions that the question of the transfer of skills is deeply sociological so long as one thinks of skills as being the properties of communities.

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.

A bibliography related to sociological studies is presented, including the books "Stepfamilies," by Graham Allan, Graham Crow and Sheila Hawker, "Markets," by Patrick Aspers and "The Cycle of Juvenile Justice," second edition, by Thomas J. Bernard and Megan C. Jurlyscheck.

The concept of place has become fertile ground for sociological investigations, yet it is still undertheorized and in need of further development. Its most advanced employment is to be found within a sociological agenda on materialities of care and health architecture. In this article, we build on this work to conceptualize 'placed care' and to show how ecologies of care are produced and maintained through care infrastructures. The article investigates the case of an illegal baby foundling room in the Netherlands, where one may abandon one's infant anonymously. We conceptualize this place, continuously produced through its care infrastructures, as 'place-by-proxy': a place that allows, by virtue of simply being there, for the animation of infrastructures around it. With this concept, we advance discussions on places as bounded and open, pointing to the work and consequences of 'binding' place and opening up the concept for further application to various sociological concerns, particularly in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norbert Elias and John Scotson's analysis of the interconnection between positive and negative community identities in The Established and the Outsiders is well-known. Elias's subsequent writing about community offers a more rounded analysis, going beyond established/outsider configurations by exploring community's gendered character and the forces involved in the 'we–I balance' that counteract the pervasive process of individualization. Elias's use of personal pronouns to reveal how community identity ('we') relates not only to outsiders ('they') but also to an individual member ('I') of communities is central to his extended theory of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture – rather than text − as the important legacy of the 'cultural turn' in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the 'dynamic' and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the 'practice turn' in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a 'theoretical' – as against a purely 'methodological' conception – of the qualitative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the unresolved concern about the relationship between habitus and reflexivity. Using Sri Lanka, a postcolonial social context, as the research ground, the article provides a contemporary interpretation of individuals' reflexive and habitual behaviour that displaces Bourdieu's concept of habitus as inappropriate for the representation of 21st-century social dynamics. While Sri Lanka is often labelled a traditional society, where habitual, routine, pre-reflexive action is thought to be more common, studies that question this generalised view appear to be largely absent. Therefore, based on a critical realist morphogenetic perspective that offers the analytical possibility of both routine and conscious action, this article investigates the role of habitus and reflexivity through 75 work and life histories gathered from Sri Lanka. The findings suggest that even the reproduction of traditional practices has increasingly become a reflexive task; thus, this work supports the position that habitus fails to provide reliable guidance to understand social action, even within a society labelled as traditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses David Monahan's photographic portrait series of over 120 people before emigrating from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, entitled 'Leaving Dublin'. As a digital series that circulates across multiple media channels, it moves beyond the tradition of documentary photography into a more hybrid aesthetic, political and media environment. As well as inserting these images in multiple circulatory platforms and replicable formats, the series disrupts the dominant visual culture of emigration by expressively recasting how it is seen and thought. This article argues that the highly stylised and unsentimental aesthetic adopted by Monahan pushes the images beyond the established visual culture of sentimental departure, visualising instead transnational and multicultural histories and politics through complex circuits of migration. As such, it highlights what Mieke Bal sees as the instability of migratory culture in the city landscape. At the same time, however, it re-enacts particular social distinctions and divisions. Just as new trajectories, relationalites and stories 'appear' as constitutive of Dublin and contemporary mobility, so also other trajectories, relationalities and mobilities are disappeared in ways that keep an exclusionary topography and politics of mobility in place. This is evident in the insistent and persistent separation between Irish asylum-seeking/immigration and emigration-focused digital photographic projects. So, although digitisation facilitates reflexive ways of communicating contemporary migration, and Monahan's project succeeds in forging subtle connections, it also re-enacts structured disconnection and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for social as well as academic impact in social science research is now well established. Art is increasingly being explored as a means of generating social impact, most commonly as a way to engage publics with research findings, but to date with little exploration of the process of engagement itself. In this study, we set out to explore the power of art to engage the public. We do this by examining the 'affective' experience of engagement through a qualitative investigation using one-to-one interviews and a modified visual matrix exercise. In this article we report on the findings from our analysis of the affective experience of watching a film series, and through this discuss the use of film to communicate research findings and value of a novel qualitative psychosocial methodology for exploring the process of public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]