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This paper is concerned with the River Danube as a European object that articulates forms of relations which, by linking human and non-humans in highly specific ways, create actor-networks that dispute common societal divisions and (b)orders. By discussing the contested social relevance of the River Danube, this paper visualizes different ways of imagining Europe. Following some of the controversies concerning the River Danube, we outline a process oriented, transnational research agenda for a specific European object with the conceptual explication of human and non-human relations at its core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As football related disorders remain stubbornly impervious to 'solutions', so the study of football hooliganism has become almost a minor branch of the social sciences. This paper looks critically at the main academic approaches to the problem in the UK and Europe. The shortcomings of much of this work are revealed, both theoretically and in terms of the evidence employed about the nature of hooliganism. The meager amount of data about hooliganism contained in the plethora of Government reports that have so far been commissioned is striking. This may well be the reason why 'official' remedies so often prove inadequate. One way of gaining an understanding of this phenomenon is by making contact with, talking to, and observing at first hand the behaviour of those people most centrally involved, the hooligans themselves. This paper concludes with a series of portraits of 'the boys', some of it based on their own published writing. This will illustrate different forms of hooligan involvements. It will also provide an understanding of its origins as well as the true scale and scope of hooligan activity, about which many myths prevail. Something of the changes as well as the continuities on the football scene over the past 25 years will be indicated. Finally we will attempt to locate the whole phenomenon in its true place within British youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on two areas of innovation currently articulating the agenda of personalized medicine (PM): the discourse of empowerment in health-care reforms and the rise of molecular epigenomics. We align these two developments as discursive and technical resources, focusing on their nascent interplay in shaping alternative sociotechnical imaginaries of PM. Our work aims at inaugurating an intellectual programme on the distinct futures of policy- and identity-making that are being catalysed around epigenomic technoscience, as well as to provide an operational map of its potential synergies with pre-existing socio-political discourses of empowerment in PM. This roadmap advances our understanding of how the intersection of epigenomics with dominant policy discourses becomes a resource to shape roles and obligations of citizens, patients and health-care actors in the emergence of PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 were a major event shaping the relationship between Muslims and non- Muslims in Britain. In this paper we introduce the idea of 'securitized citizens' to analyse the changing relationship between British Muslims and wider British society in response to this and similar events. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Muslims and non- Muslims of a variety of ethnic backgrounds in the areas where the London bombers lived in West Yorkshire we examine the popular perceptions of non- Muslims and Muslims' experiences. We show how processes of securitization and racialization have interacted with Islamophobic discourses and identifications, as well as the experiences of Muslims in West Yorkshire after the attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will consider the validity of such assumptions and attempt analysis of their sources through discussion of the position of women in the kibbutz of today in historical terms, relating my own field material[2] to the more general development of the kibbutz movement.[3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the book "Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives," by Talcott Parsons. Readers who may hope that this will provide them with a simplified approach to the work of Parsons will be disappointed; his style is as turgid as ever, making this a doubtful member of a series of books for beginners. Nevertheless it is a shorter route to Parsonian ideas than most, and is much more rooted in empirical data than his other books. The societies under examination do not include those of modern Europe, which will be dealt with in a later volume.

In recent years there has been increased interest in couples Living Apart Together (LAT) within the sociology of the family in Europe. One of the main questions concerns understanding their evolution over time. Given the lack of longitudinal data, the present study focuses as a proxy to study the perception LATs hold of their future and the influencing factors. Based on data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), a sample of 5253 people in LAT relationships was taken from seven European countries. The results show that the future intentions of these couples are conditioned by the understanding of the family in different European countries, the age of its members and, above all, the social pressure exerted by family and friends to live together and/or marry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of youth transition regimes (YTR) on the political participation strategies of young people from 26 locations in 12 European countries. The central hypothesis is that the way that youth transitions take place in different European contexts determines the position of youth as a group in the system of social relations that Bourdieu calls the 'social space'. Depending upon this position, young people may be more inclined to participation through institutional channels or political protest, or, in contrast, remain inactive. Thus, the specific context of youth in each society (measured through the exposure to risk and vulnerability, the length of the pathway to adulthood and the role of the welfare state) plays a crucial role in defining young people's political action strategies. Multilevel logistic regression analysis using the MYPLACE survey, the specific operationalization of the YTR and other aggregate control variables reveal that YTR centrality is a very important contextual predictor for explaining different forms of political participation among young people in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen a notable increase in support for far right parties and an alarming rise of right-wing extremism across Europe. Drawing on a new comparative youth survey in 14 European countries, this article provides deeper insight into young people's support for nationalist and far right ideology: negative attitudes towards minorities, xenophobia, welfare chauvinism and exclusionism in relation to migrants. We first map the support for far right ideology among youth in Europe, and then use multilevel regression analysis (16,935 individuals nested in 30 locations) to investigate which individual or contextual factors are associated with a higher propensity among young people towards getting involved in far right movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forms of populism have long been a component of modern political discourse and systems where democracy relies upon popular legitimacy. There is, however, an uneasy relationship between some widely held views of 'the people' and the parties which seek to govern them. Contemporary academic and political discourse on populism often equates these views with right-wing politics, whilst some radical scholars, suggest that these views, whilst controversial, are nonetheless examples of democratic expression. Using survey evidence from 14 European countries, we show that young people take up a mixture of political positions, some of which are strongly associated with indices of populism - cynicism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia - others of which do not map neatly onto the typical 'left-right' spectrum. We find evidence that some young people hold contradictory, often conflicting political viewpoints, which are reflective of the historical and cultural contexts of each location rather than of a 'populist' ideology. Where some theorists might use the term 'populism' pejoratively to denote a poorly and emotively grounded political ideology, we argue that this description denies its democratic legitimacy, as evidence suggests that young people draw on populist rhetoric to articulate views that are more reflective of local and regional concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifestyle migration, such as the temporary or permanent movement of European citizens to coastal areas in Southern Europe, widely responds to the freedom of movement that EU citizenship provides to all its members. Although this migration can be evaluated as an individual and rather apolitical expression of a politically intended mobility within the European Union, it may seriously alter political life within destinations. The following article presents a case study about the political mobilization of lifestyle migrants living on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. It is based on empirical research and explores narrative interviews with members of a transnationally active political pressure group that campaigns against misapplications of local and regional land use policies. The central aim of the text consists of evaluating how central actors draw on European identity within conflict negotiations that traverse diverse scales including the European level. Referring to this, the article engages with key issues in contemporary sociological debates addressed in this monograph, namely the question of how sociologists approach the study of the political in general and how imaginations of Europe and European identity are strategically appropriated within political debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the vast literature concerned with the cultural aspects of gender, this article explores the ways in which individuals living in different national contexts value the ideal of a dual earner/dual carer couple at the expense of the male breadwinner model. Via a comparison of fifteen European countries included in the Family and Gender Roles module of the 2002 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), three attitudinal patterns were identified: the unequal sharing that portrays a male breadwinner norm, the familistic unequal that also endorses a gender-segregated arrangement though with a greater wish for men's involvement in housework and childcare, and the dual earner/dual carer model, which, despite covering nearly 40 per cent of respondents, is very unequally distributed across countries. It is proposed that societal gender cultures are of major importance to an understanding of cross-national variations in attitudes and their relationship with the real forms of gender division of labour. The connection between couples' attitudes and practices is thus examined in order to assess the extent to which support for the dual earner/dual carer model encourages couples to engage in more equal sharing of paid and unpaid work. Findings reveal the importance of the normative dimension insofar as the impact of attitudes on practices seems to depend on the historical pathways of gender cultures and the ways in which they underpin welfare policies and female employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that sport has been drawn into helping build a collective identity around the nation-state, particularly in the immediate ‘era of independence’ after 1945, is well documented. However, it is only recently that sport has been linked to notions of moulding what we term here as ‘pan-European identifications’. It is our argument that there are two distinctive forms to such identification. The first posits a tangible notion of identity based around territories such as nation-states. Sport assists in this process through ‘official’ policies, such as declarations, reports and statements by the European Commission and other pan-European institutions. The second form recognizes that increasing transversal interactions weakens ideas of territorialized identity, resulting in a looser ‘sense of belonging’. Sport helps craft identifications here in an informal manner through pan-European sporting competitions, such as the UEFA Champions League and 2004 European football championships. This article is structured to look at both forms of this sport/identification interface whilst also considering the complex nature of sport and identity by explaining how sport can simultaneously erode such identifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, Harald Wydra argues that the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe has been a long-term social process interwoven with the collapse of communism whose origins are long before 1989. He challenges the vision of East and West as two isolated blocs that prevailed in the 1950s and the assumption of gradual convergence that became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. His main focus is upon the East where, he believes, dissident movements created a 'second reality', undermining the myths propounded by the official communist establishment. He argues that there was an increase in self-restraint on the part of the communist state accompanied by the growth of civil society and non-violent political opposition. The East experienced a feeling of 'unrequited love' in its relationship to the West. Dissidents took their standards and aspirations from Western experience but found themselves largely ignored by the West. Since 1989, democratisation has increased the influence of western models and standards but it has also led to a breakdown of self-restraint and an upsurge of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores the prospects for a postnational polity in Europe where the territorial base of power is replaced by a system of networks and flows in which the principal resource is knowledge. The argument depicts a united Europe as a space of flows rather than as a super-or supra-statist entity. Tensions that arise between a Europe of networks and spaces and a Europe of places are examined, partly through a study of the burgeoning European Information Society Project which attempts to harness these developing networks in the service of European integration. Issues relating to the democratic nature of governance without government in the network polity are highlighted to exemplify the difficulties of re-imagining Europe. The rhetoric surrounding the European Information Society expresses the ambivalence within a programme that foresees Europe as a web of discursive spaces while continuing to acknowledge the power of the old imagined communities based upon territory and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores a threefold European deficit: a democratic deficit, a deficit in European identity, and a deficit in the European public sphere. It argues that although interests such as social movements have most leverage at the national level, since this is the level at which the media are largely organised, the emergence of distinctively 'European' issues such as BSE means that national cycles of media attention are becoming increasingly synchronised. This makes it more likely that a homogenisation of issues and opinion will occur at the European level. This would favour the eventual emergence of a supranational identity. The creation of a European public sphere through the synchronisation and homogenisation of cycles of media attention on contentious 'European' issues is a more realistic prospect than direct attempts to create a 'new European' identity through public education or the legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study carried out to measure the consequences of Western civilization over other nations. In recent decades, a general notion has emerged and become widely accepted that as a consequence of the impact of Western civilization the economic, social and cultural conditions of many nations in the future will become similar to those of Western Europe. Social and technical changes in a society and its relationship to demographic characteristics have always been sociological problems. So, in this study the demographic characteristics are considered to be dependent variables reflecting the external structural changes of a social system. The theoretical framework of this study is based upon the interrelation between the structural components of a social system and the types of forces that cause change in the structure of a social system. The national and provincial statistics of the first census of Iran, 1956, and the United Nations Demographic and Statistical Year Books of 1956-57 were used as the major sources of data in this study. This data was analyzed at two levels: provincial and national. The findings of the study suggest that the components of modernization are closely interrelated and are functionally associated with the demographic composition of a population; the modernization forces, especially at the early stage, seem to influence first the public external features of a population, and secondly the private and internal features; the more urbanized the Iranian population becomes, the more its demographic structure resembles the highly modernized societies. Finally, the Western type of industrialization, urbanization, and ideology has an almost universalistic application.

This research study is concerned with the town within its limits as a separate unit, though not with the usual terms of reference, and it also offers some contribution towards the placing of one town in comparison to others as a "central place." Geographical studies of urban areas may be concerned with either of two major aspects. They may, in the first place, be concerned with the study of the town as a physical entity, describing the characteristics of its site and the structure of the urban settlement which has evolved. Secondly, studies may be concerned with the study of the town as a functional entity, analysing the position of the town as a unit in a wider regional setting. It may be said that any town or urban unit is not a homogeneous whole but is rather a close association of component parts. The main divisions which can be observed in the town structure are those between parts incorporating shopping and business, residential and industrial functions. In other parts of Europe and in the United States some attempts have been made to use available statistics to provide a more quantitative analysis and comparison.