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Drawing on a series of ethnographic encounters collected while hanging around at a seafood stand in east London, the following article aims to explore the relationship between individual expressions of distaste and the production of class, ethnic and generational forms of distinction. Starting with the visceral expressions of distaste directed towards a seafood stand, the following paragraphs draw on a combination of historical and ethnographic data rendered through a matrix of anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the role of everyday ambient experiences and the stratifying processes that cut across the lives of the city's inhabitants. Arguing against purely biological explanations of disgust, the paper explores how social histories and cultural experience inflect gut responses to the sensoria that suffuse urban environments. Moving the focus beyond the social construction of urban sensibilities, the paper goes on to develop an account of culturally inflected forms of distaste, shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on private equity in the UK and is set in the context of debates about transformations in the City of London. The article focuses on a particular concept of trust as expressed by senior members of the private equity sector. The argument developed is based on interviews with five senior founding partners of private equity firms who talked to us about their background and education, their understanding of how private equity worked and the basis for successful money making and their relationships with those inside and outside the organization. All interviewees strongly asserted the need for absolute trust between senior partners as an essential condition for the successful operation of their business. At the same time, their description of trust in this context was that while it is deep, it is also easily broken, and that once broken, the breach cannot be forgiven. We call this 'brittle trust': asserted to be simultaneously strong while extremely fragile. The paper argues, drawing on Diego Gambetta's work on the Sicilian Mafia, that this concept of 'trust' reflects a particular understanding of the practice of private equity as a high risk, tough and unforgiving business that nevertheless requires high standards of personal integrity. The study allows us to understand something more about the social ideals that were built into this financial sector by its founders, which we argue formed a crucial part of the transformation of the financial sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An association with mothering is viewed as the greatest stumbling block in the path to raising the quality and status of childminding. As a broadly conceived rite de passage, this article suggests, professionalisation offers childminders a symbolic route out. It is a ritual process which demands the production of 'fabrications'; particular artefacts, special words and appropriate modes of behaviour which are produced specifically to meet the regulatory gaze. When childminders engage in performative professionalism, it is proposed, they gain recognition as bona fide members of the children's workforce, but their work is changed in ways which make it less meaningful for them. Presenting a phenomenology of their encounter with a widely diffused 'technology of quality', the paper reveals how childminders' collective identity is both endangered and engendered in struggles over particular cultural forms. Interpreting data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork with childminders in inner London, the article draws on and extends work focused on audit culture and performativity in secondary schools by synthesising it with feminist work on women's knowledge and the ethics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term ‘working class’, and consider what forms ‘working class-ness’ takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We emphasise the heterogeneity of the working class(es), the differences in attitude and experiences based on place, gender, occupational status, education, age and family membership. Then we consider our respondents in relation to their strategies and exercise of agency, their engagement with the labour market, and their embedded-ness in social networks. We conclude that one way of understanding the lives of urban working class families is to consider the extent to which they ‘manage or struggle to cope’, a focus which emphasises process, activity and the differential degrees of agency which the respondents are able to exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut-out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on-going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on family life in London, England suburb. The material presented in this paper was collected in the course of a study of an urban general practice made by the Social Medicine Research Unit of the Medical Research Council during 1950-52. It relates to the way of life, and the family and social relationships, of a group of families within that practice, and it is the kind of material that often lies unused in research flies. It also provided a basis for assessing the characteristics of the group; characteristics which cannot be left out of account if any attempt is to be made to understand the factors which influence the behavior of patients in health and illness. The young wife of a man who had recently set up in business on his own volunteered the information that she and her husband could talk about everything and anything together, she thought that modern girls were not afraid of their husbands, as the older generation hat been, and so they could be companions for each other and do things together.

Bosanquet's political philosophy was a social theory of the function of the State as 'hinderer of hindrances to the best life', where individual development was supported by relationships within a community. This was worked out in the context of considerable knowledge of conditions among the London poor at the turn of the century, and reinforced by his wife's practical work and research. He sympathized with Durkheim's pioneering sociology, and was in contact with him through the Sociological Society. His 'New Liberal' approach, seeing problems of poverty as to be met by informed charitable activity, was restricted by insufficient recognition of the structural aspects of social problems and conflicts. The bearing of his Idealist Metaphysics is critically considered, and it is claimed that, although a good deal of this may not be acceptable, it gave a background to a kind of social thinking which is of interest to those looking for a communitarian type of political philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the Department of Social Administration of the London School of Economics and Political Science in England. The research program center attempts to understand social needs as well as understand the services developed to meet those needs. The center regards research as an essential and integral part of their university work and sees research and teaching duties in competition superficially. They allow research as an option for part of the practical work in their diploma course and each year, some of their students have students have chosen to participate in the research of the department.

This article builds on 'the convivial, everyday turn' by approaching the workings of complex urban spaces of multiculture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value. The article explores the competing value claims made for a leisure space, a London bowling alley, used by a diverse group of people (in terms of dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, class and age) that has been threatened with demolition. It examines how arguments about diversity and inclusivity are deployed in these debates and how official discourses are resisted through the mobilisation of other articulations of social value. The article argues that the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life. This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its temporal dimensions. Bringing together Lefebvre’s trialectic of the conceived, the perceived and the lived with Adam’s notion of timescapes, the article argues that we need to attend more closely to the multiple temporalities that underpin interventions of urban change. In particular, this article explores how temporalities of planning, the environment and everyday life interact to create unique timescapes of urban change. By drawing on a longitudinal study of the regeneration of the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona, the article explores the multiple, at times interdependent, at times divergent temporalities that are tangled up in the making and experiencing of this street. The article suggests to approach urban regeneration as a long-term process and place making as a temporal practice where a diversity of temporal modalities interact to produce a diverse and dynamic sense of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weaving together observations and insights from ethnographic research gathered over two years, this article considers how design and everyday life intertwine to create convivial places, but also pauses to take in the moments when tensions rise and conviviality fails. To illustrate, the article takes as an example the redevelopment of a small urban square in London, designed by landscape architects Gustafson Porter and completed in 2011. Gustafson Porter’s practice is deeply informed by inclusive design, and they strive to design barrier-free environments that ‘promote choice, flexibility of use and enable everyone to participate equally’. Taking in both the material design of the square and the social encounters that happen there, the article considers how inclusion and exclusion operate in a public space like General Gordon Square, and reflects on the challenges of making and maintaining conviviality. It suggests that inclusive design might be imagined as a vision of convivial culture in which we live together with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The street has long been a key laboratory for studies of social life, from the roots of urban sociology in the ethnographies of the Chicago School to the diverse range of contemporary studies which consider the performative, affective and non-representational nature of street etiquette and encounter. For all this, the street remains only loosely defined in many studies, and sometimes disappears from view entirely, with social action often privileged over material and environmental context. This Special Issue is intended as a spur to take the street more seriously in contemporary sociology, and explores the importance of the street as a site, scale and field for sociological research. Recognising that the street is both contradictory and complex, the Introduction to this Issue draws out emerging themes in the shifting sociologies of the street by highlighting the specific contribution interdisciplinary work can make to our understanding of streets as distinctive but contested social spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The streetlife of discrimination emerges in the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Focusing on livelihoods forged by migrants on four peripheral streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester, this article draws on face-to-face surveys with over 350 self-employed proprietors. Despite significant variables amongst proprietors, these individuals had all become traders on streets in marginalised parts of UK cities, and the article addresses whether ‘race’ matters more than class for how certain groups become emplaced in the city. Narratives of inequality and racism feature prominently in the proprietors’ accounts of where they settled in the city and what limited forms of work are available in the urban margins. Yet as significant to proprietors’ experiences of trade are repertoires of entrepreneurial agility and cross-cultural exchange. Through the concept of the ‘migrant margins’ the article explores the overlap of human capacities and structural discrimination that spans global and urban space. It combines urban sociological understandings of ‘race’ and inequality with fluid understandings of makeshift city-making that have emerged in post-colonial urban studies. Such combinations encourage connections between the histories and geographies of how people and places become bordered, together with city-making practices that are both marginal and transgressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years we have witnessed an increasing prevalence of ethnographic studies concerned explicitly with the social and cultural life, and production, of space and specifically of the urban public realm. In line with a wider trend, many of these studies seek to analyse urban public life through the prism of the ‘everyday’, using accounts of the ordinary to explore the ways that city streets are used and experienced. In this article the author seeks to interrogate this multifarious deployment of ‘everydayness’ in ethnographic work on urban ‘streetlife.’ This interrogation is both theoretical, exploring how the everyday became the privileged approach for studies of the street, and methodological, asking what is it about our methodological choices that lends itself to conceptualising public life as everyday, and what might we do differently? At the same time, the article draws on ethnographic work on London’s South Bank to open up a space to consider the exceptional in sociological studies of streetlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a conference on the link between the armed forces and society that was held in London, England on September 14-16, 1967, by the sub-committee on Militarism and the Professional Military Man of the International Sociological Association. The scope of the conference included sociological analysis of the military professional and military institutions, the sociology of war and revolution as well as United Nations peace keeping and arms control. There was also a discussion of the professional problems involved in doing research on military institutions and the sociology of war, as well as the actual and potential role of the sociological research in contributing to world peace.

The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expenditure and other official statistics. The analysis shows how income and space variably define household motoring experience as one of choice or constraint and risk. The end result is a cultural economy analysis that shows how motoring sustains multiple, overlapping identities in different worlds of enabling and enforced consumption which connect with production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the methodology of Homeland, a nomadic public dialogue action and work of social practice art commissioned by the 1993 London International Festival of Theatre and created by PLATFORM, a social practice collective in London, England, whose members work as artists, educators, and activists. The event was held in a furniture truck and involved conversations between members of PLATFORM and public participants. It explores how the work taught participants about London's use of light and lightbulbs and explores the notion of the sense of home. Aspects of performance and imagination are also considered.

Whilst engaged in research into Pentecostalism in the North of England, and later in London, one became convinced of the need for detailed ethnographic studies of particular Pentecostal sects and their organized events. Although normative values were held in common by many of the congregation, as evidenced by their familiarity with the hymns and choruses, verbal appreciation of the jokes and enjoyment of the sermons, there were elements of uncertainty as to how to behave. This uncertainty was matched with a total acceptance that one looked to the platform for instructions. This was especially noticeable in relation to clapping during choruses. The congregation would never clap enthusiastically unless the platform did so first, and even then there seemed to be no consensus on how hard and loud clapping should be. The community sense-of being with people of similar expectations and shared normative values--was taken for granted by the believers and it was not necessary to know of the biographical background of a person to be sure of his ideological commitment because Pentecostals have various 'recognition signals' whereby they know each other and thus can structure their interaction assured of their common ground.