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One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempt to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,[1] these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations form and come to be recognized as such. The creation of health visiting between 1850 and 1919 will be taken as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During most of the nineteenth century, the etymology of the term 'statistics' was still much alive: statistics was state-istics, the empirical study of the state. It has been argued that the nineteenth-century avalanche of printed numbers gave rise to a new discourse about society. Not only was society conceived of as a population; the corps social (Quetelet) was also conceptualized as a subject of statistics. An important contribution of this state-istics was to conceive a new sort of object, which could be both the target of research and of policy interventions. On the basis of a case-study of all the Belgian population censuses taken before the Second World War, we attempt to articulate the complex interactions between science, government, and society in the modern era. We thereby direct our attention to the range of exclusions and exclusion places that appeared in these censuses. Our analysis highlights the intimate relationship between population and territory in the 'search engines' of the statisticians. The discursive constitution of territorial exclusions allows us to analyse the articulation of inclusion ideals - in the period before such ideals became firmly institutionalized in the so-called welfare state of the postwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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