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This paper interrogates the relationship between working-class participation in higher education ( HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working-class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to 'become middle class'. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different 'forms of capital', or symbolic 'mastery' ( Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of 'creditor' to whom the working-class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as 'deficient' and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of 'escape' implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of 'fugitivity', to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subscribers to the British Sociological Association will be aware that its newsletter, Network, has recently been carrying correspondence on the ethics of covert observation, provoked by Roger Homan's paper, in a previous Sociological Review, 'Interpersonal Communication in Pentecostal Meetings'. Homan, himself, has contributed to this correspondence and defended his stance at more length in a paper, published with a rejoinder by Martin Bulmer, in the British Journal of Sociology.[1] I am not, however, convinced that we have yet reached some of the core issues in this area, because the ethical discussion has become so far removed from an adequate understanding of the nature of fieldwork. In this paper, I want to reunite these two topics, partly because I believe ethical debate to be a rather futile activity if it is not grounded in everyday practice and partly to show that there are so many grey moral areas in ethnography that an over-academic analysis may ultimately be inimical to our continued use of this approach to social life. Although I shall concentrate on field practice, this should not be taken to imply a disregard for planning and writing-up research. Plainly the ethical questions are at least as important, but their better documentation makes an extended consideration a less urgent matter for this present paper. By ethnography I intend to include all research based upon naturalistic modes of inquiry within a predominantly inductivist theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on capitalist states, and under governments explicitly dedicated to the reduction of the interference of the state in the economy and the trend towards the dominance of the state that has continued. This article is intended as an illustration of one possible outcome of such a situation - the 'capture' of a part of the voluntary association leadership by societal elites, and its reintegration into the structure of these elites. At an empirical level the subject of the paper is a study of the relations between the broadcasting organizations in Great Britain, and the Christian denominations. The study therefore raises questions for further investigation about the relationship between integration at different levels of analysis. While in this present context it is necessary to stress this point with respect to the theory of voluntary association, it is evidently a problem of far wider significance in sociological theory. It is hoped that this small investigation will have reopened these theoretical questions, and suggested lines along which they might be pursued in the field.

The article focuses on the origin, nature and history of the Institute of Sociology or Sociological Society and its dissolution. The Sociological Society began in 1903. It was first a small group of men concerned to work out a social theory which would react on practice. It was an urge to interpenetrate every department of human investigation with the scientific idea. Its programme issued at the first meeting provided a framework for the Society. The various tasks included in the programme were to publish a Journal of Sociology, to hold meetings for lectures and discussions as customary to an efficiently organised learned society, to collect relevant periodicals and books and maintain them for reference in an adequate library, to maintain an interest in sociology in the universities and colleges in this country, to provide a research centre to aid the progress of systematic sociology and to establish and maintain a press for sociological publications. Director and treasurer of the institute Alexander Farquharson's death in 1954 created a state of emergency in Institute affairs. At the Council Meeting held on 7th July 1955, a declaration of solvency was made and at the extraordinary general meeting, which followed, a special resolution was passed to wind up the Institute voluntarily under the provisions of the Companies Act, 1948.