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The article presents instructions for contributors to the journal "Sociology." Contributions should be typed on quarto sheets, using double spacing, on one side of each page. Authors should submit the top copy and retain a carbon copy. The pages should be numbered serially. The title of the article, the author's name, and a biographical note on him should be typed on a flysheet which can readily be detached from the body of the article. A contributor should also supply an abstract of 100-200 words summarizing the article in such a way that the abstract can be read independently. Contributors are especially requested to ensure that all necessary details are provided in their references. Titles of journals and monograph series may be abbreviated according to the system used in International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. The notes should be typed on a separate page or pages from the text, as should the bibliography. Figures and maps should be drawn in opaque black ink on Bristol board, tracing film, or graph paper with faint blue ruling.

Sociological studies of sustainable transformation have highlighted the relevance of 'unequal' and 'uneven' transformation dynamics. We argue that a practice-based approach provides far more insight into such unequal dynamics than currently recognized. We re-interpret the political concepts of agonism, antagonism and historic bloc that Gramsci used to analyse domination in order to theorize practice constellations and dynamics that are responsible for the perpetuation of unsustainable practices and the suppression of sustainable ones. Based on empirical findings, we also expand his vocabulary by introducing the concept of synergy. Using the example of urban cycling in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, we propose a Gramscian-inspired account of power and domination in practices as a way of understanding inequality in transformation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the fragmentation of work time influences subjective time pressure, and how this relationship varies across gender and parenthood status. This is an important question that has been neglected by previous studies. Using the latest UK time-use data (N = 620) from 2020 to 2021 and Ordinary Least Squares regressions, the study finds that work time fragmentation generally predicts more subjective time pressure. Specifically, work time fragmentation is found to increase subjective time pressure more among women without children than mothers. However, this effect is inverted among men, as the fragmentation of work time predicts more subjective time pressure among fathers but not among men without children. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of the adverse consequences of 'role switching' and 'work schedule instability' and their interaction with gender and parenthood. Accordingly, future research should consider work time fragmentation as a vital indicator of job and life quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between knowledge hierarchies and gender stratification in research funding. Through a mixed-methods study combining data on 5460 funded and unfunded social science applications submitted to a research council in Western Europe, and nine interviews with current and former council members, we explore how applicants' disciplinary, thematic and methodological orientations intersect with gender to shape funding opportunities. Descriptive analysis indicates that women's proposals are underfunded, with a relative gender difference of around 20%. Using computational text analysis and mediation analysis, we approximate that around one-third of this disparity may be attributed to gender differences in disciplinary focus, thematic specialisations and methodologies. The interviews with council members allow us to make sense of these disparities and expose the disciplinary hierarchies and power struggles at play in the council, sometimes resulting in a devaluation of qualitative methods and, more broadly, interpretive, descriptive and exploratory approaches in proposal assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises whether organisational commitments impact the representation of ethnic minorities in the university workforce. In doing so, it considers the institutional context and the broader restructuring of universities' personnel. The analysis is based on a longitudinal dataset of 120 universities, including university-level indicators of organisational commitments, institutional characteristics and ethnic minority staff numbers. The findings reveal that while on average, universities that are members of the Race Equality Charter exhibit higher shares of minority ethnic staff in higher-level contracts compared with those universities that are not members, joining the charter does not make a university more inclusive. Importantly, the share of minority ethnic staff is substantially lower in elite universities compared with all other universities, which indicates tensions between inclusion and university reputation. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to sociological institutionalist and organisational theories, and to higher education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Sociology was established in 1967, the journal has assumed a significant role in shaping the discipline. In the interim years it is often said that the very practice of sociology has now ‘spun out’ beyond the dedicated departments that were once the centres of sociological practice. This raises questions as to the relationship between sociology and other disciplines, questions that are compelling and arguably distinct from a welcome recognition of sociology’s undoubted intellectual hybridity. The extent to which this is a productive tension or one that requires a resolution is an ongoing conversation to which this special issue speaks. In this introductory article we take what we consider to be an innovative route that is guided by the theme of ‘Bringing Sociology Home’ whilst simultaneously recognising the enormous strengths brought by the multidisciplinary developments of the last 50 volumes. We set out the terrain before introducing a mixture of short and substantive papers from contributors, as well as interviews, with scholars who have made a contribution to the study of the discipline of sociology both inside and beyond the pages of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life course has become a topic of growing interest within the social sciences. Attempts to link this sub-discipline with life span developmental psychology have been called for but with little sign of success. In this paper, we seek to address three interlinked issues concerning the potential for a more productive interchange between life course sociology and life span psychology. The first is to try to account for the failure of these two sub-disciplines to achieve any deepening engagement with each other, despite the long-expressed desirability of that goal; the second is to draw attention to the scope for enriching the sociology of the life course through Erik Erikson’s model of life span development; and the last is the potential for linking Eriksonian theory with current debates within mainstream sociology about the processes involved in ‘individualisation’ and ‘self-reflexivity’ as an alternative entry point to bring together these two fields of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most characteristic features of contemporary debates in the social sciences is the growth of interest in non-class forms of social division and identity, accompanied by an increasing focus on ethnic and gender inequalities. This paper attempts to provide a frame for incorporating such divisions into stratification theory by placing the notion of 'social division' at centre stage and redrawing its boundaries. The paper pays particular attention to ethnicity and class for the purposes of the argument. It is argued that a theorisation of social divisions can show how non-class forms of division and identity constitute central elements of the stratification system of modern societies. Such an approach also marries better with the wealth of evidence that scholars of ethnicity and 'race' have been collecting on the importance of race/ethnicity as structuring social location and differential and unequal social outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science has long fought shy of the natural sciences. Meanwhile, concerns with the environment, health and the new genetics are creating a need for systematic links to be made between these disciplines. This paper suggests a new way in which social theory can be linked to biology. Recent developments in biology point to the importance of considering organisms in relation to their environment. And work in epidemiology stresses the links between the infant-development, health in later life and the well-being of future generations. Complex combinations of genetically-determined predispositions and capitalist social relations are responsible for important features of contemporary social stratification and well-being. The paper is informed by critical realist epistemology and Marx's theory of the subsumption. Such a fusion leads to a key assertion. Capital tends to modify the powers of human biology in its own image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the character of the debate about 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' methods in feminist social science. The 'paradigm argument' has been central to feminist social science methodology; the feminist case against 'malestream' methods and in favour of qualitative methods has paralleled other methodological arguments within social science against the unthinking adoption by social science of a natural science model of inquiry. The paper argues in favour of rehabilitating quantitative methods and integrating a range of methods in the task of creating an emancipatory social science. It draws on the history of social and natural science, suggesting that a social and historical understanding of ways of knowing gives us the problem not of gender and methodology, but of the gendering of methodology as itself a social construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a research in British Departments of sociology. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, a set of quantitative indicators of research outputs and research inputs is constructed for all sixty-seven British sociology departments that were assessed in the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise so that individual departments can see how their own research profile compared with that of other departments during the assessment period. Secondly, this paper examines the statistical relationship between the research ratings awarded to departments of sociology and the various indicators of research inputs and research outputs that can be constructed from the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise database. Specifically, the aim is to discover the extent to which variations in the research rating between departments of sociology can be explained by these research input and research output indicators. This paper has shown that some interesting and potentially useful research indicators can be constructed at department level from the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise. In particular, it is possible for individual departments of sociology in Great Britain to compare their own research activity across a range of research output and research input indicators with the research activity of other departments.

In this paper, I address recent feminist epistemological claims -- in particular, those associated with 'standpoint theory' and 'feminist postmodernism'--arguing that they share difficulties with other forms of anti-positivist social theory and contribute to an impasse in social inquiry which is becoming increasingly acute. This impasse is traced to the displacement of explanation from the centre of theoretical concerns. In arguing this, I am not, however, proposing a return to positivist social science. The view that explanation can be equated with positivism -- that 'empirical' equals 'empiricism'-is a common misconception. It has led some advocates of a distinct feminist epistemology to describe much research on gender issues as 'feminist empiricism'. Such research, they argue, involves a paradoxical or contradictory reliance upon the very 'masculine' epistemological criteria which feminist theory has done so much to challenge. In this paper I shall criticise this argument, proposing instead a 'post-positivist' position in which empirical research is at the heart of any feminist challenge to mainstream approaches and the reconstruction of social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a reanalysis of the British, French and Swedish mobility data first presented by Erikson et al. (1979). A descriptive model is specified and used to identify precisely where the differences in the relative openness of the three societies are located. In doing this the paper seeks both to synthesize previous findings and to extend our knowledge of the mobility processes at work in the three societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Braverman and his followers have been useful and influential in reviving a sociology of work. However as well as stimulating debate, the Braverman model has also created impediments to further analysis. This paper discusses some of these limitations and argues that, in part, they result from a particular reading of Marx which neglects crucial Marxian categories. In part, they result from weaknesses and ambiguities in Marxian theory. The second part of the paper focuses on the concept of control, and makes a plea for a revival of interest in the pre-Braverrnan sociology of the workplace. It is suggested that such work conjoined with that of recent theorists provides a more adequate basis for theory of capitalist labour processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article present authors' reply against criticism of their studies concerning the persistent evasion of technical problems in media studies. A substantial part of the paper was given over to the re-analysis of the critics' data. The remainder of the paper involved general critical comments on "media studies" using one or two cases as occasions for a wholesale attack. Media studies is a big and burgeoning field. The thing critics' needs to do is to single out those which are exemplary, canonical, which are not fairly easily accessible to serious methodological criticism. The article author complain, that "form" has been neglected in media studies. Critics accepts their point, but suggests that recent studies may meet the authors objection. There are a lot of media studies, that does not stand disputing, but it is worth asking whether they add up to anything. They are very repetitive, being mainly designed to give some empirical application to more or less dilute versions of the theory of ideology.

This second and concluding pan of the paper deals with a third problem area; the relationship between values and explanation. It is discussed by examining Myrdal's distinctions between valuations and value premises and between theoretical and practical research; Stretton's conception of the role of the `valuing skill' in all kinds of socio- historical research; and Maclntyre's arguments concerning categories and accounts that combine either evaluation and description or evaluation and explanation. Like the first part of the paper, it is illustrated by studies in the history and sociology of revolutions. Again, the main aim is methodological clarification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the future is a growing field of research transcending almost all research topics. Despite this rising interest, this field often seems fragmented into different approaches, as though the common object of study were vague or inconsistent. This article proposes a framework analytically distinguishing the three key dimensions of the future embedded in the course of action: expectations, imaginaries and narratives of the future. For each, a definition and a short introduction to their use in the social sciences are provided, together with a description of their capacity to shape the course of action and examples. Then, the scope condition of this influencing capacity is discussed, in particular considering its situational origin and the intergenerational links of the future, with climate change as a case in point. The conclusion highlights research perspectives and methods that can be employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humour and laughter have been regarded as suitable topics for research in the social sciences, but as methodological principles to be adopted in carrying out and representing the findings of research they have been neglected. Indeed, those scholars who have made use of humour – wit, satire, jokes etc. – risk being regarded as trivial and marginalised from the mainstream. Yet, in literature the idea that comedy can tell us something important about the human condition is widely recognised. This neglect of the potential of humour and laughter represents a serious omission. The purpose of this article is to make a sensible case for the place of humour as a methodology for the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While various attempts have been made to link nature and society more closely together within environmental sociology, it now appears as though there is a general acceptance of rather traditional divisions between these two domains. Yet ecology specifies that natural and social entities are bound together in complex interrelations. Why then does sociology insist on sifting out the social from the natural? The paper takes this question as its starting point and seeks to identify what environmental sociology might gain and lose from a shift towards ecological thinking. It does so by examining the case of actor-network theory, an approach that, in significant respects, closely approximates a kind of 'ecological sociology'. Actor-network theory is 'co-constructionist': it seeks to identify how relations and entities come into being together. Critics have focused on the problems of co-constructionism: they have argued that human actors generally possess powers of reflection (through language) and that these powers of reflection provide motive forces for action. Thus some form of social analysis is still necessary. Any ecological sociology will thus need to bring these two perspectives together so that humans and non-humans can be considered within the same frame of reference but so the distinctions that generally hold between the two can also be assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades have seen rapid changes in the ways in which sociologists think about children, and a growing cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers in a variety of social science disciplines. This paper builds upon these developments by exploring what three inter-related ways of thinking about spatiality might contribute to the new social studies of childhood. Specifically, we identify the importance of progressive understandings of place in overcoming the split between global and local approaches to childhood; we discuss the ways in which children's identities are constituted in and through particular spaces; and we examine the ways in which our understandings of childhood can shape the meaning of spaces and places. These ideas are illustrated by reference to our current research on children's use of the internet as well as a range of wider studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a fourfold typology referring to different definitions of the social-structure concept, and of a critique of Giddens's and Bourdieu's strategies for transcending the divide between objectivist and subjectivist sociologies, this paper argues that rapprochement rather than transcendence is the way to overcome the existing fragmentation and for bringing closer together structural/structuralist and interpretative paradigms in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epigenetics is regarded by many as a compelling domain of biomedicine. The purported novelty of epigenetics has begun to have various societal ramifications, particularly in relation to processes of responsibilisation. Within sociology, it has stimulated hopeful debate about conceptual rapprochements between the biomedical and social sciences. This article is concerned with how novelty is socially produced and negotiated. The article engages directly with scientists' talk and writings about epigenetics (as process and field of study). I aim to advance an explicitly sociological analysis about the novelty of epigenetics that underscores its social production rather than an account which participates in its reification. I attend to definitional skirmishes, comparisons with genetics, excitement and intrigue, and considerations of the ethical dimensions of epigenetics. Any assertions that epigenetics is exciting or important should not inadvertently elide reflexive consideration of how such characterisations might be part of the machinery by which they become real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore sociology as an imaginative pursuit. After a brief reconsideration of Mills's notion of 'the sociological imagination' I examine three areas illustrating the various imaginations within the discipline: the work of Robert K. Merton; ethnomethodology; and the diversities of feminist scholarship. Two particular case studies are explored: the sociology of the body and the use of autobiographical studies in sociology. I conclude with some suggestions for the encouragement of imaginative thought within the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminism's eminent position in critical social science is now beyond question, and a range of substantial texts on feminism, epistemology and social theory have reworked the dominant male images of knowledge and society. However, within feminist discourses, some key epistemological questions -- such as 'is feminist standpoint epistemology viable?'--remain unresolved. Indeed, they have become compounded by the anti-epistemological impetus of postmodernism. In this paper I draw attention to some general problems in the area of feminism and epistemology, and conduct a close textual analysis of some key writings by feminist theorists to see whether a specifically postmodernist philosophical ambience suits feminism better than an enlightenment ambience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on the debate between Martin Bulmer and Donald Fisher, which appears in an earlier issue of this journal, concerning the influence of Rockefeller philanthropy on the social sciences between the wars. Three central issues of contention are distinguished and rival claims are evaluated. I argue that new empirical evidence drawn from the foundations' archives does not support some of their arguments although each interpretation has its merits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the recent articles in Sociology on the concept of `strategy', this paper aims to make a contribution to the debate by drawing attention to some of its gendered aspects. We seek to raise some further questions without necessarily providing clear-cut answers. We argue that the concept is rooted within masculine spheres of activity, and yet has been widely applied to women's lives, particularly in considering some of the contextual constraints of domestic activities. We consider the reasons for the attractiveness of the concept, as well as the dangers in applying it to women's domestic lives, using illustrations from our own empirical work. While we have found an alternative language difficult to find, we are concerned that the sociological conceptualisation of women's lives in the private sphere needs to work outward from the domestic rather than inward from the public. Furthermore, such conceptual reconsideration may also assist our understandings of female and male lives in public settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on dept Hermenutics and the analysis of symbolic forms. In a recent paper J.B. Thompson presented an outline of a theory of culture and ideology derived from his proposed depth hermeneutical method, using the mass media to illustrate its application. As a synthesis of the many advances in ways of thinking about culture and ideology, as well as empirical work on the mass media, the theory undoubtedly has a great deal to recommend it. Thompson's basic aim is to attempt to formulate an adequate theory of culture and explicate a method for its analysis from which a critique of ideology may be developed. Thompson does not intend to reduce the field of meanings in culture that are to be mapped prior to the mapping process having begun. But because he formulates his approach in terms of a notion of ideology that is conceived as in some way mobilized in a text, and because, crucially, he does not clarify the relative epistemological status of analyst and audience's readings, there is a clear danger that the reductions tendency will predominate. If this should prove to be the case, the utility of the method as a means of illuminating signifying processes would be manifestly compromised.

This paper is programmatic in its intent. I have avoided extensive literature-citations and, in some areas, resorted to rather tendentious assertion rather than thorough argumentation. My purpose is to `place on the table' a project for re-conceptualising the relationship between sociology (together with related social science disciplines) and the biological sciences. Of course, this relationship has a lot of history behind it, some of it not at all pleasant. Necessarily, therefore, I will have to preface my positive proposals with a brief account of that history, and my own interpretation of its significance. Before I try even to do that, however, I will say something about our present situation in the social sciences, and what seem to me the pressures within it towards a recasting of the established division of labour between biology and the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on trends in study of gender. The study of gender has come a long way since 1974. Most subsequent British Sociological Association conferences have had streams devoted to gender studies and the 1989 conference not only contained a specifically gender stream but a number of important papers discussing gender issues were to be found elsewhere in the program. The sociological interest in gender issues can also be seen in the explosion of research and publications on the subject, including several new and highly significant journals. This article briefly illustrates how such work has added significantly to the topics studied within sociology and offers significant opportunities for advance in theory and methodology. It argues however, that people should not regard gender issues as simply making up another sub-area of the discipline. Instead the study of gender is an important means through which sociology itself is being re-shaped. There are two main ways in which a concern with gender is altering the shape of empirical sociology. The first particularly characterized the early stages in the development of gender awareness. A second approach to studying gender has involved the introduction of new aspects of experience and activity as subjects for sociological scrutiny.

The paper presents a critical exploration of the treatment of subjectivity and power in sociology through an examination of recent developments in labour process theory. This is introduced through a discussion of dualism and the study of power. It is then argued that the exposure of the neglect of subjectivity in the response to Labour and Monopoly Capital has not been matched by effort to remedy this deficiency. Originating in Marx, the intellectual history of this neglect is explored through a review of key contributions to the post-Braverman literature. Our argument draws upon the work of Foucault to suggest a more adequate appreciation of processes of subjugation in which subjectivity is fetishised in identity. This thesis is articulated and illustrated through a critique of the influential empirical studies of Burawoy and Cockburn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported in this paper assesses the impact of auspices, style of question and layout of questionnaire on response rates, using an experimental design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A remarkable variety of academic treatments of family life are in broad agreement as to the processes of development and change occurring within families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A wide range of authors regard the following as a set of interconnected changes: family household members increasingly come to have a sense of themselves as a distinctive and sacrosanct unit, 'the family', which is separated from the wider social world; emotional relationships within the family household become very intense; gender divisions become more acute, with the sharp demarcation between a housewife/mother role and an earner/father role; respect for the rights of the individual is increased -- loyalty to oneself may take precedence over loyalty to the family. My aim in this paper is to confront this 'classical' corpus of historical and sociological analysis with a particular set of experiential data -- oral accounts of growing up in urban Scotland in the early 1900s gathered by me in 1975-77 (Jamieson 1983). As we shall see, these data cast into doubt several of the generalisations contained in the 'classical' corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the recent growth of artificial intelligence (A!), and of its implications for understanding human behaviour, this paper evaluates the prospects for an association between sociology and artificial intelligence. Current presumptions about the distinction between human behaviour and artificial intelligence are identified through a survey of discussions about A! and 'expert systems'. These discussions exhibit a restricted view of sociological competence, a marked rhetoric of progress and a wide variation in assessments of the state of the art. By drawing upon recent themes in the social study of science, these discussions are shown to depend on certain key dichotomies and on an interpretive flexibility associated with the notions of intelligence and expertise. The range of possible associations between sociology and A! reflects the extent to which we are willing to adopt these features of Al discourse. It is suggested that one of the more important options is to view the Al phenomenon as an occasion for reassessing the central axiom of sociology that there is something distinctively `social' about human behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents author's remarks on the review of his paper "The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundation and Social Sciences," by Martin Bulmer. According to Bulmer, the author hold the position that philanthropic foundations have perverted the course of development of the social sciences in interests of the ruling class. In making these accusations, Bulmer ignores the evidence that is included to support the author's view. There are primarily three reasons why Martin Bulmer is drawn to his conclusions. First, a point about source material. Bulmer and the author have used the same source material, but their modes of analysis and interpretation are different. Second reason is a point about the use of evidence. The author's article had the limited objective of describing, analyzing and interpreting the process by which Rockefeller policy for the social sciences emerged. The question of who controlled this process is central. The third reason is that Martin Bulmer lacks a clear theoretical base. Throughout the piece, reference is made to an alternate interpretation but it is never presented.

This article presents author's remarks on the paper "The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundation and Social Sciences," by Donald Fisher. The history of the large American private philanthropic foundations is of particular significance for the history of the social sciences, both in the U.S. and Great Britain, as they developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Applied to the social sciences, foundations are held to have perverted the course of development of a number of disciplines, including sociology, in the capitalist interests of their founders and the technocratic interests of foundation officials. Donald Fisher has performed a major service in documenting in considerable empirical detail the range and scope of activities of the major philanthropic foundations. One of the Fisher's central propositions is that foundations have represented interests of the ruling class. His interpretation of the key McKenzie-King affair of 1914-15, when the Rockefeller Family was publicly censured for using foundation funds to further their business interests, demonstrates the tendentious nature of his approach.

This paper uses fresh data to confirm and extend our original findings (Britten and Heath, 1983) which were criticized by Goldthorpe (Sociology, November 1983). Given that the manual/non manual divide has little relevance for women's jobs, we demonstrate that office work and sales work entail very different conditions of employment for women, although the market situation of both groups is inferior to that of men in manual work. The career paths for women across three distinct labour markets (semi-professional, office and unskilled) demonstrate women's attachments to particular kinds of work in spite of interrupted employment histories. It is concluded that the intermittent nature of women's employment does not detract from our approach. In fact we show that women's qualifications have a more significant association with their careers than do their husbands' class positions. Using a new class schema, we confirm the importance of women's jobs in explaining their voting and fertility behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the paper on bootstrapped induction published in the earlier issue that was a part of an extended body of work in which the problem of reference from a sociological point of view was considered. The great sociological importance of the problem of reference will be apparent. If the proper use of a term can be unproblematically fixed in advance by its meaning, or by secure reasoning from its previous usage, or indeed, by anything at all, so that what it refers to is completely and immutably specified, then verbal rules have set implications, norms may govern and determine, values may command actions. A number of interesting alternative approaches are to be found in the sociology of knowledge and science, the context of much of my own work. There is no indication of why it should bear upon the question of the correctness of mechanism. Worse, there is no indication of what dehumanization and reduction consist in. And there is certainly no evidence offered of any connection between the use of mechanistic representations and the production of either of these outcomes.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of industrial relations courses yet the status of the subject is still far from clear. Concern has been expressed about its lack of theoretical development and that having eschewed theory for empiricism it appears to be helpless in the face of practical problems. The reformism of the `Oxford School' reached an impasse in the 1970s both practically and theoretically. In the face of this impasse the void was filled by a more radical approach based upon an alternative economic analysis. Whilst there appears to have been a temporary lull in the hostilities the pluralist and Marxist approaches still vie for supremacy. This paper attempts to examine the object of industrial relations by submitting it to a critique. I argue that it is trapped theoretically within the confines of empiricism. During the course of the critique I discover that industrial relations is not the study of industrial relations; it is the study of objectified ideologies or rules. Given a definition of law I suggest that the academic distinction between industrial relations and the sociology of law should be re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that it is necessary to teach social scientists `data analysis' rather than `statistics'. Instruction in statistical principles needs to be closely integrated with the use of appropriate software packages and secondary data sets. It is also suggested that a discussion of interval level techniques such as correlation and regression should precede the introduction of the supposedly simpler technique of cross tabulation. The merits of intensive short course module teaching are also briefly examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments on sociologists D.C. Anderson and W.W. Sharrock's paper "Biasing the News: Technical Issues in Media Studies," in which they describe as a general critique of radical media/cultural studies treatment of news texts. Unlike other sociologists, Anderson and Sharrock demonstrated commitment to the non-evaluative reading. Their writings focuses less on themselves but more on the news texts to be read. Their work displays the basis for their ability to produce a critically evaluative reading. They claim that any legitimate reading can only take place under the legislative guidance of the writer. Further, the claim that the media are biased, it can only be assessed relative to the claims which the media themselves actually make concerning impartiality. For the reader of news, bias appears as a lack. The significance and extent of bias are produced by media scholars, rather than by the media themselves. Significant bias is not, then, to be found by identifying some under-represented viewpoint.

Our aim is the development of a formal basis for the analysis of institutional structure. While the concept of an institution is a central one in sociology, there has been much doubt about its analytical utility (Buckley, 1967: 161). The notion of a role- programme model, set out and discussed in this paper, appears to offer a precise analytical version of the institution concept. Its formal basis rests on representational techniques developed in information science. The approach is presented and exemplified with reference to a common institution, the restaurant, specifically waitress-customer interaction patterns, and its main implications for the analysis of institutional structure are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that books by Warner and Low and Selznick on the sociology of organizations have been misinterpreted and that a reassessment is overdue. This is undertaken via an analysis of both the original texts and the process of misinterpretation. One implication is that organizational sociology is, in part, a product of those bureaucratic and labelling processes that it affects to describe and that the agenda of issues with which it deals has been unduly delimited as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any sociological description is an organisation of perspectives which necessarily throws certain ideas out of focus. The sociology of deviance has characteristically ignored one major quality of crime, its capacity to inflict distress upon people. Not all crimes impose suffering, and not all forms of inflicted suffering are illegal, but the criminal law is conventionally held to be concerned with the regulation of damage to the physical or material self. En its neglect of that quality, sociology has distorted its analysis of a number of problems. One such problem, that of motivation, is examined in this paper. It is argued that many deviant acts produce discomfort in others and a description of motives must comprehend how that discomfort is defined and tolerated by the deviant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of this paper is that the content, form, location and social role of utopia vary with the material conditions in which people live. These variations have been obscured by definitions of utopia in terms of its function in catalysing social change, which has also produced the illusion that the contemporary Western world lacks utopias. By defining utopia with reference to its meaning to author and audience as an expression of their desires and aspirations, it is possible to trace a series of shifts in the English utopia, to relate these to one another and to the social context, and to sh?w that the `absence' of contemporary utopias is simply another transformation of this kind. From being a spatially-locatat wish-fantasy, utopia moved through the function of social criticism to being a temporally-located catalyst of social change. These changes depended on perceptions of society-in-time as increasingly malleable and open to human control, culminating in the nineteenth century belief in progress. Utopia now appears to have reverted to the role of wish-fantasy as a result of a prevalent fatalism and a shift away from an evolutionary perspective, a change which, paradoxically, allows it to be more utopian by tying it less closely to reality. Utopia as a catalyst of social change depends on an optimism which is now absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to criticize the account of language and meaning implied by and underlying the metatheory of ethnomethodology in the work of Garfinkel. In doing so it focuses on the notions of 'indexicality' and the 'practices' by which its repair is achieved. The notion of 'indexicality, in at least some of its statements, is shown to depend on a familIar, but probably erroneous, account of 'meaning', which holds that 'meaning' is deeply connected to experience . Other theoretical approaches which share this assumption about meaning are shown, by the example of the empiricist approach to language, to lead to similar specifications of `members' problems' and the necessary repair of indexicality. It is suggested that in involving the knowledge gained in `experience' in accounting for how members understand language, Garfinkel renders the meaning of terms indefinitely problematic through scepticism about that knowledge. This illuminates several issues. First, it suggests that far from being an approach to sociology strikingly consistent with the philosophy of language of the later Wittgenstein, as has been frequently claimed, Garfinkel's version of ethnomethodology is in fact very like the theories of language and meaning that Wittgenstein rejected. Secondly, it suggests that instead of having uncovered a new area of empirical investigation, Garfinkel's 'Ethnornethodology' remains obstinately theoretical and metaphysical: where, as is obvious, some new things have been learned about the social world by those working in the perspective, the connection to the metatheory is incidental, and those results may be seen best as belonging to other perspectives, e.g. sociolinguistic structuralism. Thirdly, it confirms the now familiar argument that the notion of 'indexicality' cannot be used as a basis for a criticizm of 'orthodox' sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pleads for hermeneutic processes to be taken into account in the discussion of role conflict. In order to avoid reification of mechanistic assumptions under- lying cross-pressure models of social action, it is suggested that theory as well as research should take into consideration that norms and behaviour are mediated by interpretative processes. These constitute a level of `social understanding' which can be operationalized in role-conflict terms as three different types of conflict. Reciprocity of perspectives and evaluation, as the main dimensions of interpretation processes, are shown to be the main features of conflicts in role interaction [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the case for social research training at the post-graduate level integrally linked to a social survey research organization. Programs related to social research training should reflect a clear aim in relation both to post-graduate training in sociological method in particular and to postgraduate education in sociology in general. One such program is developed by the Detroit Area Study at the University of Michigan. Three main objectives of this scheme are to establish a highly efficient means of providing young social scientists with an all-round training in the planning and execution of survey research, to provide staff members with an opportunity to pursue social science research and to supply social science data of value to authorities and communities in the area surrounding the university where the program is located. The form which the training takes follows the standard procedures of social survey research. Students' work includes preliminary relevant reading, problem formulation, question drafting, pretest analysis, sampling, interviewing and data processing. In addition each student writes an analysis paper based on part of the collected data.

This is the second of two papers on measurement models in sociology. The concepts of Ordinal Graph and Ordinal Simplex are elaborated and their applicability to some major theoretical problems outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by several intellectual turns and sub-areas of sociology this article explores veganism as a practice and argues that its nascent social normalisation can be partly explained by specific modes of material work with food performed by vegan practitioners. Based primarily on interview data with UK-based vegans the research identifies four modes of material constitution – material substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – which are of particular importance in strengthening links between the elements of the practice. The article argues that these are significant for offering an explanation for the recent growth of vegan practitioners in UK society and that they are also of value to the broader endeavour of understanding sustainable food transitions and intervening for more sustainable food policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]