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This paper draws upon an ongoing study into gambling in the United Kingdom to examine off-course betting as a form of social life. Through such an approach it identifies several features of betting shop life that complement and refine the research literature to date: the different sub-groups within the off-course betting population; how they manage their activities in terms of their finances and their domestic and work responsibilities; the often subtle social dynamics of the betting shop. Through an analysis of these features of the punter's world, the paper investigates the rationality of the activities of loss-making punters, and shows how this differs markedly from the rationalities employed by those who win at the game--bookmakers and professional gamblers. One common concern for many punters is the dream of the 'big win' for a little stake--a concern not shared by the other two groups--a dream that undermines their ability to win, and thus compounds their losses. The paper then identifies the different sub-groups involved in off-course betting, and discusses the different times at which they bet and the different strategies they use. In such a way the paper contributes to the debate through identifying groups and social processes not addressed in the literature, and shows how they refine the categories and concepts used to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores and develops the concept of 'emotion work' as used by young women talking about sexual negotiation. It suggests that 'emotion work' should be viewed not simply as an analyst resource of use to social scientists, but also as a participant resource used by ordinary social members. Existing research, on emotion work generally treats self-report data as offering a transparent window through which the behaviour 'behind the talk' can be (more or less adequately) assessed. This paper proposes instead that self-report data should be considered as talk-in-interaction. Using data from our own research on young women's experiences of refusing sex, we show how young women's talk about (what analysts call) 'emotion work' can be analysed as a participant resource through which young women construct consensual versions of men as emotional weaklings, and portray themselves as active agents who are knowledgeable about heterosexual relationships. The implications of this analytic shift are explored in relation to feminist approaches to sexual coercion, and with reference to qualitative data analysis more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does society affect health deep within the recesses of the human body? What role do emotions play in these processes, and what light does this shed on the relationship between biology and the social patterning of disease? Taking as its point of departure the 'epidemiological transition' and the shift from direct material to indirect psychosocial pathways to disease, this paper explores the centrality of emotions to the relationship between social structure and health. In doing so, it aims to bring the health inequalities and the life-events literature into a new theoretical alignment through a sociological focus on 'emotional capital' and the micro-macro links this provides between the private realm of 'personal troubles' and broader 'public issues' of power and status, domination and control. A key analytical distinction is drawn here between 'psycho-neuro-immunological adaptation', psycho-social coping', and 'socio-political praxis' in theorising these links between 'distressful' feelings, the emotionally reflexive body', and health. Finally, the paper concludes with a broader set of reflections on emotions and distributive justice, together with the role of the 'biological' in social explanation (i.e. the need for a non-reductionist, socially 'pliable' biology). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines men's and women's levels of satisfaction with the domestic division of labour. In most households women continue to undertake the bulk of childcare and housework duties and consequently spend significantly greater amounts of time on domestic labour than men. Men report high levels of satisfaction with these arrangements, but surprisingly we find that almost half of our sample of women also report satisfaction with these arrangements. This finding has been reported in studies from several countries. Our paper attempts to explain this apparent paradox. Using data from a recent national survey in Australia we explore gender differences in levels of satisfaction with the domestic division of labour and examine women's levels of satisfaction with household work arrangements in relation to a number of factors such as labour force attachment, attitudes to gender roles and husbands' participation in domestic labour. Our findings raise implications for the meaning of equity within the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tradition of thinking behind the idea of citizenship, which has become a key concept of modern social theory, has given insufficient attention to either gender or sexuality. In this paper it is argued that claims to citizenship status, at least in the West, are closely associated with the institutionalization of heterosexual, as well as male, privilege. This is demonstrated when the association of certain forms of citizenship status with heterosexuality, national identity for example, is threatened or challenged. In discussing the relationship between sexuality and citizenship, attention is focused on the implications for the social inclusion and exclusion of lesbians and gay men. The analysis shows how sexualized notions of citizenship are connected to the public/private divide at both institutional and personal levels. Finally, the paper raises wider questions about the implications of the discussion for theorizing citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with forms of moral discourse produced by British Asian girls as they talk about soap opera in groups without an adult presence. It is argued that moral identities are discursive constructs which help constitute the self as a centreless weave. The paper explores the contradictory nature of the girls' moral discourses as they apportion responsibility and blame between individuals and social circumstances. It is suggested that while being both Asian and girls is of significance, the latter is a more prominent consideration in the participants' soap talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I use three concepts -- the hedging of risk, the transfer of risk and recommodification -- to examine recent changes in the distribution of market risk. Mechanisms that formerly hedged risk -- such as the welfare state and the nuclear family -- have declined in effectiveness and popularity and the result has been the recommodification of individuals and their life chances. These themes are illustrated by an examination of change in the nature of employment relationships and its likely impact on the service class. The future of the service class remains linked to the informational asymmetry problem that underlies the service relationship, and this limits the degree to which employers can claim an option over the labour supply of service class workers. The paper ends by discussing some more general issues in the relationship between risk, stratification and recommodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the integration of a greater awareness of reproductive conduct into sociological theory and research. Instead of conceiving the relationship between demography and sociology as one where sociological concepts are used to illuminate demographic concerns, the paper works towards the development of a demographic perspective in sociological understandings of modern society and its historical development. The argument will be for the notion of the 'reproductive self', with a greater emphasis on understanding human identity as stretching over time and generations, rather than as self-contained, timeless and autonomous. The paper will show that such a conception of human identity enables us to improve our understanding of a range of theoretical issues, including the relation between social structure and action and the rationality of human action, as well as revealing the historical roots of a number of long-term trends which are usually treated as changes typical of the second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary ethnographic research is drawn on in this paper so as to examine the nature of supervisory systems in two manufacturing organisations which have both, to varying degrees, implemented 'new' manufacturing techniques such as just-in-time and total quality management and have organised around 'teams'. Debates in industrial sociology and the labour process have understandably concentrated on the implications of such developments for workers; the important and problematic role of supervisors in realising managerial objectives has been largely neglected. This paper analyses the nature of supervision and the role of supervisors/first-line managers within contemporary manufacturing. In contrast to previous studies, which have sought to explain supervisory roles in terms of their link with structural factors such as technology, organisational size and formalisation (Perrow 1970; Woodward 1965), this paper highlights the importance of supervisors as social actors. The analysis demonstrates the dynamic and complex role of supervisors in implementing and adhering to managerial rules while needing to ensure a degree of operational flexibility that relies on informality, particularly in reaching accommodation with labour. These types of contradictory pressures have long been recognised in supervisory work (Roethlisberger 1945) but recent research into developments on the 'new' shopfloor has failed adequately to report and conceptualise the increasingly complex position of supervisors and front-line managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing data on social mobility in Britain demonstrate a disparity of up to 4:1 in the relative chances of children from different social class backgrounds ending up at the top or bottom of the occupational class system. In an earlier paper, it was argued that such disparities should not necessarily be seen as the result of social advantages or disadvantages associated with different class origins, for they are also consistent with a model of meritocracy in which class differentials in average levels of ability are reflected in the class destinations achieved by people from different social backgrounds. That paper has been criticised, both analytically and empirically, and this paper addresses some of these criticisms through an analysis of data from the National Child Development Study. The analysis shows that ability is an important factor influencing social mobility chances, and through a series of logistic regression and multiple regression models, it demonstrates that meritocratic factors (individual effort and ability) outweigh social advantage/ disadvantage factors in predicting the occupational class achieved by over 6,000 men and women by age 33. The paper ends by answering the analytical criticisms made against the earlier paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is written with a degree of irony: it treats a sociological approach as if it were a client presenting itself for psychoanalysis, and argues that using Melanie Klein's developmental theory the approach can be seen as a manic psychosis -- a defence against entering the depressive position. It is suggested that sociologists find it difficult to recognise the limitations of their discipline -- the depressive position -- one reason being that we do not actually exercise power over anybody; social constructionism enables us to convince ourselves that the opposite is true, that we know everything about how people become what they are, that we do not have to take account of other disciplines or sciences, but we can explain everything. The paper ends by suggesting that its own argument can be treated as a psychoanalytic version of a manic psychosis and that a non-psychotic theory is one which knows its own limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the 'jungle' in its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the late Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of 'the jungle' is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of explorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analogies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well as, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduction, growth and decay. This particular image of 'the African jungle' was then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vice, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the Way Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre of cultural hegemony that can be called 'the dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the work of Callon in attempting to explore the relation between discourse and agency in an analysis of the hiring of management consultants by a large life insurance organisation, 'Lifeco'. The data focus on the recruitment and deployment of management consultants within Lifeco, and explore the actor network relevant to this process. As well as examining the 'moments' of translation within the network, attention is paid to the degree of longer term 'convergence' (Callon 1991) around the consultant's work within Lifeco. Whilst acknowledging the advantage of Callon's work to exploring agency and discourse, the paper remains critical of certain aspects of his theorising, especially the question of access to particular locations in an actor network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which housing tenure constitutes an enduring aspect of social inequality in relation to theories of re-stratification and the supposed decline of social class divisions. It uses an analysis of housing mobility based upon a survey of council tenants carried out in the inner London Borough of Camden and it looks at the housing tenure destinations of the tenants' adult 'children' who have left the parental home. The largest tenure of destination was owner occupation, whilst just over a third of the 'children' were local authority or housing association tenants. This indicates that an inter-generational, social renting 'underclass' has not so far developed, contrary to the re-stratification theories. However, a higher proportion of the younger than the older 'children' were tenants of social rented housing. The relative impact of class and household employment patterns on housing mobility is considered. The paper concludes by arguing that social class is of continued importance in terms of understanding patterns of housing mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the paper Outline of a Theory of Human Rights by Bryan Turner which appeared in a previous issue of Sociology. According to the commenter, Turner has properly identified an embarrassing lacuna in sociological theory in the paper. He notes that Turner's paper is a unique contribution because it aims to be both sociological and foundationalist. His key problem is to find a universal of human ontology that can explain the non-relativized character of human rights. He discovers this in the conjunction of two conditions: the frailty of corporeal existence; and the precariousness of social institutions that can defend bodies against environmental threats. Turner attributes the failure of sociology adequately to theorize human rights partly to its social constructionist orientation, its normal claim that social institutions are not universal but historically contingent and culturally relativized. The commenter argues that an adequate sociological theory of human rights must, indeed, take a social-constructionist point of view, that human rights is an institution that is specific to cultural and historical context just like any other, and that its very universality is itself a human construction.

To provoke debate, the paper, after fifteen years, repeats and expands on an analysis of the use of empirical data and the role of quantification in articles published in some major British journals of sociology. The earlier paper argued that the training of undergraduates, and the influence and example of their teachers, tends to orient them, well before graduate education begins, towards particular kinds of research topic and, where empirical data are used, approaches employing no quantification or very simple techniques. It suggested this would be a self-reinforcing process unless there were far-reaching changes in undergraduate curricula which were unlikely to come about. It predicted that the divide between these aspects of British sociology and that practised in North America and many parts of Europe would widen further. British sociology has become somewhat more empirical over the past fifteen years, with the bulk of this expansion in the qualitative area. The more sophisticated quantitative approaches are not much more in evidence than before. This raises a number of questions which should be a matter of debate. It is worrying that the debate does not seem to be taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seen as a corrective to the continuing preoccupations of the sociology of social movements with progressive organisations and movements, this paper offers an analysis of the defensive crime prevention initiatives emerging in the suburbs of South Manchester (and, undoubtedly, elsewhere) as a vital contemporary social movement, taking a very specific organisational form. The paper also attempts to show how the movements taking place around crime ought to be linked, analytically, to other local suburban initiatives on Quality of Life issues and, in particular, following Molotch and Logan's pioneering work on the political economy of post-industrial cities, to interest-governed campaigns around the positioning of the larger city in national and international competition. The angry commitment informing all such connected social movements in the suburbs is ignored by progressive social movement analysis at its own peril. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a re-reading of the Foucauldian analysis of professional accounting firms given by Grey in his 'Career as a Project of the Self...' (Sociology, 28,2). It argues that Grey's paper provides an exemplar of the 'desocialising' tendencies observed in some Foucauldian analysis and attempts to illustrate this desocialisation through placing Grey's data in an Eliasian rather than a Foucauldian framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reacts to Ian Craib' response to papers by Stevi Jackson and by Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden devoted to emotions in the May 1993 issue of Sociology. First, Craib suggests that sociological commentary on the emotions is as crass and insensitive as psychoanalytic discussions of society, and that a sociology of emotions might restrict rather than extend people's understanding of emotional life. Secondly, the present authors relate that although they recognize that Craib's main charge is directed at the two specific papers mentioned, he is nonetheless in danger of treating these as representative of the sociology of emotions more generally. They note that Craib is guilty of a methodological sin: namely that one cannot simply generalize from two case studies to the field as a whole. The present authors' next point concerns the issue of stereotypes--a criticism which is especially directed at Duncombe and Marsden's paper. The present authors relate that on the one hand they agree with Craib that stereotypes are not particularly helpful in characterizing (post)modern social life. Fourthly, Craib asserts that whilst sociological concepts such as work, power or equality might be extremely useful for thinking about the economy, or political or social structures, it still has to be established that they are appropriate for talking about emotional life.

Though perspectives underpinning research may have differed sharply, industrial sociology at its best has been able to uncover the variety of workplace resistance and misbehaviour that lies beneath the surface of the formal and consensual. The paper argues that this legacy is in danger of being lost as labour is taken out of the process and replaced by management as the active and successful agency. While there are a number of practical and theoretical forces shaping this trend, the paper identifies the growing influence of Foucauldian perspectives. It goes on to develop a critique of the way in which such theory and research overstates the extent and effectiveness of new management practices, while marginalising the potential for resistance. [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 critically examines the constructivist, relativist trend in the sociology of science and exposes its internal contradictions. It concludes that such a sociology has fabricated a science without nature. This has obscured the importance of nature in science, has glossed over the manipulation of nature, and has, therefore, muddled one of the most significant features of the contemporary world. The paper argues in favour of transcending such pre-ecological sociology by incorporating into the analysis the unique learning curve of science, which results in both its utility and its danger, and by explicitly examining the embeddedness of social action in the processes of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have revealed that organizational commitment is often managed through symbolism. This paper focuses upon how time is used in an organizational context, symbolically and pragmatically, to demonstrate and demand commitment by new members. The paper draws upon data collected as part of a qualitative project on the occupational and organizational socialization of graduate accountants. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in a regional office of an international firm of chartered accountants in the United Kingdom. One aspect of the data analysis revealed that the management and utilization of time is central to understanding the socializing function of the accountancy firm, and to the ultimate organizational success of the graduate accountants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically reviews some recent contributions to the debate about the nature of race and racism. It questions the analytic and empirical divorce between race and racism for which Floya Anthias and others have argued. It suggests that disconnecting race and racism while insisting on the retention of a concept of race could well give rise to a view that race is, after all, a valid scientific concept denoting a real biological division of the human species. This paper argues, instead, for a focus on race as a social relationship rather than a category of human being. It suggests that race and racism are inextricably linked and that, moreover, recently discovered new racisms depend for their power on the continued influence of biologically determinist modes of conceptualising human difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that successful economic development within the 'Third World' depends on the ability of a state to lead its national society to controlled participation in the world market. The first part of the paper produces a model of the requisite state capacity. What matters is 'bounded autonomy': states need to be, at one and the same time, autonomous from and yet constrained by their societies. The second part of the paper examines the recent economic performance of five major regions -- East Asia, India, China, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa -- in the light of the model, thereby lending empirical support to its basic contours. The conclusion notes that the factors used to create the model must be placed in historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which 'between partners' forms of the domestic division of labour within dual career households are influenced by the employment of waged domestic labour. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first a typology of domestic divisions of labour relating to the employment of waged domestic labour is developed. In the second we consider the forms of domestic division of labour within dual career households in Northeast and Southeast Britain, focusing on how particular forms of the 'between partners' domestic division are transformed, modified and replicated with the employment of certain categories of waged domestic labour. In a final section we offer some explanations for the observed patterns, and stress the importance of the categories of waged domestic labour employed, the 'between partners' form of the domestic division of labour and specific 'trigger situations' to understanding the resultant form of the domestic division of labour. We conclude by offering some more general observations on debate over the contemporary renegotiation of the domestic division of labour and the place of waged domestic labour within this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was prompted by Martyn Hammersley's (1992) paper 'On Feminist Methodology'. I suggest that Hammersley's assessment of feminist writings on method is flawed, mainly because his conceptualisation of these writings is too narrow. He portrays a uniform feminist methodology, ignoring obvious differences as well those which are more subtle. In criticism of Hammersley's assessment, I take the case of feminist ethnographic writings and indicate the range of writing even in this particular area of feminist methodology. Discussion centres on issues raised by Hammersley both explicitly and implicitly in his paper, namely personal reflexivity, power and knowledge. In contrast to Hammersley, I indicate both diversity of topic and method as well as what is shared by feminist ethnographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper argues that the transformation of the relationship between public and private spheres lies at the heart of the process of change in Eastern Europe, and that the exclusion of women and the de-grading of feminine identity currently in train are not contingent to, but rather a fundamentally constitutive feature of, the democratisation of Eastern Europe. This contrasts with existing accounts of social transition which have focused exclusively on the reconstruction of the public sphere. The paper characterises the changing nature of patriarchy in Eastern Europe, and explains why such changes have as yet not met with serious feminist challenge. It does so by highlighting the way in which the formal structures of state socialism acted to foster neo-traditionalism and traditional gender identity, and by showing how traditional gender identity has acted as a vital vehicle for change. Drawing on historical comparisons, it is argued that Eastern Europe's silent revolution may in fact be seen as a dramatic illustration of the masculinism at the heart of Western democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theory and case study of the formation of public professional radicalism. Theories of 'new class' and 'middle class' radicalism are criticised for neglecting the experiential context in which political consciousness is formed. A similar critique is made of Offe's analysis of the political contradictions of the welfare state. It is suggested that public professionals resolve their contradictory experiences of welfare capitalism into forms of rhetoric and action that combine 'non-market' and 'pro-market' values. This process is identified as the formation of ideology. Interviews with anti-racist educationalists in London and Tyneside are introduced to exemplify this argument. Five ideologies are discussed. Three (the notions of anti-racism as 'good education', as an exercise in 'consciousness raising', and as part of 'the Black struggle') were articulated in both study sites. Two others (the notions of 'local sensitivity', and 'the gentle approach') were distinct to Tyneside. The paper concludes by noting the salience of a geographically sensitive approach to the analysis of public professional radical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the institutionalisation of love in marriage and its representation in romantic fiction have been the focus of considerable attention in sociological and feminist writing, the cultural meaning of love as an emotion has been neglected. This paper explores the possibility of developing a sociological approach to love based upon the assumption that emotions are culturally constructed. Existing sociological and feminist work is suggestive of themes which the paper seeks to develop: the distinction commonly made between being 'in love' and love as longer term affection, the mysterious power accorded to the former emotion, the contradictions between these two forms of love and the ways in which the ideology of romance has been associated with women's subordination. As a means of theorising these aspects of love, a conceptualisation of subjectivity as constituted through narrative or discourse is considered. This perspective may enable us to account for the cultural specificity of emotions, but there are questions which it leaves unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas about interpersonal relations between health care practitioners and their clients have been radically reformulated over the past two decades. In the face of critiques of the ways in which health care systems objectified the populations which they served, a new vocabulary - stressing holistic and personal care - has become thoroughly accommodated within health professions. This paper examines the ways in which this new definition of the patient raises questions about power and control in health care. The paper takes as a concrete example the practices involved in the nursing care of the terminally ill. However, at a general level the arguments advanced here may be applied to a range of health and welfare professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on empirical data from research on maternal relation- ships between affinal women. It examines concepts of obligation and altruism in relation to short- and long-term childcare services provided by paternal grandmothers. Whilst grandmotherhood is welcomed as a positive and enjoyable experience by middle-aged women, it is not seen as an opportunity to resume mothering or to repeat the more demanding aspects of childcare. This paper offers some evidence that paternal grandmothers, at least, do not wish to provide long-term support for working mothers, other than in exceptional circumstances and only then with reluctance. The views expressed here question assumptions that all family women are `naturally' altruistic and prepared to subordinate their own interests in support of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis has recently been criticised from a variety of standpoints. In this paper we argue that much of this criticism is misplaced and that, as a research programme, the promise of class analysis is far from exhausted. The first part of the paper clarifies the nature and purpose of class analysis, as we would understand it, and in particular distinguishes it from the class analysis of Marxist sociology. The second part then makes the case for the continuing relevance of class analysis, in our conception of it, by reviewing findings from three central areas of current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues the need for a sociology of management which relates the micro-sociology of management activities to the economic performance of the firm and to debates about power relations and the distribution of wealth. The substance of the paper is a study of a medium-sized British company in the computer components industry. The research focuses on the relationships between development engineers and managers, and analyses the structural reasons for the failure to innovate. In particular it shows that management, in attempting to pursue an instrumental rationality, undermined the achievement of their own objectives. The contradiction between the logic of short-term instrumental controls and the espoused organic, human resources model of management produced a damaging pattern of workplace relations characterised by distrust and defensiveness. The result was a motivational crisis over the management of innovation, which contributed to the eventual failure of the business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, based on data from three groups of male respondents: (I) those employed for at least the last twelve months; (2) those recently recruited to employment, (i.e. within the last twelve months); (3) those currently employed and having held the same job for the last twelve months. By comparing the work histories and characterising features of these three groupings the paper sets out to explore the theoretical and empirical validity of the notion of the underclass, focusing specifically on two competing definitions: non- participation in the labour market, and systematic disadvantage in the labour market. The data reveal a distinctive pattern of broken employment for the second of the three groups identified above. Those affected are thus located between the two contrasting positions of long-term unemployment, and relatively secure employment. The existence of such a grouping is argued to undermine a definition of an underclass purely in terms of unemployment. However, the characteristics of the `under- employed', despite indicating a clear pattern of disadvantage, are too heterogeneous to constitute a distinctive class position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to connect `race' and ethnic phenomena and locates this discussion within a multiculturist context that seeks to redress racial disadvantage by providing for ethnic difference. It is argued that the connection between race and ethnic categories is more fundamental, and yet the connection between fighting racism and ethnic pluralism is more problematic than this position implies. Ethnicity and racism are different but connected discourses for articulating collectivity and belongingness, and serve diverse political projects which include those of class and nation building. The paper rejects the view that they can be explained with reference to a generic race or ethnic process. Their understanding as concrete social relations however, requires attending to gender and class processes and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the different ways in which sociologists have studied careers. It examines the various dimensions in careers research which constitute a developing research tradition. It highlights the problems associated with reification in analyses of career which are either implicit in particular models or are addressed in others but in ways which fail to resolve the difficulties. The paper suggests that the analysis of processes of change in career structures and career experiences can best enable researchers to avoid reification in their conceptualizations of career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the socio-medical organisation of psychiatric disorder. The main line of analysis demonstrates how different psychiatric ideologies produce different objects of professional focus arid, consequently, radically different forms of therapy and therapeutic environment. By way of empirical evidence, the paper examines in some detail three contrasting contexts in which psychiatric disorder has been described and organised. The first is represented in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, the second in the case books of a turn of the century asylum, and the third in the activities and practices of a modem psychiatric ward. By drawing on these sources of data, it is argued that an understanding of large scale changes in the organisation of psychiatric health care (such as is evident, for example, in modem trends from hospital to community care), firmly depends upon a study of the inner structure of psychiatric ideologies. Furthermore, and as a corollary of this it is claimed that appeals to extra-psychiatric (economic) interests and/or scientific (pharmacological) advances as key factors for explaining processes or organisational change (especially the process of deinstitutionalisation), are essentially misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper the professions were identified as a primarily Anglo- Saxon phenomenon, and associated with economic under-performance. The present paper goes further by questioning the theoretical interpretations of professionalism in the writings of some of the founding fathers, and occasionally of their translators. We variously question here Weber's restricted concept of the entrepreneur, Parsons's rendering of these ideas in English, the assumption that science in general has had a Newtonian character, and that association with science produces a rational disposition in human actors. The view expressed here is that these various misapprehensions - about entrepreneurialism, professionalism, rationality and science - derive from a desire to impose order, to oversimplify phenomena as systems, and to focus on that which may be described and codified, to the neglect of voluntaristic and problematic dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with themes taken from two different areas of sociological theory and investigation. The first relates to work on social class and social relationships and networks, within which a central issue has been the extent to which interpersonal ties are differentiated by occupationally-based class groups in modern society. The second area of work lies within the sociology of health and illness, and concerns the question of the health-promoting potential of social support. The paper draws on data from a study of a social support intervention in pregnancy involving 507 pregnant women in the Midlands and the South of England, and considers to what extent family, friendship and neighbourhood ties exhibit different patterns by occupational and other measures of class. The study findings suggest that working class women are not more closely involved with their relatives and are more isolated in terms of friends than middle class women; male domestic support is also less common in working class households. These patterns are discussed as part of the context within which services for the promotion of maternal and infant health are provided in modern industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, a significant body of feminist research has developed which has home-based reproduction as its focus. Strategically placed at the interface of sociology and social policy, this literature has had a significant impact on wider debates about everyday social reproduction. Yet, it has remained largely uncritiqued. Recognising the lack of critical debate, the paper reviews the way in which the concept of caring has been theorised within British feminist research. It suggests that caring has been typically defined by feminist researchers as the unpaid work of kin within the private domain of their family. Gender is seen as the dominant system of social relations which shapes the organisation of such care. Thus, rather than a broad structural analysis of everyday reproduction within families, most feminist research on caring has been restricted to one form of care (unpaid care by relatives) and one structural division (gender). The way in which racial and class divisions are embedded in everyday reproductive work has been largely eclipsed. Drawing on the critiques of Black women writers, the paper highlights forms of, and divisions within, home-based reproduction obscured in past and present feminist research on caring. It takes domestic service as a case-study which highlights how the social divisions of `race' and class, as well as gender, have been constituted through women's experiences of looking after families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research on routine policing has shown how danger is a prominent feature of the self-image of members of many police forces, even though the degree of danger faced is not proportional to its centrality. However, members of the RUC face very real life-threatening dangers at work and home. Based on ethnographic research, this paper addresses the question of how policemen and policewomen in the RUC make accountable their feelings about being targets. Three discrete forms of talk about danger were used by them, and the paper identifies the contextual factors which help to occasion and sustain these vocabularies. It concludes by suggesting that these vocabularies are highly structured ways of making accountable feelings about the threat in an occupational culture which otherwise inhibits the expression of emotion; they make reportable the common sense notions, ideas and patterns of behaviour which normalize the threat; and make accountable the manage- ability of the threat in order thereby to continue with routines which would otherwise be rendered difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on ethnographer Martyn Hammersley. It provides a discussion of description, theory and explanation in ethnographic research and writing raises a number of key epistemological problems. At three points in his discussion Martyn Hammersley provides readers with elements of an ideal typical representation of what ethnography is. These are placed one after the other at the outset of the paper and powerfully fix a highly particular view of the nature and claims of ethnography in the reader's mind. Thus the structure or form of his paper is crucially related to its argumentative content. Almost invariably sociological research, whether in surveys, interviews, ethnographies and theories, analyses description as a resource, which provides information, about whatever is the sociological topic in hand. In relation to analyses of class, for instance, people are asked about their income, educational attainments, employment, their father's and perhaps mother's occupation, and many other matters; and variant theoretical sociological perspectives on class and occupation result.

The account presented here is based on the fieldwork collected for a doctorate which comprised a case study of a journalism school for postagraduate journalism students. The research, on occupational socialisation, which was primarily carried out by participant observation took place over one academic year (1984/85) and followed a cohort of students through their training at the school. This paper Looks at the re-socialising function of the first term at journalism school, which because of the demands it makes upon the time and commitment of students is presented as a `Greedy Institution'. During their first term students are expected to discard their lay perspectives on journalism, and also the academic style which characterises their undergraduate education, in favour of the school's version of occupational practice. The paper also takes issue with the ways in which the researcher must fit in with the day-to-day requirements of practice demanded by the school and how, in many ways, her academic and research interests are incompatible with the task of re-socialisation which staff at the journalism school set out to achieve. The paper highlights how greedy institutions may have particular implications for the participant observer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that the discussions of the concept of strategy in papers by Crow (1989) and Morgan (1989) ignore the military origins of strategic thinking, and that more attention needs to be given to its diffusion from military to general social usage, as well as to specifically sociological uses. The paper then outlines a critique of strategic studies derived from the sociology of war. It argues that sociologists can learn, from the problems and current controversies of strategic studies, some of the limitations of strategic analysis as an approach in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three accounts of consumer culture are discussed in this paper. The first one, the production of consumption perspective, presents the culture which develops around the accumulation of commodities as leading to greater manipulation and control. The second, the mode of consumption perspective, focuses upon the way in which goods are variably used to create distinctions and reinforce social relationships. The third perspective examines the emotional and aesthetic pleasures, the desires and dreams generated within particular sites of consumption and by consumer culture imagery. In addition the paper discusses the alleged tendencies towards cultural disorder and declassification within consumer culture which some refer to as postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis of a `discouraged worker' effect, whereby local unemployment discourages 16 year-olds from leaving school, among a recent sample of young people in Scotland. The analysis supports the hypothesis: ceteris paribus young people were more likely to stay on at school, the higher the local unemployment rate. Local unemployment was also associated with lower school attainment: its positive direct effect on staying on may have been partly offset by a negative indirect effect mediated by attainment, although the direct effect was stronger and the evidence for the indirect effect was more tentative. The discouraged worker effect applied to staying on at school but not to college, whose courses (in Scotland) tend to be vocationally specific. The discouraged worker effect was similar for girls and boys; it was strongest for 16 year-olds with attainments slightly above the average, who were typically on the margins of the decision to stay on or leave. Staying on tended also to be encouraged by high proportions of local employment in service industries and in higher-level occupations; controlling for these factors increased the observed discouraged worker effect. The paper suggests that the design of most area-based studies of education and the youth labour market is inadequate to explain area differences, given the multi-dimensionality of the effects revealed by the Scottish data. Given the economic `need' for higher levels of educational participation, the paper provides further evidence of the distorted market signals generated by the labour- market context' of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept `patriarchy', while being vital for feminist analysis, has been criticised for not being able to deal with historical and cross-cultural variation in the forms of women's subordination. This paper presents a new way of theorising patriarchy to meet these objections; one which is flexible enough to take account of its various forms, but rigorous enough to be an effective tool for analysis. It leaves behind base-superstructure models of patriarchy in which there is only one base, which have led to many of the rigidities which have been identified, arguing instead for a model of patriarchy as six partially-interdependent structures. The paper concludes with a discussion of the different forms of patriarchy in recent British history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses problems associated with patriarchy. The concept of patriarchy has been both essential and problematic in the development of feminist thought, as the two papers by sociologists Malcolm Waters and S. Walby, published here, argue. In responding to their work, the author sketches the recent history of the concept and discuss a few of the issues raised by a reading of these papers. In the 1960s and 1970s, patriarchy provided the essential focus and the identification of the theoretical object for rapidly developing innovative thinking about the subordination of women. Feminists criticized social theory as inadequate for explaining this widespread phenomenon. Existing theory attributed women's domination by men either to nature or social necessity rather than to social-structural processes, unequal power, or exploitation. Further, theory had been produced from the perspectives of men, usually men associated with ruling classes, to whom women were generally invisible, unimportant, or uninteresting as social actors. Theorizing patriarchy was a first step to reconceptualizing the subordination of women and to correcting flawed social theory, even to achieving a paradigm revolution.