Search

The notions of active citizenship and community involvement have become increasingly prominent in political discussions and policy practices within Britain in the past 15 years. This is a significant development as the modus operandi of modern liberal democracies has been a representative mode of government in which the wider citizenry has a passive role. This paper contextualizes active citizenship in terms of the interrelationship between civic society and the political realm. The Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality has made a concerted attempt to examine such issues. Governmentality regards government, not in the conventional sense as the provenance of centralized institutions, where interest groups and ideologies play their part, but as a complex and ever-changing process that forges ways of thinking about governing with a myriad of practices that proliferate throughout society. Whilst it is informative, it is questioned whether this analytic approach can fully explain and illuminate political developments like active citizenship, given its rejection of realist and critical approaches to government. The second half of the paper addresses such concerns. Here, community involvement is regarded as a contested notion and one where the central state has played a prominent role. To highlight these analytical points, the historical development and political configuration of community involvement over the past 20 years is traced. It is shown that central government, through policies influenced by contrasting ideological conceptions of citizenship and political expediency, has played a key role in shaping community involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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.

This paper reports on a successful experiment in the use of the telephone to screen a large urban population in order to identify a relatively small sub-sample. The problem at hand was the identification of a sample of wives of men working in the offshore oil industry. Alternative ways of identifying such a sample are discussed and reasons are given for the decision to use the telephone. The form of random digit dialling used in the study is described and the results of a pilot and the main screening exercise are presented in some detail. The final section of the paper takes a broader view of telephone interviewing. Data are presented on telephone coverage in the U.K., and the advantages and disadvantages of the telephone are assessed in relation to other data collection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier work (Hope, 1974, 1975a) demonstrated 'no change' in social mobility between the Glass inquiry of 1949 and the Oxford inquiry of 1972. However the mobility investigated was that known as exchange mobility (other synonyms being pure, perfect, fluidity and circulation mobility), which is defined as departure of observed mobility from perfect mobility. When the man in the street speaks of mobility he usually means something much more specific, namely mobility up or down a vertical hierarchy. The present paper investigates the meaning of perfect mobility by disaggregating the model for it into discrete, additive components, and it shows how the vertical dimension may be represented in a mobility analysis by just one of the many degrees of freedom which are associated with exchange mobility. Implications for comparative analysis, and also for investigation of the relations between vertical and class mobility, are discussed. The theoretical developments of this paper stem from the apparently novel observation that the `additive model' of status inconsistency analysis is formally identical with the `perfect mobility' model of social mobility analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers reflections on the author's working experience as an industrial sociologist from the 1960s. It seeks to contextualise this in more general considerations of the part played by industrial sociology in the development of sociology in the UK. This is evidenced in thematic concerns, the importance of historical perspectives as well as the use of case studies and the development of ethnographic work. It discusses the role which industrial sociology has played in bringing issues of power, authority, control and class into sharp focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response from the authors of the study "Ethnic Minorities in Britian," to the article "Race, Racism, and Ethnicity," by Ken Smith which commented on their study. In Smith's article, he argues that while objections to the concept of race are widely accepted within sociology, the study Ethnic Minorities in Britain, seems to use a concept of ethnic group that makes it indistinguishable from race. This is because, he says, the authors believe: that an ethnic group can include physical appearance as a distinguishing marker; that there are important boundaries that separate ethnic groups; and that an ethnic group membership can be based on the objective criterion of family membership rather than simply chosen by the individuals concerned. He suggests that the authors radicalizing of ethnicity indicates that they are studying a form of collectivity that has been captured by Weber in his notion of status group. The authors agree with Smith's perspective on race. His paper seems to be an unnecessary rehearsal of already well-accepted arguments. But the authors reject the suggestion that their work is racist in the pernicious sense that Smith claims. His own views about ethnic groups are muddled--in particular, he offers no firm alternative theoretical or practical approach to the definition of ethnicity on which the authors analysis have been based.

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to Sara Delamont's paper in the February 2000 edition of Sociology which provides an account of the relationship between the sub-discipline, sociology of education, and parent discipline, sociology. Delamont argues that the hooligan is an anomalous beast for sociologists of education, who paradoxically revere him: while the sociology of education is an anomalous beast for the parent discipline, whose practitioners reject and fear it. Essentially, according to the author, the latter part of Delamont's argument amounts to the claim that the wider discipline of sociology has neglected sociology of education. The author notes that in this article, his response is concerned with Delamont's unsatisfactory characterization of British sociology of education. According to Delamont, sociology in Great Britain has two grand narratives, both male--one derived from the political arithmetic tradition is quantitative, empirical and focused on social mobility, and the other discursive and focused on anti-heroes: the portrayal of the rebellion or resistance of the hooligan. Delamont has attempted to characterize British ethnographic studies, which include some reference to anti-school/delinquent boys, and which have been conducted by male sociologists, as falling into the same category.

British research on social movements, with a few exceptions, has been criticised for making little reference to social movement theory, such that the term, social movement is often used as an unproblematic descriptor. This failure leaves intact assumptions about the relationship between the aims, organisation and activity of social movements and the 'interests' that underlie them. This paper attempts to integrate theoretical and substantive analyses of social movements in the context of the 'two women's movements' in the United States and Britain which have had the family as a key focus for mobilisation: one conventionally associated with feminism, the other a mass movement of women mobilised to challenge feminism's claim to speak on their behalf. The analysis reveals the limitations of both mainstream and radical/Marxist explanations of social movements on account of their shared reductionist orientation. It suggests that a more fruitful account is provided by resource mobilisation and post-Marxist theorists who, despite drawing on different traditions and questions, recognise the autonomy of politicised culture. The article concludes by questioning whether any foundationalist notion of 'interests' and the associated concept of 'identity' can provide the basis for grounding political behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intergenerational social mobility of young adults in Britain, from a secondary analysis of the National Child Development Study. We show that by examining the relationship between social class background and the tested 'ability' of boys and girls, it is possible to advance our understanding of some of the key processes that help facilitate the reproduction of class inequality. In particular, we emphasise that the advantages of the service class over other class rests not just upon their ability to impart appropriate cultural capital to their children, but also on other 'secondary' factors, notably material resources. We show how boys born in advantaged social positions have more resources than girls in maintaining their class advantages, and we indicate some patterns of closure within the 'service class'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quite a lot is already known from the existing sociological literature about the overall time spent by women and men in different domestic tasks, but there is much less information available on more complex sociologically-relevant facets of the experience of time, such as the social context of activities, and the common combinations of different activities. In this paper I use time-use diary data to focus upon three important aspects of the gendered experience of time. These are the social context of domestic tasks in relation to their (gendered) patterns of management, the intensity or density of time-use involving combinations of different activities, and the fragmentation of leisure time according to which activities are responsible for interrupting it. Overall these analyses support the conclusion that women's time is not only more pressured in terms of the intensity of domestic tasks, but that the more enjoyable aspects of their time, such as leisure time, tend to be more fragmented than that of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some of the findings from two national research projects which focussed on Ph.D. research in Britain. Through interviews with graduate students, supervisors and department heads, it explores the characteristic structures which index natural science and social science doctoral study in both single and multi/inter-disciplinary fields. By comparing and contrasting a 'research group approach' to Ph.D. research with the 'one-to-one' model, the research findings highlight ways in which doctoral study can be organised to minimise some of the problems routinely faced by graduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of corruption in British public life has been neglected as an area of sociological research. The object of this paper is to begin to develop a theorisation of corruption by examining some basic conceptual and methodological issues. It will be argued that Britain is not necessarily experiencing a rise in corruption, but a change in its actual nature. This is characterised in terms of a move from 'primary' to 'secondary' corruption. By continuing to employ a primary conceptualisation, there is a danger of developing a radically misinformed, even corrupt, perspective on the recent 'rise' in corruption. An attempt is therefore made in this analysis to examine some structural and cultural features of this new wave of corruption and argue that secondary corruption is endemic with the 'marketisation' of public services and the introduction of the New Public Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The winter of discontent continues to exert a powerful hold over the British political imaginary. It acts as a discursive key to a collective mythology seemingly appealed to, and conjured, in each wave of industrial unrest, in each hint of political turmoil and, until recently, whenever the election of a Labour Government looked credible. In this paper I consider the rhetorical strategies and linguistic devices deployed by the tabloid media in the narration of the events of the winter of 1978-79. I argue for an interpretation of the winter of discontent as a moment of state crisis. By crisis however I do not refer to the mere accumulation of contradictions but rather to a moment of transition, a moment of decisive intervention. Within such a framework, the winter of discontent emerges as a strategic moment in the transformation of the British state, and perhaps the key moment in the pre-history of Thatcherism. For, as I hope to demonstrate, the initial appeal of the New Right was premised upon its ability to offer a convincing construction of the winter of discontent as symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis of the state. In such a moment of crisis, a particular type of decisive intervention was called for. In this discursive construction of crisis the New Right proved itself capable of changing, if not the hearts and minds of the electorate, then certainly the predominant perceptions of the political context. It recruited subjects to its vision of the necessary response to the crisis of a monolithic state besieged by the trade unions. This was perhaps the only truly hegemonic moment of Thatcherism. It occurred well before Mrs Thatcher entered Number 10. It is thus not surprising that one of the most enduring and distinctive legacies of Thatcherism has been the new political lexicon of crisis, siege and subterfuge born of the winter of discontent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare state has fostered a large volume of academic investigation but the core of its scholarship has been on the relationship between class forces and different systems of welfare. The possibility of a gender effect does not appear to have seriously troubled the minds of mainstream scholars in this domain. As a result, gender as a structuring principle of welfare systems remains under-explored. This paper undertakes a gender-focused analysis of a key aspect of welfare provision -- income maintenance policies. The British welfare state is a useful site of analysis -- at one stage an exemplary model of welfare provision, now a 'laggard' among its European neighbours. To identify the gender dimension of British income maintenance policies, we go back as far as the 1830s for the new Poor Law. From then we trace female and male access to welfare income, in the process considering how women and men have been constructed by public income-support policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshall et at have claimed that class is the major social structural influence on social consciousness and ideological conflict in modem Britain. In this paper I re-analyse data from the Essex class study and demonstrate that the class consciousness index devised by Marshall et al. is not an adequate measure of a unitary concept of class consciousness and that their claims about the pre-eminence of class as a structuring influence on identities and attitudes are not supported by the data. My analysis shows that education, income and several other factors influence levels of `class consciousness'. I go on to show that the class consciousness index in- appropriately aggregates diverse types of attitudes and identities, of which only `class identification' has a substantial association with social class. Moreover, class differences in attitudes towards redistribution disappear completely when they involve costs as well as benefits for working class respondents, thus indicating that classes do not differ in their commitment to egalitarianism, in the discussion several responses to the problems encountered in measuring class consciousness in contemporary Britain are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes changes in class voting in Britain by applying models for the analysis of ordered categories to data from the British General Election Surveys. The findings support Heath, Jowell and Curtice's (1985) claim that there has been no general class dealignment. In addition, changes in class voting are unrelated to changes in the overall performance of Labour relative to Conservatives, although the Liberals do appear to benefit when class voting declines. The analysis also reveals distinctive behaviour in one class (`foremen and technicians') which had not been previously noticed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparisons of engineering graduate numbers are frequently used as indices of industrial development and measures of the responsiveness of the educational system to industrial requirements. Such comparisons make implicit assumptions about quality by assuming that like institutions or like qualifications are being compared. In this paper the concept of 'best practice' engineering education is derived from engineering manpower reports of German engineering education in order to address issues of both quantity and quality in comparing engineering education in Britain and Japan. Japan is found to have associated engineering education with relatively more prestigious institutions and to have attracted a higher proportion of more able male pupils to broad based engineering education compared to Britain. Yet there are some interesting differences between the model of 'best practice' engineering education based on Germany and Japanese practice, particularly in curricula, which underline the importance of the division of labour between education and employment in the education and training of engineers. Examining the responsiveness of educational systems through propositions derived from a model of 'best practice' rather than through simple output statistics underlines the importance of different patterns of institutional development, the role of the state, educational and occupational selection, and status within the curriculum for understanding the variety of contemporary engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profit sharing has recently returned to public prominence and is becoming increasingly popular in British industry. Although it is commonplace to view the previous incidences of profit sharing in terms of the cycle of control thesis, this perspective cannot explain the present enthusiasm. This paper re-examines the cycle of control theory's ability to predict the timing, the contextual conditions and the managerial motives for the introduction of profit sharing. Two case studies are presented in order to show ways in which management have used profit sharing; these studies raise serious doubts about the explanatory value of the cycle of control thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reanalyses data from the 'Breadline Britain' poverty survey to examine differences in personal consumption between men and women. It has been argued (a) that resource allocation in marriage reflects the pattern of inequalities in society, so that married women tend to have a lower level of consumption than married men; and (b) that women's involvement in paid work may not enhance their personal command over resources, because the extra income is absorbed by other members of the household. An index of personal consumption (as distinct from joint consumption, shared with other members of the household) was constructed from information on who had access to items which are normally consumed on an individual basis. This was related to marital status, participation and other characteristics for men and women. The analysis shows that, for women, both being married and being engaged in paid work tend to be associated with a higher individual standard of living to a far greater extent than is the case for men. Neither of the arguments mentioned above is supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the changing nature of labour and discipline in Scottish and English institutions of confinement from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The analytical framework employed includes a consideration of material, social and ideological forces and is allied to the theoretical perspectives of Marx, Rusche and especially Foucault. The historical evidence presented demonstrates the significance of the demands of capital, Protestant ideology, and the ideals and efforts of penal reformers both in the creation and development of penal institutions and in the shaping of the diverse forms of labour and discipline within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines, with some reference to a content analysis of three British journals, the methodological orientation of current British sociology in order to argue that most graduate students as a consequence of their undergraduate socialization are unlikely to wish to take advantage of formal methodology courses at the graduate level, at least in so far as these are highly technical in content. Some of the implications of the argument for sociology in Britain generally, for undergraduate methods teaching and for the structure of graduate education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts by British writers to give sociological accounts of inflationary processes suffer from the defect that they fail to distinguish clearly between factors which are inherent in all capitalist societies and those that are peculiar to British industrial development. Hence their discussions make it unclear whether the `British sickness', which includes high inflation, is likley to be prototypical of all capitalist societies. This paper begins by examining how `sociological' factors enter into economists' explanations of inflation and goes on to outline a distinctively sociological model of inflation. The model has four elements: the extent to which economistic values are held by different groups of income-receivers; the existence and strength of any normative system which might restrain the pursuit of such values; the structure of power between groups of income-receivers; and the structural capacity of the socio-economic system to meet the demands placed on it. It is suggested that two different configurations of these variables are empirically more likely to occur. One being highly likely to promote inflationary tendencies, the other being likely to mitigate such pressures. Finally, it is argued that Britain's particular pattern of industrial development means that she corresponds to the first type, whereas other capitalist societies with different historical paths may correspond to the second type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptual model of the business system in terms of its two constituent parts: the exchange network and the communication network. This model is applied to the Scottish economy and an analysis of the Scottish business system is given. It is argued that whilst Scottish capital is predominantly owned by English interests, the network of interlocking directorships shows the relative autonomy of Scottish business within the British economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from the Oxford Growth of Firms project on the ownership and control position of the largest 250 UK companies and, in more detail, that of a sample of ai of these large firms. An analysis is made of the social and economic historical context in which most of today's large firms grew up. A theoretical model is developed of the stages of control through which firms are likely to pass. It is suggested that most firms are unlikely ever to become controlled by their own professional managers and that there is a trend towards firms being controlled by financial institutions. Evidence is then put forward, from an analysis of the current control position of the `top 250' UK firms and from brief histories of the 21 sample large firms, which supports the previously outlined theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Mobility in Britain has been a key work for theories of mobility and social stratification, but its basic data on the occupation of fathers and sons is open to question. Arguing from evidence (mainly from the Census) about occupational transition and differential fertility, this paper suggests that the 1949 study appears to have an implausible number of middle-class fathers. When this critique is related to the peculiarities of the data already separately reported by others such as Ridge, Hope, and Noble, a strong case can be made for the rejection of the Glass findings. It follows that the conventional sociological wisdom that Britain has a low rate of mobility must be reconsidered, and also that those theories of stratification which have drawn too uncritically on Social Mobility in Britain must now be re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a postal survey of first year Sociology degree courses in the United Kingdom. The main feature of the results is their uniformity and traditionalism. Both polytechnics and universities work within considerable resource constraints in the first year, frequently teaching large numbers. Teaching relies heavily upon lectures and a highly planned course, with limited class/tutorial support. Although courses are constantly revised and few teachers appear satisfied, there is considerable consensus upon the contents of courses with a limited number of elements usually combined into one or more of a few recognizable types. The source of this constant revision yet limited range lies in the tension between the empirical aspiration to describe the social world and the complex issues raised by attempts to do so, the difficulty of which is often seen as frustrating to students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses recent speculation concerning the normative bond which ties the lower class to the present structure of British society. It focuses on the assertions by some theorists that the normative opposition which can arise 'spontaneously' within the lower class is inherently limited in scope, and that any future class based movements of a radical kind depend on the action of agencies 'external' to the lower class. Some preliminary results are presented from a recent survey of council tenants in Barking, East London, some of whom were on rent strike. This evidence reveals the existence of attitudes 'deviant' to dominant values concerning the ownership and rights of property. In conclusion, the nature of lower class normative opposition is reassessed and it is suggested that the lower class are not as conceptually restricted as is often suggested, and that future possibilities of radical action do not necessarily depend on the activities of the Labour Party or trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]