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This article extends existing sociological scholarship on doing and displaying family by developing the concept of documenting families. We suggest that documenting is conceptually rich insofar as it showcases the relationship, and tensions, between institutional practices and individual experiences of family display. Drawing on our research with men who became parents without partners, we argue that the process of documenting family is made especially evident in studies of what Finch originally referred to as 'non-conventional' family relationships. We explain that documenting sheds light not only on the official and unofficial means through which families are recognised on paper, but also on family practices as work – in this case paper-work – that involves negotiation between different social actors who are generally unequal in terms of their authority and agency to impose situational meaning. [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]

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]

This paper examines the community situation of shipyard workers on Tyneside, certain aspects of their orientations to work and general social perspectives, and the relationship of these to each other and to the structure of social relations at work. In terms of their community situation shipyard workers would seem to come close to Lockwood's traditional proletarian type of worker. There is evidence to suggest, however, that these workers' social perspectives are not at all clearly traditional proletarian. The explanation for this is found, at least m part, m the much greater complexity of social relations at work than are accounted for in the model of traditional proletarianism. The paper suggests that existing typologies of the orientations and social perspectives of workers need to be refined by more detailed studies of the structural and relational aspects of both work and community situations. The paper concludes with a brief examination of changes in both industry and community and the likely effect of these on the social perspectives of shipbuilding workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN A RECENT paper Mr. Runciman concludes by inviting replies to his argument that it is logically and conceptually useful to employ the tripartite distinction between `class' `status' and `power' in the analysis of social stratification. Mr. Runciman does not, of course, deny the existence of links between these three dimensions, but suggests that such links must be seen contingent empirical relationships and not necessary logical ones. I hope that the following paper will provide such a reply. It must be clear that the following criticism is directed, in the main, to those parts of the paper in which Mr. Runciman is concerned with the logical and conceptual problem. The essay in question also contains a clear and valuable assessment of the problems encountered in any attempt to measure the three types of inequality. In the first part of the paper I propose to give a critical assessment of certain central aspects of Mr. Runciman's argument and, in the second part, I will put forward a very brief formulation of what I consider to be a more meaningful alternative view of the relationships between class, status, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, in the case of gay male couples, the issue of sexual exclusivity should be examined in terms of expectation and behaviour. Using this approach, a typology of three categories of gay male Christian couples is presented. Couples who were expectationally and behaviourally exclusive considered sexual exclusivity a symbol of total commitment, complete mutual satisfaction and adherence to the conventional Christian ethic of sexual monogamy. Couples who were expectationally exclusive but behaviourally non-exclusive developed various regulatory mechanisms to manage the disjunction between expectation and behaviour. The majority of couples were expectationally and behaviourally non-exclusive. They justified this lifestyle on the ground of sexual variety, prevention of possessiveness and the promotion of freedom and egalitarianism. They embraced the theology of friendship which emphasises inclusiveness rather than monogamy. Couples in all the three categories did not demonstrate significant differences in terms of their level of relationship satisfaction and commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the time-use of diaries of a sample of couples are used to explore the relationship between partners' daily pattern of activities and their enjoyment of those activities. By analysing the diaries of couples together it is possible to assess which activities are undertaken simultaneously, which separately, and whether time spent in different activities is more enjoyable spent separately or together. So, in addition to the usual information obtainable from time diary analysis on the domestic division of labour, these data provide information on the quality of time, and the ways in which couples may manipulate it in order to increase the proportion of enjoyable time (which, it is shown, is more enjoyable when enjoyed together). The wider significance of this approach is that an empirical link is provided between 'work-related' debates on the domestic division of labour, and those on the nature of affective relationships between couples found within the sociology of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of gender from writings on citizenship, such as those of Marshall, Mann and Turner, causes problems for the understanding of citizenship. Debates as to how gender can be integrated into citizenship highlight major divergences in feminist theory over the relationship between the public and the private. The paper argues that citizenship cannot be understood without a dynamic theory of gender relations, and that political citizenship for women destabilises private patriarchy and the family. Citizenship is about a transition from private to public patriarchy, not only the civilising of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify a philosophy for ethnography which could overcome some of the epistemological criticisms to which it has recently been subjected, notably by Martin Hammersley (1990, 1992). It is argued that Roy Bhaskar's (1989a) theory of critical realism is capable of solving many of the problems raised in relation to representational claims, theoretical focus and explanatory status. A substantive example of how critical realist ethnography can be used is given in a participant observation study of how racism affects occupational relationships between nurses and doctors, and how its effects are mediated by professional ideology. It is argued that the universalist-achievement ethos of professionalism tends to counter the ascriptive nature of racism. Thus, as long as a functional-specific pretext is unavailable, the effects of structural racism will remain latent in social situations where professionalism has a powerful influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of ideologies of love and intimacy in heterosexual coupledom, and examines the applicability of theories of the gender division of 'emotion work' to the field of intimate personal relationships. Research on the private sphere of the family has recently focused on quantifying instrumental aspects of relationships, such as financial management, the domestic division of labour and informal care. However, although fruitful, such approaches neglect the expressive or emotional; particularly the experiences of love and intimacy, which many people say they regard as a key element in their personal relationships. We suggest reasons for British sociology's neglect of what is almost a cliche in everyday discourse. And we present evidence (including preliminary findings from our own research on heterosexual couples) that -- despite dissatisfaction with gender inequalities in domestic tasks and finance -- many women express unhappiness primarily with what they perceive as men's unwillingness or incapacity to 'do' the emotional intimacy which appears to them necessary to sustain close heterosexual couple relationships. We illustrate how similar discussions of gender differences in emotional behaviour have emerged elsewhere (including in the new masculinity literature), raising questions about how far men's and women's emotional behaviour can and should change. The exploration of socially-regulated or 'managed' gender divisions in intimate emotional behaviour entails two related but distinct questions: are men and women equally 'susceptible' to the emotions or discourses of love and intimacy; and, do they handle such emotions in similar ways in the context of close personal relationships. We suggest how research findings on heterosexual couple relationships can be linked to work on the social regulation of emotion, which argues that there is a 'gender division of emotion work' where it is assumed that women will take responsibility for the... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with describing confidant relationships outside the marital relationship in a small sample of married women at the intensive stage of the family cycle. Such confidant relationships were by no means universal: only one third of the women in this study having at least one such relationship. In the context of an ideology which extols the couple as the locus of intimacy, such relationships can be seen as potentially threatening. In fact, such a view does not appear to be warranted. These relationships had very little to do with the level of intimacy in the marital relationship. Rather, they appeared to reflect the security of the respondents' base in the local community and their financial resources to create and maintain such relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract in contemporary western societies the subjective features of social life have become the object and target of a new expertise. The paper addresses the limitations of certain influential approaches to this phenomenon, in particular analyses framed in terms of 'social control' and 'medicalisation'. it offers an alternative framework based on three elements: firstly, a conception of government as a varying set of rationales and programmes which seek to align socio-political objectives with the activities and relations of individuals; secondly, the constitutive roles of psychological and managerial techniques and vocabularies. These are seen to be crucial in the formation of new ways of thinking about and acting on the social relations of the family and the workplace; thirdly, a notion of subjectivity as a capacity promoted through specific regulatory techniques and forms of expertise. This framework is utilised in the analysis of the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock institute of Human Relations to explore some of the fundamental transformations in twentieth century British society. Three 'case studies' are provided: the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s and l930s; the role of psychological expertise in the Second World War; and the links between industrial productivity, group relations and mental health forged in the immediate post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the development of social network analysis, tracing its origins in classical sociology and its more recent formulation in social scientific and mathematical work. It is argued that the concept of social network provides a powerful model for social structure, and that a number of important formal methods of social network analysis can be discerned. Social network analysis has been used in studies of kinship structure, social mobility, science citations, contacts among members of deviant groups, corporate power, international trade exploitation, class structure, and many other areas. A review of the formal models proposed in graph theory, multidimensional scaling, and algebraic topology is followed by extended illustrations of social network analysis in the study of community structure and interlocking directorships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the pre-conditions of the images of normal family relations which inform contemporary discourse on truancy. It locates these pre-conditions within state intervention into nineteenth century schooling. This structured the kind of school relations which were to become fundamental to state-authorised schooling. It illustrates the way in which this intervention fostered the generation of one particular model of family relations as `normal' and rendered alternatives deviant. It argues that a theory of correct family relations was embedded in the model of good schooling which was being structured by the state. Any given social division of labour involves a particular scheduling of social identities. A division of labour involving the family as a unit of production meant a scheduling of identities such that schooling and work would intersperse with each other. State intervention into schooling undermined social relations of families in occupations characterised by this form of organisation. It is argued that both the form and the content of schooling were implicated in fostering a particular scheduling of social identities and in marginalising alternative patterns of living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A revised version of the conventional approach of classifying families in social class analysis recently surfaced in Sociology. Two-partner families are classified according to the class position of the main bread-winner, usually male. This approach discounts the importance of the other partner's work experience within the family. The special case of the cross-class couple is used to illuminate significant problems in the conventional approach. Swedish data from 1980 brings into question several of the assumptions of the conventional approach. Do women actually have a weaker attachment to the world of work? Are most families actually class homogeneous as the unitary family classification system would lead one to believe? Using evidence from a qualitative study of cross-class couples, this paper argues that diametrically opposed class experiences have significant effects on dynamics in the family unit. Issues in the division of labour in the home and access to cultural capital are clearly affected in class heterogeneous families. Women's work makes a significant difference in everyday life in the family and should necessarily affect the classification of families in class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new formal, theory of social exchange is presented, which attempts to overcome the hedonistic and economistic bias of Homans' (1961) and Blau's (1964) approaches. In their analyses, principles of social exchange are essentially illustrations from social life of elementary economic principles. This paper argues that although the rational choice assumption - characteristic of economics - is useful in analysing social relationships, there is a distinct quality to social exchange which distinguishes it from economic exchange. The theory is based on the idea that this quality, which Sahlins (1965) calls `degree of sociability', has to do with a concern for the wellbeing of the other party to the relationship as an end in itself. The usefulness of the theory is illustrated by showing how some of Sahlins' empirical ganeralizations about `primitive exchange' can be seen as special cases of more general principles which are theorems of the formal theory. An additional result of this analysis is the discovery of certain conceptual ambiguities in some of Sablins' formulations, which in the light of the theory are then restated in a more precise fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses itself to the politics of race as a sub-field of the sociology of race relations. It offers a conceptual framework for use in the sub-field by formulating a new concept called 'racial politics' and reformulating the concept of nationalism to link it with racial politics as defined. This is done with a view to casting light on certain theoretical and historical issues in the study of South African race relations, including (1) the importance of identifying different patterns of interaction between race and politics; (2) the identification of the conflict in South Africa as not simply a racial conflict; (3) seeing the use of racial categories for political mobilization by subordinate racial groups in South Africa as the result of the imposition of racial distinctions rather than from characteristics inherent in race itself; (4) recognizing that race and nationalist politics are connected but not identical; and (5) realizing that nationalisms based on race can in fact be racially inclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper documents the reasons for the reluctance of fieldworkers to formalize and codify their methods of data creation. While these reasons are not directly challenged, it is asserted that the conventional emphasis on the experimental foundation of fieldwork practice may usefully be replaced by a consideration of its communicational and interactional foundations. Some implications for the teaching and learning of fieldwork are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the process through which an elite of professional communicators regularly produce knowledge cast in the form of news. It focuses on the ideological and relational constraints which shape the knowledge product in systematic ways, and it is hoped that the type of analysis offered here can enrich our understanding of how economic, political, and social interests come to be reflected in media representations and accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to utilize the cross-cultural material presented by G. P. Murdock in the Ethnographic Atlas to analyse the concomitants of differences in the system of inheritance, particularly with respect to the contrast between Africa and Eurasia. In the major Eurasian societies property tends to be distributed directly, from parents to children of both sexes (i.e. by diverging devolution); in Africa property largely devolves between persons of the same sex, laterally as well as lineally. An attempt is made to show the distribution of diverging devolution and its association with the payment of dowry, with monogamy, with in-marriage of various sorts, and with kin terms that differentiate the nuclear family from more distant kin. The tight control of property represented by diverging devolution is in turn seen as .deriving from the intensive exploitation of resources which is also linked to the growth of complex political institutions. These associations are tested and held to be established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades a series of sexual services that offer company, talk, and more generally, what is understood as a ‘girlfriend experience’, are increasingly offered to a middle and upper-middle class clientele. These services involve a change in the boundaries of intimacy. We argue that they can be interpreted as part of the general process by which late capitalism has subsumed the 1968 critique that demanded liberation and authenticity. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with escorts and street walkers, we explore the discourse of authenticity in escort work in Spain and how the line is drawn between an ‘authentic intimacy’ that is sold, and a ‘private intimacy’, which involves the non-commodified affective life of the sex worker. We argue that escorts and street walkers draw these borders differently, the former emphasising authenticity in their service. Both, however, deploy a form of emotional labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores men’s articulations and practices of gender through transition to first-time fatherhood. Using qualitative longitudinal data, men’s antenatal intentions and postnatal practices are explored in this study which replicates earlier research on motherhood. The contemporary context in the UK is one where paternity leave, discourses of caring masculinities and more public displays of fathering involvement appear to offer new possibilities for men. But data analysis shows that whilst opportunities to disrupt gender norms are initially imagined, longer term practices can confirm ‘patriarchal habits’. The findings illuminate gender being done and undone, at times simultaneously, as the exhaustion and hard work of new parenting is encountered. A retreat into normative behaviours can be a path of least resistance as experiences unfold in an arena where men are found to have available to them a wider repertoire of discursive storylines. Optimistically, some changes in fathering involvement are discernible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of ambivalence has received limited attention from contemporary sociologists, notably because of its association with psychoanalysis and psychology and their emphasis on individual experience in isolation from the broader social and cultural contexts to which people belong. This article revisits the concept by placing it within a framework of relational sociology with the purpose of strengthening its conceptual foundations as a sociological construct. We illustrate the foundations of this framework through analysis of narratives collected as part of the project ‘Old age and autonomy: The role of service systems and intergenerational family solidarity’, involving interviews with adult children and their ageing parents engaged in informal caring relationships. Viewed through a relational lens, ambivalence can be reconceptualized as having both temporal and transformative properties and as the product of complex relational experiences existing within a wider web of interdependent social relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive 'neo-orthodoxy' has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work. This article contends that the potential of LPA can best be fulfilled through a renewal of critical reflection upon the foundational assumptions of LPA that can open up an acknowledgement and appreciation of the embroilment of subjectivity in the reproduction and transformation of production relations. This development is consistent with the central analytical importance ascribed to the 'indeterminacy of labour' in LPA but invites the adoption of a negative ontology in order to advance a less narrow conception of its meaning and significance. Studies of the new media and creative industries are engaged to indicate how a revitalized labour process analysis might embrace this ontology as a way of exploring and explaining the radical contingency of organization in contemporary social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the historical and contemporary absences in the sociology of service work. Although studies of service work have now become the empirical mainstream in the sociology of work, there have been few attempts to conceptualize broad patterns of worker--customer relations in service work. This neglect is to be regretted because whether the customer is an alienating figure for service workers constitutes a key unasked question in contemporary sociology of work. The article highlights three factors that are likely to have a key influence on workers' sense of alienation vis-a-vis the customer. It highlights divergent literature in each of these areas and hence ends with a call for research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the insinuation of therapeutic culture into everyday life from the vantage point of a qualitative cross-generational study of economically marginalized young women and their mothers. Against dominant assessments of therapeutic culture -- as representing cultural decline, social regulation or transformation -- we draw on interview narratives to analyse its practical and situated effects. We argue that desires for disclosure and open communication are not trivial or narcissistic and instead interpret them as productive emotional strategies for managing difficult circumstances, and for engendering a sense of competence and possibility. Thus a concern with 'talking things through' is neither ineffectual nor adequately understood as a manifestation of an ahistorical feminine alignment with emotions and interior life. While we do not dismiss regulatory aspects of therapeutic culture, our analysis offers an alternative and empirically based account of the ways cultural imperatives are enacted across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a sociological examination of fatherhood. It is found that expectations and concepts of fatherhood are shifting to reflect the personal life experiences of fathers themselves and away from the traditional social norms of what "fatherhood" is supposed to be. It is suggested that this reflects an increasing trend towards the individualization of important common life experiences.

Late modernity has been characterized as a space, place and 'series of flows', marking conditions of complexity, contradiction and diversity as the global economics of capital restructuring reach down into the local/e to radically disorganize prior social forms of collective and political identity and allegiance (Giddens, 1998). Individualization implies a de-coupling of self from the weight of group, community and tradition, thus more local, idiosyncratic and syncretic trajectories are now said to structure 'biographies of choice'. My starting points for reflecting on this are Bourdieu's conceptualization of the 'social logics of the individual' conceived as a thoroughly social subject. I use this idea to frame how two contrasting locales shape the subject within their respective interpersonal relations. Gender and class are central terms of the following discussion examining the newly improvized identities of the digitally enhanced and networked middle class, alongside the survival identities impelled by those 'muddling through' within disconnected locales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discussions of sociological research based on the recording of interactional occasions, participants' awareness of the presence of recording devices is often deemed to have a detrimental effect on the 'authenticity' or 'naturalness' of the data collected. We propose an alternative approach to this issue by seeking to turn participants' observable orientations to the presence and relevance of recording devices into an analytic topic, and exploring the precise kinds of situated interactional work in which such orientations are involved. Drawing on a substantial data corpus from three distinct research settings, we analyse a range of interactional functions associated with participants' orientations to the fact of their talk being recorded, Instead of assuming that it will act as a constraint on the production of 'natural' talk, we show how the relevance of a recording device is negotiated and used in situ as a participants' matter and interactional resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]