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This paper provides an empirical investigation of Israeli flight attendants in order to characterize the structural underpinnings of the liquid self, and their resultant phenomenological consequences on personal morality, conceptions of self and interpersonal relations. The study touched upon the motivations and behaviours of flight attendants, how they juggle family and personal commitments, and the internal persona they adopt vis-à-vis their own selves. By contextualizing their narratives through the structural elements of their jobs, the study exposes the attendants’ ambivalent and incoherent lives and the complex ways in which they manage their social networks across place and time. While flight attendants evince chameleon-like selves and fluid morality in their interpersonal relations – taking advantage of their ability to stage different selves in different ports of life – they maintain their multiple selves in functioning ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

Taking as its starting point the 'irrational passion for dispassionate rationality', so prevalent in Western thought and practice, this paper traces, through the emotions, current debates surrounding the ambivalent nature of modernity as both order and chaos, conformity and transgression. Reason and emotions are not, it is argued, antithetical to one another, rather there is a need to fundamentally rethink existing epistemological models and ontological ways of being and knowing. These issues are traced, on the one hand, through the increasing rationalisation of Western society, the latest expression of which, it is claimed, is a new form of 'postemotionalism', and, on the other hand, through the resurgence of more Dionysian values and collective forms of effervescence. The paper concludes with a critical assessment of these contradictory features and the corporeal dilemmas which underpin them, speculating on the 'fate' of emotions at the turn of the century in the light of current postmodern theorising. [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]

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]

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.

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.

Measures of inequality form the backdrop to a variety of sociological investigations, allowing the description of gaps in opportunity by occupational class, gender or ethnicity, for example, and of trends in these differences over time and place. These preliminary descriptive patterns can then be explored in more detail to uncover their socio-economic determinants, leading to the reduction of inequality. However, it has become clear from the 'index wars' dating back to at least the 1930s that measuring inequality is not a simple issue, To some extent the results obtained in an investigation and, therefore, the definition of further problems to be explored, are dependent on the precise nature of the measures used. This paper concentrates on measures of segregation. It considers a number of the methods available to the analyst concerned with the patterns of spread of socioeconomic disadvantage between institutions. It focuses on measures of evenness and exposure, rehearsing the relative advantages of each approach and showing how closely related they are in practice. It introduces for the first time the notions of strong and weak compositional invariance, showing that some common indices of segregation, such as the dissimilarity index, display only weak compositional invariance. It therefore advocates the use instead, in appropriate circumstances, of the precise exchange proportion, termed here the 'segregation index'. This has been developed and used successfully in our long-term study of the changing socio-economic composition of schools in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure-agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual--society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people -- no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure-agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense 'activity dependence' as 'Cambridge events'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper explores the possible patterns of crime and control in the twenty-first century, drawing on an analysis of current and recent developments. These suggest a dystopian prospect of permanently high crime rates, and control strategies that reinforce social division and exclusion. Current 'third way' policies for crime reduction may achieve modest success, in part because they indirectly encourage agencies to manipulate statistically recorded outcomes to their advantage. They do not however tackle the underlying sources of crime in the political economy and culture of global capitalism, offering only actuarial analyses of risk variation, and pragmatic preventive interventions to reduce these. In the absence of any broader changes to the social patterns which generate high-crime societies the prospect is of marginal palliatives for crime, which themselves have the dysfunctional consequences of increasing segregation, distrust and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If class theory has explanatory and descriptive power it should be possible to provide evidence that social classes exist as phenomena generic to modern industrial societies. This paper addresses this issue by examining the structure of class situations, as defined by job attributes, in two central European, post-communist societies--Hungary and Poland--and then comparing them with a benchmark Western society, Britain. Classes are identified through a latent structure analysis of job attributes and by assessing the correspondence between the latent classes estimated through this procedure and positions on two alternative indicators of class position--the Goldthorpe class schema and self-rated class identity. The structure of latent classes is found to be generally similar across all three societies, as is the correspondence between these latent classes and positions in the Goldthorpe schema in the two societies in which it is measured, and class identification. The main exceptions to this shared pattern relate to variations in the size and organisation of the agricultural sector and the distinctiveness of 'intermediate' class positions. The evidence indicates the presence of a considerable degree of cross-national consistency in the structure of class situations across diverse social and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his account of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project, Stuart Hall points out that discourse theory provides insight both into the ways in which Thatcherism was constructed as a discourse from a combination of disparate ideological strands and into the ways in which this discourse was engaged in a hegemonic project. However, discourse analysis has rarely been applied in empirical study of the spread of the ideas and values of Thatcherism. The findings of attitude surveys indicate the failure of Thatcherism to produce radical social and cultural change. This paper presents textually oriented discourse analysis as an alternative way of understanding the spread of Thatcherism to that of attitude surveys. Research applying the approach demonstrates the continuing use of elements of Thatcherite discourse across the Conservative party and Labour party and hence the lasting impact of Thatcherism in spite of its failure to become hegemonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines and evaluates recent contributions by Nicos Mouzelis and Margaret Archer to the structure-agency debate. Mouzelis offers an internal reconstruction of Giddens's structuration theory; Archer an external alternative. I show that, although representing an advance on Giddens's position, Mouzelis's account fails because he relies on the former's definition of structure as comprising rules and resources. I then examine Archer's solution to the problem. I argue that her definition of activity-dependence makes her account of the relationship between agents and structures unclear. I outline an alternative account in terms of supervenience, and argue that it contains the minimum ontological claim necessary for a realist understanding of the structure-agent relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary class analysis takes the national state as its unit of analysis. This convention could be challenged on at least two grounds. On the one hand, the national state might be seen as too gross an aggregation that leads to the neglect of important internal variation; on the other, the national state might be considered an irrelevant distinction for the study of processes that are best viewed on a larger canvas. In this paper we concern ourselves with this latter possibility and we assess the extent to which globalization threatens to displace the national state's role in shaping class structure and patterns of social fluidity. In our formulation, the competing claims of national state and global system effects on class structures and mobility regimes involve matters of degree, and thus are open to empirical investigation. The existing evidence supports the continued resilience of the national state but not so emphatically as to preclude the need to take account of world-system influences. This leads us to propose an analytical strategy for integrating world-system effects into class analysis. We conclude by suggesting that a more robust challenge to the role of the national state in class analysis might yet come from the growth of the 'new regionalism' in Europe and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide have motivated important theoretical advances in the discipline, and the development of 'structuration theories' and 'analytical dualism' has promoted fresh thought about dominant views of the human agent. These approaches have sought to release sociology from any residual reliance on the oversocialised conception of the individual that formed part of the legacy of Parsonian sociology. It is the argument of this paper, however, that while structuration theory and analytical dualism focus on the creative powers of human reflexivity, as part of their rejection of the 'oversocialised agent', the theoretical weight they place on consciousness neglects the socially shaped somatic bases of action and structure, and results in an undersocialised view of the embodied agent. If the relationship between socialisation and agency needs analysing in terms of embodiment as much as in terms of the cognitive internalisation of norms and values, however, there are good reasons for structuration theory and analytical dualism rejecting attempts to ground subsequent notions of the embodied agent they may develop in dominant, static notions of the habitus. These minimise creativity and make it difficult to analyse social change. An important challenge for future reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide, then, is to construct a sociology which recognises the significance for human agency of a socially shaped form of embodiment, yet which refuses to make the embodied actor a mere product of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper underlines the importance of the distinction between 'social' and 'system' integration (agency and structure) introduced by David Lockwood in 1964. Its four sections (i) examine the original difficulty of maintaining any distinction between the 'parts' of society and its 'people' against the social ontology of Individualism whose proponents argued that the former must always be reduced to the latter as individuals were the ultimate constituents of society, (ii) shows how collectivist opposition held 'systemic factors' to be indispensable in sociological explanations, but could not substantiate their ontological status against the charge of reification whilst empiricism held sway, (iii) explores how once the individualist/collectivist debate was superseded, Lockwood's distinction was redefined in structuration theory, where insistence on treating structure and agency as mutually constitutive effectively denied their independent variation and thus reduced the 'social' and the 'systemic' to differences in the scale of social practices; (iv) argues that social realism's ontology, in which 'structures' and 'agents' belong to different emergent strata of social reality, avoids reducing one to the other or eliding the two. Instead it supplies the ontological grounding for Lockwood's distinction and enables it to be developed into an explanatory programme -- analytical dualism -- whose central tenet is the need to explore the interplay between these two irreducible constituents of social reality in order to account for why things are 'so and not otherwise' and in a manner which is of direct utility to practical analysts of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of writers have argued that social divisions associated with consumption are replacing social classes as the key dimensions of social stratification. In particular, using the example of housing, they have argued that there is a major social divide between public and private sector consumers. This paper examines the possibility and value of identifying consumption sector divisions in the field of medical care, arguing that no clear divisions can be drawn between public and private consumers. It explores the possible bases for such divisions and provides evidence to show that most individuals, even if they have private medical insurance, are consumers of both state and private medicine. It argues that those who purchase private medicine secure little in the way of long-term medical advantage and that private medicine does not maximise consumer choice. It concludes by calling into question the importance that has recently been attached to consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While gender-related inequalities at work remain common, examples of theft elimination, though rare, do exist. This paper provides an empirical examination of the acquisition of equal pay by women in the Post Office between 1870 and 1961. Using the dual theoretical axes of strategic action and structural constraint, it focuses upon the collective action of social groups, and the structural constraints within which they acted. Arguing that structure and action cannot be isolated from each other except for heuristic purposes, it concludes that men were the primary inhibitors of equal pay, and politically buttressed market forces its crucial promoter. [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 provides the first detailed study of lower white-collar workers in Soviet society. It traces the historical development of this social category during the Soviet period, gives a general social profile of the stratum now and locates it in the Soviet system of social stratification. Comparisons are made with equivalent strata in Western society, and both divergences and commonalities are identified. The former are explained by reference to the different economic, political/ideological and cultural factors which have shaped the system of social stratification and movement within it. Similarities are seen to be a consequence of the fact that the same division of labour characteristics both types of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Lockwoodian typology of deferential, proletarian, and privatized working-class consciousness, this social-historical analysis reconstructs and compares the kinds of social representations held by East European workers of the immigrant and native-born generations in an American mill town in the period 1890-1940. Exemplifying and extending the newer literature on class consciousness and social imagery, the paper shows (1) how and which influences of a micros and macroscopic nature shaped the social meaning-systems of East European workers; and (2) how and under which circumstances their images of the social order formed complex, fragmented, and multivalent configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the contours of current, practical explanatory problems in stratification theory showing the similarity of issues in apparently diverse approaches, both Marxist and non- Marxist. There are two related purposes. The first is to show the specific nature of the current crisis, locating paninular explanatory failures. The second is to illustrate the more general issue of the way in which the central epistemology of self-conscious social science derives from and describes failures in social scientific practice. This is well illustrated in the response to current problems. Both purposes are served by Laying bare the procedures by which attempts are made to convert the contradictions inherent in explanatory failures into contradictory features of social experience which could be explained by consistent theories. Contradiction is thus, apparently, removed from its role in specifying the need for theoretical development, to encapsulating the processes by which current social arrangements are reproduced. However, we show that despite initial plausibility such attempts merely displace explanatory contradictions rather than solve them. The attempts are justified by an explicit or implicit action frame of reference which, though it is central to abstract discussions of the nature of social science, is invoked in practical social science only in circumstances of explanatory failure in an unproductive attempt to insulate the theories from the consequences of their failure. Productive social science is the resolution of contradictions in the transformation of theoretical objects and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the sociological importance of popular class imagery has gained considerable attention in recent years, much empirical research continues to interpret class identifications and conceptions of class structure as evidence of fundamental class perspectives. This paper challenges the underlying assumptions of this position by directly examining popular sentiments about class and inequality. The results show that neither nominal class affiliations, nor conceptions of class structure, encompass ideologically homogeneous perspectives. Working and, especially, middle class identifications embrace diverse class sentiments, and these discrepancies within class affiliations are reinforced by differences in political preferences. Similarly, conceptions of a dichotomous class structure are not inevitably associated with particular class sentiments any more so than are conceptions of society as a graded hierarchy. In modem societies, where many traditional, ascriptive class barriers, distinctions and privileges have been eroded, class assumes a more fluid and indefinite meaning in social consciousness, diluting the links between class affiliations, conceptions of social structure, and class sentiments proper. In essence, class sentiments cannot be taken for granted, and require systematic investigation in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article commences with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the `sociology of sociology' enterprise. It is argued that a careful use of the approach can be illuminating in so far as it relates perceived internal contradiction in a given work to the wider intellectual milieux. The first section deals with the way in which some writers have depicted the strains between individuals and their worlds. I then go on to examine the way in which George Brown and his co-workers have chosen to explain the relationship between the `social structure' and the aetiology of depression in women. There then follow two sections dealing with the ambivalent relationship between two strands in Brown's work a the impulse of `romanticism' and the constraint of `classicism'. This ambivalence it is argued, derives from his assumptions regarding the nature of man and scientific method. The paper concludes with an examination of the way in which an adherence to a `scientific' methodology negates the `romantic', political implications he claims for his work. 1 do not offer any alternative research strategies, but simply point out that a more self-consciously `political' theory is required with a lesser dependence on clinical classification, if we are to understand the social nature of mental illnesses such as depression in the hope of finding socio-political remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is pointed out that the new `sociology of literature' makes virtually no reference to poetry and is unable to cope with it. I argue that the reason for this is that in some sense poetry is incompatible with the idea of sociology. The language of poetry is almost definable as that which cannot be used in ordinary discourse or in the affirmation of social organizations. Examples are given to support this view. The implication is then drawn that `academic sociology' by overlooking this feature of poetic language stays unaware of the limitations of its own language; on the other hand Marxism, although clearly more sympathetic to poetic uses of language, is over-cager to then explain that use in Marxist terms. But even Marxist criticism pays little attention to poetry, thus supporting the general view of this paper. The parallels with the view expressed in terms of the views of social phenomenology. and its view of language, are also drawn out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of West Indian political mobilization in Britain is discussed. A number of processes-cultural ambivalence, individualism and island parochialism are examined as contributory factors to the paucity and ephemerality of localized West indian political associations in the metropolitan society. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of, for example, changes in religious and family organization and how these relate to localized stratification systems within West Indian settlements in Britain. The utility of historical and comparative frameworks is stressed throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that worker participation has not evolved out of the humanization of capitalism, as is usually suggested, but has appeared cyclically. These cycles are traced over more than a century and are shown to correspond to periods when management authority is felt to be facing challenge. Participation is thus best understood as a means of attempting to secure labour's compliance. However, the framework of common interests upon which participation is premised is untenable, and m practice the efficiency of such schemes in Britain has been for the most part severely attenuated by the realities of structural conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a response to an article by Robin Fincham. The information society is no arcane sociological concept emerging from high theory. It is already in much more popular use, and there frequently exhibits the high-tech hype the author mentioned in the article. At the same time it is used by serious social scientists trying intellectually to grapple with the transformations of the modern world. The problem is that futurists often draw upon sociological data in order to justify the information society and that some social scientists are uncritical of certain aspects of it. The author does not mean to tar all its users with the same brush. But it does seem to him that a proper sociological task is to examine both the empirical adequacy of the concept and its role within legitimating processes, especially given its increasing use in public discourse. As the author sees it this entails referring selectively to both kinds of literature. To obtain theoretical leverage at least two issues must be confronted. One is to accept an interactive model of the relations between technology and society, a model, which recognizes both the social relations in technology and the ways that technologies constrain and enable social development. Following from this, the second issue is to recognize the different levels of analysis.

It is well known that women and men tend to work in different occupations, and generally held that this disadvantages women. In order to understand how far this occupational segregation entails gender inequality it is necessary to examine the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the segregation. The horizontal dimension measures difference without inequality while the vertical dimension measures the extent of the occupational inequality. Two measures of vertical inequality are used: pay and social stratification (CAMSIS). Measurements over a number of industrially developed countries show the expected male advantage with regard to pay. However, contrary to popular beliefs, women are consistently advantaged in terms of stratification. Also, it is found that the position of women is more favourable where the overall segregation is higher – the lower the male advantage on pay and the greater the female advantage on stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the central interests of sociology is the relationship between self and society, and in particular how social change affects individuality, constraining or liberating the selves that we can be. This article proposes that because a sense of belonging plays a central role in connecting the person to the social, it can act as a window into studying the relationship between social change and the self. Furthermore, belonging offers a complex person-centred and dynamic approach that avoids reifying social structures, but rather depicts them as actively lived. A focus on belonging thus allows a dynamic examination of the mutual influence between self and society, and of how everyday practices are both regulated and creative, and hence generative of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The social institution of prostitution or sex work has a long and varied history in the West, during almost all of which women playing their trade within it have been stigmatized. After a brief excursus on contemporary sex work and the concept of stigma itself, this article applies the author's jigsaw model to throw light on the causal role of social structures in shaping sex work stigma, in relation to women migrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics working as escorts in central London, typically on a short-term opportunistic basis. Interviews with a small snowball sample of a dozen women inform and illustrate the analysis. The differential causal effects of relations of class, command, gender and ethnicity, as well as those of stigma, are considered. It is argued that stigma relations in a given context or figuration cannot be grasped in isolation, but are always part of a nexus of social structures of varying causal importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential of social capital for understanding social processes involved in neighbourhood decline or regeneration, in social exclusion and inclusion, and for illuminating relationships between structure and agency. Theoretical approaches in the work of putnam, Jacobs, and coleman are compared and qualitive neighbourhood case studies used to identify contextual influences on social capital's source of more inclusive and integrative social networks and wider solidarity is addressed. Influences on key sources of social capital stability, integration, solidarity and tolerance solidarity and 'thin' (as well as 'thick') trust is contingent on certain resources and conditions. They indicate also how local work history is reflected in the organic nature of social capital. Informed by Giddens' structuration theory, an alternative approach for exploring process is suggested which considers social networks as key mediator in recursive relationships between structures and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]