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This article considers the challenge of regulation across national borders using the example of the shipping industry. It examines the success of different global regulatory strategies in the sector; specifically the implementation of smart regulation and enforced self-regulation. In doing so it draws upon empirical research into the enforcement of labour standards via port-State control in India, Russia and the UK, and the regulation of training in Singapore, Philippines and the UK. It concludes that effective global regulation faces considerable challenges. Within the relatively conducive environment of shipping it finds that smart regulation has been vitiated by perceived inconsistency in inspection practice and that enforced self-regulation has been rendered less effective by cross-national differences in resourcing and regulatory commitment, compounded by the difficulties of paper-based validation. It argues that, in relation to issues of effective global governance, the shipping industry may stand as a critical case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Professor Les Back talking about class and community driving the path into sociology. Topics include task of the academic practice of sociology being a kind of lay making the familiar strange; and objects to stories of globalisation, supply chains, manufacturing in the global South as well as colonialism.

There has been a well-documented 'cultural turn' in social theory. This takes two forms: the 'epistemological' case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the 'historical' case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the 'cultural turn' away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a 'cultural turn' in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics -- albeit without naming it as such -- and how this might be extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban and rural sociology is currently dominated by two relatively separate approaches. One perspective emphasises political economy and increasing globalisation. Another focuses on the meaning of urban and rural areas in people's lives. This paper argues for a fusion between these two views. Urban and rural sociology should be concerned with the relations between political economy on the one hand and the biological and psychological bases of human behaviour on the other. Recent developments in the human sciences and psychology assist in making this link. They can be used to extend the original insights of the early Chicago School of sociology, particularly as regards the formation of human identities. Nevertheless, there remain substantial arguments as to how 'the Chicago School's biotic level' should be conceptualised and how we envisage its links to the more conscious, pre-planned, aspects of human behaviour. Early Marx and Williams's now somewhat neglected work on the country and the city offer provocative yet helpful ways forward. [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]

Change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union presents a whole new set of sociological problems, requiring a revision of old theories of large-scale institutional change. My aim in this paper is to delineate patterns and gaps to be found in sociological theories dealing with change in Soviet-type societies. After a short review of the explanatory claims of totalitarian, modernisation, civil society and institutional perspectives, I propose an analysis of such change in terms of the strategic conduct of the main agents (the state-party and society) within its institutional context. The collapse of communism is seen as a result of the evolution of the system caused by the lack of institutional arrangements which could set limits to the party-state's arbitrary rule, and -- by the same token -- could create conditions for economic efficiency and encourage the emergence of interests other than those directly serving the centre. This can be seen as a spiral process of change in which the system was long losing its internal consistency and gradually exhausting itself. This process consisted of two mutually reinforcing trends: first, changes in the relationship between political centre and society, resulting in the declining ability of the party-state to act effectively as the agent of society; secondly, the growing heterogeneity and internationalisation of society, leading to the growing incompatibility of central planning with the informational and motivational requirements of a modern economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a network analysis of interlocks among the largest Canadian corporations, this paper examines the restructuring of finance capital between 1976 and 1986, a time of great flux in the structure of capital, both internationally and in Canada. Results indicate a shift away from the relatively depersonalized system of `polyarchic financial hegemony' - prevalent during the post-war boom era - towards a `holding system' of family-controlled enterprise groups, the largest of which are self-contained financial-industrial complexes whose members are linked by complicated patterns of intercorporate ownership and capital allocation. The increasingly internationalized - and particularly continental - character of Canadian-based finance capital points to the consolidation of a circuit of transnational finance capital that expresses Canada's specific location in the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situating data from a pilot study conducted in the Philippines within the research literature, we examine the impact of the recent global economic crisis on the experiences of Filipino migrant workers and their families in the context of previous economic upheavals. In so doing, we highlight the gendered effects of shifts in the global economy and detail government response to the premature return of migrant workers to the Philippines primarily due to retrenchment impelled by the global economic crisis. While the current conditions of migration and return are significant, we argue that these are not the result of a new global economic crisis, but are instead the ongoing effects of neoliberal globalization that have resulted in sustained multiple crises with which residents of the Global South have had to contend. Moreover, the reputed solutions offered to returned migrants are rooted in the same faulty paradigm that will be destined to produce only further hardship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article opens by suggesting that the decline in the sociology of work in the UK has been overstated; research continues, but in locations such as business schools. The continued vitality of the field corresponds with material changes in an increasingly globalized capitalism, with more workers in the world, higher employment participation rates of women, transnational shifts in manufacturing, global expansion of services and temporal and spatial stretching of work with advanced information communication technologies. The article demonstrates that Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a crucial resource in the sociology of work, especially in the UK; core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work). The article argues that the concept of the labour power has been critical to underpinning the sustained influence of labour process analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and proliferation of new information and communication technologies has generated some profound claims about the erasure of place. Whilst these claims have continued political and policy resonance, they are increasingly challenged in sociological debate, which emphasizes the persistence of the local. Following this lead, our article explores relations between technology and place. We develop our understanding through engagement with Science and Technology Studies, Actor Network Theory and geographical conceptualizations of place. Our argument is worked through a new empirical study of telemedicine, where new technologies are applied precisely to overcome place. Our analysis is that, on the contrary, empirical outcomes are legible only through the lens of place. This has important policy implications and broader implications for thinking about technology in contemporary debates about globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses European migrants to Spain's coastal areas. These 'residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories and employ transnational affective and instrumental networks. Research on British migrants to Spain has shown a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. While these migrants dream of integration, an ambiguous status in Spanish society constrains assimilation and leads to marginalisation.

The familiar sociology of intellectuals has been constructed in the global metropole, and it is debatable how relevant its concepts are to the periphery. A life-history study was conducted with diverse intellectual workers in South Africa. A range of intellectual identities is apparent. The specific history of the Apartheid era, the struggle against Apartheid, and the advent of neo-liberalism have all shaped intellectual workers' cultural formation and created major differences in trajectories. Periphery/metropole relations profoundly structure cultural practices and consciousness, but these relations are not static. Distinctive patterns of intellectual work appear. The legacy of democratic struggle gives prominence to 'crossover' forms of intellectual work, fuels resistance to neo-liberal globalization, and gives a distinctive form to the problem of reproducing the intellectual workforce and project. The research thus emphasizes the cultural productiveness of the global 'periphery' and the need for forms of social theory based here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of globalization requires attention to the social and political units that are being variously undermined, restructured or facilitated by this process. Sociology has often assumed that the unit of analysis is society, in which economic, political and cultural processes are coterminous, and that this concept maps onto that of nation-state. This article argues that the nation-state is more mythical than real. This is for four reasons: first, there are more nations than states; second, several key examples of presumed nation-states are actually empires; third, there are diverse and significant polities in addition to states, including the European Union and some organized religions; fourth, polities overlap and rarely politically saturate the territory where they are located. An implication of acknowledging the wider range and overlapping nature of polities is to open greater conceptual space for the analysis of gender and ethnicity in analyses of globalization. Finally the article re-conceptualizes 'polities' and 'society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]