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.

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

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

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

This paper argues that the analysis of culture and mass communication should be regarded as central concerns of sociology and social theory. It develops a framework for the analysis of culture and shows how this framework can be applied to the study of mass communication. Focusing on the medium of television, the paper highlights some of the distinctive characteristics of mass communication and examines some of the factors involved in the production, construction and reception of media messages. It is argued that this approach enables the analyst to pose questions concerning the ideological character of mass communication in a new and more fruitful way.

In his 'reply' to our paper 'Biasing the News'1 Murdock accuses us of 'misrepresenting media studies'2 and there is a sense in which he must be right, though it is not alas one which enables him to rebut our arguments. A substantial part of our paper was given over to the reanalysis of some of Murdock 's data.3 This is not the part of the paper which attracts interest, and all the oral and written comments we have received have avoided reference to it, though it is the part which interests us and which motivated the production of the paper. Oddly enough, Murdock gives only a brief section of his counter-argument to discussion of this part, though it is the one which directly concerns his work. The remainder of our paper involved general critical comments on (sociological) 'media studies' using one or two cases as occasions for a wholesale attack. Media studies is a big and burgeoning field. We do not need Murdock to tell us that, or to give us reading lists in it. The fact that there is an awful lot of it about (and that a lot of it is awful) gives reason and edge to our objections. However, given that we are briefly characterizing and criticizing a large field, we are bound to be in a position where some studies can be found which will, in one way or another, be exempt from one or other of our strictures. That a study is not subject to one criticism does not entail that it also avoids the others, and we cannot find studies which do avoid the difficulties we point out, some of which Murdock concedes we do correctly identify. It is no good, then, listing a large number of studies. The thing Murdock needs to do is to single out those which are exemplary, canonical, which are not fairly easily accessible to serious methodological criticism. We complain, for example, that 'form' has been neglected in media studies, Murdock accepts our point, but suggests that recent studies may meet our objection, but the one to which he refers is one that we have just had occasion to review, and which we argue does no better with its data than the studies we criticize in the initial paper.4 Murdock likens us to Tom Jones' tutor, Thwackum, but conducts himself in the fashion of Jones' other teacher, Square, who held virtue to be a matter of theory only, and was well versed in eclectic reliance upon the writing of the 'antients'. The reference to Thwackum is no doubt meant to be chastening, as is the citation of media literature. How insolent we are to question all this established knowledge in so many books. The citations lay down the criteria for club membership; media studies are about the things these books are about, for they are the relevant authorities. We disagree. And insist that the criteria are arbitrary. We are not impressed by bulk. There are a lot of media studies, that does not stand disputing, but it is worth asking whether they add up to anything? They are (despite divergences and disagreements amongst various kinds of approach to the media) very repetitive, being mainly designed to give some empirical application to more or less dilute versions of the theory of ideology. They seek over and over again to make much of the fact that the media are socially produced, so much that we think we shall likely weep if we have to read again that 'Everyday life is not organized a priori as discrete public events which can be simply mirrored by newsworkers. It does not differentiate itself into newsworthy events for reporting and publication'5 and that 'importance and interest are not endemic properties of occurrences

The nature of working class or subordinate consciousness and its relation to the dominant value system has been a central component of the research into actors' `images of society'. This paper offers an empirical contribution to this topic via an examination of the conceptions of the economic system held by samples of Australian managers and shop stewards. Previous research has suggested that the consciousness of members of subordinate groups is inconsistent or contradictory in that lower class actors provide a mixture of support for and rejection of dominant values. The evidence reviewed here lends support to this finding but by focusing more closely upon the categories, vocabularies and frameworks which make up the actors' images of the economy, the paper attempts to offer a more satisfactory explanation of how such inconsistencies can appear, one which highlights the role of language as a mechanism in ideological incorporation.

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.

Cultural trends shape the experience of marriage by forming expectations, entitlements and obligations. The self-development discourse generated by the therapeutic culture has been suggested as playing a part in such shaping. This paper examines how this particular discourse affects the way women experience their marital conversations and, more specifically, the extent to which they feel able to initiate change-directed negotiation within them. Twenty-eight professional women in England, selected to reflect different occupational exposures to the self-development discourse, were interviewed in order to examine their experiences of the marital conversation and possible changes within it. The analysis shows that specific feeling rules limit the possibility of women's concerns entering the marital conversation, and that the self-development discourse can introduce alternative feeling rules with the potential to overcome such limitations. It is shown that women who are influenced by the ideological messages equating change with relationship improvement contained within this discourse are able to adopt its proposed feeling rules and to use them to introduce negotiation into their marital conversations. These women are able to use this increased negotiability within the marital conversation to become more powerful in shaping their marital experiences.

Sociological theories of race and ethnicity have been dominated by the metaphor of the social construct, which suggests that they are ideological categories concealing `real' principles of social structure. This idea is problematic because it elides the sense in which race and ethnicity operate both as functional principles of material exclusion and sources of social meaning. The paper examines critically the metaphor of social construction in leading contemporary theories of race and ethnicity, arguing that too often the context and the content of these processes of construction are not clarified and that, paradoxically, this can lead to the implicit incorporation of a racial essentialism into the explanatory enterprise. An alternative, symbolic approach to theorising race and ethnicity is suggested which avoids these pitfalls. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice and anthropological ideas of symbolic kinship, it argues that race and ethnicity can be theorised as both categories of material exclusion and of social meaning. The implications of this approach for understanding the historical construction of racial and ethnic categories are discussed, along with the implications for the relationship between sociological analysis and political activism in the arena of race.

Based on a recent ethnographic study of professional crime (Hobbs 1995), this paper is concerned with juxtaposing the contemporary enacted environment of serious crime with the most potent device that is utilised to explain and contain its practices and ideological frameworks: the underworld.

This paper critically explores the ways in which power has been conceptualised within Foucauldian feminism. I focus on two facets within this framework: power as productive and power as relational. Although Foucauldian feminism combines both, tensions between them exist, particularly when it comes to understanding resistance. I argue for the need to focus on a productive or generative paradigm of power which perceives power neutrally as neither inherently oppressive nor liberatory, yet with the capacity to be both. In this way, power can be conceived of as ubiquitous and trans-historical without inhibiting the possibilities for social change.

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.

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 management of emotion in the private sphere.

Marshall et al. have claimed that class is the major social structural influence on social consciousness and ideological conflict in modern 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.

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.

Critics of the convergence thesis have not seriously challenged the notion that occupational structure is technologically determined and a relatively invariable feature of industrialized societies. This paper discusses some of the conceptual problems raised by the account of the transformation of occupational structure to be found in the convergence literature. The issues are examined with reference to some distinctive features of the Soviet occupational structure which have resulted from policies pursued in accordance with ideological considerations and deliberate growth strategies. The evidence shows that the state of technology cannot be viewed as an autonomous variable and that policies which counteract or reinforce the workings of market forces are of crucial importance. Some of the implications of variations in occupational structure for patterns of social stratification are discussed; recent studies of stratification in state socialist countries have tended to by-pass these questions. The sociological causes of diversity in the occupational structure of advanced societies need to be further explored.

IN a recent paper, Berger et al argue that traditional concepts of honour and reputation have been eroded as a consequence of subjective adaptations to modern industrial society. However, historical analysis of English libel laws suggests that honour and reputation are ideological elements whose contents are broadly specified by distinct modes of production. Thus feudal honour was an aristocratic class ideology which was necessarily transformed by the rise of commodity relations. Moreover, subsequent commodification of honour in English law derives from and reflects the emergence of capitalist forces rather than more general forces of modernization. The corollary of this observation is that in modern socialist laws, honour and reputation differ substantially from the parallel concepts in English and United States law, strongly reflecting a specifically socialist ideology.

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 characterises both types of society.

Social movements inspired by radical or transformative ideologies have pro-liferated in western industrial societies, but have usually been effectively contained without violent repression. This paper takes up the debate about the mechanisms of containment with reference to a neglected aspect—the process of ideology production itself. It is suggested that the symbolic structure of radical ideologies may be understood as the outcome of three conceptual processes: (1) de-legitimation; (2) dis-alienation; (3) `commutation' or communication/interaction. The ideological product may also be evaluated, in sociological terms, as a theoretical and empirical response to determinate social problems. Two recent examples are used to illustrate the main lines of such an analysis: the International Marxist Group in Britain, and Students for a Democratic Society in the USA. They indicate that the internal, conceptual requirements of a radical ideology, and especially the need to publicly present and validate ideological knowledge, may distort the social analysis in ways which render it less effective as a force for political mobilization, and therefore magnify the effects of more familiar structural constraints on radical movements.

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 reasessed 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.

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.

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 modern 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.

This paper considers the relevance of data from a recent survey to the thesis that the welfare state is currently running the risk of a crisis of political legitimacy. Two traditions in the discussion of legitimation issues are outlined, focusing respectively on the role of ideology and of the maximization of individual values in the production of dissenting opinions about state policy. The analysis of survey data indicates that there is no evidence for the view that attitudes to welfare provision add up to a consistent disaffection with policy. Perceptions of self-interest emerge as the best predictors of preferences, and these appear closely related to location in a typical family life-style.

This paper begins by examining the typology of educational systems outlined by Earl Hopper in Sociology (vol. 2, no. 1, 1968) and argues against the attempt to reduce the comparative study of education to varieties of occupational selection. On the other hand, accepting that a central part of the sociology of education must be with ideology and the generation and transmission of learning, it outlines a framework for examining this in Britain.

This paper presents the first findings of a survey carried out in Melbourne, Australia. It attempts to test hypotheses based on the embourgeoisement thesis, and its variations, in a social system with a strong equalitarian ideology and compulsory arbitration for all sections of the work force. It assesses the economic differences between white collar and blue collar workers and also the difference between these groups and a middle class group. It also compares the Australian situation with America and Britain. It finds a significant difference between blue collar and white collar income rates, total income medians and career income medians, as against the apparent near parity of the situation in Britain and America. These differences are not mitigated by wives' earnings or income from other sources. There is an almost complete dichotomy between these groups and the middle class group.