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This article attempts to move debates about interests beyond the impasse between proponents of objective evaluation and defenders of a non-judgemental approach to lay actors’ interests. It develops an evaluative approach to actors’ understandings of their interests but rejects ideas of ‘real’ or ‘objective’ interests in favour of an engagement with the limitations of actors’ understandings from within their own frameworks. These ideas are developed through a sympathetic but critical engagement with Lukes’ account of interests in Power: A Radical View. Issues explored include the viability of the divide between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ interests, the notion of ‘contradictory interests’ and the relation between social scientific and agential accounts. Following Holmwood, I argue that social scientific evaluations are only justified when they identify limitations and problems in actors’ understandings of their interests and show how these are avoided in social scientific interest accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alongside many significant changes, there are considerable continuities between the work activities and work institutions of the 21st century and those of earlier periods studied by the sociology of work. These continuities are easily neglected if we get too taken up with what is allegedly 'new' in the world which we study or if we constantly seek new theoretical 'directions' or 'turns'. A successful future sociology of work needs to achieve a balance between attention to change and continuity, both in what it looks at empirically and in the devices it uses in its analyses and theorizing as well as in its communication beyond the academy. The idea of the sociological imagination, which brings together American Pragmatist thinking with the European ideas of Weber and Marx can help considerably in reinvigorating the sociology of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the examples of the 'kinship consequences' of assisted conseption, the contemporary enthusiasm for tracing family histories, and a more sgeneral interest in family resemblances to argue that there is a contemporary fascination with kinship which existing sociological and anthropological theory do not

The article focuses on the challenges which qualitative data archiving poses. The starting point is that one has no quarrel regarding the availability of information about the mechanics of qualitative data available on the LSDS Qualidata site. By mechanics it does not only mean the preparation of research materials in an archive friendly format but more importantly the precautions to be taken in the interests of protecting the research participants, the concerns of those who developed and carried out the original research and the integrity of the data themselves. Indeed, these issues are now well rehearsed in any self-respecting account of qualitative data and secondary analysis. In the interests of moving the debate forward everyone would like to focus attention upon the actual re-usage of qualitative data. The first issue not as easily dispensed with as might be imagined. Actual figures on the current usage of archived qualitative datasets do not appear to be published.

In response to the recent articles in Sociology on the concept of `strategy', this paper aims to make a contribution to the debate by drawing attention to some of its gendered aspects. We seek to raise some further questions without necessarily providing clear-cut answers. We argue that the concept is rooted within masculine spheres of activity, and yet has been widely applied to women's lives, particularly in considering some of the contextual constraints of domestic activities. We consider the reasons for the attractiveness of the concept, as well as the dangers in applying it to women's domestic lives, using illustrations from our own empirical work. While we have found an alternative language difficult to find, we are concerned that the sociological conceptualisation of women's lives in the private sphere needs to work outward from the domestic rather than inward from the public. Furthermore, such conceptual reconsideration may also assist our understandings of female and male lives in public settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the class location of families has received considerable attention in recent years, existing research has adopted quite divergent approaches in defining those locations. This inconsistency is symptomatic of a number of unresolved practical problems associated with classifying the class composition of families. This analysis identifies these problems and suggests ways in which they might be overcome. It argues that rather than adopting a simple categorical distinction between class homogeneous and class heterogeneous families, it is important to distinguish between levels or degrees of class heterogeneity. A strategy for doing so is outlined, and its advantages in distinguishing different types of class locations are demonstrated through an analysis of class identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that the discussions of the concept of strategy in papers by Crow (1989) and Morgan (1989) ignore the military origins of strategic thinking, and that more attention needs to be given to its diffusion from military to general social usage, as well as to specifically sociological uses. The paper then outlines a critique of strategic studies derived from the sociology of war. It argues that sociologists can learn, from the problems and current controversies of strategic studies, some of the limitations of strategic analysis as an approach in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the article is to examine some ethnographic data, which sheds light on the way humour is used in the production of social order in specific settings. The sociology of humour and laughter has been a neglected area of sociological investigation, yet humour belongs to fundamental aspects of human life, comparable to say, religion and language. However, recently a number of publications have appeared dealing with sociological aspects of humour. Such work often begins with an extended, almost exclusory, apologetic for, firstly, having the nerve to draw humour to the attention of serious-minded colleagues and, secondly, for the likelihood that the subsequent analysis will probably destroy the intrinsic fun of the topic under study. According to the author, writing an ethnographic account of humorous situations is rather like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again; but the study of humour suggests that it is not just serious accounts of humour which are prone to this problem, but all attempts to unpick social reality in order to assemble a final sealed account of it with no loose ends.

This paper provides an analysis of a relatively unusual topic, namely, the social divisions surrounding the consumption of tourist-related services. In the first section a number of points are made which suggest that the topic is both important and difficult to analyse. Some attention is paid to the features of the tourist gaze. In the second main section the problems brought up by various economists of congestion and positionality are analysed. It is suggested that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the romantic and the collective tourist gaze which makes the issue of congestion/positionality more complex than economists have suggested. Some sociological implications of this distinction are developed in the final concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case for feminist knowledge as an improvement on male-centred sociology is a strong one. Taking a feminist standpoint produces knowledge of gendered meanings and relationships of which we may not be aware and which sociology has generally ignored. This resolves some of the problems posed by male-centred versions of sociology. Taking a feminist standpoint, though, also raises serious problems of how to make both sociological and feminist knowledge convincing. It enables us to improve on existing sociological knowledge, but exposes many further problems which still need attention. The implications of taking a feminist standpoint are explored by considering some methodological problems of improving on a 1960s study of shiftworking women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common methodological themes and issues are identified which run through quantitative, ethnographic and comparative-historical research. Particular attention is paid to a variety of historical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems of deciding upon objectives and strategies for courses in research methods, at whatever level they are taught, are inevitably inscribed within a more general set of intellectual and political problems with which all sociologists are familiar. Beyond these general intellectual and political elements which influence us are the particular institutional settings in Which we do our teaching and research and which equally affect decisions made on the content of courses. In what follows attention is given to some of these factors and their inter-relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first section of this paper 1 note a parallel between certain problems generated by Steven Lukes's `three-dimensional' view of power, and what I call the `paradox of emancipation' in certain traditions of Marxist thought. Lukes's critique of what he calls the one and two-dimensional views of power is next reviewed, and Lukes's own `three-dimensional' view subjected to analysis and criticism. Lukes's definition of power in terms of interests is identified as a major source of difficulty, and three distinct ways of constructing a distinction between `real' interests and subjective' interests, or preferences are identified in Lukes's work. In the fourth section of the paper I present an alternative conception, or `view' of power which, I argue, sustains the essential features of Lukes's critique of the one- and two-dimensional views, but which, by severing the definitional tie between power and interests, avoids the value dependence of Lukes's own view of power. Finally, I make explicit a view of interests which runs counter to that which, I hold, Lukes, Connolly, a at have in common with more orthodox political scientists. I go on to indicate the place of this concept in the formation and re-formation of personal and social identities, and briefly indicate its bearing on what I earlier called the paradox of emancipation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]