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Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The relationship between gentrification and globalisation has recently become a significant concern for gentrification scholars. This has involved developing an understanding of how gentrification has become a place-based strategy of class (re)formation during an era in which globalisation has changed sociological structures and challenged previously established indicators of social distinction. This paper offers an alternative reading of the relationship between gentrification and globalisation through examining the results of a mixed method research project which looked at new-build gentrification along the River Thames, London, UK. This research finds gentrification not to be distinguished by the gentrifer-performed practice of habitus within a ‘global context’. Rather, the responsibility for gentrification, and the relationship between globalisation and gentrification, is found to originate with capital actors working within the context of a neoliberal global city. In order to critically conceptualise this form of gentrification, and understand the role of globalisation within the process, the urban theory of Lefebvre is drawn upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Patient and public involvement in health research and care has been repeatedly theorised using the metaphor of spaces, knowledge spaces and participatory citizenship spaces. Drawing on data from a three year qualitative study of people involved in health research with organisations across England, this article explores where these spaces fit in a wider social, political and historical landscape. It outlines a theme recurring frequently in the study data: a unified public/patient/service‐user perspective in opposition to a professional/clinical/academic view. This is discussed in relation to Habermas's division between the lifeworld and system. Patient and public involvement is mapped as spaces between these spheres, therefore between the social norms pertaining to them. In this way, involvement spaces are seen as liminal, in‐between or threshold spaces; this concept provides us with new insights on both the opportunities and the conflicts that are integral in the ambiguous, complex interactions which take place in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critique of King's well-known Scheme of the social order in 1688 examines his purposes, the Scheme's evolutionary process, and the taxation data (hearth, poll, window, and marriage duty) that King used to construct it, before contrasting his conclusions with recent research. His social hierarchy emerges as a rather crude and backward-looking stereotype based on too many intelligent guesses, with his treatment of the poorer families being least satisfactory. Overall, King's population totals appear sound, his national income estimate low, and various mean household sizes and family and children's totals unreliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the social structure and the distribution of agricultural wealth in Cumbria, England. The challenge thrown to a growing group of historians may well turn out to be beneficial. There is little doubt, for example, that the examination and analysis of probate inventories, covering large geographical areas, and for long curiously neglected, will eventually produce working estimates of changing wealth levels which will in turn permit inter-regional as well as inter-local comparisons. It is explicitly assumed that a person's economic and social position at the time of his death-when the inventory was made-may not reflect his wealth and status at the peak of his career as a farmer, dealer, or craftsman. The apparent wealth levels suggested by inventories may have been influenced by a host of variables-the most important being mean death ages in a period, time, or region, ages at marriage, the sizes of families, inheritance customs and types of tenure. Plainly, if a strong element of homogeneity exists, these damaging or worrying variables become much less frightening, although it is taken for granted that elaborate demographic investigation must follow at a later stage, and that no dubious assumption will be left unchecked. Finally, it should be stressed that this is a study of stages in the growth of wealth and not a study of poverty.

The article examines the social structure, population change and origin of commonfields in the eastern Norfolk community in England in the 1980s. Within eastern Norfolk clearest evidence of the early history of the commonfield system is provided by the township of Martham in the coastal district of Flegg. Like so many townships in this area, Martham was divided among several different manors, the largest of which belonged to the Prior of Norwich and comprised slightly more than half the arable area. It is to this manor that the bulk of surviving documentation relates, the absence of comparable data for the other manors in the township preventing any full appraisal of the topographical extent of the township's commonfields and the size and layout of peasant holdings. Notwithstanding this limitation, though, available evidence (of which the most important is a detailed extent of 1292) is sufficient to show that Martham's commonfields covered an extensive area and were characterized by extreme subdivision.