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This study used an interdisciplinary approach to examine what tourism researchers have done by analyzing all full-length articles published in Annals of Tourism Research (ATR) from 1973 to 2006. During the study, the research topics of the included articles in ATR were identified using an interdisciplinary approach, and generated 20 research topic categories. The study also identified six categories of regional focus. After that, the research topics and regional focus of each included article were analyzed. Among the 20 research topics, Sociology and Cultural Issue was found as the most popular research category, which was followed by Psychology and Tourists Behavior Issue, Economics of Tourism, Resort Development and Planning, and Heritage and Environment Issue. Apparently, tourism research in ATR follows an interdisciplinary approach, and this approach is valued in the study and research of tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first article in English of Rosenstock-Huessy'sFull Count of the Times, the second volume of hisSociology. The vastness and diversity of Rosenstock-Huessy's corpus, plus the associative manner of his writing, makes any systematic analysis of his work very difficult. Yet he explicitly stated in his Sociology that he did have a system. In this paper I clarify why his work is devoted to theFull Count of the Times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper highlights the juridical Genetic Modified Organisms statu artis and its legal definition in Italy, Europe and in the rest of the world in order to compare different cultural approaches to needs, interests, fears and precautions against a not scientifically certain innovation. It also stresses the legislative processes towards an extended participation that unifies economic interests, political goals, customer satisfaction, collective safety, and human construction for a sustainable future, a new form of governance. The paper ends with a sociological and comparative analysis of needs, fears, interests and responsibilities related to GMO in Italy and Europe, with the aim of defining some possible evolutions of ruling uncertainty today.

A genuinely sociological theory of social change is lacking, but the literature of the social sciences abounds with the elements of such a theory. The present paper deals with one of these elements, namely the change from tribalism to urbanism as a major instance of social change. For this purpose the concepts of culture and civilization are examined, and a plea is made to restore the concept of civilization to its rightful place in the vocabulary of sociologists and anthropologists. In doing this, the intention is not to reduce social change to the process of urbanization, but rather to isolate the sociological element which makes for social change within the supersession of a familial by a territorial society, wherever it occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay's aim is to explore the potential for relieving suffering with which clinical sociology can provide social actors. The author carries out a theoretical reflection of culture's function in human societies. Culture is an instrument for social actors, to give a meaning to what is happening at each moment. If culture does not grant an effective interpretation of reality, phenomena of disease can arise. This can happen for many different reasons, such as incoherent cultural representations or conflicts between different cultural issues. The paper outlines the kinds of cultural disease that can occur, as well as the possible causes of each. It also sets a link between cultural disease and the contemporary, general lack of cognitive references, due to historical changes - such as globalization - that have been happening too fast to be fully accepted by all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses methodological and theoretical issues that arise in contemporary analyses of cultural consumption. First, I review measures of cultural consumption that receive attention in the literature and I put forward several others that broaden the definition and measurement of this concept. I propose the inclusion of a variety of consumption realms and consumption publics, and advocate the use of integrated and flexible measures. I discuss the comparability of consumption indicators in the context of cross-national, crosscultural, and longitudinal research, and submit that it is important to have standardized measures for the sake of their reliability and validity, but also that it is important to have case-specific measures in order to prevent blurred cultural distinctions. Second, I suggest that consumer culture research further develop a series of theoretical questions that stand at the core of the field, particularly those that acknowledge the significant social consequences of cultural consumption: the transition from production to consumption; cultural consumption and the social matrix; cultural consumption as a generative concept; multiple consumer identities; and cultural consumption and cultural policy. The shared emphasis of these theoretical questions is on locating the position of individuals on multidimensional hierarchies of consumption, thus facilitating conceptualization of lifestyle tribes, status groups, or taste communities as generators of values, attitudes, and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of the contemporary class structure of the United States differ markedly in their interpretations of the class identification of professional and managerial employees. This paper argues that professional and managerial employees are a distinct new class formation particular to monopoly capitalism, that is, a new middle class. The gist of the argument is that monopoly capitalist relations of production and distribution have created conditions that allow new middle-class employees to receive a significantly higher price for their labor power than workers do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to a critical review of recent theoretical and methodological developments in comparative social mobility research. Issues are raised concerning underlying assumptions and ideological commitments that determine the way questions about social mobility have been formulated And researched within the mainstream empirical tradition of comparative stratification and mobility research. Part of the aim is to provoke a critical rethinking of the problems and a reassessment of the alternatives. It is argued that a substantive and viable alternative lies in class-based, as distinct from status-centered, theorizing that draws into its purview a larger, more dynamic image of the mobility process and an empirico-structural analysis of the interrelationships between social mobility and the process of class formation, domination, and reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similar in scope and significance to the industrial and agrarian revolutions, the modem scientific revolution has been slowly developing for the past century bringing changes which are both obvious and obscure. In general, scholars have analyzed this revolution in terms of two major conceptions which have emphasized either the effect of science technology or the effect of science on the social institutions and social organization of society. More recently interest has focused upon the growth of power of science and its alienating effects. But one aspect of this revolution, perhaps the most important aspect, has been almost totally ignored. This paper is devoted to an examination of this aspect the effect of science on culture. From its early beginnings, when it was at war with theology, to the postindustrial period of widespread acceptance, science has made its mark upon culture first in the production of new information and thus a "new world view" and later in the rise of "scientism" where the uncritical adoration of science has produced a new value in society-that of science itself. Because of their historical development and confinement to certain types of analytical models, sociology and the sociology of science have been unsuccessful in dealing with this type of social change. In addition to sociology's neglect of the effect of science on culture, sociologists are producing fragmented information about science and the revolution which leads to the belief that science, because of its internal value structure and utilitarian relationship to other social institutions, can not develop unchecked to a position of overwhelming power. Without any manifest intentions, sociologists have produced a conservative evaluation of science and the revolution.ceptions of the revolution; (2) the reasons for the neglect of sociological analysis of the effect of science on culture; (3) a brief overview of the replacement, destruction, and accommodation theories of the effect of science on culture; and (4) the change from atomistic accommodation during the preindustrial period, when science was at war with theology, to the holistic accommodation of science in the rise of scientism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a sociological commonplace to note that urban-industrial societies, regardless of differences in antecedent culture or in details of national history, tend to develop essentially similar social structures, and to undergo change in similar directions as a consequence of the working out of the same general processes in their specific socio-cultural settings. At the same time these specific socio-cultural differences--along with differences in resources, population societal scale and the like--produce larger or smaller differences in the detailed configuration of the basically similar structures in different societies or even within the same society from region to region, or at different points in time. Discovering the exact nature of these similarities and differences is the primary task of a comparative sociology of urban-industrial societies. But the identification of universal features common to all urban-industrial societies, and of less general features peculiar to a particular nation or a distinct stage in a process of change, requires the development of new methods of systematic comparative analysis. This paper proposes one such method, suitable for application to a limited, but important, phase of the problem: the comparative study of patterns of ecological differentiation among the residential sub-areas of urban communities.

This article focuses on the construction and development of cross-cultural analysis tools for students in Colombian universities. Primarily, it is a reflective piece of research which shows how ethnographically based constructs when combined with appropriate curricular platforms can constitute valuable tools in the acquisition of complex concepts such as culture and power in the context of conflict societies. Through the use of storytelling and narrative, the dynamics of power and culture are explored in the context of a university-level classroom. Lastly, the students’ standpoint in relation to critical societal issues is partly embedded in the narratives as the product of incremental or add-on exchanges during and beyond classroom time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction ( Bourdieu, 1979 , 1986 ), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as 'cultural capital'. The English Preface to Homo Academicus ( Bourdieu , 1988 ) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason ( Bourdieu, 1994 , 1998 ) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinction to Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control ( Young, 1971 ) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblesse d'état/State nobility ( Bourdieu, 1989 , 1996 ) and La misère du monde/The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al. , 1993, 1999 ) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les héritiers/The Inheritors ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b ; 1977 ) and La reproduction/Reproduction ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970 , 1977 ). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with an ethnographic account of an African Caribbean quadrille dance workshop for older people in south-east London. It moves from ethnography to cultural history to consider the evolution of the quadrille in France and England, its subsequent transportation to Jamaica and its creolized transformations. This leads to a discussion of the two dance styles performed in the quadrille workshop: the ballroom style and the camp style. The aim is to shed some light on the relation between mimesis and alterity in the performance of the quadrille, from an African Caribbean perspective, in this twenty-first century context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article serves as a reply to comments made on the author's article, wherein the commentator suggested that a congruence exists between the authors' description of the mystique in anthropology and the idea of cultural primitivism unobjectionable. The authors of the article in question claim that nowhere have they identified the mystique as a theory and deny that they proposed a reversal of the direction of valuation of the dichotomic theory in anthropological thought. Anthropology, according to the authors, is the study of culture, and culture not in any restricted range of manifestation.

An interview with Shamus Khan, assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, is presented. When asked about the definition of cultural sociology, he states that there are only a few definitions of class and they are all about economic and other inequalities. He mentions that the main debate has been whether classes are identifiable and bounded social phenomena or not.

This final article of the special issue looks back on our work on the ESRC projects, especially Keeping Open the Door to Mathematically-Demanding Courses in Further and Higher Education (published here and elsewhere), and looks forward to that of the 'Transmaths' projects under way - a collection of work on post-compulsory mathematics education during adolescence. I argue that this phase of mathematics education is dominated by two factors. First, there is the 'value' of mathematics to the learner and to society at large, which shapes all choices, decisions and strategies. Second, there is the fact of adolescence and the special demands on mathematics education this poses, for theoretical thinking, for identity, and for relationships. In our project, we adopted mixed methods approaches to capturing the 'whole person' of the mathematics learner (and teacher): their sense of self and motivation, their disposition to learn mathematics, and their mathematics self-efficacy. The key contradiction that emerges is that, between the use and exchange value of mathematical knowledge, whether for the learner, the teacher, the institution, or wider society and culture. I discuss the prospects for a theory of value in Activity theory and in Bourdieu's sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among social scientists, development theorists, and policy makers there is today an emergent consensus about the multidimensional and contextual character of poverty. Working within the framework of such a consensus in this article, I attempt to identify the social dimension of human poverty. Most generally, I try to sketch an account of social poverty as a shared normative (or soft) constraint on human action and interaction. The argument is developed as follows. I begin by summarizing and then using social capital theory to characterize my account of social poverty more fully. Here I distinguish between what I call horizontal social capital (networks of social trust and connections that are accessible and appropriable within a specific socioeconomic or cultural stratum) and vertical social capital (networks of social trust and connections that are accessible and appropriable between and among various socioeconomic and cultural strata). I argue that social poverty is an absence or scarcity of vertical social capital. From there I go on to analyze some of the mechanisms and asymmetrical effects of social poverty in specific empirical contexts. In closing I reflect briefly on how the problem of social poverty has been addressed in the US context. I suggest that reducing social poverty requires both a bottom-up approach towards the creation of vertical social capital and a top-down approach aimed at the diversification of existing stores of horizontal social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how a community responds to external pressures to adapt culturally to a dominant cultural/political paradigm. Interviews were conducted in Montreal, Canada in 2003 and in France in 2005. In Montreal interviews were conducted among Chinese shopkeepers residing in Montreal's Chinatown, or Quartier Chinois. In France interviews were conducted with Muslims in various ummahs, or Muslim communities in France. The results of the interviews demonstrate that when a minority group is pressured to linguistically, politically, culturally, religiously, and economically adapt to a dominant paradigm that the minority community will respond by closing itself from the dominant culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Layder's domain theory (1997) as an analytical framework, this article shows how the information society can be measured through various levels of society. Layder's notions of psychobiography, situated activity, social setting, and contextual resources help identify cultural and social indicators for understanding changes in the information society. With the help of empirical indicators for each domain, this article uses the case of Estonia to show that there is often more to the information society than what is captured by traditional measures. This article calls for a context-sensitive approach, which takes into consideration social and cultural indicators. Measurements from all four domains are necessary for understanding the complexity of information-society-related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All of these writers – Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Shklovsky and Brecht – allow us to sense in different ways the ineluctable significance of the uncanny as a means of thinking about so-called 'real life', the ordinary, the familiar and everyday. (Royle, 2003, pp. 5–6) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this address i focus on sociological relativity and our discipline's ineffectiveness in dealing with the anomie associated with high modernity, i attempt to make the case for a sociology that can empirically distinguish between tolerance and license and can posit conceptions of "social justice" and "morality" as empirically demonstrable phenomena. After briefly discussing relevant ideas associated with classical sociology and recent theoretical approaches to the question of sociocultural relativity, I suggest that any attempt to deal with the issue of social justice must involve an empirically grounded view of universal human nature as an emergent process that reveals itself time and time again within the seemingly infinite diversity of a socially constructed world. I further suggest that the path to understanding emergent human nature might include an integration of linguistic analysis, contemporary brain research, and the quest for human universals. Alter considering the practical (and impractical) implications of a successful search for emergent human nature for the discipline of sociology, I conclude the address with a real life example that illustrates the essence of human species powers even in the face of authoritarian oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses cultural identity and political responsibility. Anthropology and sociology have always insisted on the social and cultural rather than the natural determinations of identity. Through culture, identity is constantly defined, constructed, invented, redefined, reconstructed, and reinvented. In addition, identity and culture are polysemic notions that evolve in the course of concrete historic experience. The two major assumptions on which contemporary cultural identity policies are based are presented.

The article focuses on the concept of habitus given by sociologist P. Bourdieu that appears to have little to offer educational research. This proposition is considered in a critical evaluation of the origin of habitus in Bourdieu's work and its ability to fulfill its theoretical functions. Sociologist J. Tooley and D. Darby are not the first to have reached the conclusion the Bourdieu's approach of sociology and particularly the concept of habitus has little to offer educational research. They are not so much concerned with Bourdieu as with the value of his concepts for educational research, and their critique is directed specifically to sociologist D. Reay's work on habitus in the classroom. Tooley and Darby's view that the substantive weakness they identified are due to an "uncritical adulation" of Bourdieu and, more generally, to demonstrate the worthlessness of their approach as a means to reach their substantive conclusion. On the basis of Reay's account of habitus, Tooley and Darby included their study as an instance of the poor-quality educational research they believe to be caused by the willingness of many academics to attach themselves to the coal-tails of some major theorist.

The postmodem challenge to sociological notions of individual agency assails its experiential substantiality, conveying agency instead in philosophically abstract terms and fleeting media images. In opposition to this, we argue that everyday interpretive practice reflexively constructs agency, utilizing resources drawn from the ordinary contours of experience. Narrative and ethnographic material collected in diverse settings, both formal and informal, illustrate how enduring features of the ordinary—locally shared meanings, biographical particulars, and material objects—are used for the production of manifold selves with recognizable substantiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which tested the role of communication in acculturation. Insight on the relationship between the different sociological variables in a communication framework; Methodology of the study; Results and discussion.

The article comments on the term culture fixation. The fact that culture fixations provoke a certain severance from the innovations is obvious. Another factor is that the farmers were not equal in economic and social level. Really, it was only the better-situated farmers within an area who were able to uphold culture fixation. For the more impoverished farmers it was only a case of mechanical simplification or degeneration. There are even examples, however, where culture fixation has been prominent in spite of social inferiority. The fact that culture fixation has chiefly been observed, or even can be substantiated, within connected geographical regions is fairly obvious. It is also this point which allows comparisons to be made on the economic plane. Naturally, an inventory of cultural material is required as a basis before any conclusions can be drawn. Each statement concerning culture fixation naturally requires specialized investigations made from different aspects. Among other things, consideration has to be given to the number of culture phenomena and to where they belong socially, for a culture product which is too isolated cannot be used for this purpose, but can possibly be a cog in the wheel when used later in another connection.