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This paper reflects on the vocation or 'calling' of the researcher in the sociology of religion in the light of his experiences of researching transformations in English Catholicism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It takes as its starting point Weber's two essays. A consideration of religious perspectives on the lay vocation leads to an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of insider research. The paper reflects on research mistakes, threats and attempts to co-opt the researcher, unexpected surprises and serendipity, and the need for the social scientist to retain control of his/her research. It concludes with inspiration from Havel that the calling of the sociological researcher is socially important and urges renewed commitment to seeking with integrity the extension of certified knowledge and the demystification of powerful institutional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will report some of the findings of a study of the rise and fall of the Young Christian Worker movement in England and Wales. From its origins in the industrial north in the 1930s, the movement reached its peak in the early 1950s. Since then it has declined and yet many of the current generation of Catholic activists were strongly influenced by its ideology, ecclesiology, and inductive approach to finding Christian responses to social issues. We explore from a social movement perspective what social factors contributed to its early growth. The context for its decline in recent decades are the major post-war social and post-Vatican religious changes which have transformed English Catholicism. We argue that the two stages of the decline correspond closely to the passage through adolescence and the young adult years of two successive generations in the post-war years, the 'baby boomers' and the 'baby busters'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a wide range of researches to stress the importance of social context to the sociological understanding of religious experiences. It argues that individualistic definitions fail to take into account real group experiences such as those resulting from the reforms of Vatican II. For the sociologist, it is important to explore general patterns of group experiences and the meanings attributed to them. The paper discusses some of the methodological and conceptual problems in this area before considering evidence for the patterning of religious experience according to differences of generation, gender, class, level of urbanization, institutional involvement, and status inconsistency. The paper concludes by locating religious experiences in the context of modernity. In contrast to related theories of secularization, it draws attention to the recent work of Hervieu-Léger which suggests that utopian future expectations create space which can only be met by new forms of religious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article presents a study on the typology of English Catholics. In order to explore the extent of heterogeneity among English Catholics secondary analysis has been carried out on the data from the 1978 survey of Roman Catholics in England and Wales. The sample comprised 1001 self-identifying Catholics together with a further twenty-two who, though no longer identifying themselves as Catholics, reported that they bad been baptized as one. In order to obtain a representative sample of Catholics aged 15 and over quota controls for age, sex and Mass attendance frequency were applied at each of 105 sampling points throughout England and Wales. The quotas were based on the findings of ongoing Gallup omnibus surveys. Random sampling was not possible in this first national survey of the dispersed Catholic minority because it would have been prohibitively expensive. In the event the achieved sample overrepresented the higher status groups and those with longer educational experiences. In the analyses which follow these have been allowed for by weighting the data according to the Gallup omnibus Mass attendance and socio-economic status data.

This paper explores the relationships between religion, environmental and other values and voluntary activities using the data from the 1990 European Values Surveys (EVS). Previous work on these data had suggested that environmental concern is much more influenced by demographic characteristics such as education and income than by religious values. The way in which religious identities and convictions and, particularly, interpretations of scriptural passages are related to environmental concerns is a controversial one. Various sources suggest that the relationship between religion and environmentalist views among the populations of advanced industrialist societies is unclear. The 1990 EVS provides the opportunity to explore some of these relationships. This paper examines, using path analysis, the strength of both an individual Roman Catholic identity and a Roman Catholic national context on environmental values and propensity to appropriate action in pursuit of environmental concerns. It shows whether Catholics have internalized a sense of stewardship, which is reflected in higher levels of environmental concerns, in contrast to Protestants who place greater emphasis on economic growth, production as an end rather than a means, and mastery over nature.

This article examines the marginalization of British Catholics active both in the Church and in the Labour movement. On the one hand such Catholics often have to face the traditional clerical suspicion of socialism with its imputed associations with militant atheism and Marxist materialism. On the other hand, within the Labour movement there have been suspicions of the resistance of Catholics to radical social change and their alleged reactionary positions in the matter of women's rights. Two Catholic Members of the Parliament have complained that though they received some support for their political involvement from individuals, in the main they did not feel they received support in the vocation from the institutional Church. Both testified to the political difficulties which they had and the pressures to which they had been subjected in attempts to amend abortion legislation. Such findings lend credence to the hypothesis that Catholics active both in the Church and in politics experience a sense of marginality in both institutional spheres. As such, Catholics grapple with the sometimes conflicting demands of the social worlds of the Catholic Church and the Labour movement and they experience psychological uncertainty.

The international consumer market in the western industrial nations is largely the product of the affluent post-war period. It has grown out of a concern that the legal principle of caveat emptor is inadequate to protect the consumer in the modern, complex marketplace by consumer education and protection, improved consumer information and a general concern for the consumer and physical environments. Consumer groups are typically seen to be self-help groups for the educated middle classes with little concern for the disadvantaged consumer, and there is no evidence that they have seriously challenged the dominance of producers and distributors. Two contrasting approaches to the structural analysis of consumer groups in the political systems of western industrial nations are considered, the pluralist approach and the conflict approach. It is argued that the analysis of power in the marketplace demonstrates that there is substantial producer dominance in the marketplace. The paper concludes by identifying five structural weaknesses of the consumer movement: negligible communication between consumers; the inability to mobilize; the rejection of effective (but politically radical) forms of action; the acceptance of existing market arrangements; and the provision of ideological support for these arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews post-war trends in food consumption in Britain based on an analysis of the annual National Food Surveys. Long-term trends are distinguished from the consequences of short-term shortages and changing welfare and subsidy policies. The data are used in particular to illustrate the interaction between social class and family size effects. In the second half of the paper emergent food trends are considered in the light of three sets of factors: economic and political, technological, and social and cultural. It is concluded that food behaviour is fundamentally a social phenomenon imbued with cultural significance and meaning, and reflecting traditional beliefs and values and dominant power differentials both within families and between different social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]