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This article focuses on attempts to understand how the curriculum and pedagogy can help to reduce inequalities in the outcomes of schooling between those from higher and lower socio-economic backgrounds. In the 1970s, the author was involved with Michael F.D. Young and others in the development of the so-called ‘new’ sociology of education. Much of this work entailed laying bare the assumptions underlying the school curriculum and demonstrating how the selection of school knowledge was implicated in the reproduction of social inequalities. During the 1980s in England the curriculum was overtly politicised by the Thatcher government but the interests of sociologists of education moved increasingly away from the sociology of school knowledge to focus instead on the sociology of education policy. This paper identifies a recent tendency on the part of sociologists of education to return to the ‘knowledge question’. In particular, it examines Young's own role in this and his attempts to revisit and revise of his earlier position. Contemporary developments in curricular policy in England and Northern Ireland are then outlined and discussed. Finally, the paper considers whether the work of Basil Bernstein, particularly his concepts of classification/framing and recognition/realisation rules, might help us to address one of the prevailing political problems of many modern education systems — the systematic failure of socially disadvantaged pupils to perform well at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a participant in the development of mathematical sociology over the past several decades, the author undertakes a personal and historical review of the field. A special effort is made to link early innovations and interests to recent developments. The paper deals successively with (a) the origins of mathematical sociology and its early achievements, (b) the cognitive interests and values of mathematical sociologists in relation to ideas associated with the founders of sociology, (c) the scope of mathematical contributions in terms of the general components of human action and society, and (d) the problematic specialty status of mathematical sociology. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the future of mathematical sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to sociologist Andy Pickering's comments, partly because of the inherent intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with such a distinguished colleague, but partly also because of the need for much greater interchange between the two fields, the sociology of environment and technology, on the one hand and the sociology of science on the other. Pickering's comments raise three important points about the analysis of Iron Mountain, Michigan. First, he praises what he calls papers symmetry in noting the importance of physical⁄environmental as well as social factors in understanding social outcomes. Second, he argues that people have not taken this point far enough, in large part because, he believes, the social is not sufficiently at stake in papers. Third, he argues that a fruitful antidote would be to trace the evolution of actual practices, in detail, over time.

The article presents a reply of gratitude for the criticisms offered by sociologist Laura Sanchez on the works which appeared in the "Journal of Marriage and the Family." The authors are indebted to Laura Sanchez for taking their work (1995) seriously and raising some nontrivial questions for discussion. She has motivated them to reread their own paper closely and critically, and a close reading of many of the works she cites has broadened their familiarity with the feminist literatures. They know that there is no true reading of the paper. They know what they intended to say and what the paper says to them as they reread it. The authors also recognize that any text is only one part of a reading; what a reader sees in a text is also a function of what she brings to her encounter with the text. Some of Sanchez's critique reflects deficiencies in the text--things they did not say as well as they might have--and they are grateful for a chance to clarify ambiguities. Other feminist writers seem to corroborate their view of the central concerns of feminist scholarship.

In this article, the author responds to the sociologist Bryan S. Turner's comments on his article related to the inter generational conflicts. Turner's interpretation, and suggestion that he was drawing attention away from structural issues, is rooted in a paradigm which is inadequate to the task of properly describing how life course processes are integral to general social arrangements. In his paper, the author took issue with the assumptions and arguments of age stratification and generational conflict theorists. These writers see age and generation related self interest as underpinning a growth in age based conflict. The dimensions of such conflict are seen to cleave around people's current relations to work and welfare. In his response to the author's paper Turner re-asserts the salience of intra-generational cohesion and inter-generational difference in shaping consciousness and action in efforts to secure social advantage. Turner insists that age and generation are important components of social stratification and should be incorporated in theory accordingly.

The paper argues that sociologists have constructed their accounts exclusive of nature. This pre-ecological sociology is critically examined and explained. It has resulted from disciplinary specialization and revulsion at biological determinism, with the trend away from systems sociology to human-agency sociology being an aggravating factor. Sociology as if nature did not matter has also been influenced by the assumption prevailing in modern societies of the plasticity of the relationship of humans to their natural environment. This sociology has been the sociological expression of modern societies careless of nature. The growing awareness that social constructions unleash dynamic processes of nature - processes beyond human control that bear on social action - has the potential of radically transforming such sociology. The paper proposes the reconstruction of sociology in which nature matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents John Goldthorpe's response to several comments about his paper which analyzed the uses of history in sociology. According to Goldthorpe, his main concern was to show that history and sociology necessarily differed in the nature of the evidence that they used or, more precisely, in the ways in which this evidence came into being. He claims that in his paper, he emphasizes that historians cannot hope to produce descriptions that are free of general ideas about social action, process and structure. His argument concerning the differences in evidence available to historians and sociologists is that the latter have the possibility of engaging in research that itself generates evidence, over and above, not as distinct from, that of exploiting relics. Goldthorpe clarifies the argument with which his paper began was that (i) pace Abrams and Giddens, history and sociology are not the same thing; (ii) that one important way in which they differ is the nature of the evidence on which historians and sociologists draw; and (iii) that sociologists, in being able to generate their own data in the present, rather than being restricted to the relics of the past, are in a position of advantage that should be recognized and not given up without good reason.

Alan Fox is one of the most prolific and original British sociologists of industry and employment. Fox's largely derivative writings on macro-sociology have received considerable attention in the literature. In comparison his original micro-sociological theory of the role played by trust in organizational integration has been neglected. This paper presents a critical evaluation of Fox's microsociological theory of 'trust dynamics' in organizations. The paper identifies conceptual, theoretical and methodological weaknesses in Fox's complex argument and concludes that Fox's theory is invalid. The paper also suggests that trust in organizational life is probably more significant as an aspect of 'social integration' than, as Fox contends, as an aspect of' 'system integration'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though staging an imaginary dialogue between French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and East Javanese informants, the paper explores anthropological processes of knowledge-making regarding the roots of social domination. The employment of an explicitly comparative framework is undertaken with the aim of revealing the frontier areas and outer limits of knowledge production and of cross-cultural translation in general. At the same time, it engages with ‘indigenous’ ways of knowing that emphasize embodied subjectivity and sensorial inter-involvement with others and the ambient world, and that posit the assumption that being a particular person and acting in a specific way are closely connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights that the Scientific Study of Religion has opened up to new areas of research, to new groups of researchers and new frames. The articles published in the society's journal, "Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion" have moved away from papers on the Protestant Mainline. Looking at twenty-eight issues, beginning with volume 5 and ending with volume 35, the journal published ninety-six articles that could be categorized as focusing on a particular religious group. Of those, sixteen articles were about the Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. Only one of those was published after 1981. The study of religion was somewhat ghettoized in the discipline. A renewed interest in religion among sociologists was facilitated by the advent of new cultural approaches in sociology. Sociologist Clifford Geertz's work, for example, not only proposed a frame for seeing religion as a cultural system, but perhaps more importantly, Geertz revealed how the analysis of popular expressive forms could be as significant and revealing as the study of high culture or official dogmas. New studies appeared examining faith healing and devotional practices, conversion and individual's search for meaning in a changing society.

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study on astrology and its constituency. To date, there have been few sociological studies of astrology, and little is known about what types of people are interested in the practice. This study's focus was on adherents of astrology who attended an astrology conference. Unlike previous research, the findings of this study show that the characteristics of these astrologers reflect those of the general population, providing a new understanding of a segment of astrology's constituency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the secularization theories put forward in the 1960s and 70s by different sociologists are not compatible at the theoretical level, they nevertheless share a very broad set of assumptions and analytical categories. This paper provides a systematization of this common framework (or paradigm). It is shown, with exact references to the texts of Luckmann, Berger, Wilson, Martin, Penn, Parsons, and Beliab, that the secularization paradigm is based on a core of three "concepts" (or exemplars): differentiation, rationalization, and worldliness. Around this core are a number of logically subordinated exemplars, most notably autonomization, privatization, generalization, pluralization, and collapse of the world view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stages is presented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It was learned that one of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's work revolves around the correlative concepts of thought collective and thought style. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was discussed. Stage three in the career of the concept scientific community is marked by criticism and the development of alternative models. During the 1960s and 70s, the view prevailed among metascientists that scientific knowledge is produced by communities of specialists. In the works of leading contemporary philosophers of science, as in many historical studies, the existence of scientific communities was assumed without question or argument. Kuhn's paper represents a watershed in the histories of both the concept itself and the entire discipline of sociology of science. Social integration in science was considered a result of a consensus about strategic norms or standards. Findings on the examination of the concept scientific community through the related works of Kuhn and Fleck, the Polish scientist and scientist knowledge, was presented.

This article is an attempt to evaluate the contribution of the late Erving Goffman to the field of Sociology. In doing so I have attempted to document some of the main commentaries upon Coffman's work — especially those of A. Dawe and A.W. Gouldner — and to evaluate their validity. This paper is presented within the framework of a general overview of Goffman's work and an elaboration of some of the salient themes within it. The intention of the author is to free Goffman from some of the crude overgeneralizations that his colleagues have used in evaluating his writings. In particular, I have attempted to show, in general terms, how Goffman's work is sensitive to ‘structural’ as well as ‘situational’ concerns and also to class, hierarchy and power. It is argued that Goffman's importance has been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon his death in 1920, at the age of 56, sociologist Max Weber left behind a huge and untidy mass of personal papers and scholarly manuscripts, some of the latter in the process of being edited for publication by Weber himself, others intended for intensive reworking, others yet superseded drafts. The intended characteristics of the book "Max Weber Gesamtausgabe," in the first of the publications listed below: they are those of a critical-historical edition, intended not to replace the several collections of Weber's writings currently available for the use of students, but rather to serve the needs of scholars, including the editors of such future collections. The edition is to include three sections: Writings and Speeches; Manuscripts of and notes from lecture courses. In the first section, the arrangement of material will embody a compromise between chronological and thematic grouping; that is, the numbering of volumes will reflect the shifts in the prevailing concerns of Weber's scholarly and publicistic activity, but each volume may contain again, in chronological sequence writings and speeches. From a number of years in so far as they bear on its chief theme. Each volume will contain editorial material which elucidates the circumstances of each piece of writing or speech, indicates the state of the relative sources and eventual discrepancies among them, and clarifies or corrects such parts or points in the text as might baffle or mislead even a relatively informed contemporary reader.

Recent contributions of sociologists and others have brought a new awareness and new theoretical under standing of the extent to which human aging and life-course patterns are shaped by social conditions and influenced by social change. Yet the potential of many social processes to account for individual aging patterns remains untapped, because research and theory have focused heavily upon comparisons between cohorts rather than the internal differentiation of cohorts, This paper shows that focusing upon intracohort differentiation over the life course leads to a mobilization of sociological findings whose age-related implications have not been exploited. Using the phenomenon of "aged heterogeneity" as an illustrative case, it is suggested that intracohort differentiation- operating through macro-level, organizational, and micro-level processes-can explain significant phenomena of aging previously neglected by theory, or else assumed to be psychological in origin. These processes specify Men on's "Matthew effect." Implications for biological aging and for research are briefly discussed˙. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the role of language in historical class formation in light of the recent developments in postmodern social theory and historiography. Revisionists from within this perspective have questioned if not abandoned E. P. Thompson's class struggle analysis, arguing that he fails to account for the constitutive character of language in the construction of collective identities. They oppose his account of the making of the English working class with alternative histories emphasizing populist and other non-class identities. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle of literary studies, and returning to Thompson's own writings, I argue that we can incorporate language into class struggle analysis as a critical mediating force. I maintain that class struggle occurs largely within a hegemonic discursive formation, and that class consciousness and identity thus in part are formed through counter-hegemonic strategies of resistance to ideological domination. To illustrate this theory I analyse the role of language in the class struggles of the silk weavers of the Spitalfields district in London in the 1820s. I analyse how the silk weavers articulated a class consciousness through their counter-hegemonic struggles with the large capitalists and the language of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorfman is eulogized as the creator and curator of the definitive account of Veblen's life and work. He argued that Veblen was the archetypal marginal man and that this explains his dissenting contribution. Dissemination of Dorfman's pathography of Veblen led to its hegemony - until now. Andrew Veblen was the first to challenge Dorfman's portrait of his younger brother's life in the mid 1920s. He asserted that his family were not linguistically, socially or economically deprived. However, it was not until Dorfman's private papers became publicly available in the 1990s, that his flawed view of Veblen became more widely and comprehensively contested. An alternative appreciation of Veblen is advanced with reference to his experiences in general and the works of Bellamy, Morris and Ibsen in particular. Data sources include Dorfman's original tome, Andrew Veblen's extensive correspondence with Dorfman, and Veblen's own writings. It is concluded that Veblen's radical views are entirely congruent with his life experiences during an era of capitalist transformation. The moral of this saga is that a dose of Veblenian scepticism is essential to intellectual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reassess Norbert Elias's central theme of the `civilizing process' with reference to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. My argument is that the process of `civilization' must be seen as thoroughly ambivalent, following Zygmunt Bauman's use of the latter term to denote the possibility of assigning an object or event to more than one category. The practice of naming and classifying social behaviours or processes as `civilized' or `barbarous' is am- bivalent, because they can never be placed so unequivocably in one or the other category - certainly not in a social scientific way. I then trace out ambivalences in the three central features of the `civilizing' process as Elias conceives it - the monopolization of means of violence, the removal of physical violence `behind the scenes', and the lengthening chains of interdependence between people. I shall argue that these ambivalent features are as much potential forces of destruction as they are of internal pacification and `civilization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on a previous article that appeared in the September 1996 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. According to the author, the more interesting issues raised by sociologist Andre Beteille's paper have less to do with the mismatch between class and status than with the question of how two conceptions of status, the one focusing on unequal social esteem and the other on the equal rights of citizenship should be related to each other in a general theory of social stratification since it is not unreasonable to anticipate some difficulty when the same general concept is used to describe a major aspect of inequality and also an antidote to it. The common feature of status relations in all societies is that they are exhibited fundamentally through acts of defense, acceptance and derogation. But such interactions vary according to how they are sanctioned and maintained, and the kinds of privileges and disabilities with which they are associated. No one would wish to deny that within the limits set by the rights of citizenship, inequalities of esteem, and more particularly the social networks in which they are grounded, continue to exert their influence for the reasons Beteille so well adduces.

The article presents the author's views on the paper by Shostak and Ottman. The article profiles the involvement of the people in the world of epilepsy. Especially, the patients and the family members. It also profiles the authors review of the empirical evidence on epilepsies. Its main objective is the insider's view of a person who has been diagnosed.

The article presents the authors' response to comments made by sociologist Robert Salt in his paper, "Child Support in Context: Comments on Rettig, Christensen, and Dahl." The authors share Salt's concern that too often persons tend to discuss divorce from the perspective of their own gender. In some cases, women may appear to be advocating for custodial mothers and men for non-custodial fathers, or they may be accused of doing so simply because they are women or men. Equally unfortunate, however, seems to be the tendency to discuss divorce from the perspective of their own ages. In other words, adults tend to address issues, which seem unfair to other adults and perhaps to ignore issues, which are unfair to children.