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This paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of 'girl' was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the 'girl'—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that 'girlhood' is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bandura's self-efficacy (SE) theory claims that if people believe that they can control the outcome of their behaviour, then they can. SE theory positions the self as the centre and originator of change, beginning with control over belief systems, which determine levels of performance. This conception depoliticizes social mechanisms of control, internalizing them within individual cognitive processes. We argue that SE theory emanates from culturally-positioned and ideologically informed functional trends in US psychology, which perpetuates a blaming-the-victim approach to social problems. Through an examination of the way gender and disability are manipulated in SE research, we show that efficacy is socially construed, and is actually about control over and access to power and the ideological, institutional, and social resources that provide the foundation for taking certain actions. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores temporal constituents of the female self in terms of their role in underpinning ongoing gender inequality. Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young, together with sociological approaches to ambivalence, I suggest that these temporal subjectivities are embodied, arise from the split subjectivity associated with woman as simultaneously subject and object, and counterpose the neoliberal emphasis on "choice" and agency with a more traditional gendered "expectation," or "waiting" style. The dialectic between both temporalities, in which neither is hegemonic, results in a chronic state of ambivalence which impedes women's ability to fully project themselves into the future, a skill significant to planning and career ambition and the absence of which suspends women instead in an extended present. The paper aims to do two things in particular. In conceptual terms it aims to explore aspects of the configuration of the gendered self that underlie the stalling and slowing down of the gender revolution and which can be seen to provide a "missing link" between structures, institutions, and micro‐cultures. In empirical terms, it suggests a future research agenda, of which this paper constitutes a beginning, through which such gendered temporalities can be explored in greater detail via ethnographies of women's lived experience of time throughout the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and 'groupishness' of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a recent print-mediated discussion about linguistic phenomena that are perceived by many commentators to be ‘deviant’ from ‘standard Swedish.’ The aim of the paper is to illustrate how this language debate is built on two closely entwined discursive processes: a struggle to define the name, meaning, and value of a specific linguistic phenomenon; and the indexical processes through which such a phenomenon is bound up with a multifaceted image of its purported speakers, in which gender is imbricated in age and ethnicity. Essentially, the argument is that the metalinguistic pronouncements in this debate are ultimately the outer manifestation of deeper social concerns about what it means to be a ‘non-Swedish’ young man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this era of reflexive sociology it is commonplace that subjectivity is of great sociological concern, and that the comprehension by social researchers of their own subject position is essential. Still, old habits die hard. Focusing on selected texts in the sociology of the Australian family, this paper traces the effects of failing to focus the sociological gaze on subjectivity and its variation across society. Highlighted are some patterns of analytic misconstruction of subjectivity, especially the substitution of measurement for a theory of practice, and the projection by sociologists of their own class-specific subjectivity onto society at large. Ultimately, this misconstruction turns works like those discussed in this paper into a powerful denial of alternative subjectivities, and a reinforcement of the socially dominant perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the mutuality of values, claims and social relations in the process of social change. Values are not separable from social relations but are embedded in the shaping and reshaping of social difference and interdependence. The paper focuses on developments around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses changes in the relative social positioning of children and adults, and women and men, shifting patterns of interdependence, and linked values and ideas about difference. The reconfiguring of generational and gender relations was integral to the first fertility decline, to transformation in family life and societal divisions of labour, and to the embedding of particular values and claims regarding gendered difference, identities and gender appropriate roles. Analysis of these developments reveals the mutuality of 'cultural' and 'material' processes and holds lessons for interpreting social change today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on stereotypes about gender differences in emotional communication or expression, as opposed to emotional experience or recognition. Expressiveness includes measurable changes in either the use of words, the facial and vocal characteristics associated with emotion, physiological arousal, or behaviors such as aggression or crying. The possibility that gender differences in emotional expression may be specific to certain situations is often ignored. For example, a series of recent widely cited papers have suggested that while females express dysphoric emotions more in words and facial expressions, males express these emotions more through physiological responses, as measured by increased heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure. Several papers are based on studies of couples' physiological responses, monitored during conflict situations in which wives confront husbands with feelings of marital dissatisfaction. In these conflict-laden interactions, husbands often show increased physiological arousal, while wives do not.

This paper analyzes gendered social identity in Japan and the United States, countries with comparable postindustrial economic systems but distinct cultural traditions. Using national surveys (1995), we find gender differences in value orientations to be neither systematic nor consistent. They often disappeared after controlling for demographic and human-capital variables, though not so often for Japan. Other variables proved more important predictors of values than gender, although in different ways in Japan and the United States. We conclude by reassessing the use of the term gender in social research and the cultural meaning of gender relations by addressing the feminist concerns with issues of gender location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to M. Bittman and J. Pixley's paper "Equality and Gender, Divided Versus Multiple Subjectivity: A Response to Allon J. Uhlmann's The Sociology of Subjectivity, and Subjectivity of Sociologists" in volume 55, issue number 3 of the "British Journal of Sociology." The criticism of Bittman and Pixley's book "The Double Life of the Family" focused on a number of selected texts in order to expose some of the analytical dynamics that prevail in the sociology of the Australian family. The book served as an example of a class-unconscious discussion of the family. It was argued that the book overlook systemic differences in subjectivity across class and gender, and did not consider the sociological significance of the variation in the contexts in which members of different classes lead their lives. Bittman and Pixley's response skirts the main issues which have been the focus of the critique.

This paper explores recent arguments about the marketization of female labour, in the context of a wider analysis of the role of concepts like ‘the market’ and ‘individualization’ in sociological accounts of change in employment relations. It will be argued that within sociology there has been a tendency for rapid, large-scale changes in employment relations to be characterized as the breakdown of social influences or structures and as the emergence of atomized, individuated market forces. In the most recent models, change in the nature of gendered positions within employment are presented in terms of a decline of social structuring and social constraint. These emergent accounts hold similarities to classical economics, and to Marx's and Weber's accounts of employment, which also characterized new forms of employment relations in terms of the emptying of their social content and their replacement by market forms. We offer an alternative, moral economy, perspective which foregrounds the continued significance of social relations in the structuring of employment and employment change. We develop the argument through an analysis of gendered patterns of employment and change in family form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use longitudinal data to test the strength of individual preferences and structural variables as explanations for married women's labor force participation. Data drawn from a subset of the Career Development Study are used to compare gendered preferences measured toward the end of adolescence vs. work and family structural variables as predictors of the actual number of hours married women work for pay. Family structures that push women out of the labor force and pull them into family work prove to be the strongest predictor of married women's employment hours, with work structures (e.g., aspects of "good" jobs) and the subjective definition of paid work as a career also being substantively important for explaining hours in the labor force. Our findings also indicate that attitudes formed before and during early adolescence do have a weak but statistically significant effect on married women's labor force participation, at least for baby boom women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary socialist criminologists concentrate their analysis of crime on production relations, ignoring the co-determination of reproduction and thus the role gender plays in crime by men and women. The author argues that this omission has occurred by reason of the theoretical work of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist ‘criminologists’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance of the paper lies in its demonstration that the questions raised by these early socialist theoreticians are inadequate for developing a comprehensive theory of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist theory and research on the sociology of human reproduction have historically been bound together as each has developed. Yet recently sociologists of reproduction and 'women's health' have lost sight of core debates in feminist theory. They still tend to work with the assumption that feminism is an internally coherent body of thought, despite the emergence of significant internal divisions since the mid-1980s. In this paper we evaluate the challenge that feminist posts structuralism poses to prior conceptualisations of gender in the context of reproductive health through a critique of sociological work in this area from the 1970s and 1980s. We conclude with a critical exploration of the new insights that might emerge from a post-structuralist 'deconstruction' of gender in the context of human reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to tile social construction of scientific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Oghurn (1886-1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Oghurn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to he its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburn's search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburn's ideas were favorably received by his mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores several conceptual problems in social deniographic studies of the status of women, including failure to recognize the multidimensionalit of women's status and its variation across social "locations," the confounding of gender and class stratification systems, and the confounding of access to resources with their control. Also discussed are some generic problems in the measurement of female status, such as the sensitivity of particular indicators to social context, and the need to select consistent comparisons when judging the extent of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]