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Coordinated checkpointing techniques ensure that a consistent global state is maintained by means of coordination between processes. The approach requires that application messages temporarily cease to be exchanged but the rollback procedure when recovering from a fault is consequently simplified and the recovery costs are small. With current reductions in communications costs, the importance of coordinated techniques may be seen to be growing. However, in large-scale systems there is a possibility that performance will be seriously impaired due to the frequent halting of the exchange of messages. In this paper we propose a method whereby coordination is performed at only a subset of the checkpoint generation points that are periodically visited while at the remaining points each process independently generates an incremental snapshot. This method aims to both alleviate the performance degradation incurred from coordination and to realize relatively high-speed recovery. In evaluating the effectiveness of this method we estimate the checkpointing overheads and recovery costs using a probabilistic model and simulations and compare it with existing coordination methods. The results show that the proposed method is more effective than existing coordination methods from the perspective of both performance and reliability in environments with a relatively low frequency of messages. In addition, we perform comparisons of two different delta schemes for representing the incremental snapshots and discuss which environments they are each respectively suited to. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 90(8): 39– 53, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20296 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Effective dengue prevention and Aedes aegypti control is a priority for the Cuban health authorities. To enhance effectiveness, strategies oriented towards a more active involvement of communities in control activities are being tested. This paper presents a sociological perspective on a pilot project conducted in the health area ''26 de Julio'' (La Havana) in 1999-2004. Methods: Instrumental case study based on an exhaustive content analysis of project documents and on observations of a sociologist. Results: The context and the pilot project are systematically described and an analysis of the evolution of the underlying concept of community participation is provided. The pilot experience was a dynamic process influenced by self-reflection of the research team, feedback from research partners and changes in the epidemiological context (provoked by two dengue outbreaks during the study period). Community participation evolved from being just one component in Aedes aegypti control directed by the health staff into a learning and empowering process for the people. This change in the concept of participation was reflected in different aspects of the pilot project such as the learning and evaluation processes. Conclusion: Empirical evidence from 5 years of research in the particular context of Cuba showed that moves towards community-based Aedes aegypti control are feasible. However, in order to be successful, community-based dengue prevention should be a social learning process, implying a transfer of power and responsibilities to local people. Actions undertaken must be oriented towards creating local capabilities, strengthening existing structures and organizations and promoting group work for learning participation from participation itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to a study of Canadian child welfare workers that unexpectedly found participants scoring high on a measure of emotional exhaustion (burnout) and, at the same time, high on overall job satisfaction, this paper reviews research that has investigated these constructs in the social work literature as well as in selected studies from sociology, social psychology, management and women’s studies. The review reveals that some previous studies also report the coexistence of high levels of emotional exhaustion and strong job satisfaction in child welfare and social worker samples. Several studies have suggested that individual characteristics, including finding reward in helping others, having a commitment to the mandate of child welfare and believing that one’s labour is ‘making a difference’, contribute to satisfaction with child welfare work in spite of work overload and emotional exhaustion. Attributions regarding causes of exhaustion, coping strategies and goal orientation may also attenuate the expected negative effects of emotional exhaustion. Considerable evidence supports the positive influence of variables organizational managers can control, including job autonomy, supportive supervisors, workload, promotional opportunities and perception of personal safety. The degree to which this phenomenon is associated with female socialization and the ‘ethic of care’ underlying social work is discussed. Implications for child welfare research, practice and policy are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post-war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio-political discourses as well as in long-term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio-political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio-political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the conservative policy review paper Breakdown Britain, which argued that government should financially promote marriage to tackle‘moral decline’, and an announcement from the Liberal Democrats that they too would use the tax and benefit system to ‘encourage marriage’, the premier sociologist of the family, Göran Therborn, unpicks the myth of the modern family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the embodied remembrance of Bloody Sunday (1972), when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British soldiers while peacefully marching against internment. The work of Paul Connerton represents a crucial analytical starting point in a growing number of studies examining the body as site of memory. While Connnerton's theorisation has been very influential and persuasive, I argue that there is some scope for improving his ideas about the changeability of bodily memory and the Bloody Sunday case represents an interesting empirical example of how embodied remembrance reflects and responds to transformations in the wider socio-political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the submission guidelines of the "Journal of Sociolinguistics." Submission of a paper is assumed to mean that it is original work which has not been previously published and is not simultaneously in press or being considered for publication elsewhere. Related articles are being published or considered elsewhere should be acknowledged and discussed in a cover letter. Submissions should normally be limited to a maximum of 40 manuscript pages including all references, tables, figures and appendices. Lists or numbered examples should use arabic numbers on the margin followed by a stop but without parentheses.

An untitled draft found among Weber's posthumous papers was published. In English translation it was given the title `Ethnic Groups'. In the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe it is titled `Ethnic Communities'. In this manuscript, Weber treated the feeling of belonging together because of shared ethnic origin as a social construct, underlain by a desire to monopolise power and status. Subsequently, Weber determined to put an end to the use of collectivist concepts, but at the time of writing he treated groups as real entities, instead of using the concept of group as an aid in the explanation of behaviour. The causal connections in ethnic group formation and maintenance have been more closely identified in subsequent sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In 1957 Sykes and Matza introduced Neutralization Theory as a response to the prevailing criminological wisdom that offenders engage in crime because they adhere to an oppositional subcultural rule set that values law breaking and violence. Sykes and Matza rejected this perspective arguing that, despite their involvement with offending, delinquents maintain a strong bond to conventional society and want to perceive themselves as “good.” To resolve their contemplated law breaking with this desired self-identity, they employ neutralization techniques designed to assuage anticipated guilt. Subsequent research indicates that the original formulation of the theory is limited to explaining the behavior of conventionally attached individuals and fails to address the decision-making processes of nonconventionally oriented individuals such as criminally embedded street offenders. The current paper argues that, for a core group of such offenders, guilt is not an issue at all because their crimes are not only considered acceptable, but attractive and desirable. In-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with 191 active, noninstitutionalized “hardcore” street offenders indicate they discount guilt not through neutralizations but by attaching normative definitions to their crimes (as either mundane, inevitable, or enjoyable) that preclude them from eliciting guilt in the first place. In addition, these interviews detail the manner in which such outlooks develop among hardcore offenders and how they are maintained in a manner that supports further offending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ways in which the department store has become a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity through the introduction of images and goods taken from the West, along with the emphasis on “Western design” and “Western taste”. These new consumer spaces have become aestheticized in various ways so that we can speak of an “aestheticization” of everyday life. Yet this was also a modernizing learning process for Japanese consumers, hence a key problem was how these new experiences were to be classified and ordered into a relatively stable habitus. The rise of the department store has had an important mediating function here. Department stores not only provided new goods along with interpretations of how to use them, but also acted as theatres, as rehearsal spaces, with front and back stage areas where one can watch the performance, try out for oneself new roles. This is especially the case for women in the city, who were able to explore a new identity space with a new set of competence experiences and pleasures. In this process, the department store also provided a form of women's public sphere where they could enjoy shopping, entertainment and learning opportunities. Department stores encouraged not only a sense of luxury and theatrical settings, but also help to teach women how to assemble new tastes and styles into their lifestyle. In addition, it should be emphasized that in the Japanese case, department stores also played an important role not just as a new cultural initiative on the part of the businessmen and cultural intermediaries who invented consumer culture, but also as a political initiative on the part of the government who sought to link them to the reform of everyday life and the production of good Japanese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Alienation,” in the sense of disenchantment with core institutions of society, increased after the mid-1960s. Most accounts hold that the rise in alienation was uniform across all groups. This paper evaluates the hypothesis of uniform change using data from the Harris Polls. We find evidence of both short-term and long-term shifts in patterns of alienation. Blacks and low-income people are less alienated under Democratic than under Republican administrations. Over the long term, increases in alienation have been larger among women and people without a college degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a better articulated conception of stigma can enhance the analysis of popular culture. Beginning with the work on stigma by Erving Goffman and other scholars, the article contends that the stigma sometimes attached to the production and consumption of popular culture is distinct from the low status associated with certain forms of popular culture. Unlike low status, stigma discredits cultural forms and practitioners often rendering them problematic. This reassessment of stigma is applied and developed further through a study of comic books, showing the various ways stigma can operate in popular culture. The analysis suggests that stigma significantly impeded the evolution of the comic book as an art form, illustrating the potential negative effects of stigma in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sociologists and the public at large are increasingly interested in the life conditions of animals, conceptual and empirical development of the topic is limited. This paper seeks to further develop the sociological research on attitudes toward animal well-being. We build on insights from contemporary stratification theory to explain the nature of animal attitudes and their determinants. We also extend past work by examining a broader range of factors related to attitudes about animal well being, focusing on place, other social structural factors, and individuals' unique animal-related experiences. Data are from a survey of over 4,000 Ohio residents conducted in 2002. We find that childhood experience has the greatest place-based effect on attitudes. Other findings highlight the importance of social structural factors, suggesting support for the "underdog hypothesis." Women, people experiencing economic hardship, those with less education, younger and middle aged people, and blacks tend to be more concerned with animal well-being. Individualized, experiential variables are also important. Our results reflect the complexity of attitudes about animals and point to the need for greater sociological attention to factors left largely unexplored in previous studies, including childhood place-based factors, economic hardship, and individuals' unique animal-related experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research on care leavers has, understandably, tended to focus on those who are in their mid- to late-teens or early 20s. This reflects the profound impact of central and local government policy on those young people. It also reflects their prominence in contemporary analyses of most of the indicators of social exclusion among young people in the UK – unemployment, homelessness and lack of educational qualifications among them. However, some issues affecting adults who grew up in care apply across the life course. One such issue is the access that former care adults have to their child care files. Indeed, as we shall see, this issue has particular importance for many older adults (in their 30s and upwards). Policy and practice in this field has changed significantly during the past 20 years and there is a growing awareness of the needs of former care adults in this area. Access to such files can be a significant element in the process of seeking to address identity concerns centring around family and childhood experiences. This paper explores some of these identity concerns and analyses how access to care files both reflects such concerns and attempts to address them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the international research on young people leaving care. Set in the context of a social exclusion framework, it explores young people’s accelerated and compressed transitions to adulthood, and discusses the development and classification of leaving care services in responding to their needs. It then considers the evidence from outcome studies and argues that adopting a resilience framework suggests that young people leaving care may fall into three groups: young people ‘moving on’, ‘survivors’ and ‘victims’. In concluding, it argues that these three pathways are associated with the quality of care young people receive, their transitions from care and the support they receive after care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent paper in this journal by Hardcastle et al. in 2005 argued that Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory (ST) might usefully inform sociological nursing research. In response, a critique of ST based upon the Realist Social Theory of Margaret Archer is presented. Archer maintains that ST is fatally flawed and, in consequence, it has little to offer nursing research. Following an analysis of the concepts epiphenomenalism and elisionism, it is suggested that emergentist Realist Social Theory captures or describes a more coherent explanatory vision of social reality than other perspectives and nurse researchers are advised to consider its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the paper "British sociology and public intellectuals: consumer society and imperial decline," by Bryan Turner. Philippe Fontaine reviews the fact that sociologist have failed to document the gradual fall Great Britain from world power status, and discusses R. W. Cornell's views on the connection between empire and sociology. The anti-intellectual sentiment seen by Turner in Great Britain is critiqued, as well as Turner's insistence that social scientists chose certain topics to structure their investigations.

Background: Case study research has been used increasingly in psychology and sociology in recent years. It provides researchers with an opportunity to explore a situation involving one individual or several individuals over time from multiple points of view. Methods: This literature review explains case study research as a method and summerises its scientific merit, also providing an example of its use. Results: Case study research offers occupational therapists a scientific methodology that can be used to understand and develop occupational therapy practice. Conclusion: This paper argues that case study research should be used more extensively by occupational therapists as the method respects the basic principles of occupational therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Social pressures are often an integral part of the process of seeking addiction treatment. However, scientists have not developed conclusive evidence on the processes, benefits and limitations of using legal, formal and informal social control tactics to inform policy makers, service providers and the public. This paper characterizes barriers to a robust interdisciplinary analysis of social control and coercion in addiction treatment and provides directions for future research. Approach Conceptual analysis and review of key studies and trends in the area are used to describe eight implicit assumptions underlying policy, practice and scholarship on this topic. Findings Many policies, programmes and researchers are guided by a simplistic behaviourist and health-service perspective on social controls that (a) overemphasizes the use of criminal justice systems to compel individuals into treatment and (b) fails to take into account provider, patient and public views. Conclusions Policies and programmes that expand addiction treatment options deserve support. However, drawing a firm distinction between social controls (objective use of social pressure) and coercion (client perceptions and decision-making processes) supports a parallel position that rejects treatment policies, programmes, and associated practices that create client perceptions of coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the number of ethnic minorities in Denmark has increased rapidly, now accounting for over 8 per cent of the total population. This paper presents results from a number of recent studies regarding the educational choices of minority children from less developed countries. An important social concern is that the educational attainment of these children is much lower than among native Danes. The studies show that that a main reason for the education gap is very high dropout rates from vocational schools among minority children and that inadequate Danish language proficiency of immigrants, parents and their children, is an important reason for the high dropout rates, as are inadequate educational preparedness from grade school and insufficient apprenticeship positions available for minority youth. Socio-economic background, however, has relatively little effect. Recent policy changes to reduce dropout rates from vocational schools are reviewed and additional policy interventions are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of generation within sociology has until recently been a marginal area of interest. However, various demographic, cultural and intellectual developments have re-awakened an interest in generations that started with the classic essay by Karl Mannheim. To date, the sociological literature has generally conceptualized generations as nationally bounded entities. In this paper we suggest that the sociology of generations should develop the concept of global generations. This conceptual enhancement is important because the growth of global communications technology has enabled traumatic events, in an unparalleled way, to be experienced globally. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the era of international generations, united through print media, and the mid-twentieth century saw the emergence of transnational generations, facilitated by new broadcast communications. However, the latter part of the twentieth century is the period of global generations, defined by electronic communications technology, which is characterized, uniquely, by increasing interactivity. The 1960s generation was the first global generation, the emergence of which had world-wide consequences; today with major developments in new electronic communications, there is even more potential for the emergence of global generations that can communicate across national boundaries and through time. If in the past historical traumas combined with available opportunities to create national generations, now globally experienced traumas, facilitated by new media technologies, have the potential for creating global generational consciousness. The media have become increasingly implicated in the formation of generational movements. Because we are talking about generations in the making rather than an historical generation, this article is necessarily speculative; it aims to provoke discussion and establish a new research agenda for work on generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological understanding of generations can be enhanced by avoiding defining them rigidly as chronological cohorts but rather linking people's accounts of their generational experience with an historically informed political economy. It then becomes possible, for example, to understand the complexity of generational politics. This paper uses data on the ‘War Generation’ taken from the Exeter Politics of Old Age project to link an empirically based political economy of generational inequality with a cultural sociology of generations. The ‘War Generation’ recognizes itself and is referred to by others in terms of a common identity. It is also an historical generation; its values, attitudes and, above all, sense of national solidarity and mutual obligation were forged in the direct experience of war. But it is also divided by divergent economic interests in property and pension rights based on the historical experience of the life course by successive groups and this segmentation can be observed in political action. The political culture of the War Generation manifests both continuity and change. Understanding these dynamics requires listening to people constructing their worlds, understanding their full range of historical experiences, and analysing the conditions for their conflicts and their cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines two strands within contemporary gender essentialism – that is, the argument that men and women are fundamentally different and that it is this ‘difference’ that explains the continuing social and material differences between the sexes. The first strand we examine is Hakim's ‘preference theory’, which has argued that persisting sex differences in employment patterns are an outcome of the ‘choices’ made by different ‘types’ of women. We next examine the claims of populist conservative feminism, that has argued that women (and men) in partnerships will be happier if they adopt a gender role traditionalism in the domestic sphere. Our empirical findings suggest that neither of these theoretical explanations are supported by our data, which is derived from the samples of six countries participating in the International Social Survey Programme Family 2002 module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the relationship between nationalism and localism have brought evidence that these orientations might maintain either relations of opposition or congruence. By conceiving of localism mainly as a strategy, this paper argues that localism can be used alternately as an anchor of nationalist narrative or as an alternative to nationalism by the exact same community. This argument is illustrated by the case of Sakhnin, an Arab-Palestinian town in Israel. Local pride in Sakhnin has developed around two separate foci: a nationalist heroic narrative of martyrdom and the success of the local football team. These two foci developed in complete isolation, since the first is embedded in a Palestinian nationalist narrative while the latter is oriented toward the Israeli Jewish public. An ethnographic study follows the construction of these separate spheres and a survey conducted among 174 men in the town confirms that involvement in the football sphere correlates with both local pride and integrative orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents guidelines to contributors of the "British Journal of Sociology." Papers submitted for publication are normally read by at least two assessors as well as by one of the Editors. The Editor's decision will be final. Articles submitted to the journal should be an original piece of work, not been published before, and not being considered for publication elsewhere in its final form either in printed or electronic form.

The internet is now a major source of health information for lay people. Within the medical, sociological and popular literatures there have been three main responses to this development. We classify these as ‘celebratory’, ‘concerned’ and ‘contingent’. This paper falls into the third category and, drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, examines people's accounts of their use of online health resources. It identifies six implicit rules – which we call ‘rhetorics of reliability’– that people readily draw upon when articulating why they trust some online sources and not others. In addition participants locate their accounts within broader discursive frameworks in order to present themselves as ‘sensible’ users. The article concludes by suggesting that there is an emerging concordance between the lay use of the internet for health and illness and dominant (generally) biomedical conceptions of what constitutes ‘good quality’ health information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The healthcare professions have never been static in terms of their own disciplinary boundaries, nor in their role or status in society. Healthcare provision has been defined by changing societal expectations and beliefs, new ways of perceiving health and illness, the introduction of a range of technologies and, more recently, the formal recognition of particular groups through the introduction of education and regulation. It has also been shaped by both inter-professional and profession-state relationships forged over time. A number of factors have converged that place new pressures on workforce boundaries, including an unmet demand for some healthcare services; neo-liberal management philosophies and a greater emphasis on consumer preferences than professional-led services. To date, however, there has been little analysis of the evolution of the workforce as a whole. The discussion of workforce change that has taken place has largely been from the perspective of individual disciplines. Yet the dynamic boundaries of each discipline mean that there is an interrelationship between the components of the workforce that cannot be ignored. The purpose of this paper is to describe four directions in which the existing workforce can change: diversification; specialisation and vertical and horizontal substitution, and to discuss the implications of these changes for the workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas of community and social capital have received much attention in the last decade, but are plagued by a multitude of conceptualizations, definitions, and operationalizations. This confusion is problematic for both researchers and policymakers trying to use these concepts. While numerous efforts have been made to clarify “social capital” and “community,” too often the two are simply conflated. This paper attempts to distinguish between them by looking at the various ways they are related in concrete examples. Drawn largely from the literature, five examples are offered that together describe the complex interactions of place-based communities and social capital networks. These examples also demonstrate distinctions between community and social capital with regard to boundaries, the qualities of social relations and trust in each, instrumentality, the consequences of one for the other, and issues related to multiple communities in a single place. It is hoped that these distinctions will inform the ongoing efforts to develop unique and useful conceptualizations of these two terms. [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.

Increasingly, understanding behaviour requires a multidimensional conceptual and methodological approach. A historical analysis of social psychology leads to the identification of separate and clear psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives in the thinking and research of the field. In an overview of the highlights of each orientation, this paper identifies the way in which each subbranch of social psychology flourished and is closely tied to the psycho-socio-cultural ecosystem in which its theoreticians and researchers developed. Evident from this process is the inclination of psychological researchers to stress functional aspects of behaviour and utilize experimental methodologies; the sociological orientation stresses structural variables and is inclined toward observational and field descriptive studies; and cultural investigation tends to pull from both the psychological and sociological perspectives and places major interest on the ecosystem in which behaviour presents itself. Linked to individual researchers' interests and training, and congruent with the sociocultural parameters and ecosystem in which Latin American social psychologists have evolved, novel indigenous interpretations of each social psychology have emerged. Documentation of the research topics, preferred theoretical and methodological approaches, and idiosyncratic findings is presented for the emergence of social psychology in Latin America. Emphasis is placed on the process of creating and shaping an indigenous view of social psychological thought, in which phenomena derived from a combination of one of the three views, and the behavioural manifestations and ideas representative of autochthonous everyday life, are stressed. As a conclusion, true to its upbringing, and born out of a perennial antithesis between mainstream thought and mundane reality, both a series of replications and novel conceptualizations and findings have emerged that have a distinct psychological, sociological, and cultural flavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ethnographic research, this paper explores the experiences of elite women athletes on a Division-I college soccer team. I draw on existing literature in the sociology of sport, sociology of the body, and interactionism to inform my analysis. With this approach, I illustrate the complicated relationship women athletes have with their bodies in relation to physical competition and dominant notions of femininity today. Key reference groups influenced the players’ self-perceptions and encouraged the women to closely monitor their own appearances and actions. While undoubtedly affected by these inter-actions as well as their place in the gender hierarchy, many women athletes subtly resisted notions of idealized bodies and constructed their own meanings about their bodies and experiences. Investigating the day-to-day body awareness and negotiations of women athletes reveals the gendered nuances of sport and the complicated relationship between cultural ideals and female embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a confluence of unique values and activities, the collective practice of community psychology is difficult to characterize in a simple way. Increasingly, however, professional contexts are laden with pressure to define any practice-from library work to medical interventions-in the orderly, compact language of traditional science. This trend has historically been resisted in the field by those sensing a fundamental lack of fit between the fluid, emergent aspects of community psychological practice and the fixed, precise language of classic science. In response to this “language-practice gap,” some have attempted to adapt the traditional language of science to better fit the field’s practice, while others have explored alternative languages of practice seemingly more indigenous to the messy “swamp” of actual communities. While the former effort leaves some theoretical contradictions intact, the latter tends to discount scientific identity entirely. This paper proposes a potential step forward by resituating questions of disciplinary language and identity within a current philosophical discourse where the nature of social science itself remains sharply contested. This suggests shifting attention away from “should webe a science?” to “what kindof science might we be after all?”; in turn, alternative languages may be re-cast as legitimate contributors to a kind of science more authentic to human communities-even a viable “science in the swamp.” One such language-philosophical hermeneutics-is presented as a particularly valuable supplement to traditional science. Illustrations highlight ways that hermeneutics may advance the formal language of the field towards a closer fit of what actually happens in practice, while preserving and even bolstering the empirical rigor and scientific identity of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to point out a remarkable gap between the social science literature on diffusion and the legal literature on reception and transplantation and to explore the implications of this gap for research on diffusion of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical analysis of the changing significance of the most influential statement ever made on inequality and development—Simon Kuznets’s “inverted U-curve hypothesis.” The shifting interpretations and appropriations of the hypothesis over time—from its status as a speculative supposition in 1955, to its rise and fall as a reified socioeconomic law, to its contested standing in the social sciences today—demonstrate how Kuznets’s arguments, originally advanced under more limited conditions, became transformed into overarching theoretical, empirical, and political constructions. This history suggests that even empirically grounded and testable social science models are contingent on the broader social and political contexts in which they are produced and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic interactionism is often represented as a perspective which is limited by its restriction to‘micro’ aspects of social organization. As such, it is allegedly unable to adequately conceptualize‘macro’ phenomena such as social structure, patterns of inequality, and power. Such a view is routinely presented in undergraduate textbooks. This paper contests such a view through a consideration of the concept of power. We argue that the interactionist research traditiondoesshow a fundamental concern with power phenomena, and that a reconsideration of the concept is timely in light of theoretical developments in sociology more generally. An increasing concern with the analysis of culture, the continuing influence of Foucault, the development of feminist perspectives, and the emerging consensus around neo-Weberian thought have all contributed to a renewal of interest in themes long ago explored by interactionists. As examples we suggest that interactionist studies in the fields of deviance and education have been concerned above all with the authoritative imposition of consequential identities, i.e., with the social processes through which power is enacted and institutionalized in real situations. Such developments have led some to argue that interactionism has now been incorporated into the mainstream of sociology. We conclude, however, by arguing that such a view runs the risk of granting to orthodox sociological thought a legitimacy which is analytically unwarranted, and which fails to recognize the alternative theoretical and philosophical foundations of symbolic interactionist thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treatments of sources of Adam Smith's sociological theory of the self and associated ideas inThe Theory of Moral Sentimentstypically refer to classical antecedents or the work of his teacher Francis Hutcheson or his contemporary David Hume. During the seventeenth century, however, many books on the passions were published in London that arguably constitute an important but neglected source of Smith's treatment of moral sentiments. These works are largely forgotten today but at the time were widely read. They are not philosophical, partly devotional and predominantly psychological. Although Smith does not refer to these works his argument resembles theirs in many places. The importance of the seventeenth-century books on the passions, apart from their role in the history of psychology, is their bearing on contemporary economic practices. In this paper the connections between Smith and one of these books, Thomas Wright'sThe Passions of the Minde in Generall, are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an account of the European principle of subsidiarity that presents it as a principle of democratic structuring: engaging both with the allocation of powers to existing democratic institutions and with the creation of new democratic institutions. In the process of discussing the European principle, a contrast is drawn with the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and with the rival doctrine of national self-determination. It is argued that the European principle is a central part of the Union's constitutional identity, and, as such, crucial to an understanding of the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be social actors. The methodological consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best known for his pioneering studyDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian‘discrowning’ of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes, popular and high, on a similar footing, equally rooted in specific class practices. Only a careless inattention could support such a conclusion. From his early interventions in French cultural policy debates up to and includingThe Rules of ArtandPascalian Meditations(1996), Bourdieu has consistently repudiated the view that a sociological approach to questions of aesthetic judgment must result in a levelling form of relativism. In exploring why this should be so, this paper considers the issues at stake in the forms of‘historical universalism’ that are associated with Bourdieu's account of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. It does so with a view to identifying some of the difficulties underlying his understanding of sociology as a historical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the literature providing reasons for why battered women“stay” in abusive relationships and examines the emergence of images of battered women as“survivors” in early and contemporary activists’ discourses, drawing on ideas from social constructionist approaches to social problems, identity, and deviance to explore this phenomenon. Most of the early representations of battered women I analyze emphasize their emotionality and their victimization, while the more recent constructions of this collective identity discussed here emphasize their rationality and their agency. Both“victim” and“survivor” typifications provide accounts for why battered women stay in violent relationships, thus providing a vocabulary of motive for this oft-imputed“deviance.” Constructing battered women as survivors, however, may also remediate some of the stigma that can attach to victimization more generally. After situating victim and survivor discourses and considering how the image of a survivor may meet normative expectations that a victim image perhaps violates, I briefly discuss some implications of these alternate collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organic movement is hailed as a way of transforming industrial agriculture making it more ecologically sensitive. This paper explores, from a sociology of knowledge perspective, how biodynamic farmers' understandings are the basis for influencing a wider population. I argue that their relationship to their farming and‘Others’ resembles a form of religious life defined by asceticism, repetition, sacrifice, and an emphasis on spiritualism and purity. Their reserved relationships with the outside world, particularly in communicating their ideas on agriculture meanwhile recall the search for solitude of religious hermits. They reject a strategy of direct proselytising as attempting to persuade may involve compromises, it would mean revealing their difference and alienating themselves further from the wider community, and some of them question their ability to influence people and wider systems. On one level they want to maintain the purity of their ideals and farming practices, on another, they don't want to be made to feel too different. They take on the role of trying to change the wider agricultural system through example and‘bearing witness’ to the ideas of biodynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a rapid proliferation of scholarship on resistance but little consensus on its definition. In this paper, we review and synthesize the diverse literatures that invoke the concept of resistance. This review illuminates both core elements common to most uses of the concept and two central dimensions on which these uses vary: the questions of whether resistance must be recognized by others and whether it must be intentional. We use these two dimensions to develop a typology of resistance, thereby clarifying both the meaning and sociological utility of this concept [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnew's General Strain Theory (GST) has both revived and advanced strain theory. It has recently been applied to topics ranging from gender differences in delinquency to differences in community crime rates. Tests of GST are now focusing on the intermediate variables that fall between GST and delinquency, such as anger and social support, but these tests have produced varying results. This paper adds to GST literature by empirically analyzing whether social support moderates individuals’ responses to strain and whether this moderating effect varies by gender. Testing is conducted using data from wave six of the National Youth Survey (NYS). Results provide support for GST and suggest that there are gender differences in the types and levels of strain experienced during the late teens. Further, there is evidence to support the hypothesis that social support does moderate females’ responses to certain types of strain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exist a variety of tests for attraction and repulsion effects between spatial point populations, most notably those involving either nearest-neighbor or cell-count statistics. Diggle and Cox (1981) showed that for the nearest-neighbor approach, a powerful test could be constructed using Kendall's rank correlation coefficient. In the present paper, this approach is extended to cell-count statistics in a manner paralleling the K-function approach of Lotwick and Silverman (1982). The advantage of the present test is that, unlike nearest-neighbors, one can identify the spatial scales at which repulsion or attraction are most significant. In addition, it avoids the torus-wrapping restrictions implicit in the Monte Carlo testing procedure of Lotwick and Silverman. Examples are developed to show that this testing procedure can in fact identify both attraction and repulsion between the same pair of point populations at different scales of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic convergence of the European Union in terms of the effects of European Monetary Union (EMU), which began in 1999 and possible conflict with, ‘social mobility’ in Europe. Our focus is on the low rate of mobility in the labour market. We assume that this is due to psychological and social aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on Davidson's work to generate counter examples to his claim that since there are no untranslatable languages there are also no alternative conceptual schemes. I argue that Davidson's argument to that effect is based upon an equivocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion represents a particularly interesting subject for a social movements analysis of healthcare issues because of the involvement of both feminist pro-choice activists and a segment of the medical profession. Although both groups have long shared the same general goal of legal abortion, the alliance has over time been an uneasy one, and in many ways a contradictory one. This paper traces points of convergence as well as points of contention between the two groups, specifically: highlighting the tensions between the feminist view of abortion as a women-centred service, with a limited,‘technical’ role for the physicians, and the abortion-providing physicians’ logic of further medicalization/professional upgrading of abortion services as a response to the longstanding marginality and stigmatisation of abortion providers. Only by noting the evolving relationships between these two crucial sets of actors can one fully understand the contemporary abortion rights movement. We conclude by speculating about similar patterns in medical/lay relationships in other health social movements where‘dissident doctors’ and lay activists are similarly seeking recognition for medical services that are controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]