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The article offers information on re-reading Khaldun's economic thought in present times, highlighting his deep insight into the culture of his day. Topics include Christian Fuchs' approach to demonstrating Khaldun's anticipations of key modern concepts, Khaldun's nominations as the founder of sociology, a pioneering economist, and the first modern historian, and Fuchs' claim of Khaldun for critical political economy and his relevance to critical communication analysis.

While the late 19th-century analytic context in which classical sociology emerged was constituted in substantial part by a discourse of political economy, the subsequent development of the discipline has been characterized by a growing analytic distance between sociology and economics. With increasing specialization in the field of knowledge in the course of the 20th century there was a neglect of social institutions in orthodox economic analysis and a parallel relative neglect of economic phenomena within sociological analysis. The latter condition has been exacerbated by the 'cultural turn' in social thought that took place towards the close of the century, ironically a period marked by the growing prominence of economic matters in social and political life. This paper presents an argument for a return to the analytic concern with economic life that lies at the heart of classical sociology, for an 'economic turn' in contemporary sociological thought. This is achieved through a discussion of the work of J.K. Galbraith on economics and the transformation of capitalism; private affluence and public provision; and the consequences of a culture of contentment, work that suggests an affinity with the analytic preoccupations of the classical sociologists. The paper demonstrates the sociological relevance of the social and institutional analyses of J.K. Galbraith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the bibliography of papers related to several issues. Items are grouped in the bibliography according to the section of the trend report in which they first occur. Some of the papers enlisted are "Historical Sociology," by Philip Abrams, "Industrial Sociology: An introduction," by Maria Hirszowicz, "The Ideas of the Founding Fathers," "Sociology. A Guide to the Problems and Literature," and "Sociology as Social Criticism," by T.B. Bottomore, "Capitalism and Modern Social Theory," "New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies," "Studies in Social and Political Theory," "Durkheim," "Central Problems in Sociological Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis," "Sociology, A Brief But Critical Introduction," and "Classical Social Theory and the Origins of Sociology," by Anthony Giddens, "Theories of Industrial Society: The Future of Futurology or the Recrudescence of Historicism?," by John H. Goldthorpe.

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I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one–sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been celebrated as a path-breaking approach to the understanding of capitalism. This article advances a conceptual critique of NIE approaches to economic history. The author suggests that NIE cannot solve the underlying tension, that its economics remains ahistorical, and that when history, social relations and realism are invoked, the economics disappears, being replaced by various cultural and state-centred explanations. Therefore NIE is not so much a research programme in progress, but rather an indication of the degeneration of the tools of neo-classical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents Marxist political economy, revolutionary politics, and the labor process theory. This article examines the relationship between labor process theory and Marxism. However, rather than simply trying to reassert the relevance of H. Braverman's analysis of the labor process, the authors acknowledge that the trajectory of the labor process debate needs to be understood in relation to the drastic changes in the political context since the time when Braverman and his contemporaries were writing. The year 1968 was a high point for the Left. Marxists look back upon that time with fond nostalgia for the strikes and protests, when it seemed that the specter of communism had returned to haunt not just Western capitalism but state socialism as well. Since then Marxism has been on a retreat and Neoliberalism has been promoted in management theory by organizational economists, who maintain that organizational entities only exist for the benefit of their owners and stockholders.