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This paper focuses on private equity in the UK and is set in the context of debates about transformations in the City of London. The article focuses on a particular concept of trust as expressed by senior members of the private equity sector. The argument developed is based on interviews with five senior founding partners of private equity firms who talked to us about their background and education, their understanding of how private equity worked and the basis for successful money making and their relationships with those inside and outside the organization. All interviewees strongly asserted the need for absolute trust between senior partners as an essential condition for the successful operation of their business. At the same time, their description of trust in this context was that while it is deep, it is also easily broken, and that once broken, the breach cannot be forgiven. We call this 'brittle trust': asserted to be simultaneously strong while extremely fragile. The paper argues, drawing on Diego Gambetta's work on the Sicilian Mafia, that this concept of 'trust' reflects a particular understanding of the practice of private equity as a high risk, tough and unforgiving business that nevertheless requires high standards of personal integrity. The study allows us to understand something more about the social ideals that were built into this financial sector by its founders, which we argue formed a crucial part of the transformation of the financial sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces Edward Shils’ transition, during World War II, from enthusiasm to harsh criticism of Karl Mannheim, the Hungarian-born sociologist of knowledge. While serving in London, Shils drew upon a direct and explicit intellectual assault on Mannheim by fellow emigrés to England. Even while Shils maintained regular contact with Mannheim, Shils was exposed to an often vituperative dismissal of Mannheim’s work by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, in the pages of the London School of Economics (LSE) journal Economica. After the war, when both Popper and Shils joined the LSE faculty—Hayek’s affiliation dated to 1931—Shils’ encounter with their critiques was deepened. And in these early postwar years, Shils became close friends with yet another emigré Mannheim critic, Michael Polanyi. Combined, these sustained and sophisticated criticisms helped wrest Shils from his interwar, Mannheim-friendly intellectual coordinates. The implications for Shils’ later propagation of the “mass society theory” label are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract The paper describes a developing sociological and psychoanalytic approach to the study of 20 London families in the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was transcribed from a talk presented by David Kynaston at a seminar on Social Science Data Archives for Social Historians: creating, depositing and using qualitative data, organised jointly by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) and the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London on 25 November 2003. This paper presents the author's experience of doing research for a social history of Britain between 1945 and 1979 using data and documentary evidence drawn from some of the classic sociology studies archived at ESDS Qualidata (University of Essex). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between gentrification and globalisation has recently become a significant concern for gentrification scholars. This has involved developing an understanding of how gentrification has become a place-based strategy of class (re)formation during an era in which globalisation has changed sociological structures and challenged previously established indicators of social distinction. This paper offers an alternative reading of the relationship between gentrification and globalisation through examining the results of a mixed method research project which looked at new-build gentrification along the River Thames, London, UK. This research finds gentrification not to be distinguished by the gentrifer-performed practice of habitus within a ‘global context’. Rather, the responsibility for gentrification, and the relationship between globalisation and gentrification, is found to originate with capital actors working within the context of a neoliberal global city. In order to critically conceptualise this form of gentrification, and understand the role of globalisation within the process, the urban theory of Lefebvre is drawn upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years ago, 'Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom' was published as a special issue of New Society, the weekly magazine of social enquiry. It was a collaboration between the urban geographer Peter Hall, the design and architecture historian Reyner Banham, the architect Cedric Price, and Paul Barker, the magazine's Editor, It attacked the perverse and often futile effect of attempts to impose criteria of urban form and aesthetic design from above. Its own approach to popular choice was social-anthropological. Published three years before Learning from Las Vegas, Non-Plan was highly controversial, but it has had a continuing influence. The paper examines how the concept arose, and spells out some of its consequences, both ideological and practical. Two case-studies, of North London inter-war suburbia and of a shopping mall and its surroundings, are used to illustrate Non-Plan in the recent past and the present. It is acknowledged that Non-Plan is inextricably associated with a very popular but often criticized design form, suburbia. But the case is put for an essentially humble approach to design: people's own choices should be respected. Present-day planning and design dogmas may be no wiser than those of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on recent theoretical developments within sociology which have proposed new ways of looking at and understanding class. Drawing on two contemporary examples, namely the Gambling Bill and the recent 'riots' at Ikea in Edmonton in north London, the article demonstrates some of the ways in which class operates subjectively within the practice of everyday life. Using these examples, I show how class continuously informs identity and how, by looking at a range of contemporary cultural consumption practices, it is possible to gain a sense of how boundaries surrounding rights to middle-class identity are constantly tightened and refined. By presenting a range of responses to these consumer practices, I show how representations of the working class are often problematic and leave important questions about the everyday performance of class unanswered. The article thus offers an alternative understanding of class to those that have often positioned the working class as a dangerous deviant mob, as romantic rebels or simply as victims of an oppressive capitalist state. It concludes by arguing in favour of a renewed sociology of class and for ensuring that class features more prominently on the sociology of consumption agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of revisiting Young and Willmott's Family and Kinship in East London was probably impossible. Dench, Gavron and Young extended the geographical coverage of their study area to include some fundamentally different zones adjacent to Bethnal Green. The study extended over a decade but the authors' The New East End fails to make clear dates, actors and locations. The theoretical framework is incoherent and especially so when referring to actors outside the area of study who the authors claim have considerable power and influence in the East End. Local people are static informants and so as a 'community study' the book fails to provide a narrative or analysis rooted in local events during a very eventful period of its history. The discussion of social policy changes, which form the background to this study is partial and tendentious. Although there is an illuminating section discussing migration from Sylhet the book is simply bad sociology. One outcome of the publication of The New East End has been that more general readers (including both the BNP and the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality) have been able to draw whatever conclusions from the book suit their own agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the role of science in society in reference to the speech by John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, England, in January 2008. In his speech, Denham focused on the central importance of science to society, and its impact on everyone's lives. He outlined a vision for Great Britain where the public is engaged with science in the modern world.