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This paper gives a history of the Oxford Ethnography Conference. Over more than three decades, a regular conference of sociologists of education and ethnographers has met and produced a series of academic writings. The paper describes some of the interrelationships between developments that occurred within the conference and external changes to the academic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore how we may best understand the relationship between teacher identity and national culture. Using Raymond Williams' concept of 'structure of feeling' as a starting point, it is suggested that creative cultural forms of representation of teachers may complement social scientific studies to give a more complete and richer view of these matters. The paper focuses on England and Scotland, and has three substantive parts. First, consideration is given to the depictions of teachers in fictional literature from Scotland and England. Second, consideration is given to the range of methodologies that are deployed by sociologists in their consideration of teachers. Thirdly, the author draws on his own studies of teachers in both countries, to assess whether these throw any further light on questions of identity and culture. The concluding discussion argues that the complexities of the interplay between history, culture and identity are such that any single approach is unlikely to provide a broad understanding and therefore it is desirable to draw from different forms of enquiry in seeking to make sense of teacher identity in a national context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to observe the investor relations (IR) process from the perspective of media sociologists. Design/methodology/approach – The focus of the piece is the changing role of the financial news media in equities markets. It is based on two lengthy periods of research into the part played by communications in investment in the London Stock Exchange. The research looked at three sets of participants and three stages of the communications process: financial public/IR and the IR function, financial journalists and news reporting, and professional investors and their evaluation processes. Much of the work involved semi-structured interviews with over 100 high-level participants. Findings – The findings suggest a slow decline in the importance of financial news media in the investment process. However, financial news also continues to play a significant role in trading in the city and can, at times, still have a powerful impact on investment patterns. Consequently, all sides – companies, IR practitioners, analysts and investment managers – continue to target and consume it. Originality/value – The paper introduces readers to theories and research methods used in the adjacent research field of media and communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This paper was originally planned as an abstract of the introduction to a book on the coordination of the social sciences. It was written out in its present form as a contribution to the discussions at the conference on the same topic, held at Oxford, England, in October 1922. Unfortunately it arrived just too late for use at the conference; but it was kept in hand. The task of preparing the paper for the printer has not been altogether easy; for the author is now in India, and it has been impossible to consult him on a number of points, some of them important. The author has not hesitated to make slight changes in choice and order of words, and arrangement of matter, where he seemed to see clearly that improvement was possible. In some other respects slight changes have been necessary to meet printing difficulties. The author trusts, however, that the ideas, which the author is earnest to place before his readers, have in no way been obscured by these changes. It is impossible to foretell how far a contribution on such original lines will have authority with the sociologists of to-day.

This paper argues that sociological engagement with the 2011 summer unrest in England has thus far overlooked an important aspect of the 'rioting': the troubling by 'rioters' of the communitarian publics and moral geographies which constitute marginalised city-space. In response to this knowledge gap, this paper seeks to argue that the unrest was transgressive of governance logics which construct inner city 'communities' as spatialised units housing ethno-class legacies and sociations; environments in which remoralised urban citizenships are increasingly being located by policymakers and urban managers. A key goal of the paper is to briefly unpack and situate these projects within repertoires of urban management within the neoliberal city. Another goal is to reflect on media and policy responses to the 'riots' to illustrate the existence and reinforcement of these projects, evinced by the popular construction of 'rioting' as contravening ordered community practice. By mapping the representation and vectoring of community within these narratives either as a fallen or resurgent entity, the paper contends that they provide important insights into the contested socio-moral management strategies increasingly brought to bear on the urban poor. The paper also considers foregrounding such urban strategies as context to be crucial for a sociological framing of the unrest and the repudiation of depoliticised victim-blaming accounts. The paper also briefly reflects on the periodised, networked and disparate practices of the 'riots' to stress the dangers of boxing unrest, or indeed rest, within narrow spatial or behavioural boundaries or essentialised causal categories. Amongst other things, the diffuseness and multi-scalar nature of the 'riots' revealed the deficiency of this normative reading of the registers of urban citizenship. In this sense, the paper suggests that some academic commentary on the 'riots' has been in danger of reinforcing the same localised and residualised cartographies of citizenship generated by communitarian governance strategies at a time when sociologists should be exposing and resisting such articulations. In developing this discussion therefore, the paper seeks to challenge the formulations and boundaries of 'community' as conceptualised by urban governance strategies driving the functional reproduction of neoliberal marginalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents updates on the British Sociological Association in 1955. It was decided at the Annual General Meeting in March 1955 that the office of the president should be created so that it might be possible to invite an eminent sociologist to become associated in this way with the association. The president would hold office for one year and would be eligible for re-election. This decision was endorsed by the majority of the members voting by postal ballot and the constitution has been amended accordingly. Professor Morris Ginsberg has been invited to be the first holder of the office for the remainder of the current year and has been pleased to accept. On October 14, 1955 the association will hold a meeting on problems of social change and causation at the University of London in England. Meanwhile, the Urban Sociology Study Group and the Industrial Sociology Study Group will resume their monthly meetings in October 1955. The possibility is being investigated of forming a third study group for examining the territory on which the interests of psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists meet. Furthermore, the association welcomes applications for membership from younger sociologists and others whose disciplines are related to sociology. It offers student membership for those occupied in full-time study at an institution of higher learning. Student members have all the advantages of full membership except the power to vote and make nominations. Subscriptions for 1955 will be waived for all members whose applications are accepted between now and the end of the year. Particulars will be sent on application to all those interested.

The article presents a narrative conversation with issues of gender and masculinity within the Jamaican culture within the socio-political milieu studied by Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson. It narrates the author's experience of growing-up in a mother-headed household that offered keen insights on the issues of gender and masculinity. The article also shares how the author met his father in London, England and how the occasion became an opportunity to reconstruct positive masculinity.

Norbert Elias (1897–1990) achieved international recognition as a major sociologist only towards the end of his long life. As a German Jewish refugee in England, he did not even gain a secure academic post (at the University of Leicester) until he was 57. Apart from his magnum opus, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation [The Civilizing Process], which was published obscurely in 1939, all his other books and most of his essays were published after his formal retirement. These personal recollections date from that last highly productive part of his life, when he gradually attracted an extensive international following. They depict his foibles, some endearing, some that seemed perversely to stand in the way of his growing reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews Anthony Giddens, sociologist and director of the London School of Economics in England. Reaction to comments on his book “The New Rules of Sociological Method”; Origin of the term structurization first mentioned in his book “The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies”.

The article presents an analysis of values in England and the U.S. In his studies of cultural evolution, U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested that, in the modern era, core Western values were essentially unified and stable. The evidence Parsons used to substantiate his claims was selective and the empirical literature comparing values in England and the U.S. disagrees as to whether value similarities or differences are predominant. Consequently, hypotheses concerning the unity, diversity, and stability of value patterns in these two countries are explored using three distinct cross-national data sets. Although a direct comparison of the data sets is impossible because the value concepts and operational definitions used by each method differed, the data lead to remarkably consistent and unambiguous conclusions. On the level of general value patterning, England and America do seem to have significant value unity. Strong cross-national agreement in value priorities in general was indicated in all data sets considered--the adult interview data on personal values, the student questionnaire data on social values, and the content analysis data on value themes in dominant culture magazines.

The article presents information on sociologist E.P. Thompson's "The Poverty of Theory," related to British Marxist historiography and works of sociologist L. Althusser. In political theory, in the history of science, in urban sociology and elsewhere, Aithusser's immediate disciples have produced sustained analyses. Elements of the Aithusserian language have been assimilated with varying degrees of success into a number of areas and periodicals in Britain, and inform ambitious studies such as that by sociologist A. Cutler. Some Althusser's concepts have nevertheless become assimilated across a broad swathe of social sciences. Yet there has been no substantial penetration into the field of historical analysis except some the work like the work of historiographical critique connected with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England. No substantive piece of concrete historical analysis however rests even upon narrowly appropriated elements of the Althusserian system. Sociologist E.P. Thompson's "The Poverty of Theory," is a sustained polemic by a well-known historian against Aithusser's philosophical work, its assimilation and its implied threat both to a Marxist historical practice in general and, in particular, to the crucial interconnections of theory and practice on which it rests. Aithusser's work has been centrally organized around a reading of sociologist Karl Marx and the alleged trajectory of his whole oeuvre.

The article presents the autobiography of sociologist T.H. Marshal related to his British sociological career. His home was typical of the higher professional classes of the period, intellectually and artistically cultured and financially well-endowed. Although they lived, officially, in London, they spent all their holidays in the country and it was in the there that they felt they really belonged. Hindhead was occupied by middle-class intellectuals similar to those who surrounded them in the Bloomsbury of those days, while they had numerous Marshall relatives in the Lake District, England, descendants of his great-grandfather who had settled there in 1815. Add to this his conventional schooling, first in a very select preparatory boarding-school and then at Rugby, a solidly bourgeois but not particularly snobbish Public School, and it is easy to understand how limited, and how naively unsociological, was his youthful view of society. The author feels if he were a sociologist at that time, he would have been able to study by participant observation and any other survey method requiring a computer, the emergence of a structured society from a miscellaneous collection of individuals (all male) flung together by chance in a confined space (a race course and its stables), and its subsequent fortunes.

One remark made more frequently by sociologists than by their gibing critics that sociology has not yet come to that development which commands from its adherents wholehearted agreement as to the objectives to be aimed at, the field to be limited, and the methods to be used. Not only is this lack of unanimity characteristic of the science as a whole, when viewed apart from national boundaries, but also even within each country there is still to be found great diversity of opinion as to the major concepts and abstractions of this field of inquiry. England seems to offer the one exception. It is not that English sociologists have consciously developed an agreement and so are working as a unified group for the advancement of their science, for they seem to be less aware of disagreement and of the controversial aspects of the situation than most workers in the field. It is rather that there seems to be a fairly general acceptance of the idea that there is something called a sociological point of view which can be applied to economics, anthropology, religion, or what not, but that point of view is infinitely elastic and does not cry to be defined nor elaborated into a separate discipline.

An area of research in which sociologists and historians would seem to share a rather obvious concern is that of social change. In his presidential address before the joint meeting of the Canadian Historical and Canadian Political Science Association, S. D. Clark emphasized this. "We cannot become students of change," he said, "without becoming historians. It is only by looking at what has happened to societies of the past, and over time, that the sociologist can derive the data on which to build his principles of social change." That is to say that the study of social change requires recognition of processes in time and must deal, insofar as time past is involved, with evidence that is historical. The student of social change must become a historian and the historian, insofar as he is interested in understanding and interpreting general processes, must become a social scientist. When, however, one searches the literature for particular studies of historical social change, one's findings are meager indeed, especially if one's standards, theoretically and methodologically, are reflective of those of contemporary social science, and one's historiographical standards, of contemporary history. If, in addition, one is searching for social change studies of a particular national history, then the material is even more limited. For this reason I have expanded this review, which was originally concerned with the American nineteenth century only, to include two studies of English history, because these two studies include important theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of history and social change in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes American sociologist Robert K. Merton's thesis on the relation of science to the "Puritan ethos" of seventeenth-century England. Ill-conceived knowledge has a way of getting embedded in the literature and persisting for generations, only eventually being dislodged with a mighty effort. There are portents that Merton's conclusions are headed for or such a career. The purpose, then, is to halt a trend rather than to make a systematic restatement of a proposition. Merton's declaration is that it is the thesis of this study that the Puritan ethic, as an ideal-typical expression of the value-attitude basic to ascetic Protestantism generally, so canalized the interests of seventeenth-century Englishmen as to constitute one important element of the enhanced civilization of science. The rationale of such a study is not readily apparent. While not deigning to make a formal definition of Puritanism, Merton would list its "dominant tenets." The first characteristic is the "juxtaposition of the spiritual and material" which might be acceptable as an interpretive construct of the Calvinistic "ethos."

The article presents the annual report of the Sociological Society that was presented by the Council to the Annual General Meeting on July 10, 1923. The Council of the Sociological Society has to record that the year 1922-23 has witnessed a period of considerable activity. The usual number of meetings has been held, and have been well attended, a Conference on "The Correlation of the Social Sciences" was held in Oxford, England, last autumn, which attracted some attention in the U.S. and France, as well as in Great Britain. The Social Psychology Group has had a satisfactory year in pursuit of its investigation into the Modern Family.

This article discusses the views of sociologist Emile Durkheim on education. He wrote a great deal on educational theory and practice, and in both his university posts, in Bordeaux and in Paris, he was engaged in the training of teachers. At the age of 29 a special post was created for him at the University of Bordeaux, where he taught the social sciences and pedagogie. In 1902, already noted as a sociologist, he was appointed to the Sorbonne in the chair of the Science de I' É'ducation. At this time sociology was not much in favour in the University of Paris, and was thus introduced under the cloak of education until 1913, when the position was re-named as the chair of the Science of Education and Sociology. The influence of Durkheim on educational thought in England has been practically non-existent. This is because nobody, until recently, not even the sociologists, seems to have read his books on education. Yet he could well be called the founder of educational sociology. The views of Durkheim on education must, of course, be considered in the context of his general approach to sociology. He used to say to his students that it was always as a sociologist that he spoke to them of education.

Relates the memoirs of Irving Melody, a sociologist specializing in science and theory in Durham, England. Interests of Irving in phenomenology and history; Distinctive characteristics of Irving; Impact of Melody's broken marriage relationship on his life; Creation of the history of human sciences group; Works of Melody on human sciences.