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The article focuses on the personal and professional relationship between the author, Chris Rojek, and Peter Beilharz, highlighting their encounters, conversations, and shared interests in sociology. Topics include their meetings, Peter's scholarly orientation, and the significant role Thesis Eleven played in bridging Australian sociology with the academic community and Chris Rojek reminisces about his interactions with Peter, highlighting their common ground as first-generation nationals.

The article explains the pedagogic and publishing success of the book "The McDonaldization of Society" by George Ritzer. The publishing of the academic book that is a pedagogic success in academic sociology is organized into four categories including research monographs, modular texts and textbooks. The article presents notes on the four categories and the reasons for the success of the book "The McDonaldization of Society" is explained. The article defines public intellectuals as the people possessing special media skills.

This paper is a position paper. It seeks to set a new and distinctive approach to the study of leisure that combines theory, practice and ethics. It stands on the shoulders of 'action sociology', as represented in the Weberian tradition, and symbolic interactionism. But it offers a radical renewal of this perspective by relating action to 'embodiment', 'emplacement', 'location' and 'context', and repositioning leisure studies in relation to 'care for the self' and 'care for the other'. The paper is concerned to elucidate a renewed action approach and to demonstrate its value for the study of leisure. It does not aim to compare or contrast this approach systematically with other positions in the field. The action approach identifies 'testing' to be a duty of all theoretical propositions. It regards leisure to be intrinsically political. The paper distinguishes the differences between postmodernism and the action approach. The paper ends with a suggested research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview examines the relations between production and consumption and the significance of what Bauman calls 'the consumerist syndrome'. The latter is defined by the desire for instant satisfaction. The article distinguishes the consumerist syndrome from Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption. It breaks with the 20th century practice of regarding consumer preoccupations and activities as derivative of needs and suggests that consumption is now driven by infinite desire. Bauman sets the consumer syndrome in relation to his concept of liquid modernity. The choices of the modern consumer are set against unfulfilled options. The notion of using consumption as a form of resistance is examined and criticized. The article concludes with some reflections on the condition of sociological activity today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Leicester School of Sociology, and presents an interview of Eric Dunning, professor at Leicester School of Sociology. Eric Dunning is a prominent figure in the sociology of sport and has lectured widely throughout the world. Eric Dunning enrolled as a student in Leicester in 1956 and remains there to this day as an emeritus professor of sociology. His position as probably the best known advocate of the figurational/process perspective in Great Britain, together with his career connections with the Department of Sociology at Leicester, makes him uniquely placed to comment on the rise of the Leicester School. This interview sheds light on an important chapter in the development of British sociology, and attempts to assess the Leicester tradition of sociological activity. The British tradition in sociology has always tended to be more insular than its continental counterparts. The article further focuses on the interview where Dunning shares several facts regarding Leicester School of Sociology.

Elias's great work, The Civilizing Process (2 vols), was originally published in the inauspicious year of 1939. Elias wrote it as an associate of Mannheim's Frankfurt circle. The Second World War, and his fraught attempts to establish himself in British academic sociology in the first two decades after 1945, plunged his works into obscurity. Only now, as his early publications are starting to become available in English, is the resonance and insight of his sociological method coming to be widely appreciated. This paper considers the main features of the figurational approach and critically assesses its value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]