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Drawing on the sociology of moral panic, this paper argues that the media will shift from alarming to reassuring coverage when a `hot crisis' portends a possible grass root panic. To determine whether this moderation effect follows from dread-inspiring events that are developing in unpredictable and potentially threatening ways, the paper compares newspaper and magazine coverage of emerging diseases with their coverage of Ebola Zaire. The results reveal that the mutation-contagion package, with its frightful account of emerging diseases, was quickly abandoned and subverted during the Ebola epidemic. In its place, the media fashion a containment package that uses a strategy of 'othering' to allay the fear. The conclusion discusses the flexibility in the tool kits used by the media to frame events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stages is presented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It was learned that one of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's work revolves around the correlative concepts of thought collective and thought style. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was discussed. Stage three in the career of the concept scientific community is marked by criticism and the development of alternative models. During the 1960s and 70s, the view prevailed among metascientists that scientific knowledge is produced by communities of specialists. In the works of leading contemporary philosophers of science, as in many historical studies, the existence of scientific communities was assumed without question or argument. Kuhn's paper represents a watershed in the histories of both the concept itself and the entire discipline of sociology of science. Social integration in science was considered a result of a consensus about strategic norms or standards. Findings on the examination of the concept scientific community through the related works of Kuhn and Fleck, the Polish scientist and scientist knowledge, was presented.

This paper examines the relationship between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ social action with reference to recent research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Evidence is presented in support of the proposal that a taken for granted model of conversational interaction is used by analysts, both lay and professional, as a comparative reference point against which certain actions are categorized as ‘formal’. Such a procedure, it is suggested, results in evaluative interpretations which fail to address the question of how such interactions may be operating to produce orderliness in the settings where they are found. This theme is developed mainly in relation to the way a number of recurrent features of multiparty interaction may provide practical solutions to a general problem which appears to be common to all such settings, namely that of how to create and preserve the conditions for sustaining the shared attentiveness of all co-present parties to the proceedings at hand. The general themes are also briefly considered with reference to small-scale interactions that are likely to be regarded as ‘formal’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of Basil Bernstein's work on language in relation to education and child rearing is widely recognized, but his contributions to the sociology of the school are less well-known. It is not the purpose of this article to make an extended critique of the theoretical and other propositions made in Bernstein's series of writings, but to report an attempt to put some of them to the empirical test. The results of the investigation give only limited support for some of the propositions made by Bernstein about the sociology of the school. This statement must be qualified by a number of reservations. Firstly, the variables used to test the propositions were not constructed for this specific purpose, and may not therefore represent the best use of the concepts involved. Secondly, they do not cover all the examples suggested by Bernstein. Thirdly, the schools to which the measures apply are secondary schools. With these reservations, the results suggest that Bernstein's explanation of the relationship between the different aspects of the school should be reconsidered. The explanations appear to be based upon an adaptive view of education, in which its form and change are determined by, or closely related to, the nature of and changes in superordinate sectors of society.

The vigorous growth of Cultural Studies has in part come about through an insistence on strong contrasts with sociology. Unlike sociology, the theoretical orientations of Cultural Studies are often held to be postmodern and discursive in character. This paper questions the usefulness of such contrasts by examining the work of Stuart Hall, focusing in particular on the problem of hegemony. I argue that Hall's approach slides ambiguously between reading hegemony as either con- centrated state domination or free-wheeling discourse. Consequently, Hall cannot resist and indeed in some ways reinforces the discursive turn in contemporary Cultural Studies, despite his own explicit criticisms of this development. I track the instability of Hall's approach to an abstract logic of articulation that fragments social relations and subordinates them to political association. Hall's predicament suggests that social life must be theorized as something more than a pliant diversity of sites. The problem of hegemony calls for an account of cultural and group formation as distinct from their political and ideological construction. I thus conclude that Cultural Studies stands in need of a sociological re-orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the application of Foucauldian perspectives within sociology. While Foucault's epistemology has generated novel historical and philosophical interpretations, when transposed to sociology, problems arise. The first of these concerns the association of knowledge and power, and the concept of 'discourse'. Foucault suggested that there are 'rules' of discursive formation which are extraneous to the 'non-discursive' realm of 'reality'. This formulation is consequently both deterministic and incapable of supplying explanations of why some practices become discursive which others do not. This determinism is reflected in some sociological analyses of embodiment, offering a model of the 'body' which is passive, and incapable of resisting power/knowledge. Secondly, Foucault's notion of the 'self' moves to the other extreme, inadequately addressing the constraints which affect the fabrication of subjectivity. Sociological accounts do not always recognize the ambiguities which consequently result from efforts to use Foucauldian positions. It is argued that post-structuralists other than Foucault may offer more to sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of the sociology of knowledge in light of the two problems that have systematically thwarted all efforts to fulfil its promise: the self-defeating relativization of knowledge and the circularity of knowledge and society that the theories imply. The paper looks at the strategies that social scientists have developed to overcome (and sometimes ignore) these problems, and building on the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn advances the concept of a cultural paradigm as an alternative approach. To clarify the questions of the sociology of knowledge and exemplify the usefulness of the new perspective, the paper briefly explores the historical and cultural contexts that helped constitute an idea of the person as a player of roles. Shakespeare notwithstanding, the perception of the person as a role-player, the paper suggests, is to be seen as a central element in the production of modernity - of an eminently American, eminently middle-class sort of modernity whose development it reflected and helped to shape. The incorporation rather than the denial of relativism and circularity within this framework are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to challenge selected aspects of Professor J. A. Banks' discussion of Morris Ginsberg's view of the place of historical research in sociological work as they are presented in 'From Universal History to Historical Sociology' (BJS, rot. LX, no. 4, 1989:521-43). Specifically, it challenges Professor Banks' argument that Ginsberg believed that sociologists need not -- perhaps even should not -- do their own empirical research; that they should rely instead on historians and other disciplinary specialists for their data. It is true that Ginsberg was dismissive of a narrow positivist conception of empiricism and of sociology as a science more generally. At the same time, however, he saw empirical research (historical research included) as a necessary part of the sociological enterprise. Indeed, while the formulation of an all-inclusive theory of social development was the first purpose of general sociology, this was not possible without empirical contributions from a variety of smaller-scale specialized sociologies. Thus, it was not a question of historians doing one thing and sociologists another, but a question of emphasis. The paper concludes by noting that part of the difficulty in determining Ginsberg's position on this issue and other related theoretical matters is that, following Hobhouse, he styled himself as a 'rational empiricist'. According to this perspective, which from the dominant contemporary perspective incorrectly conflates philosophy and science (and sociology), the rational analysis of values can be described as a 'scientific' endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline some of the key ideas within Zygmunt Bauman's sociology; both in terms of his contribution to the creation of a postmodern sociology and his substantive texts. The critique that I develop, is that Bauman's work is assembled upon a modernist notion of `the social' which he not only accepts without question, but which undermines his attempts to devise a distinctly postmodern sociology. His substantive texts still contain many personal insights, but they need not make any use of postmodernist abstractions, which in the last analysis provide little more than a gloss over his own reflections on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational action theory (RAT) is not a highly unified intellectual entity. In the first part of the paper, varieties of RAT are distinguished in terms of three criteria: i.e. according to whether they (i) have strong rather than weak rationality requirements; (ii) focus on situational rather than procedural rationality; (iii) claim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action. In the second part, these same criteria are applied in a consideration of which version of RAT holds out most promise for use in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations of the persisting differences in the structure of men's and women's employment have long been debated in the social sciences. Sociological explanations have tended to stress the continuing significance of structural constraints on women's employment opportunities, which persist despite the removal of formal barriers. Neo-classical economists, in contrast, have emphasized the significance of individual choice, an argument which has been recently endorsed by Hakim who suggests that patterns of occupational segregation reflect the outcome of the choices made by different `types' of women. In this paper, a previous debate relating to the explanatory utility of men's `orientations to work' is used to argue that employment structures are the outcome of both choice and constraint, and that this is the case for women, as well as men. The argument is illustrated with evidence from cross-nationally comparative biographical inter- views carried out in five countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the authors' comments on the report by John Westergaard and Ray Pahl to the University Grants Committee (UGC) on the institutional state of sociology in British universities. The paper has its limitations. Both authors were members of the working group of the UGC for the subject review, and so among the signatories of the report. At the time of writing this, the report is still only in the pipeline for publication so there are no reactions yet from sociologists to either argue or agree with the report. Nor can we make we make up for possible bias from inside commitment by offering startling benefit of inside view. Not because our lips are sealed; but because we do not think there is much unexpected to expose. We have no breathtaking revelations to make, for example, about mechanisms or pressures which might have been at work to induce the subject review panel to give the report a shape or direction at odds with some of its members' views. Circumstantial pressures there certainly were; but of a kind needing no special insight to anticipate or detect. The working group's recommendations bear no doubt a clear imprint from awareness of the acute, and politically determined, shortage of funds for higher education.

This paper argues that the idea of equality of opportunity should be rescued from general opprobrium. It defines a theory of competitive equality of opportunity as open competition for scarce resources. It suggests that this is an idea which demands objective tests of competence incumbent similarly and equally upon all competitors for scarce resources. Resources should be allocated to those most competent to manage them on the grounds of efficiency. This system is just if that allocation is managed to the benefit of and in the best interests of all. It is also argued that under a social system which does not impose equality of resources between citizens it is still possible to sustain equality of opportunity between individuals if public educational resources are allocated according to testable individual abilities and needs. Acknowledging that under present conditions schools make very little difference to individual life-chances it is proposed that they might do more to equalise opportunities if they were organised under principles of strict selection and separation under educational charters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Weberian sociology, the social conditions which promoted the growth of rational capitalism (free cities, an autonomous merchant class, rational law and an ethic of world mastery) are typically associated with the emergence of modern science. Protestantism, capitalism and rational science are assumed to require an open discursive space, free from arbitrary restraint on conscience and consciousness. This 'uniqueness of the west' argument encounters the following difficulties. Technology and science flourished in Chinese and Islamic cultures in which the political system was patrimonial and bureaucratic. In these societies, innovative science was often associated with oppositional, magical beliefs. Furthermore, in Weber's interpretation of Protestantism, it was the irrationality of the salvational drive which led to the rationality of a calling as an unintended consequence of action. Although this sceptical viewpoint suggests that no general theory of scientific accumulation is possible, the paper employs Weber's economic sociology to identify the close historical relationship between economic change, state regulation and the patronage of intellectuals in the development of science. Scientific rationalism is the outcome of contingent features (such as the requirements of navigation), structural arrangements between the economy and the state, the presence of rational technologies (in mathematics, writing and experimentation) and finally the teleological impact of rationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the reasons why Edward Westermarck's reputation as a sociologist began to decline in the 1920s. It begins with some personal recollections of Westermarck, who was the author's great-uncle. Then follows an account of how Westermarck in both The History of Human Marriage and The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas made original contributions to the discussion concerning several issues, which were at that time regarded as central in the sociological debate. Although Westermarck and Durkheim held very similar ideas concerning some of these problems, they disagreed on other important points. Of particular consequence for the subsequent development of sociology was Durkheim's utter rejection of Westermarck's and the other comparativists' method of quoting examples from various societies which were detached from their context as support for their theories. During the inter-war decades Durkheim's ideas were taken up and championed by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, with the effect that Westermarck's comparative method was definitely regarded as passé when he died in 1939. Also other factors, which are discussed in some detail in sections V and VI of the paper contributed to this development. The paper ends with the conclusion that Westermarck's magna opera are today mainly of historical interest, whereas his Moroccan monographs and his Ethical Relativity will retain their value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an advocacy for the employment of psychoanalytical concepts within sociological theorizing about the individual. Through an exposition of Freud's views on the development of intra-psychic structure and a critique of Parsons' reduction of psychoanalysis to a branch of learning theory, I attempt to show that the sociological approach to the individual is implicitly behavioural and imprisoned in a series of assumptions which, among other things, treats subjectivity as epiphenomenal and identity as an unmediated reflection of some external reality. In contrast, psychoanalysis presents to us a picture of the individual as flawed and ambivalent in his relation to society, formed by but at odds with the demands of culture. In particular, the psychoanalytic concept of identification reveals that the acquisition of identity is a hard-won achievement marked by the renunciation of lost and forbidden objects. I argue, following Freud and Lacan, that the ego, far from being an agency of reason, somehow directly ‘plugged into’ reality, constitutes itself in the fantasied image of another and that the quality of this identification crucially affects the way the world is experienced and believed by the individual. This argument is elaborated through a discussion of Peter Berger's remarks on the social causes of identity crisis which, when set against the work of object-relations theorists on those suffering from disturbances of identity such as, for example, schizoid personalities, are shown to be both superficial and misleading. I conclude the paper by arguing that while psychoanalysis can enhance our understanding of the way in which the individual is formed by and through culture it also cautions us against making simple generalizations about the impact of culture upon the person, showing that the individual never submits himself unequivocally to its demands and interdicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the principles and practice of the resolution to the ‘measurement problem’ in sociology. The aim is to amend those criticisms which argue that sociological measures are inevitably arbitrary since they are conventionally based on everyday meanings and thus mirror the mutability of natural language. Such critiques normally fail to distinguish the issue of the indefiniteness of meaning of the elements of ordinary language from the problem of translation from a natural language to the formal or mathematical languages underlying measurement scales. I argue that social variation in meaning, in itself, does not prevent measurement in the social realm and that rather the insurmountable problems stem from crucial differences in the two language forms which prevent determinate inter-translation. The consequences of this revised critique are examined by considering the logic-in-use of two current practical examples in the measurement field, viz. Goldthorpe and Hope's scale of occupational standing and Coxon and Jones's studies of occupational cognition. These authors tackle the question of whether there is socially structured variation in understanding occupational order. They produce conflicting results and thus disagree on the possibility of creating any singular, well-founded measure of occupational hierachy. I argue that both sets of findings are irrelevant and misleading because in concentrating on assessing the degree of social consensus in occupational cognition they ignore the problem of the incompatibility of natural and formal languages. Both investigations depend on making this transition between language forms and in both cases this is managed illegitimately by the use of techniques which bestow those crucial formal properties absent in the ordinary language occupational discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical review and discussion of a major field of Israeli sociology — the study of immigration and absorption. It concentrates on the dominant school of Israeli sociology, that of S. N. Eisenstadt and his associates, and points to the close relation between this body of work and functionalist theory. The paper demonstrates the inadequacy of this approach for the study of the formation of Israeli society, and its inability to deal with important economic and political developments. It is argued that its omissions and conclusions both point to the basic affinity between this school of Israeli sociology and the dominant state ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnomethodology has emerged as an attempt to make problematic the everyday phenomena of the social world and to reintroduce sociology to those forgotten aspects of everyday life. This article is no more than a brief outline of a possible critique of ethnomethodology written from the viewpoint of an implicit Marxian sociology. The paper relates to particular problems at the time of writing and is intended as no more than a statement of the exploratory attempts to understand the confusing relations between meaning in contexts, and more importantly, their political significance within social processes which either grow out of those contexts or which shape them. It is suggested however, that because ethnomethodology neglects to take into consideration the character of certain events, it borders close on being an ideology of conservatism. While it is agreed that with ethnomethodological critique of positivism and conventional research, certain reservation is expressed concerning those areas of ethnomethodological study which ignore such important social features as social change, the relations between meaningful contexts and political processes, and alternative realities to those features under analysis.

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]

In a previous paper published in "British Journal of Sociology," the author made the claim that despite decades of intensive investigation, not a single researcher had ever shown that class difference in education was indeed unfair and unjust. It was a charge that was underwritten by a simple, if technical, argument, which drew attention to what, in logic, would have to be shown if such a difference was to be regarded as an inequality, rather than as just another difference in a differentiated society. In this case, it was suggested that, other things being equal, the researcher would have to meet one of two conditions. He would have to show that the different classes were similarly disposed to education or, alternatively, if there were evidence, as in Great Britain, of considerable working-class indifference to education, he would need to demonstrate that such indifference was itself the result of structural or cultural inequality. Only then, it was argued, could the researcher be said to have reasonably shown that class difference in education was unfair; for only then could the researcher be reasonably sure that such a difference was not, after all, just another difference.

This article is an attempt to evaluate the contribution of the late Erving Goffman to the field of Sociology. In doing so I have attempted to document some of the main commentaries upon Coffman's work — especially those of A. Dawe and A.W. Gouldner — and to evaluate their validity. This paper is presented within the framework of a general overview of Goffman's work and an elaboration of some of the salient themes within it. The intention of the author is to free Goffman from some of the crude overgeneralizations that his colleagues have used in evaluating his writings. In particular, I have attempted to show, in general terms, how Goffman's work is sensitive to ‘structural’ as well as ‘situational’ concerns and also to class, hierarchy and power. It is argued that Goffman's importance has been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon his death in 1920, at the age of 56, sociologist Max Weber left behind a huge and untidy mass of personal papers and scholarly manuscripts, some of the latter in the process of being edited for publication by Weber himself, others intended for intensive reworking, others yet superseded drafts. The intended characteristics of the book "Max Weber Gesamtausgabe," in the first of the publications listed below: they are those of a critical-historical edition, intended not to replace the several collections of Weber's writings currently available for the use of students, but rather to serve the needs of scholars, including the editors of such future collections. The edition is to include three sections: Writings and Speeches; Manuscripts of and notes from lecture courses. In the first section, the arrangement of material will embody a compromise between chronological and thematic grouping; that is, the numbering of volumes will reflect the shifts in the prevailing concerns of Weber's scholarly and publicistic activity, but each volume may contain again, in chronological sequence writings and speeches. From a number of years in so far as they bear on its chief theme. Each volume will contain editorial material which elucidates the circumstances of each piece of writing or speech, indicates the state of the relative sources and eventual discrepancies among them, and clarifies or corrects such parts or points in the text as might baffle or mislead even a relatively informed contemporary reader.

Ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts have based their claim to a status superior to that of conventional sociology on their supposed ability to avoid the problems of attributing motives to actors by concentrating on the 'scenic properties' of social action. In all earlier paper we argued that a close inspection of the practice of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis revealed considerable motive attribution. Two ethnomethodologists have criticised our argument. In this: rejoinder we demonstrate that our critics have conceded our main point. Ethnomethodologists may have a particular research focus but their methods are similar to those of conventional sociologists in the matter of imputing motives to social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary exploration of a neglected area in sociology of religion. It aims to interpret and to characterize the distinctive performative basis of Christian liturgy. Ambiguities in liturgical enactment can be routinely handled as long as they relate. to the nuministic content of the rite and not to its social form. Silence is a distinctive non-reducible phenomenon of rite that can be related to the regulation of ceremonial form through tactful management of the implicit. Liturgies work on the basis of an apophatic characteristic that makes them distinctive as religious rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on the article "Taking the State Back Out: Rose and Miller on Political Power," by Bruce Curtis that appeared in the 1995 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology." It is curious that one article should produce such a defensive reaction, while an entire field of related literature can be ignored without discomfort. Once again, polemic substitutes for argument in sociological discourse. Those for whom the state appears an unproblematic term in the analysis of power, who seek the intelligibility of the present through the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, or who find it productive to evaluate power relations via the one-dimensional opposition of domination and emancipation, will inevitably be disappointed by the current literature on government and governmentality. One of the principal aims of the paper, originally written some six years ago, was to draw attention to a variety of studies, which had shown the value of posing the question of political power differently. It was timely for sociologists to learn the central lesson of such studies: the constitutive role of an array of authorities, forms of knowledge, and technologies of conduct that are fundamental to the activity of politics, but which lie beyond the state.

This paper attempts to theorize some aspects of problems of order in prisons in the light of recent contributions in the theory of legitimacy by Beetham (1991) and Tyler (1990). Previous work in the sociology of imprisonment has generally raised the problem of legitimation only implicitly, and often merely to deny its possibility. Drawing on fieldwork in two English maximum security prisons, we argue that while prisons present chronic problems of legitimacy, it may nevertheless be possible to specify circumstances under which prisoners are more or less likely to confer or withhold degrees of recognition of legitimate authority of prison staff and regimes. Such conditions include not only the regularity and efficiency of service delivery, but also perceived distributive and procedural fairness of treatment, as well as human qualities in the nature of routines. We deploy these considerations in analysing aspects of current British penal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mannheim's 1923 essay 'The Problem of Generations' has often been described as the seminal theoretical treatment of generations as a sociological phenomenon. Yet in practice scant attention has been paid to the sociology of generations by British sociologists. This is despite the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical time. This paper aims to raise the profile of the sociology of generations within British sociology. It is shown that Mannheim's essay can be read as a text which contributes to our understanding of key sociological issues, in addition to 'the problem of generations'. These issues include the nature of time, the relationship between biology and the social, and socio-psychological connections of language and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marxian theory of social class has always been troubled by the fact that the coalitions that individuals form have not, by and large, been consistent with the pattern of asset ownership. The purpose of this paper is to add another dimension to some of the existing approaches to this 'goodness-of-fit' problem. This is done by using n-person game theory to examine the coalitions that individuals would be expected to form in a struggle over division of the surplus. This provides a partial analysis of fragmentation within the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a content approach to recasting the concept of ideology. The legacy of the encounter of the independent effects of ideology on social development has been scholars' preoccupation with the social functions of ideology and a corresponding disregard of what ideology is. As a result, it is not surprising that the relevant sociological literature reveals a bias towards a functional definition of ideology and, conversely, a lack of concern for a definition based on, or even related to, content. Despite some significant contributions, the sociological understanding of ideology, in particular the adequacy of its definition, has not recovered from such a legacy. Implicit in any attempt to overcome the problem of the sociology of ideology is the assumption that the retention of such a concept is worthwhile. Assuming that ideas and beliefs are the broad subject matter of the study of ideologies, a concept of ideology is worth having because sociologists find it useful to distinguish certain beliefs which are thought to have influence in the social domain. In attempting to arrive at a definition of ideology, it makes sense to look at those situations where there is good reason to believe that certain beliefs have had some impact to see what special properties they have.

This paper presents the author's reply to the article The Misconstruction of Occupational Judgment, by A. P. M. Coxon, published in the 1983, volume 34, number 4 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. Coxon has charged that the author's article on the linguistic base to sociological measurement misrepresents the methodological presupposition of his project on occupational cognition. In reply, the author would like to counter the charge of misrepresentation, restate the source of their disagreement, challenge Coxon's advocacy of methodological pluralism in the study of social cognition and, finally, examine the broader consequences of this exchange for measurement practice. In his article, the author suggested that there is root incompatibility between the structure of ordinary language and that of formal language, and that the attempt to achieve a description of the former in terms of the latter, by way of scaling techniques common in sociological research, is achieved, quite illegitimately, through the surreptitious imposition of the key elements of formal language at certain contrived points in the data collection and analysis procedures. The reader will note that Coxon has made no attempt to defend himself against this charge in relation to the artefactual results generated by his use of the paired comparison technique.

Recent discussions in the philosophy of the social sciences exhibit a remarkable agreement about what has become one of the most urgent problems for sociological methodology. The situation may be summarized thus: ethnomethodological developments in interpretative sociology have shown that there can be no firm and certain basis on which to ground truth claims for our propositions. The conclusion drawn from this is that the traditional aspirations of conventional sociology — to be objective and scientific — cannot be attained. However, the programme of work promised by those who have developed ethnomethodology as a critique of ‘conventional sociology’ itself contains certain difficulties. Thus, the problem addressed by those writing in the philosophy of social science is this: given the contradictions in sociology as traditionally practiced, and given the problems in the programme offered by those largely responsible for discrediting it, whither sociology now? The purpose of my paper is to show that the question may be unnecessary. This is not so much because interpretative sociologists are mistaken in their understanding of the conditions in which research is undertaken, but rather because the positivist epistemological assumptions taken to be necessary for an objective scientific sociology, are not required for this and indeed are erroneous. I shall argue specifically that a Popperian account of (objective) science is wholly compatible with the understanding contemporary interpretative sociologists have of the research context, and indeed that there are striking similarities between this and Popper's ideas, most especially those developed in recent years. Thus, I shall go on to suggest that, by adopting a Popperian epistemology we may thereby recognize the validity of the fundamentals of the ethnomethodological position without being forced to abandon the effort to be objective and scientific; we may also sidestep the particular dif... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical and contemporary criminology has largely overlooked female criminality. This neglect has produced a situation in which analyses of this phenomenon have met no theoretically informed body of criticism and ideologically informed studies have become 'leading' works by default. The ideological underpinnings of these studies are based upon common-sense, uncritical understandings of female behavior and upon a belief that deviant behavior is caused by individual pathology. The combination of these factors has had certain implications for our present knowledge and understanding of female criminality and for the 'treatment' of female offenders. In particular the transformation of Holloway Prison into a secure psychiatric hospital is symbolic of social attitudes towards female offenders who are presumed to be 'sick' and who need help to re-adjust to their appropriate, traditional role. Tiffs paper attempts to outline the prevailing ideologies inherent in the major works on female criminality and to point to their implications. By so doing it is hoped that more critical interest in this area will be generated so that female criminality will not remain of such marginal interest to the new schools of thought that are developing inside criminology as it has been to the traditional schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comments on the article of David Downes entitled Promise and Performance in British Criminology. Margaret Thatcher declared at the Conservative Conference in October 1977 that she will not make the fight against crime an issue at the next election but rather, the people will. Since then the socialist Bishop of Southwark has said that in the inner cities crime and violence have become real problems which must be dealt with. In such a context, talk of progressive and degenerating problem shifts might seem like fiddling while Rome burns, while the fact that Downes' paper is at least the third major review of the history of British criminology could be taken as sad evidence of chronic academic navel-watching. In the U.S., there has been a tendency for some scholars, led by J. Q. Wilson to argue that academics in the crime business have been insufficiently preoccupied with the real policy issues caused by escalating crime on the streets; that they have concentrated on what is interesting rather than what is important; and that it is necessary to deal with symptoms before one can deal with causes. This kind of thinking, coupled with the widespread failure on its own terms of the influential post-war treatment model of crime and delinquency, has led to a climate in at least some U.S. circles where the importance of general deterrence is re-stressed.

Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments provides a useful overview of critical scholar- ship on Giddens. It also stimulates reflections on the significance of Giddens's career and writings. The book illustrates the unifying effect Giddens's work has had within the notoriously multi-paradigmatic arena of the social sciences by providing a common reference point for both disciples and critics. For his part, Giddens has been very adept at incorporating criticisms into his intellectual structures in order to repair and strengthen them. Giddens's career should be seen in the context of broader developments within the British social sciences over the past thirty years. He has established himself as the latest representative of a liberal tradition. In this respect his predecessor was T H Marshall. There is a family resemblance between the central themes upon which Marshall and the [later] Giddens focus. Marshall is concerned with the potential conflict between a regime of social rights and a social order governed by the rules of the capitalist market. Giddens explores the difficulty within modern societies of maintaining efficient systems based upon bureaucracy, professional expertise and the globalized market while also constructing meaningful self-identities. Both Marshall and Giddens have a strong belief in the importance of the creatively active individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis on a seemingly inevitable process of secularization leading to 'demoralization' as part of modernization has meant that sociologists have not felt it necessary to give much heed to Durkheim's call for the development of a sociology of morals. However, there has been some recent movement in that direction, stimulated by a revival of interest in Durkheimian sociology and Foucault's work on discourses and moral regulation. The analysis of controversies about representations of sexuality in broadcast television can reveal the varied range of moral discourses that are drawn on by ordinary viewers when they feel provoked to write to protest about representations that they find morally offensive. The attempts of the regulatory authorities to adjudicate between the different moral discourses reveals some of the difficulties and strategies involved in moral regulation in late- or post-modernity, with the regulators often having to retreat from moral reasoning to legal-technical rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exposes the developments of qualitative methodology in French sociology with respect to methods proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine: `provoked and accompanied' self-analysis and the sociological intervention. In addition to the presentation of these two methods, the propose of this article is to describe and discuss the position of these two authors on certain problems such as representativeness, objectivity, status of data, epistemological rupture and lastly on the question of the writing by which sociological knowledge is formed from common sense knowledge contained In the data. This brings to a broader discussion on these questions. The strengths and weaknesses of these two methods are finally examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piaget's sociological theory is not widely discussed among sociologists, partly because much of it is contained in untranslated French works. In this article I summarize several aspects of Piaget's sociological views, especially his social exchange theory, and briefly indicate its relevance to several current theories in sociology and social psychology. Rejecting both Durkheim's sociological holism and Tarde's individualism, Piaget advances a sociological relativism (relationalism) in which all social facts are reducible to social relations and these, in turn, are reducible to rules, values, and signs. Piaget's theory of social values takes the form of a social exchange theory characterized first in an abstract, logical way -- its structural aspect -- and second its developmental aspects. Piaget claims social exchange requires normative principles of reciprocity and that individual social development results in such an equilibrium because rationality itself is social in nature and based upon social co-operation. These views, in turn, derive from his orthogenetic view concerning the course of evolution: development can be characterized as an increase in equilibrium manifested both in individual action and in social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Émile Durkheim's analysis of historical attitudes of societies toward suicide led him to claim that (1) the social disapproval of suicidal conduct increased constantly from ancient times to the present; (2) such increased disapproval was generated by the growing emphasis put on the dignity and sacredness of the individual; (3) the condemnation of suicidal conduct was therefore essentially moral, and it expressed the strong reaction of the collective conscience against offenses to the cult of the individual. In this study we show that Durkheim's interpretation of the historical evidence is erroneous: not increasing condemnation of suicide, but rather tolerance or mild aversion is the typical social response to suicide. Also, when confronted with the historical evidence, Durkheim's claim that increased disapproval of suicide accompanied increased consideration for the dignity of the individual is shown to be unfounded. Our argument develops in four steps. First, we survey the historical evidence on views of suicidal conduct from classical times to the nineteenth-century; second, we present the moral statistics literature on suicide which flourished during Durkheim's lifetime; third, we analyze Durkheim's own theory of anomic suicide. In the conclusion we propose an alternative interpretation of the historical evidence on attitudes on suicide, and a different framework in which to highlight their significance in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents the list of authors of the December 1989 issue of the British Journal of Sociology.

This section presents the articles published in the December 1989 issue of the British Journal of Sociology.

This article focuses on ethnomethodology in Great Britain. Immediately on publication in 1967, Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology made a strong and controversial impact on British sociology, which attracted attention than was altogether beneficial to the longer term health of the enterprise within the British concept. Initial interest and misplaced enthusiasm quickly faded, sometimes replaced by a resentment that ethnomethodology had not lived up to the image rather arbitrarily created for it. Other fashions came along, and the volume of comment expanded, especially the gratuitous and negative kind. The number who have remained well disposed to ethnomethodology through the period is small, a substantial proportion of them being linked through the Sociology Department at Manchester University in England. Studies of a more or less ethnomethodological sort have covered a range of substantive topics including the formulation of arguments in sociology texts, the analysis of newspaper headlines and stories, courtroom proceedings, interviews, interrogations, educational and business simulations, classroom organization, doctor-patient encounters, moral categories and political speeches, among others.

The main post-war tradition in the sociology of welfare assumed that government could provide agreed levels of service to cater for a limited range of needs as an accepted component in a common citizenship. Government policy no longer supports this assumption. The main theoretical currents in the discipline also express disquiet at the capacity of the state to deliver a satisfactory level of welfare. The rapidity of the shift against welfare statism among sociologists is particularly striking, since cross-national evidence indicates that the UK is in a favourable position to sustain welfare provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whatever the differences in their approach to religion, Marx, Durkheim and Weber all foresaw a major decline in its role in the modern world. Religion's ability to provide a single, integrated and generally held conception of meaning had been fatally eroded by the emergence of a plurality of life experiences deriving from widely differing relationships to a rapidly changing social order; by the increasingly rationalistic organization of an industrialized, mass market economy; and by more universalistic conceptions of citizenship. The sociology of religion in Great Britain has been articulated largely within a framework deriving from these theoretical assumptions. Its primary concerns have revolved around the following themes: to what extent have such trends, broadly encapsulated within the notion of secularization, become a reality in Britain, and how does the British pattern compare or contrast with that of other societies?; what are the consequences of secularization for the structure and functioning of religious institutions and the role of religious professionals, and for the operation and integrity of our culture and society?; to what extent have such trends been resisted, and what are the forms and sources of that resistance, the dilemmas faced by its carriers, and the consequences of resistance?

This article argues that contemporary British historical sociology is cognitively high-powered and of immense importance for sociology as a whole. A novelty of the exposition that is more or less dictated by such a claim is the specification of intellectual advance. Contemporary historical sociology is not another research program promising to deliver the goods at some future date, instead it is actually possible to point to sustained achievements which have implications for core concerns of the discipline. The term historical sociology is used broadly to include comparative as well as historical studies. A distinction will be made between a general sense of the past and the practice of historical sociology. One obvious way to underline the difference is by insisting that all sociologists, though with greater or lesser degrees of self-consciousness, posses the former. If historical sociology is a discrete speciality, it has a unique capacity to speak to fundamental presuppositions of most practicing sociologists. It must also be admitted that it is not always possible to separate British historical sociology from developments elsewhere. It has been pointed out that sociology was created by the emergence of modern societies whose precise physiognomy has thereafter been the central preoccupation of the subject.

This articles provides an overview of the topics on British sociology discussed in the September 1989 issue of The British Journal of Sociology. Pahl and Westergaard's reports to the University Grants Council on the institutional state of sociology in the British universities, represents a sociography of the sociological establishment at the last moment of a constitution of more or less autonomous universities which is not to pass to national management by the Universities' Funding Council. While Albrow's view of the nature of sociology offers illuminating contrast with the view taken by W. G. Runciman. Runciman dismissed some other fashionable explanations and went on to put forward his own terms of the nature of the subject. The significance of education in the political economy of modern society differs sharply in liberal and Marxist theory. For liberal it is central to the determination of both production and distribution. For Marxists it is a dependent variable about which Marx himself wrote little. In more recent writing the contrast continues, mainly because of opposed interpretations of the changes in the structure of employment and the incidence of the changes in the structure of employment and the incidence of social mobility both of which entail theories of the relation between education and employment.

Traditional perspectives in organizational analysis are being questioned, the field displays new diversity, especially as a result of phenomenological studies, new directions are emerging, and a dialectic animates the relationship between theorizing and research. Organizational analysts, positing a distinction between the organization and the environment, have raised a number of issues which remain: How can organization and environment be defined? What is the nature of the consequences of organization-environment transactions? Are they in fact distinguishable? These questions are addressed here and some tentative proposals made. The essay argues that organizations prefigure, organize, and then enact the social environment in which they operate. ‘Organizational work’, it is argued, involves the social construction of the environment as well as the management of intrusive, unseen aspects of the environment that nevertheless affect everyday organizational life. In order to elaborate this thesis, data from several studies of police organizations are presented to outline the nature of the external environment posited by the organizations and to suggest that the occupational culture is a significant source for a perspective of that environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of disenchantment has had varying interpretations within sociological theory. Defined as the progressive extirpation of magic from social life, the idea of a disenchanted world carries with it an atavistic, melancholy character. Within the same definition it has been seen as the programmatic liberation of the mind as it is related to the betterment of material conditions. Although interpretations of this nature are invariably tied to problems of value and politics, the concept of disenchantment, more than most other work of social theorists, has been the focus of quiet but intense debate. This article attempts to make the discussion more public in as much as disenchantment, on the historical level, is an important way of understanding the development of sociological theory and, on the analytic level, a promising line of inquiry for studying the effects of the culture of industrial societies. To underscore the polarities involved in the use of disenchantment by sociologists, two divergent approaches to this process will be examined in terms of the theorists' partisan evaluation of the contemporary world. Before the concept of disenchantment can be integrated into a viable critical sociology, it has to be first stripped of its ideological mask.

The participant-observer study of the Cheshire Home in Great Britain which is described in this article was intended to bring some fieldwork evidence to bear on popular speculations in the field of the sociology of knowledge. These speculations are best known through the writing of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which draws heavily on the work of Alfred Schutz. Berber's sociology of knowledge draws heavily on notions of socialization which are derived from Goffman's studies of institutional life and from a too simple interpretation of G. H. Mead. This article therefore examines a Cheshire Home as a marginal world which perhaps gave a base for a counter reality and a cluster of counter identities by focusing on processes of resocialization. In view of the great weight given by Berger and Luckmann to temporality as a constituent of reality, special attention was given to the temporal framework within which inmates apprehended both daily agenda and personal biographies. The picture that emerges is of a remarkably tenacious normality. The Cheshire Home was not a base for a counter reality. The three categories which give shape and meaning to the lives of most adults held firm and were still prime categories for interpreting their lives and the world and for structuring relationships.